... and then God created evolution: evolution does not imply that there is no God.

• Author: Frost, Ron
• Position: Religion

THE GREAT evolution debate, which long has troubled American society, is driven by two passionate camps. On one extreme stand the Creationists, who maintain that evolution cannot have occurred because it belies a literal interpretation of the Bible. On the other extreme stand neoatheist scientists who contend that evolution is a mechanistic process that makes any belief in God or a spiritual dimension unnecessary (or, to be more extreme, fallacious). Both camps can agree on only one thing: it is impossible to believe in evolution and in God at the same time. During this entire debate, seldom has it been noted that a third interpretation of evolution occupies the middle ground between these extreme vantage points. This view, which is predicated on the validity of evolution and the existence of a spiritual dimension, has been around for more than 50 years.

A contributing problem to this debate is the failure of both sides to distinguish between the facts of Earth history and the interpretation of those facts. Science has accumulated a huge army of data about the age of the Earth and the history of life upon it. Recently, astronomy, augmented by physics, has shown that the universe is 13,700,000,000 years old. Geologists armed with cutting-edge chemical analyses have shown that the Earth is 4,550,000,000 years old. The sciences of biology, genetics, and biochemistry show that all life on Earth could have formed from a common ancestor, although the identity of that ancestor has not yet been found. Paleontologists replete with new sophisticated analytical instruments and methods have established a progressively more detailed picture of how life on Earth has changed over time.

The common interpretation of these facts is that evolution is a random mechanistic process that simply involves the transfer of genetic material from one generation to the next. Indeed, some of the most prominent neoatheists are biologists who use the existence of evolution as a major argument against the existence of God. This has led to a theory of evolution that theologian John Haught calls evolutionary materialism. Christians (and some other religious people) have reacted in horror to the neoatheists' claim that evolution implies that human life is purposeless and meaningless--that transferring genes to your offspring is its only praise. The mistake the Creationists make is to attack the facts of evolution rather than the materialistic way that these facts are...