2. Evolution and Continuous Creation

Christian theologians have developed a diversity of responses to Darwin and his scientific descendants beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing on into the present. Many have seen evolution and Christianity either as locked in an irreconcilable conflict or as totally irrelevant to each other. I will focus, however, on a variety of options for their constructive interaction ranging from theologies of nature which appropriate selected evolutionary themes to those which are thoroughly reconstructed in light of evolution.

Most scholars start with the assumption that God is both the transcendent Creator ex nihilo of the universe per se, including its existence and its fundamental laws, and the immanent, continuous Creator (creatio continua) who is acting everywhere in, with, and through natural processes to bring about physical and biological complexity. What science describes in terms of neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology is what theology sees as God’s creative and providential action in the world. Evolution is thus the way God creates life, a broad position often called ‘theistic evolution.’

Arthur Peacocke has been a strong advocate of this crucial position. Starting in the 1970s, Peacocke has developed a compelling response to Jacques Monod’s challenge that chance events in nature point to the fundamental irrationality and meaninglessness of the world. For Peacocke, chance events, from genetic variation and expression to changes in populations and the environment, do not mitigate against God’s creative purposes. Instead, God is the ground and source of both chance and law (or necessity). Together they serve as God’s means of continuously creating physical, chemical, and biological complexity, and thus a world characterized by continuity and emergence, temporality and open-endedness. Peacocke situates both the ex nihilo and the continuous creation tradition within a panentheistic doctrine of God, in which the world is within God even while God infinitely transcends the world. He articulates his theology of creation through a variety of models: God is a composer and improviser of unsurpassed ingenuity; like a mother, God births the world within herself though the world is other than God.Following the direction Peacocke has taken, Philip Clayton has developed a richly nuanced version of panentheism throughout his writings, seeing it as the natural outgrowth of the theistic tradition as it is reconstructed in light of science. His panentheistic approach to divine action in nature agrees with Peacocke on seeing God at work in the emergence of new forms of life, though unlike Peacocke he finds quantum physics to be a fruitful avenue for exploring God’s immanent action in nature.

Barbour, too, adopts a panentheistic view of God and the world, though he develops it within a process perspective. God is a source of order and novelty, acting within the indeterminacies in each integrated physical and biological system as a top-down cause. Thus evolution is the product of law and chance within which God is continuously active, influencing events through persuasive love but not controlling them unilaterally. Following Hartshorne, he embeds the panentheistic mind-body analogy for God’s relation to the world within a social and ecological context, then adds to it an interpersonal perspective. God is “preeminent but not all-powerful,” the creative participant within the evolutionary community of beings. Through tenderness, patience and responsiveness, God nurtures the world towards unchanging goals without coercing it through a ubiquitous, detailed plan.Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr., argue that there is no clear-cut demarcation in nature between life and non-life although there are genuine levels of increasing complexity and an increasing capacity for conscious experience. God is immanent in the world as the “life-giving principle” and “the supreme and perfect exemplification of the ecological model of life.” Thus life is purposeful, not governed by sheer blind “ongoingness” but suffused with “the cosmic aim for value.”Writing from a Roman Catholic and process perspective, John Haught suggests that the concept of God explains both the order and the novelty and creativity we see in evolution. As a divine gentle invitation, “‘God’s will’...is to maximize evolutionary novelty and diversity.”

Evolution and ecology provide the primary context for Sallie McFague’s panentheistic and feminist doctrine of God.Her metaphorical theologydraws specifically on the model of the world as God’s bodyand explores new models of ‘God as mother, lover and friend,’thus emphasizing mutuality, interdependence, caring, and responsiveness against traditional monarchical models. Her theology of creation emphasizes the importance of a procreational-emanationist perspective in addressing the tone of externality and domination in the ex nihilo - production tradition.Similarly she balances the anthropomorphic tendency of agential models of God’s relation to the world with organic embodiment models which draw on cosmology, evolutionary biology and ecological science.The result is to highlight divine immanence and to support the intrinsic value of God’s creation, viewing nature as ‘the new poor’.

The metaphor of nature as mother has been developed in the context of evolution by other feminist theologians as well. Elizabeth Johnson claims that, rather than merely supplementing a purely transcendent image of God, the mother-creator metaphor as such invokes both divine transcendence and immanence Anne Clifford proposes that we actually replace Darwin’s metaphor “natural selection” with that of nature as a mother giving birth. It brings together in dynamic tension the reproductive and evolutionary character of nature with the biblical doctrine of God as creator. Moreover, Clifford’s feminist metaphors support Darwin’s rejection both of God as designer and the immutability of species, and take up his concern for suffering in nature.

Trinitarian theologians have also found rich resources in biological evolution and ecology. The inter-relationality and interconnection of all life of earth are much more suggestive of recent models of God as ‘divine-persons-in-relation’ than are the substantialist models of classical theism. For Catherine Mowry LaCugna, “To-Be-is To-Be-in-relationship, and God’s being-in-relationship-to-us is what God is.”Johnson offers a vivid series of images for the perichoresis of the divine persons, deployed in a panentheistic and feministic perspective.Karl Rahner appropriated Aquinas’ concept that creation is an ongoing relation between the creature and its Creator but he reformulated it in terms of the relation between a dynamic, immanent God and the evolving and self-organizing world described thoroughly by science. Evolution results from the intrinsic power of nature for self-transcendence, but this power issues ultimately from God as the power of being.Jürgen Moltmann specifically places evolution within a Trinitarian account of continuous creation in dialogue with the panentheism of Peacocke and Rahner’s concept of the world’s self-transcendence. Creation is “not yet finished,” the ‘crown of creation’ is God’s sabbath still to come.” For Moltmann, the history of creation involves God’s transcendence to and immanence in the world, and the immanent God is the creative Spirit, acting through God’s “uncreated and creative energies.”Denis Edwards believes that a relational account of God asTrinity provides the foundation for an evolutionary theology in which “creation is the free overflow of (the) divine fecundity.”In developing his approach, Edwards draws upon a rich variety of medieval sources including Richard of St. Victor and Bonaventure, as well as a diversity of contemporary writers in theology in science.

Evolutionary and molecular biology also provide a crucial context for further research on ‘non-interventionist divine action’ as suggested above (Part 2, A, 2, a, iii). Recall that quantum physics can be interpreted as pointing to ontological indeterminism: the world is genuinely open at the subatomic level. In such an approach, God can act with natural causes, and in any or all quantum events, to bring about the actual processes of nature without being reduced to a natural cause and without overriding natural causality. Since genetic mutations are a key to biological evolution, and since they involve quantum processes in which hydrogen bonds are made or broken, one can now picture God as acting within evolution at least at the genetic level. This approach is being explored by writers including Ellis, Murphy, Tracy and me. The results would be compatible with a variety of specific approaches, including process, feminist, and Trinitarian theologies.

Finally, one should note that many conservative and evangelical theologians have offered creative interpretations of evolution, including A.A. Hodge, Henry Ward Beecher, Benjamin B. Warfield, A. H. Strong and more recently Alister McGrath and Howard J. van Till. Particularly notable is Bernard Ramm, who played a role in the Evangelical development of the science-theology dialogue comparable to that of Ian Barbour among the liberals. Regrettably, there will not be space to treat these positions here, though they will be considered in a future, more lengthy, essay.

Contributed by: Dr. Robert Russell