What is Theistic Evolution?

“Some think of evolution as the theory of common ancestry: Any two living things share ancestors, so that we and the poison ivy in our back yard, as well as other living creatures, are cousins. This is surprising, but compatible with Christian belief.”  (Alvin Plantinga)

“I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature,” Collins says. “... I do not find the wording of Genesis 1 and 2 to suggest a scientific textbook but a powerful and poetic description of God’s intentions in creating the universe. The mechanism of creation is left unspecified.” (quoting Theistic Evolutionist Francis Collins.  http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=21375

Interesting things happen when one begins to really listen to science, instead of dutifully maintaining one's head up one's ass in order to be "faithful." The book that got me started down a path to sanity was: Coming to Peace with Science by Darrel Falk. It's a wonderful book, and many, many things fell into place after that.  (from a Facebook post by Steven Johnson, best-man at my wedding)

Young evangelicals are in the process of picking apart and deconstructing this tangled mess of ideas in order to get back to the most basic teachings of Jesus. So you shouldn't be surprised to bump into more and more and more oddities like me--a young evangelical Christian who votes for Democrats, has gay friends, and believes in evolution. Article Newsweek, (Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town)  

Before launching into defintions, difficulties, etc. - it seems important to note that there are several major varites of theistic evolution, and these approaches to evolution (or theism) are so varied that they really should not employ a common label. 

For example

Teleological evolution (or Intelligent Evolution) is, as the name implies, God directed, or God enhanced evolution.   On the other hand, some Theistic Evolutionists adhere to evolution as realized by Charles Darwin.



COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

DAWKINS: I think that's a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

COLLINS: Who are we to say that that was an odd way to do it? I don't think that it is God's purpose to make his intention absolutely obvious to us. If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1555132-4,00.html#ixzz0xRviEwY8

Three primary Components of Darwinian Evolution

    Common Descent

    Natural Selection

    Random Change (Random Mutation) 
    Natural Law an expression of materialism (Implied)

Three primary Components of Theistic Evolution (as relized by men like Francis Collins.)

   Common Descent

   Natural Selection (?)

   Random Change (Random Mutation) (?)
   Natural Law an expression as laws created (or held) in God.
   The prospect of God working in and through Natural Law to achieve his ends.

Note: Theistic Evolution may assume that God works through natural causation at a level below detection, or that God, in setting up the very laws of nature, set them up in such a way as to produce desired ends.)Three components of Intelligent Evolution

   Common Descent

   Natural Selection, and/or Directed Selection

   Directed, or programed Change (Intelligent Genome)

   (with the possiblity of periodic acts of special creation)

Note: Theistic Evolution may assume that God works through natural causation at a level below detection, or that God, in setting up the very laws of nature, works through natural causes to his own ends.

The problem with the standard model of theistic evolution is to show how God might guide or otherwise be a part of the process without interfering with Darwin’s concept of natural selection. If God does the selecting should we still call it “natural selection”. Or should we rather see God, not at the point of selecting, but rather doing all those background things which lead to variation in the first place. (Thereby, God becomes the king of added information and mutation.) The question that a scientist might ask - especially one given to naturalistic presuppositions is - is such God-involvement detectable? Or is God’s involvement beyond detection, so that the supernatural is masked under the cloak of the natural. Biblical creationists in particular argue that evolution is a fundamentally “inefficient, bloody and chaotic affair, and not the kind of thing we should expect to see given the omnipotence or holiness of God.


For some the very concept of teleological evolution is self contradictory.

Are evolution and a belief in God compatible?

(From a back page debate on the possibility of theistic evolution.)

It is also irrelevant whether various religions differentiate between natural and supernatural. Once again, this is the TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, people. Wake up. The teleological argument demands a diametrical opposition between "designed" and "evolved". The terms are mutually exclusive. Something evolved doesn't have a designer, and is therefore not designed. Something designed has a designer, and is therefore not evolved. Evolution, by definition, does not progress through the arbitrary whims of a designer. Design, by definition, does not occur through the blind forces of evolution.

