Notes from Finding Darwin’s God

- By any reasonable analysis, evolution does nothing to distance or to weaken the power of God. We already know that we live in a world of natural causes, explicable by the workings of natural law. All that evolution does is it extends the workings of these natural laws to the novelty of life and to its changes over time.

- The Western God stands back from his creation, not to absent Himself, not to abandon His creatures, but to allow His people true freedom. A God who hovers, in all His visible power and majesty, over every step taken by mere mortals never allows them the independence that true love, true goodness, and true obedience requires. For our freedom in this world to be genuine, we must have the capacity to choose good or evil, and we must be allowed to face the consequences of our own actions.

- God is not the reason for such bloodshed and horror, e.g. the Holocaust; our sins are made on earth, not heaven. If we choose to trace any of them to God, we will find at their sources only the value He places on human freedom.

- By choosing evolution as His way to fashion the living world, He emphasized our material nature and our unity with other forms of life. He made the world today contingent upon the events of the past. He made our choices matter, our actions genuine, our lives important. In the final analysis, He used evolution as the tool to set us free.

- In the view of the absolute materialists, since Christianity and Judaism base their beliefs on the Bible, the fact that the opening pages of the good are scientifically incorrect means that the whole things is rubbish. Biblical literalists, holding the other side of the absolutist coin, use the same conflict to conclude that evolution is rubbish.

- As opposed to an extreme literalist view, where one might use Genesis 2:7 to argue that the elemental composition of the human body should match that of ordinary dust, a broader and more sensible reading would tell us simply that the materials of the human body were taken from the earth itself.

- By recognizing the continuing force of evolution, a religious person acknowledges that God is every bit as creative in the present as He was in the past. If faith and reason are both gifts from God, then they should play complementary, not conflicting, roles in our struggle to understand the world around us.

- We do not regard the indeterminate nature of events in human history (such as the rise of Western civilization or the collapse of the Roman Empire) as antithetical to the existence of the Creator so why should we regard similarly indeterminate events in natural history any differently?