Theistic evolution

Francis Collins describes theistic evolution as the position that "evolution is real, but that it was set in motion by God",[4] and characterizes it as accepting "that evolution occurred as biologists describe it, but under the direction of God".[5] He lists six general premises on which different versions of theistic evolution typically rest. They include:[6]

1. The prevailing cosmological model, with the universe coming into being about 13.8 billion years ago;
2. The fine-tuned universe;
3. Evolution and natural selection;
4. No special supernatural intervention is involved once evolution got under way;
5. Humans are a result of these evolutionary processes; and
6. Despite all these, humans are unique. The concern for the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the continuous search for God among all human cultures defy evolutionary explanations and point to our spiritual nature.

The executive director of the National Center for Science Education in the United States of America, Eugenie Scott, has used the term to refer to the part of the overall spectrum of beliefs about creation and evolution holding the theological view that God creates through evolution. It covers a wide range of beliefs about the extent of any intervention by God, with some approaching deism in rejecting the concepts of continued intervention or special creation, while others believe that God has directly intervened at crucial points such as the origin of humans. In the Catholic version of theistic evolution, human evolution may have occurred, but God must create the human soul,[1] and the creation story in the book of Genesis should be read metaphorically.[7][8][9]

When evolutionary science developed, so did different types of theistic evolution. Creationists Henry M. Morris and John D. Morris have listed different terms which were used to describe different positions from the 1890s to the 1920s: "Orthogenesis" (goal-directed evolution), "nomogenesis" (evolution according to fixed law), "emergent evolution", "creative evolution", and others.[10]

The Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was an influential proponent of God-directed evolution or "orthogenesis", in which man will eventually evolve to the "omega point" of union with the Creator.

Historians of science (and authors of pre-evolutionary ideas) have pointed out that scientists had considered the concept of biological change well before Darwin.

In the 17th century, the English Nonconformist/Anglican priest and botanist John Ray, in his book The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1692), had wondered "why such different species should not only mingle together, but also generate an animal, and yet that that hybridous production should not again generate, and so a new race be carried on".[18]

18th-century scientist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) published Systema Naturae (1735), a book in which he considered that new varieties of plants could arise through hybridization, but only under certain limits fixed by God. Linnaeus had initially embraced the Aristotelian idea of immutability of species (the idea that species never change), but later in his life he started to challenge it. Yet, as a Christian, he still defended "special creation", the belief that God created "every living creature" at the beginning, as read in Genesis, with the peculiarity a set of original species of which all the present species have descended.[19]

Linnaeus wrote:

Let us suppose that the Divine Being in the beginning progressed from the simpler to the complex; from few to many; similarly that He in the beginning of the plant kingdom created as many plants as there were natural orders. These plant orders He Himself, there from producing, mixed among themselves until from them originated those plants which today exist as genera. Nature then mixed up these plant genera among themselves through generations -of double origin (hybrids) and multiplied them into existing species, as many as possible (whereby the flower structures were not changed) excluding from the number of species the almost sterile hybrids, which are produced by the same mode of origin.

— Systema Vegetabilium (1774)[20]

Linnaeus attributed the active process of biological change to God himself, as he stated:

We imagine that the Creator at the actual time of creation made only one single species for each natural order of plants, this species being different in habit and fructification from all the rest. That he made these mutually fertile, whence out of their progeny, fructification having been somewhat changed, Genera of natural classes have arisen as many in number as the different parents, and since this is not carried further, we regard this also as having been done by His Omnipotent hand directly in the beginning; thus all Genera were primeval and constituted a single Species. That as many Genera having arisen as there were individuals in the beginning, these plants in course of time became fertilised by others of different sort and thus arose Species until so many were produced as now exist ... these Species were sometimes fertilised out of congeners, that is other Species of the same Genus, whence have arisen Varieties.

