I should have read Rowan Williams a long time ago. His brilliance as a theologian has been mentioned by many, which I can now confirm first-hand. For example, in Tokens of Trust, Williams mentions that William Paley’s (in)famous watchmaker analogy isn’t very helpful, and goes on to say:
The one thing belief in a creator doesn’t say, in Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition, is that God made the world and then stood back and left it lying around, so to speak. Believers in all these religions would say that creation is going on now. There is indeed a beginning point, but it is the beginning of an active relationship that never stops. For God to create is for God to ‘commit’ his action, his life, to sustaining a reality that is different from him, and doing so without interruption. If I might offer an analogy that is as bad in its way as the watchmaker image, think about an electric light burning. The electric current causes the light to shine, but that doesn’t mean that the electric power is something that was around only at the moment you put the switch on, so that the light itself is a rather distant result. On the contrary, the light is shining here and now because the electric current is flowing here and now. In the same way, it is the ‘current’ of divine activity that is here and now making us real.
It should be a rather exhilarating thought that the moment of creation is now – that if, by some unthinkable accident, God’s attention slipped, we wouldn’t be here. It means that within every circumstance, every object, every person, God’s action is going on, a sort of white heat at the centre of everything. It means that each one of us is already in a relationship with God before we’ve ever thought about it. It means that every object or person we encounter is in a relationship with God before they’re in a relationship of any kind with us. And if that doesn’t make us approach the world and other people with reverence and amazement, I don’t know what will.
Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007) 34-5.
As an evolutionist who also happens to be a christian (or in the way to be one) I feel really glad at reading this.
@mountainguy Yes, it is always refreshing to see a theologian who manages to talk profoundly about creation without devolving into creationism.