It is clear from reading the vast majority of literature emanating from many recent earth creation and intelligent design sites and papers that the concept of biological evolution and its supporting evidence are very badly misunderstood.

Editor's note: Also referred to as Evolutionary Creation.

Welcome to the “Theistic Evolution” corner of the Center for Faith and Science International.  Here you will find articles and resources supporting that position.  Here at CFSI, we believe that God is the author of the universe in all of its splendor and grandeur and that our salvation as creations of our awesome God comes through His son Jesus Christ. 

What is “theistic evolution?”
As you will discover from visiting other corners of this page, those that profess a belief in Jesus Christ as their savior have different understandings of the size and age of the universe.  These range from the current mainstream scientific understanding that the universe is between 13 and 17 billion years old (with the earth approximately 4.5 billion years old) to belief that the earth is 6,000 years old.

Supporters of young-earth or recent-earth creationism accept this young date and state that scientific evidence can be used to support this position.  Believers of this perspective hold to a literal interpretation of scripture in which the early chapters of Genesis record actual events with no embellishment.

Intelligent Design supporters vary on their acceptance of differing ages of the earth but are in agreement that the design of nature supports the existence of God.  Some supporters of this movement accept limited biological evolution while others do not. 

Those that support theistic evolution argue that biological evolution best supports the available data and that this is God-created and God-directed.  This is the position that I support.  Future posts in this corner will discuss theological and scientific support for this position.  To do this, however, a proper understanding of just what biological evolution is and why it is acknowledged by the scientific establishment to be a legitimate scientific discipline will be necessary.

What is “Biological Evolution?”
It is clear from reading the vast majority of literature emanating from many recent earth creation and intelligent design sites and papers that the concept of biological evolution and its supporting evidence are very badly misunderstood. 

Biological evolution is the theoretical construct positing that the biological world and the fossil record reflect the process of descent with modification and that this reflects common ancestry from a single life form.  This process began more than six hundred million years ago and accurately describes the current and past biological diversity of species on the planet.  This view also accepts that biological evolution has the creative power necessary to account for this biological diversity and that the modern, synthetic theory of evolution as described by its founders (Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, G.G. Simpson, Sewall Wright, J.B.S. Haldane and others), which built on the works of Charles Darwin is a theory that has stood the test of time. 

In its modern form, this theory identifies four major processes of evolutionary change, many of which work in tandem.  These are :

• Genetic flow, which documents the movement of genes between and through populations due to migration and mating patterns. 
• Genetic drift, which observes the behavior of genes in small, isolated populations. 
• Mutation, in which new genetic material is incorporated into the genome of a species through stochastic genetic change at the chromosomal level, and
• Natural selection, in which new traits or trait combinations either increase or decrease in a given population based on how well adapted they are to a given environment.  The working of this process was independently deduced by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the 1830s.   Selection acts on flow, drift and mutation. 

In modern evolutionary theory, the unit of change is the population, and any genetic modifications that occur in individuals of a population are acted upon by selection.  However, the other processes have their own effects as well.  In reproductive populations, gene flow into a population reduces the rate of evolutionary change by expanding the amount of genetic variation.  In this way, many genes that might ordinarily express themselves in smaller populations are masked in larger ones.  Drift, on the other hand leads to faster evolutionary change because genes are often not masked and are expressed in the population more frequently.  Drift, in very small populations, can lead to gene fixation, where all individuals express a particular trait. 

It is the work of selection over time, though, that leads to populations undergoing changes that result in new species.  Speciation occurs when populations split and accumulated genetic change causes the two populations to be reproductively isolated.  As selection works in these populations, over time, they will begin to diverge physically.  Modern evolutionary theory extends observation of these processes into the past to explain the changes seen in organisms represented by the fossil record.

The nature of predictive explanatory evidence
This understanding of evolution as a theoretical construct also accepts that the modern view of science, based on empirical verification, is adequate to describe the natural world as it is and as it has been through hypothesis testing and theory construction.  Note that verification does not equal replication.  Although some sciences rely on hypothesis testing that can be replicated, many scientific disciplines do not.  These are considered the historical sciences, and include geology, palaeontology, taxonomy, astrophysics, and astronomy.  These disciplines, including evolutionary studies have been criticized for having to rely on reconstruction of events to derive an understanding of the past.  A modern critic of such endeavors has remarked: “Were you there?”  It is important to understand that predictive sciences are no less important or less scientific than those relying on replication of tests.  Modern geology and palaeontology, for example, exist in a realm in which hypotheses can be made and tested about what should be found in the fossil and geological records.

For example, it has been hypothesized that the transition from lobe-finned fish (sarcopterygians) to land-dwelling tetrapods (four-limbed animals) took place in the context of shallow Devonian seas between 370 and 400 million years ago.  As a test of this hypothesis, Neil Shubin and colleagues went to late Devonian deposits found in modern-day Greenland and, in their third field season, discovered Tiktaalik roseae, exactly what they hypothesized they would find—a form with transitional characteristics between the sarcopterygians and the tetrapods. 

In the 1870s, Charles Darwin observed that the animals most closely related to humans, the gorillas and chimpanzees, lived in Africa.  Consequently, he hypothesized that the earliest human precursors who would have shared a common ancestor with these apes, would likely also be found there.  This hypothesis was borne out when Raymond Dart, an anatomy professor at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa discovered the first of the australopithecines (southern ape-man) from a cave in South Africa.  This launched a century of discovery leading to the discovery of over fourteen different species of early humans, corroborating what Darwin has originally predicted.

In the next several posts, I will provide support for evolution as it exists from the fields of palaeontology and genetics and support for the theistic evolution perspective which derives from scriptural interpretation and an understanding of how God’s universe and his Word work in concert.