Responses from contemporary theologians

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.

 Printer-friendly | Feedback | Contributed by: Adrian Wyard