Christ in Evolution

Have taken up Ilia Delio's Christ in Evolution.  This book was prior to her The Emergent Christ which I completed a few weeks ago.  Here are a few of the many things that have jumped out at me so far. 

The mechanistic view of the world associated with Newtonian physics has been replaced with a dynamic, open ended view of the world in which some events are in principle unpredictable. At the infinitesimal level of the atom and its subatomic particles, quantum mechanics has uncovered a realm where time, space, and matter itself behave according to laws whose very functioning have uncertainty built into them. Quantum physics has given us a new view of matter today as not only indeterminate but also as relational.The universe seems to be inherently relational.*

*Ian Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (London:  SCM Press 1997)

John Polkinghorne, who notes that “both chance and necessity are indispensable partners in the fruitful history of the universe.” “The role of chance does not turn evolution into a cosmic lottery,” he states, “but is the way the physical world explores and realizes its potential.”**

** John Polkinghorne, Science and Theology, (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press 1998).

In the light of this, what she says earlier in the book about Christ makes a lot of sense to me.  The universe is evolving according to a plan and

Christ is the “design” of the universe because the universe is modeled on Christ, the divine Word of God; the universe is Christologically structured. Because the universe has a “plan,” we can speak of the evolution of this plan as the unfolding of Christ in the universe, who is “the mystery hidden from the beginning” (Eph 3:9).