Do evolution and creation, science and religion, have to be opposed? The Theistic Evolution explores the possibility of reconciling the two and offers a new perspective.
In recent years, from the discovery of the Higgs boson to whether or not the eponymous bird should be revised in textbooks, there have been a number of issues that have been reported in the internet media that show the conflict between the religious and scientific communities. At the center of these issues is the theory of evolution. Of course, the question of the origin of all forms of life, from bacteria smaller than a grain of rice to carnivorous dinosaurs the size of your fist, has been one of the most hotly debated topics throughout human history, especially since the 19th century, when creationism, the idea that God created life, and evolution, the idea that life has evolved into different species, were both hotly debated.
In the Western world before the 19th century, when scientific knowledge about living things was still very scarce, the scientific approach to the origins of each species was practically non-existent, and the idea of creation was based on the belief in God. However, it’s no secret that since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, written after his trip to the Galapagos Islands in the 19th century, there has been a love-hate relationship between creationism, which centers on traditional religious beliefs about the origin of each species, and evolution, which is a new scientific idea.
However, one idea is beginning to emerge to neutralize these opposing views: theistic evolution. The idea is that creation is a religious belief and evolution is an inquiry into the process, and that the two should be viewed as harmonious but distinct categories. Collins, one of the scientists who led the U.S. Genome Project, used the concept of biologos to reconcile creation and evolution in terms of an all-encompassing, transcendent divine power, and C.S. Lewis, the novelist of The Chronicles of Narnia fame and a convert from atheism to devout Anglicanism, also advocated this theistic evolutionary concept. In addition, the Catholic Church, one of the major Christian denominations, has a positive stance on theistic evolution. What do these theories have in common? Taken together, they say that creation and evolution are not opposites.
Historically, the uncomfortable relationship between creation and evolution has been shaped by two factors that have led religious communities to avoid evolution. The first is the phrase “after every kind, according to its kind,” which comes from the Christian scripture, the Bible, and the second is the idea that humans have apes as ancestors. Theistic evolution has an interesting take on both of these concepts.
As for the first reason for the creation of each kind, theistic evolutionism takes the view that the phrase “each kind” itself is not a word, but a context. It is sufficient to see that God’s creation is not an instantaneous creation of each species, but a comprehensive and gradual birth through evolution. Of course, there are many different views, ranging from the semi-accommodative claim that kind in creation after kind means something distinct from species in the modern sense to other fully accommodative views, but the common interpretation that creation after kind must be viewed in context is clearly a reflection of Collins’s concept of Biologos. Second, the question of whether our ancestors were apes is again divided into different perspectives, but as a representative example, there are various eclectic interpretations within the framework of theistic evolution, ranging from the progressive view that humans were created from apes as a new spiritual human being to the more conservative view that humans were created by the evolution of other creatures but emerged as an independent entity that resembles apes. In these alternative forms, we can see that the theistic evolutionary theory attempts to approach the basic realms of creation and evolution from a perspective of mutual harmony rather than mutual invasion, leading to a very different relationship between creation and evolution.
Of course, this is not the only way in which creation and evolution are opposed. For example, the six-day creation in the Christian scripture, the Bible, is debated even within the same religious circles, such as whether it should be viewed as a literal 24 hours or a semantic approach as a divine expression, and many other issues. Therefore, theistic evolution, which tries to take a harmonious position, has a flaw that it is not enough to resolve these conflicts. Still, it is clear that the concept of Biologos has great significance in the sense that it completely overturns the old opposing paradigms.
The idea of creation is not a scientific option, but a religious one, in that it is an object of faith, not a product of scientific inquiry and verification. However, it has been increasingly argued that it is indispensable for society to mitigate the aggressive attitudes of organizations, the media, and people who want to view the relationship between religion and science in terms of a confrontation between the two, and the concept of Biologos has been carefully raised to meet this need. Of course, it would be foolish to claim that theistic evolution is the most valid concept or the inevitable conclusion, as they are equally criticized and there are various arguments within them. However, it is clear that this idea is one of the great attempts to mitigate the confrontation between religion and science, with creation and evolution as the centerpiece, and we can clearly feel that a wide range of attempts to do this are still being made in various fields, starting with Biologos.
