The following extract is from an article in The Lutheran Witness, Vol. 117, No. 7, and is used with permission.

Is God an Evolutionist?

By David N. Menton

Some Christians claim God might have used evolution over billions of years to create everything we see today. But that notion just doesn't hold water.

On reading Charles Darwin's evolutionary view in his Origin of Species, a contemporary of Darwin's was said to have responded, "I hope it's not true, and if it is, that it does not become widely known."

Well, true or not (and I would say not), the Darwinian view of the origin of everything by random change and natural selection has indeed become widely known. Surveys, however, at least among Americans, show that Darwinism may be more widely known than believed.

In a recent poll from Gallup, only 9 percent of the Americans asked said they believe that man has evolved from simpler forms of life by a purely materialistic process extending over millions of years.

In contrast, nearly half (47 percent) believe that God created man in essentially his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.

And a significant minority (38 percent) prefers a compromise view involving some form of divinely guided evolution. "This latter view, endorsed by Pope John Paul II in a pronouncement last fall (he called evolution "more than a hypothesis," saying it was "on a par with the opposite hypothesis"), has become a hotly debated subject among Christians.

The question arises: Should Christians try to "make peace" with Darwin?

Creation and our salvation

Of primary concern to the Bible-believing Christian is whether an evolutionary view of origins is compatible with God's Word as revealed in Scripture.

The Bible speaks of a sovereign, omnipotent and omniscient God who created out of nothing (ex nihilo) by the power of His Word. Thus, God exists outside of nature (literally supernatural) and is the Creator of all temporal things we call nature. God Himself, however, is not a created being but rather is uniquely eternal.

It has been said that whatever we hold to be eternal is our god. Those who deny the existence of an eternal God must ultimately declare nature itself to be eternal, and thus nature, in effect becomes their god. The philosophy that recognizes only the natural world as "real" is called naturalism.

Christians should be particularly careful now they view Divine Creation because it is foundational to the whole Bible and Christianity. Creation is given a preeminent position in the first chapter of the Bible and is the First Article of belief in the Apostle's Creed (I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth). Throughout Scripture, the God who is real is contrasted with man's false gods by virtue of God's sovereign role as Creator.

Most important, there is an integral relationship between Creation and our salvation. The first three or so pages of the Bible reveal both man's accountability to God through His Creation and man's subsequent fall into sin and death through his disobedience. All the remaining pages (about 1,500 in a typical Bible) deal directly or indirectly with God's solution to man's sin-problem documented in the first three pages. It should come as no surprise, then, that those who deny human sin and accountability would also seek to deny God as their sovereign Creator. Sadly like Adam and Eve, they try to hide from the very God who could save them.

Still, some Christians have argued that how God created is not that important as long as we credit Him with at least some nonspecific role in the process. They insist that the Bible tells us merely who created while science (or, more accurately, naturalistic scientism) tells us how. After all, they ask, couldn't God have used the process of evolution to create?

But "Divine Darwinism" inevitably leads to either espousing evolution with miracles or creation without miracles. As we shall see, the former is incompatible with Darwinism, while the latter is incompatible with Scripture.

The question of origins

When it comes to the ultimate origin of nature and living things, many contemporary scientists insist that we must ignore even the possibility of intelligent design and confine ourselves to purely naturalistic explanations. To the consistent evolutionist, none of the obvious complexities of living things can be considered as evidence for purpose or design.

The denial of the manifest evidence of the handiwork of God in nature is in direct contradiction to the Biblical claim that nature reveals the glory of God. The Scriptures say that God's "invisible qualities...have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse" (Rom. 1:20). Indeed, Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans that this visible evidence of God's eternal power and majesty in nature is so obvious that man can deny it only by "suppressing the truth."

At the end of his life, Charles Darwin considered Genesis a "manifestly false history of the world," adding that he "could hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true." Sadly, the widespread rumors of his deathbed repudiation of evolutionism and return to Christianity are unfounded.

Many Christians accept the view that science must never appeal to the supernatural to explain natural phenomena. This axiom would seem reasonable if we were speaking of ongoing phenomena that are subject to study by empirical science (more on this term below). Certainly, a scientist can understand something of the structure and function of, say, the human eye in purely physical-chemical terms without considering metaphysical or supernatural principles. The eye, like a camera, appears to be an optical device (though a profoundly complex one) that obeys the fundamental laws and physical properties of nature.

