THE ENTANGLED TRINITY,QUANTUM BIOLOGY,AND DEEP INCARNATION

By utilizing the concept of quantum decoherence, augmented by the novel theory of quantum Darwinism, to understand the transition from the quantum to the classical worlds, the scaling up of the concept of quantum entanglement2018 to the biological level offers a fascinating metaphor for the presence of the creative spirit in nature and the “flesh” of Incarnation. This in turn provides helpful theological metaphors for articulating divine presence at the level of life in theistic evolution, partially addressing the issue of evolutionary theodicy by supporting the concept of deep Incarnation. The point of understanding the Incarnation as deeply entangled enfleshment is that it brings the suffering of creation into the life of the Redeemer as well as the Creator, facilitating redemption and hope through the divine life.     

Perfecting not Perfect: Christology and Pneumatology within an Imperfect Yet Purposeful Creation

Abstract

The issue of evolutionary theodicy remains an area of difficulty within the science–theology dialogue. The evolutionary understanding of life identifies a process where suffering and extinction are intrinsic; however, theology seeks to articulate God's loving goodness towards creation. Therefore the central question of evolutionary theodicy becomes: “How can a loving God act by such a process?” Within the view of theistic evolution, evolutionary theodicy has resulted in a deeper understanding of Christology and Pneumatology, as the whole of creation is understood to be moving towards its eschatological perfection in Christ.     

DOES SCIENCE CLARIFY GOD'S RELATION TO THE WORLD?

Abstract. Central to the work of Arthur Peacocke on science and religion is the intention to develop a reasonable faith within an intelligible framework of meaning. Showing the inadequacy of reductionism is necessary for this purpose. Knowledge of God is related to what science can tell us about creation. From an evolutionary framework, characterized as a delicate balance that issued in humans, and manifested through contingency and chance, God's actions are expressed as exploring the potentialities of creation. The creation is understood to be in God, but God is more than the world, as in panentheism. God suffers with the creation in love, and the focus of human meaning is expressed in Jesus Christ, the Incarnation, the sacrament of God.     

God and Evolutionary Evil: Theodicy in the Light of Darwinism

Pain, suffering, death, and extinction have been intrinsic to the process of evolution by natural selection. This leads to a real problem of evolutionary theodicy, little addressed up to now in Christian theologies of creation. The problem has ontological, teleological, and soteriological aspects. The recent literature contains efforts to dismiss, disregard, or reframe the problem. The radical proposal that God has no long–term goals for creation, but merely keeps company with its unfolding, is one way forward. An alternative strategy to tackle the problem of evolutionary theodicy is outlined, with an implication for environmental ethics and suggestions for further work.     

EXTINCTION,NATURAL EVIL,AND THE COSMIC CROSS

Did the God of the Bible create a Darwinian world in which violence and suffering (disvalue) are the means by which the good (value) is realized? This is Christopher Southgate's insightful and dramatic formulation of the theodicy problem. In addressing this problem, the Exeter theologian rightly invokes the Theology of the Cross in its second manifestation, that is, we learn from the cross of Jesus Christ that God is present to nonhuman as well as human victims of predation and extinction. God co‐suffers with creatures in their despair, abandonment, physical suffering, and death. What I will add with more force than Southgate is this: the Easter resurrection is a prolepsis of the eschatological new creation, and it is God's new creation which retroactively determines past creation. Although this does not eliminate the theodicy question, it lessens its moral sting.     

RESPONSE WITH A SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

In this response to the articles in this issue, Southgate considers lessons to be learned in respect of science–religion teaching, and about his edited textbook God, Humanity and the Cosmos. He emphasizes the importance of collaborative work in theology. He then considers issues in evolutionary theodicy raised by other contributors, especially eschatology, divine passibility, and the status of the “only way” explanation of evolutionary suffering. Lastly, he engages with critiques of his work based on a preference for characterizing the disvalues of creation in terms of “mysterious fallenness.” The article is followed by a select bibliography of his published work since 1979.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Special Topic:</Emphasis> Confucian and Christian Conceptions of Creativity

In this article the concept of God as creativity (rather than as “the Creator”) is explored. Though creativity is a profound mystery to us humans, it is a plausible concept today because of its interconnectedness with the belief that our cosmos is evolutionary: new orders of reality come into being in the course of time. Three modalities of creativity are explored here: the initial coming into being of the universe (the Big Bang); the creativity manifest in evolutionary processes; the human creation of culture. It is suggested that this creativity itself should be thought of as God: God is creativity. Thus God-talk is given a referent that is specifiable in terms of today’s understandings of the world and the human. God remains a profound mystery here, but one with a significant place in our modern understanding of the world and human life. This article includes text and ideas taken from my book, In the beginning…Creativity (Kaufman 2004).     

