Evolution and Creation Aren’t Mutually Exclusive
You can read in almost any news publication that somewhere in the United States at
any given moment there is a debate raging on the theory of evolution versus the
story of creation in the Bible. I think that’s sad, because the effort being spent
debating these points of view could be better used in so many other ways, like
helping to house the homeless, raise funds for schools, and so forth. But when you
realize, as I do, that these two concepts are NOT mutually exclusive, it’s not only
sad but rather silly.
Creationism, depending on whom you ask, tells us that there is a God. God, we are
told, created the Heavens and the Earth. This took him six days to complete. When he
was finished, we had the Earth and all the creatures upon it, including humans. If
we look in the Bible for exact methods that God used to create these things, there
is little or nothing specific. Most theologians would tell us that it is an act of
blasphemy to suggest that we as humans could ever truly understand and/or reproduce
God’s methods of creation. They would tell us that such understanding is beyond us.
This the image of creationism that exists in my mind. Yours may differ, as is your
right and belief.
Evolution, on the other hand, tells us that all life on Earth started from some
humble organism that gained the “spark of life”. While there are theories on just
how that spark happened and how life began, there is no concrete proof. In this
sense, evolutionists and Christians have the same “question mark” in their heads when
they look at the initial “creation” of life on Earth. Neither side can say exactly
how it began. It should be noted at this point that Charles Darwin, who is credited
with inventing the theory of evolution, believed that there was a God of the Christian
variety and that his theory was in keeping with Christian beliefs. Evolution says
that from the initial living organisms, all other life on Earth came about through a
series of changes, mutations, and interactions. As a particular form of life
found itself ideally suited to its environment, it thrived and sometimes displaced
other less-ideally-suited forms. At the end of all that “evolving” we find the many
varied forms of life on Earth today.