However, just because an existing biological system (such as the eye), like an existing manmade machine, can be understood in mechanistic terms, it does not necessarily follow that the origin of that system can also be understood in that way. How, for example, would one explain the origin of a modern automatic camera in purely naturalistic terms? Nothing we know about the physical composition of a camera could cause its spontaneous self-assembly with time. Sophisticated cameras come into existence only when intelligent designers and builders impose their design and work on the raw material from which the camera is made. Surely we can assume no less for a vastly more complex optical device like the eye.

It is further argued that science must never consider the supernatural (even for origins) because to do so suppresses further inquiry and is thus fatal to the advancement of science. Some evolutionists go so far as to insist that Biblical Christianity (and particularly the doctrine of creation) would, if widely accepted, mean the end of all modern science and its benefits. This serious accusation bears our further investigation.

What is true science?

In its broadest sense, the word science merely means knowledge or experience. But when most of us think about the wonderful achievements of science, we are generally thinking of a particular type of science known as empirical science.

Empirical science is the study of nature by means of the so-called scientific method. Powerful though it may be, empirical science does have three important requirements that limit the kind of questions it is best suited to answer.

First, empirical science must deal with objects or phenomena that are observable. Second, the phenomenon under study must be repeatable so it can be reexamined under controlled conditions. Finally, any hypothesis we might propose to explain a phenomenon must be testable by some critical experiment capable of disproving it (in the event the hypothesis is false). Hypotheses that repeatedly withstand tests that could disprove them are called theories.

Because of these limitations, the scientific method is best suited to studying things as they now exist. Empirical science can tell us much about how our existing eyes work, but it is severely limited in telling us how we came to have eyes in the first place. Thus, our attempts to explain origins (which occurred, obviously, long before you and I were around) are not technically scientific theories at all.

The origin of life

Darwin assumed that life itself evolved by chance from simple chemicals in some "warm little pond," but he was unable to provide any specifics. To this day, an evolutionary explanation for the origin of life has proven to be so elusive to rational speculation that many evolutionists now insist it is not even a part of the theory of evolution. In what has become a well-known analogy, the prominent evolutionist Sir Fred Hoyle has concluded that the formation of a living organism by chance would be comparable to "a tornado sweeping through a junkyard [and assembling] a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."

Nobel laureate Dr. Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA), in his book Life Itself, concedes that the improbability of life's chance origin simply defies calculation. Crick, an atheist, said: "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle."

Classical Darwinism

Wisely slapping over the most difficult step in evolution, the origin of life, Darwin was primarily interested in how the various plant and animal species came into existence. He proposed four postulates that still constitute the central dogma of evolutionism.

First, he proposed that the variation he observed among the individuals of a species was unlimited. Second, he proposed that more animals of a species are born than can possibly survive, given limited resources, and that this results in a struggle for survival. Third, he proposed that only those animals survive who happen by chance to be the most fit-a process called "natural selection." Finally, he proposed that those organisms that acquire characteristics that permit them to survive in their struggle with the less fit would pass those characteristics on to their offspring.

Darwin's only observable evidence for "evolution in action" was the great variation that occurs among the individuals of a species. He was especially impressed by the seemingly endless range of variation produced by animals under domestication such as pigeons and dogs. He reasoned that if breeders could produce such a range of variation by selecting for desired traits, nature in time could accomplish even more through "natural selection."

Darwin, who knew nothing of genetics, erroneously assumed that there was virtually no limit to this variation among the individuals of a species.

Today, evolutionists like to refer to the sort of variation we see among individuals of a species as microevolution, implying that this is somehow related to the chance formation of fundamentally new animals by a process known as macroevolution. Most evolutionists, however, concede that there is no known relationship between so-called microevolution and macroevolution. Even so, most biology textbooks continue to extrapolate the observable but limited variation among the individuals of a species into the unobservable evolution of fundamentally new animals.

The fossil record

Since evolution is believed to occur far too slowly to be discernible in the time frame of human observers, fossils must be used to provide the historical evidence whether life has in fact evolved from simple to more complex forms.

Fossilization typically occurs when organisms (either living or dead) are deposited from water into sediment. In some instances, the sediment solidifies, making a cast of the entombed organism. In others, the organic material of the organism itself is replaced by mineral to form a stony replica.

