I am proposing to spend a year writing a book-length manuscript entitled "Evolution of God". Having co-founded "The God and Science Project" at the University of Massachusetts – a ten-year initiative comprised of regular small-group faculty conversations and large, auditorium-packed debates – I became aware both of the potentially rich and revelatory relationship between science and theology, as well as a troubling divide between them. Of all the principal scientific disciplines, it was biology that proved most antagonistic to the possibility of God.

I believe that at the heart of this antagonism is the assumption that evolution and belief in a God are incompatible. Among conservative traditions, the seemingly autonomous volitional force of evolution is seen as supplanting the need for God, or of any “creator”. Amongst liberal traditions, evolution and theistic faith are generally presumed to be “compatible”; yet their relationship is rarely rigorously explored beyond the threshold of benign tolerance.

In the course of writing “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design”, I became convicted that the intransigence of these polarized perspectives stems from a common source: their desire to control the truth. For the theists, it is a divine control; for the evolutionists, a mechanistic control. Yet neither side seems capable of accommodating the ambiguity of a God who gave up such control in order to beget “greater life.”

In this book, I would assert far more than that evolution and God are compatible. I would assert that, particularly in the case of a Christocentric God, God depends upon evolution. The crucifixion as the ultimate sacrifice of one man’s “selfish gene” became the way to a God who revealed what it meant to live in the resurrection.