 John Hott grew up on a farm in Virginia in a family of 11. He continues to love fishing, bluegrass music, and going to Georgetown basketball games with his two sons. As a young man, he stumbled on the writings of Théard Deschardins, the French geologist, philosopher, and theologian, and felt a kinship with Théard's sense of the evolutionary nature of the universe. He earned his BA from St. Mary's University and his PhD from the Catholic University of America, and in 1969 started teaching at Georgetown University. He has been on that faculty ever since, and is currently the Thomas Healy Distinguished Professor of Theology, as well as the Director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Science and Religion. His dissertation was in systematic theology, and he has continued to teach and write about traditional themes such as revelation, hermeneutics, and eschatology, about individual theologians, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner, Rudolf Bultmann, and movements such as liberation theology and process theology. But very early in his teaching, he developed an interest in science and religion. This interest has led to courses such as science and religion, ecology and theology, the problem of God, and theologies of evolution. The titles of some of his recent books provide another clue to these interests. There is God After Darwin from the year 2000, which is used in some courses here on campus, and is currently being translated into Italian, Portuguese, and Slovak. There is its sequel, Deeper Than Darwin, from the year 2003. 100 responses to 101 questions on God and evolution from 2001. Science and Religion from Conflict to Conversation, 1995. The Promise of Nature, Ecology and Cosmic Purpose, 1993. What is Religion? And a delightful little book called What is God? How to Think About the Divine. In God After Darwin, how it describes three general approaches to the question of science and religion. The first sees them as opposed to one another. Included here are both the creationists who regard Darwinism to be completely wrong, and the materialists, such as Richard Dawkins, who regard any brand of theism as incompatible with evolution. The second approach is separatism. The separatists see science working in one realm and theology in another. A separatist might say, for example, that science deals with physical or mechanical causes, while religion deals with questions of meaning and ultimate purpose. Although a separatist draws a line between science and religion, the two fields are understood to be compatible, rather than opposed. The third approach moves beyond separatism to engagement. The physicist and theologian Sir John Polkinghorn offers one form of such exchange, but how it has been working out a more thorough going form of engagement called evolutionary theology. Evolutionary theology, he says, quote, claims that the story of life, even in its neo-Darwinian presentation, provides essential concepts for thinking about God and God's relation to nature and humanity. In other words, evolutionary theology is willing to rethink some traditional theological assertions in the light of the portrait of the world that emerges from contemporary science. How it's conviction is that if done correctly, such a rethinking opens theology to deeper insights into the biblical view of God as self-emptying and deeper insights into theological conundrums such as God and human suffering. In the end, as he is willing to argue, evolutionary theology turns out to be more compatible with Darwinian biology than is materialism. Professor Hout is accompanied by his wife Evelyn. We welcome them both to the Nobel conference and look forward to his presentation on God after Darwin, Evolution, and Divine Providence. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Joe Dock, for that very generous introduction. I want to thank you especially and Dan Pioski for the wonderful hospitality you've extended to me and my wife. And I want to thank President Peterson and the whole Gustavus community for the honor of participating in this conference with such distinguished fellow panelists, especially. Well, if after those two wonderful presentations that you've heard already, any of you are still harboring any suspicion about the evidence for evolution. Perhaps you might want to call to mind what an old Jesuit said one time when he was asked what the evidence was. He said, well, the very fact that monkeys have hands is enough to give us pause. I can hear my wife groaning there in the second row, but I always like to begin with that because my talk can only get better after that. Well, as most of you know, the religious world in general and the Christian world in particular have had a very difficult time coming to grips with Darwin's ragged picture of life. And I think when you get right down to it, the fundamental reason for it is it's very hard for many religious believers to square their belief in the doctrine of divine providence, the God who provides and cares for the world with the portrait of life that evolutionary biology has been giving us. And I think to dramatize that point, we have to remember that the doctrine of providence came into our consciousness, came into religious consciousness very closely attached to a hierarchical view of the universe that was pre-evolutionary, pre-scientific, vertical, and static. And this hierarchical universe was framed within what from our perspective is a very limited sense of time and space. The hierarchy pictured reality as a great chain of being, running from God on high down to matter at the lowest level. And the discontinuity of the levels in the hierarchy allowed us humans perhaps to think that we were cared for in a very special way by God. But let's shift abruptly to the new scientific picture that science is giving us of the universe of a 13.7 billion year journey that I like to picture. There are different ways in which you can picture it as represented in 30 volumes, 30 books, imagine on your shelf, say three shelves of ten each. And each of these books is 450 pages long, and each page stands for one million years. In this story, of course, the Big Bang