to evolutionary materialism and closes with his theology of evolution. Darwin’s revolutionary theory radically altered the medieval and Newtonian view of the universe as fixed and eternal—the metaphysics of being that has influenced religious thought for centuries to the very present. In Darwinian evolution, now recognized to include Mendelian genetics, random genetic mutations naturally selected for the organism’s survival in a process occurring over immense periods of time accounts for the diversity of species, including human life. Materialists, like the zoologist Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, assert that a contingent, deterministic, and mindless evolutionary process demolishes the intellectual respectability of religion’s providential and creator God. In his response, Haught invites atheists, agnostics, and theists to adopt a deeper understanding of God, creation, and humans in relation to evolution. Pointing to the richly diverse and complex living species—including human life, mind, and subjectivity—he asks whether an apparently blind and mindless evolutionary process alone is a sufficient and ultimate explanation for such creativity and “new forms of being.” He answers that Darwinism is methodologically necessary but metaphysically insufficient. Such creativity, for Haught, requires the God of evolution “drawing the world from up ahead . . . toward the future.” This entails a metaphysics of the future that accounts for, but does not supplant, the cosmic qualities of chance variations, natural law, and immense time needed for the emergence of real novelty.
Haught faults the response to Darwinism propounded in creation science, intelligent design (ID) theory, and traditional hierarchical theologies. Creationists “trivialize religion” by disputing Darwinism, using a literalist interpretation of the Bible and claiming that this ancient sacred text is scientifically accurate. ID theorists advance a theologically “restrictive” and “lifeless” argument when theology requires a more robust vision to discern the deeper meaning in an evolving universe. Finally, traditional theologies rest on a metaphysics of the present—the eternal and timeless hierarchy of being, informed by Greek philosophy—that largely ignores the temporal creation of new being and “the coming of a new future.” Instead, Haught proposes an evolutionary theology focused on continuing rather than original creation; on the imperfect, suffering, and unfinished world; and on the human expectations for the future. In this evolutionary theology, divine grace permits the world to emerge on its own, enabling human freedom and emergent novelty; and divine action is not coercive but persuasive, luring the universe to greater beauty and assuring human redemption from absolute perishing in death. Evolutionary theology provides an understanding (theodicy) of innocent suffering and restores the biblical picture of God’s humility and self-emptying love. It represents a reasonable and scientifically informed metaphysics of becoming in which the world is drawn “perpetually toward deeper coherence by an ultimate force of attraction, abstractly identified as Omega, and conceived of as an essentially future reality.”
“Part III: God, Science & Revelation” includes writings on the history, role, and value of Revelation Theology, especially as it relates to cosmic origin, evolution, emergence, and futurity. Until Vatican II, Revelation Theology largely concerned creedal propositions addressing unorthodoxy and safeguarding faith rather than interpreting God’s relationship to the world. Vatican II broadened and deepened the meaning of revelation to include God’s self-revelation and self-emptying in Scripture and in the world. Haught’s Revelation Theology recognizes the revelatory character of diverse religious paths and the revelatory value of new scientific information in mediating transcendent mystery. Indeed, Haught finds the new cosmic story a primary source of revelation. It reveals a self-humbling, self-limiting, and self-emptying God who lovingly allows for human freedom and cosmic flowering into the future. In addition, the self-effacing and self-giving divine love embodied in the crucified Christ encourages individuals to accept their own and others’ suffering, shame, and “shadow side.”
God’s revelation in cosmic history also provides answers to the “God question” posed by modern secular and scientific skeptics, and Haught admonishes theologians to communicate such answers at the risk of otherwise becoming irrelevant. The cosmic story reveals truths about reality that are inaccessible—and yet essential—to science, for example: the reason why reality is intelligible, why the cosmos produced human intelligence, why our minds can grasp reality, and why truth exists and is worth pursuing. By persisting in its otherworldly indifference to science, traditional theology inadvertently reinforces today’s cosmic pessimism and existential homelessness. Haught leads this critical theological undertaking in his Revelation Theology, intended to “provide an enlivening sense of the meaning of the universe that science is now setting before us.”
“Part IV: God, Science & Purpose” tackles perhaps the most vexing theological problem posed by modern science—reconciling cosmic purpose and divine providence with a self-actualizing universe that supports proliferating and diversifying life forms due to blind chance, deterministic law, and immense time. For many in the scientific and intellectual community, scientific information suggests a pointless and meaningless reality consisting entirely of valueless matter manipulated by physical and biological laws, thereby rendering traditional religious explanations intellectually untenable and illusory. Accepting his theological responsibility to address the cosmic pessimism of reductive and deterministic materialism, Haught methodically points out the limits of science regarding questions of ultimate purpose (or teleology) and then deconstructs metaphysical materialism, showing it to be a belief system and not a scientific truth. In explaining cosmic purpose, Haught resists the anthropic principle—the notion of a universe physically fine-tuned since the Big Bang for inevitable human life and mind—as bordering on outdated design arguments of natural theology and as centering narrowly on human rather than cosmic evolution.
Though still shrouded in divine mystery, cosmic purpose, for Haught, is “the working out or actualizing of something of self-evident value”; and he finds unquestionable value in the “unimaginably wide display of beauty” emerging in the cosmic story—“the bursting forth of sentience, mentality, self-consciousness, language, ethics, art, religion, and now science.” Haught’s teleology effectively synthesizes Whitehead’s aesthetic cosmological principle of the intensification of beauty with Teilhard’s law of emergent complexity-consciousness and the phenomenon of terrestrial intelligence. He locates the drama of an awakening universe within an Abrahamic theology of God’s futurity and promise. In Haught’s evolutionary theology, the struggle, suffering, and waste of natural selection and the catastrophic accidents in natural history represent the inevitable byproducts of the universe still aborning, risking suffering and evil in its restless cosmic unfolding of ever-new and harmonious syntheses of novelty with order. Divine providence, for Haught, resides in the emergent and anticipatory character of the universe opening to a salvific future where God reveals “the breadth and depth of feeling to take into the divine life the entire cosmic story, including its episodes of tragedy and its final expiration.”
“Part V: God, Suffering & Death” takes aim at much current theodicy—that is, the theological understanding of suffering and death—because of its failure after Darwin to account for the length, breadth, and depth of nonhuman pain, struggle, and suffering in sentient life. In 1996, Pope John Paul II endorsed evolutionary biology, and in 2004, the International Theological Commission deemed contingency “not incompatible” with divine providence. Yet both statements failed to reconcile the apparently wasteful, inefficient, and random events and the vast unmerited suffering of sentient beings in evolution with the providential governance of a loving and caring God. Underlying this failure, for Haught, is Catholicism’s adherence to traditional prescientific metaphysics, inadequate for a theodicy explaining the pain and misery of biological and human evolution. Instead, Haught argues that “a shift from the metaphor of divine governance toward that of God as goal—in accordance with the metaphysics of the future—is more appropriate to a theology for an unfinished universe.” By identifying human suffering as expiation for original and ongoing human sin, theology remains indifferent to Darwinian evolution, resorts to a literalist biblical reading of Genesis, and assumes human descent from a lost mythical perfection, rather than focusing on a creative and promising future. Conversely, by explaining evolution as an epic drama of biblical “grace, promise, and liberation,” theology makes thoughtful
