A while back, I was sitting in my therapist's office, and he offered some perspective on an issue with a reminder that a dimension of the problem at hand could be traced to the basic "fight-or-flight" mechanism we've evolved.
Suddenly remembering I'm a theologian, he asked with concern, "oh, does that conflict with your beliefs?"
Ah yes, here we were again at a strange idea that to be religious is to deny evolution. Of course, there is abundant evidence for this idea. I am taking it for granted that readers of Daily Kos are well aware of the many voices that pit a literal reading of the Bible against evolutionary theory. But, this has not always been the dominant response of religious people to Darwinism. By the end of the nineteenth century, most theologians and churchfolk had come to terms with Darwinism - young earth creationism was a reaction to, not a continuation of, a theological consensus on religion and evolution.
In the theological context, the undecided question among those who affirm evolution is the extent to which evolution should be marshalled for natural theology, the approach that asserts that one can move through observation of natural phenomena to the rationality of theistic belief. (Affirming the rationality of theistic belief may or may not also involve the further step of attempting to prove the existence of God, depending on what conception of rationality the theologian uses.) Not all theologians affirm the basic approach of natural theology, so the theological uses of evolutionary theory vary widely. Furthermore, many (not all) of the nineteenth-century examples are Lamarckian, not Darwinian, in their understanding of evolution. The following examples do not add up to a defense of one hypothesis; they show a range of positions taken.
What that last sentence means is that this diary does not attempt to offer a philosophical or theological defense of the compatibility of religious and scientific claims; it offers a historical account of various attempts to relate religious and scientific claims positively rather than negatively. (Let me repeat - I am fully aware of religious resistance to the results of scientific inquiry, I am not dwelling on it here because that side of the equation is well-established in the conversation around here.) From a theological perspective, the fact that the central sacred text I work with starts off with two completely contradictory creation stories tells me right there that the doctrine of creation is a matter of metaphor, not causality.
It was also my intention to include non-Christian perspectives on the question, but just looking at Christian positions alone gave me plenty to do. Don't believe me? Take a gander over the flip.
What follows is an annotated chronicle of publications; please make a mental note to yourself "we have just left the nineteenth century" at the appropropriate point. Dates in italics refer to publications on evolution in general.
1778, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Epochs of Nature
1799, Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers
My first example of a religious voice in favor of evolution is Schleiermacher because he is where modern liberal theology starts. His argument in this text is that religion is primarily neither a matter of metaphysics nor of morals, but of contemplation. This experiential approach to religion shifts the meaning of revelation from a supernatural dictate captured by religious stenographers to a core insight derived from the feeling of awe that comes with genuine contemplation. Schleiermacher affirms that all such insights are historically and culturally conditioned - to the point that he affirms that God is not a necessary outcome of religious reflection. In his Speeches on Religion, he doesn't defend organic evolution, but the historically changing character of experience is so pivotal to his argument that it is a small step to extend affirmation of change in human affairs to affirmation of change in the natural world. Indeed, the acceptance of the implications of evolution is precisely the kind of historical change Schleiermacher is talking about.
(When I read this text many, many years ago, I remember my jaw dropping open, and jumping up to show my mom a passage, saying "Wow! He was talking about evolution in 1799!" My mom didn't disagree with my reading back then when I showed it to her, but I didn't find the passage on this read, so my understanding of "what counts as evolution" must have shifted.)
1800, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, "Floreal Lectures"
1803, Erasmus Darwin, "The Temple of Nature"
A long poem by Charles Darwin's grandfather. Some significant verses
ORGANIC LIFE beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and raise'd in Ocean's pearly caves.
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers aquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet and wing.
- cited in Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons
1844, Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Vestiges was a pre-Darwinian attempt to argue from the geologic record for the necessity of evolution. It was widely sold and read in both England and the United States, thus preparing people for Darwin's arguments fifteen years later. Chambers was not especially religious, but his argument proceeded in a manner intended to reach Christian readers, who at this time had largely synthesized Newton's science with Anglican theology. In this synthesis, intelligent design was a reigning assumption, best spelled out in William Paley's Natural Theology, which was a major influence on the early Darwin. Darwin's later works, of course, posed a challenge to design, a challenge that has only grown increasingly insurmountable over the last century and a half.
1859, Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
1860, Baden Powell, "On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity" in Essays and Reviews
The 1860 publication of Essays and Reviews was a major event in nineteenth-century English theology. It introduced "higher criticism" of the Bible, in which German scholars attempted to identify its human authors, to England. It was this biblical criticism that aroused more furor than scientific approaches, but it was also an example of a speedy acceptance by liberal theologians of Darwin's theories.