THE REVOLUTIONARY VISION OF WILLIAM BLAKE

It was William Blake's insight that the Christian churches, by inverting the Incarnation and the dialectical vision of Paul, have repressed the body, divided God from creation, substituted judgment for grace, and repudiated imagination, compassion, and the original apocalyptic faith of early Christianity. Blake's prophetic poetry thus contributes to the renewal of Christian ethics by a process of subversion and negation of Christian moral, ecclesiastical, and theological traditions, which are recognized precisely as inversions of Jesus, and therefore as instances of the forms of evil that God-in-Christ overcomes through Incarnation, reversing the Fall. Blake's great epic poems, particularly Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20), embody his heterodox representation of the final coincidence of Christ and Satan through which, at last, all things are made new.     

MALEBRANCHE AND LEIBNIZ ON THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

In this article I explore Leibniz's claim in the Theodicy that on the essential points Malebranche's theodicy “reduces to” his own view. This judgment may seem to be warranted given that both thinkers emphasize that evils are justified by the fact that they follow from the simple and uniform laws that govern that world which is worthy of divine creation. However, I argue that Leibniz's theodicy differs in several crucial respects from Malebranche's. I begin with a qualified endorsement of Charles Larmore's recent claim that remarks in Malebranche's correspondence with Leibniz indicate that their theodicies rely on incompatible conceptions of the moral rationality of divine action. I also attempt to go beyond Larmore's discussion in highlighting further differences concerning the sort of freedom involved in the divine act of creation. My conclusion is that these differing conceptions of divine morality and divine freedom reveal that in contrast to the case of Leibniz, Malebranche's theodicy not only does not require that God create anything at all, but also is compatible with the result that the world he decides to create is not uniquely the best possible.     

Jesus as an exemplar of faith in the New Testament

Roman Catholic theologians long denied that Jesus had faith in God, and Jesus having faith in God seems in conflict with traditional claims that Jesus is fully divine (Section II). What the New Testament means by “faith” is explored (Section III), and in light of this we consider arguments from orthodox Incarnation theory to the conclusion that Jesus did not have and could not have had faith in God (Section IV). Relevantly, the New Testament clearly asserts in five ways that Jesus had faith in God (Section V). This exposes problems for traditional Incarnation theories, some of which are addressed by recent “Kenosis” accounts. But these too are problematic (Section VI).     

CHRISTOPHER SOUTHGATE'S COMPOUND THEODICY: PARALLEL SEARCHINGS

Christopher Southgate proposes that a theological response to the suffering that is built into an evolutionary world requires a compound evolutionary theodicy, made up of four interrelated theological positions. This article proposes a fourfold response to the suffering of nonhuman creation that parallels Southgate's compound theodicy. In its similarities and differences, it is offered in the spirit of a tribute to Christopher Southgate.     

EXPLORING OLD AND NEW PATHS IN THEODICY

Christopher Southgate's work raises questions about God, evolution, and suffering. In this article, I begin by contributing an alternative to Southgate's “only way” argument and by offering a third option in speculations about the nature of nonhuman animals in heaven. The second half of the article starts with Southgate's approach of evolutionary theodicy as “an adventure in theology” and proposes a new path branching off his work. “Compassionate theodicy” is a reworking of the method and audience of traditional theodicy in the hope that it might become something that could offer theological resources to those who suffer.     

SOUTHGATE'S COMPOUND ONLY‐WAY EVOLUTIONARY THEODICY: DEEP APPRECIATION AND FURTHER DIRECTIONS

Christopher Southgate offers a remarkable evolutionary theodicy that includes six affirmations and arguments; together they form a unique and very persuasive proposal which he terms a “compound evolutionary theodicy.” Here I summarize the arguments and offer critical reflections on them for further development, with an emphasis on the ambiguity in the goodness of creation; the role of thermodynamics in evolutionary biology; the challenge of horrendous evil in nature; and the theological response to theodicy in terms of eschatology, with its own severe challenge from cosmology.     

