It should be well known to readers of the Journal ASA that the
ASA does not take an official position on controversial questions. Creation
is not a controversial question. I have no hesitancy in affirming, "We
believe in creation," for every ASA member.
The Biblical doctrine of creation is one of the richest doctrines revealed
to us by God. It reveals to us that the God who loves us is also the God
who created us and all things; at once it establishes the relationship between
the God of religious faith and the God of physical reality. It is because
of creation that we trust in the reality of a physical and moral structure
to the universe, which we can explore as scientists and experience as persons.
It is because of creation that we know that the universe and everything
in it depends moment-by-moment upon the sustaining power and activity of
God. It is because of creation that we know that we are not the end-products
of meaningless processess in an impersonal universe, but men and women made
in the image of a personal God. It is by the formulation of "creation
out of nothing" that we affirm that God created the universe freely
and separately, and reject the alternatives of dualism and pantheism. To
worship God as Creator is to emphasize both His transcendence over the natural
order and His imminence in the natural order; it is to recognize that His
mode of existence as Creator is completely other than our mode of existence
as created. To appreciate God as Creator is to recognize that which He created
as intrinsically good; the rationale for scientific investigation, the assurance
of ultimate personal meaning in life, and the nature of evil as an aberration
on a good creation are all intrinsic to such an appreciation. We believe
in creation. It is unthinkable for a Christian to do otherwise.
It is because of this foundational character of the Biblical doctrine of
creation that it is unfortunate when the word "creation" is used
narrowly and restrictively to refer--not to the fact of Creation--but to
a possible means in the creative activity, usually to that means known as
fiat creation. When it is implied that creation and evolution are
necessarily mutually exclusive, or when the term "creation" is
used as if it were primarily a scientific mechanism for origins, a profound
confusion of categories is involved. The implication is given, deliberately
or not, that if evolution should be the proper mechanism for the growth
and development of living forms, then creation would have to be rejected.
To pose such a choice is to do basic damage to the Christian position. It
is to play directly into the hands of those evolutionists who argue that
their understanding of evolution does away with the theological significance
of Creation. If such an evolutionist is wrong to believe that his biological
description does away with the need for a theological description, the Christian
anti-evolutionist is wrong to believe that his theological description must
make any biological description impossible.
The key to much of the evolution controversy lies in the recognition of
the necessity and propriety of descriptions of the same phenomena on different
levels of reality. Even a complete biological description does not do away
with the need for a theological description, any more than a complete theological
description does away with the possibility of a compatible biological description.
Evolution can be considered without denying creation; creation can
be accepted without excluding evolution. Evolution is a scientific question
on the biological level; it would be unfortunate indeed if a scientific
question were permitted to become the crucial point for Christian faith.
Evolutionary philosophy--shall we say rather evolutionary religion--may well
be something quite different. In its anti-Christian form, such philosophical
evolutionism may involve an exaltation of man, a denial of the reality of
moral guilt in any theological sense, and hence an interpretation of the
life and death of Jesus as nothing more than a good example. In this view,
continued development and improvement are inevitably assured as man, now
become conscious of evolution, completes for himself the process of the
ages. Such evolutionism is a faith-system which competes for the religious
allegiance of men, and against which the Christian faith is called to stand.
But, if it is true that the evolutionist must realize that he has little
scientific support for extrapolating biological evolution into a general
principle of life, the Christian anti-evolutionist must realize that he
has little religious justification upon which to attack a scientific theory
dealing with biological mechanisms. How tragic it often is when Christians,
seeking to avoid the errors of philosophical evolutionism, promulgate the
falsehood that the efficacy of faith in the atonement of Christ effectively
depends upon the dogmatic acceptance of fiat creation and the dogmatic
rejection of any evolutionary processes.
We believe in Creation. We praise the Lord for that faith. But let us avoid
either posing creation and evolution as intrinsically antithetical alternatives,
the acceptance of one demanding the rejection of the other, or presenting
creation as a scientific mechanism alternative to evolution, as though good
science must ultimately lead to the verification of fiat creation
and a falsification of evolution.