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 ... 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 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.

150.101.202.198 13:46, 1 April 2018 (UTC)