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Reconciling the biblical God with Darwin's theories would challenge even an omnipotent being. But a growing number of thinkers and scientists are altering their concept of the deity to make room for evolution.

More than 350 years after the inquisition hounded Galileo over charges of heresy, physicist Howard Van Till, of Calvin College in Michigan, confronted a little inquisition of his own. Van Till roused a small but fervent pack of enemies at the conservative college with his book, "The Fourth Day," in which he argued that the stories of the Bible and science's account of evolution could both be true.

His critics on the school's board of trustees had no interest in reconciling the religious account of creation with a naturalist explanation of how life and the universe have evolved over the ages. For years after the book's release in 1986, Van Till reported to a monthly interrogation where he struggled to reassure college officials that his scientific teachings fit within their creed. Van Till's career survived the ordeal, but his Calvinist faith did not. Over the next two decades, he became the heretic his critics had suspected.

Maybe the inquisitors were right to see contradictions between his science and their religion, he thought. Their beliefs demanded a God of absolute power who intervened constantly in the history of life and in human affairs. But Van Till found that picture increasingly at odds with his conviction that everything from stars to starfish has evolved according to natural laws. The college inquiry, he says now, "shook me awake."

He could have dropped all faith in God, in the long tradition of scientific atheists, whose most recent champion is British biologist Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion."

Instead, Van Till tried to adapt his religious views.

He rejected the idea of God as a supernatural being who took care to design every galaxy and blade of grass. The God he sought couldn't have designed everything at the outset, because the universe that science reveals is always unfolding, always changing. He began to think of God as a silent presence within nature, the source of the nameless awe he felt when studying the genesis of solar systems and the life of our endlessly fertile planet.

"If your faith requires supernaturalism, or a God who wields overpowering control over nature, then yes, evolution will challenge that," says Van Till, who took early retirement from Calvin College in 1999."The key is to correct your portrait of God," he says. It's an audacious suggestion, but transforming the way people think about God has become a vital mission for a wave of scientists and theologians who want to place the natural world at the forefront of religion. They see themselves as spokespersons for an emerging religious majority that has been obscured by the excesses of stubborn creationists and the iconoclastic broadsides of scientific atheists.

Evolution, they contend, is more than a soulless explanation for the development of life. It is a glimpse of a divine plan so subtle it's almost invisible. Some scholars call the idea "theistic evolution," though the term has been slow to catch on. Dr. Francis Collins, the leader of the U.S. government's Human Genome Project and a born-again Christian, prefers to call it "BioLogos," the union of biology with the word of God.

The new theology of evolution can lead to a vision of a more humble God, scarcely recognizable as the almighty of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. To some religious believers, the God of modern science would be as difficult to worship as a Galapagos tortoise.

Such discomfort is unavoidable, says John Haught, a professor of theology at Georgetown University and author of "God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution." He says religious traditions have never absorbed the scope of the scientific story that emerged in the 20th Century through the refinement of evolutionary theory. That story can overturn believers' assumptions, but he believes it also leads to a richer form of faith.

For Haught, evolution means that the chore of creation is going on all around us, all the time. Most important, the process does not follow a preordained path, because God loved the world enough to set it free.

"I think Darwin was a gift to theology," Haught says. "We can't have exactly the same thoughts about God that we did before."

Such a hopeful view of evolution brings scorn from creationists, as well as from the new breed of scientific non-believers. That's because Charles Darwin's legacy typically is seen as a threat to faith, not an opportunity. The emerging theology of evolution is in some ways an effort to salvage religion from the success that Darwin and his scientific heirs have had in toppling ancient assumptions about God's design of the living world.

Put simply, evolution seems to explain much of the design that religions always attributed to God. The displacement of the divine hand has played a central role in many scientists' loss of religiosity, from Darwin to Dawkins.

One of the more colorful scientific de-conversion stories comes from Jerry Coyne, a professor of genetics and evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago. It happened in 1967 when Coyne, then 17, was listening for the first time to the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album while lying on his parents' couch in Alexandria, Va.

