“Evolutionary views of creation also steer us into a deeper engagement with the natural world, as we see ourselves quite literally connected to the creatures and ecologies around us. The idea that our world emerged from deep time through natural selection implies that the wonderful diversity we see around us is contingent, unique, and precious. They provide arguments for better stewardship of the natural environment, because its current state took an enormous length of time. The creatures of the Earth are not only there for us, but we are also there for them. A Darwinian theology argues that care for creation becomes an important aspect of God’s grace to the natural world through us.”

“Unsurprisingly, to Darwin, God gradually came to seem less personal, benevolent, attentive, and active. Surely, such a loving, personal Deity would have created in another way (other than evolution), a way that involved less trial and error, fewer false starts, fewer mindless species extinction, fewer pointless cruelties, and less reliance on predation to sort out the fit from the unfit. Darwin arguably never lost his faith in God. Rather, he believed that God created through the evolutionary process, but his growing knowledge of that process dramatically transformed his view of God, which left him ill at ease with the anthropomorphic personal theism of his day and at odds with friends and colleagues who believed in a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active divine being.

Christians and othe theists who casually assert that God creates through evolution–as if there is no theological problem with this assertion–should pause and consider Darwin’s faith journey. Darwin was theologically more perceptive than many of his liberal endorsers. He knew that evolution puts enormous stress on the idea of God. . . .”