This text lays out three distinct ways in which people who have been exposed to science are now responding to the following questions: “Does science rule out a personal God?” and “Is faith compatible with evolution?” The first kind of response claims that the natural sciences and religious faith are mutually exclusive. This is the conflict position. Its representatives include two main subgroups: (1) skeptics who believe that the natural sciences have made all religious claims unbelievable, and (2) people of faith who refuse to accept certain scientific ideas such as Big Bang cosmology and biological evolution. However, in the present text conflict refers only to scientific skeptics, those who claim that scientific method and discoveries now make religious faith and theology obsolete.A second type of response to the questions listed claims that science and faith are each concerned with different levels or dimensions of reality. Science and theology, according to this approach, ask completely different kinds of questions, and so it makes no sense to place them in competition with each other. The contrast approach, as we call it, maintains that there can be no real conflict between the claims of natural science and those of faith and theology. Contrast insists that faith and science are not competing for some common goal, so they cannot come into conflict with each other.A third approach is that of convergence. It might also be called “consonance,” “cooperation,” “contact,” or “conversation.” Convergence agrees with the contrast approach that religious faith and natural science are distinct ways of understanding the world, but it argues that the two inevitably interact. Convergence promotes this interaction. Its objective is to arrive at a synthesis in which both science and faith keep their respective identities while still relating closely to each other in a shared pursuit of intelligibility and truth. Convergence assumes that scientific discoveries matter to faith. In other words, scientific findings can make a significant difference in how we think about God and the meaning of our lives. Convergence wagers that science and faith, as long as they are not confused with each other, can together continue to a richer view of reality than either can achieve on its own.

W artykule przedstawiona została próba wskazania płaszczyzny dyskusji ewolucjonistów z kreacjonistami, która umożliwiałaby dialog zwiększający szansę wypracowania spójnego światopoglądu łączącego elementy wiedzy naukowej i wiary religijnej. W odniesieniu do różnych typów wiedzy zaproponowane zostało wyróżnienie trzech poziomów: 1) przedmiot badań, 2) wiedza o tym przedmiocie, 3) interpretacja tej wiedzy. Dialog może być prowadzony już na poziomie drugim, lecz z poszanowaniem wzajemnej autonomii i ukierunkowaniem raczej na inspirację, niż na integrację. Właściwą płaszczyzną dialogu jest poziom trzeci: interpretacja wiedzy oraz budowanie wizji świata i człowieka. Celem dialogu na tym poziomie jest integracja wszystkich elementów światopoglądu i dążenie do wyjaśnienia i zrozumienia całej rzeczywistości.

One of the contemporary world-view disputes is the conflict between materialistic evolutionists and proponents of the intelligent design. Importantly, both sides of the dispute claim that their positions fall within the area of natural sciences. Discussions have been going on for over a hundred years, but there is no chance that they will end and that there will be some consensus. The source of this state of affairs seems to lie in the fact that this dispute is taking place on a philosophical level.In the article, I give arguments that both materialistic evolutionism and the concept of intelligent design are not scientific theories. I also compare the concepts of evolution and creation and show that the concept of creation is not a scientific concept. Creation is an act of the Creator who is not a space-time being. Therefore, his activities cannot be studied by methods appropriate to natural sciences.

The aim of the paper is to seek such an interpretation of the presence and activity of God in nature that could harmonize important truths of faith with scientific understanding of the world, governed in its evolution by chance and devoid of any direction. The search is taken in a few steps. Firstly, classic accounts of teleology are indicated, with the conclusion that the only way of the understanding an idea that the world is purposeful is that in terms of inner teleology: the world is directed not so much by God but towards God.Contemporary discussions about the possibility of God’s aims being realized in nature often concentrate on the notion of general or special divine action. Drawing on some accounts of GDA and SDA the paper supports the view that strict delimitation of what is natural and what divine in a given case is probably impossible.One of the reasons of this impossibility is captured by the principle of the causal closure of the world. With relation to this principle, a need to revise some classic accounts of the miraculous is pointed to. Particularly, “the miracle of the human” does not need any special divine interventions, any special guidance of the evolutionary processes (which are, in any case, truly random), if one accepts a hypothesis of the underdetermination of the goal of creation: If God’s aim is that a special being emerges in nature, able to maintain a conscious relation with its Creator, then such a being (called Human in theology) does not need to be a representative of the species Homo sapiens.Finally, panentheism is pointed to as a truly Christian view of the world; the world which is “fate and destiny” of God himself (Karl Rahner). In such a perspective, the details of the evolutionary development of the world cease to be relevant for religion, and religion frees itself finally from “error and superstition” (John Paul II).