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John F Haught

Georgetown University

Back when I was in my early twenties, I began reading the works of the Jesuit geologist and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), prompting my earliest interest in science and religion. From 1966 to 1970 I studied theology at the Catholic University of America and, while working on my doctoral thesis, I began teaching part time at Georgetown University across town in Washington, DC. After getting my degree in 1970, I joined the faculty there. In the early 1970s, I started developing a course for undergraduates in science and religion at Georgetown and I taught it almost every year until I retired from teaching in 2005. I was not trained as a scientist, so I had to do a lot of reading in physics, cosmology, biology, and other disciplines that most theologians generally ignore. In addition to Teilhard, I began to work ideas into my teaching and publications that I picked up from the philosophical writings of science-friendly and religiously appreciative authors such as Alfred North Whitehead, Michael Polanyi, and Bernard Lonergan. My first book, Religion and Self-Acceptance (1976) was a philosophical approach to religion based on Lonergan’s theory of knowledge; my second and third books, Nature and Purpose (1980) and The Cosmic Adventure (1984), were more deeply influenced by Whitehead and Polanyi.

What Is God? (1986) reflects my growing interest in other thinkers that I had been studying and teaching at that time, especially Paul Tillich, Jürgen Moltmann, Karl Rahner, and Wolfhart Pannenberg. The Revelation of God in History (1988), What Is Religion? (1990), and Mystery and Promise (1993) do not focus explicitly on the question of science and theology, but they indirectly reflect my ongoing interest in the topic. Along with my interest in science and theology, I later became preoccupied with the question of the relationship of ecology to religion, which led to the publication of The Promise of Nature (1993). In that book, I argued that any truly Christian environmental theology must be concerned with the future of creation and not just with conscious survival beyond death. I became convinced that Christian spirituality and ecological morality must never again separate the question of personal salvation from that of cosmic destiny.

Since 1993, all of my books have, in one way or another, focused on science and its implications for religion and theology. I based Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (1995) on an approach I developed over many years of undergraduate teaching at Georgetown. After writing that book, however, I became increasingly interested in topics related to evolutionary biology. Because of the growing importance of the question of God and evolution in the intellectual world—as well as in the American cultural conversations—and about the scientific and religious status of what has been called “Intelligent Design,” I wrote God After Darwin (2000, 2007), Responses to 101 Questions on God in Evolution (2001), Deeper than Darwin (2003), Is Nature Enough? (2006), Christianity and Science (2007), God and the New Atheism (2008), and Making Sense of Evolution (2010). Because of an increasing number of invitations to lecture and write on theology and evolution, both nationally and internationally, I decided to leave the undergraduate classroom in 2005 and devote my time to lecturing and writing on the relationship of religion and theology to evolutionary biology and cosmology. A new emphasis on cosmology is reflected in my two most recent books Resting on the Future (2015) and The New Cosmic Story (2017). In these works, I still draw, in some measure, on the hopeful vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) that I first encountered many years ago.

The just-mentioned notion of intelligent design (ID), I should note, is controversial, primarily because its proponents insist that it should become part of science education and, hence, a topic to be taken up in biology classes in our public schools. Since the modern scientific method looks only for the physical causes of phenomena, however, ID is not really science and should not be part of science education. ID still commands a large following among conservative Christians and Muslims, but, in 2005, after a long trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Judge John E. Jones struck down the initiative taken by the Dover County school board to make ID part of that district’s high school biology curriculum. Because I had already become deeply involved in discussions relating to religion and evolution, I was asked to testify at the Harrisburg trial on behalf of the plaintiffs who were opposed to the teaching of ID in public schools. I did so happily. Joining the expert witnesses from various academic fields, including biology and philosophy, I was the sole theologian to provide testimony at the trial (Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover District School Board). I supported the argument that ID is a somewhat impoverished theological idea, rather than a properly scientific one, and therefore has no justifiable place in public school education. As a result of my testimony, I was later awarded a “Friend of Darwin” award by the National Center for Science Education. I was probably one of the few non-atheists on this list of awardees.