— From his Fundamenta fructificationis (1742)[21]

In the 19th century, geology and paleontology were still connected to Old Earth creationism. The above depicts a brutal world of deep time, existing before Adam and Eve, from Thomas Hawkins' book on plesiosaurs.[22] Artist: John Martin, 1840

Jens Christian Clausen (1967), refers to Linnaeus' theory as a "forgotten evolutionary theory [that] antedates Darwin's by nearly 100 years", and reports that he was a pioneer in doing experiments about hybridization.[23]

Later observations by Protestant botanists Carl Friedrich von Gärtner (1772–1850) and Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter (1733–1806) denied the immutability of species, which the Bible never teaches.[24] Kölreuter used the term "transmutation of species" to refer to species which have experienced biological changes through hybridization,[25] although they both were inclined to believe that hybrids would revert to the parental forms by a general law of reversion, and therefore, would not be responsible for the introduction of new species. Later, in a number of experiments carried out between 1856 and 1863, the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), aligning himself with the "new doctrine of special creation" proposed by Linnaeus,[25] concluded that new species of plants could indeed arise, although limitedly and retaining their own stability.

Georges Cuvier's analysis of fossils and discovery of extinction disrupted static views of nature in the early 19th century, confirming geology as showing a historical sequence of life. British natural theology, which sought examples of adaptation to show design by a benevolent Creator, adopted catastrophism to show earlier organisms being replaced in a series of creations by new organisms better adapted to a changed environment. Charles Lyell (1797–1875) also saw adaptation to changing environments as a sign of a benevolent Creator, but his uniformitarianism envisaged continuing extinctions, leaving unanswered the problem of providing replacements.[26] As seen in correspondence between Lyell and John Herschel, scientists were looking for creation by laws rather than by miraculous interventions. In continental Europe, the idealism of philosophers including Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) developed a Naturphilosophie in which patterns of development from archetypes were a purposeful divine plan aimed at forming humanity.[27] These scientists rejected transmutation of species as materialist.[28][29][30] radicalism threatening the established hierarchies of society. The idealist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), a persistent opponent of transmutation, saw mankind as the goal of a sequence of creations, but his concepts were the first to be adapted into a scheme of theistic evolutionism, when in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation published in 1844, its anonymous author (Robert Chambers) set out goal-centred progressive development as the Creator's divine plan, programmed to unfold without direct intervention or miracles. The book became a best-seller and popularised the idea of transmutation in a designed "law of progression". The scientific establishment strongly attacked Vestiges at the time, but later more sophisticated theistic evolutionists followed the same approach of looking for patterns of development as evidence of design.[31]

The comparative anatomist Richard Owen (1804–1892), a prominent figure in the Victorian era scientific establishment, opposed transmutation throughout his life. When formulating homology he adapted idealist philosophy to reconcile natural theology with development, unifying nature as divergence from an underlying form in a process demonstrating design. His conclusion to his On the Nature of Limbs of 1849 suggested that divine laws could have controlled the development of life, but he did not expand this idea after objections from his conservative patrons. Others supported the idea of development by law, including the botanist Hewett Watson (1804–1881) and the Reverend Baden Powell (1796–1860), who wrote in 1855 that such laws better illustrated the powers of the Creator.[32] In 1858 Owen in his speech as President of the British Association said that in "continuous operation of Creative power" through geological time, new species of animals appeared in a "successive and continuous fashion" through birth from their antecedents by a Creative law rather than through slow transmutation.[33]

According to Eugenie Scott: "In one form or another, Theistic Evolutionism is the view of creation taught at the majority of mainline Protestant seminaries, and despite the Catholic Church having no official position, it does support belief in it. Studies show that acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Europe or Japan; among 34 countries sampled, only Turkey had a lower rate of acceptance than the United States.[45]

Theistic evolutionism has been described as arguing for compatibility between science and religion, and as such it is viewed with disdain both by some atheists and many young Earth creationists.[46]

