Evolutionary theology

An essay of mine has just been published at Sapientia as part of a symposium in response to John Schneider’s Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil, overseen by Kevin Vanhoozer.

Longtime Hump readers will find nothing surprising in my article: my argument is much the same as those I made repeatedly at BioLogos in the years before they became a conduit for the suppression of dissent against government COVID dogma, and which led to my first book God’s Good Earth.

The position of many in the Evolutionary Creation camp has been to say that the discovery of deep time and evolution pose novel problems, which established theology is not equipped to tackle: cue progressive and speculative theologies of various kinds, including Schneider’s deep dive into a theory of divine aesthetics. But my response is that theology had all the right tools in place, having faced most of the “new” issues in one form or another repeatedly over the centuries, but that these tools had been largely forgotten, at least by the published intelligentsia, by the nineteenth century.

It is Enlightenment religion, rather than a truly biblical theology, that has problems with evolution. In fact, to some extent it has caused them by shaping the way science approached evolution.

Hope you enjoy the piece.

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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.
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