Mr. Darwin's masterly volume on The Origin of Species by the law of "natural selection" - a work which now substantiates on undeniable grounds the very principle so long denounced by the first naturalists - the origination of new species by natural causes: a work which must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favor of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature"
1860, Asa Gray, "Natural Selection not Inconsistent with Natural Theology" - Atlantic Monthly article reprinted in Darwiniana
The scientific community did not rush to accept Darwin's theories all at once. One of the most illustrious naturalists of the day, Louis Agassiz, resisted Darwinism strenuously. One of Darwin's early scientific defenders was the Harvard professor of botany, Asa Gray. In 1860, he wrote a series of articles for the Atlantic Monthly, asserting that Darwin's theories did not pose a challenge to natural theology, which for Gray meant there was room for design in Darwinism:
The whole argument in natural theology proceeds upon the ground that the inference for a final cause of the structure of the hand and of the valves in the veins is just as valid now, in individuals produced through natural generation, as it would have been in the case of the first man, supernaturally created. Why not, then, just as good even on the supposition of the descent of men from chimpanzees and gorillas, since those animals possess these same contrivances? Or, to take a more supposable case: If the argument from structure to design is convincing when drawn from a particular animal, say a Newfoundland dog, and is not weakened by the knowledge that this dog came from similar parents, would it be at all weakened if, in tracing his genealogy, it were ascertained that he was a remote descendant of the mastiff or some other breed, or that both these and other breeds came (as is suspected) from some wolf? [...] And if the argument from structure to design is not invalidated by our present knowledge that our individual dog was developed from a single organic cell, how is it invalidated by the supposition of an analogous natural descent, through a long line of connected forms, from such a cell, or from some simple animal, existing ages before there were any dogs? (123)
1862, Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby
In this fairy tale, a liberal religious affirmation of scientific approaches to evolutionary theory results in a conservative political vision.
1864, Herbert Spencer: Principles of Biology
1866, Gregor Mendel, Experiments on Plant Hybrids
"Experiments on Plant Hybrids" is, strictly speaking a scientific paper, with no explicit reflections on religious implications. As such, you might expect it to be listed with Lamarck, Darwin, and Spencer in bold italics without a link, as all the general texts on evolution are. I'm including Mendel here with the specifically religious affirmations of evolution to highlight that both science and religion aren't just a set of propositions we can agree or disagree with, but are activities with their own set of rules. Mendel did not just "believe" in the tenets of Roman Catholicism, he changed is life completely to conform to monastic vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. All of his work on peas happened within a daily rhythm of saying Mass, chanting, and living in total dedication to God, a commitment which led to his being elevated to abbot of the monastery. His later years were devoted to waging a campaign against the taxation of church property.
On the level of ideas, it is perfectly reasonable to accept genetics without accepting Catholicism. Applying that separation to any account of Mendel's life could only result in a gross distortion of his biography.
1871, Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
1871, St. George Jackson Mivart, On the Genesis of Species
Mivart's text is a scientific critique of Darwin, defending a Lamarckian view of evolution. Before the rise of genetics and a full documentation of the fossil record, this was a reasonable tack to take. He furthermore reconciles scientific enquiry and religion - he was Catholic - with the insight from Aquinas that investigating creation is not a matter of looking for miracles, but discovering natural laws.
1871, James McCosh, Christianity and Positivism
McCosh would later, in 1890, go on to write The Religious Aspect of Evolution
In all past ages there have been new powers added. Life seized on the mineral mass, and formed the plant; sensation imparted to the plant made the animal; instinct has preserved the life and elevated it; intelligence has turned the animal into man; morality has raised the intelligence to love and law. The work of the Spirit is not an anomaly. It is one of a series; the last and the highest. It is the grandest of all the powers. It is an inward power, convincing, converting, sanctifying, beautifying, and preparing the soul for a heavenly rest, where, however "they rest not day nor night," for rest consists in holy and blessed service. (113)
1874, Alexander Winchell, The Doctrine of Evolution: Its Data, Its Principles, Its Speculations, and Its Theistic Bearing
Winchell was the missionary of evolutionary theory to the Methodist church. His book on evolution is primarily a summary of the then-current state of scientific inquiry on evolution, with a brief ending section asserting its compatibility with theism. The final recapitulation of the whole argument closes
There exists no a priori ground for denying that some phase of the doctrine of filiative evolution in the organic world may yet become fully proven and established, or that even the work of creating new forms directly from inorganization may be now going on. These are simply questions of fact, to be found out by searching.
Should these doctrines become proven, even in their extreme phases, there will be no proof of the absence of immediate divine agency from any of the operations of life; and, having seen organization emerge from inert matter, we can believe more easily than before that "God made man of the dust of the earth." In any issue of scientific investigation in a new development of truth, Christian Theism has nothing to fear, but only a new truth to gain; and should entertain a gratitude above all other interests for being placed in possession of new, solid material to incorporate into its system. (123)
Winchell is, unfortunately, representative of a distinct racist strain in pro-evolutionary thought, both religious and non-religious. In 1878, he published a pamphlet, Adamites and Pre-Adamites, in which he made a biblical argument that Adam and Eve were not the first humans in an attempt to reconcile the historicity of the Bible and the evolutionary record.
Adam was the "first man " only in the same sense as Christ was the "second man;" for Adam "was the figure of Christ" (v. 14.) 7. All men are of one blood in the sense of one substance -one "matter." The Jews are descended from Adam; the Gentiles-from Pre-Adamites. The first chapter of Genesis treats of the origin of the Gentiles; the second, of the origin of the Jews.
