[2]According to Eugenie Scott, Director of the US National Center for Science Education, "In one form or another, Theistic Evolutionism is the view of creation taught at the majority of mainline Protestant seminaries, and it is the official position of the Catholic church".
One recent survey, conducted by physicist Max Tegmark, on "of how different US faith communities view origins science, particularly evolution and Big Bang cosmology".
Although "Gallup reports that 46% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago", it found "only 11% belong to religions openly rejecting evolution.
Both Jews and Christians had considered the idea of the Genesis creation history as an allegory (rather than as an historical description) long before the development of Darwin's theory.
[11][12] Theistic evolutionists argue that it is inappropriate to use Genesis as a scientific text, since it was written in a pre-scientific age and originally intended for religious instruction; as such, seemingly chronological aspects of the creation accounts should be thought of in terms of a literary framework.
This can be argued either from the standpoint that it simply does not matter, or from an interpretation of the Agañña Sutta favoring the notion that it describes the basic concept of evolution.
Donald S. Lopez, a renowned [citation needed] Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan studies explains in his book "Buddhism and Science: a Guide for the Perplexed" that in Buddhism, the process of Rebirth (into any of a multitude of states of being including a human, any kind of animal and several types of supernatural being) is conditioned by karma (action of consciousness), which explains Dalai Lama's view.
This Parable of the arrow has often been used to illustrate the Buddha's teachings that "practitioners who concern themselves with the origins of the universe and other topics are missing the point of their religious practice."
[20]Evolution contradicts a literalistic interpretation of Genesis; however, according to Catholicism and most contemporary Protestant denominations, biblical literalism in the creation account is not mandatory.
[24]Later, Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, would follow Augustine's logic, writing: On the day on which God created the heaven and the earth, He created also every plant of the field, not, indeed, actually, but 'before it sprung up in the earth,' that is, potentially... All things were not distinguished and adorned together, not from a want of power on God's part, as requiring time in which to work, but that due order might be observed in the instituting of the world.
[35] Alexander Men' (1935-1990), a popular but sometimes heterodox advocate of Eastern Orthodoxy, wrote: According to the Christian understanding, evolution is not simply a movement forward, but also a return of the created order to the ways originally set out by the Creator.
It reveals the purpose of the evolutionary development aimed at creating humanity whose calling is to spiritualize the world, opening it to new creative acts of God.
Science, on the other hand, can only study the forms and stages of nature's formation, and as such, it is still a long way from unravelling the entirety of factors governing evolution.
[37] The position of the Roman Catholic Church on the theory of evolution has changed over the last two centuries from a large period of no official mention, to a statement of neutrality in the early-1950s, to limited guarded acceptance in recent years, rejecting the materialistic and reductionist philosophies behind it, and insisting that the human soul was immediately infused by God, and the reality of a common descent for all humanity (commonly called monogenism).
[41] The Pontifical Biblical Commission issued a decree ratified by Pope Pius X on June 30, 1909, stating that special creation applies to humans and not other species.
They find it to be undignified and unwieldy for a deity to make constant adjustments rather than letting evolution elegantly adapt organisms to changing environments.
According to Sagan: The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.
[47]Capra, in his popular book The Tao of Physics, wrote that: This idea of a periodically expanding and contracting universe, which involves a scale of time and space of vast proportions, has arisen not only in modern cosmology, but also in ancient Indian mythology.
Experiencing the universe as an organic and rhythmically moving cosmos, the Hindus were able to develop evolutionary cosmologies which come very close to our modern scientific models.
[48]The British geneticist and evolutionary biologist J B S Haldane observed that the Dasavataras (ten principal avatars of Lord Vishnu) provide a true sequential depiction of the great unfolding of evolution.
[52] Plenty of Muslims view that the theory of human evolution can be made compatible with the Islamic faith if the homo species which evolved from the Australopiths (such as H. Habilis, Rudolfensis, Erectus, etc.)
Adam and Hawa and their pre-hybridization descendants are considered as some kind of unknown human species whose fossils have not been found yet and thus, separate from the standard theory of evolution.
This would also mean that Adam and Hawa and their descendants played a crucial role in shaping human evolution as hybridization would drastically change the future generations.
These Rabbis forming part of Jewish opposition to evolution considered that his books were heresy as they indicated that the Talmud is not necessarily correct about scientific matters such as the age of the Earth.
Karaite Judaism is a Jewish a movement which is distinct in that they do not accept the Talmud (a series of Rabbinic commentaries) as law and follow the Hebrew scriptures as they are written.
Pantheists (for instance in Naturalistic Pantheism) may view natural processes, including evolution, as work or emanations from the impersonal, non-anthropomorphic deity.
Wallace, in his later years, was effectively a deist who believed that "the unseen universe of Spirit" had interceded to create life as well as consciousness in animals and separately in humans.
[59] Darwin had Gray and Charles Kingsley in mind when he wrote that "It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist & an evolutionist".
[60] An early example of this kind of approach came from computing pioneer Charles Babbage who published his unofficial Ninth Bridgewater Treatise in 1837, putting forward the thesis that God had the omnipotence and foresight to create as a divine legislator, making laws (or programs) which then produced species at the appropriate times, rather than continually interfering with ad hoc miracles each time a new species was required.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a noted geologist and paleontologist as well as a Jesuit Priest who wrote extensively on the subject of incorporating evolution into a new understanding of Christianity.