Author: David Opderbeck

An older, but equally excellent, Stackhouse post that mirrors much of my own thinking:

First this:

There are only two respects, then, in which “creation versus evolution” makes sense: first, when certain Christians insist that “creation” must mean “creation science” and thus rule out any divine use of evolution; and, second, when certain evolutionists insist that “evolution” must mean only what Darwin thought it meant, namely naturalistic or atheistic evolution. For then, of course, “creation versus evolution” really amounts to “theism versus atheism.” Put this way, however, we should recognize that we are dealing now with a religious and philosophical issue, not a scientific one. Science cannot, in the nature of the case, rule out God as somehow supervising evolutionary processes.

.. and then this:

Maybe evolution, theistic or otherwise, can explain all these things–as Christian Francis Collins believes just as firmly as atheist Richard Dawkins believes. But we must allow that evolution has not yet done so.

And that’s a pretty important set of allowances to make—as the ID proponents, as well as the creation science people, rightly insist. Indeed, the late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould himself agreed, sufficiently so that he and Niles Eldredge postulated “punctuated equilibrium” as a theory to explain the last problem on that list. The creation science and ID people simply aren’t wrong about everything—and their opponents would do well to heed their criticisms, even if they hate their alternative theories.

All of this is right on, IMHO, and it echoes on of Stackhouse’s themes about epistemology and apologetics, which I greatly appreciate: it’s ok to say “I don’t know” sometimes.

The fact, which we evangelicals need to face, is that the basic outlines of contemporary evolutionary theory seem to be sound. All of life does indeed seem to be genetically linked, the amazing and beautiful facts of how genetics operate show that organisms can and do change over time, and contemporary evolutionary theory seems to provide sound explanations for what we find in the record of life on earth.

However, the grand narrative of evolution with a capital-E is inferential and does not in itself account for some important beliefs and affirmations that Christian theology brings to the epistemic table. The evolution-with-a-capital-E metanarrative raises very important questions about “chance,” God’s action in the natural world, and, probably most importantly, about human nature and sin, in ways that seem to require some “push back” or dialectical tension / conversation with theology. So, it seems to me, we have an obligation not to dismiss or ignore basic and well-established principles of how life on earth ordinarily works, but at the same time we do not have an obligation to accept the entire evolutionary meta-narrative. Did God “intervene” at some key points in life’s development? How exactly do Christian affirmations about the uniqueness of humanity, sin, and “the Fall” relate to the ordinary development of life on earth? We don’t know exactly — and that’s ok — we’re not obligated to resolve either end of this tension or to state what we hold and affirm about all aspects of it in stark “either-or” terms. All we really have to admit is that we’re limited in what we can say for sure about how this all works together.