Francis Collins, the US government’s genome mapper, whose book The Language of God I reviewed here, has launched BioLogos, to advocate a sort of rebranded theistic evolution:
BioLogos
BioLogos is most similar to Theistic Evolution. Theism is the belief in a God who cares for and interacts with creation. Theism is different than deism, which is the belief in a distant, uninvolved creator who is often little more than the sum total of the laws of physics. (For more on God’s involvement with creation, see Questions 11 and 14 about Miracles and Divine Action.) Theistic Evolution, therefore, is the belief that evolution is how God created life. Because the term evolution is sometimes associated with atheism, a better term for the belief in a God who chose to create the world by way of evolution is BioLogos. (For more about the definition of evolution, see Question 2 on What is Evolution?) BioLogos comes from the Greek words bios (life) and logos (word), referring to the gospel of John:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Just exactly why Collins is doing this, I am not sure. Giving a new name to “theistic evolution” is like putting ballroom slippers on a horse. It won’t help either the slippers or the horse. But I am pretty sure which party will come out ahead.
Why try to rescue theistic evolution? It only ever got started because some people needed a religious belief that squares with the idea that God never intervenes. So you can believe, for all practical purposes, in a God who doesn’t exist. That is the key reason theistic evolution is so commonly associated with atheism.
Whether God in fact intervenes at specific times is, in my view, an open question. It is commonly raised in the Catholic Church around the canonization of saints.
Collins offers a reasonably fair assessment of intelligent design theory, compared to many sources. He seems stuck on the idea that Darwinian evolution can actually create huge amounts of new information, which is obviously untrue, but – in my experience – if people need to believe that, well, …
Of course, Pharyngula calls Collins’s view creationism – but what would you expect?
Update: The odd thing is that I am a theistic evolutionist myself, in the true sense. Tht is, I do not doubt that, in principle, God could cause everything to unfold from the Big Bang. But – he need not have done so and has never been under any obligation to do so. The matter must be determined by evidence, and the typical “theistic evolutionist” or “BioLogist” doesn’t seem much interested in that.