Fundamental Creationists believe quite literally that God created the Universe and all that is in it, in six days flat, and that everything in Genesis (Noah’s Ark, Tower of Babel, Methuselah living to 968 etc.) actually happened. This is not the place to refute these stories, merely suffice to say that there is little evidence to support such a view.
Fundamental Evolutionists have of course written God out of the picture altogether, claiming that all the diversity we have today comes from a single process, that of genetic mutation, followed by the “survival of the fittest” argument. However there are weaknesses in this theory too: there are too many different species if natural selection has really been working for so long, the links from ancestral primates to man and some other parts of the fossil evidence are incomplete etc.
I would like to propose a middle way, that of an Interventionist God.
It is entirely possible to believe that God created the Universe (although not in 144 hours), even by the process of the Big Bang (after all this operates according to the Laws of Physics – who created these laws if not God?), AND believe in the process of evolution. In fact with an interventionist God, the two theories fit together rather well.
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Just look at the creation account in Genesis 1. “In the beginning the earth was formless and void” – well a huge ball of molten rock would be pretty formless to start with. Hereafter the order is exactly as is believed by scientists: first God said, “Let there be light!” – the first of the divine fiats – and it was so. As the dust cloud cleared, but long before the Sun itself was visible, there would be a distinction between night and day – the first day. Next the atmosphere settled out its dust, so there was a visible sky – in the Bible this is the separation of heaven and earth on ‘day’ 2. At this point there is a small discrepancy: the separation of land and oceans is fine, but all the plants appear on ‘day’ 3 before the Sun and Moon on ‘day’ 4. It is unlikely that green plants as such would occur before the Sun was visible, although life in this form may have begun before the haze finally cleared.
The order of animals is then exactly as believed by evolutionists: starting in the oceans – ‘day’ 5, moving onto the land, and ending with Man – ‘day’ 6. There is no way that the Bible writers of 4-5000 years ago could have known that this would be in agreement with the theory of evolution, but it is spot on – divine inspiration perhaps?
So supposing evolution works (and it can be observed both that genetic mutation does occur, and that those most fit for their environment tend to survive and hand their genes on through reproduction – one only has to look at viruses for this evidence), what drives the process? Are the mutations purely random, or might there not be an underlying process? I believe that this is where God comes in. Quite apart from designing the ‘laws’ of physics so that it all works properly, there are certain key moments in evolution where really important (and often rather too quick for true randomness) mutations occurred. The most recent of these was the change from our various anthropoid ancestors to what we might call humans. There is a famous ‘missing link’ here.
But why could this not simply be the ‘creation’ of Eve (and Adam) with a major genetic change from all the other females of the time? The important change is the use of language, and a change in structure in the brain. Mitochondrial evidence suggests that there could have indeed been one common female ancestor of all modern humans, and at about the correct time in the evolutionary scale. The ability to pass on knowledge clearly, precisely and directly through grammatical language was such a major change, with such major benefits, that her descendants became the dominant species on the planet in a short time, leading to the extinction of the other anthropoids. The other primates of course have long been shown to be distant cousins rather than direct ancestors – evolution never said we descended from the monkeys!
To summarise (as I have waffled on for quite long enough): evolution exists, and is still working today (except in humans, where the gene pool is now degrading, but more of that anon), but the laws which govern it, and the process itself, were created by God and left to run their course. Alongside this there were major and notable mutations, such as the start of a backbone, leading to a spinal chord and centralised brain, animals coming out of the sea and having breathing mechanisms, and most well-known the missing link to modern humans. The middle way is to accept all of this and that these were the moments where God chose to intervene directly and push the evolutionary process in the direction according to His overall plan – the Interventionist God, combining the truths of both creation and evolution.
Your comments are welcome!