Can Christians Believe in Evolution? Theistic Evolution . www.swordify.com.ng

All of us are familiar with the term evolution.
When I was a science major at the university, every subject that I
studied — biology, botany, ecology, microbiology — was taught from
the point of view of evolution. In this case, evolution is the
“theory that all life originated from nonliving material and has
developed according to natural selection and speciation as random
mutations effect changes without purpose or design over billions of
years” (Baker Compact Dictionary of Theological
Terms^[1], 76).

Think of elements like oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon
coming together to form nonliving substances like air, water, and
metals, as well as living beings like wood, grass, insects, birds,
elephants, and human beings. At an imperceptible level, changes
accidentally occurred — random mutations in DNA — that favored the
survival of those things with slight innovations. As those distinct
kinds — species — of plants and animals developed with survival
advantages, they eventually produced all the diversity of nonliving
and living things that now exist. Importantly, this entire process
was undirected and purposeless, without God.

What Is Theistic Evolution?

Theistic evolution is a subset of evolution with, minimally, two
versions. According to one version, theistic evolution is defined
as “the theory that all life has developed according to
evolutionary processes into which God has at times intervened to
accomplish his purpose. It affirms both divine action (‘theistic’)
and evolution” (Baker Compact Dictionary of Theological
Terms^[2], 77). According to this
version, the most significant difference between evolution and
theistic evolution is that the former denies any role for God in
the developmental processes that produced all nonliving and living
things that exist today, while the latter holds to some role for
God in those processes.

To take one example, theistic evolution is “the view that God
created matter and after that did not guide or intervene to cause
any empirically detectable change in the natural behavior of matter
until all living things had evolved by purely natural processes”
(Theistic Evolution^[3], 946). Thus, after God’s
initial creative act to bring into existence a world apart from
himself, he did not play an ongoing role in the evolutionary
processes that he had put into effect.

According to a second version, represented by the organization
BioLogos, theistic evolution is defined as the view that “God
creates all living things through Christ, including human beings in
his image, making use of intentionally designed, actively sustained
natural processes that scientists today study as evolution”
(“A Flawed
Mirror^[4]”). Thus, God not only
acted initially to create the world but continues an active
involvement throughout the development of all that exists. He
oversees the evolutionary processes like natural selection,
speciation, and random mutations to ensure that they engender both
nonliving and living beings in accordance with the divine
design.

Does either version of theistic evolution fit with Scripture? To
answer, we need to look at church history and historical Christian
doctrine.

Evolution Meets the Church

For most of its history, the church has believed that God
created everything that exists ex nihilo (out of
nothing). The church affirmed this doctrine based primarily on the
opening verse of Scripture: “In the beginning, God created the
heavens and the earth” (Genesis
1:1^[5]). God, who eternally
exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, purposed to and did create
a universe distinct from himself.

Other passages add to the foundation of this belief. For
example, the psalmist attributes creation to the word and breath of
God: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the
breath of his mouth all their host. . . . For he spoke, and it came
to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Psalm
33:6^[6], 9). According to a
traditional understanding of this passage, God the Father spoke the
universe into existence through the Word (God the Son) and by his
Breath (God the Holy Spirit). Creation was a mighty act of the
triune God.

Furthermore, Scripture itself denies that God used preexisting
materials when he created: “By faith we understand that the
universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was
not made out of things that are visible” (Hebrews
11:3^[7]). For example, God did
not take two preexisting hydrogen (H) atoms and one oxygen (O) atom
and fuse them into water (H2O). Rather, he created both hydrogen
and oxygen atoms as well as the water. Divine creation was out of
nothing!

In accordance with the rest of the creation account in Genesis
1, the church also has believed that God created every kind of
thing that exists: light, water, air, soil, vegetation, the sun and
the moon and the stars, sea creatures, winged birds, earth
creatures, and, ultimately, human beings in the divine image.

Importantly, the church never countenanced the idea that all
nonliving and living things came into existence and developed
according to processes like natural selection, speciation, and
random mutations. Indeed, the early church soundly denounced the
“atomic” theory that everything that exists started out by the
accidental collision of small elements (“atoms”) and then
fortuitously developed by chance. Rather than embrace randomness,
the church praised the Creator, as Origen did: “We Christians,
however, who are devoted to the worship of the only God, who
created these things, feel grateful for them to him who made them”
(Against Celsus^[8], 4.75).

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the church, faced
with many attacks against the authority and truthfulness of
Scripture, began to waver on its doctrine of creation. With the
publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of
Species (1859), a new and all-encompassing worldview
arose that denied creation ex nihilo, divine design
and development of the many kinds of nonliving and living things,
and the special creation of human beings in the divine image. This
evolutionary worldview now dominates most sectors of our
contemporary Western society. Tragically, it presents one of the
fiercest challenges to biblical and historical Christianity
today.

Creation by Natural Selection?

Put simply, the church has always affirmed the doctrine of
creation as presented above. One of its earliest statements of
faith — the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (AD 381) — affirmed,
“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of
heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” In
a later theological development, Thomas Aquinas “rejected the idea
that the creation itself possesses the ability to create or develop
other living realities.” He reasoned that only God, “as absolute
being, possesses the power of creating, which is impossible for
created things. His position stands against theistic evolution
views that attribute creative power to matter and its development
by purely natural processes” (Theistic Evolution^[9], 935–936). Similarly,
Protestant theology continued to affirm the traditional doctrine of
creation.

Accordingly, Christians who embrace theistic evolution, in
addition to being at odds with the biblical account of creation,
place themselves outside of the historical position of the church.
While believing that God created matter, they fall short of
affirming that God created not only nonliving matter but all
visible things (for example, oak trees and horses) and invisible
things (for example, the angels). “God’s creation, therefore, was
not a creation of generic material but of specific kinds and
varieties of creatures” (Theistic Evolution^[10], 946).

Applying this discussion to the second version of theistic
evolution, the theistic evolutionists of BioLogos — or
“evolutionary creationists,” as they prefer — affirm the axiom of
common ancestry. To take an example of human beings and chimpanzees
(our closest relatives), common ancestry means that if we go back
about 300,000 generations, we will find an “ancient population
(which was neither human nor chimpanzee) [that] split into two
groups, and these groups were reproductively isolated. . . .
Eventually the characteristics of each group were different enough
for scientists to recognize them as different species.” Importantly
for evolutionary creationists, “a similar story could be told for
the ancestral lineage of any two species that ever lived” (“What
Is Evolution?”).^[11]

This vision of the origin and development of species in general,
and human beings in particular, conflicts with the biblical
account, even when infused with an appeal to divine direction and
purpose. Evolutionary creationists deny the Genesis 1 account
of God’s specific and immediate (not mediated by natural processes)
creation of fish, birds, land animals, and finally human beings,
choosing instead to say that God created each of these living
beings through natural mechanisms over long periods of time.
Implicit in their position is also a denial of the biblical account
of the fall, since such an evolutionary process has no room for a
historical Adam and Eve.

For these reasons (and others^[12]), the church should
stand firm in its enduring reading of Scripture’s account of divine
creation and remain faithful to its historical position, praising
God the Creator for his purposeful creation ex
nihilo and of every specific kind of both nonliving and
living things.