Question I was reading up on the study of whether biologists who accept the evolutionary theory believe in God(s) and other theologistic happenings. Many of them say that they find no conflict between the two whatsoever. How is this possible? Isn't the theory of evolution itself based on random, natural selection?

Accepted:
December 9, 2005

Comments

See my answer to a very similar question from December 2.

You can find the question/response to which Prof. Lange refers here.

If I can add a little, I guess I find myself puzzled about why anyone would think there was a conflict between belief in God and evolutionary theory. Some Christians, Jews, and Muslims (and, perhaps, adherents of other faiths about which I know less) do find there to be a conflict, but that is because they read their scriptures in a very literal way and take it as a matter of revealed truth that the universe and its inhabitants were created in a particular way. Then, indeed, there is a conflict, and the issue becomes how one should read scripture. This sort of very literal approach is, in Judaism and Christianity, actually a fairly recent phenomenon, and it does not fit at all with how the authors of the relevant texts understood their own writing. There are, for example, two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis, which have quite different histories, and they contradict one another at several points. That fact does not seem to have troubled the compliers of the book, and there is no reason it need have done so, if they did not themselves consider the book literal history.

So there is that issue. But suppose we do not read the scriptures that way. Why then should there be any conflict between belief in God and evolution? I don't understand the alleged significance of the claim that evolution is "random". In any event, it's not, but is presumably governed by natural laws, whose character biologists seek to uncover.