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Judaism

Despite evolution, I can still believe in a Creator

Why, 200 years after the birth of Charles Darwin, the great scientist’s theories still leave room

February 18, 2009 17:15
The logo from “Darwin — the Genius of Evolution”, the series of BBC programmes this year marking the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th of The Origin of Species

By

Joseph Mintz,

Joseph Mintz

4 min read

‘Is it on your grandmother’s or grandfather’s side that you are descended from an ape?” asked Thomas Huxley, Bishop of Oxford and one of the early opponents of evolutionary theory at an infamous debate at Oxford University in 1860. It was one year after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin Of Species had set the world alight.

There have been many letters written in the pages of the JC in the 150 years since its publication, debating the implications of evolutionary theory for Judaism and religion in general. Yet there is little doubt that a scientific consensus has existed for over a century now to the effect that the world was not created in just six days, and that in fact a process of random natural selection led to the evolution of present day life over millions and millions of years.

For those few who still cling to the idea that creation did literally happen in six 24-hour periods, it remains unclear how they realistically explain away the uncomfortable reality of facts such as the fossil record and the evidence of evolutionary genetics. It is perhaps not surprising that the secular world, and the secular press in particular, chooses this particular worldview to label as “creationism”. Yet in doing so, they perhaps conveniently mask the deeper challenge of the evolutionary theory, which is not to engage in what are really quibbles about the mechanics of the process of creation, but to deny the involvement of a divine power as the prime mover in creation.

After all, for an omnipotent God, does it really matter if He chose to create the world in six days or in six millennia? No, the crucial issue for us as Jews, as well of course for Christians and Muslims, is whether a living God engaged in the act of creation, has continued as an active force in the world up to the very present. And although Darwin’s intention was never to deny the place of God, the introduction of evolutionary theory into Western consciousness in the mid-Victorian era opened the door for the eventual declaration that “God is dead”.