DIGITAL THEOLOGY AND A POTENTIAL THEOLOGICAL APPROACH TO A METAPHYSICS OF INFORMATION

In this article, I offer a background to digital theology and its methodology, exploring especially aspects of transhumanism and metaphysical enquiry. The article moves on to engage with several articles given at the Science and Religion Forum at Birmingham in 2022, especially the Gowland Lecture given by Professor Niels Gregersen and the Peacocke Lecture by Andrew Jackson. Both offer a metaphysical approach to information linked closely to the concept of Logos drawn from the Prologue of John—Jackson focusing on Maximus the Confessor's exploration of phylogenetic logoi; Gregersen on a further development of “Deep Incarnation” through the title “God with Clay” drawn from Bonaventure. The article extends this engagement with John by querying the model of incarnation in “deep incarnation” but building on the Logos/logoi to set out some initial building blocks for an alternative metaphysics of information.     

Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240) and Rūmī (1207–1273) on the Question of Evil: Discontinuities in Sufi Metaphysics

This article compares and contrasts Ibn ?Arabī’s and Rūmī’s accounts of evil. Ibn ?Arabī explains the existence of evil as a consequence of both metaphysical necessity and God’s volitional act. Evil is the inevitable ‘shadow’ of existence implied by the Infinity of God, and God’s mercy existentiates the possibilities ‘hidden’ in the Infinite, allowing this metaphysical necessity to emerge. In contrast to Ibn ?Arabī’s necessitarian-cum-volitional theodicy, Rūmī presents an almost exclusively volitional theodicy. He traces the roots of evil to the Divine Will. To preserve God’s moral perfection, he frequently points to the positive compensating functions of the existence of evil in the world. Ibn ?Arabī’s theodicy enables him to accentuate the necessity of evil in order to save the act of will, and hence God’s perfection, from being directly related to the emergence of evil. Rūmī’s volitional theodicy, however, relates the Divine Will directly to evil, and subsequently attempts to preserve the purity of the Divine intention by accentuating all the positive compensations.     

Happy Danes and Deep Incarnation

The new Copenhagen School of Deep Incarnation posits that, in Jesus Christ, God has become incarnate and therefore present “in, with, and under” all physical and biological processes. This claim raises the issue of “compatibilism,” according to which divine action and creaturely action are compatible, and “incompatibilism,” according to which divine action must be absent to allow for free creaturely action. Niels Henrik Gregersen, representing the Copenhagen School, affirms both compatibilism at the quantum level of physical activity and incompatibilism at the level of nature's self‐organization. This article points out the incoherence of this position along with the positions proffered by process theologians and kenotic theologians.     

A Response to Sollereder and Allen

In this brief response to the papers of Sollereder and Allen in this issue, Southgate considers the state of the debate on evolutionary theodicy, and specifically the source of the disvalues in creation. He responds to Allen’s Augustinian suggestions by reference to a recent article on Augustine and theodicy by Stan Rosenberg. He ends by reflecting on the journey in his own thinking in relation to suffering.     

Moving Ahead on Southgate’s Compound Only-Way Evolutionary Theodicy

Southgate offers a remarkable evolutionary theodicy that includes six affirmations and arguments; together they form a unique and very persuasive proposal which he terms a “compound only-way evolutionary theodicy.” Here I summarize the arguments and offer critical reflections on them for further development, with an emphasis on the ambiguity in the goodness of creation; the role of thermodynamics in evolutionary biology; the challenge of horrendous evil in nature; and the theological response to theodicy in terms of eschatology, with its own severe challenge from cosmology. Using a text box, I suggest how the 6 arguments create a unique synthetic whole, and how the removal of any one of them would diminish the argument as a whole. I then suggest how Southgate’s treatment of the key question, “Why not just heaven?” adds a crucial seventh argument to produce an even more splendid and promising whole.     

Malebranche and the General Will of God

Central to Nicolas Malebranche’s theodicy is the distinction between general volitions and particular volitions. One of the fundamental claims of his theodicy is that although God created a world with suffering and evil, God does not will these things by particular volitions, but only by general volitions. Commentators disagree about how to interpret Malebranche’s distinction. According to the ‘general content’ interpretation, the difference between general volitions and particular volitions is a difference in content. General volitions have general laws as their content and particular volitions have particular contents. The ‘particular content’ interpretation holds that all of God’s volitions have particular contents. The difference between general and particular volitions is whether the content of the volition is in accordance with the laws that God has established. A proper interpretation of this distinction is essential to understanding Malebranche’s theodicy, as well as his account of occasionalism and God’s causal activity in the world. In this paper, I defend the ‘particular content’ interpretation of the distinction.