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It
should be no surprise therefore that there is a diversity of theological
responses to evolutionary science. At one end of the spectrum we have varieties
of ‘creation science’ which do not grant nature or general providence a
significant role in creation history. As we have seen, they are responding to
supposed threats which are not necessarily justified by a careful
interpretation of the science. At the other end of the spectrum we find a
number of theologians who endeavour to seamlessly weave Darwinian ideas into a doctrine
of creation through ‘theistic evolution.’ For this essay I shall focus on just
those scholars who contend that they have taken Darwin ‘seriously,’ leaving
anti-Darwinian creationist accounts and the ‘Intelligent Design’ movement for
subsequent study.
The
remaining responses can be roughly divided into three groups: 1) Those who
accept Darwinian natural selection as a
force in biological history but one which must be supplemented by divine
activity in order to provide a full account of life’s history. 2) Those who
accept it as a reasonable approximation of the mechanism driving biological
development, but one which is flexible enough to allow for concurrent divine
action. While this is typically located in probabilistic events, and may or may
not be detectable by methods employed in the sciences, for the believer this
divine action is very real. 3) Those who embrace natural selection itself as an expression of divine
creativity. As would be expected, each of these groups develop very distinct
accounts of providence, some explicitly allowing for miracles and
some developing a thoroughly immanentist view of God’s presence in the world.
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