I wrote this essay years ago to sort out my thoughts about creation and evolution and why I would choose to follow the God of the Bible rather than to choose to disbelieve in that God. By the time I finished the essay I had made my choice and reworked the whole thing to reflect that choice. Feel free to comment to disagree with my logic, etc. I don’t get offended and I enjoy a good debate.
Did God Use Evolution?
Have you asked any of the following questions?
Where did the universe and everything in it come from?
What’s the point of anything?
How’s it all going to end?
Is God real?
From the study of psychology we learn that people who do not ask and think about this type of question never ‘own’ their faith, they just blindly accept whatever they are taught. Some people question their beliefs in one area but neglect another. People are also capable of having conflicting ideas believing both to be true. Further, lots of people never think through the implications of their beliefs.
In this article I am going to discuss the two contrasting dominant world-views, Evolution vs. Creation. Exploring the answers each gives to the above questions, and I intend to answer the question “Did God use evolution?”
A long time ago …
When I was a little girl, my mother taught me that God created the sun, the moon and stars, the world and everything in it. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth … and it was good.” Genesis 1.
Then I went to school and learned a new theory called ‘Evolution and the Big Bang’. Essentially this theory says:
“In the beginning there was nothing and it exploded, and made everything, and this was called the Big Bang. Everything was in chaos. Over billions of years everything pulled itself together and got organized, by following natural laws. Then everything made itself into stars and planets. One insignificant planet on the outskirts of everything just happened to have the right gravity and mix of chemical elements and to be the right distance away from its star, which just happened to be the right size, type, and temperature, for life to spontaneously overcome huge mathematical improbabilities and spark into existence in the primeval soup that covered the face of the earth.
Then millions of more years passed and through the laws of natural selection the spark of life grew and evolved and hundreds and thousands of different types of life, called species, came to being and lived and died, evolved into new species and became extinct. And finally humans evolved from the great apes and took dominion of the earth. And it was not good or bad but it was what happened. And in all these billions of years there was no god nor any need for a god.” (Catriona’s summarized version)
Time goes by …
As we grew older my brother and I used to have great debates about how God created the world, we wanted to believe the Bible and we also wanted to believe the scientists.
Exactly what happened when God spoke? Did His word make the matter? Or did it organize matter that was already there? Or did He somehow use evolution? And His word started each step of a long drawn out process? We came to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter how the world was made or what we believed about origins, it wasn’t going to affect our eternal salvation or how we lived our lives now.
We couldn’t have been more wrong.
Because …
To be able to understand why we were so wrong you need to understand the rules of natural selection, this theory is commonly described as “survival of the fittest.”
Essentially natural selection says that a species can adapt to fit the current environmental conditions. A classic example of natural selection is given to us by Darwin’s finches. Which goes something like this…
At some time in the past some seed eating finches were blown by strong winds from mainland South America to the off shore Galapagos Islands, which until that point had had no birds. With no competition or predators the birds reproduced and multiplied very quickly until the bird population increased to be more than the islands seed resources could handle. The birds started to starve. Some birds who just happened because of their genetic mix to have bigger beaks than the average found that they could eat berries and so survived and had baby birds, also with larger beaks, while large numbers of their smaller beaked cousins died. Over many finch generations their came to be two species of finches on the Galapagos Islands. (There are now several species of finches on the Galapagos Islands. It was after observing these that Charles Darwin wrote his book ‘Origin of The Species’.)
There is nothing wrong with the theory of natural selection in itself, we can see it happening within any species, for example there are many types of daisies. Mountain daisies thrive in cold climates, others need warmer temperatures to flourish, some like sandy soil while others require a soil type that holds the moisture better. All daisy varieties are products of their environments but they are all still daisies. The problem comes when you try to say that one kind of species evolved through natural selection into another kind of species. For example, evolutionists say a lizard was an ancestor of the original Galapagos Island finch. They say many small changes over millions of years changed reptiles into birds.
The point to notice from this theory is that it involves a large amount of death. An environment alters, a species can no longer survive as it is so all the unadapted (unfit) individuals die, and the adapted individuals survive, the adaptation occurring because of some fluke genetic trait that makes them more fit to survive in the altered environment than the original individuals. All this change involves death.
Evolutionists say that man is at the end of three and a half billion year old evolutionary chain. All three and a half billion of them involving death.
