Cynthia Crysdale - Creator God, Evolving World

I dont remember when exactly I met Neil Ormerod. It must have been at one of many conferences on theology or Lonergan or both. What I remember is that I quickly pegged him as someone I needed to talk with as much as possible. Once we began corresponding with each other I took every possible opportunity to pick his brain on whatever I was trying to figure out when I happened to encounter him. Between his scientific knowledge and his thorough grasp of the work of Bernard Lonergan, he was always a few steps ahead of me in putting together cutting-edge ideas.

After a few conversations of this sort over several years, I had occasion to visit Neil in Sydney. My daughter, Carolyn, was in a study-abroad program at the University of New South Wales. While I was visiting her in Sydney, Neil graciously drove me to see the Blue Mountains (which in fact I never sawfog surrounded us the entire time we were there) and he and his wife, Thea, hosted Carolyn and me at their home in Sydney one evening. Neil also invited me to give a lecture at The Australian Catholic University and videocast it to other campuses of the ACU around Australia. After my lecture on the ethics of risk, in which I offered many examples from biology and evolution, he asked me, Why dont we write a book together on these issues? I was of course flattered and also thrilled at the prospect of ongoing robust conversations with Neil. I had never done such co-authoring before but he assured me that we could each write sections, comment on each others work, and then have Skype dates for further conversation.

This is exactly what we have done and we would both agree that it has been an exciting challenge and a fruitful exchange. Early on, Neil indicated that I was not to worry about his ego, and we both got used to lots of tracked changes interrupting and coloring up our drafts. He would correct major and minor points I made, both scientific and philosophical. I in turn pressed him to think more deeply about several of his positions. We added examples to illustrate each others arguments. Neils facility with physics and my longstanding interest in biology meant we each had our teaching moments as well as a wide selection of illustrations to offer one another.

The result of these fruitful interchanges is this current work. We take on big ideas, pushing ourselves to think big thoughts about mostly incomprehensible ideas (like God and the unfolding universe). Incomprehensible does not necessarily mean unintelligible, however, and we have striven to make sense of complex processes and concepts, providing as many examples, illustrations, and stories as possible in order to facilitate insights for readers. However much we have worked to do this and to communicate with clear prose, note that even if you get itwhatever the it is in any given chapteryour brain is likely to hurt when you are done. This wont be because we are intentionally trying to be erudite or obscure but because the ideas themselves involve considering things too big and too vast to comprehend in a single act.

So what is the big idea here? Or, as I often ask my students at the end of a class, Whats the take-home message? One is that the presumed polarity between meaning, purpose, and order on the one hand, and chance, chaos, and contingency on the other, is a misconstrued dilemma. Chapter 2 takes on this false dichotomy by examining two ways science makes sense of the world. Classical science deals with the orderly and regularly occurring phenomena while statistical science asks how often various events occur, yielding probabilities. In fact, chance and order interact as the world unfolds, both contributing to the stable routines and the novel realities that emerge. In essence, even though the theory of evolution introduced the notion of chance into what was assumed to be a fully determined world trajectory, chance is not nonsense. Creationeverything in space and timeis part of a continually unfolding interaction between regularities and probabilities. Creation unfolds according to what Bernard Lonergan calls emergent probability.

A second key idea has to do with how we think about a Creator God. Once we have accepted the role of chance in the unfolding of world process, what do we make of our traditional notions of God as omniscient, omnipotent, and unchangeable? Is God also subject to chance? To the uncertainty of what comes next? In chapter 3 we promote a resounding no to these questions. Instead, we retrieve and endorse the classical theism of the Christian tradition. God is fully transcendent, outside space and time, and yet fully involved as the primary cause of all that is. A few key distinctions here, most notably between primary and secondary causality, and two different ways of understanding the contingency of the world, as well as a clear presentation on the space-time continuum, reveal that the classical conception of a fully transcendent Creator is not only compatible with modern science but indicated by it.