--69.209.242.45 04:19, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Hmmmm, although I agree with the sentiment, there is no diametric opposition between design and evolution. Evolution does not exclude the possibility of design, it merely makes it redundant as an explanatory factor. Design does not exclude evolution, it just says that design at some point in time was involved with the origin of certain features of life/the universe. -Superiority 06:08, 9 November 2005 (UTC) On the other hand, Christians have always affirmed that God employs means (even sinful, man directed means) to accomplish his pre-ordained will. Is it possible that God could use a seemingly random process to arrive at the very ends He pre-ordained?



Date: July 18, 2005

A renowned philosopher from the University of Notre Dame supports recent comments by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn that belief in evolution as accepted by some in science today may be incompatible with Christian beliefs.

“Cardinal Schönborn has it right,” said Alvin Plantinga, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy and one of the world’s leading scholars in the philosophy of religion. “Evolution means different things to different people. Some of these things are perfectly consistent with Christian belief, but others are not.

“Some think of evolution as the theory of common ancestry: Any two living things share ancestors, so that we and the poison ivy in our back yard, as well as other living creatures, are cousins. This is surprising, but compatible with Christian belief.”

Problems arise, according to Plantinga, when “scientists and others take evolution to be a process that is wholly unguided and driven by chance, so that it is simply a matter of chance that rational creatures like us exist. This is not compatible with Christian belief, according to which God has intentionally created us human beings in His own image. He may have done so by using a process of evolution, but it isn’t by chance that we exist.”

Plantinga adds that the idea that “human beings and other living creatures have come about by chance, rather than by God’s design, is also not a proper part of empirical science. How could science show that God has not intentionally designed and created human beings and other creatures? How could it show that they have arisen merely by chance? That’s not empirical science. That’s metaphysics, or maybe theology. It’s a theological add-on, not part of science itself. And, since it is a theological add-on, it shouldn’t, of course, be taught in public schools.”

http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content.cfm?topicid=12242

Evolution and Christianity By: Dennis Brown



Author’s note: while a certain approaches to evolution may be compatible with Christianity, the challenge remains, how are such views to be reconciled with even a very loose reading of Genesis 1.
Theistic Evolution:


(From a back and forth discussion on the Jesus Creed Blogsite:)  "While I agree with Plantinga on the available options - I disagree on a more significant level with his conclusion regarding evolution. It is not a commitment to methodological naturalism that leads most Christians in the sciences - including the vast majority of biologists and biochemists- to accept the evolutionary framework including common descent. It is the strength of the available evidence; especially the genetic evidence, as Francis Collins (The Language of God), Darrel Falk (Coming to Peace With Science) and others have tried to make clear. Many Christians have been forced to that realization, despite their intentions and inclinations. (Jesus Creed) http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2010/03/what-role-naturalism-1-rjs.html


for a strong critique by Albert Mohler of BioLogos's Karl (gimerson)
http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/08/25/a-letter-to-professor-giberson-on-darwin-and-darwinism/



Guided but not "designed"

A blog comment by Jurassicmac/Uncommon Descent: http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/why-secular-and-theistic-darwinists-fear-id/  

I usually don’t refer to myself as a ‘theistic evolutionist’ for the same reason I don’t refer to myself as a ‘theistic gravitationalist’ or a ‘theistic heliocentrist’; To a scientifically inclined Christian, those terms should be redundancies. I don’t think that Theists who accept darwinism ‘fear’ ID as much as ‘are embarrassed by it.’

Gil, I agree with you that it doesn’t make any sense to say that ‘God guided darwinian evolution.’ But that certainly doesn’t rule out the idea that God intendedthe results of darwinian evolution. There is no reason to think an omnipotent being couldn’t set up the proper initial conditions for a universe in which evolution not only occurs, but also produces intelligent creatures, and not have to fiddle around with the process after it is started. If one were to have perfect knowledge of all natural processes and laws, (like if one had created them) It would be trivial to set up initial conditions to produce any desired outcome, without having to violate those laws or intervene in any way.

With perfect knowledge of the laws, intervention would only be required for interaction with the creatures, not for the assembly of them.