Teens and Christ

Faith and science

Evolution, and where it strains

Christians have never been anti-science. The people who built modern science — Kepler, Boyle, Pascal, Faraday, Mendel, Lemaître — mostly believed they were tracing the work of a rational Creator, and they expected the universe to make sense because God made it that way.

So when we look at evolution, the goal is not to score points. The goal is to be honest: to say clearly what the theory claims, what the evidence genuinely supports, where real scientific questions remain open, and where the argument has quietly stopped being science and started being philosophy.

Every claim below is footnoted. Follow the numbers to the source and check it yourself — including the ones that argue against us.

Sources and further reading

  1. [1]Lindberg & Numbers, “Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science”

    Historians of science dismantling the popular “conflict thesis” between Christianity and science.

  2. [2]Lemaître, “A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass” (1927) — American Physical Society overview

    The Belgian priest whose work produced what became the Big Bang model.

What the theory actually claims

Before you critique something, you have to state it fairly.

Biological evolution is the claim that all living things descend, with modification, from common ancestors, and that the main engine of that change is natural selection acting on random genetic variation over very long periods of time.

It is worth separating several claims that often get bundled together, because they are not equally well supported.

  • Microevolution — change within a kind

    Populations shift over time: beak sizes, moth colouring, antibiotic resistance in bacteria. This is directly observed, repeatable and not disputed by anyone, Christian or otherwise.[1],[2]

  • Common descent — the family tree

    The claim that all species share ancestors. It rests on comparative anatomy, fossils and genetics. Christians disagree with each other here, and the disagreement is real rather than dishonest.[3]

  • The mechanism — that random mutation plus selection explains everything

    This is the piece under the most genuine scientific pressure, including from secular biologists, and it is where most careful Christian critique is aimed.[4]

  • Naturalism — that there is no mind behind any of it

    This is not a finding of biology. It is a philosophical assumption smuggled in alongside it. No experiment can show that nothing was intended.[5],[6]

Sources and further reading

  1. [1]Grant & Grant, “Unpredictable Evolution in a 30-Year Study of Darwin’s Finches”, Science (2002)

    Three decades of directly measured beak-size change on Daphne Major.

  2. [2]CDC, Antimicrobial Resistance Threats Report

    Observed, documented selection in bacterial populations.

  3. [3]National Academy of Sciences, Science, Evolution, and Creationism

    The mainstream statement of the evidence for common descent — read the strongest version of the case.

  4. [4]Laland et al., “Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?”, Nature (2014)

    Working biologists arguing, in Nature, over whether the standard mechanism is sufficient.

  5. [5]Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons”, New York Review of Books (1997)

    A leading geneticist openly describing an a priori commitment to materialism.

  6. [6]Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies (Oxford University Press)

    The argument that the real conflict is between naturalism and science, not faith and science.

Where the account strains

Honest problems, stated without exaggeration.

None of these prove Christianity, and none of them are secrets — they are debated in mainstream journals. But they are real, and it is fair to say the confident textbook story is tidier than the science.

  • The origin of life is unsolved

    Evolution explains how life changes, not how it started. Origin-of-life research has produced no plausible unguided route from chemistry to a self-replicating cell with a genetic code. That gap is enormous and openly acknowledged.[1],[2]

  • Information, not just matter

    DNA is not merely complex; it is a code with a language-like structure. Every other coded, information-bearing system we know the origin of came from a mind. Appealing to chance and selection to write the first code assumes what needs explaining.[3],[4]

  • Irreducible and integrated complexity

    Some biological machines — the bacterial flagellum, blood clotting cascades, the ribosome — need many parts working together before they do anything useful. Step-by-step advantage-at-every-stage stories for these are proposed, but they remain largely speculative rather than demonstrated.[5],[6]

  • The Cambrian explosion

    Most major animal body plans appear in the fossil record over a geologically short window, without the long chain of gradual precursors Darwin himself said his theory required. Darwin called this a serious objection; the fossil record has not resolved it as neatly as he hoped.[7],[8]

