Prologue: Deep Time Religion

Abstract

The story of evolution and religion is at best a story half told. Conflicts between traditional religion and evolutionary ideas make it appear that the relationship between the two can never be other than adversarial. But this is due to an important oversight as to our place in evolutionary time, at the very beginning of intelligent life. Temporalism is the position that emphasizes this oversight and its consequences. One of the latter is that religion appropriate to our place in time may be possible even if old time religion is defunct. The book is divided into four pairs of chapters exploring this possibility, focused, respectively, on the scientific background, the new form of evolutionary skepticism that this scientific work informs, the unexpected opening for a new form of religion – evolutionary religion – emerging with such skepticism, and the defense of evolutionary religion.