ABSTRACT
Powerful voices in the religious world continue to hold the idea of an absolute reality as far away from evolution as possible. Evolution happens, ultimately, because of the “coming of God” toward the entire universe. The coming of God into nature, like the nonintrusive effectiveness of the Tao, is always respectful of the world’s realized autonomy. In biblical circles the very heart of authentic faith consists of the total orientation of consciousness toward the coming of God, the ultimately real. Moreover, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of evolutionary “progress” has led some neo-Darwinians to write him off as an outdated ideologue. Evolutionary materialism locates the source and substance of life’s diversity in the purely physical determinism that, allegedly, has led, step by fateful step, out of the dead causal past to the present state of living nature in all its profusion of complexity.