And then, he goes on to say
It is agreed, then, that the enlightened nations of the world belong to one race. This is the race of white men. [...] The Negroes are about to cause us trouble. The Negroes have made us a great deal of trouble. The whole group of black races recedes from the white and dusky races. These tropical ebonites are now regarded as comprising four races.
1874, John Fiske, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy: Based on the Doctrine of Evolution, with Criticisms of the Positive Philosophy
Fiske developed a general philosophy based on evolutionary theory, which left room for movement into a spiritual appreciation of a vague "unknown," which his ecclesiastical contemporaries found a horrifically impersonal approach to deity, but which many current theologians would be perfectly comfortable with.
1876, James Thompson Bixby, Similarities of Physical and Religious Knowledge
1879, Newman Smyth, Old Faiths in New Light
Remember Schleiermacher from the beginning of the list? Smyth was the theologian who brought Schleiermacher into American theology, which generally distrusted German idealism and relied more heavily on Scottish "common-sense" philosophy.
Smyth's Old Faiths in New Light opens with a discussion of the state of evolutionary theory, and the fact that all thought of his era stands before its judgement. Like many nineteenth-century theologians, Smyth turned to historical criticism of the Bible to treat it as an evolving document, part of the general evolution of humanity in the larger picture. He devotes a chapter to a comparison of natural observation in the Bible to the science of his day; he makes a case for the Bible being a relatively "secularized" text, freer of mythic outlooks than other ancient texts. In his conclusion, he reiterates the importance of evolution as the basic starting point for all thought about religious matters:
We began by accepting loyally the results of scientific research into the present constitution of things. We trust our senses, and the logic of the senses, just so far as the human understanding can work out a positive science. We admit that the course of visible nature can be best summed up in some general law of evolution. We do not question, and have no moral interest in questioning, a physical evolution, and a mechanism coextensive with the bounds of nature, so far as by such conceptions the sum total of our scientific knowledge can be at present expressed to the best advantage. But ours is by birthright the duty, also, of subjecting visible nature to the interpretation of the spirit, and of reading the formulas of things in the light of our own moral ideas. The science whose source is within us, can never yield to any sciences whose sources are in the world without us. Perfect knowledge must be the harmony of both. (383-4)
1881, Albrecht Ritschl, "Theology and Metaphysics" reprinted in Three Essays
Ritschl's short essay says nothing explicitly about evolution, but it was a theological articulation of what Stephen Jay Gould would later call "non-overlapping magesteria." He proposes a stark divide between facts and values: it is the job of religion to reflect on the latter, and leave science to the former. This understanding of theology gives room for scientists to follow wherever the evidence leads in describing what is, the world of objective facts. Religion is left to reflect on ethics, what ought to be, and on subjective experience. With this understanding in place, evolutionary accounts of the world simply provide material by which a theologian is liberated from outdated presuppositions. Ritschl's perspective was enormously influential for Protestant theology into the 1950s. One effect of the dominance of Ritschlianism in Protestant theology in the first half of the twentieth century is that theological engagement with evolution waned in comparison with the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century.
1882, George Frederick Wright, Studies in Science and Religion
Wright is fascinating because he went from being a defender of Darwinism in the 1880s to contributing to The Fundamentals, the founding text of American Fundamentalism, which insists on biblical inerrancy and literalism.
1883, Henry Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World
1884, Frederick Temple, The Relations between Religion and Science: Eight Lectures Preached before Oxford
1885, Henry Ward Beecher, Evolution and Religion
I haven't been able to get my hands on a copy of this text, but in this text, Beecher used the theory of evolution to launch a full-frontal attack on the notion of original sin, laying an axe to the root idea of the Calvinism in which he had been raised. With this move, Beecher advanced the cause of universalism in the Congregational denomination. In terms of American religious history, the significance of this development is huge.
1891, Joseph LeConte, Evolution: Its Nature, Its Evidences, and Its Relation to Religious Thought
LeConte was a geologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this book, he goes through a thorough examination of evolution, concluding that evolution is a matter of greater certainty than gravity. (276) He went on to spell out various implications for religion.
See, then, how the issue is forced. Either Nature is sufficient of itself and wants no God at all, or else this whole idea, the history of which we have been tracing, is radically false. We have here given by science either a demonstration of materialism or a else a reductio ad absurdum. Which is it? I do not hesitate a moment to say it is a reductio ad absurdum. And I believe that evolution has conferred an inestimable benefit on philosophy and religion by forcing this issue and compelling us to take a more rational view.
What, then, is the alternative view? It is the utter rejection with Berkeley and with Swedenborg of the independent existence of matter and the real efficient agency of natural forces. It is the frank return to the old idea of direct divine agency, but in a new, more rational, less anthropomorphic form. It is the bringing together and complete reconciliation of the two apparently antagonistic and mutually excluding views of direct agency and natural law. Such reconciliation we have already seen is the true test of a rational philosophy. It is the belief in a God not far away beyond our reach, who once long ago enacted laws and created forces which continue of themselves to run the machine we call Nature, but a God immanent, a God resident in Nature, at all times and in all places directing every event and determining every phenomena - a God in whom in the most literal sense not only we but all things have their being. [...] According to this view the law of gravitation is naught else than the mode of operation of the divine energy in sustaining the cosmos - the divine method of sustentation; the law of evolution naught else than the mode of operation of the same divine energy in originating and developing the cosmos - the divine method of creation. (300-1)
Like Winchell, LeConte is also a figure in the sorry history of American racism. In 1892, he wrote The Race Problem in the South, in which he asserted
There was a time, and that not more than a century ago, when slavery was regarded as the normal, and indeed the necessary, result of the close contact of civilized with savage races. This view may be regarded as the natural one, as the survival of the law of force and the right of the strongest, inherited by man from the animal kingdom.
