Why God is not superfluous word in a Darwinian universe

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.

One is strict materialism, which is saying the evolving universe has no “point” to it. The universe in fact may dissipate into nothing. The religions we hold dear, the materialists say, are helpful fictions and “adaptive” tools produced by genes. As a theologian, of course, Mr. Haught could not disagree more, though he has no quibble with the materialists’ science itself.

His other foil is a group that doubts the accuracy of some Darwinian science and allows for God’s “design” in the universe. Their idea of finding design and purpose in the universe answers Carl Rogers’ question of why call it “God.”

Mr. Haught, an ecumenical Roman Catholic who heads Georgetown’s Center for the Study of Science and Religion, has argued this “middle path” of theistic evolution in three previous books.

With some degree of elegance, his writings have argued the continued relevance of insights from Alfred North Whitehead, the father of process thought, and the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who said the universe is evolving to oneness in Christ, the Omega Point.

Thus, they both suggest that the ultimate fulfillment of God’s providence is in the future, toward which man and nature are drawn in an extremely long and deep evolutionary process.

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