Today I was watching a TV show that I had recorded a while ago. Richard Dawkins era The genius of Charles Darwin. On the show, Dawkins visited a school and talked to some kids about the topic of evolution. The program offered some of the familiar evidence of evolution, including Darwin’s wonderful collection of specimens amassed during his voyage on the Beagle, his pigeon-breeding experiments, and a look at a wide variety of fossils.
In fact, he took some schoolchildren to a beach to look for fossils; and discussed the sequence of creation recorded in the fossil record. Surprisingly, at least to me, many of the children he spoke with had rejected the idea of evolution and were convinced that their own religious views offered better explanations of how life came to be. However, although the descriptions of creation within certain religious texts may seem diametrically opposed to natural selection, evolution is actually God’s creative process.
Of course, I am aware that such a statement raises other important questions, such as the question of the existence of the spider wasp that we recently discussed, and indeed, as Dawkins and others have pointed out, the whole issue of animal suffering and its relationship to idea of a creator God. In this article, however, we will focus on the question of why evolution does not contradict the Bible and how it is possible for two seemingly contradictory views to be simultaneously true.
Perhaps the best place to start this discussion is with a little analogy, so let’s get on the subject of light. According to scholars, sometimes light behaves like a wave and other times it behaves like a stream of particles. It is neither a waveform nor a stream of particles, but both at the same time, although this idea seems to be invalid, counterintuitive, and just plain wrong. As far as we can understand the matter, the fact is that light has a dual nature.
Exactly the same is true about the biblical description of God’s creation process. Yes, it is true that the Bible uses different language to describe the creation process, but none of this description conflicts with what scientists have found in fossils. What needs to be understood is that different perspectives on the same subject are often valuable in allowing us to form fuller and richer overall pictures. This is an important principle.
Quantum mechanics tells us that it is impossible to know the position and momentum of an electron at the same time. And that? Well, science has shown that, firstly, we simply can’t know the answer to some questions, and secondly, while we focus on any one of these characteristics of an electron, the other must remain uncertain. This is not due to any kind of deficiency in our ability to measure; it is a statement about the nature of reality.
Similarly, when different perspectives provide separate but equally valid descriptions of reality, as is the case with the uncertainty principle, as we focus on one particular perspective, the other necessarily becomes increasingly uncertain. That’s what happens when broadcasters like Richard Dawkins insist that the Bible suggests a recent creation date for the Earth, thousands of years from now, which, of course, it doesn’t. It is exactly the same theme, although from the opposite perspective, when some Christians say that God created the fossils to ‘test our faith’ or that they are the footprints of animals that did not survive after the flood; comments that have no real place in polite society.
When we accept that evolution is God’s creative process, we free ourselves from trying to reconcile two different perspectives on the same truth. Furthermore, we can begin to focus on the purpose of the Bible, which was never intended to be read as a scientific document to be compared and contrasted with modern scientific explanations of the creative process.