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Evolution and Religion

Are evolution and religion incompatible?

Some people believe that acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution requires rejection of their religious beliefs. The disagreement about whether evolution and religion conflict occurs because some Christians think the Bible is literally true (and thus sentences about how human and animals were created are factual descriptions), while others think the Bible’s messages are true, but not that every single sentence is literally true on its own (e.g. they don’t think that the Bible’s mention of the “four corners of the Earth” means that the Earth is not round, and they take the Genesis story as metaphorical or allegorical).

The age of the Earth

As discussed in class, the best way to know whether someone rejects evolution is not by knowing whether the person believes in God, as many people believe in both God and evolution, but knowing their stance about the age of the Earth.

The two views about the age of the Earth are that it is less than 10,000 years old and that it is around 4.5 Billion years old. The “young-Earth” view is held primarily by :Biblical literalists 🡕, who have gone through the Bible, noted the births and deaths of people named there, and added up their ages to determine the age of the Earth. The position that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old is sometimes called :Young Earth creationism 🡕.

Others think the Earth is billions of years old based on :scientific evidence.

If your religious beliefs allow for the idea that the earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, then evolution and religion are fairly compatible:

  • you can say that God created the diversity of life using evolution as a mechanism, and evolution is one of many biological laws of nature that God created when the universe was created, along with laws of physics and chemistry
  • you might argue that evolution and science explain how diversity of life is created, and religion explains why it was created
  • consider an analogy: astronomers can explain how the planets orbit each other, and we discovered the mechanisms such as gravity that govern planetary orbits relatively recently, but the accepting theory of gravity does not mean that you reject the notion that God created the universe

Implications of a young Earth

If you hold that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, then there is potentially serious conflict between evolution and religion, because evolutionary theory states that millions of years are needed for so many species to evolve. There are at least four ways that you might try to resolve this conflict:

  1. You might say that the science is wrong, the earth is young, and evolution is false. This is extremely difficult to do, because the scientific evidence for evolution is [:really overwhelming]/ev resources/(## Evolution—Is it really true?)
  2. You might say that the Earth and the scientific evidence supporting evolution were both created within the last 10,000 years. For example, you could argue that ice cores were created 10,000 years ago already having 45,000 layers, and 1 layer has been added every year since, which makes it seem like the ice sheets are 50,000 years old even though they are not. People who adopt this position sometimes argue that God might have done this as a test of faith.
  3. You can argue that evolution occurs much faster than biologists believe. This position isn’t actually as totally crazy as it might first seem, as there have been observed instances of evolution in our lifetimes, and evidence that some significant changes in species have occured over hundreds of years rather than hundreds of thousands of years. However, even if evolution is must faster in some cases than previously thought, I haven’t looked at the research to see if that would make evolutionary theory as a whole compatible with a young-Earth view.
  4. You can argue that God made all species and that there has been only “micro-evolution” since that time, which they argue is distinct from “macro-evolutions”. This idea is defended by some in the :intelligent design 🡕 movement (example here 🡕), which is creationism described in complex scientific terms. The main problem of the “micro-evolution” position is that there really is no difference between what these people call micro-evolution and macro-evolution, as evolution works by :adding up lots of micro-changes until they appear as macro-changes 🡕.

Other resources discussing evolution and religion

  • As mentioned in class, Biologos is a website by Christian organization that supports evolutionary theory. If you are interested in this, you might start with their article on Evolutionary Creationism 🡕 and explore more of the site from there.
  • Acceptance of evolution by religious groups - Wikipedia 🡕
  • What is a Creationist? Evolution Question #5 🡕
  • Was Charles Darwin an Atheist? 🡕
    • In class, I said that Darwin was a Christian, which is actually a bit misleading. According to this article, he was born a Christian, but “[a] gradual scepticism towards Christianity and the authenticity of the Bible gradually crept over him during the late 1830s — leaving him not a Christian, but no atheist either; rather a sort of theist. To be a ‘theist’ in Darwin’s day was to believe that a supernatural deity had created nature or the univerise but did not intervene in the course of history.”

:x scientific

If you want to know how scientists estimate the age of the earth, a short discussion of evidence is found in this article 🡕, or you can take a deeper look with videos such as these: