Author: Creegan, Nicola Hoggard

Source: Zygon, Volume 42, Number 2, June 2007 , pp. 499-518(20)

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Abstract:

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Recent controversies surrounding the discernment of design in the natural world are an indication of a pervasive disquiet among believers. Can God as creator/sustainer of creation be reconcilable with the belief that God's work is indiscernible behind secondary evolutionary causes? Christian piety requires that the order experienced in the natural world be evidence of God's love and existence. Theistic evolutionary models rarely examine this matter, assuming that God is indiscernible in the processes and order of the world because only secondary causes can be examined. This leaves antievolutionary perspectives to interpret and address the problem of seeing God in the world. I examine these issues in order to gain more credibility for the religious longing to discern God in nature while at the same time affirming the indubitable truth of an evolutionary history. I argue that God's trinitarian nature, hiddenness, and incarnation give us reason to believe that God's presence in the natural world will be discernible, but only within the natural processes, and thereby only in an obscured fashion. I also argue that newer understandings of evolutionary mechanisms are more consistent with theological appropriation than are strictly Darwinian ones.

Keywords: Simon Conway Morris; creation; Charles Darwin; Richard Dawkins; Christian de Duve; Deus absconditus; sensus divinitatis; Denis Edwards; evo devo; evolution; God; Stephen J. Gould; John F. Haught; incarnation; intelligent design; Stuart Kauffman; kenosis; Jürgen Moltmann; natural selection; nature; non-Darwinian evolutionary models; telos; trinity

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9744.2007.00499.x

Affiliations: 1: Lectures in systematic theology at the Tyndale-Carey Graduate School, Private Bag 93104, Henderson, Waitakere City, New Zealand;, Email: nicolahc@bcnz.ac.nz.

Publication date: 2007-06-01

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