God's Progress.

Mr. Glynn, the associate director of the George Washington University Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies, is the author of God: The Evidence (Prima).

Beside Still Waters: Searching for Meaning in an Age of Doubt, by Gregg Easterbrook (Morrow, 381 pp., $25)

Nineteen-ninety-eight has been a breakthrough year in the science-religion debate. "Science Finds God," Newsweek trumpeted on its cover in July, and thanks to a series of such articles, as well as several new books, the public is learning what many scientists and theologians have long known - namely, that the new physics has yielded a cosmos surprisingly compatible with religious belief.

Gregg Easterbrook has been a significant voice in this new discussion, publishing important articles in Science and The New Republic (where he is a senior editor) on the science-religion question. It is somewhat surprising, then, that the science-religion issue forms only a small part of his focus in Beside Still Waters. Easterbrook's aim here is more ambitious-to tackle the whole epic struggle between faith and reason and offer a comprehensive new solution.

Like many people who wrestle with religious doubt, Easterbrook seems less perturbed by the claims of scientific rationality than by that other great challenge to belief: the problem of evil. How did a good God manage to create what seems, in many ways, a bad world?

Easterbrook finds the orthodox answers unsatisfactory, rejecting the doctrine of original sin as un-Scriptural and the doctrine of free will as insufficient to account for naturally caused suffering and pain. Rather, he believes the solution lies in discarding what he sees as the mistaken Western belief that God is omnipotent, a claim he views as unsupported by Scripture.

To be sure, the various attributes that Christian theologians have traditionally attached to God-All-powerful, All-knowing, etc. -may owe more to logical extrapolation, and to Greek rationalism, than to biblical revelation. But when Easterbrook speculates that God is a Being somehow subject to the physical laws of the universe, that He can therefore travel no faster than the speed of light, that He may frequently be off visiting other inhabited planets, and that that is why He often seems, as it were, AWOL from earth for hundreds of years at a time, one pauses.

It turns out that Easterbrook's God is not only severely constrained by physical laws like the speed of light; He is also learning on the job. The heart of Easterbrook's case is a reading of Scripture inspired partly by "process theology" and partly by Jack Miles's recent bestseller, God: A Biography. Extending Miles's premise, Easterbrook reads the Bible, quite literally, as the story of God's own evolution and growth, a kind of divine Bildungsroman. Only gradually, he argues, did God mature from the petulant, wrathful, jealous God of the Old Testament-who destroys thousands with flood and fire and rejoices in the slaughter of Gentile women and children, and smites sinners dead on the spot-into the loving, nonviolent Deity of the New Testament. God, it seems, is evolving along with us.

Most believers will find this faintly Gnostic notion of God unappealing, not to say downright scary. But the question is not whether such a picture of God is consoling, but whether, so far as we can tell, it is true.

Orthodoxy has long had its own answer to the discrepancy between the violent God of the early Old Testament and the more loving God of the New, a doctrine dating back to the time of the Church Fathers: progressive revelation. That is, God revealed himself only gradually to his initially very primitive chosen people. It is not God who is evolving in the Bible, but the human understanding of God. The God of the earliest books of the Old Testament still has many of the attributes of the pagan deities. By the time of the prophetic books, especially Isaiah, the vision of the divine is more sophisticated-and more in line with what emerges in the New Testament, where God is finally identified with love.

Progressive revelation seems to fit better with the available facts. For one thing, it rests on a less naive and literal-minded reading of these ancient, opaque, and highly figurative texts. (Easterbrook, though often a sharp interpreter, sometimes reads Biblical tales as if they were stories off the AP wire.) For example, in the Old Testament, God is said to relish the aroma of animals burned for sacrifice. In the New Testament, Jesus rejects this practice, creatively misquoting Scripture to say, "I desire compassion and not a sacrifice."

Which seems more likely, that God had a nose for burning flesh and outgrew it? Or that animal sacrifice was a primitive form of worship that God eventually sought to wean humanity away from, when the time was right? To offer an analogy: My wife and I have a tomcat, George, who deposits an eviscerated chipmunk on our doorstep every few weeks, apparently as an offering. While we appreciate the thought, needless to say we do not fold George's hard-earned contribution into the family meal plan. The point: the distance between the cat's comprehension and ours is probably less than the distance between our understanding and God's. The Bible tells us as much.

As to the problem of evil-who knows? Easterbrook concludes this engaging book with an eloquent chapter on the Christian ethic of love and a plea for an end to tribalism, religious sectarianism, and hate. The intellectual solution to the problem of evil remains a mystery, but Scripture offers us a practical solution, and on this Easterbrook and I would probably agree. "Spiritual compassion," he writes, "holds the potential for resolving the world's ills." Indeed. The real "solution" to the problem of evil is love, the central imperative for all of us-orthodox, heterodox, and everybody in between.