Postscript: additional thoughts
Following is discussion of some topics that I thought it important to address, although there wasn’t a particular place for them in the flow of my main thrust.

The unhappy dynamics of the “Creation/Evolution Debate”
When the theory of evolution was first introduced, it met the traditional "literal" reading of Genesis popular at the time head-on, and as human nature would lead one to expect, immediate attempts were not made to harmonize and make sense of the two together; rather, a polarized standoff developed; each of the two “camps” being defined as simply “not its opposite.” When two blocs form and are only defined for the purpose of opposing the other, rather than advancing a substantive, coherent position that stands on its own merits, you have the textbook picture of the false dilemma. This is where we get the two “sides” that persist to this day, the Fundamentalist-Christian-Creationist, and Humanist-Atheist-Evolutionist. Anyone who so much as leans in one direction will likely to some extent define their whole position as being opposed to the “other.” Those who, rather than participate in this self-perpetuating dichotomous war, attempt to harmonize the two concepts of “Creation” and “Evolution,” are relatively rare. It is against this backdrop of bipolar political struggle that many evolutionary arguments, both pro and con, take their shape and in which context they must be understood.

The “no animal death before the Fall” notion
Some Christians seem to react with consternation at the long history of animal death that evolution entails, thinking this somehow inherently unbiblical. In fact, some Christians talk as if the Bible explicitly teaches that there was no animal death at all in the world before the Fall. Presumably, the following passage is what is interpreted as such.

“For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Rom. 8:20–22)

The inference that is commonly made, it seems, is that the “frustration” and “decay” that resulted from sin refer directly to animal death; and therefore, before the Fall, there was no animal death at all. But this seems, frankly, ridiculous, when you look at the basic ecology of animal life on Earth and its natural features. “No animal death before the Fall” would mean no carnivores until only recently in Earth’s history. And when we see how carnivores are so completely fitted to the acquisition of their titular food source, how are we to imagine that they were once herbivores? If all animals were once placid vegetarians, did they suddenly, at the Fall, mutate into creatures with all the adaptive accoutrements that go along with thoroughgoing carnivorousness? And consider the elegant poise and finely-honed instincts of the feline as it hunts, and the pain-staking, effective intricacy of a spider’s web, each strand of which is stronger by weight than steel: are we to believe that these are the work of Satan? The idea is, frankly, preposterous to the extreme. And when you’re watching a nature show, and the cheetah catches up with the antelope and brings it down, do you really think to yourself, “oh, that’s terrible”? And in cases where we feel ambivalent about the very idea of animals preying on other animals, might we simply be wrong to be offended? Remember, we are in an alienated state from nature just as we are from God: our right relationship with it has been sundered, and we should not be surprised if we are confused about our disposition toward it. Excessive anthropomorphization of animals may well be expected under the corrupted condition in which we find ourselves. The confusion inherent in our outlook and perspective on the state of nature is excellently expressed by the below "Calvin and Hobbes" comic:

So what do the “frustration” and “decay” refer to? It's undeniable that nature does feel the effects of our sinful nature, not least because of the aforementioned alienation of our right disposition toward it. This corruption that has seeped into nature might be manifested in any of a number of ways, genetic for instance, about which we can barely begin to conjecture, and that result in the world being in the state it is, ravaged by viruses and disease. In addition, it seems very likely that Satan was somehow at work perverting certain features of the natural world well prior to the Fall (after all, the Biblical story portrays him as able to take shape as an animal before the first human act of disobedience). But animal death, as such, I think it absolutely untenable to ascribe to the consequences of sin.

Judeo-Christian misgivings about “no special creation of humans”
Humans being descended from previous species just like all other animal life is an idea that, probably more than any other, is likely to trip up the Christian considering an evolutionary point of view. After all, part of the Christian view of man is as inherently transanimalistic—yes, we’re physically “animals,” but also qualitatively something on a higher plane: spiritual, sentient beings. Consider the empirical fact that humans are genetically 97%, 98%, or whatever, identical with gorillas. Well, we already know that this doesn’t describe what we are, qualitatively, or the quantum leap in difference between the natures of our two species—it cannot be quantitatively represented by mere DNA homology. The evolutionary explanation gives an explanation for this physical homology, but like the homology itself, doesn’t really tell us who we are in the qualitative sense that every person knows. The Genesis creation story emblematically represents the specialness of human beings, but if you take that away as a historical account, some may misunderstand it to also take away the meaning account, but it does not. Its meaning still stands, but we have the evolutionary account to tell us whence our animal nature derives.

