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Theists Don’t Have Problems With Gradual Processes…

I’m here at the Vibrant Dance of Faith and Science Conference in Austin, where I’ve enjoyed hearing from Stephen Meyer, Hugh Ross, Darrel Falk, Dan Heinze, and more in presentations to a large auditorium of conference attendees. It’s interesting and I think good to bring together so many different perspectives on science and origins, though sometimes distinctions seemed purposefully blurred so as to preserve unity.

An example of this might be Biologos’ Darrel Falk’s plenary session, where he discussed his view of “evolutionary creation” (he doesn’t like “theistic evolution”) as God working through a gradual process. He is right that most of the theists in the room do indeed agree on the point that God is creative and creator, but after appeals to authority (“the sort of evidence that makes almost all people in faculty positions think that humans arose through an evolutionary process,” “why it is absolutely convincing to the majority of biologists in this area – by far, the majority,” “Here is what most biologists believe happened,” etc.) and the story of the Alu sequences in the genome, he said something that struck me as a little off.

If God created humans by a gradual process over a long period of time, does that make it less God’s work?

Now I have a lot of respect for Dr. Falk, but frankly, this seems either naive or misleading. The question for theists is not whether or not God created using a gradual process; it’s that Darwinian evolution is, by definition, an undirected process. Change over time, most theists get. A blind, purposeless process is a bit more troublesome, and as Jay Richards points out, not even God can direct a directionless process.