1892, Lyman Abbott, The Evolution of Christianity
Evolution is defined by Professor Le Conte as "continuous progressive change, according to certain laws, and by means of resident forces." It is my object to show that the Christian religion is itself an evolution; that is, that this life of God in humanity is one of continuous progressive change, according to certain divine laws, and by means of forces, or a force, resident in humanity. The proposition is a very simple one; illustrated and applied, it may help us solve some of the problems which are perplexing us concerning the Bible, the church, theology, social ethics, and spiritual experience.
All scientific men to-day are evolutionists. That is, they agree substantially in holding that all life proceeds, by a regular and orderly sequence, from simple to more complex forms, from lower to higher forms, and in accordance with laws which either now are or may yet be understood, or are at all events a proper subject of hopeful investigation. The truth of this doctrine I assume; that is, I assume that all life, including the religious life, proceeds by a regular and orderly sequence from simple and lower forms to more complex and higher forms, in institutions, in thought, in practical conduct, and in spiritual experience. It is my purpose not so much to demonstrate this proposition as to state, exemplify, and apply it. (1-2)
1896, John Zahm, Evolution and Dogma
Zahm attempted a Roman Catholic defense of Darwinian evolutionary theory at the end of the nineteenth century.
1900, "Rediscovery" of Mendelian genetics
Mendel's published paper was ignored for thirty-five years. In 1900, it began to be discussed among scientists, and proved to be the missing link that made the Darwinian approach to evolution of natural selection definitively edge out the Lamarckian view of acquired characteristics. Lamarckian understandings of evolution left considerably more room for design and teleology than Darwinian understandings did.
Ironically, around 1900 non-Darwinian approaches to evolution became more prominent in scientific writing for a few decades - see Peter Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories around 1900
1900, Georg Wobbermin, Christian Belief in God: A German Criticism of German Materialistic Philosophy
I am certainly of the opinion that the doctrine of evolution and the Christian belief in God not only do not conflict but, on the contrary, that they are mutually complementary - I might almost say that each is necessary to the other. The Christian belief in God alone comprehends the riddle propounded by the theory of evolution - it does not solve but it comprehends this riddle. For it is most especially under the conception of evolution that the world of living things seems like a work of art, in comparison with which even the most elaborate human works of art are but very imperfect imitations. It appears as a work of art in which innumerable distinct elements serve the single purpose of developing ever more perfect forms of life from the lowest stages of unicellular organisms or such, indeed, that do not even have the value of a complete cell in form, and with only an extremely vague sensibility, up to the highest stage where rational and religious moral life becomes possible, and with it conscious and responsible personal beings. (96-97, in the 1918 translation)
It should be noted that Wobbermin's understanding of evolution toward higher beings led to his endorsement of Nazi ideology in the 1930s. As already shown by the example of
The Water-Babies, liberal theology, in its dependence on scientific progress, did not always result in liberal political positions.
(The living expert on Wobbermin is Kossack Mahanoy, author of Faith at the Intersection of History and Experience: The Theology of Georg Wobbermin.)
1904, Rudolf Otto, Naturalism and Religion
1915, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Although this utopian feminist novella is decidedly post-Christian, it's a vitally important piece of the picture as it shows a feminist religious understanding grounded in the early twentieth-century ethos of progress that generally integrated evolution into its argumentation.
1921, Henri de Dordolot, Darwinism and Catholic Thought
1924, Shailer Mathews, The Faith of Modernism
1929, Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
Strictly speaking, this book doesn't really belong here, as it is a work of philosophy, not theology. However, it is the foundational text for a modern branch of the theology - process theology - which puts change at the center of its understanding of the world, and thus easily integrates organic evolution. (I generally love where process theologians end up, but must admit to scratching my head quite a bit as I follow how they get there.)
1931, Ernest Messenger, Evolution and Theology: The Problem of Man's Origin
1932, John Anthony O'Brien, Evolution and Religion: A Study of the Bearing of Evolution upon the Philosophy of Religion
1932, Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society
Niebuhr used evolutionary theory as part of a blistering attack on what he considered to be the naïveté of the Social Gospel movement, which was a very popular, progressive, and idealistic theology in the early twentieth century. His central thesis is that while individuals have the capacity for ethical greatness, societies are hampered by the need to maintain a balance of power in their quest to act ethically.
