Evolutionary Christianity

Throughout Advent and the Christmas Season a natural scientist and devout Christian, Michael Dowd, conducted 38 telephone interviews on this topic with a wide range of scientists and theologians from diverse Christian traditions, including evangelicals, all discussing various aspects of their views about Christianity & Evolution. There were three Nobel Science Prize winners among the speakers and four Templeton Prize winners for their contribution to religion. Some were academics. Some were pastors. It is an incredibly diverse group and all these conversations can be downloaded as MP3 files.

They seem to me to have three basic themes, but each guest speaker takes their own particular slant on them.

Firstly, they want to claim a middle ground between Ken Ham's young earth Creationism and Richard Dawkins' scientific atheism. For them there is no conflict between science and the Bible and in fact the whole realm of scientific evidence, as a revelation of truth, is in some sense a revelation of God. Therefore, the scientific evidence for a process of evolution does not undermine faith in Biblical Revelation, it simply changes what we understand the text to be saying and how it got to be that way.

Secondly, they want to propose that the idea of evolution, of gradual and incremental change is intrinsic to all aspects of creation. If this is so, and there is a great deal of evidence for it, they want to suggest that our faith must also be seen in evolutionary terms - not just at a personal level, but also for the whole of the church. Most of us can see the sense of our own faith journey as one in which we have had a gradually unfolding, ever deepening relationship with God. I like, but find quite challenging, the idea that the faith of God's people and the church must also be constantly evolving into new things.

Finally, they talk about time as Deep Time and by it simply mean that there is to much evidence (revelation from God) that the world is approximately 18 billion years old for anyone to convincingly argue that God made it all 6,500 years ago.

It seems to me, and others, that there are basically four ways that Christians deal with this Science-faith debate.

1. The two world views are mutually exclusive - you can't have an evolutionary scientific world view and be a Christian.

2. The two world views must be kept in separate compartments of our lives - like oil and water, they don't mix, but they are both there.

3. The two world views can learn from each other, but they are still essentially separate.

4. The two world views can and must be integrated into a single world view.

I can see all versions of this among the people I know in the church, but I have found this series of conversations have helped give me a vocabulary to express that I have intuitively believed - that science and faith can and must live together within a single world view. What do you think?