takes place on page one of volume one. And you'll notice that the first two shelves consist of what seems from our perspective today to be essentially lifeless and mindless matter. The Earth story doesn't begin until volume 21, and about a billion or so years later, 3.8 billion years ago, scientists tell me, life begins. But even then, it's not in a hurry to become terribly complex or terribly interesting until you get to toward the end of volume 29, where the famous Cambrian explosion that Niles Eldridge was talking about took place. And then things begin to speed up. And even though, even then, it's not until around the middle of volume 30 that dinosaurs come into existence, and they go extinct on page 385. And it's only in the last 65 pages that most of the interesting development of mammals and primates and then us humans are coming along in the story. Our pre-homoted ancestors came in. We'll hear more about this tomorrow. Several pages before the end, but modern humans, in the sense of descendants of pro-magnans, we didn't come in until roughly the last 10th or so, maybe a little more, of the last page of the very last volume. Now, if you're scientifically educated, you can't help but wonder at this picture here. Bertrand Russell commenting on this, wondering about the point of it all, said that if the point of this was to produce intelligence, then why did it take so long to produce so little? What we want to look at this afternoon are several aspects of evolution in relation to religion and the doctrine of providence, in particular. First, the recipe, the puzzling recipe for evolution that Darwin gives us, you can simplify it, I think, by saying it consists of three ingredients. Accidental events, such as the contingencies that Dr. Eldridge was talking about, meteorite impacts, climatic changes and so forth, plus contingency or chance in the origin of life itself, plus chance in the variations, what later came to be called mutations, that provide the raw material for evolution. So there's that ingredient of, we can call it contingency, plus the necessity or the rigidity and the invariance of the law of natural selection, which like other physical laws, seems to be very faithful and consistent and also impersonal. And you mix that up, mix those two ingredients up in the bowl of deep cosmic time of this 13.7 billion year old universe and that's enough, at least for many Darwinians, to explain life and for many to explain it ultimately as well. We want to look at that, but I also want to look at a deeper question. How do you map that classical hierarchical view which I showed in the first slide onto this one? Keeping in mind that the religious sensibilities of most people were framed within the static, pre-evolutionary, hierarchical view of the universe, how do you map that on to this horizontal picture of the flow of time over 30 volumes culminating, or at least up to this point, in modern humans? But most of all, I want to talk about the question of providence after Darwin. What do we do with that classic venerable teaching? Well, one response is to say it's entirely unbelievable that if Darwin is right, then the doctrine of providence is wrong and vice versa. Another approach is to say, well, let's not look too closely at the Darwinian chapters in the story of evolution, but go back to the initial cosmic design and maybe there we can detect some presence of providence in setting up a universe that would produce life. A third approach is to throw up your hands and say, well, let's never know and it's not a good idea even to inquire. Yes, we can accept evolution, but we don't know what it means and we'll just trust that there's some hidden plan behind it all. A fourth approach is a little bolder and says, well, maybe we can speculate a little bit on what's going on in evolution. Maybe we can redeem the doctrine of divine providence if we interpret evolution as divine pedagogy, God setting up a school in which life and then eventually human character can develop some substance to them and therefore give a kind of meaning to the Darwinian picture of life. A fifth one is even bolder and says that after Darwin we can still look at evolution within the framework of cosmic history and if we look carefully, if we open our eyes, we can see at least some vaguely directional trend which would signal some divine providential influence behind the process. And then finally, maybe this will be my own approach, maybe if we look up close at the Darwinian recipe itself, look down what too many people seems an abyss, maybe at the bottom of it in that very recipe of randomness, natural selection, and deep time, we can find perhaps perhaps some hints of divine providence. So what I'm going to do is to zoom in on each one of these. I'll spend more time on some than on others. Starting with the idea of whether divine providence is compatible with the ruggedness, with the suffering, the struggle, and so forth that obviously goes on in the evolutionary picture. Can we honestly, when we look at a picture of this, of a reptile consuming another reptile, can we honestly say that this is the content of divine providential design or would we perhaps want to sympathize with Darwin who wrote to his friend in the United States, Asa Gray at Harvard University, what a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature. And Darwin goes on to refer to what he calls the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings that goes on in peaceful woods and smiling fields. Or look at the life cycle of the sheep-liver fluke. I'm sure you're all familiar with this, but I hope that you don't mind if I go through and summarize it briefly. There's a parasite that lives near our ponds, and when it hatches out into little worms, they crawl into water snails and start eating those poor creatures from the inside. And they reproduce asexually within the snail. Then they crawl out, the youngsters do, and they attach themselves to little cyst-like formations on vegetation at the edge of the pond. And then a cow or a sheep will come along, grazing, and ingest the cyst on the vegetation. Within the digestive juices of the cow or sheep, the