My exposure to Teilhard years earlier had already turned me into someone who believes that evolutionary science has been a great gift—rather than a danger—to theology. Had it not been for that early influence, my academic life could have taken many other directions. I first encountered Teilhard’s evolutionary vision soon after graduating from college in 1964. I was immediately swept away by the power and freshness of his thought. I did not realize fully at the time that my excitement was due also to the fact that I was becoming dissatisfied intellectually and spiritually with the medieval theological worldview presupposed by my religious education up until that point. Before encountering Teilhard, I had been studying in a Catholic seminary and was thoroughly schooled in Thomistic philosophy (much of which I was required to read and memorize in the original Latin). To this day, I am grateful for having had the opportunity to study Thomistic thought. However, I began to realize long ago that Thomas’s prescientific philosophy, ingenious and adventurous as it was in the thirteenth century, cannot adequately contextualize contemporary science—although there are a few Catholic philosophers and theologians still attempting to forge just such an impossible synthesis. I have high regard for the effort and goodwill behind these attempts, but I have come to think of them as both intellectually and spiritually inadequate to what we now know about the universe in the age of science, especially after Darwin. Many of the severest critics of Teilhard are rigorous Thomists who have yet to appropriate evolutionary science in a serious way.

In any case, I left the seminary soon after the Second Vatican Council and immediately began to pursue a lay career in academic theology. My decision to take up theological studies was also a consequence of my exposure to the writings of Karl Rahner and contemporary biblical scholarship, especially that of my teacher, the Johannine scholar Raymond Brown. To this day, I am grateful for the historical-critical understanding of Scripture that I learned from Brown and others. I was thus enabled to see long ago that scientifically modern biblical criticism liberates theology from the anachronistic impulse to seek scientific information in the Bible and the ridiculous attempt to make ancient scriptures compete with modern natural sciences. This is a lesson that countless Christians and most anti-Christian evolutionists have yet to learn.

As I recall, however, it was mostly due to the excitement I had felt in my very limited acquaintance at that time with Teilhard’s Christian vision of nature and evolution that I found myself drawn toward a life in systematic theology. Even though I have sought intellectual support for relating theology to science by studying the works of many other religious thinkers, especially Bernard Lonergan, Alfred North Whitehead, and Michael Polanyi, Teilhard has been my main inspiration, both intellectually and religiously. I am not as uncritical of his thought today as I may have been when I was younger, but I still draw upon the audacity of his deeply religious conviction that acquaintance with science is absolutely essential to understanding the meaning of Christian faith today.

I want to point out here that even before I came across his writings, Teilhard’s bold ideas were already helping to shape some of the theological reflection that would make the Second Vatican Council such an important event in the history of the Church as well as in my personal life. Gaudium et Spes, the Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (1965), was revolutionary for many reasons, including its making the following two observations: (1) “The human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one. In consequence there has arisen a new series of problems . . . calling for efforts of analysis and synthesis” (§5). And (2) “A hope related to the end of time does not diminish the importance of intervening duties but rather undergirds the acquittal of them with fresh incentives” (§21).4 I cannot read Gaudium et Spes without noticing the influence of Teilhard in it—in spite of the fact that the Vatican had censored his writings earlier. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the controversial Jesuit evolutionist and creative religious thinker had already expressed some of the same sentiments that eventually made their way into Vatican II.

Teilhard had developed some of his ideas on God and evolution in The Human Phenomenon and The Divine Milieu while he was living in China, becoming one of the top two or three geologists of the Asian continent. These two books and countless other shorter writings have made him famous posthumously, but he remained largely unpublished and unknown in his own lifetime. Because of church censorship, he was never given the opportunity that most scholars have of exposing their works to the critique of other experts. No doubt, then, there are deficiencies in his writings that could have easily been avoided and corrected had his church allowed for the circulation of his ideas. After his death in 1955, his lay friends fed his manuscripts to hungry publishers who then distributed them widely. Some of these were immediately devoured by theologians who helped shape the documents of the Council, and so Teilhard’s hope for the future of humanity and of our need to take responsibility for “building the earth” greatly influenced one of modern Catholicism’s main documents. This is most ironic because, in1962, the same year the Council met for its first session, the Holy Office of the Vatican issued an admonition advising seminary professors and heads of Catholic colleges and universities to “protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and his followers.”5 Fortunately, I was one of those who escaped such efforts to protect the tender minds of young Catholics.

