{"id":2460,"date":"2009-06-11T05:30:40","date_gmt":"2009-06-11T09:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geneveith.com\/?p=2460"},"modified":"2009-06-11T05:30:40","modified_gmt":"2009-06-11T09:30:40","slug":"theistic-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2009\/06\/theistic-evolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Theistic evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Theistic evolutionists say they believe in God while also believing in Darwinism. They maintain that God used evolution as His way of creating the world. But the whole point of Darwinism is that the process of mutation and natural selection is random and undirected! If they want to believe that God directed some form of evolution, theistic evolutionists would have to embrace some form of intelligent design, but they don\u2019t, trying to distance themselves from that line of investigation so as to remain respectable Darwinists. <\/p>\n

John G. West of the Discovery Institute was able to get a platform in the Washington Post <\/a> to raise some of these issues:<\/p>\n

The real sticking point is Darwin\u2019s claim that all of life\u2013human beings included\u2013developed through a blind and undirected process of natural selection acting on random variations. In the words of late Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, \u201cMan is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nThere are ways to try to reconcile Darwinism\u2019s undirected process with theism, but they involve throwing overboard some long-cherished beliefs about God.\n

The first idea to go is the belief that God directed the development of life toward specific ends. According to biologist Kenneth Miller, one of the most prominent proponents of \u201ctheistic\u201d evolution, God did not plan the specific outcomes of evolution\u2013including the development of human beings. Miller describes humans as \u201can afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out.\u201d While God knew that undirected evolution was so wonderful it would create some kind of creature capable of praising Him, that creature could have been \u201ca big-brained dinosaur\u201d or \u201ca mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities\u201d rather than us.<\/p>\n

Seeking to lessen the discomfort such arguments pose for most religious believers, Francis Collins suggests that God \u201ccould\u201d have known the specific outcomes of evolution beforehand even though He made evolution appear \u201ca random and undirected process.\u201d In other words, God is a cosmic trickster who misleads people into thinking that nature is blind and purposeless, even though it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

One need not be a religious fundamentalist to find such arguments less than satisfying. Indeed, one need not be religious at all. Media coverage notwithstanding, theistic evolution has been shunned by leading evolutionary biologists, 87 percent of whom deny the existence of God and 90 percent of whom reject the idea that evolution is directed toward an \u201cultimate purpose\u201d according to a 2003 survey.<\/p>\n

While theistic evolutionists are mired in the past trying to defend Darwin\u2019s nineteenth-century mechanistic process, other scientists and scholars are suggesting that twenty-first century science is fast making Darwin obsolete. Experiments with bacteria, where evolution can be tested in real time, are showing just how little undirected processes like natural selection can actually accomplish. Experiments with protein sequences are revealing how astonishingly fine-tuned protein sequences must be to work at all. And the DNA inside each of us is disclosing massive amounts of genetic information that points to mind, not chance and necessity, as the ultimate source of biological innovations.<\/p>\n

Such discoveries do not \u201cprove\u201d God\u2019s existence, but they do provide tantalizing evidence that life was produced by an intelligent process rather than a mindless one, a finding that certainly has positive implications for faith.<\/p>\n

The Roman Catholic Church, no less, seems to have embraced theistic evolution. Do Catholics account for these difficulties?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Theistic evolutionists say they believe in God while also believing in Darwinism. They maintain that God used evolution as His way of creating the world. But the whole point of Darwinism is that the process of mutation and natural selection is random and undirected! If they want to believe that God directed some form of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"yoast_head":"\nTheistic evolution<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Theistic evolutionists say they believe in God while also believing in Darwinism. 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