Aubrey L. Moore – Beyond the False Antithesis: Why Evolution Does Not Exclude God

[John Bauer]

[We cannot yet] say whether theologians or men of science are most to blame for the confusions which certainly exist in this matter. Theologians [may] have too often shown an unreasoning jealousy and suspicion of scientific inquiry, [but] men of science have certainly not gone out of their way to make the real question at issue plain. When a champion of evolution throws down this challenge to the Christian world—“Natural evolution, or supernatural creation of species—we must choose one of these, for a third there is not”—we can hardly wonder that the devout and unsuspecting believer is caught in the trap of a false antithesis. For a third [option] there is. And we may call it indifferently [theistic] evolution or [evolutionary] creation. For the antithesis between evolution and creation is as false as … the antithesis of natural and supernatural. Evolution, to make it a rational system, implies as much the presence in it of a power which is above nature as creation does—for evolution is creation, and there is nothing natural which is not supernatural. …

If we are ever to approach scientific problems in the spirit of Christian theology, we must, at the risk of paradox, declare that the common distinction between the natural and the supernatural is unreal and misleading. There are not, and cannot be, any divine interpositions in nature, for God cannot interfere with himself. His creative activity is present everywhere. There is no division of labor between God and nature, or God and law. “If he thunder by law, the thunder is yet his voice.” The plant which is produced from seed by the “natural” laws of growth is his creation. The brute which is born by the “natural” process of generation is his creation. The plant or animal which, by successive variations and adaptations, becomes a new species (if this is true) is his creation. “The budding of a rose,” it has been said, “and the resurrection of Jesus Christ are equally the effect of the one Motive Force, which is the cause of all phenomena.” A theory of “supernatural interference” is as fatal to theology as [it is] to science.

We need hardly stop to remind ourselves how entirely this is in accord with the relation of God and nature, always assumed in the Bible. What strikes us at once, trained as we are in the language of science, is the immediateness with which everything is ascribed to God. He makes the grass to grow upon the mountains. To him the young ravens look up for food. He holds the winds in the hollow of his hand. Not a sparrow falls without his knowledge. He numbers the hairs of our head. Of bird and beast and flower, no less than of man, it is true that in him they “live and move and have their being.” O Lord, how glorious are thy works! For the Christian theologian the facts of nature are the acts of God.

Aubrey L. Moore, Science and Faith: Essays on Apologetic Subjects, 6th ed. (1889; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1905), 223–226. This public-domain book is attached as a PDF (14.4 MB).