Roger HAIGHT, S.J. Faith and Evolution: A Grace-Filled Naturalism. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2019 .Pp xiii, 241. $30.00. ISBN 9781626983410 (hard cover). Reviewed by Joseph A. BRACKEN, S.J., Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH 45207.

Roger Haight, Scholar in Residence at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and the author of many books in systematic theology, tries in the present book to reconcile the truth-claims of theology and natural science through espousal of what he calls a grace-filled naturalism. In the first chapter, for example, he offers five theses about the workings of physical reality from an evolutionary perspective.  Then in Chapter Two Haight explains that, while science and theology use different methodologies, they can still influence one another’s truth-claims. For example, the truth-claims of theology counter any tendency to materialistic reductionism in science. The methodology of natural science reminds theologians of the dangers of anthropocentrism in their thinking.  In Chapter Three Haight rethinks the doctrine of Creation out of Nothing:  “God creating means an always already active Presence in everything that transpires as its primary cause” (76). In Chapter Four, Haight claims that creation as an evolutionary process is empowered by divine grace.  God is present in the world as Creative Presence, i.e., the Holy Spirit understood as an immanent activity rather than as a transcendent entity (86-87). Precisely how God thereby empowers rather than overpowers the finite but real agency of a human being or other living creature remains, however, a mystery beyond human comprehension (88-89; 110-111). In Chapter Five, Haight dismisses the classical notion of original sin as derived from the sin of Adam and Eve and focuses on the slow change in human behavior from reliance on animal instincts needed for self-preservation in a hostile world to moral responsibility for others and care for the environment. In Chapter Six, he deals with the way that Jesus as a human being concretely represents the incomprehensible reality of God in his words and actions. In Chapter Seven he rejects the notion of the resurrection of Jesus as an empirical event and emphasizes the grace-filled transformation of the subjective experience of the Apostles and all subsequent generations of Christians in their conviction that Jesus is both divine and human. How Jesus as the risen Lord can be experienced as both divine and human is linked with the notion of God as Ground of Being or Creative Presence in the evolutionary growth in size and complexity of the cosmic process. Finally, in a chapter on eschatology Haight discusses the possibility of life after death in the memory of God: “The memory of God refers to God acting, and God’s acting in this case accomplishes two things: it preserves identity created in time, and it actualizes it as finite being, or continued becoming, in God’s eternal present” (230).

While I support Haight’s attempt to align basic Christian beliefs with current scientific understanding of the cosmic process and I certainly admire the depth and scope of his research into the writings of historical and contemporary philosophers of science and theologians, I still have misgivings about the end-product. First of all, while Haight makes frequent reference to the mystery of the God-world relationship, hence, to the need for an analogical understanding of God’s causal relation to the workings of the evolutionary process, in a scientific hypothesis the basic categories must apply univocally to all the entities to be explained by the system. Hence, if the notion of God is included within the hypothesis, it too must be explained in terms of the categories proper to all the other entities covered by the hypothesis. The principle of the analogy of being, therefore, only applies to a scientific hypothesis insofar as the hypothesis as a whole represents an imperfect model or paradigm for physical reality. Scientists are willing to accept the fallibility of their hypotheses, but unwilling to accept the inevitable ambiguity of the classical analogy of being. Secondly, Haight follows the lead of Karl Rahner and other Neo-Thomists in grounding systematic theology in first-person subjective experience of God, self, other people and the world of nature. But scientists aim at an understanding of the laws of nature entirely free of subjective bias.  Hence, the methodologies at work in natural science and systematic theology seem to proceed in opposite directions. Haight, for example, claims that “God is not a being that is infinite, but, like a verb, God is act or energy or dynamism” (72). This may be the way that Haight experiences the reality of God in his life, but a natural scientist would likely find logical inconsistencies in the concept of God as energy or the act of being. For, in natural science, an activity does not exist apart from an agent who uses it to make something happen. Likewise, energy is scientifically defined as the capacity to do work. Hence, energy is a specific property or attribute of material entities.  It only becomes apparent and can be empirically measured when it is embodied in the concrete interaction of material entities to one another.  Haight and like-minded Neo-Thomists may have good reason to be dissatisfied with the abstract categories of Being in Aristotle’s philosophy and in Aquinas’s systematic theology.  But these metaphysical categories applied equally well to areas of research and reflection in both disciplines. Haight and other contemporary theologians, however, work with symbols and metaphors rather than logically ordered concepts. A symbol or metaphor is valuable only insofar as it gives rise to new insights about the nature of reality. In itself, it is a “halfway house” between two metaphysical systems, one that is showing its age and another one that holds promise for the future.  Accordingly, rather than appeal to the mystery of God’s ongoing interaction with the world of creation, why not develop the basic concepts and organizing principles of this more recent, process-oriented metaphysics so that they would be equally useful in studying both the God-world relationship in theology and the emergence of higher-order and more complex forms of life out of lower-order and more primitive forms of life in natural science? Then theologians and scientists would be talking the same language and using the same trial-and-error methodology for their independent research and reflection.  The results might be very impressive.