When Horizons requested that I review this book, I wondered immediately whether the Baker Publishing Company could offer a truly informed discussion of the topic of evolution. It is no secret, after all, that even now Baker publishes books that are overtly hostile to post-Darwinian science. Just recently, for example, this conservative Christian publishing house put out a third edition of Scott Huse's book The Collapse of Evolution, a religiously motivated polemic against neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory.
In Finding Ourselves after Darwin, we have a collection of essays in which the authors, mostly Protestant, seem to have become more or less reconciled to the theory, although some more than others. It is a sign of both intellectual and theological progress that Baker has sponsored this collection.
The title seems to be a takeoff on one used by the evolutionist Kenneth Miller, whose book Finding God after Darwin came out almost two decades ago, about the same time as my own theology of evolution, God after Darwin. Both of these books, written by committed Catholics, fully embraced contemporary evolutionary biology and were openly critical of the anti-Darwinian Intelligent Design (ID) movement, some of whose promoters had been arguing that ID should be taught in public school classrooms alongside Darwinian biology as an alternative “scientific” theory. Because ID, contrary to what some of its anti-Darwinian promoters have claimed, is not science but instead a thinly disguised theological interpretation of life, Judge John E. Jones ruled rightly in 2005 that teaching ID in public school classrooms clearly violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Defenders of ID, however, are still plentiful among Protestants and even a few Catholics.
I was halfway anticipating, then, that some of this volume's essays might revert to the old ID apologetic, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that none of them engage in the kind of science-bashing with which so much conservative Christian thought has been unfortunately often identified in the past. Most of the authors here are hospitable to contemporary evolutionary biology, and several of the authors, most notably Ted Peters, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Thomas Jay Oord, and Christopher Southgate, are known for promoting the development of evolutionary theology. On the other hand, essays by Andrew Pinsent, Richard Swinburne, and several others say nothing significant about evolutionary biology's implications for the question of God and human identity.
The book is arranged to reflect discussion of three topics related to theology and Darwinian science. First, what can it mean after Darwin to say that we are created in the image of God? Second, what is the meaning of Original Sin, especially if Darwinian evolution does away—as apparently it must—with literal interpretations of the myth of Adam and Eve? And, third, how can Christian faith and theology reconcile the long story of life's suffering, especially as revealed by Darwin and his followers, with the responsive God of biblical religion?
Most of the essays here add little to what has already been written previously on evolution and Christian faith. It is interesting to observe, moreover, how little theological difference the discoveries of Darwin make to the majority of the authors. Although they are not explicitly literalist in their understanding of biblical texts, some contributions reflect a tacit sense of regret that after Darwin biblical narratives need to undergo any reinterpretation at all in order to accommodate contemporary scientific discovery.
I could not help noticing that a majority of the authors in this book, including the editors, although thoughtful and nonpolemic, seem unable to approach the topic of evolution with the kind of enthusiasm and sense of theological adventure that one finds in the early twentieth-century writings of the Jesuit geologist and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Indeed, the name of Teilhard appears not even once in this volume, at least not so far as I could determine. In my opinion, non-Catholic thought has yet to produce any thinker, including process theologians, who can match Teilhard in setting forth the spiritual implications of the fact that life and the universe are still coming into being.
Consequently, readers who hope to be excited religiously by new reflections on science and faith will find most of the essays in this volume quite disappointing. Instead of inspiration, the authors, apart from those mentioned earlier, exhibit a kind of weary resignation at having to defend or refashion their thoughts about the Bible, humanity, the cosmos, and God after Darwin. Instead of considering the possibility that religion on our planet now needs to undergo a radical new awakening in the age of Darwin and Einstein, one finds here a kind of defensiveness against any truly epochal change in our thoughts about human identity and ultimate reality
