In the following two statements John Polkinghorne in his essay, The Inbuilt Potentiality of Creation, shares how he believes that God used chance and cleverness to bring about our exquisitely designed universe:
“The Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley, writing soon after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, had already grasped the theological significance of this. Although the Creator could, no doubt, have brought into being a ready-made world, God has in fact done something cleverer than this, bringing into being a creation that could ‘make itself.’”1
“Just as we may understand the reliability of ‘necessity’ as being a pale reflection of the Creator’s faithfulness, so we may understand the role of ‘chance’ as being an expression of God’s loving gift of freedom.”2
To use the words God and chance in the same sentence sadly, in my opinion, takes away the sovereignty of God and leads one to believe that God needed death, struggle, and bloodshed as well as trial and error to get it right. A straightforward reading of Genesis 1 tells us that God created our universe in a very powerful and special way. It was fearfully and wonderfully made just as Psalm 139 says we were made. There is not even a hint of chance and evolution being the mechanism used by God to create our universe. Our God is a God of divine providence and He leaves nothing to chance. Since we are made in the image of God there could be no room for chance as the mechanism that brought us into being.
When Kingsley states that God brought into being a creation that could “make itself” he is in essence putting the creation in place of the Creator and taking God out of the picture and allowing chance to have its way in the creation process. According to this scenario God used chance to create. But I believe that God, when he created our universe, left no room for chance – He knew exactly how to bring our exquisitely designed universe into being.
And since when is “chance” God’s loving gift of freedom? After all is said and done theistic evolution makes God look like he used chance, not his creative genius, in the creative process. If chance eventually brought human beings into existence did we also sin by chance or did we willfully and calculatingly sin. I believe chance had no role to play in our choice to sin. Our wills were not a byproduct of chance but created by a loving God free so we could have a loving relationship with God if we chose to. In closing God is not clever, He is Creator. And God doesn’t allow something as important as mankind to be the result of chance. We did not come about by trial and error – remember God leaves nothing to chance in his universe.
1 John Polkinghorne, The Inbuilt Potentiality of Creation (Essay in Debating Design, Edited by William Dembski and Michael Ruse) (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 256
2 John Polkinghorne, The Inbuilt Potentiality of Creation (Essay in Debating Design, Edited by William Dembski and Michael Ruse) (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 256
Evolutionary theory is made up of huge, unexplainable gaps over time and natural selection of random genes leading to progressive development, making its claims absurd. To overcome the absurdities, theistic evolution places God in the gaps, an attempt to add plausibility to the argument.
If theistic evolution is embraced, then heresy must follow. The first Biblical doctrine to be denied is the Fall of man. The entire fossil record is the result of death. Death did not occur until brought about by man’s fall into sin. Prior to the Fall, the Bible teaches that everything God created was “good.”Since the basic tenant of evolution is the progressive nature of organic materials, then Adam’s sin is considered a move up the ladder.
You cannot believe in the Biblical creation account of “good,” “Fall,” “death,” and the theory that God used the Fall as a means to progressively develop the species at the same time.
As one author stated, “Adam didn’t fall down, he slipped up.”