It seems that Christians have been fighting the theory of evolution ever since Darwin – whose education was from a seminary school – proposed natural selection and evolution as a theory for life we observe.
But are the two completely at odds?
I would argue that they are not and that they can (and do) coexist quite peacefully.
What exactly causes Christians to think that evolution couldn’t possibly explain the diverse and beautiful world that we see today? At this point while writing this article, I tried to do some research so I could understand and lay out this side of the argument. But these arguments tended to stem from a huge misunderstanding of evolution. (I actually had to take a break because I got too heated at the number of argumentative articles that were based on a rather inaccurate understanding of evolution.) The main viable argument for this side is that the universe, especially life and human life, is far too complicated to come about without divine creation.
I have concerns with this typical Christian stance on evolution. As a Christian and a biology major, faith and science are both hugely important in my life, and evolution is a part of both. No part of the theory of evolution says there is no divine creator. It is a mechanism that explains the physical evidence that we witness on a macro level through the fossil record and on a micro level through – a very important example – antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
There is no doubt in my mind that God can act through the mechanisms we observe here on Earth. He created those mechanisms, and he uses them. There is no reason to discount the mechanisms as not having divine origin and purpose in themselves.
Now, I can hear you all saying, “What about Genesis? Creation happened in six days!” Please, go read Genesis 1-2. I’ll wait. But you must read it very closely.
All right, you read it? Good. Notice anything about the consistency between the two chapters? They don’t necessarily agree on which days certain things were made. That’s the first lesson – the Bible isn’t infallible. Furthermore, who is to say that if the six-day creation timeline is accurate that God is constrained by our sense of time? It seems to me that an all-powerful being that creates all of the universe is probably not constrained by human definitions of time.
So, why can’t evolution be the explanation for how God made life? In fact, in Genesis 2 there is already a precedent set for the creation of life from other life (Eve made from Adam’s rib). I do not see how God forming organisms and then forming other, more complex organisms from those he had already created is at all in conflict with Christian values.
It is extremely important for Christians to be open to new interpretations of the world and to fit rational explanations of the world that we live in into our faith. There is nothing worse than a lazy Christian who is unwilling to adjust their beliefs or think about how science and Christianity fit together.
It is the twenty-first century, and Christians ought to be working to further understand God’s creation instead of narrow-mindedly thumping a Bible that is meant to be interpreted.
