There was a certain point in my thinking about evolution as an explanation for the mechanism of God’s creation that I reached the conclusion that there was not a necessary conflict between evolution and the existence of God, something that is widely assumed, if not clearly articulated.

I was watching a VHS tape with a debate between Phillip Johnson, University of California, Berkeley, and evolutionist William B. Provine, Cornell University. By way of introduction, Johnson said that he and Provine agreed that if the creationist view was wrong, then there was no more place for God, life was meaningless, etc.

Will Provine and I agree that the modern neo Darwinian theory of evolution is fundamentally inconsistent with any meaningful theism, with any meaningful God who acts as a creator of the world. Now of course this isn’t necessarily true of the concept of evolution broadly construed … but the modern neo-Darwinian theory, that is to say the orthodox view among today’s scientists, insists that evolution is an unplanned, undirected process. It combines elements of chance and necessity, or natural law – that is to say, a combination of random genetic changes or mutations which are accumulated through natural selection. These are impersonal, material forces reflecting no preexisting intelligence and no guidance, so that human beings as the outcome of this process are essentially an unplanned accident of nature.

It’s evolution in that sense that we are talking about. … The implication of evolutionary biology in that sense is perhaps not exactly that God does not exist. It would be more accurate to say that if God does exist, existing is about the only thing that God has ever done. God is permanently unemployed, has never found useful employment in the entire history of life, because impersonal material forces were capable of doing the whole job, and did do it.

So if one attempts to hold a view of God as creator, it is a very attenuated view and one which tends to fade away into unreality.

I would agree with Will Provine on this, I would tend to stress … a theistic picture of the world is fundamentally inconsistent with the manner of thinking that evolutionary biologists have employed to reach their conclusions. That is to say, contemporary evolutionary biology, like much else in science, is based on the premise that nature is all there is — it is based on a premise of metaphysical naturalism. One assumes that at the beginning there was nothing but matter in mindless motion. It follows from this starting point assumption that impersonal, unintelligent, purposeless forces must have been capable of doing all the work of creation, because there wasn’t anything else.”

(I might engage Johnson’s arguments later, but the point I am making here is how he shares the perspective of Provine that if evolution is true, a meaningful god cannot exist.)

The debate, predictably, was a typical ‘dialogue of the deaf.’ It occurred to me that in the question of which was right, Provine the evolutionist and atheist or Johnson the creationist and theist, there was a third option: both were wrong. It seemed to me that if these two guys, Johnson and Provine, agreed on something and they were both obviously wrong (in different ways) then maybe the fundamental error lay in their assumption that evolution=atheism.

Kenneth R. Miller (Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution) says that by insisting on this identification of evolution with atheism, creationists “are the unlikely and unwitting allies of vigorous atheists like Dawkins, Provine, and Lewontin who would agree enthusiastically that a complete success for materialist science condemns any search for God to ultimate failure.” (p. 215)

The church has left those who are convinced of evolution – as often happens as students who are in the sciences enter college – with nowhere to go except to atheism. Fanatics like Richard Dawkins do the same with the secular community – claiming that if you believe in evolution, then you must not believe in any god or follow any religion.

Michael Ruse, another evolutionist, sees the rabid atheism of Dawkins as a disservice to the cause of evolution. Ruse, who was a witness for the plaintiff in the 1981 test case (McLean v. Arkansas) of the state law permitting the teaching of “creation science” in the Arkansas school system , takes the position that it is possible to reconcile Christian religion with evolutionary theory, unlike, for example, Richard Dawkins or Phillip E. Johnson. (Wikipedia) He wrote in a review of one of Dawkins’ books: “What we need is not knee-jerk atheism but serious grappling with the issue … it is just plain silly and grotesquely immoral to claim that Christianity is simply a force for evil, as Richard (Dawkins) claims.”

The exact same charge could be leveled against creationists who make no attempt to understand evolution and the arguments that support it, and insist that a Christian must deny evolution in order to remain loyal to the Scriptures.