The opening passages of Genesis describe God creating life in abundance. Life on this planet is so abundant that of the estimated 8.7 million species the vast majority have not even been identified. Cataloging them all could take more than a thousand years! How did such diverse life come about?
There are many important points to draw from the Genesis creation stories: the distinction between Creator and creation, God's sovereignty and power, God's intent for a relationship with humanity, the goodness of creation, and humanity's role as caretakers. Christians can agree on these points.
And if we find ourselves discussing or even debating this topic, we need to be humble, and not, as Augustine says, rush headlong, and so firmly take our stand on a particular side. Progress in science or theology may eventually undermine our position, and discredit our belief.
In 1889, Charles Darwin introduced the concept of evolution through his book, On the Origin of Species. Evolutionary biology, built upon this foundation, asserts that species gradually evolve from one another over millions of years, forming a connected tree of life. This idea challenged the earlier belief that species were independently created and unchanging.
Before we wrestle with how evolutionary biology sits with the Christian faith, it’s important that we understand what it is, and what evidence there is to back it up.
Evolution doesn't attempt to explain the origin of the very first life cell. It focuses on how all life emerged from a common ancestral life form.
Evolution encompasses changes in a population's genetic makeup and traits over time. There are two scales of it: macroevolution, which involves long-term changes leading to new species and groups, and microevolution, which involves small-scale changes in a few genes over shorter periods.
In a nutshell, evolution relies on variation and reproductive success. Organisms exhibit a range of traits, with those best suited to their environment having higher survival rates and more offspring. Consider bears. If a population of bears has a range of fur colour, the bears with the whiter fur will be better able to survive in a snowy climate and produce more offspring. Those with brown fur will be better able to survive in a forest area. This leads to separate species – polar bears and grizzly bears. That’s the theory.
The word “theory” may give the impression that there are reservations with the science of evolution. But no amount of evidence turns a scientific theory into a fact. In science, “theory” means “the best explanation of available evidence.” The theory of evolution is considered to be the best explanation because it’s supported by multiple lines of evidence across a range of scientific disciplines.
When we examine today's animals, we discover remarkable anatomical similarities between species. For example, the skeletons of four-limbed creatures. While there are variations, the basic body plan remains consistent, with bones arranged in a similar pattern. Skeletons don’t have to be this way for animals to function – in fact, they result in some inefficiencies, like humans with back or knee trouble. But this is the sort of pattern we would expect if the body plans of four-limbed creatures changed slowly and diversified over many generations.
We also find traits in modern animals similar to those of other animals but with no apparent function – redundant features that are a legacy from our ancestors. Examples include hip bones in whales and leg bones hidden in some snakes' muscles. Even humans have vestigial features like the appendix, wisdom teeth, and goosebumps. These seem to connect today's organisms to ancestors with distinct characteristics.
If evolution is correct, we'd expect evidence in the fossil record. Critics claim no "intermediate" fossils exist, but that's not true. While fossils can't prove one species evolved from another, a succession of fossils with slight changes over time strongly suggests evolution.
As an example, the fossil record shows whales evolving from land mammals. The oldest known whales, like Pakicetus from around 49 million years ago, looked like land-dwelling mammals but had ears similar to those of modern whales, suggesting adaptations for hearing underwater. Species like Maiacetus and Rodhocetus appear later on with feet and spines adapted for more specialised swimming. By 40 million years ago, whales like Dorudon and Basilosaurus were fully aquatic animals with rudimentary hind limbs that could no longer support the body on land.
As noted, although these records do not prove evolution, they provide a very strong line of evidence supporting the theory.
Genes are made from a long molecule called DNA, which is copied and inherited across generations. The language of DNA is called genetic code, which lets organisms read the information in the genes.
Basically, it’s through genes that living organisms inherit features or traits from their ancestors. Genes carry instructions for an organism's construction and function, influencing both visible traits, like eye colour, and hidden ones, like disease resistance.
Genetics provides a very effective way of tracing ancestry. Imagine you’re at a family reunion. Geneticists could take a DNA sample from everyone there and use those DNA samples to completely reconstruct the family tree without any additional information. In the same way, scientists are using DNA to reconstruct the tree of common ancestry of all plants and animals.
