Darwin for Dummies: Can Someone Be a Christian and Believe in Darwin?

Whether the issue is exciting, infuriating or tiresome, everyone has an opinion. But for those who want a bite-sized bit of perspective, we respond to the touchy question: What does a Christian lose if he adheres to Darwin’s system?

MAN

First, the Christian loses the uniqueness of man. Man was created directly by God (Gen 1:26; 2:7), created separately from land, sea, and air creatures. Man was created ‘in the image of God’, and he was assigned a unique role in the universe: to ‘rule’ over the rest of the created beings (Gen 1:26-30). However, the Darwinian system denies all of these tenets of Christian anthropology. Darwin presents man as another member of the natural order (species), perhaps unique in his mental capacities (Darwin is anxious for psychological discovery) but not unique in his creation, nature or role. For Christians, man is one member of nature that must be a created species. Furthermore, the existence of man’s immortal soul (a Christian doctrine) holds no place in Darwinism, which sees the end of natural life as the end of existence for an organism (including man).

IMMORTALITY

Second, Darwin denies the ongoing existence of man. The Bible positions man as a continuing, unique species which is called to subdue and fill the whole earth with progeny (Gen 1:28). Biblical anthropology does not provide for any other species being given this type of responsibility, and the Scriptures describe humans as the creatures which will experience the end of the natural world (and its subsequent re-creation and eternal existence with their resurrected human bodies).

HISTORY

Third, the Darwinist sees history as one unbroken chain of Natural Selection (one ongoing evolutionary process) where competition and death are the norm. However, the Christian must recognize the Fall of man as a history-altering event in which death and many aspects (perhaps all aspects) of ‘competition’ began to function where they had previously not existed (Gen 3).

BEAUTY

Fourth, Darwinism solely acknowledges the existence of natural phenomena, and Darwin claims that nothing is ‘useful’ save for the sake of survival. Darwin admits that the existence of something being useful for its own sake apart from its utility toward survival would harm his theory and in fact be ‘fatal’ to it. Christians maintain that a number of things have been created ‘for the sake of beauty, to delight man or the Creator’, and they have based their study of aesthetics with such a view in mind.

CAN’T BE A DARWINIST: BUT WHAT ABOUT AN EVOLUTIONIST?

According to the above divergences, one cannot be a Darwinist (adhering to the contents of The Origin of Species), but perhaps someone can be a Christian and believe in evolution (some sort of process of natural selection of species over time). Because the Bible is the standard for Christian belief, the discussion of what a Christian can believe about the evolutionary process invades another inquiry of a literary and theological nature: one’s view of Scripture generally and how to read the first chapters of Genesis in particular. Perhaps someone can believe that God’s creation of the universe is in fact an evolutionary process which took long periods of time from original ancestors, but s/he is pressed to cohere that view with the seven day Scriptural account of creation (Genesis 1-2). S/he must be able to either present a form of evolution which can agree with the statements of the biblical text (such as “day”, “God made”, and “after their kind”) or else create a biblical hermeneutic which allows for a radical reinterpretation of the apparent meaning of the stated text to agree with Darwinian evolution.