Suddenly Coyne began to shake and sweat. For reasons he still doesn't understand, it dawned on him at that moment that there was no God, and he wasn't going anywhere when he died. His casual Judaism seemed to wash away as the album played on. The crisis lasted about 30 minutes, he says, and when it was over, he had left religion behind for good. He went on to study how new species evolve, and found the Darwinian view of nature perfectly in tune with his abandonment of faith.

"Scientists in general tend to be more atheistic, and particularly evolutionists," Coyne says. "That's because we're dealing with a subject that was previously known to be a product of God's intervention, and now we know it's not."

Evolution played an even more central role in torpedoing Dawkins' Anglican faith when he was 15. Dawkins says he had always assumed that the intricacy of living things meant God must have designed them, just as the English philosopher William Paley argued in his 1802 book "Natural Theology."

Then Dawkins began to learn about evolution, and he realized that biology could explain life's apparent design without the need for a deity.

"So finally it was Darwinism that did it for my religious faith," Dawkins said in an interview at Oxford University, where he holds the Charles Simonyi chair for the public understanding of science.

In a curious way, Dawkins and his fellow scientific atheists espouse the same notion of God that drives their sworn enemies, the creationists who oppose teaching evolution in public schools. For both camps, the only God who makes sense is one who designed all life with exquisite attention to detail.

Scientific atheists disavow such a religion; creationists embrace it. But what if both sides started out with the wrong idea of God? What if their pitched battles were the fruit of a shared misconception, one that conceals evolution's potential for new religious insights? The greatest challenge may be for believers to understand evolution as it is, not as they wish it would be. Indeed, many scientists and even theologians believe that Darwin's theory requires throwing out old ideas about divine design.

The union of Darwinian theory with genetics has shown that natural processes on their own can yield organisms and molecular machinery of stunning complexity. Random variation is evolution's fuel, not supernatural ingenuity. Genetic inheritance locks in those random traits that help a creature survive or pass on its genes. Bit by bit, life branches into a million twigs on a vast evolutionary tree. Evolution starts with randomness and, through the constant hoarding of crucial changes, churns out decidedly non-random inventions--the wings of a bat, the microscopic weaponry of a virus, the subtle mind of a human being. Evolution creates exactly what Paley, the English philosopher, claimed would be impossible--"design without a designer, contrivance without a contriver."

The religious response is simple, some believers say: God used evolution to create us. But invoking God's direct guidance raises daunting scientific hurdles. Ever since the publication in 1859 of Darwin's "Origin of Species," religious writers have tried to cram the idea of design back into evolution, often without success.

The Harvard botanist Asa Gray, one of Darwin's earliest American defenders and a devout Presbyterian, suggested that God had guided the raw variation in species "along certain beneficial lines." But scientists have rejected that idea, since there is no evidence that genetic variability or mutations are rigged to achieve certain ends. For example, when bacteria adapt to a new antibiotic or other changes in their environment, it appears the germs don't suddenly start making more beneficial mutations. Studies suggest that such mutations occur truly at random.

The contingency of natural selection also comes through in the work of biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant, of Princeton University, who have chronicled how natural variation drove small-scale evolution among Galapagos finches in the wake of a 1977 drought. Birds with relatively big beaks were better-equipped to survive the drought and left more descendants with big beaks. But there was nothing remarkable or pre-ordained about their beak size; the lucky birds just happened to be in the upper end of the variation that had been there all along.

Some religious thinkers cling to a garbled version of Gray's idea under the banner of intelligent design. Rather than championing Darwin, as Gray did, the intelligent-design movement argues that natural selection could not have produced the complexity of living things. Some intelligent force must have intervened--a force that the movement's mostly Christian backers identify as God.

Intelligent design's shortcomings as science are immense, but its theological problems may be just as profound. The God of intelligent design is a master craftsman who leaves virtually nothing to chance. That's unsatisfying to Cambridge University paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, who says many of his objections to intelligent design stem from his Christian faith. "It's theology for control freaks, with God as an engineer."

The image of God as a micro-managing autocrat leads to some awkward paradoxes. For example, supporters of intelligent design often point to the flagellum, the complex molecular motor that allows bacteria to move, as an example of something that evolution could not have produced. Yet if God designed even the tiny flagellum, why stop there? Intelligent design implies that the creator's blueprint knows no limits. And if God designed every last element of life, that makes him minutely responsible for nature's cruelty and failures as well as its beauty.

