Making Sense of Evolution 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’s science, however, allows us now to tie our search for the kingdom of God and our building up of the body of Christ into the larger cosmic drama of creation.”
― 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

“Too often we have thought that Christ’s salvific role is that of liberating our souls from the universe rather than making us part of the great work of renewing and extending God’s creation.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Every eucharistic celebration is a declaration of “what is really going on” in the universe even now: the risen Christ continues to transform the whole world, gathering us, our labor and achievements, our joys and sufferings, along with the entirety of life’s long struggle and the whole cosmic process—gathering it all into the formation of his own body.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Christianity, Teilhard is convinced, provides a coherent alternative to materialism’s reading of evolution.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“The materialist project of explaining mind in terms of mindless stuff makes the very existence of mind inexplicable even while, ironically, the materialist is relying on his or her mind to explain it.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Divine action in the world may be hard to understand as long as nature is taken to be essentially mindless, but it turns out that the very idea of mindless (or spiritless) matter is a logical illusion, stemming from science’s inability to “see” the interior side of matter that comes out into the light of day most explicitly in the evolution of human consciousness and the noosphere.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Evolutionary science makes the most sense if we place it in a nonmaterialist metaphysical setting, one that gives priority to the future rather than the past.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“A wider (dramatic) vision allows one to see that in evolution the universe has always aimed to become more. It has never ceased being restless for increasing complexity, consciousness, freedom, and intense beauty.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Today the shadow of suspicion under which some Catholic ecclesiastics formerly held Teilhard has virtually disappeared except among the most reactionary devotees of pre-Vatican II spirituality.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“the God that Darwin eventually disowned was the severely limited designer deity of William Paley and nineteenth-century natural theology, not the biblical God, which some contemporary theologians rightly refer to as the “power of the future.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Only those who have lazily flattened out the world so that it fits into a materialistically hewed explanatory slot, or whose only criterion of theological rectitude is that of perfect design, only such people will ridicule the kind of expansiveness that rare figures such as Teilhard have made available to those with open minds and the capacity to hope.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“It is impossible to make your way directly from a scientific understanding of evolution to a Christian or any other religious way of understanding what is really going on in the depths of life.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Who will at last give evolution its God? —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin1
Christ is the end-point of the evolution, even the natural evolution, of all beings; and therefore evolution is holy. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin2”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“In the age of evolution, if we take science seriously, our thoughts about God cannot be exactly the same as before.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Evolution makes better sense if we locate it within a theological vision in which the cosmic past is liberated from lifelessness and mindlessness by God, the “power of the future.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“I cannot scientifically prove that evolution has its ultimate explanation in a God of promise and fidelity, nor is it appropriate even to try to do so. However, I am at least confident that there is no contradiction between a Christian theological setting and the discoveries of evolutionary science.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“The Bible gives us such a worldview, one in which ultimate reality—in other words, God—arrives from out of the future to give new life to the creation and fresh hope to human history. Here the fact of evolution finds its ultimate explanation in a universe opened by its creator to undreamed-of possibilities still hidden in the future.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“I suggest that the materialist worldview to which Crews is so devoted actually obscures the richness of the life-world as Darwin saw it.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Why does it fail? Because evolutionary materialism is compelled by the logic of its own belief system to make cosmic mindlessness the ultimate foundation and explanation of the human mind. In doing so, it provides no good reason for a materialist such as Crews to trust his own mind, as in fact he does whenever he makes any of his confident claims, including his declaration that materialism is the real truth of Darwinian science.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Crews’s decree springs from evolutionist devotionalism, not from science.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“Perhaps genes are tricking evolutionists into the naturalistic belief that Darwin’s ideas are as deep as one can go in attempts to understand what life is really all about.”
― 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

“Scientific materialism is also a belief, one that has its origin in an even more fundamental devotion: scientism, the belief that science is the only reliable guide to truth.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“typical of the thought world of countless evolutionists who assume, without any evidential support, that evolution and theology are destined forever to contradict each other.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“gene-centered evolutionary approach has to admit that if our ancestors had not been religious, we would not be here.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“In that respect, they remind one of attempts to explain today’s weather by saying that it is all caused by the laws of physics.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“The problem with evolutionary accounts of morality is that their generality prevents them from telling us anything significantly informative about our sense of duty.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life

“biological understanding of morality cannot differentiate clearly between Martin Luther King’s idealistic intransigence and a Nazi’s sense that it is good to purify the race. Because of its incurable generality, a gene-survival account of morality ends up “explaining” mutually contradictory motivations and actions in terms of the very same sets of purely natural causes in every case.”
― John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life