verse, all the cliffs and abysses that so disturbed the religious pre-
conceptions of Darwin and his contemporaries.

At the same time, however, it is not helpful for theology to talk
about God in vague terms that abstract from the particularities of our
faith traditions and their own ways of understanding ultimate reality.
Religious thinkers can deal with evolution in a meaningful way only if
they do so on the basis of their own experience of the sacred as medi-
ated through the faith communities to which they belong. Otherwise,
their discussions of "God" and evolution will drift so far from actual
religious experience as to be pointless and uninteresting. I shall pro-
pose here that fundamental aspects of biblical tradition, for example,
can initiate us into a way of experiencing and thinking about ultimate
reality that is not only religiously satisfying but also able to illuminate
the evolutionary character of the world. When the idea of divine cre-
ativity is tempered by accounts of God's vulnerability, and when na-
ture itself is viewed as promise rather than simply as design or order,
the evidence of evolutionary biology not only appears consonant with
faith but lends new depth to it as well. A religiously adequate under-
standing of God not only tolerates but also requires the adventurous
extension of cosmic frontiers implied in evolutionary science.

An engagement of theology with evolution will be of benefit not
only to religious consciousness but also to the cause of science,
which has suffered immeasurably because the ideas of one of its
most brilliant thinkers have been taken by a great sector of the
world's population (including many American Christians) to be
completely irreconcilable with an appropriate sense of God. Much
of this distrust, of course, stems from the fact that evolutionary sci-
entists themselves often present Darwinian ideas in an intellectual
guise that makes them appear inexorably irreligious or antitheistic.
And so, when faced with a choice between evolution and God, it is
hardly surprising that many among the religious will turn away from
the Darwinian alternative. It is very much in the interest of science
education itself, therefore, that we examine carefully whether such
an apparently forced option is the only one available.

However, it is not only the misunderstanding of religious experi-
ence by some evolutionists that forces the decision between God and
Darwin. A persisting distaste for evolution stems no less from ques-
tionable theological habits of identifying God with cramped notions
of order and design. I believe that we must look "beyond design" as
a first step in thinking responsibly about God after Darwin. Once

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