Evolutionary theory provides Niebuhr a basic starting point for debunking the notion of social perfectibility that was promulgated by the social gospel. He accepts the more violent image of "survival of the fittest" that legitimated a crass Social Darwinism, but holds out the possibility and necessity of rational and religious restraints on an unfettered selfishness:
Every type of energy in nature in nature seeks to preserve and perpetuate itself within terms of its unique genius. The energy of human life does not differ in this from the whole world of nature. It differs only in the degree of reason which directs the energy. ... Reason enables him, within limits, to direct his energy so that it will flow in harmony, and not in conflict, with other life. Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life. Reason may extend and stabilize, but it does not create, the capacity to affirm life other than his own. (25-6)
(This is the quote that originally inspired me to write this diary.)
In 1959, Niebuhr contributed to A Book That Shook the World: Anniversary Essays on Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, in which he hailed Darwinism as rescuing Christian theology from a bad detour:
One reason why the gradual acceptance of the Darwinian thesis proved not to be lethal to religious faith was that the Biblical doctrine of creation was not as dependent upon Aristotelian ontology as Christians had traditionally assumed. The two were, in fact, in contradiction to each other; but that was not discovered until Darwin's triumph shattered the relation and also prevented Christian obscurantists from using the doctrine of creation to obviate the necessity or possibility of inquiring into the sequence of causes. (31)
1933, Ernest Barnes, Scientific Theory and Religion: The World Described by Science and its Spiritual Interpretation
1937, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species
1939, William Greenwood, Biology and Christian Belief
Greenwood was a British biologist, not a theologian. His book begins with a discussion of atoms and their challenge to a thoroughgoing materialism, and builds a description of the physical and biological sciences all the way to personality and a defense of life after death. I would imagine that the science is now somewhat out of date.
1942, Ernest Mayr, Systematics and the Origin of Species
1947, Ronald Fisher, "The Renaissance of Darwinism" in Listener
To the traditionally religious man, the essential novelty introduced by the theory of the evolution of organic life, is that creation was not all finished a long while ago, but is still in progress, in the midst of its incredible duration. In the language of Genesis we are living in the sixth day, probably rather early in the morning, and the Divine artist has not yet stood back from his work, and declared it to be "very good." Perhaps that can only be when God's very imperfect image has become more competent to manage the affairs of the planet of which he is in control. - Cited in Michael Ruse, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?
1950s-1960s, Pierre Teillhard de Chardin
No theologian before or after Teillhard has tried to create an absolute fusion between evolutionary theory and Christianity as hard as he did. He died in 1955, but many of his works were published posthumously, as the pre-Vatican II church found his work theologically suspect. The main texts are
The Phenomenon of Man
The Future of Man
Christianity and Evolution
A sample from The Hymn of the Universe
Like those materialistic biologists who think they can do away with the soul by dismantling the physico-chemical mechanisms of the living cell, zoologists are persuaded they have done away with the necessity for a first Cause simply because they have discovered a little more about the general structure of his work. It is time we set aside once and for all a problem so invalidly stated. No; strictly speaking, scientific transformism can prove nothing for or against the existence of God. It simply establishes as a fact the concatenation of reality. It offers us an anatomy of life, not an ultimate explanation of life. It affirms that something has become organism, something has developed; but to discern the ultimate conditions of that development is beyond its competence. To decide whether the evolutionary process is self-explanatory or whether it demands for its explanation a progressive and continuous act of creation on the part of a first Mover: this falls within the domain not of physics but of metaphysics.
The theory of transformism, it must be said again and again, does not of itself involve the acceptance of any particular philosophy. Does that mean that it offers no hint in favour of one rather than another? No, indeed. But it is interesting to note that the systems of thought which are best adapted to it would seem to be precisely those which at first regarded it as a menace to them. Christianity, for example, is essentially based on the twofold belief that man is in a special sense an object of pursuit to the divine power throughout creation, and that Christ is the terminal point at which, supernaturally but also physically, the consummation of humanity is destined to be achieved. Could one desire an experiential view of things more in keeping with these doctrines of unity than that which shows us living beings, not artificially set side by side in pursuit of some doubtful utility or amenity, but bound together by virtue of the physical conditions of their existence, in the real unity of a shared struggle towards greater being.
1954, Bernard Ramm, The Christian View of Science and Scripture
This is a good place to start if you want to understand the distinction between Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism. Ramm's book was an Evangelical critique of Fundamentalist ideas of creationism and biblical interpretation, and was favored by the most popular evangelist of the day, Billy Graham. The central text of modern creationism, The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris, is a full-on attack on this text, seeing it as compromising the Bible.
Nevertheless, as an evangelical text, it proceeds with assumptions that make it ripe picking for those who would want to argue for the inherent braking function of religion on scientific enquiry. His argument includes defenses of the Virgin Birth and Jonah's being swallowed by a fish as historical events.
