Replies

I also happen to be a scientist who believes in God and accepts evolution.

I've wondered for a while whether it is possible to believe in evolution as a theory and still believe in God (and vice-versa), and the answer that I have come to, so far, has always been no, at least in terms of logically consistent thinking. Here is my reasoning:

Evolution is a process. The theory of it depends upon defining the process of how one organism can, through selection and/or mutation, become another distinct organism over time. The theory, put in very simple terms, is something like: randomly occurring mutations in a species (most of which are unfavorable, and the host dies or fails to reproduce)->environmental change which favors one of the mutations->mutation host survives/reproduces better than the peers->species as a whole adopts the new characteristic. Presumably, this process has been repeated over and over since life first began on Earth, and so we have merely to follow the chain. Though the process is extremely complex, the theory requires that it be consistent.

Now, if one believes in God, a belief which presumably accepts that God has unlimited power, then one must accept that God is quite capable of altering the evolutionary process at will, or bypassing it altogether. This does not necessarily mean that He did do so, but merely that He has the power to do so if He sees fit. However, once accepting that premise, one must accept that there may be breaks in the evolutionary chain where God simply altered the process as it suited Him. For example, He may have taken a horse and made it into a giraffe simply because He felt like it. However, acceptance of such a possibility would necessarily invalidate the entire theory of Evolution, because it would mean that the process of evolution could not be depended on to be consistent; one would have to be prepared for gaps in the chain that have no purely scientific explanation (within the theory), because the influence of God would be a random, outside force which could not be predicted, nor accounted for, when trying to trace the chain backwards from a present species to its origins.

A believer in God who also believes in evolution may argue that evolution is consistent, that it is merely the mechanism by which God created all of the current species, but that position demands that the proponent believe that God limited himself to the set of rules contained within evolutionary theory, and did not violate them, ever. This seems like an unreasonable assumption, given that a believer in God believes Him to be all-powerful. If God had a more efficient method of creating a species that He wanted, such as merely bringing it into existence immediately, then why would He limit himself to an arbitrary set of rules that He created that would inhibit His ultimate goal? No, from a logical standpoint, if one believes in an all-powerful God, one must accept that, even if evolutionary processes did exist, they were capable of being bypassed by God at any time He pleased, and therefore could not be counted on either to predict future species, or to trace back predecessor species.

A proponent of evolution who also believes in God could argue that the evolutionary process is intact, and that when God wants a new species he merely influences one of the determining factors, such as the mutation rate and type, environmental change, etc. in order to produce the species that He wants, and could do so within a single generation or two, but then what the proponent is talking about is really intelligent design.

Of course, the same argument could be used to discredit the Law of Gravity and other such accepted, reproducible rules of the universe, but the difference is that things like gravity are rules that we must live by, whereas the proponents of evolution who believe in God are necessarily suggesting that the evolutionary process is a rule that God had to live by, in order for the process to be consistent enough to be worth studying.

So, the end result is that I cannot so a person believing both in God and evolution without engaging in a logical disconnect.