cyst will break open, and more little worms will crawl out, and they'll make their way into the liver, and they'll cause enormous discomfort to these poor creatures, sometimes called sheep rot. And then they reach sexual maturity in the bile ducts. The eggs are passed on in the host feces. They hatch out, find another snail, and so the implacable cycle continues, age after age. You can't help asking the question, what's going on here? Sir Charles Sherrington, as you can see from his pictures, not very happy with the situation. In his Gifford Lectures, from which I got this example, he complains that this is a story of securing existence to a worm at cost of life superior to it in the scale of life as humanly reckoned. Life's price, he says, is given to the aggressive and inferior of life. Destructive of other lives at the expense of suffering in them, and sad as it may seem to us, suffering in proportion as they are lives high, at least in human terms, in life's scale. And he says this is one example of countless many that we could think of. Again, what's going on here? Richard Dawkins has an answer to this. Richard Dawkins, the outspoken evolutionist who oftentimes comes close to identifying Darwinism with atheism, says what's going on here? Genes are trying to get into the next generation, and that's it, that's fundamentally the ultimate explanation of evolution. So long as DNA is passed on, it doesn't matter who or what gets hurt in the process, he says. Genes don't care about suffering because they don't care about anything. And he makes a philosophical conclusion on the basis of these observations that the universe we observe, meaning the Darwinian universe that we observe, has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, in other words, no providential presence, no evil and no good either, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. And in his book, Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins goes on to say that Darwinism suffices, and within Darwinism, the gradualism of temporal change itself is enough to explain everything that's going on in life. He asks you to picture a mountain on one side of which there's a sheer drop-off to the plane below, and on the other side, slopes gently, say at a 45-degree angle. And he says that if life had available to it only a biblical period of six to 10,000 years to move from a primitive status to complex organisms that include such things as the eye and the human brain, then we would be forgiven for invoking providence to give this process the miraculous boost that it needs. But on the other hand, if you go around to the other side of the mountain and imagine a trail meandering back and forth over a period of roughly the four billion years that life has had, and you mix that up with the other ingredients of Darwin's recipe, the randomness or contingency on the one hand, and the remorseless regularity of the law of natural selection on the other, then that makes the emergence of life, of complex life much more probable in a purely naturalistic way, and therefore there's no need to invoke the notion of God or providence. So this is the way in which some people deal with the question of Darwinism and providence, and you can imagine if you're a religious person and this is the understanding of evolution that you're given from the scientist, you can't say, well, anything but, well, I can't reconcile this with my belief in a compassionate, caring, providential God. But other people would say, let's not be too swift about all this, let's back up and look at the evolutionary, biological evolutionary chapters within the context of a whole cosmic process or what might be called, analogously, a cosmic evolution. And the reasoning goes something like this. We all have mind, we all are instances of mental existence, but scientists tell us that we wouldn't have the kind of minds we do were it not for the complex brains that we have, and we have these complex brains only because evolution has very swiftly taken the hominid brains of our ancestors and over several million years complexified them to the point where the leap into thought, as we know it, becomes possible. But you can't have evolution, of course, without life, and you can't have life without planets with just the right chemical composition that can give rise to life or can at least nourish life, which means especially carbon, but also heavy elements, but especially carbon. But today, in the light of astrophysics, we can no longer take carbon for granted. It wasn't there always in the universe, so where did it come from? Other people can explain this much better than I can, but the answer that most astrophysicists give today is that it comes especially from the heart of massive stars which cook up the primordial hydrogen helium into carbon and the other heavy elements, which are necessary for life. And you can't take hydrogen and helium for granted because they have to be the ratio of electron mass and proton mass has to be just right to have free hydrogen and so on. But above all, in order to have these massive stars that cook up the carbon, you have to go all the way back to the first moment of those 30 volumes that I talked about earlier and acknowledge that at the time of the Big Bang, there has to be a finely tuned expansion rate if the universe expanded too fast or too slow, we wouldn't have these massive stars, we wouldn't have carbon, we wouldn't have life, we wouldn't have us, we wouldn't have mind. Likewise, the gravitational constant had to be just so in order for the sequence of events to produce life to take place. The ratio of electron to proton mass, the weak and strong nuclear force and many other coincidence had to be just right if life was to take place. Today, it's not so much theologians but some physicists who are looking at this picture and saying, don't worry too much about the Darwinian chapters, yes they might be rough and so forth, but can't we see that this incredibly fine tuned design, as they call it, was probably front loaded and perhaps by the hand of Providence so that after Darwin, some belief in divine Providence is possible on the basis of physics, if