Bible Science... |
What is Theistic Evolution? (continued...) |
John G. West |
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(continued...) This view of evolution as a purposeful process began to disintegrate early in the twentieth century after Darwinian natural selection underwent a resurgence due to work in experimental genetics. Once Darwin's theory of undirected evolution became the consensus of the scientific community, the task for mainstream theistic evolution became considerably harder: Now one had to reconcile theism not just with the idea of universal common ancestry, but with the idea that the development of life was driven by an undirected process based on random genetic mistakes. But how can God "direct" an "undirected" process? Modern theistic evolutionists do not offer clear or consistent answers to this question. Prominent current proponents of theistic evolution include Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, author of Finding Darwin's God; Eastern Nazarene University physicist Karl Giberson, author of Saving Darwin; former head of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins, author of The Language of God; and biologist/theologian Denis Lamoureux. Former Calvin College professor Howard Van Till was a prominent defender of theistic evolution in the early to mid 1990s, but his prominence waned after he abandoned Christianity and embraced "freethought." While some contemporary proponents of theistic evolution maintain that their views are consistent with traditional Christian theology, many others have made clear that embracing theistic evolution requires radical revisions in how one views God. Contemporary proponents of theistic evolution raise at least three significant challenges to traditional Christian theology: First, many theistic evolution proponents assert that because Darwinian evolution is by definition "undirected." God could not have actively guided the evolutionary process, contrary to traditional Christian teachings about God's sovereignty. Indeed, God supposedly cannot even know with certainty or specificity how the evolutionary process will turn out. Applied to human beings, this means that God did not know beforehand whether the evolutionary process would produce human beings or some other rational creature such as a big-brained dinosaur. Second, many theistic evolution proponents repudiate traditional Christian teaching about the original goodness of creation and its subsequent "Fall." According to Karl Giberson in Saving Darwin, human beings were flawed and sinful from the very start because they were produced by an evolutionary process driven by selfishness. Thus, there was no "Fall" from original goodness in the history of humanity. The foreword to Giberson's book was written by fellow theistic evolutionist Francis Collins. |
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