When scientists use DNA to reconstruct the tree of common ancestry, they arrive at the same tree that they derived independently from the fossil evidence.
The genetic evidence for evolution is significant. It’s so compelling that Christian geneticist Francis Collins once said, “If we never find another fossil or vestigial trait, genetic evidence puts common ancestry beyond reasonable doubt.”
The evidence for the theory of evolution is undeniable. It may be hard to come to terms with it.
I grew up believing that God created plants and creatures independently, so when I first started to explore the evidence for evolution, it shook me up and challenged my faith.
It wasn’t how I was used to thinking about God creating.
I began researching the implications of evolution for my Christian faith and discovered that there are basically four different ways of thinking about how God might have created life.
One option is to reject the theory of evolution entirely, believing that it conflicts with the Bible. Young Earth Creationism effectively reads the creation accounts in Genesis in a very literal way: God created in a literal six days, and this happened no more than 10,000 years ago.
Young Earth Creationism is a very recent movement. It was strongly advocated in the 1920s by an Adventist called Martin Price, but it wasn’t until the early 1960s that others took to the view and popularised it in a book called The Genesis Flood.
Two years later, The Creation Research Society was formed to promote this view. Within a decade or so, Young Earth Creationism became a popular position.
Not all Creationists interpret the genealogies as a literal account for the age of the earth. Some accept the scientific consensus of a 13.8 billion-year-old universe and a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth. Old Earth Creationism accepts these ages but rejects evolution.
Most Christians in the 1920s who considered themselves to be fundamentalists didn’t interpret the Bible in the Young Earth way. They had two other interpretations. One suggested that the days of Genesis were long geological ages rather than 24 hour cycles. Another group said that after creation an indeterminate period of time passed before the six-day creation in Eden, and that gap accounts for all the geological and fossil evidence that would suggest the earth is old.
Intelligent design is another form of Creationism, and gained traction in the 1980s. The idea is that there are things in our world that are so intricate that they couldn’t possibly be the product of random selection. It also attempts to account for the origin of the first living cell, which is not yet well explained by any scientific theory.
For a cell to exist, there need to be proteins, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, DNA, RNA and lipids – a whole variety of chemicals in the same place at the same time. We don’t know how, in the very beginning, these complex ingredients all came together into a tiny membrane-bound cell. Intelligent Design suggests that it was by God’s direct design.
The view also postulates that there are particular biological components, like the human eye, that are irreducibly complex – needing to be fully functional from the outset, not evolved.
Intelligent Design may offer an attractive and somewhat compelling perspective on creation, but it’s not without its problems. In the case of the eye, for example, we know of various creatures that have proto-eyes, which discredits the notion that a component like the eye couldn’t evolve.
Another issue with the Intelligent Design approach is that it puts God into the areas where there are gaps in scientific knowledge.
Science often eventually closes those gaps with good theory, which end up discrediting Intelligent Design. And when you think about it, it doesn’t make a great deal of theological sense either. It implies that God wasn’t quite getting it right at the beginning, so had to keep stepping in and helping the process along.
The idea of life evolving through an unguided process has caused great difficulty for some Christians, and it’s a major reason why views like Young Earth Creationism, Old Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design firmly reject the theory. Still, there are many Christians who are open to the possibility that God created in this way.
Some scientists have recently begun to argue that evolution is not as unguided as we had previously thought. Simon Conway Morris, Professor at Cambridge University, suggests that nature is actually hard-wired to evolve in a particular way to generate particular features in living things. This is evident in different lineages independently evolving similar traits, like the eye, which has emerged independently at least seven times.
The idea that God created a universe with such a deep order that it would enable life to evolve in a particular way is pretty impressive. I find this far more profound than the idea of God creating each living thing independently.
A universe that has at its heart an order and elegance that enables life to find a way by being adaptive to environmental stress – one that enables life to fit and work with the conditions of the environment – is far more elegant and effective than a universe that requires each life form to be a one-off creation suited to its initial environment.
