What about evolution?

Question 60002.

Darwinian evolution is the account of origins that most of us absorbed before we could evaluate it, in classrooms and documentaries and museum captions, and it arrives with the authority of settled fact rather than as a theory with a history and a set of assumptions.

I want to do two things here. I want to be precise about what is actually being claimed, because the word evolution covers several very different ideas that get quietly swapped for one another. And I want to say where I stand and why, without pretending that the questions are easy or that everyone who disagrees with me has abandoned the Bible.

Defining the terms before we argue

The word evolution can mean simply change over time within a population, and nobody disputes that. Bacteria develop resistance, finch beaks alter with drought, dog breeds diversify under selection. This is observable, repeatable and entirely compatible with Genesis.

Darwinian evolution in the full sense claims something much larger, that every living thing descends from a single common ancestor by the accumulation of random variations filtered by natural selection over immense periods, with no direction and no designer involved at any stage. That is a claim about history and about philosophy, not only about biology.

Sliding between the two is the commonest move in the whole debate. Evidence for variation within a population is presented, and the conclusion drawn is universal common descent. I accept the first without accepting that it establishes the second, and the distinction is where most of the argument actually lives.

What Genesis says about kinds

The creation account repeats a phrase ten times in Genesis 1. God makes plants and creatures according to their kinds, and the Hebrew word is min. Whatever the precise boundaries of a kind, the text describes discrete categories reproducing after their own sort rather than a single tree branching from one root.

The word kind is not the same as the modern species, and I would not defend that equation. A kind probably corresponds to something broader, perhaps around the level of family, allowing considerable variation inside it. There is room in Genesis for a great deal of diversification since creation.

What there is no room for is the central claim of Darwinian evolution, that the categories themselves have no reality because everything grades into everything else given enough time. Genesis presents a world of bounded kinds made by deliberate acts, described with the Hebrew verb bara, a verb used in Scripture only with God as its subject.

Where the case for Darwinian evolution is weaker than advertised

I am a pastor rather than a biologist and I will not pretend otherwise. But the claims made for Darwinian evolution are historical and philosophical as much as they are technical, and an ordinary reader is entitled to ask whether the evidence carries the weight placed on it.

The fossil record is the first place to look, since Darwin himself named it as his greatest difficulty. He expected innumerable transitional forms and hoped later collecting would supply them. The record we now have is vastly larger, and the pattern remains one of abrupt appearance, long stability and disappearance. The Cambrian layers in particular present most major body plans arriving with no ancestral sequence beneath them.

Then there is the question of information. A living cell runs on a coded instruction set, and mutation plus selection is offered as the mechanism that wrote it. Selection can only choose between things that already exist, which places the entire creative burden on random copying errors. Explaining the origin of the code by appealing to errors in copying it has always struck me as an argument working very hard against itself.

The origin of life problem

Strictly speaking this is not part of Darwinian evolution at all, since Darwin began with life already present, and defenders often say so when pressed. It remains the foundation on which the whole account has to rest, because without a first self replicating cell there is nothing for selection to act upon.

Decades of laboratory work have not produced a plausible route from chemistry to a functioning cell. The Miller experiments of the 1950s made some amino acids under conditions now thought unrepresentative of the early atmosphere, and the gap between a soup of building blocks and a self maintaining, self copying organism is not a detail.

I mention it because it shapes how confident we should be about the rest. If the first step remains unexplained after seventy years of well funded effort, the certainty with which the whole story is told deserves some scrutiny.

The philosophical commitment underneath

The most important thing to grasp is that Darwinian evolution is not simply a conclusion drawn from data. It operates within a prior commitment to methodological naturalism, the rule that only natural causes may be considered.

Under that rule, a designed origin is not rejected because the evidence tells against it. It is excluded before the evidence is examined, because it is the wrong sort of explanation. Several prominent scientists have said as much in print with admirable candour.

So when someone tells me that science has disproved creation, I want to point out gently that a method which has ruled out the Creator in advance was never in a position to find Him. Paul writes that God’s invisible attributes have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made, Romans 1:20, and I explore that further in how creation reveals God.

Why Adam is the point of no return

Christians hold a range of views about the days of Genesis 1 and the age of the earth, and I can work happily alongside believers whose position differs from mine. There is one place where I cannot compromise, and it is Adam.

Paul’s argument in Romans 5 rests on two men. As by one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous, Romans 5:19. The logic works because both men are historical individuals whose actions have representative consequences.

Take Adam out and the structure collapses. If sin and death entered through a population rather than a person, then death preceded sin, and the wages of sin becomes a metaphor. Jesus refers to Adam and Eve as real people, Luke puts Adam at the head of a genealogy, and Paul calls Jesus the last Adam. This is not a peripheral matter that Darwinian evolution can quietly adjust.

Death before the fall

Here is the second theological pressure point. Darwinian evolution requires hundreds of millions of years of death, predation, disease and extinction as the mechanism by which everything arrived. Selection needs failure in order to work.

Scripture presents death as an intruder. God pronounces creation very good, He gives plants for food to man and beast in Genesis 1, and death enters through sin. Paul says the whole creation groans and was subjected to futility, awaiting liberation from its bondage to corruption, Romans 8:21.

If death is the tool God used to create rather than the enemy that entered through Adam, then the cross addresses something God Himself built into the system. That is a heavy price to pay for a synthesis, and I am not willing to pay it.

The views Christians actually hold

Let me be fair to the range. Theistic evolution holds that God used the Darwinian process, guiding or sustaining it, and that Genesis 1 is theological literature rather than sequential history. Progressive creation holds that God created directly at intervals across long ages. The framework view treats the days as a literary arrangement rather than a chronology.