The beginning implies the end …
Why were my brother and I so wrong? It’s the end implications of the 3 possible beginnings stories that make the difference:
1. Literal Biblical Seven Day Creation:
What does the bible say about death and its entry into the world? “Where for as by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin and so death passed upon all men for that all have sinned.” Roman 5:12
The Bible teaches:
i. In seven days man (Adam) and the world were created, perfect.
ii. Man sinned.
iii. Death entered the world.
iv. Jesus died to save us from sin and death.
v. Jesus is coming again to remake us in our former sinless glory and take us back to heaven forever.
vi. God loves us with an everlasting love.
vii. My eternal salvation is assured if I accept the free gift Jesus gives me.
viii. I live my life to bring glory to God.
2. Billions Of Years Of Evolution:
Evolution teaches:
i. Man evolved through the process of natural selection (lots of death).
ii. There is no such thing as sin.
iii. Death has always been with us.
iv. Jesus was just a man who died.
v. Heaven doesn’t exist.
vi. God doesn’t exist.
vii. I have no eternal salvation, when I die that’s it.
viii. I live my life however I please and am accountable to no-one.
3. Some Kind Of Fusion Of Them Both (e.g. each biblical day symbolizes millions of years)
Now see if you can make these two theories fit together, (lots of people believe both because they don’t think each theory through to its end point.) If you can manage to fuse these two worldviews then there are some inescapable conclusions to be made:
i. After 3½ billion years man evolved to perfection (if this is perfection…). Death was a tool God used in the creation process.
ii. Man sinned – but sin doesn’t exist.
iii. If the literal Biblical account of creation is untrue then death is a natural part of life and not the result of sin. The wages of sin can’t be death, because God used death to create - which happened before sin, which doesn’t exist.
iv. Jesus died to save us from something, not sin because it doesn’t exist, and not death because death is God’s tool. (So really Christ’s death on the cross was a pointless exercise.)
v. Jesus is coming again to remake us in our former sinless glory (would that be the Neanderthal glory or the Ape glory?) and take us back to heaven (which doesn’t exist) forever.
vi. If God loves us I can do without that kind of love. (The God who used evolution as a creation mechanism must be a very cruel God indeed.)
vii. I live my life trying to please a cruel and distant God (The Bible was lying about sin and its results (death), so I can’t trust anything else it says either.)
Trying to fuse these two worldviews just doesn’t work they contradict each other in too many important points.
Three choices …
Biblical creation and evolution are incompatible. Trying to mix the two results in a book of lies and a God no one would want to worship. This leaves us with two possible beginnings, ‘Creation by God’ or ‘The Big Bang and Evolution’. I can’t tell you whether to choose to believe in creation and the Bible or in evolution, both require faith because neither can be proved beyond doubt, however let’s look at how each answers my original questions.
| Question | Biblical Creation Answer | Evolution Answer |
| Where did everything come from? | “In the beginning God created…” Genesis 1 | In the beginning there was nothing |
| What is the point of everything? | “Fear God and give glory to him and worship him who made heaven and earth …” Revelation 14:67 | There is no point. |
| How is it all going to end? | “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth…” Revelation 21:1-5 | At some point the human species will do one of two things: 1. Evolve into higher form 2. Become extinct (much more likely) |
| Is God real? | Yes | No |
Did God use evolution?
My brother and I grew up and left school he went out to work and I went back to school and learned how to teach. While my educational life continued to steadily climb, my spiritual life staggered around, sometimes making advances but more often than not retreating. Taking a paper in philosophy started me thinking about God again, I decided that I would choose to believe in the God of the Bible, if I didn’t make that choice I might as well kill myself because a life without God would be pointless and hopeless, why should I put myself through seventy odd years of life with no point, no guarantees that any of it would be good, and no hope of anything better at the end?
I choose to put my faith in the God of the literal seven day creation week and when someone asks me “Do you think God used evolution” I answer with a resounding “NO HE DID NOT!”
As a science teacher I know there appears to be a lot of facts proving that evolution is true, but these facts can be interpreted in different ways depending on whether the scientist doing the interpreting has an evolutionary bias or a creationist bias, and there are scientists out there who believe in creation. We have to arm our children and ourselves with biblical interpretations of these facts. Educate yourself in the theories relating to evolution, most high school biology or science textbooks have a section about either ‘The Evolution of Life’ or ‘The Big Bang and the Formation of the Universe’. Learn to understand the arguments for and against evolution so that when you are asked you can give intelligent answers to questioners, there are many good books for this purpose at the ABC and other Christian book shops, an excellent magazine called ‘Creation’ is put out quarterly by the Creation Science Foundation. (www.AnswersInGenesis.org)
I strongly believe that to truly own our Biblical Christian faith we must know and understand why we believe in a literal seven day creation week exactly as the Bible says. As a church I believe we need to put much more effort into defending the creation week as it is the foundation upon which all our other beliefs rest, including the Sabbath.
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