A common misconception floating about among Christians is that scientists, freethinkers and others “believe” in evolution the same way they believe in God or divine providence, and sometimes we slip into the misleading language in this way to describe our perception that evolution is a real process. Of course, this misunderstanding is essentially based on skewed semantics, as the word, “believe,” can be used to mean both something that a person takes on faith and a disputed piece of information that a person chooses to accept against the alternatives. But as Keith Blanchard said here, evolution is not disputed:
Theistic evolution
Evolution is nothing more than a fairly simple way of understanding what is unquestionably happening. You don’t believe in it — you either understand it or you don’t. But pretending evolution is a matter of faith can be a clever way to hijack the conversation, and pit it in a false duality against religion. And that’s how we end up with people decrying evolution, even as they eat their strawberries and pet their dogs, because they’ve been led to believe faith can only be held in one or the other.
Thus, instead of saying we believe or even accept evolution, perhaps we should speak about it with as much certainty of fact as we do gravity and the planet’s rotation around the sun, for when believers decry evolution, they make themselves look as ridiculous as if they had suddenly claimed the world is flat. While I agree with Blanchard that a person can, and many do, recognize evolution as fact and simply reconcile it with their faith — notice how the reach of faith always, always recedes behind science — they must do so at the expense of the Bible’s validity. Liberal Christians, such as Francis Collins, reconcile evolution and the Bible by claiming that God was behind the whole plan of creation and guided evolution to ultimately culminate in human beings. Basically, since Genesis does not provide an exact time frame for the process of creation, a “day” in the Bible could be virtually any amount of time.
But there are at least two problems with this theory. OK, three. First, although the Bible attempts to provide years and time periods for “historical” people and events, no attempt, as I’ve said, is made to do this in the creation story. One would think that an important event like the creation of man would have warranted a basic timeline so the Bible’s later readers could know about when the species began. Certainly, providing this information in detail would not have been out of the purview of an all-knowing god.
Second, as the image above points out, evolution is riddled with “errors” in design (Here’s just a few). Presumably a god who was in control of the process would have been able and willing to streamline the process and “guide” evolution more efficiently without the flaws, which leads to the next point. More than 98 percent of all species that ever existed, including early humans, are now extinct. An all-loving God would have had to watch eons and eons of misery and death before our little blip of time came around. Sure, some Christians will argue that millions of years for God is nothing, but while God might be able to fluidly transport himself through space and time, he still orchestrated a plan that includes 98 percent more death and destruction than life. So although some Christians do regard the accepted science of evolution as true, they still have logical mountains to climb if they are to reconcile evolution with the notion of all-loving, all-powerful god.