Because of the theological ferment fostered by Vatican II, my own, previously medieval, spirituality began to evolve into something new. Catholic University—at least while I was a student there—was an intellectually and religiously liberating environment. It was there that I began to supplement my interest in Teilhard with the theology of hope articulated by Protestant theologians Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg along with that of Catholic theologians Karl Rahner, Edward Schillelbeeckx, Yves Congar, and many others who had helped shape Vatican II. My scholarly interests became increasingly ecumenical and my doctoral dissertation reflects how Protestant theology helped me to address the question of how to translate the ancient eschatological thinking of the Bible into relevant contemporary terms compatible with science. To deal with the ancient biblical language of promise and hope, however, I had to study hermeneutics, the art and science of the interpretation of texts, on which I wrote my doctoral dissertation. As I look back on my life in theology, I observe that my constant concern to include the whole cosmos within a sweeping biblical vision of promise and redemption was already beginning to blossom in my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation.

Developing a hopeful sense of the cosmic future and of a purposeful universe has continued to be the main preoccupation of my theology. I have maintained, with Teilhard and “process thought,” that, in light of geology, evolutionary biology, and contemporary post-Einsteinian cosmology, theology henceforth needs to start out with the observation that the cosmos remains a work in progress. If the cosmos is still coming into being, we need to entertain the thought that something of great importance may be aborning up ahead and that human technology and morally chastened engineering will be increasingly essential to the shaping of the cosmic future, perhaps even in ways that we cannot yet imagine. I have long viewed the cosmos as a drama of awakening and I have continued to argue that the flourishing of a scientifically informed religious faith is essential to sustaining its momentum.

Concern for the cosmic future and for what’s really going on in the universe has not been a major theme of Western theology until after the emergence of evolutionary science and cosmology. Classical Christianity and its theologies first came to expression at a time when people took for granted that the universe is fundamentally fixed and unchanging. Their otherworldly spiritual instincts reflected a static, vertical, and hierarchical understanding of the cosmos. Today, however, especially because of developments in the natural sciences, we understand that the whole universe, not just life and human history, is still in the process of becoming. My writings reflect the belief that if we take seriously the fact that the universe is unfinished, we need to think new thoughts about the meaning of all the traditional theological topics, including God, faith, and the moral life. I have previously outlined the theological implications of an unfinished universe, especially in my recent book Resting on the Future (2015). There, as well as in my latest book The New Cosmic Story (2017), I have argued that the universe is best understood according to the metaphor of drama rather than that of design. This means that the most important question in science and theology today is not whether “intelligent design” points to a deity or even how God acts in nature but rather whether the cosmic drama carries a hidden but imperishable meaning.

I am quite aware, however, that this sense of the universe as a still unfinished drama has yet to settle deeply into Christian theological awareness in particular and most religious thought everywhere. Most of the devotional life of religious people on our planet still presupposes an essentially immobile universe. Some of our schools of theology still pay scarcely any attention to science. Christian thought and instruction even at non-fundamentalist schools still tend to nurture nostalgia for a lost Eden or look skyward toward a final heavenly communion with God, apart from natural history and the cosmic future. Emphasis on the need to restore a putatively idyllic past, together with a longing to escape from Earth into eternity, still leads theologians to ignore the Abrahamic spirit of adventurous hope which, in my opinion, must once again become the foundation of any truthful and honest Christian worldview.