Conditions must be perfect for fossilization to occur, which explains why there is so little evidence of fossils being formed today. Both the burial of the organism in sediment and its subsequent hardening must occur quickly lest the decay process destroy the organism before it is fossilized. Most fossils do indeed give evidence of quick and catastrophic burial.

Evolutionists believe that fossilized organisms were gradually deposited in sequential layers of sediment over hundreds of million of years. This, they believe, has produced a geologic column comprising many layers of sedimentary rock that give a visual record of at least some of the stages of evolution from the first simple organisms to the most complex.

Most creationists, on the other hand, believe that nearly all fossils were deposited over a relatively short time during and after a worldwide deluge, namely, Noah's Flood. Thus, creationists believe the fossil record reveals organisms that were mostly contemporary with one another-not an evolutionary sequence extending over millions of years. These beliefs are sufficiently different that it should be quite easy to determine which is more consistent with the fossil record as it exists today.

To be consistent with evolution, the fossil record should show how organisms slowly transformed one into another through countless intermediate or transitional stages. Evolutionists, for example, claim that it took more than 100 million years for the gradual transformation of invertebrates into vertebrates. If this were true, we would expect that the fossil record should show at least some' of the progressive stages of this large-scale transformation.

To be consistent with creation, on the other hand, the fossil record should show no obvious transitional stages between distinctly different kinds of organisms, but rather each kind of organism should appear all at one and fully formed.

A growing number of evolutionists concede at least that the fossil record shows few (if any) unambiguous transitional stages in the evolution of an organism into a distinctly different kind of organism. The popular evolutionist Stephen J. Gould has called this "the trade secret of paleontology." Evolutionists have been aware of these missing transitional forms since the time of Darwin, blaming it on the incompleteness of the fossil record. Some still cling to the hope that the "missing links" which they believe formed a continuous chain of evolution may yet be found. This seems unlikely, however, since most paleontologists believe that the majority of all existing fossilized species of plants and animals (numbering more than 250,000) have already been found and identified.

Even most of the currently living kinds of plants and animals have been found in essentially their present form in the fossil record. David Raup, a paleontologist at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, has proposed that we may even have fewer examples of evolutionary transition today than we had in Darwin's time! This surprising conclusion is based on the fact that some of the classic examples of transitions, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information.

The evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson conceded in his book Major Features of Evolution that most new genera, species and families and nearly all broader categories of plants and animals, "appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences. " Steven J. Gould echoes this point: "In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and fully formed." This, of course, is exactly what creationists would expect to find.

The Evidence for Creation

Evolutionists often challenge Creationists to come up with their own scientific explanation for origins. The only explanation the evolutionist will accept, however, is a materialistic one. Since the act of creation was clearly a miraculous event, there can be no materialistic explanation. Whether or not we find the evidence for Creation compelling depends on our willingness to accept the Biblical revelation of an omnipotent and omniscient God.

As we've noted, many scientists have great difficulty accepting the idea that some things may not have a natural explanation. They do not seem to fear the unknown so much as the unknowable. This threatens the pride and sovereignty of natural man, who from the time of the Fall wishes to be as gods, deciding for himself what is right and wrong.

Most of the scientific argument for Creation involves the overwhelming evidence for intelligent design in nature, while demonstrating the utter failure of evolutionary explanations that appeal to chance. We usually have no trouble detecting evidence for intelligent design in a structure (Stonehenge, for example), even if we do not exactly know its builder or purpose.

Let's briefly consider three evidences for special Creation

1. Intelligent design:

The Bible reminds us of the obvious fact that an intelligent designer and builder is necessary for building anything that is complex, "for every house is built by someone, but He who built all things is God" (Heb. 3:4).

Modem biology has found living things to be far more complex than Darwin could have imagined in his day. The human brain, for example, consists of approximately 12 billion cells, forming 120 trillion interconnections. The light-sensitive retina of the eye (which is really part of the brain) contains more than 10 million photoreceptor cells. These cells capture the light pattern formed by the lens and convert it into complex electrical signals, which are processed and sent to a special area of the brain where they are transformed into the marvelous sensation we call vision.

The signal-processing ability of the cells in the retina greatly exceeds the computational power of our most sophisticated super-computers. It has been estimated that in one one-hundredth of a second, the signal processing of a single photoreceptor cell from the retina requires the solution of approximately 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times! Considering that there are more than 10 million such cells interacting in complex ways in the retina, it would take nearly 100 years for the fastest Cray supercomputer to simulate what takes place in our eye many times every second!

