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J. Aleksandr Wootton's Reviews > God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution
God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution
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Really, really impressive. Synthesizing and building on the "process theology" that developed in the wake of Alfred North Whitehead's work, Hans Jonas' emergent mind philosophy, cosmology, and Neo-Darwinian evolution, Haught offers a sympathetic reading of the Christian Bible that is consistent with both traditional interpretations and theology as well as twentieth-century consensus science. "If these are all true," Haught asks, in essence - "If our present understanding is mostly accurate, what are the theological implications?"
The question has been asked before; not often by persons with much patience for the subject. Typical answers are shallow, callous, dismissive, or vitriolic, expressive of a false dichotomy between "believers" and "the scientific establishment." Bad arguments and logical fallacies are rampant. Frankly, the whole squabble is boring.
Haught's response, on the other hand, is a thing of beauty. He rightly points out that the overriding themes of Scripture are prophetic and futuristic - not emphasizing a lost paradise which we must but cannot recover and which God acts to restore, but pointing rather to God's past and ongoing work as "merely" a sign of the new and better work to come. God is "located" in the future, Haught says, calling all creation out of nothing towards himself, but not compelling its immediate perfection: giving all things the time and grace to grow, stumble, lapse, and recover along the way.
Wisely, Haught does not claim that his views are "correct" but rather, like their subject, that they express a possible yet incomplete framework for understanding God in light of both biblical revelation and the study of the natural world. Along with the prior work it represents and builds on, God After Darwin is brilliant, potentially an eventual cornerstone of reconciliation between the liberal / fundamentalist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The question has been asked before; not often by persons with much patience for the subject. Typical answers are shallow, callous, dismissive, or vitriolic, expressive of a false dichotomy between "believers" and "the scientific establishment." Bad arguments and logical fallacies are rampant. Frankly, the whole squabble is boring.
Haught's response, on the other hand, is a thing of beauty. He rightly points out that the overriding themes of Scripture are prophetic and futuristic - not emphasizing a lost paradise which we must but cannot recover and which God acts to restore, but pointing rather to God's past and ongoing work as "merely" a sign of the new and better work to come. God is "located" in the future, Haught says, calling all creation out of nothing towards himself, but not compelling its immediate perfection: giving all things the time and grace to grow, stumble, lapse, and recover along the way.
Wisely, Haught does not claim that his views are "correct" but rather, like their subject, that they express a possible yet incomplete framework for understanding God in light of both biblical revelation and the study of the natural world. Along with the prior work it represents and builds on, God After Darwin is brilliant, potentially an eventual cornerstone of reconciliation between the liberal / fundamentalist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Adam
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Dec 29, 2020 01:41PM
Sounds just like Hegelianism
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I've not yet studied Hegelianism, but on a cursory look, Haught's argument doesn't strike me as noteworthily similar. I mean, Hegel is a major contributor to philosophy, so anyone who's "done the reading" is in conversation with him to some extent. Their initial method would seem to be generally in agreement, but Haught's book is concerned with developing a position, rather than a method.
