Evolution as an Unwrapping of the Gift of Freedom

Abstract

Extending the approach to a ‘theology of science’ developed in Faith and Wisdom in Science (McLeish 2014), I expand its theme of the tension between chaos and emergent order, within the arc of the Biblical story of creation, towards a theol-ogy of evolutionary science. In addition to the material in Job, the book of Wisdomprovides a remarkable account of transmutation of species, within a recapitulation of the Exodus theme, that I reconsider as a background historical narrative to an inter-pretation of modern genotype-phenotype theory of evolutionary dynamics, exploiting analogies with statistical mechanics. The dual and connected structures of microscopic and macroscopic provide a contemporary locus for the Joban tensions of chaos and emergent order, and provide an interpretative narrative for the emergent directionality of evolution, and a theology that situates within a creation of freedom to explore the potential of the created order.