Evolution

Evolution, in the sense at issue between Darwinian biology and the doctrine of creation, is the hypothesis that species have no fixed properties but are mutable, that all higher organisms, including man, have descended from earlier, simpler forms through a process called natural selection, and that the first organic life itself arose from non-living matter under purely mechanical and chemical laws.¹ The objection Christian theology raises is not to the idea of gradual development as such, an idea already present in Greek philosophy, but specifically to the naturalism and materialism of this hypothesis.¹

Historical Origin

Charles Darwin proposed the theory in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, in whose first edition he estimated the age of life on earth at roughly three hundred million years, a figure later revised upward by other writers.¹ The theory was quickly extended from biology generally to the specific question of human descent, and drew sustained theological engagement almost immediately: Baptist theologian Augustus Hopkins Strong was still weighing its evidence at length in his own Systematic Theology nearly half a century later.²

Core Tenets

The theory’s central mechanism is natural selection: in the struggle for existence, the varieties of a species best adapted to their surroundings survive and reproduce, while the rest die out, so that over long spans of time, gradual change and improvement of lower into higher forms of life is held to produce new species, including man.² Taken to its consistent end, the theory holds that all organic matter ultimately descends from a common source, and that this source itself emerged from inorganic matter.¹

Theological and Scientific Response

Bavinck states plainly that “this divine origin of humankind has never been questioned in the Christian church and in Christian theology,”¹ and the Second London Baptist Confession states the historic Reformed position directly: creation was completed by God “in the space of six days, and all very good.”³ Bavinck raises four specific objections to the Darwinian account.

The theory cannot explain how life itself began. Proposed naturalistic explanations, whether spontaneous generation from inorganic matter or life arriving from elsewhere in the cosmos, “fail to satisfy the mind or heart and demonstrate a kind of desperation.”¹

The theory cannot account for the emergence of new species, only for the elimination of the unfit. “Transitions from one species into the other have never been observed, and natural and sexual selection are insufficient to make them possible.”¹ Strong makes a similar point from the mechanism itself: natural selection “accounts for the selection, not for the creation, of forms”; it is, in his sources’ words, “a destructive, not a creative, principle.”⁴

The theory is especially unable to account for human beings specifically. It offers no adequate explanation for language, morality, conscience, or religion, capacities Bavinck calls “the Rubicon between us and the animal world,” borrowing Max Müller’s phrase.¹ If the theory were true in full, “we are not fallen and human image bearers of God but only highly developed animals,” so that “humanity as the image of God cannot be maintained.”¹

The theory clashes with Scripture’s own account of humanity’s age, unity, and origin.¹ Bavinck is nonetheless cautious about overspecifying that age from Genesis’s own genealogies: “we are thus led to a time that is not much beyond five thousand to seven thousand years before Christ, though we need to recognize that scholars are far from having reached agreement about the chronology of the Bible.”⁵

Not every theologian who has held the doctrine of creation has drawn an identical line against Darwinian biology. Strong, writing as a Baptist rather than as a confessional Calvinist, took a more mediating position: “We grant that Darwin has disclosed one of the important features of God’s method. We concede the partial truth of his theory… But we refuse to regard natural selection as a complete explanation of the history of life.” On man specifically: “Though man came through the brute, he did not come from the brute, but from God.”² Among Christians who affirm the doctrine of creation, both a young-earth reading and various forms of concordism between Genesis and geological age remain live, named positions.⁶

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 11, “The Image of God,” “Human Origins.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰
Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 469. ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” §1. ↩
Strong, Systematic Theology, 2:470. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 11, “The Image of God.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth,” editorial note on concordism, citing Hugh J. Ross, Genesis One: A Scientific Perspective (Sierra Madre, CA: Wiseman Productions, 1983), and Davis A. Young, Creation and the Flood: An Alternative to Flood Geology and Theistic Evolution (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1977). ↩