Creation? Evolution? Both?

First Baptist Church - Troy, TX

Creation? Evolution? Both?

March 16, 2024 • Dr. Kathy Wood

How does a scientist who is also a Christian know where to stand on the evolution/creation controversy? Is there a point in the middle? And where do most people stand in the United States? We will look at all of these questions in this segment.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

I have been asked to prepare a series of podcasts dealing with the controversy surrounding creation and evolution. As a biologist who is also a Christian, the tension between these 2 points of view has been ongoing in my life for many years. When I was a very young Christian as a graduate student studying biology, I remember sitting in a classroom where the evolution of a particular protein was being discussed. I was kind of clueless – I did not know that questioning evolution was a hot topic, so to speak. So I raised my hand and asked how the professor knew that this protein had actually evolved this way? My professor immediately stopped talking, looked me in the eye, and asked me if I was one of those people who was a creationist. At the time, I was quite shocked to be called out like that and I really did not know what to say. Frankly, it about scared me to death!

Since that time, I’ve come to realize that there are some serious tensions between science and religion when evolution and creation are brought up. For many years I just tried to ignore these tensions. I tried to believe both sides of the argument. Kind of hard to do, but somehow I managed to do it! (In fact, as I have talked with college students over the years, I find that many of them who were brought up in a Christian home have some considerable concerns about how to make what they learn in school agree with what they learned in church. Most of them just choose not to think about it too much.)

So, back to my story: Then as a college professor myself, I was asked to teach an introductory biology course in which the textbook described the idea of special creation by God as being “pseudoscience”. Now the tension between evolution and religion was in my face and I had to decide what I truly believed.

My plan for these podcasts is to introduce some of the terminology used when discussing evolution and creation and then to look at the history behind the controversy. We also need to look at why it even matters. What are the repercussions within our society for believing evolution over creation? Then I plan to take a closer look at just a few of the evolution topics found in a typical college introductory biology textbook. Frankly, it would take too long to cover all aspects of the argument surrounding evolution versus creation – currently in my library, I have a book over 500 pages long dealing with some of those arguments! We don’t have time to get into it but there’s plenty of material out there if you want to read further. Finally, we need to decide which of these points of view is correct. So let’s get started.

Evolution, more properly called Darwinian evolution, is the theory 1st put forward by Charles Darwin that life on earth has evolved through natural selection. Natural selection is a process through which plants and animals change over time as they adapt to their environment. If a plant or animal has a trait that makes it able to live longer or more successfully adapt to the environment, it may be able to pass that trait onto its offspring whereas other members of that species aren’t as well adapted and die without passing their traits on. Over a long period of time, these very small changes in traits could theoretically develop an entirely new species.

A species is considered any group of animals or plants that can only reproduce with others like it – one species cannot reproduce with a different species even though they may look very much alike. There have been too many changes within the species to allow it to reproduce with another species. (I will say here that some cross species reproduction may occur at times if the 2 species are closely related but it is definitely not the norm and usually has to be “set up” by human intervention – for example, a lion and a tiger can be crossed to get a “liger” but this is quite infrequent.)

Now, I mentioned that evolution is a theory. So what is a theory? It is a statement or principal which, through scientific observation, reasoning, and experimentation, explains a natural phenomenon. Essentially a theory is a law or fact that is accepted by scientists as being true. The way that scientists see “theories” is very important because in common language, most people consider a theory as something that may or may not be true. They look at it as kind of like a “guess”. But that is not how scientists use this term. In discussions with a scientist about evolution, you must be careful about saying that evolution is “just a theory”, as if it really might not be true.

So, what is creationism? It is the belief that the creation story in the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible, specifically in the 1st book of the Bible called Genesis, is literally true and that it is an explanation for the creation of the earth and the development of life by God out of nothing.

There is a movement within creationism that has attempted to uncover scientific evidence to show that the biblical creation story is true. This movement has labeled itself “creation science”. Evolutionists question the accuracy of calling any form of creationism “science” since those holding the view that creationism is true, cannot go through the normal processes of observation, reasoning, and experimentation to prove that it is true.