Young earth creation, which is where I stand, holds that God created in six ordinary days a few thousand years ago, that Adam and Eve were the first humans, and that a global flood accounts for much of the geological column. I set out the reasoning in what about the age of the earth.

I hold my position with conviction and without contempt. Some of the finest expositors I have read take a different view of the days, and I have learned from them. Where I dig in is the historicity of Adam, the goodness of the original creation, and the entry of death through sin.

Common objections worth answering

The first objection is that the church always loses these arguments, as with Galileo, and should learn to accommodate the science. The Galileo case is more complicated than the legend, and in any event a question about planetary motion is not a question about human origins and the entry of death.

The second is that genetic similarity between humans and other primates proves common ancestry. Similarity is real, and it is equally consistent with common design, since a shared engineer reuses good solutions. The interpretation is doing more work than the percentage.

The third is that rejecting Darwinian evolution makes Christians look foolish and closes doors in evangelism. I understand the concern, and I would rather be thought foolish than teach young believers that the first chapters of their Bible cannot be trusted, only to be asked later which other chapters we are prepared to surrender.

What I do not want to claim

Bad arguments for a good position do lasting damage, so let me name a few I will not use. I will not claim that no transitional fossils of any kind exist, since candidates are proposed and deserve to be assessed rather than waved away. I will not misquote scientists to make them sound like secret creationists.

I will not pretend that the technical questions are simple or that a confident manner settles them. Radiometric dating, the distant starlight problem and the details of the geological column are genuine difficulties for my position, and honest young earth researchers say so in print.

Integrity here is part of the witness. Nothing hands a sceptic more ammunition than a Christian who overstates a case and is then corrected in public, and I have written about that risk in defending biblical authority in a post truth culture.

How this affects ordinary discipleship

Most believers will never debate a biologist. They will, however, have children coming home from school with questions, and grandchildren watching documentaries narrated in tones of quiet certainty.

So teach the distinction early. Variation within kinds is observed and uncontroversial. Universal common descent is an interpretation of the past that nobody watched and nobody can repeat. A child who learns to ask which sense of the word is being used has been given a lifelong tool.

Teach also that Christians are not against science. The founders of most scientific disciplines were believers who expected an ordered universe because they believed in an orderly Creator. Objecting to Darwinian evolution is not objecting to investigation, it is objecting to a rule that decides the answer before the investigation begins.

Talking to someone who accepts it

Start by asking what they actually believe rather than assuming. Many people have never separated the observable from the historical claim, and simply drawing that line changes the conversation.

Then ask the questions the theory struggles with, gently and without triumph. Where did the information come from. How did the first cell arise. Why does the fossil record show abrupt appearance. You are not required to have a complete alternative model in hand before you may notice a gap.

And do not make Darwinian evolution the gospel. Nobody is saved by rejecting a theory of origins. The resurrection is the door, and I would rather a sceptic wrestle with the empty tomb, which I set out in the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, than win an argument about fruit flies.

What is really at stake

Underneath the technical exchanges sits a question about identity. If Darwinian evolution tells the whole story, then you are an accident that learned to worry, your moral instincts are survival mechanisms, and the universe has no opinion about how you live.

Genesis tells you something else. You were made deliberately, in the image of God, by a Creator who spoke and then said it was good. Your value is not a function of your usefulness, which is why Scripture protects the weak and the unborn and the very old with such fierceness.

I have sat with people at the end of their lives, and I have never once found the first account any comfort to anybody. That is not an argument for its falsehood. It is a reason to look very hard at whether it is true.

A short history of the idea

It helps to remember that Darwinian evolution has a biography. Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 into a culture already primed for it by Lyell’s uniformitarian geology and by a growing confidence that natural explanations would eventually cover everything.

The theory itself has been revised repeatedly since. Darwin had no idea how inheritance worked, and it took the rediscovery of Mendel and then the molecular work of the mid twentieth century to produce the neo Darwinian synthesis that is usually meant when people speak of Darwinian evolution today. More recently a number of professional biologists have argued that the synthesis is inadequate and needs extending, which is an interesting development for a theory often presented to schoolchildren as beyond question.

None of that makes it false. It does mean that treating Darwinian evolution as an unchanging body of established fact misrepresents its own history, and it should make us slower to reinterpret Scripture in order to accommodate a framework that has been rebuilt more than once within living memory.

So, now what?

Read Genesis 1 and 2 slowly, then Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, and ask what the New Testament writers assumed about the opening chapters. They are your best commentary.

Then get one good book on the science rather than living off social media summaries from either direction. Read someone who disagrees with you as well, and read him properly.

And if your children or grandchildren are being taught Darwinian evolution as unquestioned fact, do not panic and do not forbid the questions. Ask them what the evidence is, teach them to distinguish observation from interpretation, and let them see that your faith is not frightened of the conversation. Where has fear been shaping your response?

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

Romans 1:20, ESV

For Further Study

Charles Ryrie treats the doctrine of creation and the historicity of Adam with characteristic clarity, and Millard Erickson provides a careful survey of the range of evangelical positions on the days of Genesis for readers who want the options laid out fairly. Lewis Sperry Chafer and J. Dwight Pentecost are worth consulting on how creation fits within a dispensational reading of Scripture, and John Walvoord on the connection between the fall and the groaning of creation. On the scientific side, Michael Denton and Michael Behe raise the design questions from within the professional literature, while Stephen Meyer develops the argument from biological information at length. Read a mainstream account of the evidence alongside them, since a position you cannot state in your opponent’s own words is a position you do not yet understand.