I have struggled with Darwinian evolution for my entire life. I have often said that Darwinian evolution will be responsible for more souls in hell than any other idea in human history. My understanding of Darwinian evolution has “evolved” over the years:
Intelligent design explains it all….evolution is not true.
Evolution explains it all….intelligent design is an allegory.
God used evolution to acheive creation.
If you must choose between the Bible and “The Origin of Species”….choose the Bible.
On the issue of life, our culture has split into two camps: Intelligent design and Darwinian evolution.
Either……Or.
That is pretty much where the argument stands today. Each side thinks that the other side is naive, foolish, just plain stupid, or……worst of all……damned.
My Bible reading today is Genesis…….the history of the flood. Noah, his family, and a bunch of animals get into a big boat and survive a catastrophic flood. Then, they climb out and repopulate the earth. I believe that every word in the Bible is important. There is one word in this passage that is critical…….”kind”. The animals in the ark consisted of pairs of each “kind” of animal. Understanding the ark requires an understanding of this one word…..”kind”. Fortunately, the Bible defines it for us:
“every bird according to its kind, everything with wings.”
Genesis 7:14, ESV
So…..in Genesis, a “kind” is a representative of a class of animals. The seven pairs of birds on the ark were representatives of all winged animals. And there is the rub. How do we get from 14 winged animals on the ark to the ten to twenty thousand species of birds on earth today?
Enter Darwin.
The Bible and Darwin both have something to say. They are both silent on other areas. The Bible gives a comprehensive explanation of the origin of the universe, of the creation of life, and of the rescue of “kinds” on the ark. It is silent on how we got from a quite limited number of animals on the ark to the incredible variety of life on earth today. Darwin provides a comprehensive explanation of the variety of life forms that we see today. He is silent on the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the flood.
What if……instead of either/or……..it is a case of both/and?
What if, the ark wasn’t full of dinosaurs? What if the lizard “kind” was a pair of iguanas? What if God turned evolution loose after the flood to create the awesome variety of life that we see today from a much smaller number of “kinds” that survived the flood. What if millions of species, including the dinosaurs, perished in the flood? This reconciles the small number of “kinds” on the ark with the amazing variety of life today. It also fits the fossil record.
There is another side of the flood/ark. The ark contained a small number of species compared to what we see today. In a post flood world, Darwin’s theory primarily describes the creation of new species……not the replacement or modification of existing species. That means that “survival of the fittest”……the improvement of existing species……the accidental creation of new species…….is a minor aspect of Darwinian evolution. Because this eliminates the need for a new adaptive mutation to work its way through the entire planet, replacing a weaker species, this is a much much faster process. This eliminates one of the biggest problems with Darwin……the fact that there just hasn’t been enough time.
The flood and the ark clearly represent a global reset.
In your cell phone, there is an icon that says “return to factory settings”. Touch the icon and your phone returns to the condition it was in when you bought it. All of the layers of apps and shells are deleted. So are all of the pieces of malware that you have accumulated. So also is all of your data. We tend to think of the ark as the preservation of life. We don’t consider that the flood destroyed an enormous variety of life forms. We understand that the ark preserved many “kinds” of creatures, including a righteous man and his family. But, the flood also eliminated a vast population of bad people. The flood also eliminated a great many species that God saw no value in. In modern parlance, the flood was a “mass extinction” event…….a “return to factory settings”. A great many species, perhaps most species, were eliminated. The ark preserved a small number of good “kinds”. The flood wiped out a large number of “bad” species. Today, we find evidence of them in the “fossil record”…….but they no longer roam the earth.
I think that the failure of our understanding of Darwinian evolution is that we push it beyond its limits. We use it to explain everything. We extrapolate the post flood development of new species to the creation of all species from non-living molecules…..a topic on which Darwin was, in fact, silent.
The failure of our understanding of Darwinian evolution is that we use it to eliminate the need for a creator, God. Instead, we could see Darwin’s theory as a tool, used by God, to expand his creation. Perhaps God uses evolution to give us the vast variety of life forms in the post flood earth.
It is not the theory of evolution that damns us. What damns us is that we use the theory of evolution to eliminate our need for God.
And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
Genesis, 1:25, ESV
“Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots! Does the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’ or ‘Your work has no handles’?
A warning about the created judging its creator,
Isaiah, 45:9, ESV