In order to somehow resolve the controversy between evolution versus creation, some people have come up with positions somewhere in between the two. We are not going to get into all of those but one common position that you might run into is the idea of “theistic evolution”. Theistic evolution is a belief held by some religious groups that God is the guiding force behind the process of evolution. These individuals believe that evolution is the true way that life developed on earth – with God’s help or guidance – but they disagree with strict evolutionists who say that evolution had nothing to do with God or any supernatural being.

I remember reading a book several years ago written by a strict evolutionist where he said that if there was a God involved in our world who could “interfere” at any time with the natural processes that we see operating in the world, how could we possibly ever accurately define laws and theories? If God could change things anytime He wanted to, how could we ever know what was really going on? Since we do know what’s going on because we observe it happening all the time, there must not be a God. At 1st glance, his logic might seem pretty good but what if God has set up the laws of nature the way He wanted them set up – gravity, for example – and what if He upholds those laws almost all the time? And what if it is only infrequently that He enters into the creation that He has made and makes something happen that is outside of those laws? Hmmm.

Before going into some of the history behind the controversy between evolution and creationism, I should also mention another frequently held position called Intelligent Design. Intelligent design is a belief that life is too complex to have evolved entirely through natural processes and that therefore an outside, possibly divine force, must have played a role in the origin and development of life. The argument of intelligent design has also made its way into the court system when groups holding that position have tried to influence what is taught in pre-college science curriculums. So far, in every case that has come before the courts, intelligent design has been seen as a non-viable way for creationism to be equally taught with evolution in the classroom.

We don’t have enough time in this podcast today to discuss the history of this controversy. However, you might be interested in some surveys that have been taken over the years in the United States. In 2013, in a Pew Research Center survey, 60% of Americans said humans and other living things evolved over time. This percentage rose to 81% in 2018. In that same survey, 24% said a supreme being guided the evolution of living things – this number increased to 48% in 2018. So it appears that a large percentage of people in the United States agree with the theory of evolution, whether it involves a supreme being or not. In fact the involvement of a supreme being of some kind in evolution (let’s call it “theistic evolution”) seemed to increase over those years.

In 2014 in another survey, 37% of Southern Baptists believed that humans evolved but they believed their evolution was mainly due to God’s design. So, again, theistic evolution. However 58% of Southern Baptists in that survey believed that humans have always existed in their present form – in other words, they did not evolve from something else. In this last group, most of them are in the 30 and above age group – so the younger Southern Baptists are not so sure that humans have always existed in their present form, i.e., were created by God as they exist today.

Finally what about scientists in America? What do they believe? As I have previously mentioned, they say evolution is well-established as a scientific theory and that it is an established explanation for what we see in nature. Most scientists say that evolution through natural selection is a fact. In a 2009 survey, only one third of scientists believed in God. In that same survey, 83% of the general public said that they believed in God. So, as you can see, there is a big difference between these 2 groups as far as their belief in God.

That’s all we have time for today. The next podcast will look at the history of this controversy. I’m not a real history buff myself but I think this is very interesting! Hopefully you will too.

More from Graceful Insights with Dr. Kathy Wood

What is Faith?

June 2, 2024 • Dr. Kathy Wood

The way we define “faith” is very different from what the Bible says it is. In fact, biblical faith changes what you do and how you do it… And it is visible to those around you. We’ll look at what faith REALLY is in this podcast.