Hominization, in both science and religion, involves the process or the purpose of becoming human. The process and means by which hominization occurs is a key problem in theistic evolutionary thought, at least for the Abrahamic religions, which hold as a core belief that animals do not have immortal souls but that humans do.[47] Many versions of theistic evolution insist on a special creation consisting of at least the addition of a soul just for the human species.[48]

Scientific accounts of the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and subsequent evolution of pre-human life forms may not cause any difficulty but the need to reconcile religious and scientific views of hominization and to account for the addition of a soul to humans remains a problem. Theistic evolution typically postulates a point at which a population of hominids who had (or may have) evolved by a process of natural evolution acquired souls and thus (with their descendants) became fully human in theological terms. This group might be restricted to Adam and Eve, or indeed to Mitochondrial Eve, although versions of the theory allow for larger populations. The point at which such an event occurred should essentially be the same as in paleoanthropology and archeology, but theological discussion of the matter tends to concentrate on the theoretical. The term "special transformism" is sometimes used to refer to theories that there was a divine intervention of some sort, achieving hominization.[49][50]

Several 19th-century theologians and evolutionists attempted specific solutions, including the Catholics John Augustine Zahm and St. George Jackson Mivart, but tended to come under attack from both the theological and biological camps.[51] and 20th-century thinking tended to avoid proposing precise mechanisms.[52]

• Artigas, Mariano; Glick, Thomas F.; Martínez, Rafael A. (2006). Negotiating Darwin: the Vatican confronts evolution, 1877–1902. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9780801883897.
• Bowler, Peter J. (1992). The Eclipse of Darwinism: anti-Darwinian evolutionary theories in the decades around 1900. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-4391-4.
• Bowler, Peter J. (2003). Evolution:The History of an Idea. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23693-6.
• Brundell, Barry, "Catholic Church Politics and Evolution Theory, 1894-1902", The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Mar., 2001), pp. 81–95, Cambridge University Press on behalf of The British Society for the History of Science, JSTOR
• Desmond, Adrian J.; Moore, James Richard (1991) [1969]. Darwin. Michael Joseph.
• Kung, Hans, beginning of all things: science and religion, trans. John Bowden, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2007, ISBN 0-8028-0763-1, ISBN 978-0-8028-0763-2. ]
• Larson, Edward J. (2004). Evolution: The Remarkable History of Scientific Theory. Modern Library. ISBN 978-0-679-64288-6.
• Numbers, Ronald L. (1993) [1992]. The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520083936.
• Numbers, Ronald (November 30, 2006). The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded Edition. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02339-0.
• Rahner, Karl (1975). Encyclopedia of Theology: A Concise Sacramentum Mundi. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-8601-2006-3.
• Scott, Eugenie C. (1997). "Antievolution and Creationism in the United States". Annual Review of Anthropology. 26: 263–289. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.263. JSTOR 2952523.

• Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution by Denis Lamoureux (St. Joseph's College, Edmonton)
• About: Agnosticism/Atheism on 'Theistic Evolution & Evolutionary Creationism' by Austin Cline; overview of various viewpoints
• Creationism: What's a Catholic to Do? by Michael D. Guinan, O.F.M.; critical assessment of creationism and intelligent design from a Roman Catholic perspective.
• What is Creationism? by Mark Isaak, presents various forms of creationism
• What is Evolution? by Laurence Moran, presents a standard definition for evolution
• Old Earth Ministries Old Earth Creationism, with section on theistic evolution
• Evolution & Creation: A Theosophic Synthesis Surveys critical problems in Darwinist explanations and common theistic views; explores ancient and modern "excluded middle" alternatives
• The Vatican's View of Evolution: The Story of Two Popes by Doug Linder (2004)
• Nobel Prize winner Charles Townes on evolution and "intelligent design"
• Spectrum of Creation Beliefs From Flat Earthism to Atheistic Evolutionism, including Theistic Evolution
• Human Timeline (Interactive) – Smithsonian, National Museum of Natural History (August 2016).