Creation and Evolution: Are Both True?

Question of the Week: Isn’t it possible that evolution and creation are both true? Read Chuck Colson’s response, taken from Answers to Your Kids' Questions: There’s a name for this line of reasoning: theistic evolution. The idea that perhaps evolution was directed by God appears to be an attractive solution and one frequently embraced by Christian students trying to reconcile their faith with the teachings of their science teachers. Evolution’s basic premise makes this approach inherently flawed, however. Imagining that evolutionary theory allows for a Creator—that evolution could be a God-guided process—is exactly what establishment scientists do not allow. Prominent Darwinists from Stephen Gould to Richard Dawkins to John Maynard Smith insist that evolution is unguided and purposeless. As Phillip Johnson puts it in Defeating Darwinism, “The Darwinian theory doesn’t just say that God created slowly [over millions of years]. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator—and God had nothing to do with it.” Evolution in the Darwinian sense is both mindless and godless. As the famous evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson put it, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.” Darwinists cannot afford to abandon this claim, Johnson says, because their whole approach is founded on naturalism, the doctrine that nature is all there is. Darwinian evolution tries to explain how nature did this without any assistance from a supernatural entity. Thus, an attempt to reconcile Darwinian evolution theories with creation “is an evasion of the conflict, not a resolution to it,” Johnson warns. People are kidding themselves when they think they can believe in both creation and evolution. What’s at stake is not merely the details of evolution versus the details of Genesis in the Bible. Rather, the issue is the stark, fundamental claim that life is the product of impersonal forces versus the claim that it is the creation of an intelligent Designer. Related Resources: Learn more about intelligent design at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center helps students start chapters on college and high school campuses to foster communication about evolution and intelligent design.

03/19/11