Blessings

May 26, 2024 • Dr. Kathy Wood

Many of us say a blessing before we eat and some of us actually ask God to bless us and other people. But what are we asking for? Is a blessing just some vague set of words before a meal or toward a person? No! FULL TRANSCRIPT: One of my favorite Psalms in the Bible is Psalm 103. Here is how it starts: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.” The verses after that list some of the things that our God does – some of the things that we should bless God for. Those verses talk about not forgetting all that He has done for us and, since I am prone to forget things, I figure it is a good idea to go over and over and over those things. As I lay in bed thinking about getting up every morning, it is not unusual, if you could read my mind, to hear these verses flow through my thoughts. Even in the New Testament of the Bible, there are many references to blessing God. One of them is in Luke 24:53. The disciples have just seen Jesus, after His resurrection from the dead, ascend into heaven. The disciples go back to Jerusalem rejoicing and verse 53 says “they were continually in the temple blessing God”. They were so excited that this was all they could do! So, what does this word “bless” actually mean? The Hebrew word is BERAKAH. It means to increase – to increase joy or peacefulness or goodness if it is used toward men. If it is used toward God, it means an expression of praise or thanks. In Psalm 103, it means we do not hold anything back in our praise and worship of Him – our entire being is praising Him. When it is used to describe how God blesses people, it means “to endow with power for success.” The Greek word is EULOGEO. It is where we get our English word “eulogy”. It means to praise someone or, if God is doing the blessing, it means to cause a person to prosper or to make them happy. Blessing God: Question – Why should we bless God? Answer – Because we are commanded to bless Him. We are commanded to praise Him, worship Him, exalt Him. As we see the overwhelming beauty of his greatness, how could we not burst out in blessing Him? Question – How can we bless Someone who lacks nothing? How can we bless God? Answer – God does not need us to begin with and He does not need anything from us. But He chose us before we ever even knew Him. So, when we bless God we are honoring Him for all that he has done, for His control over all things, for His greatness. That is always appropriate. And it must be a constant part of our relationship with Him. And it must consume our very soul – this is very sobering because most of us are consumed by everything else but this. Ask yourself this question – if God is who He says He is and if I should be consumed by praise and worship of Him, why am I worried about anything? Blessing other people: Numbers 6:22-27 “Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to Aaron and to his sons, saying, “In this way you shall bless the sons of Israel. You are to say to them: The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face shine upon you, and be gracious to you, the Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace.” In these verses, you see that the “blessing” is by God toward his people. If we go back to the definition above, it means that God is asked to bless or increase the security of His people, His favor on His people, His grace toward His people, His peace toward His people. What a wonderful blessing! Question – So, how can we bless other people? Answer – A follow-up question to this one is “how does God bless a person”? If we imitate what God does to bless someone, we are making a good start in blessing other people. No, we do not have the power or wisdom to bless people like God does. But there are some ways that we could imitate Him. For example, maybe you see someone who is sad – God does comfort people when they are sad or troubled so could you comfort that person? Maybe you see someone who has physical needs – God provides what we need so could you share some of what God has given you to help that person? So, think about all the ways that God blesses you and ask Him how you could do the same for other people. He knows exactly what they need and you may be the one He has given the ability to meet that need and bless that person. Question – Why should we bless other people? OR How does blessing another person affect you? Answer – Look at this verse out of the book of Proverbs. Proverbs 11:25 says “the one who blesses others is abundantly blessed; those who help others are helped.” So God helps and blesses those who bless other people. And He blesses them “abundantly”, even more than the blessing that they have given to others. Question – So, how do blessings work? Answer – This is a good question. How can just saying a blessing for somebody else make a difference in their life? Aren’t these just “words”? No! When we offer words of blessing to someone, we are actually praying – talking to God – and asking Him to give them favor. God is really the source of all blessing. Sometimes I really don’t know what another person needs but I do know that that person needs God’s favor. So I ask Him to bless them in any way that He sovereignly knows that they need. So, speaking of God really being the one who does the blessing, let’s briefly look at… Some other verses that talk about God blessing people or, putting this a different way, how a person can be blessed: Deuteronomy 30:16-20 “I [Moses] command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His judgments, that you may live and multiply, and that the Lord your God may bless you in the land where you are entering to possess it. 17 But if your heart turns away and you will not obey, but are drawn away and worship other gods and serve them, 18 I declare to you today that you shall surely perish. You will not prolong your days in the land where you are crossing the Jordan to enter [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=deuteronomy%2030&version=nasb1995#fen-nasb1995-5727v]and possess it. 19 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=deuteronomy%2030&version=nasb1995#fen-nasb1995-5728w]descendants, 20 by loving the Lord your God, by obeying His voice, and by holding fast to Him; for [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=deuteronomy%2030&version=nasb1995#fen-nasb1995-5729x]this is your life and the length of your days,” Question – So, how can a person be blessed by God? What did He say? Answer – By loving God, by obeying God, and by clinging to Him. This next verse is similar. Jeremiah 17:7 “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence.” God says He will bless those who trust Him. Question – What is this verse really saying? Answer – That we can expect – expect – God to bless us if we choose to trust Him with everything. God’s blessing is up to Him. He knows what form the blessing needs to take and He can be counted on to do what is perfectly right toward you in every case. That is why He becomes that person’s hope and confidence. Here is another similar one – Matthew 11:6 “And blessed is any person who does not take offense at Me.” – Jesus said this in response to some questions about John the Baptist. John had sent some of his disciples to Jesus to ask Jesus if He was really the one they were looking for, the Messiah. This verse is essentially saying that if a person believes that Jesus is who He says He is, that person is blessed. And finally, this next verse in Acts 3:26 “God raised up His Servant for you 1st, and sent Him to bless you by turning every one of you from your wicked ways.” This verse talks about another way God blesses people – He works in their hearts to turn them away from evil so that they can turn to Him and be saved. This topic on blessing is a little different for me because defining a blessing is difficult, as far as I am concerned. When I ask God to bless someone, a lot of the time I don’t know exactly what I am asking! I just know that God knows what that person needs and I am asking Him to carry out what He already knows that person needs. And then when I think about blessing God, what an awesome opportunity I have to exalt the greatest Person in all creation and outside of creation. If you think about it, it is actually a great gift God has given us to be allowed to bless Him. He doesn’t need my blessing. He is complete without it. But He has granted us – me – the privilege of blessing Him. Wow.

