Ever wondered why evolution theory, particularly its component called natural selection, is so threatening to Christianity? it is not necessarily incompatible with the idea of a supreme creator. I recently read an article in the NY Review of Books that addressed this issue. The article is aptly called, "A Religion for Darwinians?" and is written by H. Allen Orr, reviewing a new book called "Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith," by Philip Kitcher. Orr, a professor at Rochester, is an evolutionary biologist, and Kitcher is a professor of the philosophy of science at Columbia. (Orr earlier this year wrote a brilliant and witheringly negative review of Dawkins' "The God Delusion" in the NY Review of Books.)
I thought this quotation from Orr's article was exquisite:
"Providentialist religion holds that 'the universe has been created by a Being who has a great design'; importantly, this Being is deeply concerned with the welfare of human beings. A providentialist God is a God to whom one might pray. Kitcher believes that providentialist religion ultimately succumbed to the problem of evil. Though theologians struggled for centuries to reconcile the ubiquity of evil with an omnipotent and caring Creator, the problem was exacerbated immensely—and, Kitcher believes, fatally—by Darwinism, wherein evil assumes the form of mass suffering under natural selection:
"'Darwin's account of the history of life greatly enlarges the scale on which suffering takes place. Through millions of years, billions of animals experience vast amounts of pain, supposedly so that, after an enormous number of extinctions of entire species, on the tip of one twig of the evolutionary tree, there may emerge a species with the special properties that make us able to worship the Creator.'"
Orr, despite that he has made a specialty of defending the continuing vitality of "spirituality" in the face of scientific advances, agrees with Kitcher. Do you? (By the way, Kitcher's conclusion is that "spirituality" is possible in the face of the undubitable truth of natural selection.)
Here is a link to the article though I doubt you can access the whole thing:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arti...ticle_id=20496