not biology, at least physics. But others look at that and say, well, you're still ignoring the Darwinian chapters, they're still troubling. Why would Providence create a universe which would sponsor such a puzzling process? And one of the most common answers to that question is simply to say we don't know that we use terms when we talk about evolution like chance, contingency, randomness and we talk about the element of struggle and suffering and so forth, but we use these terms, especially contingency because of our human ignorance. Perhaps with the poet Alexander Pope we must say that chance is direction which thou canst not see and thou canst not see it because thou art not God and the reasoning I think behind this is that we humans all have a very limited sense of order of what constitutes design and whenever anything takes place outside of that limited sense of order we tend to label it an accident or an absurdity or a contingency but perhaps there's some larger plan, a plan that we don't know anything of but perhaps what we call chance is part of a wider divine plan. Now as I said this approach appeals to a lot of people who can theoretically accept Darwinian evolutionary biology but who can compartmentalize it you might say in one part of their mind this is the separatist approach that Dr. Jodak was talking about and keep their religious belief in some ultimate meaning completely separate from that and a lot of people are happy with that a lot of people find this I call it the default position in relating science to religion and I suppose that no matter what religious position you take this idea that God's vision of things is much wider than ours that has to be a part I would assume of any theological response to evolution but there are others who think well maybe we can be a little bolder in our speculation and maybe we can interpret evolution Darwinian evolution as a kind of pedagogy as a kind of school in which life and eventually human life can develop the idea here is to try to imagine a world without any challenges what would life be like if it never had to face obstacles it would be flabby and monotonous and the same with human character what help the human character develop unless we had to face something that calls us to transcend ourselves to go beyond the status quo this approach just to tell you that I'm not making it up is found in a book by Guy Merchie called The Seven Mysteries of Life a delightful book and in that book Merchie says that we have to agree that Darwinian process is harsh but it can be redeemed and made meaningful by the fact that it's educational Earth, he says, is a soul school and the obstacles in this curriculum this Darwinian curriculum are essential to the development of life and he asks the reader of this book to ask the question what kind of world would you have created he says imagine that you are God and he agrees that this will come more easily to some people than to others but imagine that you are God what kind of world if you were God you would have to be a creator what kind of world would you create and he concludes honestly now if you were God could you possibly dream up any more educational contrasty, thrilling beautiful, tantalizing world than Earth to develop spirit in would you in other words try to make the world nice and safe or would you let it be provocative dangerous and exciting in actual fact if it ever came to that I'm sure you would find it impossible to make a better world than God has already created Merchie professes to belong to the Baha'i religion and he sees no conflict at all between that the view of a providential God in the Baha'i tradition and the Darwinian evolution those of you from the Biblical tradition might recognize this notion of divine pedagogy that God chaseneth whom God loveth is present in our scriptures the idea that somehow when we are faced with difficulties we need to interpret it as divine love is not foreign even to the New Testament if you want a good example read the letter to the Hebrews chapter 12 verse 5 and following and I've talked to a number of people from the Christian community and a lot of them are quite comfortable with this explanation of Darwinian evolution which they can fit quite neatly into their Biblical view of faith now if you want to get even bolder in your speculation you might want to look at the writings of Pierre Théard de Chardin who believed that providence is present in what he considered to be the overarching directionality of evolution just a little bit about Théard Théard was a famous French Jesuit and geologist and paleontologist born in 1881 in France died in this country in 1955 when he was still a young man his superior sent him to the Sorbonne to study geology and paleontology and while he was there of course he became enamored of the evolutionary vision of things and began to write essays on how you might integrate religion and in his case Christian faith with the evolutionary picture of the universe and in writing these essays he distributed them to a few friends but some of his religious superiors got hold of them and they thought that these ideas he was talking about that evolution is actually essential to an interpretation of Christianity were a bit too adventurous for the time so they thought that they better get Théard out of the picture so they literally exiled him almost in China and he spent many years in China which of course is the wrong place to send people who like to dig up old fossils and he became he became one of the stellar geologists of the Asian continent during his lifetime he developed a fine reputation at least among geologists he continued to write essays on how to relate evolution and Christianity but almost none of them including his major work The Phenomenon of Man was ever published in his own lifetime he died pretty much alone in New York in 1955 but after his death his religious writings were published literally exploded onto the religious world in the 60s and 70s and many many people in the 20th century were influenced by his thought in fact Harper and Rowe said that the book The Phenomenon of Man was the number one bestseller in their