Hot Issues in the Evolution/Creation Controversy - Part 3

April 21, 2024 • Dr. Kathy Wood

In our final episode on evolution, we ask, exactly how did life begin on the earth? Did it crawl out of a primordial soup? Did God really create all the plants and animals – and even humans? Or did humans evolve from animals called primates? And finally, isn’t it possible to believe in both evolution and creation and avoid the controversy altogether? FULL TRANSCRIPT: Today we will actually touch on several additional questions that arise in the evolution/creation controversy plus we will look at the origins of life and the universe as a whole. Let’s talk about life first. Evolutionists believe in the spontaneous origin of life, although it is unknown how that might have occurred. In fact, the probability of life arising by chance on earth over 5 billion years ago was calculated by 2 evolutionists (Sir Fred Hoyle and Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe) as being one chance out of 1 followed by 40,000 zeros, or essentially 0. Both of these individuals now say that any life in the universe had to be created. They are not biblical creationists but are atheists, and they believe life had to be created – somehow. Most evolutionists do not believe there is a God but many of them do believe there is a God. In fact, in a round table discussion on PBS a few years ago, the comment was made that “science has nothing to say one way or the other about the existence of God”. The most generally held evolutionist belief about the origin of life says that life arose on the early Earth by a series of progressive chemical reactions. That is how it is put in the Britannica encyclopedia. These progressive chemical reactions are unknown and may have been highly improbable chemical events. Well, what do the science textbooks say about all this? Most of them report on an experiment in 1952 set up by Dr. Harold Urey and a graduate student named Stanley Miller. Their theory was that life began in something called a primordial soup – a primordial soup made up of ammonia, methane, and water, among other things and zapped with an electric current as if it had been struck by lightning. When they looked at the molecules that came out of this experiment, they found amino acids. Amino acids make up all of our proteins. They thought that perhaps these were the beginning molecules that would later come together to form something that was living. Since then, scientists have decided that Earth’s early atmosphere may not have been exactly like the Urey-Miller experiment assumed but they believe that some kind of primordial soup was a precursor to life. Creationists on the other hand, propose that the Bible is a credible source of how life and the universe originated and we will get into that in a moment. First, though, let’s do some physics! Creationists bring up the 2nd law of thermodynamics to explain why the evolutionist concept of how life began can’t be true. The 2nd law of thermodynamics assumes that things become more and more chaotic or disordered over time. If the 2nd law is true, those primordial soup molecules should go from order to disorder and that is what we see in nature. Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, is essentially saying that these beginning molecules become more and more ordered until they were so complex that life somehow occurred. They suggest that the universe itself started in a state of chaos because of a Big Bang. This Big Bang Theory proposes that billions of years ago all energy and all matter somehow was crammed into a small space. It suddenly exploded and expanded at a large speed – the Big Bang. From this, everything in the universe somehow evolved. From this chaos, everything in the universe became less and less chaotic. That is not what the 2nd law of thermodynamics says. Creationists therefore say that life could not have started that way. Evolutionists, however, counter that argument by saying that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is big enough to handle that apparent problem. If part of the universe is becoming more and more chaotic and disordered, other parts could become more and more ordered at the same time. A very good example of this is the snowflake. Snowflake crystals are highly ordered and form naturally. This is a physics argument and it is a good one. So, how did humans come about? Evolutionists believe that humans evolved from ape-like beasts which had evolved from lower forms of life – evolution. Creationists on the other hand point back to the