Meanwhile, intellectual life, philosophy of science, and the assumptions of popular culture remain immersed in a deadening materialist pessimism that unnecessarily undermines all hopes that the cosmos can somehow be saved from absolute death. Like traditional otherworldly theology, contemporary intellectual life is badly in need of revision. Many of the readings in this book, therefore, reflect my conviction that contemporary scientific naturalism is not only spiritually but also intellectually problematic. I argue that, since our universe is still on the move, we may find—at least in principle, without any conflict with science—reasons to anticipate the future transformation of the whole universe into something unimaginably beautiful, as Teilhard has done in many of his works and as Pope Francis recently encouraged us to do in his encyclical, Laudato si.6

Christian religious hope, along with the religious aspirations of other traditions, needs to be channeled into a common human concern for the cosmic future (“a great hope held in common,” as Teilhard puts it) and not just as a training ground to prepare our souls for personal immortality.7 I am convinced, moreover, that a concern for cosmic destiny will simultaneously include, enrich, and expand our understandable hopes for personal salvation. Moreover, the widening of human hope to include the cosmic future should be ecologically invigorating. Were theology to take seriously the evolutionary understanding of life and the new cosmological sense of an unfinished universe, the natural setting of human aspirations and religious hope would be expansive enough to give new significance to discussions of the relationship between science and faith.

The readings in this book all take for granted that our new sense of the universe as a drama of awakening is spiritually much more consequential than most scientists and religious believers have noticed. The freedom, redemption, and healing that people of faith look for has not yet fully come to pass since the cosmic story that gave birth to them is still far from finished. This means, as Teilhard has rightly indicated, that all religions and all theological speculation are unfinished and, like the universe, they have a dark side, but, since “the universe is still aborning,” they may also have a fresh future.8

Any religious expectation that is aware of nature’s leaning toward the future hopes not only for personal conscious survival after death but also for the fulfillment of the whole cosmos, as Pope Francis urges in his recent encyclical. The promising God of Abraham, who arrives from out of the future when it seems that everything has reached a dead end, may now be sought by looking in the direction of a new future—not only for individual souls but also for the whole universe. Abrahamic faith in the age of science anticipates not only human and personal redemption but also indeed a transfiguration of the whole cosmos into a scene of wondrous beauty. Without setting out to do so, the natural sciences depicting an unfinished cosmos allow room for a new and beautiful future, not just for humanity and for the earth but also for the whole universe. Science’s fresh picture of the cosmos as a drama rather than a design gives a new zest and scope to the ancient Abrahamic expectations. Both science and faith direct us, accordingly, to look for the advent of an Indestructible Rightness and Brightness that is drawing the whole scheme of things into the unity of new being from out of the future. A destiny that comprises anything less than the whole cosmic story—and perhaps a multiverse as well—cannot be fully liberating for any living being.

My Approach to Issues in Science and Theology

The objective of most of my recent writing has been to acclimatize faith to the newly discovered story of a cosmos that started fourteen billion years ago and is still in process. At the same time, however, my teaching, speaking, and writing during the last half-century have attempted not only to make room for faith in the age of science but also to fortify faith by exposing it continually to new scientific discoveries. A major obstacle to the realizing of this objective has been the persistence of biblical literalism in the minds of both believers and scientific skeptics. I have found that most scientists who profess hostility to theology have little if any familiarity with modern biblical criticism. As a result, they carry the same literalist assumptions in their reading of ancient holy books as do anti-Darwinian biblical creationists. Nowadays, in the age of science, literalism often takes the form of an unconscious expectation that the Bible—if it is to live up to its reputation as something “inspired” by God—must be the source not only of religious inspiration but also of reliable scientific information. This expectation is shared by both creationists and contemporary New Atheists. In my book God and the New Atheist I pointed out that Sam Harris, for example, insists that “the same evidentiary demands” that science has to live up to must also be the criterion of truth in religious writings and creeds.9 He remarks that if the Bible is supposed to have been “written by an omniscient being” (which is how he sums up the idea of biblical inspiration), then it should also be “the richest source of mathematical insight humanity has ever known.”10 It should have something to say “about electricity, or about DNA, or about the actual age and size of the universe.”11 The other New Atheists—Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins—likewise appeal to the scientific criteria of inquiry in their assessment of the truth-status of scripture. If the Bible is “inspired,” they insist, then it must be scientifically accurate and not just religiously motivating.