His discussion of evolution moves largely through summaries of other people's views, but a taste is here:
If evolution is purely a secondary law, if it is a derivative creation, then it has no profound metaphysical status, and can be tolerated in Christianity. If it is a secondary law of biology, and not the metaphyiscs of creation, but viewed as part of the divine creation, an element in providence, then evolution is as harmless as, say, the relativity theory. (204)
1957, David Lack, Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief: The Unresolved Conflict
1963, Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 3
In this text, Tillich goes farther than most theologians in accepting that purpose is something humans create in a purposeless universe. This fact means that human history, not nature, is the arena in which religious reflection is most pertinent:
The four characteristics of human history (to be connected with purpose, to be influenced by freedom, to create the new in terms of meaning, to be significant in a universal, particular, and telelogical sense) lead to the distinction between human history and the historical dimension in general. [...] If we take as examples the life of higher animals, the evolution of species, and the development of the astronomical universe, we observe first of all that in none of these examples are purpose and freedom effective. Purposes, eg., in the higher animals, do not transcend the satisfaction of their immediate needs; the animals do not transcend their natural bondage. Nor is there any particular intention operating in the evolution of the species or in the movements of the universe. [...] there is no absolute meaning and there is no significant uniqueness where the dimension of the spirit is not actual. The uniqueness of a species or of a particular exemplar within a species is real but not ultimately significant, whereas the act in which a person establishes himself as a person, a cultural creation with its inexhaustible meaning, and a religious experience in which ultimate meaning breaks through preliminary meanings are infinitely significant. (305)
1965, John Cobb, A Christian Natural Theology Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead
1967, Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern
1976, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
1981, Langdon Gilkey, Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock
Gilkey's book is a gripping account of his role as an expert witness for the ACLU in a case against the state of Arkansas when they passed a law mandating the teaching of creationism in public school science classes. A theologian at the University of Chicago, Gilkey showed quite clearly that the creationist curriculum was not only religious, not scientific, but specifically biblical in origin. (Yes, you have a theologian to thank for the fact that creationism is prohibited in your kid's science class.) A relevant snippet of his testimony:
Science is, in short, secular; it deals with the worldly world: with nature and its forces, with human bodies [...] It cannot go beyond this "secular" level because then it leaves the observable, sharable, quantitative, measurable, the natural or finite level. [...] The fact that science omits God is a result of the limitation of science, not of its atheism: Science is limited to finite causes and cannot speak of God without making God into a finite cause. [...] This "methodological non-theism" of science is not confined to natural science - or to evolutionary theory. It is characteristic of all modern academic disciplines. [...] If I am a lawyer defending a client from the charge of the murder of John Doe, I cannot offer an 'explanation' of the murder that holds that God, and not my client, struck John Doe dead. That would not be an explanation or theory recognized by the court. [...] Legal procedures are limited to explaining an event by natural, historical, or personal causes [...] That limitation does not mean that judges, prosecutors, and defending lawyers do not believe in God [...] Nevertheless, God is not recognized as an agent in a legitimate legal explanation of events, anymore than God can be an agent in a scientific or an historical explanation of events. [...] To say that evolution "excludes God" is, therefore, merely to say that it is a theory within natural science. (115-16)
1983, Roland Frye (ed.), Is God a Creationist? The Religious Case against Creation Science
A collection of essays by several of the authors mentioned here, from Asa Gray (see above) to Pope John Paul II (see below).
1984, Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes
In this key text of process theology, Hartshorne attacks what he considers the six major errors of classical theism: 1. God is absolutely perfect and therefore unchangeable; 2. God is omnipotent; 3. God is omniscient; 4. God loves without sympathy or feeling; 5. Immortality as a career after death; 6. Revelation is infallible. In contrast, he holds to a notion of God as the mental side of the entire world, active from atoms on up, and co-evolving with the world. The entire third chapter of this book is a discussion of creation through evolution.
According to the tyrant idea of God, there is no element of chance in reality. Everything is deliberately and decisively arranged by divine wisdom and power. According to the evolutionary theory, offspring vary from their parents and from one another partly by chance. If evolution proceeds in a fairly definite direction, it is because natural selection weeds out many nonadaptive chance variations, so that from very simple beginnings is woven a very complex "web of life" [...]
We have seen that chance is an inseparable aspect of freedom. Only those happy with the tyrant conception of deity can suppose that divine providence (creation or rule of the world) excludes chance. It merely limits the latter's scope. [...] Order in disorder is, so far as we know, the nature of the elementary constituents of the physical world. [...] If God is conceivable only as supreme freedom issuing in, dealing with, lesser forms of freedom, if the notion of creature as absolutely controlled, absolutely ordered puppet is without positive meaning [...] then the present state of physics and biology is theologically satisfactory. (67, 69-70)
1984, Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science
This book offers an attempt to understand the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2-3 (remember, from the intro, there are two creation stories at the beginning of the Bible) in relation to their historical context, rather than as proto-scientific descriptions of the beginning of the world.
It is quite doubtful that these texts have waited in obscurity through the millennia for their hidden meanings to be revealed by modern science. It is at least a good possibility tha thte "real meaning" was understood by the authors themselves. It is also possible that htese particular vehicles of a six-day creation and the paradise of Eden were used because they were especially well suited at that time to conveying this meaning. It is even possible that, after we have laid aside those concerns which preoccupy and distinguish us, the texts themselves in their ancient setting may be able to tell us something of "what these stories really mean." [...]
