Does Evolution Prove There Is No God?

As a scientist I claim no new proofs, no revolutionary data, no stunning insight into nature that can tip the balance in one direction or another. But I do claim that to a believer, even in the most traditional sense, evolutionary biology is not at all the obstacle we often believe it to be. – Kenneth R. Miller ^[1]

Although, many on either side may think otherwise, the answer is, no, and I will explain why. This past weekend, my father, my brother and I got onto the subject of evolution. Each of us have differing ideas about how religion and science works together. When it comes to evolution, my father holds the fundamentalist view that God created man, through special creation, in his own image, just as the Bible describes it. My brother holds a view that I once held, science explains how God does things. My own view, however, is that of an atheist, so religion is no longer considered and is something entirely apart from science, but I still have the insight of once being a believer, who reconciled religion and science.

Even though I am now an atheist, I was raised in a religious family. I went to church every Sunday, held positions of authority in the church, even in my youth. Somehow, having that special connection with God had always eluded me. I was drawn to science at a very early age, because I wanted to understand how God did things. I immediately gravitated towards cosmology and astronomy, in order to explain how the universe and the world came into being. The universe is a vast and marvelous place, and it was akin to looking into the face of God to behold the beauty of the universe. Even at a very early age, I was attempting to reconcile the Christian creation story in the Bible with what we know through science. Whatever God has done, the physical evidence of it must be explainable by science. This is the first major hurdle that people of faith need to overcome, the evidence of what God has done will be borne out by scientific research.

At an early age, I also understood that science does not have any evidence that would disprove God’s existence. I acknowledge that God may very well be a passive God, who created the universe and then left it alone. This is the deist view that some of our Founding Fathers had. Science does, however, have evidence of how the universe, our world, and humankind came into being. Just as science has nothing to say about the belief in God,^[2] religion should have nothing to say regarding science. The Bible is not a science textbook. It is comprised of metaphorical stories with the goal of edifying the reader. It is not a literal history or science book. If it was that, then the Bible would be meaningless, but as a collection of metaphorical stories there is more value. At the age of 26, I saw the Power of Myth series on PBS. Joseph Campbell spoke of the power of all religious and mythical stories, which was the concept of religion that had been formulating within me for the prior 5 years. The creation story found in Genesis is metaphorical and is not a literal step-by-step of how the world and life came into being. This is the second major hurdle for those of faith to surmount, the Bible is not a science text book and should not be used to explain science.

My father was adamant that within everyone a spirit that is a child of God ,and that man was created specifically for this spiritual child of God to inhabit. I asked my father when does the soul enter the body. This was a loaded question since my father is a liberal Christian, but I was only trying to establish that the soul had to enter the body sometime after conception and that a soul is somehow chosen to enter certain bodies and not others; for example souls are intended for humans and do not enter animals.

I then said that there is nothing that says that the creation story must be taken literally and most likely would not be, since ancient man would have very little understanding of the workings of biology and science. The days of creation are not literal 24 hour days. For one thing, in the beginning there was no sun and no earth. Most Christians will acknowledge this, but instead of accepting a rational period of time that may come from studying the actual age of the universe or the earth, they have instead latched onto something that Peter said, a day with the Lord was like unto a thousand years. When Peter wrote this he was in no way referring to the days of creation and he did not say that God’s day was exactly a thousand earthly years. What he said was that it was like a thousand years, meaning a very long time in their understanding of time.

There is no reason the days of the creation cannot be a variable indeterminate amount of time, on the order of millions of years. My brother likes to say that God is the master scientist, meaning he created the laws of the universe, by which all things abide. I also take it to mean exactly what scientist do, they experiment. The universe may be God’s experiment. Just as scientists put a substance in a petri dish and observes the growth that occurs, God has done the same thing with the universe. The big bang could have been God dropping a substance in a petri dish, and the universe with the earth and its inhabitants are the resulting growths.

[G]iven the size of the universe, it is easy to imagine that there may be many such experiments in progress. For all we know, God has revealed Himself to us, according to our many religious traditions, because we were the first of these experiments to be ready, or because we were merely the latest of His many encounters with creation. ^[3]

Back to evolution. What is it about evolution that would prohibit God from using evolution to create humans in which his spiritual children would inhabit? I really have a hard time coming up with a logical reason why he couldn’t have done it that way. Just as God’s spiritual children don’t enter other animals, why couldn’t man have evolved to point where it could accept the soul, which would start the next stage in God’s experiment? Why does it have to be a special creation for humans? My father couldn’t accept this explanation, and his only responses to it were “It doesn’t make sense for God to have done it that way” and “the Bible says that God created man in his own image.”

Neither of these arguments hold up to scientific scrutiny. For one thing, there are plenty of things in nature that don’t make sense, when you try to consider them as being designed by a Creator. The rabbit’s digestive system is a prime example of this. Due to its inefficient digestive system, a rabbit must consume its food twice. It doesn’t regurgitate its food, but it eats it for a second time once it has passed completely through its digestive system for the first time. Without doing this, rabbits would become extinct. It doesn’t make sense to me why God would create an animal that had to eat something that came from its anus, but science shows that it is indeed that way. Many rabbit owners don’t even realize this, since rabbits eat the first pass pellets at night, and the only thing the owner sees, in the rabbit hutch, is the feces that are produced, after the second trip through the digestive system.

So, arguing that, “God couldn’t have done it that way, because it doesn’t make sense for him to have done it that way,” is not a valid argument. Also, to do so is ultimately supposing to know the mind of God. The closest we can get to seeing into the mind of God is to actually observe the way things are, through the scientific method. This is what the scientific community has done and humans have come about by evolution. Therefore, God must have created man through the evolutionary process.

No serious biologist today doubts the theory of evolution to explain the marvelous complexity and diversity of life. In fact, the relatedness of all species through the mechanism of evolution is such a profound foundation for the understanding of all biology that it is difficult to imagine how one would study life without it. ^[4]

Both of the scientists that I have used in this article are Christian and they have reconciled evolution with their beliefs in God. Both state that evolution is a fact and is the way that God had created humans. This is the last hurdle, to accept science. It won’t replace your faith, but it is the way God has done everything he has done.