I have responded to this literalist mentality by insisting that searching for scientific truths in any ancient, prescientific, or classical text, religious or otherwise, is an anachronism that transcends mere silliness. And yet, such silliness is almost the norm in contemporary scientific skepticism. The problem is that literalism, whether by atheists or creationists, is a way of avoiding a genuine encounter with deeply hidden meanings—not only in religious texts but also in the story of the universe. Literalism, I have argued, protects the religious fundamentalist from hearing the word of God on the one hand and gives the New Atheists a pretext for mocking ancient religious writings because of their failure to satisfy contemporary scientific criteria of meaning and truth on the other.

Much of my writing is an attempt to articulate an alternative to literalist readings of both religious texts and the new cosmic story. In the writings collected here, I take for granted that theology and science are distinct but compatible ways of understanding and knowing. They cannot contradict each other because they both seek understanding and truth from within formally distinct horizons of inquiry. These horizons do not overlap, so they cannot meaningfully compete or conflict with each other. This is because the kind of evidence, the quality of understanding, and the type of confirmation operative in one horizon of inquiry is not identical with what passes as evidence, understanding, and confirmation in the other.

I am using the term “horizon” metaphorically. Visually speaking—and here I am following the Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan—a “horizon” is the field of all the things we can see from a specific point of view.12 By analogy, a “horizon of inquiry” refers to what can be understood and known by way of a determinate method of understanding and knowing. Accordingly, since the horizon of inquiry characteristic of the natural sciences is distinct from that of theology, there can be no genuine conflict between them. This is such an obvious point, it seems to me, and yet countless contemporary scientists and philosophers claim, unreasonably and without the scientific justification they demand elsewhere, that science alone is epistemologically reliable, and hence that science and theology are irreconcilable ways of reading the world.

To arrive at this verdict, of course, they first make the false assumption that theology is supposed to look at the world—or read the cosmic story—from within the same horizon of inquiry as the natural sciences. Stuffing ancient religious literature by force into the modern scientific horizon of inquiry, they conclude that it no longer deserves our attention. Ancient religious ways of understanding, they agree, fail to base themselves on the kind of empirical evidence that modern science requires, so they can never again be taken seriously. In The God Delusion, for example, Richard Dawkins rejects what he calls the “God hypothesis” because it cannot compete with or survive our scientific ways of understanding the natural world. For Dawkins (who is far from being alone among contemporary skeptics), it is only within the territory proper to scientific investigation that the idea of “God” can rightly be examined. In his belief system, the only reliable way to arrive at the true understanding of essentially anything is to follow scientific inquiry. I say “belief” because his dismissal of other horizons is not something he can back up by way of scientific experimentation. Dawkins is a true believer and not a scientist, inasmuch as he decrees that only one legitimate horizon of inquiry exists. Today, scientific skepticism in general is not the result of following the scientific method but rather of gratuitously assuming that the horizon of scientific inquiry is the only epistemologically permissible way to see, understand, and know anything whatsoever.

Science and a Personal God

The question arises, however, as to how and why an educated religious person in the age of science could still believe in a personal, caring, interested God. I appreciate the question, but my response to it has been consistent throughout my academic life. Science is not equipped to confirm or deny the existence of a personal God, but the idea of a personal God is completely consonant with what we now know from science. In backing up this point, once again I admit my indebtedness to Teilhard.

Evolution is a process of becoming more, of giving rise to fuller being over the course of time. But at each stage of evolution, the world can become more only by organizing itself around successively new and higher centers. Teilhard called this recurrent cosmic trend “centration.” Centration occurred very early in cosmic history when subatomic elements organized themselves around an atomic nucleus. Centration happened later when large molecules clustered around nuclear DNA in the eukaryotic cell, still later when the “central” nervous system took shape in vertebrate evolution, and yet again when social insects gathered around a fertile queen.