Charles Darwin, in comparing his observations of nature with the biblical accounts of creation, assumed that they were the same sort of statement and declared that the Old Testament offers a "manifestly false history of the earth." While religious objections have tended to focus on the word false, and many evolutionists - following Darwin - have been inclined to agree that it is false, the central issue is whether the biblcial materials are being offered as a "history of the earth" in a sense comparable to the modern meaning of natural history. If they are not, then both the attempts at demonstrating their scientific falsity and the attempts at demonstrating their scientific truth are inappropriate and misleading. (3-4, 6)
1985, Jurgen Moltmann, God in Creation
1986, Arthur Peacocke, God and the New Biology
1986, Howard van Til, The Fourth Day: What the Bible and the Heavens are Telling Us About the Creation
1992, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing
In this book, Ruether lays out the religious and scientific ideologies that have contributed to the current environmental crisis. Her first two chapters lay out ideas of creation. The first chapter puts Genesis in the context of other myths, such as the Enuma Elish and Plato's Timaeus. The second chapter is a detailed rendering of the scientific account of the world, contextualized in the changing relations between religion and science, and moving to ethical reflection based on this new story.
Human ethics can neither be reduced to a description of physical and biological processes, nor regarded as simply a negation of those processes derived from "higher" truths. Since human conscience and consciousness arise from natural evolution, we should regard these capacities in ourselves as reflecting the "growing edge" of nature itself. Yet consciousness also allows us an element of volitional power that seeks to rearrange patterns in nature to suit human demands. ... One of the most basic "lessons" of ecology for ethics and spirituality is the interrelation of all things. ... Recognition of this profound kinship must bridge the arrogant barriers that humans have erected to wall themselves off, not only from other sentient animals, but also from simpler animals, plants, and the aboiotic matrix of life in rocks, soils, air, and water. Like the great nature mystic, Francis of Assisi, we may learn to greet as our brothers and sisters the wolf and the lamb, trees and grasses, fire and water, and even "holy death," the means by which all living things are returned to earth to be regenerated as new organisms. (47-9)
1993, Sallie McFague, The Body of God
Like Ruether, McFague enlists evolutionary theory as part of a larger project of shifting theological ethics in an ecologically responsible direction. Unlike Ruether, she came to an ecological sensibility from an early theological position grounded in the neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth, whose influence cemented the eclipse of natural theology in the 1920s and 1930s. Her engagement with the ecological crisis would later lead her to reject the Barthian perspective she'd been initially grounded in. McFague is particularly interested in metaphors and models as they work in both science and religion.
I suggest we look at the common creation story [the story told by scientists, not Genesis] as a resource for changing the organic model. That fifteen-billion-year story does not privilege any particular body, let alone a lately arrived one on a minor planet in an ordinary galaxy (the human body!). What it underscores, as we shall see, is the billions of forms matter takes, the unbelievable diversity and difference of the body of the universe. To anticipate only two implications of this perspective: our focus would change from ourselves as the center of things to appreciating the awesome, splendid, magnificent diversity of bodies; and, were we then to speak of the universe as God's body, it would not be this or that body, and certainly not a human body, but all the bodies that have ever been or ever will be. (38)
1993, Gordon Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology
Since the 1950s, Kaufman has argued for a radical reconstruction of Christian ways of thinking in light of modern science. As a sociology major in college, he came across an anthropological study of group hallucinations, which settled the matter of the resurrection narratives for him. In the culmination of his thought, In Face of Mystery, he proceeds from an evolutionary perspective.
The notion of ecosystem alone, however - of an organic structure of interdependent parts - does not by itself adequately characterize the modern view: it is an evolutionary ecosystem in terms of which we think today, a structure moving and developing in time. We are able to trace this process back fifteen billion years or so. [...] With the appearance of humanity, however, evolving life reached a new and especially significant moment: it had produced a creature which in due course would itself be able to create. And as language and culture were gradually created over the course of time, this creature began to reorder its own life according to its artificially produced patterns of action, of images and ideas, of institutions, ultimately undertaking to reconstruct the face of the earth by means of its technology. The world which we must seek to understand theologically is precisely this whole evolving and developing ecosystem. We can now see that the two terms of the Christian categorial scheme which we set out to explore initially, "human" and "world," cannot - logically cannot - be conceived independently of each other (though this has often been overlooked in traditional Christian thinking as well as in much modern reflection). (114-5)
1996, Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
1996, Pope John Paul II, "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth"
In this address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he said
new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.
