Theistic evolution
Theistic evolution is not in itself a scientific theory, but includes a range of views about how science relates to religious beliefs and the extent to which God intervenes.
[17] 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.
"From a scientific point of view, evolutionary creationism is hardly distinguishable from Theistic Evolution ... [the differences] lie not in science but in theology.
[21] Divine intervention is seen at critical intervals in history in a way consistent with scientific explanations of speciation, with similarities to the ideas of progressive creationism that God created "kinds" of animals sequentially.
[1][22] Regarding the embracing of Darwinian evolution, historian Ronald Numbers describes the position of the late 19th-century geologist George Frederick Wright as "Christian Darwinism".
[27] 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.
[32] 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.
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,[34] concluded that new species of plants could indeed arise, although limitedly and retaining their own stability.
[citation needed] 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The clergymen Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) and Frederick Temple (1821–1902), both conservative Christians in the Church of England, promoted a theology of creation as an indirect process controlled by divine laws.
Some strict Calvinists welcomed the idea of natural selection, as it did not entail inevitable progress and humanity could be seen as a fallen race requiring salvation.
[43] Darwin himself, in his second edition of the Origin (January 1860), had written in the conclusion: I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.
Within a decade most scientists had started espousing evolution, but from the outset some expressed opposition to the concept of natural selection and searched for a more purposeful mechanism.
[47] The scientist Sir David Brewster (1781–1868), a member of the Free Church of Scotland, wrote an article called "The Facts and Fancies of Mr. Darwin" (1862) in which he rejected many Darwinian ideas, such as those concerning vestigial organs or questioning God's perfection in his work.
Brewster concluded that Darwin's book contained both "much valuable knowledge and much wild speculation", although accepting that "every part of the human frame had been fashioned by the Divine hand and exhibited the most marvellous and beneficent adaptions for the use of men".
Between 1866 and 1868 Owen published a theory of derivation, proposing that species had an innate tendency to change in ways that resulted in variety and beauty showing creative purpose.
Among the few who did record the impact of Darwin's writings, the naturalist Joseph LeConte struggled with "distress and doubt" following the death of his daughter in 1861, before enthusiastically saying in the late 1870s there was "not a single philosophical question connected with our highest and dearest religious and spiritual interests that is fundamentally affected, or even put in any new light, by the theory of evolution", and in the late 1880s embracing the view that "evolution is entirely consistent with a rational theism".
Similarly, George Frederick Wright (1838–1921) responded to Darwin's Origin of Species and Charles Lyell's 1863 Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man[52] by turning to Asa Gray's belief that God had set the rules at the start and only intervened on rare occasions, as a way to harmonise evolution with theology.
[53] 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.
[54] Theistic evolution 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.
[58][59] 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.
[61] The Islamic scholar, science lecturer and theologian Shoaib Ahmed Malik[62] divides Muslim positions on the evolution theory into four different views.
The American botanist Asa Gray used the name "theistic evolution" in a now-obsolete sense for his point of view, presented in his 1876 book Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism.
[73][75] The historian Edward J. Larson stated that the theory failed as an explanation in the minds of biologists from the late 19th century onwards as it broke the rules of methodological naturalism which they had grown to expect.
[77] A number of notable proponents of theistic evolution, including Kenneth R. Miller, John Haught, George Coyne, Simon Conway Morris, Denis Alexander, Ard Louis, Darrel Falk, Alister McGrath, Francisco J. Ayala, and Francis Collins are critics of intelligent design.
They consider that it undermines central biblical teachings by regarding the creation account as a myth, a parable, or an allegory, instead of treating it as an accurate record of historical events.