At present, the latest dominant units in evolution are human persons, but they can only be brought together socially into higher organic syntheses if their unifying centers are at least personal. We human persons cannot be fully alive or fully moved to “become more” by clustering around anything that lacks subjectivity, freedom, and responsiveness or that fails to acknowledge our own free personhood. As both Teilhard and theologian Paul Tillich agree, human persons, at the center of their being, cannot be fully attracted to or challenged by anything that is less than personal. Consequently, that which is most real—God, if you will—must at least be personal. To be fully real and deeply attractive to persons, the centering reality must be a “Thou” and not an “It.”

Like Teilhard, I cannot make sense of what goes on in the cosmic drama apart from taking, in faith, the reality of an attracting, transcendent, promising, and personal Center to which the universe is awakening. And if, as Christian faith affirms, this Center has entered intimately and irreversibly into the struggle and suffering of life, to me it is not merely interesting but worthy of worship. At the same time, however, I believe with both Tillich and Teilhard that our ideas of God must always be presented not just as personal but also as suprapersonal (to use Tillich’s term). This means, today, at the very least, in order to merit a religious surrender on our part, God must be thought of as infinitely larger than the immense universe of modern science. An anthropomorphic, one-planet deity is no longer enough.

I believe that modern scientific skepticism’s disillusionment with the idea of a personal God is partly due to the fact that our theologies have made God seem too small for the minds and souls of scientifically educated people. The God of evolution and contemporary cosmology, therefore, must be thought of as continually creating the world not by pushing things forward from the past, but by drawing the world in all its wonders towards a new future ahead. This means that the entire process of cosmic creativity finds its destiny only in an unimaginably wide and redemptive compassion transcending the world. Because of the infinitely resourceful being and compassion characteristic of what theology calls God, even if the physical world will eventually “die” of energy exhaustion, as astrophysicists predict, nothing in the cosmic story needs to be thought of as ever lost or forgotten, as Whitehead also suggests. Today, theology needs to emphasize that the entire cosmic story—and not just the human soul—is saved and redeemed forever in the everlasting life and love of God.

Finally, like Teilhard, I do not want to exempt my own faith tradition from undergoing the disturbing phase transitions that occur in other evolving systems. In 1933, Teilhard wrote: “I believe Christianity to be immortal. But this immortality of our faith does not prevent it from being subject (even as it rises above them) to the general laws of periodicity which govern all life. I recognize, accordingly, that at the present moment Christianity (exactly like the mankind it embraces) is reaching the end of one of the natural cycles of its existence.” This is “an indication that the time for renewal is close at hand.”13

It is this call for renewal that has energized my own theological life and work. I realize that, for many Christians (perhaps even the majority), a prescientific understanding of the cosmos as static and immobile is the only legitimate framework for theological reflection. At the same time, scientific skeptics are uncomfortable with Christian theologies that fail to acknowledge the depth and expansiveness of the new scientific understanding of the cosmos. For them, prescientific versions of religion and religious thought do not lift up their hearts and give new incentive to their moral lives. Contrary to the judgment of cosmic pessimists, however, I believe that scientific discovery of an awakening universe is completely at home in a broadly construed theological metaphysics.

Finally, I want to thank Bradford McCall for organizing the following excerpts and Dr. Charles A. O’Connor for his gracious introduction. (To avoid conflating my present work with what I published earlier, I have decided to make only minor revisions to the material presented here.)

4. Paul VI, “Gaudium et Spes.”

5. Holy Office of the Vatican, “Warning.”

6. Francis, “Laudato Si.”

7. Teilhard, Future of Man, 75.

8. Teilhard, Future of Man, 75.

9. Harris, End of Faith, 35.

10. Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, 60.

11. Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, 61.

12. See Lonergan, Insight.

13. Teilhard, Christianity and Evolution, 94–95.