1998, John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science
Polkinghorne, a physicist and an Anglican, represents a more conservative theology than most of the writers here, though he isn't an evangelical. Unlike many of the theologians here, Polkinghorne (like McGrath below) thinks the classical articulation of Christianity can remain relatively intact in the face of modern science. He affirms evolution, but also parts ways with the most uncompromising understandings of the implications of Darwinism:
The classical neo-Darwinian explanation of the development of life on Earth, including the rapid expansion of the hominid brain over a period of a few hundred thousands of years, has been to assign it totally to the sifting and preservation of through the process of natural selection of the effects of small random genetic mutations. No reasonable person doubts that this is a component in the history of life but that it is the sole and adequate cause of all that has happened is simply an article of blind belief. [...] There may be much more potentiality for complex structure built into the very fabric of the universe than we have yet fully realized. Life has arisen through the interplay of chance and necessity, and any account which concentrates on historical contingency to the neglect of ahistorical lawful order is unbalanced and inadequate. (94, 96)
Although this statement takes a step toward the notion of "intelligent design," Polkinghorne has explicitly stated that intelligent design has not met the criterion of scientific demonstration:
The ID people make a scientific assertion when they claim that at the molecular level there are systems that are irreducably complex (Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box), ie they could not develop gradually since they are composed of parts all of which have to be in place but which separately confer no advantage. If true, this would be a major scientific discovery, as well as posing a deep problem for Darwinian orthodoxy, but I do not think that the ID people have so far succeeded in the very difficult task of actually demonstrating such irreducable complexity. John Polkinghorne Q&A
2000, Anne Primavesi, Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth Systems Science
2000, David Ray Griffin, (yes, this is the 9/11 truther dude) Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion
2002, Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
2003, Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming
Keller's book nowhere explicitly engages with Darwinian perspectives or evolution, per se, but the whole argument is an extension of process theology (see Cobb, Hartshorne, and Griffin above), which is entirely dependent on evolutionary science for its starting point. Keller's book is significant in this respect because she pushes the idea that "becoming" is a viable philosophical alternative to the opposition "being/nothingness" to new depths. Becoming is never a zero sum matter, a fact which opens thinking about God beyond the atheist-theist pie fight. The entire book is an extended meditation on the fact that the idea that God creates the world out of nothing is nowhere present in Genesis 1. Rather, creation is an ongoing process of ordering chaos, a chaos that can never be fully banished. Keller's book thus makes for an interesting contrast with Gilkey's defense of evolution, because a strong distinction between a primary cause expressed through the doctrine of creation from nothing and secondary causes is the linchpin of his argument that there is room for a religious understanding of evolution in the Darwinian sense.
2003, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Adam, Eve, and the Genome
This book exemplifies how I think religion/science dialogue should proceed, though it rarely does in this manner. It is not a natural theology in that it attempts to derive God from scientific enquiry, but rather engages in reflection on what "human dignity" as part of the category of theological anthropology means in light of contemporary genetics. As the opening asserts, the President's Council on Bioethics report, Human Cloning and Human Dignity nowhere defines "human dignity" in its 350 pages, but proceeds as if the topic were self-evident. The book includes contributions from Ken Stone, a queer biblical scholar, and Lee Butler, an African-American theologian, who discusses the significance of skepticism toward science in African-American churches based on a history of scientific rationalizations of racism, seen in examples here by Alexander Winchell and Joseph LeConte, and continuing into recent past with the notorious publication of The Bell Curve in 1996.
2003, Keith Miller (ed.), Perspectives on an Evolving Creation
2004, Darrell Falk, Coming to Peace with Science: Bridging the Worlds Between Faith and Biology
2006, Institution of Evolution Sunday
2007, John Haught, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution
2007, Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
2007, Francisco Ayala, Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion
2008, Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World
2008, Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil
2008, Karl Giberson, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution
The title and subtitle of this book are highly misleading. This is instead, a very readable, and very good, overview of the creation/evolution debate from the nineteenth-century to the present. Giberson embarked in a career in science as a young-earth creationist, but came to realize that the evidence for evolution was insurmountable. He offers a helpful perspective of one who understands where young-earth creationists are coming from, and has much to teach about what why we are losing the evolutionary-creationist argument in the larger populace.
I think evolution is true. The process, as I reflect on it, is an expression of God's creativity, although in a way that is not captured by the scientific view of the world. As soon as we start highlighting specific plaes where we think we glimpse God's handiwork, we open ourselves up to the old "God of the gaps" problem. ...
Intelligent design and scientific creationism seem inadequate to me, because they reduce God to one agent among other agents in natural history. If ID is true, then it implies that the agents of evolution are natural selection, sexual selection, God, mutation, chance, and whatever else you want on the list. Each of these agents makes its own individual contribution. Natural selection made saliva, God made hemoglobin, sexual selection made the peacock's tail, and chance drove the dinosaurs to exinction... Is this really how we want to think about natural history?
God's creative activity must not be confined to a six-day period "in the beginning" or the occasional intervention along the evolutionary path. God's role in creation must be more universal - so universal it cannot be circumscribed by individual phenomena or events. (216)
2008, Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett, Theological and Scientific Commentary on Darwin's Origin of Species
2011, Alistair McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology
Secondary Literature for Quicker Overviews
* Peter Bowler, Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design
* Jon H. Roberts, "Religious Reactions to Darwin" and Ronald Numbers, "Scientific Creationism and Intelligent Design" in The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion
* Jon H. Roberts, "Myth 18: That Darwin Destroyed Natural Theology" and some other chapters in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion
* Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859-1900
* James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900
* David Livingstone, Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought
* Mariano Artigas, Thomas Glick, and Rafael Martinez, Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877-1902
One-Stop Source for the Various Perspectives Here
Roland Frye (ed.), Is God a Creationist? The Religious Case Against Creation Science
One-Stop Source for the Other Side of the Story
Ronald Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design
And, the Other Other Side of the Story
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
And, what's really important - who says evolution disproves teleology?