  • Time and probability

    Mutations are overwhelmingly neutral or harmful. Getting multiple coordinated mutations to produce a genuinely new functional protein fold is statistically punishing. Critics argue the available time is not obviously sufficient; defenders disagree. The argument is live.[9],[10]

  • The theory is hard to falsify

    When almost any observation — a trait, its opposite, a feature that appears useless — can be absorbed as 'selected for' or 'a byproduct', the explanation starts to look unfalsifiable. Good science should be able to say what would count against it.[11],[12]

  • The mechanism itself is under revision

    The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the Third Way movement and the 2016 Royal Society meeting all reflect working biologists arguing that mutation plus selection is not enough. That is not creationism; that is the field admitting the standard story is incomplete.[13],[14],[15]

Sources and further reading

  1. [1]Tour, “We’re Still Clueless about the Origin of Life”, Inference Review

    A synthetic chemist’s technical account of how far origin-of-life synthesis actually is.

  2. [2]Szostak, “The Origins of Life” (Nobel laureate lab overview)

    The leading mainstream research programme — useful for judging the size of the remaining gap.

  3. [3]Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (Cambridge University Press)

    The formal treatment of DNA as an information-bearing code.

  4. [4]Meyer, Signature in the Cell

    The design argument from biological information, stated at book length.

  5. [5]Behe, Darwin’s Black Box

    The original irreducible-complexity argument.

  6. [6]Pallen & Matzke, “From The Origin of Species to the origin of bacterial flagella”, Nature Reviews Microbiology (2006)

    The mainstream reply. Read both sides before repeating either.

  7. [7]Erwin et al., “The Cambrian Conundrum”, Science (2011)

    Mainstream palaeontologists on the timing problem, in Science.

  8. [8]Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ch. 10 — “On the Imperfection of the Geological Record”

    Darwin naming the sudden appearance of groups as a serious objection to his own theory.

  9. [9]Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds”, J. Mol. Biol. (2004)

    The much-cited rarity estimate for functional protein folds.

  10. [10]Durrett & Schmidt, “Waiting for Two Mutations”, Genetics (2008)

    The mathematical counter-analysis of waiting times. The disagreement is quantitative and public.

  11. [11]Gould & Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm” (1979)

    Two evolutionists warning that “just-so” adaptive stories explain too easily.

  12. [12]Popper, “Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind” (1978), Dialectica

    Popper on the near-tautological character of natural selection — and his later partial retraction.

  13. [13]Royal Society / British Academy, “New trends in evolutionary biology” (2016 meeting)

    The meeting itself — proof the debate is inside the field, not outside it.

  14. [14]The Third Way of Evolution

    Secular biologists who reject both neo-Darwinism-as-sufficient and intelligent design.

  15. [15]Laland et al., “Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?”, Nature (2014)

    The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis debate in print.

The questions evolution was never able to answer

Even a perfect biology leaves the biggest questions untouched.

Suppose every mechanism worked exactly as the textbooks say. You would still be left standing in front of the questions that actually keep people up at night.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the universe intelligible at all? Why do the constants of physics sit in the razor-thin range that permits life? Where does consciousness come from? Why does anything matter morally — why is cruelty genuinely wrong and not merely unpopular? Why do you have dignity?

Natural selection can, at best, explain why creatures survive. It cannot tell you why survival is good, why truth is worth pursuing, or why you should love your enemy — which is exactly the kind of behaviour it would be expected to weed out.

Sources and further reading

  1. [1]Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Fine-Tuning”

    A careful, non-partisan survey of the physics and the arguments on both sides.

  2. [2]Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”

    The classic statement of why consciousness is not just another biological function.

  3. [3]Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Moral Realism”

    Where the “is cruelty really wrong?” argument actually lives.

  4. [4]Leibniz’s question — Stanford Encyclopedia, “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?”

    The oldest form of the question biology cannot reach.

How Christians read Genesis

Faithful believers land in different places. Know the map.

Christians who love Scripture and take it seriously do not all agree here, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. All of these positions confess that God created deliberately, that humans bear his image, and that sin and death entered a good world.