For many Christians, this makes a great deal of theological sense too. The drama of life’s evolution corresponds with the self-giving love and promises of a God who calls not only us, but all of nature, to co-create with him.
Professor John Haught, American theologian, puts it well:
If God were a dictator or enforcer, we might expect the universe to be perfectly designed all at once in an initial moment of creative magic. And we might expect this perfectly designed world to remain essentially unchanged… Yet what a pallid world that would be compared to the one we have… The often tumultuous drama of faith in Earth, along with all the wild wonderings of life at large, corresponds well with the Abrahamic understanding of an adventurous and loving God who makes all things new.
Haught says that he finds it hard to reconcile his belief in a God of infinite love and promise with any other kind of universe than the one implied by Darwin’s vision of life evolving.
The four positions summarise the main ways Christians think about how God created life. Young Earth Creationism, Old Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design say that Scripture conflicts with evolutionary theory. But is this really the case?
To figure that out, we have to delve deeply into the exercise of Biblical interpretation and ask questions. What is the meaning of a verse? What was the intention of the author? Does this read like history or as something that is more mythical and poetic?
We won’t get into all of that now other than to acknowledge that, ultimately, any conflict with science revolves around the practice of reading Genesis as a literal account. This literal approach is actually relatively new. Many influential theologians throughout history did not perceive it as the necessary interpretation.
“What man of intelligence,” early theologian Origen asks, “will consider that the first and second and third day, in which there are said to be both morning and evening, existed without sun and moon and stars... I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions.”
Even Saint Augustine, writing over sixteen centuries ago, cautioned against rigid interpretations of Genesis. He wrote extensively on the topic, but ultimately believed that the exact meaning of these verses remains uncertain. He warned against clinging to interpretations that could become indefensible with new discoveries.
Writing about Genesis, he says:
In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush headlong, and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.
That’s what defines the Christian faith.
Check out other articles in the
series below.
More articles in the
series are to come.
We have invited these writers to share their experiences, ideas and opinions in the hope that these will provoke thought, challenge you to go deeper and inspire you to put your faith into action. These articles should not be taken as the official view of the Nelson Diocese on any particular matter.
The opening passages of Genesis describe God creating life in abundance. Life on this planet is so abundant that of the estimated 8.7 million species the vast majority have not even been identified. Cataloging them all could take more than a thousand years! How did such diverse life come about?
There are many important points to draw from the Genesis creation stories: the distinction between Creator and creation, God's sovereignty and power, God's intent for a relationship with humanity, the goodness of creation, and humanity's role as caretakers. Christians can agree on these points.
And if we find ourselves discussing or even debating this topic, we need to be humble, and not, as Augustine says, rush headlong, and so firmly take our stand on a particular side. Progress in science or theology may eventually undermine our position, and discredit our belief.
In 1889, Charles Darwin introduced the concept of evolution through his book, On the Origin of Species. Evolutionary biology, built upon this foundation, asserts that species gradually evolve from one another over millions of years, forming a connected tree of life. This idea challenged the earlier belief that species were independently created and unchanging.
Before we wrestle with how evolutionary biology sits with the Christian faith, it’s important that we understand what it is, and what evidence there is to back it up.
Evolution doesn't attempt to explain the origin of the very first life cell. It focuses on how all life emerged from a common ancestral life form.
Evolution encompasses changes in a population's genetic makeup and traits over time. There are two scales of it: macroevolution, which involves long-term changes leading to new species and groups, and microevolution, which involves small-scale changes in a few genes over shorter periods.
In a nutshell, evolution relies on variation and reproductive success. Organisms exhibit a range of traits, with those best suited to their environment having higher survival rates and more offspring. Consider bears. If a population of bears has a range of fur colour, the bears with the whiter fur will be better able to survive in a snowy climate and produce more offspring. Those with brown fur will be better able to survive in a forest area. This leads to separate species – polar bears and grizzly bears. That’s the theory.
The word “theory” may give the impression that there are reservations with the science of evolution. But no amount of evidence turns a scientific theory into a fact. In science, “theory” means “the best explanation of available evidence.” The theory of evolution is considered to be the best explanation because it’s supported by multiple lines of evidence across a range of scientific disciplines.
