God’s Presence and Guidance in Evolution Becoming Adam Podcast – Becoming Adam, Becoming Christ

Where is God in the evolutionary process? Did he just start the universe with the Big Bang and then step back?















Listen or Read. Your Choice.















Before my unexpected “vacation” due to flu, one of my podcast listeners had asked for clarity on my series, Adam’s Evolutionary Journey. “After listening to Episode 3,” she wrote, “I was left feeling a little empty. Where is God in the evolutionary process? Did he just start the universe with the Big Bang and then step back?”







Good question! My short answer is that God guided evolution

at every step along the way. Now for the long answer …















A couple of years ago, the Discovery Institute mined its

scholarly depths to put together a 1,000-page book called Theistic Evolution.

For those of you who may be new to the origins discussion, Discovery is the

self-described hub of the Intelligent Design movement, and Theistic Evolution is

the belief that God used the process of evolution to create all living things, including

us. These days, most who hold that belief prefer the term “Evolutionary Creation,”

which Denis Lamoureux coined in his 2008 book of the same name. According to Lamoureux,

the noun “creation” should receive more emphasis than the adjective

“evolutionary,” and I agree. Unlike Theistic Evolution, the emphasis in

Evolutionary Creation is upon the Creator, not upon the process.







I also prefer Evolutionary Creation for another reason – one

that comes out clearly in the Discovery Institute book. Like any general term, Theistic

Evolution has been used to describe a range of positions, but in Discovery’s

book Wayne Grudem gives it a definition that few Christians would accept.

Namely, he says,







“God created matter and after that

did not guide or intervene or act directly to cause any empirically detectable

change in the natural behavior of matter until all living things had evolved by

purely natural processes” (Grudem, 67).







Strictly speaking, this “hands-off” description of God has

more in common with 17th-18th century deism than with Christianity.

A deist would agree that a supreme being exists, but after setting everything

in motion, the creator then allowed the universe to run its course without

interference. God is a disinterested observer, in other words. Creation thus

becomes an infinitely complex course of dominoes that God set up “in the

beginning,” and once he tipped over the first, nothing else was necessary to

achieve his ultimate end. To be fair, a few Christians do believe that God “front-loaded”

everything into his initial act of creation, and afterward didn’t need to be

involved. But in my experience, I’ve found them so few and far between as to be

negligible. Grudem’s “hands-off” definition of Theistic Evolution certainly

doesn’t describe the vast majority of Evolutionary Creationists. And since the

rest of Theistic Evolution bases its critique on Grudem’s flawed

foundation, the result is a 1000-page doorstop.







God could have pressed an infinite number of levers to influence the direction of evolution, and almost all of them would be indiscernible or unprovable.







The Discovery Institute’s main problem is that its pet

theory – Intelligent Design – attempts to prove that evolution exhibits signs

of design, which implies a designer. Of course, all thinking Christians agree

that God had a plan and purpose for creating, but can that fact be proven? To

do so, one would have to find evidence of God’s intervention, which explains