God After Einstein: What’s Really Going on in the Universe?

Georgetown theology professor Haught (The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin) struggles to reconcile traditional Christianity with some of the most significant scientific discoveries of the past century in this bold if strained treatise. Haught asserts that theology can grapple with “troublesome questions about God and evolution only if it first takes into account the universe that science began unveiling in the early 20th century.” The author posits that the purpose of theology is finding “reasons for hope,” and to that end he finds plenty of them in Einstein’s work. Most centrally, Haught suggests that Einstein’s discoveries about relativity proved the irreversibility of time, a revelation that, for Haught, transforms the cosmos into a narrative building toward “indestructible rightness.” The “there’s a plan we don’t understand” response to theodicy will do little to sway skeptics, and many will find Haught’s dense prose difficult to follow (“a purely archaeonomic reading of nature fails... because it is logically self-subverting”). Thought-provoking but flawed, this works as a counterpart to such similarly themed books as Corey S. Powell’s God in the Equation: How Einstein Transformed Religion. (Apr.)