Creation versus evolution: the never-ending debate, right? So many want us to believe that science and faith are incompatible. But what if they’re not? What if science actually supports faith and what if faith actually informs science? Chip provides helpful insight to the current debate, in a time when the disagreements are more intense than ever.
Main Points
Defining our terms:
- Microevolution: The small changes that only happen within a species. Some examples of microevolution are the mosquito’s ability to resist DDT after years of exposure, and the ability of different bacterial strains to resist penicillin.
- Macroevolution: The vertical transition between species (from one kind of species to another kind) evolving to account for all animal and human life.
- Creation: The belief that God created all things out of nothing, as described in the Bible in the book of Genesis. All of life in its rich complexity happened as the result of the all-powerful, all-knowing, sovereign God of the universe who is Maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.
Today's four major positions:
- Group 1: Classic Creationism - The literal biblical account
- Group 2: Classic Evolution - Random change and natural selection
- Group 3: Theistic Evolution - God-supervised evolution
- Group 4: Intelligent Design - A designer of some kind
How did life begin?
- Evolution: Life’s beginning was unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, a natural process. The beginning of life was random, undirected without either plan or purpose.
- Creation: Defined by the Bible. God spoke.
Why did life begin?
- Evolution: Life began as a pure accident. It was random chance. There was no design, no plan, no meaning, no emotions, no purpose, and no value.
- Creation: You are the special creation of a good and all-powerful God. You are the climax of His creation. Not only is your kind unique, but you are unique among your kind.
How did various plants and animals develop?
- Evolution: A simple cell evolved to more complex plants and animals through the process of time, chance, natural selection, mutations, and survival of the fittest over a period of billions of years.
- Creation: God created various plants, animals, kinds, and species in a harmonic balance to reflect His attributes and character.
Complexity of Life
- Cells: Thanks to today’s more powerful microscopes, we know that a single-cell organism, the most basic unit of any living thing, is incredibly complex.
- DNA: Is like the software of the cell, the computer program that makes it work. In fact, if you took a tablespoon and filled it to the top with this DNA, your tablespoon could contain the precise instructions to build every single species of organism that has ever existed on the planet.
- Astronomy: “Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.” - Robert Jastrow
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