Are Evolution and Religion Mutually Exclusive?

Well, that cartoon pretty much sums it up.  Whether you believe in evolution or not, believe in a higher power or not, at this point we’re all human beings, and we all wonder about the world around us.  Fortunately, that means we have been able to start to understand some mysteries of the life from pathogens to the life cycle of stars, and we’ve managed to create wonderful things such as air conditioning and smart phones.  However, with a world of over 7 billion people, there are many sides to every issue, and as of late evolution has been very salient.  Here, we will explore 4 sides of a very common issue here in The States.  Are religion and evolution compatible?  

First we’ll take the fundamentalist Christian view:

This view says that evolution is false because the book of Genesis in the Bible says that God created the world in 7 days.  You can read this creation story here. Evolution takes more than 7 days, so it cannot be true.  This perspective takes the creation story literally and asserts that evolution is not true.  Another reason that this view promotes is that evolution is false because we are made in God’s image, and He put us here as we are; we did not “evolve from apes” as many put it. 

Where do we hear this the most?  In politics!  This is an article from National Public Radio that sums up the controversy quite well.  The article is from 2005, but well written.  The same debates are still active today.   Basically, there are groups of people who believe that the biblical creation story should be taught in the classroom as an alternative to evolution.  Others say that either evolution and belief can coexist, or that whatever you believe, the creation story is not science and shouldn’t be taught in schools, especially with the separation between church and state.  Take what side you will on that point, but I will now take a moment to clear up an incorrect understanding of scientific theory that has spawned a lot of controversy lately, and mistakenly fueled arguments to keep evolution out of the classroom.

Some argue that since evolution is a theory and not a fact, it should not be taught in schools.  However, this stems from the common understanding of “theory” which generally means that it’s not quite as proven as a fact.  In the scientific use of theory, it is simply the pattern by which a fact is explained.  The parties that argue against evolution in the classroom have other things to say, but this particular argument is off base.  See here for more information about distinguishing between scientific fact and theory.

Now we’ll move onto the more liberal Christian view:

This view states that God made the world, but we weren’t around at the time, and He’s powerful enough to do it however he pleases.  Evolution is a well-substatiated theory, and it shows the complexity of God’s creation even more.  Under this view, evolutionists could be Christians and visa versa.

Francis Collins, most widely known for his work on completing the Human Genome Project and now for his appointment by President Obama to the director of the National Institute of Health, is a Christian who believes in evolution.  He founded an organization called Biologos that explores evolution in light of the Christian God and teachings.

On this site, Tim Keller, a renowned apologist and preacher at Redeemer Presbyterian in NYC, wrote an article about common obstacles that people have in reconciling Christian faith with evolution.  I will only talk about one of the points to be concise, but he delineates 4 major obstacles here.  Keller addresses Biblical authority and essentially argues against the 7 day creation model.  In fact, he states that the creation story in Genesis was never meant to be taken literally.   As with anything, when studying a passage well, you must look at it in context.  According to Keller, the creation story contains elements of poetry and hallmarks of “exalted prose narrative” common in Jewish tradition, which was expected to be taken as a lyrical version of a story instead of fact. 

In my view, why would God tell an ancient Mesopotamian shepherd such as Abraham about Mendelian genetics, linkage disequilibrium, or phylogenetic trees when society didn’t have the knowledge base to understand those things?  That’s not what the purpose of telling ancient peoples the creation story was.  The purpose of the retelling was to say that God made the world. 

Moving forward, we come to the evolutionist, atheist point of view.

The most well known evolutionist and atheist in the world, if I may make the declaration, is Richard Dawkins.  His organization, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, states as its mission “to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.”  Obviously, if religion is superstition to Dawkins and connected to such things as intolerance, he will not be of the mindset that evolution and any type of religion are compatible.  Dawkins is an ethologist, evolutionary biologist, best-selling author, and proponent of “militant atheism” to overcome religion, as stated in his mission. 

He promotes that evolution is not only a scientific theory, but also a world view.  In his book The Magic of Reality, about which he gave a talk at Rice University in 2011, he mentioned that he regards the Christian creation story the same as any other ancient creation myth.  In essence, that Christianity should be regarded no different than religions that worshiped Greek and Romans gods and goddesses, which western society now largely considers being false.

To my surprise, I stumbled across The God Delusion, perhaps Dawkins’ most well-known book, on the web here.  In this book, as you may imagine, Dawkins claims that belief in a god is a…delusion!  There are a lot of good arguments in this book, but I’ll focus on one that addresses what I mentioned that Keller said.  Keller claims that the creation story, taken in context of ancient Jewish poetry techniques, is true and should be believed.  Dawkins, on the other hand, sees this debate about what is and isn’t to be taken literally in the Bible as that “we pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories”  (p. 238). 

The Atheist that sees religion and evolution as compatible…

No such luck!  Atheism directly contradicts believing that a higher power exists, so I was not surprised when I couldn’t find an atheist that believed that evolution can be compatible with belief in a higher power.

However, I did find someone who was an agnostic and saw agnosticism and evolution as compatible.  That person is Charles Darwin.  Through his studies on evolution and tragic life events such as the death of his daughter, Darwin is generally recognized as being an agnostic.  In a letter to John Fordyce in 1879, Darwin describes his beliefs as this:  “In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God— I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” (Found from this site). If Darwin believed in some higher power, then perhaps so can modern day agnostics.

With this, I’ll leave you to examine your own beliefs.  I also acknowledge that the above entry does not even scrape the surface of the variety of beliefs that exist today on these subjects, and am sorry that I could not explore them all or go into depth on any one belief.  I hope that reading this may help you start finding out what stance you take on this issue.  Good luck!