When Dr. Luke wrote the Book of the Acts, neither he nor anyone else had an inkling of the advances in the biological sciences that we are making today. Darwin lay far, far in the future. Luke's world view was what anybody's would be in the first century. One cannot prooftext anything he wrote to prove that evolution "fits" with the Bible. For the sake of the integrity of scripture, we have to be very clear on this point. The Book of the Acts was not written to prove our 21st century understanding of the universe.Still, it is interesting to note that Luke's description of God in Acts 17:22-28 can be read quite comfortably from an evolutionary perspective (a "Darwinian" perspective, if you like). That description begins with an affirmation that God is creator of heaven and earth, that is the universe and all that is in it, including Planet Earth. God the Creator is the source of life. Verse 26 avows that, "From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live." (NRSV) It is not even a stretch to read into this statement that God did these things by means of biological evolution, creating in us the potential to inhabit the planet and the potential for human cultural as well as genetic diversity—so that some adapt themselves to the extremes of the frozen North while others find habitation in tropical jungles. These verses also affirm the ultimate goal of humanity as being the search for God. The trajectory of evolution has taken us from non-being to being, non-life to life, non-intelligence to intelligence, and it is not hard to believe that each evolutionary leap is taking us in the direction of the divine. We are created to reach out for God. It is also not difficult to think of God as the Beyond One that is also intimately Present in the vast flow of evolution, particularly human evolution. It makes perfect sense to say, then, as verse 28 does, "For 'In him we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we too are his offspring.'" Amen.
