text: I recall reading Baum's "Man Becoming" many years after he'd published it and thinking that, finally, I had found someone for whom the starting point of theology was reality, not concepts. While the Transcendental Thomists were fretting about "the question about the question," Baum began with what exists and reasoned his way forward.
  I thought it was only a matter of time before someone did the same for theology and science -- that is, begin, not with revelation, but with the fact that, whatever else we are, we're creatures of this planet, formed from the stardust that brought the cosmos into existence. Our bodies, our minds, have evolved from the decay of countless other beings, taking one shape now, another then, until our DNA took its present form. God-talk gives us, not certainty, but perspective: a vantage point from which to see our world and ourselves as part of a process both limited and transcendent. Religious language tells us we're becoming something new and Godlike, if....