Darwinism and theism
Traditional Darwinism has often gone down as a bitter pill in the mouths of Christians. One can easily see why, when you consider that “chance” and “competition” and the whole “nature red in tooth and claw” idea seem to be part and parcel with it. What is the Christian to make of Darwinism in the context of accepting an evolutionary process for the creation of life on Earth? Well, as far as “chance” is concerned, for the Christian there is no question of “chance” in the sense of “randomness.” What it means to say that God oversaw the process of evolution is that the actual outcomes were chosen out of many possible ones. Any evolutionary scientist can tell you that there’s no particular deterministic reason that one should have expected the process of evolution to result in beings like ourselves. Out of the innumerable possibilities that arise from the vast number of contingencies involved in evolution, any of them, including the actual outcome, are and would have been indistinguishable physically from “chance” outcomes. To the Christian, providence is what we call the particular interplay of happenstance that brings about particular outcomes for a reason. This is a qualitative statement of meaning, while natural science, by nature, can only perceive “chance” wherever there is statistical complexity.

As far as Darwinism itself goes, the way I see it, the way that modern evolutionary theory is often presented makes it seem like a kind of “bastard child” of Darwinism: Darwinism being named in popular-level writings as a central, defining concept although the reality is quite a bit more complicated than the simple idea of stepwise generational changes each giving successive advantages in reproductive success. If pressed on it, any biologist will tell you that while natural selection certainly happens, the process of evolution is a lot more complicated and has a lot more to it than that (in fact, the vagaries of very long biological processes being what they are, I think theism makes sense of evolution like nothing else). If evolution is attacked based on Darwinism, an evolutionist will be quick to point out that simply Darwinism, as such, does not completely embody modern evolutionary theory. But in other cases, some of them like to say things like “Darwinism rules triumphant.” Certainly, there are individual levels of disagreement between scientists on the importance of different processes to evolution, but that does not testify against evolution any more than theological disagreements indicate the nonexistence of God. Which brings me to my next point...

Interesting parallels between the epistemics of evolution and of theology
Surprisingly, there are many ways in which the grounds for belief in evolution are very similar to those for belief in God. Of course, the irony of that idea, given the traditional antipathy of theists for evolution, is extreme to the point of outrageous humor. But it holds up very well and examining what they have in common is extremely instructive. I was originally going to list them in bullet-point fashion, but they are all really part of a unified whole that is fascinating to discover, so any sequence and separation would be arbitrary.

Both the theory of evolution and the existence of God are “unfalsifiable,”* that is, no single datum of evidence can disprove them. And this charge is sometimes brought against both (never at the same time, of course!) as grounds for skepticism against them. But the grounds for belief in evolution, and in God, that can be given are the wide variety of evidence that give us powerful clues toward them. In the scope of scientific knowledge, there is enough fossil, genetic, and other evidence to construct a single picture outlining the history of life on Earth, and that new discoveries can be harmonized with. This robustness in evidence and in coherence is what gives evolution its epistemic standing as a “fact” in science. It’s what makes sense of all biology. Likewise, the existence of God is attested to by evidence such by “fine-tuning” in the universe, the existence of sentient beings like ourselves, the necessity of moral absolutes, the idea of perfectability, the life of Jesus, and rationality itself. It all comes back on itself as a unified whole, and can be taken as grounds to place faith, absolutely and in a non-provisional way, in the God of the Bible.

Against epistemic grounds such as those just given for evolution and for God, are typically given absolute statements of personal skepticism that take the form of, for instance, “there’s no way you’re going to make me believe in an invisible, all-powerful being out there that made everything and that knows me,” or “there’s just no way that the incredible biological complexity that we see could have come about without a Designer. [by which the arguer means: “without special natural-law-defying miracles”]” Both are based on completely subjective grounds that the arguer necessarily, by the very act of making the argument, projectively sees as objective, and act as an insurmountable barrier against an idea unacceptable for personal reasons.

But as with both belief in evolution and belief in God, one should not feel one should have to understand everything about in order to believe it! Sure, evolution on a “gut” level may seem awfully improbable (although some testify that to them it seems quite plausible: does that prove that it’s true? No, assessments of truth must be considered as independently as possible from personal, subjective, “gut” standards of credulity), but as I’ve mentioned, you don’t have to be able to envision a particular pathway from a putatively ancestral structure to a modern one: evolution is very complicated and one should expect such a process to be, in its totality, beyond comprehension. I, personally, would tend to think that there’s just no way in God’s green Earth that the advent of sexual reproduction could have come about by evolutionary means, but I’m not going to go from that to a declaration that evolution could not have produced sexual reproduction. After all, what do I know? Likewise, it’s rational to believe in God while still retaining unanswered questions about certain portions of the Bible, or not understanding some of God’s particular actions in your past, or certain aspects of theological doctrine not sitting quite tight with your own idea of “logic,” or whatever other gaps exist in one’s understanding.

