(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "Evolution According to Contemporary Science." Beginning with "How Has Life Evolved?," be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the next primary section, "Evil, Ethics, and Human Values in an Evolving World.")

Does Evolution Exclude God, Meaning, and Purpose?

The belief that evolution cannot accommodate God, meaning, and purpose feeds the most profound objection to the evolutionary account of our origins, and the one that truly motivates most of the sincere theists who reject evolution or the Darwinian account of it. The real issue for them is the fear that Darwinism undermines the very meaningfulness of human existence.

But it does not. First, even if God's existence is denied, a moral and meaningful life is still possible. Many atheists profess to find meaning in love of family, beauties of art and nature, work well done, and other good things; and they can live moral lives in which they find value and pursue good purposes of their own choosing.

In fact, the supposedly "godless" evolutionary viewpoint can even give us all a more honest understanding of ourselves. It reveals that our "morality" cobbles together high-minded philosophy and religious ideals with lowly self-interest, social conventions, and canny politics, the joints between these being whitewashed over with hypocrisy. Realizing how mixed our bag of motives is aids the examination we all need to make of our lives. If we ask, "How good am I?," we will find that the answer is "Not as good as you thought!"

Second, evolution does not make God unnecessary, despite the emphatic assertions of some prominent evolutionists. Evolutionary biology, like all other natural sciences, seeks to explain the workings of nature without invoking supernatural causes. But this is not a denial that the supernatural exists. In technical terms, this naturalism of science is merely methodological and not metaphysical. If evolutionary science's naturalistic methodology is a problem for creationists, then they should be equally scandalized by automobile repair or computer design, which also assume that God does not intervene in the workings of the machine.

Furthermore, science cannot address the philosophical question of why anything at all exists; so when the theist asserts that God is necessary to explain the very existence of a physical world, legitimate natural science is simply unable to comment one way or the other.

The issue of purpose usually arises in the form of the question: What purpose or goal does the evolutionary process (or the evolutionist's universe) itself have? Believers understandably fear that the answer must be: "None." However, replacing the word "purpose" with "goal" (or "intention" or "desired result") makes it clearer that purpose implies some sort of consciousness, even if only a very rudimentary one, in which the intention or desire resides. It follows that an impersonal, lifeless process of nature cannot be said to have a "goal" of its own choosing; it can only have effects, which are more or less predictable. Natural selection in itself has only the effects of constantly maintaining and maximizing the short-term ability to survive, and in the long term, of predictably generating by-products that include novelty, diversity, and ultimately (in isolated cases) intelligence. Individual organisms, in contrast, can and do have at least one goal toward which they universally and actively (even if unreflectively) strive, namely survival.

To the atheist, this is all there is to the story, but the theist will see at once that any overarching purpose or goal there may be for the evolutionary process and its products as a whole can properly be said to reside only in the mind of the Creator who uses this process as an instrument. The absence of a "purpose" within the evolutionary process itself need not mean that purpose is absent from the totality of all that is; we must simply not look for that purpose in the wrong places.

Finally, whatever self-chosen values the atheist may find meaningful, the theist can still accept revealed religion as a more explicit guide to what is good and willed by God. Acceptance of the essential tenets of the Judeo-Christian revelation is not precluded by an evolutionary understanding of creation—in fact it is facilitated by it. The conflict some perceive arises from misunderstanding the nature of scripture: the only plausible purpose of a communication as out-of-the-ordinary as divine revelation is to guide us out of our otherwise-insoluble existential problems, not to satisfy our idle curiosity about matters in nature that we can discover for ourselves.

Above all, the believer who looks forward to the fulfillment of God's promises will find an evolutionary outlook to be as congenial to his or her faith as could be desired. Being products of evolution means being active parts of something vastly bigger than ourselves: a divinely-willed ongoing creation, a continuous chain of life on Earth stretching over more than three and one-half billion years without an instant's interruption, and embraced in a still vaster universe some ten billion years older. Can such a display of divine patience and faithfulness, extended over such eons of unbroken continuity, fail to inspire confidence in the plans and promises of such a God?

To summarize the scientific understanding thus far: the vast extent and age of the universe, and the reality of cosmic and organic evolution, have been established beyond reasonable doubt. Darwinian natural selection remains unshaken as the cornerstone of modern biology. This powerful yet simple—and fundamentally selfish—process still appears both necessary and sufficient to solve what was once among the greatest puzzles of nature: how living things came to be so well adapted to their environments.

Paradoxically, natural selection's relentless maximization of individual advantage can even explain the origins of altruism and the first steps toward true moral consciousness—the subject of the following section entitled "Evil, Ethics, and Human Values in an Evolving World." As we shall see, the inherent selfishness imposed by the evolutionary process is also the key to one of the greatest puzzles of Christian theology and anthropology: original sin.

Words highlighted in green appear in the Glossary.