[4] Responses from theology

From reading the accounts of the challenges set out in the first section it would be easy to conclude that evolutionary science is intrinsically destructive for religious beliefs. This is the impression gained from reading respected commentators such as Dennett, Wilson, Monod and Dawkins, but I hope to have cast doubt on such single-dimensional assessments. Members of the scientific and theological communities do the public a great disservice when they characterise evolution as a simple and monolithic idea which can easily be refuted or accepted and then deemed compatible or incompatible with religion. The basic algorithmic abstraction of natural selection is indeed simple, but this tells us little about the history and development of actual biological history. Moving from abstraction to evolutionary history requires perseverance with an immensely difficult and as yet incomplete scientific research programme. By varying the ‘parameters in the algorithm’ and the ‘contours of the fitness landscape’ very different kinds of histories can emerge. Some of these possible histories appear to be congruent with traditional theistic conceptions of creation, while others do not. Importantly, regardless of which histories our own Earth has undergone, the raw data discovered by the evolutionary sciences will not immediately entail the scientific blessing of any particular theological or philosophical position, pace Monod, Dawkins, et al.

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