"Charles Darwin has never been more popular than today," writes John Durant in a recent New York Time's Book Review. "His theory of natural selection is all but universally accepted as the correct explanation for the diversity of life on earth." And yet many religious believers continue to struggle with Darwin and neo-Darwinian science. On August 11, 1999, the Kansas Board of Education, bowing to the pressure of Christian "creationists," voted to allow removal of evolution from its science curriculum. And Kansas is not an isolated incident. Some educators now fear that science in the schools may continue to give ground to Christian fundamentalism.

It may be useful, therefore, to recall why some religious people have so much difficulty with Darwinian evolution. It is not always simply a matter of science versus biblical literalism. Darwin raised interesting questions not only about the Christian God, but also about notions of ultimate reality or cosmic meaning as these are understood by all of the world's religious traditions. Evolution can be a shock to the beliefs of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Taoists, native peoples, and others as well.

Almost all religions, and not just Christianity, have envisaged the cosmos as the expression of a transcending "Order," "Wisdom," or "Rightness." Most have held that there is some unfathomable "point" to the universe, and that the world is enshrouded in meaning. The elements of chance and blind selection in the Darwinian picture of life, however, make traditional ideas of cosmic purpose seem superfluous and possibly incoherent. After weighing the now well-founded accounts of life's lumbering journey on Earth, any subsequent talk about divine "intelligent design" can seem especially unsubstantial.

If theology has fallen short of the reality of evolution, however, so also has the world of thought in general. Scientists and philosophers have yet to produce an understanding of reality proportionate to the opulence of evolution. Even today there is no widely accepted alternative to materialism - the belief that reality is ultimately lifeless matter - as a conceptual setting for evolutionary science. Ironically, the intellectual world still tries to clarify the story of life against the backdrop of what philosopher Paul Tillich, referring to materialism, rightly calls an "ontology of death."

The problem with both scientific materialism and theological "intelligent design theory" is that they fail to deal with the rich reality of actual life. Both purchase intellectual clarity at the price of leaving out the novelty, chaos, cooperativeness, relationality, indeterminacy, openness, and organicism characteristic of living beings and processes. Materialist interpreters typically dampen our intuitive sense of life's rich complexity by thinking of evolution in mechanistic and atomistic terms. But, meanwhile, theological fixation on God as an "intelligent designer" of living beings is no less inclined to ignore the messiness and tragedy involved in the story of real life. It ignores the fact that life requires the dissolution of rigid "design" precisely in order to be alive at all. What is worse, by associating the idea of God only with the fact of order at the expense of novelty, it removes ultimate reality from the flow of life itself.

Although they remain rancorous antagonists, both materialist scientists and "intelligent design" theorists share the compulsion to suppress a vibrant sense of life's openness to new creation. Almost by definition scientific materialism leaves out everything that common wisdom means by "life." But the focus by much religious thought on "intelligent design" likewise turns away from the novelty and instability without which life is reduced to death.

By way of contrast, Darwin's own portrait of nature is at least able to communicate some sense of real life - with all the disturbance and drama this involves. His grand narrative, when not suffocated by the stale climate of a materialist metaphysics, can give considerable depth and richness, I believe, to our sense of the great Mystery into which the great religions attempt to initiate us. While perhaps opposed to "design," Darwinian science is not inherently opposed to the divine - whatever Darwin's own misgivings about God may have been.

Many good scientists, of course, will not agree. For a century and a half skeptics among them have found in evolution a decisive confirmation of the death of God. For an outspoken few, Darwin's "dangerous idea" has finally laid to rest all the millennia of our species' religious ignorance.

As long as we think of God only in terms of a narrowly human notion of "order" or "design," this atheist evolutionism will seem appropriate enough. Evolution does indeed upset a certain sense of order; and if "God" means simply "source of order," even the most elementary perusal of the fossil record will render this ancient idea suspect. But does it rule out each and every notion of God and cosmic purpose?

For many among us cosmic purpose does not require a divine imposition of trivial forms of order onto the world. Rather God may be understood more fundamentally as a disturbing wellspring of novelty. God, if we follow some classic biblical texts, is the one who "makes all things new." As promise-maker, this God quietly opens the world to a future percolating with contingency. Darwinian evolution, without undergoing any theological editing, can easily find a home on such terrain.

The cosmos, after all, is not just "order" (which is what "cosmos" means in Greek) but a still unfinished process. Science shows clearly that the universe is still emerging into being, even now brimming with potential for incalculable future outcomes. The world, in theological terms, is still being created. In an unfinished universe each day is the dawn of creation. The horizon of an unprecedented future stretches magnanimously ahead, and "God" may be thought of - again in biblical terms - as the world's future.

Such an idea of God, deeply rooted in tradition, is not only compatible with evolution; it also logically anticipates the kind of life-world that Darwinian biology is now setting before us. Beyond materialism and design there lie theological vistas fully open to the data of evolutionary science. Interestingly, these have been available almost since the time of Darwin himself. Materialist scientists and Christians in Kansas may never have heard of them, but they have been there all along. Concern for the future of science education in our predominantly biblical culture would seem to require that educators and scientists become aware of their availability.