Theistic Evolution
Theistic Evolution is a 19th Century term that arose in response to the claim that the new scientific theory of the evolution of species by natural selection was contrary to belief in God. By describing evolution as theistic believers intended to emphasise that God was the ultimate Creator, in control of evolution.
Well known theistic evolutionists include Francisco J. Ayala, Francis Collins, Theodosius Dobzhansky, John F. Haught, C. S. Lewis, Arthur Peacocke, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Alfred Russel Wallace.
There have been many ideas about exactly how the Creator controls evolution. The classic theistic evolutionary concept, that God created the universe with natural laws and breathed life into it, was described in the conclusion of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species:
- It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth,and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed [by the Creator*] into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
- * this phrase was added in the second and subsequent editions.
Objections to the term
Christadelphians whose beliefs could be described as "Theistic Evolution" usually prefer to describe themselves as "Evolutionary Creationists". Sometimes they reject any label that combines their belief in God with their acceptance of evolution, which they see as insignificant detail about how living things have been created, and not to be compared in the same phrase with God the Creator.
The objection that "Theistic Evolution" is an incoherent notion can be seen by comparing it with "Theistic Meteorology".