"It gives you a God who cared enough to make the motors for bacteria, but wouldn't stop the motors of the planes on 9/11," Van Till says. Despite such apparent flaws, intelligent design and older forms of creationism remain popular. Various polls suggest that most Americans believe humans were created by God in their present form, rather than arising through evolution. That's the God of Lamar Schlabach, 46, a modest Amish woodworker who makes furniture with his brother at their shop in Atwood, Ill. Schlabach says that as he crafts a complex desk or bookshelf set, he sometimes wonders what could have created hands capable of such intricate work. At those times, evolution seems to him an inadequate account.

"When you're working with your hands and it's really going well," Schlabach says, "you just think of all the things that had to come together. All the things that had to work to make this moment happen. And it's so unbelievably unlikely."

God's handiwork stares believers like Schlabach in the face. Yet evolution implies that if God left an imprint on the living world, it's much more subtle than traditional religion would claim.

Darwin often was asked about such issues. His correspondence collection at Cambridge University is stuffed with letters from readers who were desperate for him to resolve the religious problems his theory spawned. He never offered a clear answer, and his own views seemed to veer from agnosticism to a soft deism; he could imagine a creator setting the universe in motion, but he did not feel the presence of a loving God. In an 1860 letter to Asa Gray, Darwin wrote that he could not see "evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us."

At the same time, he wrote, "I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. -- Let each man hope & believe what he can.--"

Darwin couldn't resolve his ambivalence about religion. But Georgetown's Haught thinks he has a better answer to the dilemma that has bedeviled believers for nearly 150 years.

Don't think of God as a meticulous designer of life, Haught urges. A detailed design would have limited the paths that living things could take. Instead, he says, God's love led to a world that's always open to new directions for life, without the need for overpowering divine supervision. The chance-fueled nature of evolution doesn't disprove God's existence, Haught believes. It's what God wanted.

"Love persuades, it doesn't force," Haught says. "God doesn't compel the world to be a certain way, and that's because of how love works. God lets things be, and lets the weeds grow up with the wheat."

The Biblical foundation for Haught's view of evolution goes back to St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, which describes how Jesus "emptied himself" to become human. It's a crucial image, Haught believes. That idea of divine emptying--"kenosis" in Greek--offers a way of understanding all of creation. Instead of a mighty autocrat, it portrays God as a self-humbling servant, content to let the universe evolve and novelty emerge.

"Creation itself is not divine pyrotechnics but the consequence of infinite mystery contracting itself, making itself small, so something other than God can come into the world," Haught says.

Evolution reveals "a universe brimming over with fruitful possibilities," says Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and author of "Finding Darwin's God." That doesn't prove that God exists--far from it. In fact, Haught calls this vision of creation "dynamic and disturbing." But Miller and Haught believe that such a universe is consistent with a God who wanted to set up endless opportunities for life while allowing evolution to find its own way.

This view of a modest God may seem unfamiliar, but it's not new. It's the God that the British poet and artist William Blake had in mind with his 1789 poem, "The Lamb"--"He is meek and he is mild; He became a little child."

An evolutionary view of religion means the same forces that made life change constantly in the past are still at work, leaving our future uncertain. Haught believes such an open future is perfectly compatible with the messages of hope and promise that are central to Christianity.

The subtle divine signature may even be visible within Darwinian evolution, according to Cambridge's Simon Conway Morris, who made his name studying the evolution of species preserved in the 500 million-year-old Burgess Shale.

In "Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe," Conway Morris catalogs piles of instances of "evolutionary convergence," in which different species have hit upon similar designs, sometimes separated by many millions of years. For example, sharks and dolphins evolved nearly identical body plans, and mammals separated by vast oceans developed similar saber-toothed weaponry. All along, Conway Morris sees an evolutionary trend toward greater complexity and the emergence of consciousness in humans and other species such as dolphins and whales.