When we examine today's animals, we discover remarkable anatomical similarities between species. For example, the skeletons of four-limbed creatures. While there are variations, the basic body plan remains consistent, with bones arranged in a similar pattern. Skeletons don’t have to be this way for animals to function – in fact, they result in some inefficiencies, like humans with back or knee trouble. But this is the sort of pattern we would expect if the body plans of four-limbed creatures changed slowly and diversified over many generations.
We also find traits in modern animals similar to those of other animals but with no apparent function – redundant features that are a legacy from our ancestors. Examples include hip bones in whales and leg bones hidden in some snakes' muscles. Even humans have vestigial features like the appendix, wisdom teeth, and goosebumps. These seem to connect today's organisms to ancestors with distinct characteristics.
If evolution is correct, we'd expect evidence in the fossil record. Critics claim no "intermediate" fossils exist, but that's not true. While fossils can't prove one species evolved from another, a succession of fossils with slight changes over time strongly suggests evolution.
As an example, the fossil record shows whales evolving from land mammals. The oldest known whales, like Pakicetus from around 49 million years ago, looked like land-dwelling mammals but had ears similar to those of modern whales, suggesting adaptations for hearing underwater. Species like Maiacetus and Rodhocetus appear later on with feet and spines adapted for more specialised swimming. By 40 million years ago, whales like Dorudon and Basilosaurus were fully aquatic animals with rudimentary hind limbs that could no longer support the body on land.
As noted, although these records do not prove evolution, they provide a very strong line of evidence supporting the theory.
Genes are made from a long molecule called DNA, which is copied and inherited across generations. The language of DNA is called genetic code, which lets organisms read the information in the genes.
Basically, it’s through genes that living organisms inherit features or traits from their ancestors. Genes carry instructions for an organism's construction and function, influencing both visible traits, like eye colour, and hidden ones, like disease resistance.
Genetics provides a very effective way of tracing ancestry. Imagine you’re at a family reunion. Geneticists could take a DNA sample from everyone there and use those DNA samples to completely reconstruct the family tree without any additional information. In the same way, scientists are using DNA to reconstruct the tree of common ancestry of all plants and animals.
When scientists use DNA to reconstruct the tree of common ancestry, they arrive at the same tree that they derived independently from the fossil evidence.
The genetic evidence for evolution is significant. It’s so compelling that Christian geneticist Francis Collins once said, “If we never find another fossil or vestigial trait, genetic evidence puts common ancestry beyond reasonable doubt.”
The evidence for the theory of evolution is undeniable. It may be hard to come to terms with it.
I grew up believing that God created plants and creatures independently, so when I first started to explore the evidence for evolution, it shook me up and challenged my faith.
It wasn’t how I was used to thinking about God creating.
I began researching the implications of evolution for my Christian faith and discovered that there are basically four different ways of thinking about how God might have created life.
One option is to reject the theory of evolution entirely, believing that it conflicts with the Bible. Young Earth Creationism effectively reads the creation accounts in Genesis in a very literal way: God created in a literal six days, and this happened no more than 10,000 years ago.
Young Earth Creationism is a very recent movement. It was strongly advocated in the 1920s by an Adventist called Martin Price, but it wasn’t until the early 1960s that others took to the view and popularised it in a book called The Genesis Flood.
Two years later, The Creation Research Society was formed to promote this view. Within a decade or so, Young Earth Creationism became a popular position.
Not all Creationists interpret the genealogies as a literal account for the age of the earth. Some accept the scientific consensus of a 13.8 billion-year-old universe and a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth. Old Earth Creationism accepts these ages but rejects evolution.
Most Christians in the 1920s who considered themselves to be fundamentalists didn’t interpret the Bible in the Young Earth way. They had two other interpretations. One suggested that the days of Genesis were long geological ages rather than 24 hour cycles. Another group said that after creation an indeterminate period of time passed before the six-day creation in Eden, and that gap accounts for all the geological and fossil evidence that would suggest the earth is old.