*You will note that I said earlier that it is a characteristic of scientific knowledge, and by inclusion evolutionary knowledge, that it be falsifiable. The reader will hopefully allow me to use this word in different senses for different contexts. As falsifiability being a precondition for qualification as scientific knowledge, I use that to mean that the data themselves, that are used as raw material toward constructing the theory, are falsifiable. The idea of the entire theory of evolution being “unfalsifiable” is a question of scope. In fact, I’m using it in still another sense when I refer to the unfalsifiability of the existence of God, which is in principle unfalsifiable. But in this particular case, both uses of “unfalsifiability” are invoked with respect to grounds for belief and effect on credulity as related to the concept, on which the analogy that is used depends.

The Noachian Flood as a local, not global, event
Why? Two words: Australian marsupials. The fact that all mammals indigenous to Australia are marsupials is powerful evidence that they share a common premammal ancestor that, hundreds of millions of years ago, began the slow shift toward mammalhood which its island isolation kept unique from other protomammal populations. Hence, all mammals in Australia (before “stupid white men” came along and polluted it with dingoes and rabbits) were marsupials. The undisturbed evolutionary process that that implies would preclude Australia, for one, being affected by the Noachian flood. It’s just needlessly ridiculous to think of marsupials, alone among mammals, all going from the ark straight to Australia, or any other such scenario you’d have to envision to preserve the idea of a worldwide flood.

Further, there isn’t evidence of a worldwide flood, but there is evidence of a local flood in and around the Black Sea area some several thousand years ago. And Genesis 1–11 not needing to be taken as strictly “historical” (see “What I believe about evolution”, above), there’s no need to consider the “whole Earth,” as in “the entire globe” to have been inundated. The ancient Hebrews to whom Genesis was originally given would have had no sense of “the entire globe,” anyway. Similarly, when Caesar Augustus ordered a census be taken of the “all the inhabited Earth” (Luke 2:1, NASB), it’s clear that nobody had China or America in mind. And as to (quasi-)historical evidence for a Flood, it is striking that cultures in the world as disparate as the Chinese, Pacific islanders, and Native Americans, all have some kind of flood story in their oral tradition.

Context of an ancient document in the world in which it was given
So if God created life by an evolutionary process, why is that not reflected in the Genesis account? Must we mean that God was somehow trying to trick us, and didn’t give us the full or accurate story? Well, let’s say that God indeed create by evolution (in order to give anything a fair hearing, part of what must be done is to assume its truth and then assess its internal coherence and explanatory power). Would He have told the ancient Hebrews all about the evolutionary history of life on Earth? Conjectural propositions about what God “would” or “would not” have done in some given instance must be hazarded with care, but I think it’s safe to say that a prescientific people, knowing nothing of genetics or any other aspect of modern biology, wouldn’t be able to make anything at all of an evolutionary story of life on Earth. Did God let the Hebrews in on the fact that the Earth is a globe? No, not only would there be no particular reason to, but I think that God, on purpose and as a rule, leaves physical facts up to us to discover, having granted us rational faculties to find stuff out on our own. I think it would have been disennobling to our sapient capacities to have simply been hand-fed information like the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun, and that current life forms evolved from previous ones.

Further, I don’t think the ancient Hebrews had a sense of a historical account in the same way that we do, as a dispassionate record of events laid down simply for posterity and having no necessary meaning attached to them (I hope that anyone with a better background in Bible knowledge than I have will correct me on this idea if it is inexact or incorrect). The way history seems to have been recorded was to get meaning across, and in that capacity, there’s no tension between the discoveries of modern science and Biblical accounts in Genesis. Note that this doesn’t mean that there are no historical facts in the Bible. Page for page, most of the Bible is devoted to the recording of historical events, but it seems stylistically clear that, in contrast, the early chapters of Genesis are not historically literal.

The evolutionary process, with all its death and mass extinctions, as “wasteful”
Assuming one gets over the “no animal death before the Fall” notion, I don’t see any reason to be tripped up the fact, recorded in the fossil record, of countless extinctions throughout life’s history. It would seem to proscribe a rather arbitrary limit on how God could use evolution to say that it’s out of character or something. It’s as if one is saying, “because we can’t see all these animals now, why did God create them?” which is outrageously presumptive. If you were in God’s position (“bear with me in a little foolishness, but indeed you are bearing with me” :-) [2 Cor 11:1]), wouldn’t you take a positive delight in letting the grand evolutionary process create as many different strange and wonderful creatures as possible, even if they become extinct before humans get an opportunity to check them out in person? I don’t think the Earth is big enough to fit all the range of life that God could invent, all at once. But the elegant, grand process of evolution, over time, made possible the creation of a near-infinitude of life forms; indeed, the sheer fecundity of creation was manifested in evolution itself. This “problem,” then, is easily surmounted with a modicum of humility and appreciation for God’s delight in the outgrowth of his own creation, as well an application of a proscriptive attenuation of any of the aforementioned misgivings about animal death that might trip us up.

Last updated: Thursday, August 12, 2004; 3:51 pm CDT