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A John Haught Reader challenges Christian theology to respond forthrightly to the thoughtful concerns of believers, agnostics, and atheists alike about the troubling issues posed by cosmic and biological evolution. The Haught Reader compiles selected chapters from nine published books by theologian John F. Haught plus two of his previously unpublished essays. They total 36 separately numbered readings grouped under six subjects: religion and science (Part I), Darwinian evolution (Part II), revelation (Part III), cosmic purpose (Part IV), suffering and death (Part V), and the New Atheism (Part VI). Although their ordering is not chronological, these readings generally follow the historical arc of Haught’s magisterial contribution to the understanding of religion and its relationship to science. The readings include Haught’s innovative theology of evolution, his critique of religiously-based opposition to evolution, and his rebuttal to atheistic materialism predicated on evolution.

Over the last century, religion has undergone sustained foundational challenges with the growth of secularism and science. Following World War I, scientific developments in astrophysics and evolution captured public attention, philosophy retreated from metaphysics into logical positivism and existentialism, and academics embraced a purely physicalist understanding of the universe. In 1925, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) labeled this interpretation of nature “scientific materialism,” according to which the universe consists solely of “senseless, valueless, purposeless” matter reconfigured by mindless physical and natural laws without transcendent meaning.1 This materialist worldview destabilized traditional religious verities and engendered an often atheistic interpretation of the universe. By mid-century, the secular intellectual establishment had accepted scientific (or evolutionary) materialism as its reigning metaphysics, and by century-end, the New Atheists were proclaiming materialism a scientific truth and the “God hypothesis” an intellectually indefensible and delusional belief. As the twenty-first century arrived, religion confronted a profound crisis of relevancy. Yet surprisingly, few theologians rose to address this crisis. Among these few theologians, none was more effective than Georgetown Professor John F. Haught.

During his long and distinguished career as a lay Catholic theologian, Dr. Haught has established an international reputation for his scholarship in systematic and evolutionary theology and for his effectiveness in explaining and defending religion. Haught received his Doctorate of Theology Degree from Catholic University of America in 1970. From 1970 to 2005, he served as professor in the Department of Theology at Georgetown University in Washington DC and as Departmental Chair from 1990 to 1995. In 2005, he left classroom teaching to concentrate on writing and lecturing on theology and evolution, becoming a Georgetown Distinguished Research Professor. To date, he is the author of 21 books, 92 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, 45 encyclopedia and opinion articles, and 4 published lectures. He has also delivered over 300 invited academic lectures and presentations. These writings and lectures reflect Haught’s broad, interdisciplinary interests in physics, cosmology, evolution, and ecology, beyond the purview of most theologians. His recognitions include: the “Owen Garrigan Award in Science and Religion” (2002), the “Sophia Award for Theological Excellence” (2004), the “Friend of Darwin Award”2 from the National Center for Science Education (2008), and Honorary Doctoral degrees from the University of Louvain (2009) and Chestnut Hill College (2016). In fall semester 2008, Haught held the D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities at St. John’s University in New York City.

The best entrée into Haught’s collected readings is his initial essay: “My Life in Science and Theology.” In this essay, Haught identifies the many authors who influenced his thinking, especially the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), the inspiration for his lifelong interest in science and religion. Haught gradually found the medieval theological worldview and prescientific Thomistic philosophy still permeating Catholic theology no longer adequate in the age of modern science, especially after Darwin. Teilhard had convinced Haught that evolutionary science was a gift rather than a danger to Christian theology—a theology needing to refocus on the future of creation as inseparable from the pursuit of personal salvation. Haught grounds his evolutionary theology on this fundamental insight. His theology addresses the purpose and future of the whole universe as a work in progress, emerging continually into fuller being; and he considers that this awakening cosmos requires “the flourishing of a scientifically informed religious faith” to sustain its momentum. Inevitably, Haught confronted the controversy between materialists and creationists, dismissing their misguided debates over cosmic design as blind to the unfolding drama of an awakening universe. The world is not static and complete but evolving and unfinished, Haught observes, and humanity is called to participate constructively in this cosmic adventure. An intimately engaged personal God continuously creates this world by beckoning and not forcing it forward, simultaneously assuring humanity that nothing in this ongoing cosmic story will be lost to eternity.