religious holdings in the 20th century and this influence continued to have great impact on the thinking of a lot of people not only within Catholicism but outside the Catholic community as well now in all of this in all of his life and all of his work he was not just trying to be a scientist but more than that he was looking for a possible meaning in the science of evolution and he thought that if you take a look at biological evolution within the context of cosmic evolution I don't miss the directionality there there is an increase a gradual increase over the course of time in organized physical complexity pre-atomic matter evolves into atoms already complexities coming in atoms into molecules molecules into cells cells into organisms organisms into more complex organisms than vertebrates and then humans and the process is by no means over there is no reason we should think that evolution has reached its end or anywhere near its end at least in cosmic perspective he finds unfolding on our planet a new level of evolution he calls it the noosphere from the Greek word noos which means the sphere of mind mind he says is weaving itself it's almost like the earth is clothing itself it's like a brain which consists of economic relationship politics but above all communications technology which is shrinking the globe sometimes Teart is called the prophet of the internet because he predicted something like what is happening on our planet right now and he was really upset and disturbed that not more scientists especially paleontologists who are looking for levels in the development of evolution can't see or don't want to pay attention to this new evolutionary level that's developing now under our feet and over our head and behind our back it's very difficult perhaps to focus on that but one of the things that he did in his intellectual career was to try to bring into focus this new geological level called the noosphere and we still don't know what the future of evolution would be beyond that either but most of all what he wanted to point out and this is how he saw meaning in evolution is that corresponding to this gradual increase in physiological complexity there is a corresponding increase in the temperature of consciousness as we move from pre-atomic matter to the noosphere consciousness is becoming more and more substantive and intense and since consciousness is a value that none of us can deny you can't deny that consciousness is a value without valuing your consciousness even in making that denial a universe which brings about consciousness and more and more layers of consciousness is a pretty good universe and therefore we can look upon evolution as a very very meaningful process in fact one to which we ourselves can contribute and not only is there increasing complexity in consciousness there's also an increase in what he calls centration and by that he means the tendency of matter from the beginning to organize itself around a center you find this already at the level of the atom with its nucleus which organizes the subatomic elements you find it in the nucleus of the eukaryotic cell you find this centration getting hotter in the development of the central nervous system of vertebrates and in the complex brain of primates and then when you get to the humans you have this centeredness taking an unprecedented form of self awareness a reflective self-awareness where you have an organism the human with trillions of synaptic connections all coming together in that ability to utter that first personal pronoun I that's centeredness that's a function of evolution to become not only more conscious and more complex but also more centered and now we're at the level of the noosphere what is the form that the search for the center takes now that the cosmos has entered into this latest phase not the only but the most characteristic form that the search for the center takes in the universe at this phase of evolution is religion and this is how he locates religion within the context of an evolutionary world view you can talk about religion in a lot of ways politically economically, socially, psychologically theologically but he says let's look at it cosmologically what is religions place in an evolving universe and he sees religion not so much as something that we humans do on a planet or in a universe which is fundamentally hostile to life as Dawkins and others might say but religion is the way in which the universe continues its ageless search for the center and religions named the center in different ways but he would refer to it often as God omega the last letter of the Greek alphabet as the ultimate center around which evolution is converging and in many ways the meaning of our own life is to participate in that process of centration back to the question of suffering that causes so many people difficulty with the Darwinian view Thayard had no answer to the problem of suffering religious thought in general has never had I don't think a good answer to it but he says it looks different the problem of suffering and evil if you locate them in the context of a post Darwinian world an evolutionary world evolution implies that we are living in a universe which is still a process of becoming it's still if you want to use the theological term it's still being created in any case it's unfinished and if it's unfinished it's by definition imperfect it has a shadow side or a dark side to it if it were finished and perfected then yes we would have reason to really complain about the fact of suffering and evil but as long as the universe is unfinished it's imperfect there's all sorts of things that give rise to our big questions like why does life struggle why does suffering exist at all why we have to walk if you're a religious person why do you have to walk by faith and not by sight why does God remain hidden why is atheism possible as an interpretation of the ambiguity of existence and why religions are all imperfect and we shouldn't expect an unfinished universe to be absolutely perfect but also why hope is essential all these happen our characteristics of our universe because we live in an unfinished creation well you might ask