Evolution
and Creationism are not mutually exclusive
Am I the only one who doesn’t believe that evolution and creationism are mutually exclusive?
If you believe in evolution you believe that human beings as well as other animals evolved from other forms or species. If you believe in creationism you believe, at least by my definition, that God created our entire physical creation and its spectrum of creatures, including human beings. Why is it that so few people seem to believe in both?
A belief in a divine creation can be of two kinds. One can believe that God directly created human beings, for instance, as those who take the book of Genesis literally would argue. Or one can believe that He created a broader system that indirectly, yet very consciously and intentionally, gave birth to the human species. The first conflicts with contemporary theories on evolution (and more generally, reason in general). The second, though, doesn’t.
That there exists a phenomenon in our material world called evolution reaffirms, rather than conflicts with my belief in God. This is the case because it suggests to me that evolution, like so many other things, is woven into the fabric of creation, and written into the very laws of science that govern that creation. That I can drop a ball from a height and watch it accelerate towards the earth at 9.8 m/s/s every time; that an electron and a cluster of protons and neutrons oppose each other and yet are naturally ordered in a common atom; that exploding chunks of matter in space seem to gather in solar systems with elliptical orbits; that life on earth has yielded a giraffe with a neck long enough to eat leaves off of tall trees; that it has furthermore yielded a creature capable of contemplating these very mysteries; these phenomena make it particularly difficult, rather than logical, to dismiss the notion of a divine Creator as a well-intended myth.
As the commonly-cited example suggests, the chances of randomness’ resulting in the existence of human beings are roughly equal to the chance that a hurricane in a junkyard might give you a 747. But this is not a satisfactory piece of evidence to show that there is consciousness in creation. Rather, the existence of things like natural selection and evolution in nature, and the reality that these biological laws have acted as tools in our creation, helps paint a picture with the brushes of both science and spirituality that is much more palatable than anything else I can imagine.
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