  • Young-earth creation

    Genesis 1 describes six ordinary days a few thousand years ago; the fossil record largely reflects the Flood. Strength: it reads the text most plainly. Pressure: it has to account for radiometric dating, starlight travel time and geology.[1],[2]

  • Old-earth / day-age creation

    The days are long ages or a literary framework; the earth is ancient, and God created progressively. Strength: it takes mainstream dating seriously. Pressure: the days-as-ages reading is disputed on exegetical grounds.[3]

  • Intelligent design

    Not a reading of Genesis but an argument from nature: some features of biology are best explained by intelligence. Strength: it engages evidence directly. Pressure: it is often dismissed as unscientific before it is examined.[4],[5]

  • Evolutionary creation

    God created through evolutionary processes; Genesis teaches who and why, not the biological how. Strength: no conflict with mainstream biology. Pressure: it must carefully explain Adam, the fall, and death before sin.[6],[7]

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Genesis 1:1

The claim the whole debate orbits: creation is not self-explaining.

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Psalm 19:1

Nature is testimony, not noise.

For by him were all things created... and by him all things consist.

Colossians 1:16-17

Christ is not a gap in the science; he holds the whole thing together.

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.

Romans 1:20

Paul's argument that creation makes God's power visible.

Sources and further reading

  1. [1]Answers in Genesis — statement of the young-earth position

    The position in its own words, rather than a caricature of it.

  2. [2]USGS, “Geologic Time: Radiometric Time Scale”

    The dating evidence a young-earth reading has to answer.

  3. [3]Reasons to Believe — old-earth creation

    The day-age / progressive-creation case.

  4. [4]Discovery Institute, Center for Science and Culture

    The main institutional home of intelligent design.

  5. [5]Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Teleological Arguments for God’s Existence”

    A neutral analysis of design arguments and the standard objections.

  6. [6]BioLogos — evolutionary creation

    Christians who accept mainstream evolutionary biology, in their own words.

  7. [7]Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (IVP Academic)

    The ancient-Near-Eastern reading of Genesis 1 as a temple/functional text.

How to talk about this without losing people

Tone is part of the argument.

Most people do not walk away from Jesus because of a fossil. They walk away because a Christian made them feel stupid, or because a Christian said something obviously false and they later found out.

  • Never overstate the evidence

    Do not say 'there are no transitional fossils' — there are some. Say what is actually true: the pattern is patchier and more sudden than the popular story admits.[1],[2]

  • Separate the science from the philosophy

    'Mutations happen' is science. 'Therefore no one made you' is not. Most arguments you'll meet are the second thing wearing the coat of the first.[3]

  • Ask questions instead of making speeches

    'What would you accept as evidence of design?' and 'Where did the information in DNA come from?' do more work than a monologue.[4]

  • Keep the main thing the main thing

    Christianity does not stand or fall on the age of the earth. It stands or falls on whether Jesus rose from the dead. Steer there.[5]

  • Be willing to say 'I don't know'

    Honesty is more persuasive than certainty you don't have. It also happens to be a command.[6]

Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.

1 Peter 3:15

A defence given with gentleness and respect — the manner is part of the instruction.

He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.

Proverbs 18:13

Answering before you have listened is folly.

Sources and further reading

  1. [1]Daeschler, Shubin & Jenkins, “A Devonian tetrapod-like fish”, Nature (2006)

    Tiktaalik — a genuine transitional form. Know it before you claim none exist.

  2. [2]Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

    The strongest mainstream presentation of the fossil evidence.

  3. [3]Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Naturalism”

    Where the philosophical claim is defined — and why it is not a lab result.

  4. [4]Koukl, Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions

    The question-asking approach, in practical form.

  5. [5]Habermas & Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus

    The minimal-facts argument — the ground worth steering conversations toward.

  6. [6]Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Modesty and Humility”

    Why admitting ignorance is an intellectual virtue, not a defeat.

Keep going with the apologetics pages or read the case for the resurrection at The Cross.