Board index ‹ Creation and Evolution

[Nic J]

How does the Bible and evolution go together? So you believe in evolution, what’s the other side of that? The people who disagree with you. How did God use evolution to create the heavens and the earth? So are you telling me I came from a monkey?

[jimwalton]

What a good conversation. I appreciate the way your mind works, and your willingness to ask good questions.

So let’s talk about evolution. First of all, you should realize that there are good and strong Christians who take different positions about creation and evolution. There are 5 main positions:

• Young Earth, 6-day creation: The Earth is only about 6,000-10,000 years old, and God created the universe and everything we see in 6 24-hr days.
• Old Earth, 6-day creation: The universe is 13 billion years old, and the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and God created it all in 6 days 13 billion years ago.
• Day-Age Theory: Each of the “days” of creation in Genesis aren’t literal days, but they represent long eras. For instance, the first “day” of creation (creation of light) could have been billions of years in the making. But each age follows the sequence as outlined in Genesis 1.
• Gap Theory: Genesis 1.1, like the first phase of creation, happened billions of years ago. Then something cataclysmic happened, and it was all turned “formless and void,” and God started the second phase of creation in Genesis 1.2, which happened more recently.
• Evolutionary Creationism: God created the universe and all that we see, but he used the processes of the Big Bang and evolution to created everything we see. If this is the position one takes, Genesis 1 is about how God ordered the universe to function (light functions to give us day, the Earth functions to bring forth vegetation, the heavenly bodies function to give us seasons, etc.), not about how He manufactured it. He certainly created (manufactured) it, but that’s not what Genesis 1 is about.

At the same time, there are 6 different ways to define “evolution.” Only #6 is completely contrary to Christianity.

• The ancient earth thesis, some 4.5 billion years old
• The progress thesis: The claim that life has progressed from relatively simple to relatively complex forms. In the beginning there was relatively simple unicellular life. Then more complex unicellular life, then relatively simple multi-cellular life (seagoing worms, coral, jellyfish), then fish, then amphibia, then reptiles, birds, mammals, and human beings.
• Descent with modification: The enormous diversity of the contemporary living world has come about by way of offspring differing, ordinarily in small and subtle ways, from their parents.
• Common ancestry thesis: Life originated at only one place of earth, all subsequent life being related by descent to those original living creatures—the claim that, as Gould puts it, there is a “tree of evolutionary descent linking all organisms by ties of genealogy.” According to this theory, we are all cousins of each other—and indeed of all living things (horses, bats bacteria, oak trees, poison ivy, humans.
• Darwinism: There is a naturalistic mechanism driving this process of descent with modification: the most popular candidate is natural selection operating on random genetic mutation, although some other processes are also sometimes proposed.
• Naturalistic origins thesis: Life itself developed from non-living matter without any special creative activity of God but just by virtue of processed described by the ordinary laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.

So how can the Bible and evolution go together? Very easily if we take Christian position #5 and evolutionary positions #1-5. As long as we keep God as the central and necessary sovereign intelligence, power, person, and morality in the process, I don’t see where it’s a problem.

> “How did God use evolution to create the heavens and the earth?”

We see through the Bible that God consistently uses processes. He didn’t send Jesus the day that Adam and Eve sinned. Instead, He uses the process of long history to gradually bring about his covenant. Israel is in Egypt for 400 years for a reason. He lets the northern monarchy play itself out for 300 years before He judges them. He allows Israel to go into exile for 70 years. He allows 400 years of silence between Malachi and John the Baptist. God characteristically uses long, gradual processes to accomplish His work. Creation doesn’t need to be any different. And if evolutionary Creationism is true, God is still in the process of creating, a thought that goes along with the Bible. He is still bringing about His plan to its spiritual goal.

> “Are you telling me I came from a monkey?”

According to current genetic theory, monkeys and humans came from the same primate ancestors, but humans didn’t come from monkeys. We are on a primate hominid line, whereas monkeys are on a primate simiformes line. We came from Neanderthals and Denisovans, and from before that possible from various australopithecus or homo- lines, but not from monkeys.