Evolution + Christianity = ????

Al Mohler, Southern Baptist guru and theologian extraordinaire, believes that evolution and Christianity can’t go together. James Dobson, conservative evangelical radio host and leader in the pro-family movement, supports teaching intelligent design in public classrooms. Vince Miller, Georgetown professor of theology and Catholic genius, says much progress has been made integrating the claims of Christian faith with evolutionary science. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French Jesuit missionary to China, claimed that the Genesis account of Creation is metaphor and an understanding of the unfolding cosmos in evolutionary terms is necessary and can be, at its heart, Christian.


Why do I mention these varied opinions? Growing up, I was taught to believe in the literal translation of Genesis. God created the world in six days, Adam and Eve were real people, and the age of the Earth is only about 5 or 6 thousand years old. I attended seminars, read books that encouraged me to argue with my high school biology teachers, and came to see evolution as the great devil of modern science that leads people away from God.


With my Georgetown theological training, you might think that I would have abandoned the literalist interpretation of Genesis by now. As my believing professors claim, the work of famous theologians in the past century has un-problematically harmonized the teachings of Christian faith with those of evolution. Still, my skepticism of the scientific method when paired with the overwhelming trust I place in the authority of the Holy Writ has far outweighed any impact my teachers may have had on me when it comes to believing in evolution. I am still a biblical literalist at heart, and I do believe in a young earth and a real fall and a God active in human history.


What worries me most about evolution, I think, are the corollary philosophies that tend to go along with the idea. First, I need to define what is meant when I say the word “evolution.” In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed the first widely-accepted evolutionary theory by claiming that new species come about through natural selection. Put another way, natural selection can be seen as survival of the fittest. Darwin proposed that as the weak members of a species die off and the stronger members survive to reproduce, the species itself will change and become more like the stronger members. Thus, the species becomes more adapted to the environment as the better-suited individuals live to pass on their genes to future generations. In social theory, natural selection has been used as a way to understand poverty and inequality. Social Darwinism might say that the poor are poor because they are less-fit humans and we needn’t worry about them because they will eventually die out and be replaced by the rich anyways. Eugenics, a science that many claim is the logical result of evolutionary theory applied to humans, is “the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding.” Eugenics was used by Hitler when he sought to prove the superiority of the Aryan Germans over the less-able races of Jews and Gypsies.


What is Scripture’s view of natural selection? I’m not sure if the Bible speaks specifically to the modern scientific notion, but I am pretty sure that we can find out biblical perspectives on the Darwinian philosophy and worldview especially in regards to spiritual matters. How does evolution, and specifically the idea of survival of the fittest, fit into a biblical and spiritual worldview?