“Part I: God, Science & Religion” introduces Haught’s foundational writings on religion, which he defines as a conscious and appreciative response to the transcendent mystery of existence. Religion constitutes abiding faith in the trustworthiness of existence and a passionate concern for the “infinite and inexhaustible dimension of depth” beneath the surface of existence. God is this depth dimension—mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the terrifying yet fulfilling ground for humans coping with anxiety over finitude, meaninglessness, and guilt. Haught also describes religion in this setting as a hope and longing for the future; a willing and courageous acceptance of existential anxiety; an aesthetic quest after the transcendental beauty in being, goodness, and reality; and an unflagging desire and quest after metaphysical truth.

Scientific materialists or naturalists challenge such faith as unfounded, demanding scientific proof of God’s existence, as if God were a problem susceptible to scientific solution. As a gracious and self-giving mystery, explains Haught, God inevitably exceeds the horizon of human thought, especially the epistemological bounds of ordinary scientific inquiry. Haught’s full critique of materialism comes later in this volume. But reading 8 explains that religion and science (as distinct from scientific materialism) are not only compatible but also mutually supportive and nourishing. Religion fortifies science’s a priori faith in the inherent rationality of the universe and in the mind’s capacity to comprehend it, while science expands religion’s understanding of creation and thereby “broaden[s] the horizon of religious faith.”

“Part II: God, Evolution & Darwin” opens with Haught’s response to evolutionary materialism and closes with his theology of evolution. Darwin’s revolutionary theory radically altered the medieval and Newtonian view of the universe as fixed and eternal—the metaphysics of being that has influenced religious thought for centuries to the very present. In Darwinian evolution, now recognized to include Mendelian genetics, random genetic mutations naturally selected for the organism’s survival in a process occurring over immense periods of time accounts for the diversity of species, including human life. Materialists, like the zoologist Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, assert that a contingent, deterministic, and mindless evolutionary process demolishes the intellectual respectability of religion’s providential and creator God. In his response, Haught invites atheists, agnostics, and theists to adopt a deeper understanding of God, creation, and humans in relation to evolution. Pointing to the richly diverse and complex living species—including human life, mind, and subjectivity—he asks whether an apparently blind and mindless evolutionary process alone is a sufficient and ultimate explanation for such creativity and “new forms of being.” He answers that Darwinism is methodologically necessary but metaphysically insufficient. Such creativity, for Haught, requires the God of evolution “drawing the world from up ahead . . . toward the future.” This entails a metaphysics of the future that accounts for, but does not supplant, the cosmic qualities of chance variations, natural law, and immense time needed for the emergence of real novelty.

Haught faults the response to Darwinism propounded in creation science, intelligent design (ID) theory, and traditional hierarchical theologies. Creationists “trivialize religion” by disputing Darwinism, using a literalist interpretation of the Bible and claiming that this ancient sacred text is scientifically accurate. ID theorists advance a theologically “restrictive” and “lifeless” argument when theology requires a more robust vision to discern the deeper meaning in an evolving universe. Finally, traditional theologies rest on a metaphysics of the present—the eternal and timeless hierarchy of being, informed by Greek philosophy—that largely ignores the temporal creation of new being and “the coming of a new future.” Instead, Haught proposes an evolutionary theology focused on continuing rather than original creation; on the imperfect, suffering, and unfinished world; and on the human expectations for the future. In this evolutionary theology, divine grace permits the world to emerge on its own, enabling human freedom and emergent novelty; and divine action is not coercive but persuasive, luring the universe to greater beauty and assuring human redemption from absolute perishing in death. Evolutionary theology provides an understanding (theodicy) of innocent suffering and restores the biblical picture of God’s humility and self-emptying love. It represents a reasonable and scientifically informed metaphysics of becoming in which the world is drawn “perpetually toward deeper coherence by an ultimate force of attraction, abstractly identified as Omega, and conceived of as an essentially future reality.”

“Part III: God, Science & Revelation” includes writings on the history, role, and value of Revelation Theology, especially as it relates to cosmic origin, evolution, emergence, and futurity. Until Vatican II, Revelation Theology largely concerned creedal propositions addressing unorthodoxy and safeguarding faith rather than interpreting God’s relationship to the world. Vatican II broadened and deepened the meaning of revelation to include God’s self-revelation and self-emptying in Scripture and in the world. Haught’s Revelation Theology recognizes the revelatory character of diverse religious paths and the revelatory value of new scientific information in mediating transcendent mystery. Indeed, Haught finds the new cosmic story a primary source of revelation. It reveals a self-humbling, self-limiting, and self-emptying God who lovingly allows for human freedom and cosmic flowering into the future. In addition, the self-effacing and self-giving divine love embodied in the crucified Christ encourages individuals to accept their own and others’ suffering, shame, and “shadow side.”

