Can you be Christian and believe in evolution? Absolutely. Can you be Christian and deny that evolution is a real? Absolutely.
To be Christian is to recognize and declare that Jesus Christ is Lord. What most Christians mean by this claim is that Jesus is uniquely the son of God and that belief in Jesus is life-changing. Put another way: being a Christian matters and belief in Jesus makes a difference in a person’s life.
This has very little to do with evolution and everything with an assumption that there is something special about Jesus and in someway we need the truth that Jesus brings to us.
Wait. Doesn’t the Bible say that God created the Universe and doesn’t evolution say that the world was created through a different process?
Not exactly. The Bible does say (in several places) that everything that is came into existence by the power of God. Evolution, at least how I understand it, describes a process by which life in all of its form developed on this Earth over many, many thousands of millenia. It is independent of the existence of God, but is used by many atheists (which literally means non-theist or non-”God oriented”) as an argument against the existence of God. But a person can believe in God (a Theist) and still accept the scientific principles of evolution.
But what about the seven day creation depicted in Genesis? When we read the story of Creation literally we may have a problem with evolution. But, that story is not now, nor ever was intended to be, a story about scientific origins. No where in Genesis 1 does it explain how God creates. Instead, it is a theological (theology means “words about God”) claim. The claim is that God is the source of everything.
At the time that Genesis was written this was a big deal. The cultures and peoples around the ancient Middle East had stories of the world being created because Gods had sex with one another or fought with one another and the world was formed in the violence that resulted. The writer of Genesis shouts out a resounding “NO!” The world isn’t the offspring of some strange sexual relationship or the result of dramatic violence and death. The world was created by the one God. And, the creation is good!
It was and still remains a radical idea. Those atheists that insist that the world was created from a random set of events starting with the Big Bang and proceeding over millions and billions of years until this moment are also making a claim about the nature of the universe: that it just happened, continues to just happen, and has no other end in sight! This universe is neither good nor bad, but simply is and it is random at that.
But the Christian still says, No! It didn’t just happen. It isn’t just random. It is God created and it is good.
This is part of why we listened to the song “Black and Gold.” Black and Gold by Sam Sparro
In the song, a person considers the possibility that the world exists without God, but finds that there is more to life than what can “be seen.” In the song the person notes that there is the “weight of something beyond” but doesn’t know where it fits in. The Song is an excellent discussion about the difficulty of looking at the world only through the eyes of a science (only accepting what can be seen, tasted, touched, smelled, etc. And only believing what can be absolutely proven) when there are some things that are true about life that cannot be seen (“if vision is the only validation then most of my life isn’t real’) or proven.
My favorite part of the song is “if you are not really there then the stars don’t even matter and I am filled to the top with fear that it is all just a bunch of matter.”
The person in the song and the author of Genesis have something in common. The world makes more sense and is a better place when we recognize the existence of a God that can “put the world into motion.”
Listen to the song and think about the limits of what we can proven. Do you feel the weight of something beyond? Do you sometimes feel the presence of another even when you are alone? If so, it could be the Holy Spirit talking to you. God maybe trying to get your attention!
If you follow that post and watch the video for Black and Gold on You Tube, there is a comment by someone who has been there before you (that is also what the Bible is… comments from people who have been there before us). The person writes “I don’t get it. It’s about God? But it is like a love song. ”
Yep. It reminds me of someone else who spent a long time trying to avoid God. Later on he became a great writer of the Christian faith. His name was Augustine. His most famous book is The Confessions. In it he describes his many sins, his effort to avoid God, and what happened after he gave in to God’s approach. It is almost like a love affair and he wrote these famous words, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest with You.”
That song, makes me think of that.
So. Recap: Evolution is a system of scientific principles to explain the development of life on Earth. Christians can believe in evolution and take their Bible seriously. Christians are free to believe in evolution or not. Our ability to understand the universe is limited when we accept only what we can prove. Our hearts are restless until they find a deeper relationship with God. Oh, and Black and Gold is a really cool song.
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