Why God is not superfluous word in a Darwinian universe

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DEEPER THAN DARWIN:THE PROSPECTS FOR RELIGION IN THE AGE OF EVOLUTION

By John F. Haught

Westview Press, $26, 214 pages

REVIEWED BY LARRY WITHAM

The theologian Paul Tillich, who died in 1965, made his last public appearance with the humanist psychologist Carl Rogers. They agreed that feeling "acceptance" by the universe was key to human sanity.

If that was so, asked Mr. Rogers, then why in an age of science did Tillich have to call that acceptance God? Was not "God" just a superfluous word?

Tillich replied, of course, that God is real, though often elusive in such divine depths of reality. This is the argument that Georgetown University professor and theologian John F. Haught has revived in his new book, "Deeper than Darwin," in which he explains why God is more than just a word. God, he says, is the deepest thing happening in a Darwinian universe that is unfinished on its evolutionary path to the future.

Tillich rose to fame in an era when "depth psychology" intersected with Protestant thought, and the idea of looking for something deeper swept popular culture. Today, however, it can have a ring of fuzziness. So Mr. Haught sharpens up the topic by contrasting the new and deeper "God for evolution" with two rival stances of our day.