In reading the popular works of contemporary evolutionary biologists, or those of astronomers like the late Carl Sagan, one occasionally detects some frustration. It seems that the details of the development of the universe and of life on Earth are too often viewed as comprising a sterile, uninteresting story, especially when stacked up against faith-based religious narratives. This frustration is clearly seen in Sagan's book, Pale Blue Dot, in which he challenges traditional believers to incorporate a scientific worldview into their theologies and to draw on this worldview as a source of inspiration rather than as something to be ignored or explained away.

John F. Haught, a professor of theology at Georgetown University, has attempted to take up this challenge in his book God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. Haught is not a fundamentalist; he neither expects nor requires that biblical texts will be accurate descriptions of the material world. He is a committed Christian who accepts that neo-Darwinian evolution by natural selection is essentially correct in its understanding of life's variety as the result of descent with modification. His task then, as he sees it, is to reconcile those elements of Darwinism that might appear irreconcilable with a belief in God and Christian faith: an element of randomness in the universe, the presence of waste and cruelty that are the inevitable results of this randomness, the apparent lack of ultimate meaning or purpose in the universe, and the potential irrelevance of a divine presence in the universe as described by science.

Haught's evolutionary theology is grounded in the Christian Bible's notions of God as "compassionate, self-emptying love" and as the "promise of the future." In his view, biblical descriptions of God as "vulnerable" and "self-emptying" provide the ultimate explanations for the fact that the universe is allowed to develop along its own course, without being designed from the beginning and without the intervention or "bullying" of God. Only this kind of withdrawal is compatible with the Christian view of God as "compassionate love."

God is also said to be associated with, or concealed in, the future: "God's humble self-withdrawal, in other words, takes the form of God's being the inexhaustible 'futurity' whose continuous arrival into the present is always restrained enough to allow the cosmos to achieve its own independent evolution." Elsewhere he states that "in the presence of the self-restraint befitting an absolutely self-giving love, the world would unfold by responding to the divine allurement at its own pace. . . ." Thus, Haught suggests that God can be seen to be "up ahead" in time rather than the starting point for the evolution of life, and that the contingency, inevitable waste and cruelty, and vast amounts of time that are characteristic of life's history on Earth are perfectly compatible with the God of Christianity as described in the Bible, where these features, in fact, find their ultimate explanation. Finally, as for the world's accumulated sufferings, the view of God as compassionate love must imply, for Haught, that "God redeems them from all loss and gives eternal meaning to everything, though in a hidden way that for us humans only faith can affirm."

Haught readily admits that this "metaphysics of the future" is an inherently religious notion that requires "the religious posture of hope." Much of this boils down to a personal interpretation and as a result I have chosen to quote Haught directly; after all, a statement such as "the world would unfold by responding to the divine allurement" tends to resist paraphrase. For traditional believers, then, Haught's evolutionary theology may or may not resonate depending on each person's beliefs. For nontheists, Haught's theology may seem no worse than any other, and possibly better since much of it is at least consistent with science and may be flexible enough to be beyond criticism. However, when the arguments he uses to outline the main points of his theology misinterpret or distort scientific principles, or otherwise strain credulity, then thoughtful criticism is warranted.

For example, one of the main reasons for Haught's conclusion that Darwinian evolution is not adequate as an ultimate explanation of life's history and variety is that it cannot account for the production of novelty in the universe: "They (materialists) have observed correctly that the emergence and flowering of life are constrained by the invariance of physical laws and that these laws are in no way violated by life's appearance. But from this truism they have wrested, without warrant, the extremely weak conclusion that since the evolution of life does not in any way violate the seemingly eternal laws of chemistry and physics, it therefore brings nothing new into being." Moreover, neo-Darwinists supposedly argue that "Nature needed only to undergo the somewhat incidental drama of gradually unfurling over the course of time in order for life and mind to make their unremarkable appearance." Now, not even a card-carrying materialist like Daniel Dennett, who seems to be Haught's main source for this viewpoint, considers the four billion year odyssey of life from its simplest beginnings to be an "incidental" drama that brings nothing new into being. To conclude that "the reshuffling of lifeless stuff" is incapable of producing novelty is to ignore almost all of the key findings of contemporary biology, which suggest precisely that this shuffling is the wellspring of novelty.

Finally, Haught makes much of the future as the basis for his evolutionary theology, where "God . . . lures the cosmos toward new modes of being. . . ." He comments: "Without the persistent coming of an unrehearsed future, the present and the past would have no opening onto the path of transformation. Evolution is rendered possible only because of the temporal clearing made available when the future faithfully introduces relevant new possibilities." Well, yes, but what can this possibly mean other than the rather obvious point that without the directionality and irreversibility of time there would be no possibility for anything new to happen? And why, exactly, is God required for "time's opening toward the future"? Haught insists that this is a religious stance based on a metaphorical understanding of the future, but when he acknowledges that this idea "will not make sense to everyone immediately," and goes on to say that "I am compelled, in a way, to resist the invitation to clarify," he asks too much of any reader who might not have agreed with him already.

Haught's work has much to recommend it. He is a Christian theologian who, while forthrightly acknowledging that his project is an effort to reconcile Christian theology with Darwin, demonstrates throughout the book his determination to incorporate relevant ideas and points of view from other major faiths, including Islam, Judaism, and Taoism. He writes eloquently and movingly on the role of belief and faith in the effort to live a good life and to contribute to the betterment of the world's environment and its people. His disagreements with particular individuals are, generally speaking, handled in an agreeable manner. He poses questions that other theologians might be content to ignore. God After Darwin has all of this going for it, and yet those readers who concur with Sagan's challenge in Pale Blue Dot may reach the last page with their frustration undiminished.