Theistic evolution
Theistic evolution is a view that God acts and creates through laws of nature. Here, God is taken as the primary cause while natural causes are secondary, positing that the concept of God and religious beliefs are compatible with the findings of modern science, including evolution. Theistic evolution is not in itself a scientific theory, but includes a range of views about how science relates to religious beliefs and the extent to which God intervenes. It rejects the strict creationist doctrines of special creation but can include beliefs such as creation of the human soul. Modern theistic evolution accepts the general scientific consensus on the age of the Earth, the age of the universe, the Big Bang, the origin of the Solar System, the origin of life, and evolution.
Supporters of theistic evolution generally attempt to harmonize evolutionary thought with belief in God and reject the conflict between religion and science; they hold that religious beliefs and scientific theories do not need to contradict each other. Diversity exists regarding how the two concepts of faith and science fit together.
Definition
describes theistic evolution as the position that "evolution is real, but that it was set in motion by God", and characterizes it as accepting "that evolution occurred as biologists describe it, but under the direction of God". He lists six general premises on which different versions of theistic evolution typically rest. They include:- The prevailing cosmological model, with the universe coming into being about 13.8 billion years ago;
- The fine-tuned universe;
- Evolution and natural selection;
- No special supernatural intervention is involved once evolution got under way;
- Humans are a result of these evolutionary processes; and
- Despite all these, humans are unique. The concern for the Moral Law and the continuous search for God among all human cultures defy evolutionary explanations and point to our spiritual nature.
In the Catholic version of theistic evolution, human evolution may have occurred, but God must create the human soul, and the creation story in the book of Genesis should be read metaphorically.
Some Muslims believe that only humans were exceptions to common ancestry, while some give an allegorical reading of Adam's creation. Some Muslims believe that only Adam and Hawa were special creations and they alongside their earliest descendants were exceptions to common ancestry, but the later descendants share common ancestry with the rest of life on Earth because there were human-like beings on Earth before Adam's arrival who came through evolution. This belief is known as "Adamic exceptionalism".
When evolutionary science developed, so did different types of theistic evolution. Creationists Henry M. Morris and John D. Morris have listed different terms which were used to describe different positions from the 1890s to the 1920s: "Orthogenesis", "nomogenesis", "emergent evolution", "creative evolution", and others.
The Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was an influential proponent of God-directed evolution or "orthogenesis", in which man will eventually evolve to the "omega point" of union with the Creator.
Alternative terms
Others see "evolutionary creation" as the belief that God, as Creator, uses evolution to bring about his plan. Eugenie Scott states in Evolution Vs. Creationism that it is a type of evolution rather than creationism, despite its name. "From a scientific point of view, evolutionary creationism is hardly distinguishable from Theistic Evolution... lie not in science but in theology." Those who hold to evolutionary creationism argue that God is involved to a greater extent than the theistic evolutionist believes.Canadian biologist Denis Lamoureux published a 2003 article and a 2008 theological book, both aimed at Christians who do not believe in evolution, and at those looking to reconcile their Christian faith with evolutionary science. His main argument was that Genesis presents the "science and history of the day" as "incidental vessels" to convey spiritual truths. Lamoureux rewrote his article as a 2009 journal paper, incorporating excerpts from his books, in which he noted the similarities of his views to theistic evolution, but objected to that term as making evolution the focus rather than creation. He also distanced his beliefs from the deistic or more liberal beliefs included in theistic evolution. He also argued that although referring to the same view, the word arrangement in the term "theistic evolution" places "the process of evolution as the primary term, and makes the Creator secondary as merely a qualifying adjective".
Divine intervention is seen at critical intervals in history in a way consistent with scientific explanations of speciation, with similarities to the ideas of progressive creationism that God created "kinds" of animals sequentially.
Regarding the embracing of Darwinian evolution, historian Ronald Numbers describes the position of the late 19th-century geologist George Frederick Wright as "Christian Darwinism".
Jacob Klapwijk and Howard J. Van Till have, while accepting both theistic creation and evolution, rejected the term "theistic evolution".
In 2006, American geneticist and Director of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, published The Language of God. He stated that faith and science are compatible and suggested the word "BioLogos" to describe theistic evolution. Collins later laid out the idea that God created all things, but that evolution is the best scientific explanation for the diversity of all life on Earth. The name BioLogos instead became the name of the organization Collins founded years later. This organization now prefers the term "evolutionary creation" to describe their take on theistic evolution.