God’s revelation in cosmic history also provides answers to the “God question” posed by modern secular and scientific skeptics, and Haught admonishes theologians to communicate such answers at the risk of otherwise becoming irrelevant. The cosmic story reveals truths about reality that are inaccessible—and yet essential—to science, for example: the reason why reality is intelligible, why the cosmos produced human intelligence, why our minds can grasp reality, and why truth exists and is worth pursuing. By persisting in its otherworldly indifference to science, traditional theology inadvertently reinforces today’s cosmic pessimism and existential homelessness. Haught leads this critical theological undertaking in his Revelation Theology, intended to “provide an enlivening sense of the meaning of the universe that science is now setting before us.”

“Part IV: God, Science & Purpose” tackles perhaps the most vexing theological problem posed by modern science—reconciling cosmic purpose and divine providence with a self-actualizing universe that supports proliferating and diversifying life forms due to blind chance, deterministic law, and immense time. For many in the scientific and intellectual community, scientific information suggests a pointless and meaningless reality consisting entirely of valueless matter manipulated by physical and biological laws, thereby rendering traditional religious explanations intellectually untenable and illusory. Accepting his theological responsibility to address the cosmic pessimism of reductive and deterministic materialism, Haught methodically points out the limits of science regarding questions of ultimate purpose (or teleology) and then deconstructs metaphysical materialism, showing it to be a belief system and not a scientific truth. In explaining cosmic purpose, Haught resists the anthropic principle—the notion of a universe physically fine-tuned since the Big Bang for inevitable human life and mind—as bordering on outdated design arguments of natural theology and as centering narrowly on human rather than cosmic evolution.

Though still shrouded in divine mystery, cosmic purpose, for Haught, is “the working out or actualizing of something of self-evident value”; and he finds unquestionable value in the “unimaginably wide display of beauty” emerging in the cosmic story—“the bursting forth of sentience, mentality, self-consciousness, language, ethics, art, religion, and now science.” Haught’s teleology effectively synthesizes Whitehead’s aesthetic cosmological principle of the intensification of beauty with Teilhard’s law of emergent complexity-consciousness and the phenomenon of terrestrial intelligence. He locates the drama of an awakening universe within an Abrahamic theology of God’s futurity and promise. In Haught’s evolutionary theology, the struggle, suffering, and waste of natural selection and the catastrophic accidents in natural history represent the inevitable byproducts of the universe still aborning, risking suffering and evil in its restless cosmic unfolding of ever-new and harmonious syntheses of novelty with order. Divine providence, for Haught, resides in the emergent and anticipatory character of the universe opening to a salvific future where God reveals “the breadth and depth of feeling to take into the divine life the entire cosmic story, including its episodes of tragedy and its final expiration.”

“Part V: God, Suffering & Death” takes aim at much current theodicy—that is, the theological understanding of suffering and death—because of its failure after Darwin to account for the length, breadth, and depth of nonhuman pain, struggle, and suffering in sentient life. In 1996, Pope John Paul II endorsed evolutionary biology, and in 2004, the International Theological Commission deemed contingency “not incompatible” with divine providence. Yet both statements failed to reconcile the apparently wasteful, inefficient, and random events and the vast unmerited suffering of sentient beings in evolution with the providential governance of a loving and caring God. Underlying this failure, for Haught, is Catholicism’s adherence to traditional prescientific metaphysics, inadequate for a theodicy explaining the pain and misery of biological and human evolution. Instead, Haught argues that “a shift from the metaphor of divine governance toward that of God as goal—in accordance with the metaphysics of the future—is more appropriate to a theology for an unfinished universe.” By identifying human suffering as expiation for original and ongoing human sin, theology remains indifferent to Darwinian evolution, resorts to a literalist biblical reading of Genesis, and assumes human descent from a lost mythical perfection, rather than focusing on a creative and promising future. Conversely, by explaining evolution as an epic drama of biblical “grace, promise, and liberation,” theology makes thoughtful contact with Darwinian science and appropriately “locates this drama within the very heart of God.” A theology of evolution brings coherence and adventure to life’s endeavors, views suffering and death as essential to evolutionary adaptation and promise, and provides assurance that “God is the underlying permanence that fully preserves everything that occurs in the entire cosmic process.” Citing William James, Whitehead, and Teilhard, Haught sets forth a theology of evolution which recognizes that human action contributes significantly and indelibly to the universe and carries redemptive meaning, and that divine love takes care “so that nothing that ever happens can be lost absolutely.”

