by Robert Lambert

Created on: April 09, 2009

I see no reason that the existence of a god or gods and the existence of evolution should be seen as mutually exclusive. However, it makes sense that people who believe in evolution often become atheists or agnostics. I myself am an atheist and an evolutionist. The reason is not that evolution rules out the existence of gods or vice-versa, rather it is simply that believing in evolution gives a person less reason to believe in gods.

If a person does not understand the big bang, or evolution, or any of the other processes that we now know led to our world as it is, then it makes some sense to jump to the conclusion that someone had to create the world. A loaf of bread exists because someone baked it, and a house exists because someone built it, so why shouldn't the same be true of the world, or life? However, upon learning about the actual processes involved, a god becomes less necessary. One can still say that a god used the process of evolution in order to create and develop life, and many do say this, but in practice "A leads to B and B leads to C" is not very different from "the gods make it so that A leads to B and B leads to C."

If a god's function in the world is simply as a personification of the laws of physics, then it becomes less relevant to people. People are less invested in the idea of a god itself than they are in the ideas of answering prayers, giving salvation, performing miracles, and other powers bestowed upon gods which don't fit into the framework of science. Science also tends to encourage people to rely on evidence rather than faith, and since gods lack any evidence for their existence those who believe in science reject the idea of their existence along with the supernatural in general.

Proponents of evolution and of the scientific outlook in general often argue that evolution contradicts specific religious stories, and that for this reason that the two cannot coexist. For example, we find forms of life that predate humanity by millions and billions of years, which contradicts the idea that all life was made in a short time in the Garden of Eden. However, if there were an omnipotent god, it seems to me that it could easily make those fossils and have them appear to be old if it wanted to. I can't imagine why a god would want to trick people in such a way, and I think a being like that would be more worthy of suspicion than worship, but anything like a god would be a completely different type of being than humans and it's unlikely that we could understand them at all.

If the question were rephrased, asking whether specific religious stories about the creation of the universe and life could coexist with the theory of evolution and other scientific theories, then I think in most cases the answer is no. It's true that an omnipotent god could have created the universe in seven days, or even in a single moment, and then made it look older than it is, but there's simply no evidence for that. There's no reason to invent a story to re-explain what we can see as some grand illusion. I don't like it when atheists act as if we have a monopoly on reason. There are irrational atheists, plenty of them, and reasonable religious people. But belief in gods come more from a desire for it to be true than from actually weighing the evidence.

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