why would God if God exists make an unfinished universe rather than one that's rounded off and perfect from the very beginning perhaps we've all asked that question at one point or another Tayard's answer at least is that there's really no alternative to an unfinished creation at least initially and the reason is that an originally perfect creation is theologically inconceivable he says imagine a creator creating in the beginning a completely perfect universe such a universe would really not be distinct from God it would not be a world it would not be a creation it would be an appendage of deity or an extension of God's own being but it would have no internal autonomy it would have no room for freedom it might be a world which we would like perhaps a world without suffering it might be that but the price that you would pay for that he says is a world without a future frozen stiffly with no possibilities of becoming and that would mean a world devoid of freedom but ultimately also a world in which life would not be possible so in answer to the question of what the ultimate explanation of evolution would be Tayard would say that at least from a religious perspective and without in any way denying that from the perspective of paleontology or genetics there might be other ultimate explanations from a theological perspective the ultimate we can still say without in any way denying the data of evolutionary science that God is the ultimate explanation of evolution and he gives away he thinks he can give us a way of mapping that first slide I showed this afternoon of the static vertical hierarchy of the great chain of being the backdrop not only of religion but of culture every political system social system in the world implicitly obeys a kind of great chain of being hierarchy we can map that on to the horizontal 13.7 billion year story of evolution if you just remove the religious furniture in your mind around just slightly instead of thinking of God as up there up above all the time think of God as the Bible does as calling the world into the future and think of creation not as something that God creates from behind so much as the invitation of God to the universe to come into being from the future and then think of the hierarchy not as a static or vertical one but think of it as an emergent one matter becoming alive becoming conscious becoming conscious becoming spirit and now the sort of things that are going on in the realm of the noosphere all of that would be consistent that's how you can unify the Darwinian picture or the evolutionary picture with at least in general a theological vision of things he says the world leans on the future not the past but the future as its foundation the world is exploding upward into God and God he says is becoming increasingly more incarnate in the world so that's a very bold and controversial attempt to try to unify the evolutionary picture of the universe and of life with religion I have an even bolder one and this is proposed by the great American philosopher mathematician Alfred North Whitehead I said American he was originally British he taught for many years at Cambridge taught mathematics one of the great mathematicians and one of the great philosophers in England when he was about to retire at the age of 63 and go off and live in the Cotswolds or whatever they do when they retire Harvard University he had a very prominent retirement and invited him to come to America and this gives hope to all of us it was only after the age of 65 that he really got going in his publication career publishing Science in the Modern World in 1925 and then a succession of books process and reality adventures of ideas modes of thought, aims of education and so on and so forth in America but he increasingly got interested in this question of what's going on in this evolving universe the universe which he saw as in process the universe is essentially a process and to make a long story short in his book Adventures of Ideas in Particular he talks about the aim or the telos or the goal of the universe not always successfully reached but the aim of the cosmos from the beginning he understood more and more intense versions of beauty and he understood beauty as a synthesis of novelty on the one hand and order on the other or of contrast on the one hand and harmony on the other and he thought that if you have too much novelty and not enough order the universe lapses into chaos but if you have too much order and not enough novelty and contrast the universe lapses into monotony so there are two kinds of evil if you will in the world the evil of chaos and disorder but also the evil of monotony triviality the universe that we live in is one that's not content from the beginning it hasn't been content when the universe was just hydrogen atoms it didn't say well we're just fine here let's not go any further what we've learned from science Whitehead said and especially from evolutionary science but now from cosmology also is that this universe we live in has always been a restless one and he wanted to know why ultimately why you can give all sorts of physical explanations but for Whitehead those weren't deep enough we have to go deeper and ask why would there be a universe at all that would not just stay stuck in monotony why this restlessness this aim toward beauty which he called adventure and it was at this point some of his colleagues thought that he'd gone over the deep end that he brings in again the idea of God but God is not just the source of order as God was in classical thought primarily but God is the stimulus to adventure God is the source of novelty which calls or invites the universe to become more and more intense in its instantiation of beauty but this God doesn't force order and novelty coercively onto the natural world but instead offers it gently and persuasively and that's the way Whitehead says that's the way the religious idea of a God of love would have to operate love never forces love never coerces love lets the other in this case the world be and that would mean there would have to be room within the world and its evolution and experimentation not all of it successful for