Divinely Guided Evolution

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's report entitled, "Global Survey of Evangelical Protestant Leaders," introduced in an earlier posting (here), included a question concerning evolution, which provides us with further insights into the various ways people of faith understand the relationship between God and evolution.  Question 41 of the questionnaire (p. 109) asked the respondents, evangelical leaders who attended the 1010 Lausanne Conference in South Africa, to select one of three choices that corresponded most nearly to their own thinking.  The results were:

• 3% agreed that, "Humans and other living things have evolved over time due to natural processes such as natural selection."
• 41% agreed that, "A supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today."
• 47% agreed that, "Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."
• 9% gave no answer.

This is not what we might have expected.  The general perception is that evangelicals are biblical literalists and have to believe that all living species were created out of whole cloth at the beginning of creation.  No so, however.  Four evangelical leaders in ten, instead, accepted the truth of evolution but rejected natural selection as the mechanism that drives evolution.  Instead, they hold that God guides the process of evolution—a half-step away from a literalist interpretation of Genesis and toward biological evolution.

The Rev. Bill McGinnis, who apparently represents this middle way between outright rejection and wholesale acceptance of evolution, writes, "God created evolution, and He guides it and controls it, for His own purposes. Evolution is not an accident, and it does not happen according to any mechanistic process."  Rejecting the idea of the survival of the fittest and the role of random mutations in evolution, McGinnis also states, "No. God is the Creator of everything, just as it says in the Bible. He uses evolution as one of His creative tools, and he guides it and controls it every step of the way."

It's an interesting approach, but the problem is that the evidence for natural selection is overwhelming and growing by the minute.  (See the RPK posting, "The Scientific Method vs. the Creationist Method," on this same subject).  It, furthermore, leaves unanswered the issue of why God would use a method that is so clearly hit or miss and leaves all sorts of sloppy left overs (like the human appendix) that are unnecessary and sometimes harmful.  The idea that God manipulates the details of evolution, finally, also leaves us with the thorny issue of predestination and human freedom.  If God is in such intimate control, then we seem to be no more than puppets whose strings are pulled by a divine evolutionary comptroller.  God must also be the immediate source of all suffering in nature and among humans.  In all, it still seems best to understand God as the creator of evolutionary processes, which operate by fixed laws but also incorporate freedom and even chance as part of the process.  We see God's presence in the process of evolution as just that: a Presence working within the laws of evolution, seeking to mold us to ends that we really don't comprehend.  God works by the Spirit, not by fiat.