by Don Davidson

Created on: January 26, 2010

A belief in Darwinism, properly defined, is almost impossible to reconcile with faith in a personal God because they are contrary faith positions, as I will explain. But let us first define our terms.

I define Darwinism as the belief that life originated and developed through entirely natural means, without any supernatural intervention. The lack of supernatural intervention is essential, for that is science’s bias. As any scientist will tell you, science seeks to explain the world only in naturalistic terms. Richard E. Dickerson said it well in “The Game of Science”: “Calling down special-purpose miracles as explanations constitutes a form of intellectual ‘cheating.’ ”

To be clear, Darwinism involves much more than what I call micro-evolution, which is the observable and well-documented fact that organisms change and adapt in response to their environment. When bacteria gradually become resistant to antibiotics, that is micro-evolution. When dark moths became more numerous than white moths in Britain because of industrial-age pollution, that is micro-evolution. But when someone says that birds evolved from dinosaurs, or that humans evolved from ape-like creatures, all through entirely natural means, that is Darwinism. Unless someone invents a time machine, we cannot go back in time to observe how life originated and developed. To this extent, we are necessarily dealing with circumstantial evidence and its interpretation, rather than observable and verifiable events.

Darwinism is a widely-accepted scientific theory. Darwinism teaches that life originated with prokaryotes (single-celled organisms without a distinct cell nucleus, like bacteria), which slowly evolved into single-celled eukaryotes (organisms with a distinct cell nucleus), which then further evolved into multi-celled eukaryotes, including plants, animals, and humans. According to Darwinism, this process required hundreds of millions, or even billions, of years. Darwinism is the best explanation that science has come up with to explain how this all occurred. But recognize the paradigm of science: the supernatural is necessarily excluded. Thus, God can play no part in the origin or the development of life, for that would be “intellectual cheating.”

Now let us turn to God. Faith in God assumes the existence of the supernatural, since God Himself is beyond nature. All three major monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—accept

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