Historical development
Historians of science have pointed out that scientists had considered the concept of biological change well before Darwin.In the 17th century, the English Nonconformist/Anglican priest and botanist John Ray, in his book The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation , had wondered "why such different species should not only mingle together, but also generate an animal, and yet that that hybridous production should not again generate, and so a new race be carried on".
18th-century scientist Carl Linnaeus published Systema Naturae, a book in which he considered that new varieties of plants could arise through hybridization, but only under certain limits fixed by God. Linnaeus had initially embraced the Aristotelian idea of immutability of species, but later in his life he started to challenge it. Yet, as a Christian, he still defended "special creation", the belief that God created "every living creature" at the beginning, as read in Genesis, with the peculiarity a set of original species of which all the present species have descended.
Linnaeus wrote:
Linnaeus attributed the active process of biological change to God himself, as he stated:
File:Great Sea-Dragons.jpg|thumb|In the 19th century, geology and paleontology were still connected to Old Earth creationism. The above depicts a brutal world of deep time, existing before Adam and Eve, from Thomas Hawkins' book on plesiosaurs. Artist: John Martin, 1840
Jens Christian Clausen, refers to Linnaeus' theory as a "forgotten evolutionary theory antedates Darwin's by nearly 100 years", and reports that he was a pioneer in doing experiments about hybridization.
Later observations by Protestant botanists Carl Friedrich von Gärtner and Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter denied the immutability of species, which the Bible never teaches. Kölreuter used the term "transmutation of species" to refer to species which have experienced biological changes through hybridization, although they both were inclined to believe that hybrids would revert to the parental forms by a general law of reversion, and therefore, would not be responsible for the introduction of new species. Later, in a number of experiments carried out between 1856 and 1863, the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel, aligning himself with the "new doctrine of special creation" proposed by Linnaeus, concluded that new species of plants could indeed arise, although limitedly and retaining their own stability.
Georges Cuvier's analysis of fossils and discovery of extinction disrupted static views of nature in the early 19th century, confirming geology as showing a historical sequence of life. British natural theology, which sought examples of adaptation to show design by a benevolent Creator, adopted catastrophism to show earlier organisms being replaced in a series of creations by new organisms better adapted to a changed environment. Charles Lyell also saw adaptation to changing environments as a sign of a benevolent Creator, but his uniformitarianism envisaged continuing extinctions, leaving unanswered the problem of providing replacements. As seen in correspondence between Lyell and John Herschel, scientists were looking for creation by laws rather than by miraculous interventions. In continental Europe, the idealism of philosophers including Lorenz Oken developed a Naturphilosophie in which patterns of development from archetypes were a purposeful divine plan aimed at forming humanity. These scientists rejected transmutation of species as materialist radicalism threatening the established hierarchies of society. The idealist Louis Agassiz, a persistent opponent of transmutation, saw mankind as the goal of a sequence of creations, but his concepts were the first to be adapted into a scheme of theistic evolutionism, when in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation published in 1844, its anonymous author set out goal-centred progressive development as the Creator's divine plan, programmed to unfold without direct intervention or miracles. The book became a best-seller and popularised the idea of transmutation in a designed "law of progression". The scientific establishment strongly attacked Vestiges at the time, but later more sophisticated theistic evolutionists followed the same approach of looking for patterns of development as evidence of design.
The comparative anatomist Richard Owen, a prominent figure in the Victorian era scientific establishment, opposed transmutation throughout his life. When formulating homology he adapted idealist philosophy to reconcile natural theology with development, unifying nature as divergence from an underlying form in a process demonstrating design. His conclusion to his On the Nature of Limbs of 1849 suggested that divine laws could have controlled the development of life, but he did not expand this idea after objections from his conservative patrons. Others supported the idea of development by law, including the botanist Hewett Watson and the Reverend Baden Powell, who wrote in 1855 that such laws better illustrated the powers of the Creator. In 1858 Owen in his speech as President of the British Association said that in "continuous operation of Creative power" through geological time, new species of animals appeared in a "successive and continuous fashion" through birth from their antecedents by a Creative law rather than through slow transmutation.