Convergence doesn't prove the existence of a divine plan or contradict Darwinian evolution, he notes. Many biologists say that convergence is exactly what evolution would predict, with or without God. But it suggests a "deeper fabric to biology," in which not all outcomes are equally likely. God did not create individual species, but might have constrained from the outset the kinds of paths that life could take. "One enters a world which is far more extraordinary," he says.

Of course, that's not exactly how the foes of theistic evolution see things. Many boosters of intelligent design find the self-humbling God of evolution too weak and passive to inspire belief. Somewhat oddly, many scientific atheists feel the same way.

"The only kind of theism that's reconcilable with evolution is one in which everything happened without any supernatural intervention," says Jerry Coyne of the U. of C. "You strip the specialness of human beings out of it, you strip the origin of life out of it, the soul." For Coyne, the only God worth believing in is one whom modern science has rendered implausible.

A theology of evolution risks turning God into an "attenuated deity," says William Dembski, one of the founding architects of intelligent design. Haught "sees God's hands in creation as fundamentally tied," says Dembski, a professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth. Whether evolution can foster a spiritually satisfying picture of God ultimately depends on how ordinary believers receive the new evangelists of theistic evolution. It's a difficult step for someone like Schlabach, the Amish woodworker, but his experience suggests how the gulf between those worlds might be bridged.

Schlabach's formal education ended after the 8th grade, but he and his brother Ron have remained voracious readers. Often in the middle of a day's work at the Village Craftsman, their shop in Atwood, one of the brothers will cross sleepy Main Street to peruse classic books and newspapers in the town library. After reading Kenneth Miller's "Finding Darwin's God," Lamar Schlabach struck up a correspondence with the author. He sent a seven-page, handwritten letter to the Brown University professor, who is a practicing Roman Catholic.

"For the first time I feel able to dimly perceive (through a glass darkly) how a Creator might have brought this world into existence," Schlabach wrote. "I've always felt the account of our origins in the book of Genesis [was] intended for an audience much less sophisticated than the generations alive today."

"I hate to quibble," Schlabach went on, "but I do think that God's involvement in his creation . . . is more extensive than you have implied." Schlabach described some complex adaptations that he could not see emerging without a designer, such as the migratory patterns of birds that follow the same routes over the open ocean for generations.

"Can this system operate in a mindless, mechanistic fashion?" Schlabach wrote. To Schlabach's pleasant shock, Miller sent a typewritten reply that attempted to address his questions.

"Remember that God, if he exists, is the author of all things natural," Miller wrote. "The 'mechanistic' material world, therefore, is entirely His work and His creation. The 'mindlessness' of that world, therefore, is more apparent than real."

The exchange did not make a full convert of Schlabach, though he treasures Miller's reply. More than anything, he says, he was relieved to find a biologist who could talk about faith with genuine interest and respect. It was a welcome switch from scientists such as Dawkins, who in a September book review described the Bible Belt as "the reptilian brain of southern and middle America."

Many such believers would, of course, find a theology of evolution difficult to accept, but it may be an even harder sell among scientists. Ursula Goodenough, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, says she considers herself a "religious naturalist," yet her beliefs don't include God. Instead, she visits churches in an effort to excite believers about the awe-inspiring, 13.7 billion-year story of the universe and the evolutionary epic that binds humanity together, along with the rest of life on Earth. She said she draws inspiration from Thomas Berry, a 93-year-old Catholic priest and scholar, who has argued that the new story of cosmology and evolution is as important for people of faith as the stories in the Bible.

"You start with the scientific story and see what you can do with it religiously," says Goodenough, author of "The Sacred Depths of Nature." "The one rule is that you don't get to cherry-pick and fool around with these scientific understandings of nature, so that things turn out the way you want." Dawkins says he considers Goodenough an ally in his crusade for scientific atheism, but Goodenough says that's not quite accurate. "There's one really important difference between us," she says. "Traditional religions give him a stomachache, and they don't give me a stomachache. I don't have any urge to go around pointing out their problems."

Goodenough's mission has more in common with that of Francis Collins, leader of the genome project, though she does not share his evangelical Christian beliefs. Collins says he hopes to correct the defensive crouch that many churches have taken against modern science, as if fearing that each new finding had the potential to challenge old beliefs.