Intelligent design is another form of Creationism, and gained traction in the 1980s. The idea is that there are things in our world that are so intricate that they couldn’t possibly be the product of random selection. It also attempts to account for the origin of the first living cell, which is not yet well explained by any scientific theory.
For a cell to exist, there need to be proteins, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, DNA, RNA and lipids – a whole variety of chemicals in the same place at the same time. We don’t know how, in the very beginning, these complex ingredients all came together into a tiny membrane-bound cell. Intelligent Design suggests that it was by God’s direct design.
The view also postulates that there are particular biological components, like the human eye, that are irreducibly complex – needing to be fully functional from the outset, not evolved.
Intelligent Design may offer an attractive and somewhat compelling perspective on creation, but it’s not without its problems. In the case of the eye, for example, we know of various creatures that have proto-eyes, which discredits the notion that a component like the eye couldn’t evolve.
Another issue with the Intelligent Design approach is that it puts God into the areas where there are gaps in scientific knowledge.
Science often eventually closes those gaps with good theory, which end up discrediting Intelligent Design. And when you think about it, it doesn’t make a great deal of theological sense either. It implies that God wasn’t quite getting it right at the beginning, so had to keep stepping in and helping the process along.
The idea of life evolving through an unguided process has caused great difficulty for some Christians, and it’s a major reason why views like Young Earth Creationism, Old Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design firmly reject the theory. Still, there are many Christians who are open to the possibility that God created in this way.
Some scientists have recently begun to argue that evolution is not as unguided as we had previously thought. Simon Conway Morris, Professor at Cambridge University, suggests that nature is actually hard-wired to evolve in a particular way to generate particular features in living things. This is evident in different lineages independently evolving similar traits, like the eye, which has emerged independently at least seven times.
The idea that God created a universe with such a deep order that it would enable life to evolve in a particular way is pretty impressive. I find this far more profound than the idea of God creating each living thing independently.
A universe that has at its heart an order and elegance that enables life to find a way by being adaptive to environmental stress – one that enables life to fit and work with the conditions of the environment – is far more elegant and effective than a universe that requires each life form to be a one-off creation suited to its initial environment.
For many Christians, this makes a great deal of theological sense too. The drama of life’s evolution corresponds with the self-giving love and promises of a God who calls not only us, but all of nature, to co-create with him.
Professor John Haught, American theologian, puts it well:
If God were a dictator or enforcer, we might expect the universe to be perfectly designed all at once in an initial moment of creative magic. And we might expect this perfectly designed world to remain essentially unchanged… Yet what a pallid world that would be compared to the one we have… The often tumultuous drama of faith in Earth, along with all the wild wonderings of life at large, corresponds well with the Abrahamic understanding of an adventurous and loving God who makes all things new.
Haught says that he finds it hard to reconcile his belief in a God of infinite love and promise with any other kind of universe than the one implied by Darwin’s vision of life evolving.
The four positions summarise the main ways Christians think about how God created life. Young Earth Creationism, Old Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design say that Scripture conflicts with evolutionary theory. But is this really the case?
To figure that out, we have to delve deeply into the exercise of Biblical interpretation and ask questions. What is the meaning of a verse? What was the intention of the author? Does this read like history or as something that is more mythical and poetic?
We won’t get into all of that now other than to acknowledge that, ultimately, any conflict with science revolves around the practice of reading Genesis as a literal account. This literal approach is actually relatively new. Many influential theologians throughout history did not perceive it as the necessary interpretation.
“What man of intelligence,” early theologian Origen asks, “will consider that the first and second and third day, in which there are said to be both morning and evening, existed without sun and moon and stars... I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions.”
Even Saint Augustine, writing over sixteen centuries ago, cautioned against rigid interpretations of Genesis. He wrote extensively on the topic, but ultimately believed that the exact meaning of these verses remains uncertain. He warned against clinging to interpretations that could become indefensible with new discoveries.
Writing about Genesis, he says:
In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush headlong, and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.
That’s what defines the Christian faith.
Check out other articles in the
series below.
More articles in the
series are to come.
