In the biblical view of the word, God is defined before all other definitions as future. Karl Rahner described God as the Absolute Future, and many biblical texts relay the view of a future oriented belief and a focus on eschatology. The entire biblical view of faith is future oriented. Faith is hope for things yet to come.
Rahner argued that we can know of God by attending to the movement of our knowing itself towards its objects. Reflection on this reveals that our thinking always reaches beyond its immediate objects towards a further horizon. Hence, the movement of our knowing, and the ultimate goal towards which it reaches, can be grasped only indirectly (or "transcendentally") as our thinking turns back on itself. Rahner identified the elusive and final "term" of this dynamism with God and contended that the same movement towards God is entailed in freedom and love. (Karl Rahner: A Biography by Robert Masson)
Biblical writings focus upon the future and the Kingdom of God that is to come. God is the future; the past in inconsequential. Scientific thinking focuses too much on the past and it uses the past as a prediction of the present. But, the present was the future of the past. If one focuses too much on the past one will never expect or experience anything truly new. Yet, evolution produces complexity and organisms that did not preexist and would not be expected by materialism. Theistic evolution provides a metaphysics of the future and can express what is real and what may be to come. Materialism by definition can only express what is identified as matter. Matter, of course, can be combined in any number of arrangements to constantly produce diverse arrangements through evolution. But there is no underlying being or reality behind such arrangements. Materialism will only be able to describe what consists of matter; which is lifeless atomic and sub-atomic particles.
But, matter does not equal reality. Reality is matter and life; but, it is also subjective experience, feelings, love, and goodness. Subjective experience such as consciousness can not be fully tied to physical or material processes in the brain. There is a reality that exists not fully explainable by materialism. This reality is what we experience in our everyday life. It is the reality that appreciates beauty in nature, art, and music. It is a reality that is irreducible, difficult to express with words, and is constantly drawing mankind forward.
Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist, described the God of evolution as a god who pulled the world ahead and towards the future in comparison to Aristotles prime mover who guided or pushed the world and life from behind. Teilhard described this God as almost completely Omega and primarily concerned with the future. This is the God that evolution requires and it is a God that is motivated by love. An Omega God would primarily be a pulling force drawing new and complex life towards itself. Not surprisingly, the feature most obvious about macro-evolution and the feature that caught Darwins eye is the emergence of novel life. Without the emergence of new life evolution would not exist. Yet, materialistic evolution can not fully satisfy the reason behind why matter has a tendency to evolve towards complex phenomena such as life, mind, and spirit.
This explanation of God is not provided to fill a gap but as part of a metaphysics that allows all the data of the contingent universe to be evaluated and properly identified. In particular, it is a metaphysics f the future that can quantify and expect emergent phenomena such as novel life. Materialism would be unembarrassed by the absence of complex phenomena such as life, mind, spirit, and consciousness. Instead of a fall from past perfection; we are constantly evolving and becoming a new creation.
Unfortunately, the Western religious mindset has been ineffective at accepting the fact that evolution can produce a perfection that has not already existed. Evolution produces complexity and organisms that did not pre-exist. From a mind-set heavily influenced by Platonic philosophy and a metaphysics of an eternal present, this emergence of new life should not be expected and should not be allowed to invade our present and perfect past. Natural selection ensures that it is generally the fittest that survive but there is no material force that compels the fittest to some times be more complex. Materialism can supply no reason for why life exists at all and thrives in so many environments. Life seems compelled to live, multiply, and at times evolve greater functional complexity over time. An Omega God drawing life towards itself would explain why these facts occur even while the past may at some times appear random.
Neither a materialistic view of life which would require an emphasis on the past to explain the present or Platonic philosophy with its focus on the eternal present, can provide a metaphysics of the future that is required by evolution. Daniel Dennett has argued that all we need to do to explain how evolution happens is to reverse engineer present life and uncover the deterministic laws of nature. But this focus on the past to explain the present precludes any focus on the future. Yet the possibilities and situations that produce the opportunities for evolution arrive from an ever dawning future. It is the future that provides the impetus and it is what accounts for the emergence of novel life. True novelty can not be uncovered by reverse engineering the present and simply following the step by step change of matter over time. It is this intrusion of the future into our presence that allows novelty to arise rather than simply being the outcome of a deterministic past.
As a point of clarification, I do not mean to imply that a more highly involved life form need be more complex. Nor that homo-sapiens are more highly evolved than the bacteria that infect us and can lay claim to the most complex biology. Obviously, we can not. I simply mean to show that evolution can produce complexity and life forms with intelligence but without a metaphysics of the future that should not be expected.