a lot of evolutionary blind alleys for Darwinian evolution Darwinian evolution if you think of God as persuasive love which he thought is how Christianity and other religions have usually understood God is quite compatible with Darwinian evolution in all of this God's will God's purpose if you will is called the maximizing of beauty and he thought that the way in which we can participate in and find meaning in an evolutionary universe is for each one of us in our own ways to do what we can to maximize the beauty of the world that we live in that's the meaning of our lives in his view now so far I've given some very generically religious responses to the question of what to do with the doctrine of providence or Darwin but so far I haven't really talked theology and I think those who organized the conference invited me here because I'm a theologian so I suppose I should close with some theological comments and I don't think even if you followed me up to this point I'm sure that not everybody will want to follow me henceforth but I thought I should say a few words from the point of view of a theologian now you might be asking what are theologians? Well, theologians are people who don't make much money but at least they know why and I should also add an element to the biography that Dr. Jodak gave and that's for years I tried to use the words of a friend of Samuel Johnson for years I tried to be a philosopher but cheerfulness kept breaking in and so I had to take up theology as my profession and what a theologian has to do is to reflect from the perspective of his or her religious tradition and in my case it's the Christian tradition so I thought I would end with some reflections on a question can a Christian be a Darwinian? A good friend of mine Michael Ruse has written a book called Can a Darwinian be a Christian but I'm sure a lot of people especially in America today where some 40 to 50% say that they have no use for evolutionary science at all for a lot of people this question is on their mind so again not everyone will follow this but these are my own personal reflections on this question first of all I would have to say that no you can't be a Darwinian and a Christian at the same time if Darwinism means materialism and some scientists present Darwinism as though it's inseparable from materialism I don't think that that's necessarily the case at all in my own views we should keep ideology out of science whether it's materialist ideology or religious ideology and let science be science so I don't think that that's a necessary connection there's no need to identify evolutionary science with materialist philosophy even though a lot of people do that both on the religious side and the scientific side what I would argue is that a Christian can accept a providential God not in spite of but actually because of this troubling recipe this three part type this tripartite recipe of chance, natural selection and deep time but we have to begin with reflection on what do we mean by God, what do we mean by divine providence from a Christian point of view and those of you who are from the Christian tradition know that you're instructed we're all instructed not to think about God at all without thinking about the man Jesus and that means that to understand to reflect on God we have to look at the biblical portraits of Jesus as they are given to us in the records of the tradition and the Bible in Christian theology Jesus the image, the fullness of the image of God now the different ways in which you can summarize this image but the way I would choose to do so very simply is to say that in the picture of Jesus in the New Testament we have a picture of humility of self giving and promising love and if that's what Jesus is like then for the Christian logically it follows that's what God is like as well so let's look at each one of these characteristics very briefly evolution and the humility of God the classic locus for this idea of the humility of God is in St. Paul's letter to the Philippians chapter 2 where he's interpolated into the letter an early Christian hymn which had this intuition that Jesus was in the form of God but not clean to that status he emptied himself and took on the form of a slave and subsequent theological reflection has concluded that what is being poured out here what is being emptied out here in this self emptying process is the being of God and this is called in Greek canosis, canosis means emptying so Christianity has at the heart of its tradition a canotic or self emptying understanding of God in this case then as we reflect on the world from within the Christian theological perspective in the light of the canotic self emptying view of deity what should the world look like what should what kind of world could we if you want to use a scientific world predict if this is the ground and foundation of reality and a number of contemporary theologians maybe you're not familiar with most of these but they've influenced me here the fact of creating a world requires a self humbling on the part of God God who is said to be omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent has to in some way retract the divine presence so as to allow something other than God to come up into being to come into existence for a world in other words to appear and what that would mean once again echoing Teilhard's point is that an instantaneous creation by God of a perfect universe would be theologically inconceivable because such a universe could never have that otherness that would make love of other possible on God's part and also what this would mean would be that if the world is to be itself to be other than God it would have to have permission and scope and time for evolutionary meandering of germination and duration perhaps the 13.7 billion year story is only beginning so in this interpretation divine providence is care for the world or provides for the world in the sense that it's a manifestation of concern for the independence of creation the German Protestant theologian Wolfhard Lutheran theologian Wolfhard Pannenberg has often said is the independence of the universe God needs a partner to dialogue with not