Hey All,

I started reading this article yesterday and thought it had some really interesting thoughts on God and Evolution. Especially interesting is this quote:

it is vital to avoid, in the case of precultural evolution, the presumption that “God” competes with the evolutionary process as a (very big) bit player in the temporal unfolding of “natural selection.” Once we are released from that false presumption, “God” is no longer—and idolatrously—construed as problematically interventionist (or feebly failing in such) along the same temporal plane as the process itself. Rather, God is that-without-which-there-would-be-no-evolution-at-all; God is the atemporal undergirder and sustainer of the whole process of apparent contingency or “randomness,” yet—we can say in the spirit of Augustine—simultaneously closer to its inner workings than it is to itself.

As such, God is both “within” the process and “without” it. To put this in richly trinitarian terms: God, the Holy Spirit, is the perpetual invitation and lure of the creation to return to its source in the Father, yet never without the full—and suffering—implications of incarnate Sonship. Once we see the possibility of understanding the contingency of precultural evolution in this way, we need not—as so much science and religion “dialogue” has done in recent years—declare the evolutionary process as necessarily “deistically” distanced in some sense from God. Rather, I propose in contrast that God is “kenotically” infused (not by divine loss or withdrawal, but by effusive pouring out) into every causal joint of the creative process, yet precisely without overt derangement of apparent “randomness.”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Zac's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.