“Part VI: God, Hope & Atheism” opens with uplifting descriptions of Christianity’s hopeful anticipation of the entire world’s unfolding future and closes with devastating critiques of the New Atheists’ shallow, misinformed, and contradictory jeremiads against Christianity. Informed by the Bible’s promissory perspective and science’s evolutionary cosmology, Christianity today understands the ancient “coming of God” as “the promise of a radically new world.” To evolutionary materialists, science’s retrospective analytics reveals lifeless and mindless matter as merely “masquerading” as mind and consciousness, heading toward final entropic oblivion. To Christians, by contrast, the same science understood prospectively discloses “a vein of promise in this ambiguous cosmos” with “a future whose ultimate depth we may call God.” Haught celebrates the ecclesiastical community of faith, which provides access to the reality of revelation. The Church, however, must also recognize the importance of revelation to resonate in our everyday lives, to remain open to scientifically historical study, and to look at the past “to find ways of orienting ourselves toward the future.”

Finally, Haught addresses the New Atheists—Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens—who claim that “belief without evidence” causes unnecessary human misery, represents a dangerous moral evil, and warrants uprooting and eradication by scientific reason. Their absolute intolerance for faith, however, overlooks their own unprovable faith in science as the only source of truth (scientism), in the comprehensibility of the universe, and in their own critical intelligence, which they claim is entirely due to a mindless Darwinian process. Furthermore, their faith in radical secularism and scientific naturalism ignores the barbarism of atheistic dictatorships like Nazism and Communism, which adopted versions of scientific materialism. Moreover, the New Atheists erroneously understand faith as an intellectually flawed search for scientific understanding. To the contrary, theology understands faith as a state of self-surrender to the dimension of reality “much deeper and more real than anything that could be grasped by science and reason.” Haught labels their “softcore” atheism a self-subverting creed because it assumes that “by dint of Darwinism, we can drop God like Santa Claus, without having to witness the complete collapse of Western culture—including our sense of what is rational and moral.” By contrast, hardcore atheists like Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre recognized and attempted to address the disorienting terror, absurdity, nihilism, and even madness that attend the death of God. The New Atheists, however, are oblivious to this inevitable consequence of overthrowing religiously inspired Western cultural values, while still remaining “as committed unconditionally to traditional values as the rest of us.” In their Darwinian scheme, moral values become “blinded contrivances of evolutionary selection” because without God, as Haught observes, there are no absolute values. For the New Atheists, the Bible fails to deliver their imaginary ideal deity and perfect creation, unconscious that their perfectly designed, eternally splendid world would also be a dead end, devoid of “any life, any freedom, any future, any adventure, any grand cosmic story, or any opening to infinite horizons up ahead.”

This book takes the reader on an exciting adventure in the theological ideas of John F. Haught. In lucid, accessible, and compelling prose, he addresses the most fundamental issues and concerns of modern human existence: Is the universe merely the product of mindless, deterministic forces? Is science the only reliable means of understanding the nature of reality? Does reality have any intrinsic meaning and purpose in light of neo-Darwinian evolution? If the answer is yes, how does one access such meaning and purpose? Is religion compatible with science? What reasoned response can religion and theology offer to the modern atheistic sense of nature? Haught answers these and numerous related questions in a stimulating new approach to theology thoroughly informed by developments in modern science and specifically designed for our evolving universe. Whitehead states: “The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.”3 Haught’s writings constitute just such an adventure in systematic theology, providing an intellectually exciting and religiously stimulating vision of an optimistic future.

Charles A. O’Connor III, JD, DLS

October 2018

1. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 17.

2. Haught was awarded this title for his testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005) opposing the teaching of Intelligent Design Theory in high school science classes.

3. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 192.