something to be absorbed into the divine presence and likewise of course Christianity holds up the symbol of the cross as a sign of its belief that God is not aloof from the suffering of the world but participates in it and recently evolutionary theology has emphasized not just human suffering that God participates in but the suffering and struggle of the whole evolutionary process the second idea is that of the divine self gift and here our guide can be the Roman Catholic theologian Carl Rahner and what Rahner argues is that Christianity is really not that complicated what Christianity is really about fundamentally is that there's this infinite ineffable unspeakable mystery which we call God and secondly that this God seeks to give himself away completely and unreservedly to the universe if you develop that in philosophical terms what's going on in the universe what's going on in evolution from an ultimate perspective is the infinite is giving itself to the finite and since by anybody's mathematics a finite reality cannot contain or possess the fullness of the infinite in one instantaneous act the only way the finite world can adapt if you want to use a Darwinian term to the infinite self gift is to undergo a process of self transcendence for for Rahner revelation is not fundamentally the dropping of divine words from heaven to earth but what is being communicated is the divine self it's God's self gift the infinite pouring itself out in the finite world the world reacts to that or adapts to it by undergoing a process of self transcendence or in other words what science refers to as evolution so actually if Christians had thought about it long before Darwin, long before geology and paleontology and cosmology gave to us this wonderful story of an evolving universe long before that Christianity should have predicted that we would live in an evolving or what whitehead calls a restless universe finally the notion of providence from a Christian perspective can never be separated from the notion of promise in the Bible the fundamental theme that ties the strange body of books together that we call the Bible you find it hopping up on almost every page is that the ultimate reality has the character of promise and what does that mean it means the character of God is to open up the future and so in the biblical tradition providence must always be tied to the theme of promise and so also should God's word the notion of divine word which hovers over creation in the beginning is the same word that comes to Abraham and calls Abraham into the future so the word of creation is also a word that calls the universe forward into the future and that would be from theological point of view the ultimate explanation of evolution the universe then would better be thought of not as seated in the beginning as we saw earlier with design design is entirely to stiff and lifeless concept at least from a theological point of view to represent the way in which God interacts with the world but rather promise and one of the advantages of the word promise is it's consistent logically with the present ambiguity and struggle of an unfinished universe whereas if you keep harping on the theme of design that God is a designer God is a designer and you look around you don't see necessarily that this world is all that well designed even from a Darwinian point of view adaptations are never perfect but the word promise the theme of promise is consistent with an ambiguous and unfinished universe and it also has the advantage of arousing at least believers to hope that all of life suffering all of life suffering not just human suffering can be and will be in the end redeemed keep in mind that the word providence itself comes from the Latin pro video to look forward into the future and maybe it would be better instead of speaking of God's design for the universe maybe God's vision or God's dream for the universe as the ultimate context of evolution and Darwin's three part recipe if you look at it in this context the element of contingency which Niles Eldridge and others have emphasized from a theological point of view could be interpreted as essential for any universe that's open to the future I mean imagine a universe without any contingency at all it would be frozen stiff it wouldn't have any possibilities for future evolution even Thomas Aquinas in the pre-evolutionary period said a world without contingency is theologically impossible likewise the laws the laws of nature which seem to us often to be so impersonal are absolutely essential if we're going to have a universe that we can depend on again imagine a universe without remorselessly regular laws it would at any moment capriciously perhaps lapse back into chaos if it's to have any backbone of consistency to it something that we can depend upon it has to have mixed up with the contingency something to thicken the stew you might say of the recipe a strong element of regularity of necessary always obedient physical laws and finally deep time how to make sense of that theologically let me just quote from another theologian who has thought a lot about these issues his name is Jorgen Moltmann he puts it this way God acts in the history of nature of human beings through a patient and silent present giving creatures space to unfold time to develop and power for their own movement and he goes on to say we look in vain for God in the history of nature or in human history of what we are looking for our special divine interventions is it not much more that God waits and awaits the history of the world and human beings that God is patient and of great goodness that's how he links waiting to providence waiting is never disinterested passivity but the highest form of interest in the other a waiting keeps an open space for the other in this case the world gives the other time much more perhaps than 13 billion years and creates possibilities of life for the other thank you very much once again we'll ask our panelists to come up to the front and we'll entertain questions if we could take our seats please I'll ask the panelists if they have any comments and then we'll collect your questions and go from there