This is a curiosity I have. Every christian I’ve talked to about Evolution has their own way of synergizing the facts with the Bible. They usually use simple explanations that speak to the mind in a matter-of-fact or ‘it just makes sense’ way. I’m curious what the sciene-y people here have to say in the same ‘it just makes sense’ way.
“Describe how Evolution and Creationism work together in only 5 sentences.”
Keep it simple, use up to five sentences. If you want to add more detail, leave a space and continue. I’ll give examples that I’ve heard over the years:
“Evolution and Creationism don’t have to be enemies. Why couldn’t God have created Evolution? He made the laws of nature, why couldn’t he do this?”
“If God is all-powerful, he could just direct the course of Evolution.”
“Natural selection makes sense, but speciation is God’s work. Also, how can you say that a marsupial-like creature became a whale? That just seems wrong, no matter how much time you give it. God has to be real.”
All the sentences you‘ve heard assumes a mechanistic world so i‘ll give you a quote from physicist James Jeans first :
he turned to this idea as the primary subject of his best-selling[19] 1930 book, The Mysterious Universe, where he asserted that a picture of the universe as a “non-mechanical reality” was emerging from the science of the day.
The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter… we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.
A world governed by purposeful laws is not the enemy of a God who speaks things into existence.
Evolution is an open process that prepares the arena for free moral agents where a sacrificial principle would one day be revealed as the means of fellowship between the creature and his Creator. Nature shows the greatness and the mystery of His attributes where the same sacrificial principle holds the balance of the living world by His providence, not by tinkering. God does not need to constantly correct what He spoke to fulfill His eternal plan.
The Ancient of Days doesn’t need a young cosmos to have a purposeful creation.
I am not convinced that you are working Creationism into Evolution. You seem to be claiming that God shouted and ran away. Leaving Nature to sort itself out until God decided it was time for His dramatic entrance for humanity.
Creationists do not see God as tinkering, and only a minority are YEC.
It would seem that your view of Creationism is limited and out of date.
God is lavishly abundant - giving both rain and sunshine in their due seasons and times for all plants and creatures - including humans regardless of their righteousness or merit.
In the same way, a patient God also lets the earth ‘bring forth’ life - gloriously wild and various - very “other” from the Creator and yet, in humanity’s case, endowed with the Creator’s image and immanence.
Science glories in seeking out understanding of the created order, and evolution is the biological term that now captures our best current understanding of the long unfolding and development of life and some of the mechanisms that God put in place that operate to bring it about.
So while chaos and death are both seen as fearful things by the ancients, we now recognize how even these last ‘enemies’ are ultimately in the service of Christ. While chaos isn’t given much scriptural mention, except as an apparent antithesis to created order, we can now recognize how even that is a necessary part of created order in the long run, as a lavish God can and does use even apparent ‘randomness’ to see that abundances get appropriately distributed - evident in every breath that we take.
We don’t have to see things that way. In fact God never ceases to sustain the created order through ordinary and extraordinary processes, while upholding all things by the word of His power.
‘has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high’
Hebrews 1.v2-3
An open process like biological evolution is still under physical and chemical constraint, in which case nothing in those processes or in the idea of a contingent order explicitly is at odds with intrinsic teleology, an immanent governance or intelligent causation.
If you have a more updated view to give I’m all ears but we ought to make sure we’re not mistaking a framework for a worldview. The former is a way of thinking with explanatory power while the latter is the story of what it all means. Neither gets to do the other’s job, and the main issue with these conversations is that we tend to turn evolution into an all-encompassing worldview.
Because that is how it comes across and has been presented.
However claiming
is equally unsubstantiated outside of a view of Scripture and the extent of the parameters you imply is also not substantiated by Science
does not prove intelligent construction. They could be just necessary for the thing to exist at all.
Casually claiming God’s involvement in Evolution ignores the science and thought behind it. I cannot prove that God did or did not use either only evolution, or it in part. All I can claim is that Evolution as it stands now, cannot do what science claims (Which does not make me very popular)
IOW to fulfil the brief, there has to be a marriage between creationism and Evolution that neither science nor many Christians want to exist.
I don’t think there is a refusal to have both Creation and Evolution, and some propose to separate observational from historical science but I’d argue the notion of creation needs a divorce from the idea that God could only exist within the gaps of science.
With a teleological framework we could actually hold both as complementary notions. In the end it depends on whether we see Science as a methodology that doesn’t have to have the ultimate answer on the question of origins settled, or whether we make the category error of seeing Science as an ideology (scientism) that could provide a theory of everything, seeking an absolute explanation of reality reduced to nature and handing us a conclusive secular philosophy. I’d rather let it be what it is, a rigorous and successful instrument that helps us understand the natural world by providing descriptions we then interpret through particular lenses and frameworks.
The misuse of science by individuals isn’t a sign that Science itself is able to make any metaphysical claims with a purpose-blind methodology. I’m not persuaded that a contingent order is necessary in itself without an atemporal, immaterial causation at the source of the fine-tuning, making the processes biased toward life with convergent solutions. One could give physics God-like properties (transcendant, immanent, necessary, intentional ect) for sure but a secular faith is still a faith, even in scientific dress.
I meant faith as in a conviction, a conviction might be reasoned but it still is not demonstrated by the scientific method. The sting with the contingent order is that it can’t will its own existence nor can it will a fine-tuned cosmos and that is something I think a Christian could actually care about. McGrath actually touched on this :
‘The fact that biological evolution is chemically constrained means that questions of fine-tuning cannot be avoided. From a theistic perspective of course this fine-tuning provides no problems and once again McGrath argues that the Augustinian notion of seminal reasons provides a fruitful heuristic for understanding the interplay of intrinsic potentialities and their external activation.’
That would be the claim of necessity though (not contingency), as in chance and necessity plus those stays metaphysical claims among others. The burden then is to explain why an intelligible fine-tuned universe is a necessity or at least more necessary than a God who wills beings with the ability to understand it.
We could have different convictions but I tend to disagree with the idea that bold claims and suboptimal metaphysical claims are mere different point of views, or we might as well believe the world is 6000 years old with an appearance of age because Science ‘got things wrong in the past’. There need to be a reasoned answer as to why we hold a conviction that is at odd with observed properties, in this case physical and chemical constraint not leaving room for many options about the nature of the world.
That doesn’t mean one has to agree 100% , we’re free to hold whatever beliefs even though they look extravagant in someone else’s eyes.