John F. Haught > Quotes

“A greedy insistence that the whole of nature and life must present itself to our voracious demand for instantaneous intelligibility is a symptom of all world-shrinking ideology, whether religiously fundamentalist or scientifically materialist. In”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Darwin, however, announced his swapping of direct divine creation for natural selection in a soft voice and without any of the condescending swagger one finds in the evolutionist materialism of a Dawkins or Dennett.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Since Darwin’s day, science has been increasingly revealing an irreversible dramatic story-line in nature that mathematical analysis had previously failed to notice. Science has now exposed nature as a drama that makes it more open than ever to theological investigation.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“This is the God of evolution— one who honors and respects the indeterminacy and narrative openness of creation, and in this way ennobles it.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Nature itself provides evidence neither for nor against God’s existence. Something so momentous as the reality of God can hardly be decided by a superficial scientific deciphering of the natural world. Hence we are in no way troubled by evolutionary theory.”
― John F. Haught, A John Haught Reader: Essential Writings on Science and Faith

“Darwin’s Descent of Man left room for a theory of moral development, but most contemporary evolutionary naturalists make no allowances for the significant differences between a child’s preconventional moral instincts, the conventional conduct of adolescents, and the moral idealism of adults such as Darwin.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Darwin’s science allows Christians to realize that our lives can be ennobled, and our ethical action animated, by knowing that we and the earth have an important part to play in the much-larger cosmic and Christic drama of creation.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“From the reading level of a scientifically informed Christian theology, however, evolution is an unfinished, transformative, dramatic adventure of creating and intensifying the world’s freedom, consciousness, and beauty, all within the compassionate life of the triune God.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–90) expressed an exceptionally strong distaste for any theology that supports itself by leaning on the vapid criterion of design. Even before Darwin published the Origin of Species, Newman had written in 1852 that William Paley’s design-oriented natural theology could “not tell us one word about Christianity proper,” and that it “cannot be Christian, in any true sense, at all.” Paley’s brand of theology, Newman goes on, “tends, if it occupies the mind, to dispose it against Christianity.” For Newman, in other words, it is not the task of theology to discover a divine designer lurking immediately beneath or behind the data of biology or physics.7”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Evolutionary naturalists put complete and often blind trust in Darwin’s science to provide the kind of ultimate explanation that theology traditionally has professed to offer. So why shouldn’t evolutionary naturalism be subjected to the same kind of Darwinian debunking that Darwinians extend toward other kinds of religious worship?”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Human love flourishes most fully and effectively where there is a sustained—indeed intergenerational—expectation that something really big is awaiting all things up ahead.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“Science and religion make meaningful contact with each other, especially when they decide to play by the rules of what we are calling critical realism. Accordingly, good science hopes more or less to approximate the way things are, but it is always willing to be critical of its contemporary ways of representing the world. And in the case of religion, the same critical realism allows that though our religious symbols and ideas need constant correction, they may nonetheless reflect—in an always limited way—a Transcendent Reality which is truly “there” and which always necessarily transcends our subjective narrowness.”
― John F. Haught, A John Haught Reader: Essential Writings on Science and Faith

“Nostalgia can easily become a substitute for hope. It can twist human longing for a new future into an obsession with recovering imagined past idyllic moments in religious, personal, natural, or national history.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“A world devoid of evil and suffering may be a theoretically conceivable alternative to the one we have, but it would have been aesthetically trivial in comparison with the dramatically intense universe that is still coming into being and whose meaning remains obscure until the story is fully told.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Darwin moved only hesitantly toward the rejection of direct divine design, and he was relatively tolerant toward dissenters to his theory. Unlike the in-your-face evolutionary atheism of our own times, his writing suggests that he was far from being fully comfortable with what he thought he had discovered.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“However, Richard Dawkins, whose work on the “selfish gene” may be of some help at the level of understanding evolution’s grammatical rules, does not stop here. He in effect declares that beneath the grammar of life, there is no meaning at all. For him, life is not a drama but an “indifferent” succession of design flaws and imperfect adaptations. Life for this grammarian is not even significant enough to rise to the level of tragedy.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Only after evolutionists come to realize that Darwinian science has no business in answering ultimate questions will biology be fully liberated from the clutches of theology.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“the religious obsession with expiation as a reasonable response to the fact of evil. This is partly why evolution is potentially such good news for theology.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“God forgoes any annihilating “presence” to or compelling of the world in order, paradoxically, to be nearer to it. What is “withdrawn” is not at all God’s “loving kindness” or God’s intimate involvement with the world, but instead any coercive or obtrusive presence that might suppress the autonomy of the beloved. God is present in the mode of “hiddenness,” not abdication.”
― John F. Haught, A John Haught Reader: Essential Writings on Science and Faith

“Another way to think about God, therefore, is as the horizon of ultimate beauty toward which you are irresistibly drawn.”
― John F. Haught, A John Haught Reader: Essential Writings on Science and Faith

“the fact of evolution now allows theology to realize more palpably than ever that creation is not just an “original” but also an ongoing and constantly new reality. In an evolving cosmos, creation is still happening, no less in the present than “in the beginning.”
― John F. Haught, A John Haught Reader: Essential Writings on Science and Faith

“In their relative freedom from divine coercion, some of the world’s evolutionary experiments may work and others may not. But divine love does not interfere. It risks allowing the cosmos to exist in relative liberty. In the evolution of life, the world’s inherent quality of being uncompelled manifests itself in the form of the random variations or genetic mutations that comprise the raw material of evolution. Thus a certain amount of chance is not at all opposed to the idea of God.”
― John F. Haught, A John Haught Reader: Essential Writings on Science and Faith

“Teilhard says we must be ready to “try everything.” This hope requires a more adventurous moral life than what we find in classical religious patterns of piety, but Teilhard was looking for a morality rooted in hope—not only for humanity but for the whole universe. His attention to the cosmos and its future can cause confusion to theologians of “the eternal present” who have not yet fully awakened to the fact of an unfinished universe.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“Religion exists because our trust in reality is subject to constant erosion by the pain, tragedy, hostility, absurdity, and death with which the world confronts us.”
― John F. Haught, A John Haught Reader: Essential Writings on Science and Faith

“The fact that nature has an inexhaustible depth allows both science and theology to comment on the drama of life without coming into conflict with each other.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“evolutionary science has provided theology with a great opportunity to enlarge upon the ancient religious intuition—expressed so movingly by Saint Paul—that the entirety of creation “groans” for ultimate fulfillment (Rom 8:22). After Darwin, we may speak more assuredly than ever about the inseparability of cosmic and human destiny.”
― John F. Haught, A John Haught Reader: Essential Writings on Science and Faith

“Scientists can be theists, in other words, because their discipline thrives on the conviction that the world does finally make sense.”
― John F. Haught, A John Haught Reader: Essential Writings on Science and Faith

“To look for a “causal joint” between God and nature is theologically misguided and leads only to misunderstanding God’s relationship to the natural world.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“In the last century and a half, Darwin’s picture of evolution has shaken the foundations of human understanding and opened up what seems, at least to many pious people, an endless void beneath what they had taken to be the firm foundation of benign providential design.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“In its adventurous struggle toward what Darwin rightly calls grandeur, nature turns out to be something profoundly purposeful.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life