Excerpted from A Reasonable Response: Answers to Tough Questions on God, Christianity and the Bible
By William Lane Craig and Joseph E. Gorra (Moody)
A 2014 OUTREACH RESOURCE OF THE YEAR
ON EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND THEISM
Dear Dr. Craig,
I want to start off by thanking you for what you’ve done for Christianity and for Jesus both in your written work and all throughout your career.
However, I do still have two questions regarding the nature of evolution and God’s role to play.
1) Stephen Meyer, who is an American scholar, philosopher of biology, and advocate for intelligent design, says, “Evolution is a purposeless, undirected process. No one, not even God, can direct an undirected process or give purpose to a purposeless process.” He also has called theistic evolution an oxymoron. And yet he is not alone among many biologists. There’s a trend to think like this in the United States. A 2009 poll by Pew Research Center found that 87 percent of scientists say evolution is due to natural processes, such as natural selection, genetic drift and random mutation. So, does that really bother your theism?
2) If you do accept evolution, at what point did humans become human?
Did God sort of intervene in this point of history when he decided this creature is special? Because in evolution, a species is always the same as its parent; there is no one time in the history of any species where you can say, “that’s a new species.” Why did God favor this one creature to the very similar
Homo heidelbergensis
Homo neanderthalensis
Homo floresiensis
Homo habilis
Homo georgicus
Homo erectus
Homo ergaster
Homo antecessor, etc.
Many of these displayed human-like behavior and many have asked the “why” question also. So, does that bother your theism either?
Andrew
United Kingdom
