Since 1993, all of my books have, in one way or another, focused on science and its implications for religion and theology. I based Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (1995) on an approach I developed over many years of undergraduate teaching at Georgetown. After writing that book, however, I became increasingly interested in topics related to evolutionary biology. Because of the growing importance of the question of God and evolution in the intellectual world—as well as in the American cultural conversations—and about the scientific and religious status of what has been called “Intelligent Design,” I wrote God After Darwin (2000, 2007), Responses to 101 Questions on God in Evolution (2001), Deeper than Darwin (2003), Is Nature Enough? (2006), Christianity and Science (2007), God and the New Atheism (2008), and Making Sense of Evolution (2010). Because of an increasing number of invitations to lecture and write on theology and evolution, both nationally and internationally, I decided to leave the undergraduate classroom in 2005 and devote my time to lecturing and writing on the relationship of religion and theology to evolutionary biology and cosmology. A new emphasis on cosmology is reflected in my two most recent books Resting on the Future (2015) and The New Cosmic Story (2017). In these works, I still draw, in some measure, on the hopeful vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) that I first encountered many years ago.
The just-mentioned notion of intelligent design (ID), I should note, is controversial, primarily because its proponents insist that it should become part of science education and, hence, a topic to be taken up in biology classes in our public schools. Since the modern scientific method looks only for the physical causes of phenomena, however, ID is not really science and should not be part of science education. ID still commands a large following among conservative Christians and Muslims, but, in 2005, after a long trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Judge John E. Jones struck down the initiative taken by the Dover County school board to make ID part of that district’s high school biology curriculum. Because I had already become deeply involved in discussions relating to religion and evolution, I was asked to testify at the Harrisburg trial on behalf of the plaintiffs who were opposed to the teaching of ID in public schools. I did so happily. Joining the expert witnesses from various academic fields, including biology and philosophy, I was the sole theologian to provide testimony at the trial (Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover District School Board). I supported the argument that ID is a somewhat impoverished theological idea, rather than a properly scientific one, and therefore has no justifiable place in public school education. As a result of my testimony, I was later awarded a “Friend of Darwin” award by the National Center for Science Education. I was probably one of the few non-atheists on this list of awardees.
My exposure to Teilhard years earlier had already turned me into someone who believes that evolutionary science has been a great gift—rather than a danger—to theology. Had it not been for that early influence, my academic life could have taken many other directions. I first encountered Teilhard’s evolutionary vision soon after graduating from college in 1964. I was immediately swept away by the power and freshness of his thought. I did not realize fully at the time that my excitement was due also to the fact that I was becoming dissatisfied intellectually and spiritually with the medieval theological worldview presupposed by my religious education up until that point. Before encountering Teilhard, I had been studying in a Catholic seminary and was thoroughly schooled in Thomistic philosophy (much of which I was required to read and memorize in the original Latin). To this day, I am grateful for having had the opportunity to study Thomistic thought. However, I began to realize long ago that Thomas’s prescientific philosophy, ingenious and adventurous as it was in the thirteenth century, cannot adequately contextualize contemporary science—although there are a few Catholic philosophers and theologians still attempting to forge just such an impossible synthesis. I have high regard for the effort and goodwill behind these attempts, but I have come to think of them as both intellectually and spiritually inadequate to what we now know about the universe in the age of science, especially after Darwin. Many of the severest critics of Teilhard are rigorous Thomists who have yet to appropriate evolutionary science in a serious way.
In any case, I left the seminary soon after the Second Vatican Council and immediately began to pursue a lay career in academic theology. My decision to take up theological studies was also a consequence of my exposure to the writings of Karl Rahner and contemporary biblical scholarship, especially that of my teacher, the Johannine scholar Raymond Brown. To this day, I am grateful for the historical-critical understanding of Scripture that I learned from Brown and others. I was thus enabled to see long ago that scientifically modern biblical criticism liberates theology from the anachronistic impulse to seek scientific information in the Bible and the ridiculous attempt to make ancient scriptures compete with modern natural sciences. This is a lesson that countless Christians and most anti-Christian evolutionists have yet to learn.
As I recall, however, it was mostly due to the excitement I had felt in my very limited acquaintance at that time with Teilhard’s Christian vision of nature and evolution that I found myself drawn toward a life in systematic theology. Even though I have sought intellectual support for relating theology to science by studying the works of many other religious thinkers, especially Bernard Lonergan, Alfred North Whitehead, and Michael Polanyi, Teilhard has been my main inspiration, both intellectually and religiously. I am not as uncritical of his thought today as I may have been when I was younger, but I still draw upon the audacity of his deeply religious conviction that acquaintance with science is absolutely essential to understanding the meaning of Christian faith today.
I want to point out here that even before I came across his writings, Teilhard’s bold ideas were already helping to shape some of the theological reflection that would make the Second Vatican Council such an important event in the history of the Church as well as in my personal life. Gaudium et Spes, the Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (1965), was revolutionary for many reasons, including its making the following two observations: (1) “The human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one. In consequence there has arisen a new series of problems . . . calling for efforts of analysis and synthesis” (§5). And (2) “A hope related to the end of time does not diminish the importance of intervening duties but rather undergirds the acquittal of them with fresh incentives” (§21).4 I cannot read Gaudium et Spes without noticing the influence of Teilhard in it—in spite of the fact that the Vatican had censored his writings earlier. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the controversial Jesuit evolutionist and creative religious thinker had already expressed some of the same sentiments that eventually made their way into Vatican II.
Teilhard had developed some of his ideas on God and evolution in The Human Phenomenon and The Divine Milieu while he was living in China, becoming one of the top two or three geologists of the Asian continent. These two books and countless other shorter writings have made him famous posthumously, but he remained largely unpublished and unknown in his own lifetime. Because of church censorship, he was never given the opportunity that most scholars have of exposing their works to the critique of other experts. No doubt, then, there are deficiencies in his writings that could have easily been avoided and corrected had his church allowed for the circulation of his ideas. After his death in 1955, his lay friends fed his manuscripts to hungry publishers who then distributed them widely. Some of these were immediately devoured by theologians who helped shape the documents of the Council, and so Teilhard’s hope for the future of humanity and of our need to take responsibility for “building the earth” greatly influenced one of modern Catholicism’s main documents. This is most ironic because, in1962, the same year the Council met for its first session, the Holy Office of the Vatican issued an admonition advising seminary professors and heads of Catholic colleges and universities to “protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and his followers.”5 Fortunately, I was one of those who escaped such efforts to protect the tender minds of young Catholics.
Because of the theological ferment fostered by Vatican II, my own, previously medieval, spirituality began
