& 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.
Dr. O’Connor is a retired environmental lawyer, lecturer in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Georgetown University, and author of The Great War and the Death of God: Cultural Breakdown, Retreat from Reason, and Rise of Neo-Darwinian Materialism in the Aftermath of World War I (Washington DC: New Academia, 2014) and articles in the Journal Confluence, addressing the war’s impact on Jewish thought and on Western music. He is a graduate of Harvard College, AB cum laude in English (1964), and Georgetown University, JD (1967), MALS (1985), and DLS (2012).
My Life in Science and Theology
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