The church doesn’t think that there’s much conflict between evolution and faith: the Vatican said as much just this year.  Still, the “battle” between Darwin fans and God fans continues to rage.  Now here’s Robert Wright, author of “The Evolution of God” in the New York Times today on a “grand bargain,” a truce in the evolution wars in the New York Times today.  Here’s the heart of the argument: 

The first step toward this more modern theology is for them [believers who oppose Darwinian ideas] to bite the bullet and accept that God did his work remotely — that his role in the creative process ended when he unleashed the algorithm of natural selection (whether by dropping it into the primordial ooze or writing its eventual emergence into the initial conditions of the universe or whatever).

Of course, to say that God trusted natural selection to do the creative work assumes that natural selection, once in motion, would do it; that evolution would yield a species that in essential respects — in spiritually relevant respects, you might say — was like the human species. But this claim, though inherently speculative, turns out to be scientifically plausible.

Read the rest here.

James Martin, SJ

The Rev. James Martin, S.J., is a Jesuit priest, author, editor at large at America and founder of Outreach.