Bible which declares that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were each personally involved in creation, including the creation of humans. This is first mentioned in the book of Genesis in the Bible which describes how God created woman by transforming a rib of Adam, the 1st man, into Eve, the 1st woman. According to Genesis, Adam was immediately made in the image of God and Eve was made Adam – they were both created fully formed. We find this confirmed in the New Testament in 1st Corinthians 11:8 which talks about “the man does not originate from the woman, but the woman is from the man”. Jesus also confirmed this in Matthew 19:4 when he quoted Genesis 1 as a historical authority. Since Jesus accepted the early chapters of Genesis as literal, the Christian who is in evolutionist essentially finds himself in disagreement with Jesus. More recently, theistic evolution has grown in popularity because of its acceptance by some of the leading evangelical pastors and theologians. Theistic evolution proposes that Genesis 1 does not refer to 6 normal days of creation; and that the flood described in Genesis was not a worldwide flood. They also say that God used evolutionary processes to create everything that has ever lived. Therefore, another question that must be answered by theistic evolutionists is how can one decide which portions of the Bible should be taken literally and which parts should be considered impossible and unscientific, or perhaps just parables? What about the raising of Lazarus from the dead? What about the changing of water into wine? What about the virgin birth of Jesus Christ? All of these involved divine creation and none of them can be explained biologically. Some creationists have come up with a different take on this, saying that yes, God created Adam and Eve directly but that there were people outside the Garden of Eden who God created in a different way, i.e., by evolution. They say that those people ended up intermingling with the descendants of Adam and Eve. Currently, this is a fringe idea. Creationists argue that evolution of man from a primate does not include a fall from an initially perfect man, such as we find in Genesis. If there was no fall, there would also be no need of a Savior from sin. Another thing to consider is that “death” entered the picture when Adam and Eve sinned. Prior to that, apparently all life was immortal according to Genesis 2:17. In Romans 6:23, we read that “the wages of sin is death”. So death was not originally part of the plan. According to the Bible, creation was cursed after Adam’s sin when death entered the world. And without death, evolution is not possible. Evolution depends on death occurring. So, we have finally reached the end of our discussion of the controversy between creationism and evolution. Honestly, we could have continued looking at this argument for several more podcasts but I really just wanted you to be aware of the main points that are argued. When all is said and done, both evolutionists and creationists depend on faith that their viewpoint is the correct one. Evolutionists have faith in science and its ability, they say, to explain life and origins. Creationists have faith in what God has said in the Bible about life and origins. Neither group can go back in time as far as to actually prove what they believe. So, why does it even matter? Even in the 1920s, some religious fundamentalists charged that teaching evolution in the schools would destroy faith in God and faith in the Bible. They also argued that there was a danger to morality and ethical standards because students would be taught that humans are only advanced animals, no more than that. If the evolutionary concept of survival of the fittest is followed, this would promote stepping on others to get what you wanted – stepping on others to survive – and that is not what the Bible teaches. So, in conclusion, as a Christian, I believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. I accept what it says even if I can’t explain all of it as a scientist. As a scientist, I am okay with that because there is a God who ultimately is in control of all that we see. He can intervene in our world at any time. I have no idea all that happened during the creation of the world and the universe and life as we know it. I do, however, believe that a God as powerful as our God is can do anything He wants to at any time. We have a choice to believe what the Bible says or to come up with an explanation outside of what we read in the Bible. It’s really kind of simple.