2. All life reproduces after its kind:

The Bible tells us tint following its original creation, each animal continued to reproduce after its kind (the Hebrew word for kind is min). "Let the earth bring forth the living creature according to its kind: cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth, each according to its kind: and it was so" (Genesis 1:24).

This would seem to leave little room for evolution unless the Genesis kind might have represented a higher taxonomic group, like perhaps a class or order. In an effort to accommodate at least some evolution in Creation, it has been proposed that God might have created, for example, a single bird kind from which all the species of birds alive today have evolved. Levitical law, however, defines kind much more narrowly than this. A long list of birds, including the falcon, raven, ostrich, short-eared owl, screech owl, white owl, carrion vulture, stork and heron are each described as being a kind (Lev. 11:14-19).

In his "Table Talks," Martin Luther spoke of the Greek scholar Cicero's proof for the existence of God; "The best argument that there is a God-and it often moved me deeply-is this one that he proves from generation of species: A cow always bears a cow, a horse always bears a horse, etc. No cow gives birth to a horse; no horse gives birth to a cow; no goldfinch produces a siskin [another kind of finch]. Therefore it is necessary to conclude that there is something that directs everything thus."

3. Dating and the appearance of age:

Even among those Christians who seem to agree that God created solely by the power of His Word, there remains disagreement about the age of the earth and, by implication, the duration of the "six days" of Creation.

Certainly, if there were no compelling reasons to believe otherwise, the Bible clearly implies that the six days of creation were six ordinary days. While the Hebrew word for day (yom) can mean a long time, the intent of the author is generally evident in the text. Not only were the days of Creation numbered, as was customary for literal rather than figurative days, but each "was described in the Hebrew manner for ordinary days as having an evening and a morning. The word yom appears in Scripture more than 100 times in association with "evening and morning," and in every case, it clearly refers to an ordinary day.

Some Christians are convinced that the scientific evidence of a 4.5 billion-year-old earth is so compelling that Scripture must be interpreted in light of science - no matter what the text may say. Space does not permit a critique of geological dating methods, but suffice it to say they hardly constitute an exact science. Different methods often give different dates for the same rocks. Even different rocks from the same geological formation may give different dates.

When "unacceptable" dales are encountered, geologists often use their evolutionary assumptions about the presumed age of the fossils in the rock layers to date the rock. Since the rock layers in turn are used to date the fossils they contain, this is circular reasoning.

In any event, Christians should be aware that while the earth may appear to some to be vastly older than a literal Biblical chronology would allow, it may still be far, far younger than those people would suggest it is.

Virtually everything that God created (including the wine for the wedding at Cana) must have had the appearance of age and ongoing process at the very moment of its creation. Adam and Eve, for example, were presumably created as sexually mature adults. If Eve had been created with hair as long as artists tend to portray it, it would have appeared to be the product of more than 10 years of hair growth (assuming a growth rate of .3 millimeters a day). It would be ludicrous to think, however, that the omnipotent Creator, who was able to instantly create Eve by means of a miracle, would then be obliged to wait several years to "create" a head of hair by natural processes.

Similarly, a Creator who can create the stars by the power of His Word would not then be obliged to wait billions of years for their light to reach the earth to serve man as "signs and seasons."

The implications of evolution

The Scriptures tell us that "by sin, death came into the world, "and that the "the wages of sin is death." Evolutionists, however, vigorously deny that sin has anything to do with death, but rather that death is natural. Life, they insist, would be impossible without death.

Certainly, evolution would be impossible without death. Death, in fact, has been called the "engine" of evolution. Carl Sagan said: "Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today."

Evolutionism inevitably breaks the relationship between sin and death, thus negating the need for a Savior who would save us from sin, death and the power of the devil.

Finally, when the Lord returns in glory on the Last Day, and the dead are raised from their graves, will scholars attempt one last naturalistic explanation for even this? Or will we finally concede that God does miracles beyond our understanding? Will we finally be still before the throne of God, and let God be God, though every man be found a liar? We will indeed!

Dr. David N. Menton is
associate professor of anatomy
at the Washington University
School of Medicine, St. Louis.
and a member of Faith
Lutheran Church. Twin Oaks.Mo.