"My dream is to bring together open-minded, deep-thinking scientists and theologians to try to construct a new theology of how the universe is put together and how God works within that universe," Collins says. "It should be a celebration theology instead of a defensive theology." That's a job for the long haul, one that Dawkins and his allies have no desire to assist. Yet even Dawkins can relate to the foundation of wonder that fuels the faith of many believers. In fact, he thinks science provides the best channel for that spiritual impulse.

His book tearing apart the case for religion has sold more than one million copies in the last year, but Dawkins still looks at home in the role of rumpled professor. He rides around Oxford on a simple blue bicycle with a wicker basket on the handlebars, and he hasn't quite mastered his iPhone. He relishes mocking religion, but he believes atheists must keep a sense of awe about the universe and this world of life.

"It's . . . like a great piece of music," he says, choosing his words even more carefully than usual. "It's like a piece of Schubert or Mozart. It's lying on your back looking up at the Milky Way, thinking about the distances involved . . . the fact that every star you look at you're seeing at a different time separated by millions of years. And it's the millions of years that you're looking at when you look at the rocks."

"It's the staggering fact that we exist," he says, "that we have evolved to such a pitch that we're capable of consciously reflecting on our own existence. All of those things are capable of giving me a catch in the throat."

He pauses, and it is clear that this is a different Dawkins than many people see, someone who understands very well the tug of religion and the reason believers seek a world beyond themselves. But lest he leave the wrong impression, the man who has been called "a devil's chaplain" furrows his brow and finishes his thought about the wonders he had just described.

"They are made more wonderful, actually," he says, "by the thought that they are explicable by rational, step-by-step stages, and that they don't evade the issue by postulating as an explanation something that demands a bigger explanation." That impermissible "something" is God, Dawkins says, but not just any God. He gives a pass to big thinkers like Albert Einstein, who famously insisted that "God does not play dice with the universe," and Stephen Hawking, who pondered the ability of physicists to "know the mind of God." They were talking about an impersonal God embodied in the intangible laws of physics, Dawkins believes. What he can't accept is an "interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering" God--the God that Dawkins believes is central to most religions.

That all depends on the religion in question--and the believer. Most forms of Buddhism do not envision a personal God in the same way that Christianity seems to require. The late Abdus Salam, the first Muslim recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979, was deeply religious, and cited the Quran to support what he called "the faith of all physicists; the deeper we seek, the more is our wonder excited, the more is the dazzlement of our gaze."

But the notion of divine intervention in our world can be a problem for the apostles of theistic evolution. Kenneth Miller of Brown has suggested that God might nudge events in the natural world through imperceptible changes at the quantum level. Other believers, like Francis Collins, say that old-fashioned miracles are perfectly consistent with a scientific worldview because science is concerned only with natural processes, not God's supernatural action. Collins says his standard of evidence for believing in a miracle is high, but he doesn't dismiss them out of hand.

"For me, as a believer who sees God as the author of natural laws, why would it be such a stretch to imagine that such a being could, on rare occasions, suspend those laws?" Collins says.

Yet perhaps that doesn't go far enough, if Howard Van Till is right and modern science truly can transform how believers think about God. Would a God humble enough to let life take its own course need to intervene magically in our lives? Ever since his peculiar inquisition at Calvin College, Van Till has drifted away from belief in a God with such coercive power over nature. His faith in official Calvinist doctrines slowly melted. He retired to a town near the shores of Lake Michigan and joined a progressive Christian church where one sermon last year was titled, "How Science and Religion Enhance Each Other." The sermon sought ways of keeping the best of religion while leaving behind "those preposterous gods" that contradict the findings of science.

"I don't know nearly as much as I used to," Van Till says. "But I'm happier than ever."

He says he's become content to rest in a state of deep incomprehension and doubt about the nature of God. In some ways he's an agnostic, though he treasures the traditions he learned as a child. What keeps him from dropping his belief is an overpowering feeling that something he can't define has made this dazzling world possible, a limitless source of order and creation. For that, he feels he still must use the name of God, even if he no longer knows what it means.

Jeremy Manier covers science and medicine for the Tribune.
jmanier@tribune.com