I've been listening and reading to lots of Christian views on evolution recently. There are two things that frustrate me about most of them.
Firstly, that they seem to focus on whether generic theism is compatible with evolution. Unfortunately that is comparitively easy compared to the question about whether evolution is compatible with the teaching of the Bible. In my opinion, Alvin Plantinga in this excellent series of articles from 1991 asks the best questions and comes up with the best answers.
I have a soft spot for Alvin, after reading just a few pages of his writing helped me a massive amount when I was doubting the reality of God more than any point in my Christian life. He has helped me a lot again, not least in arguing that there is nothing wrong with being an agnostic on the question:
"Hasker apparently believes that if I reject [The Theory of Common Ancestery] as improbable, then (if I am proceeding properly) I must be prepared to suggest and endorse some other view of the same specificity or same logical strength as TCA. Now at first glance, anyway, that seems wrong. I think Cardinal X will be the next Pope; you think that is unlikely, but don't have a candidate of your own; there is no one such that you think it is more likely than not that he will be the next pope. Is there something wrong with your procedure? I think not."
My favourite quotation from all my reading so far has been from him too:
"accepting the view that evolution is certain is itself adaptive for life in graduate school and academia generally."
Nice.
The second thing that frustrates me is how often Christians retreat to something very similar to the non-overlapping Magesteria Dawkins criticises in The God Delusion. Many Christian responses to evolution seem to fit right into the nature/grace dualism, Schaeffer, and before him, Bavinck criticised (HT Leithart):
“The sharpness of this contrast between natural and supernatural runs the grave risk of dualistically separating (supernatural) revelation from creation and nature. Special revelation should never be separated from its organic connection to history, the world, and humanity. Stated theologically, the religious antithesis should be between grace and sin and not between grace and nature.” On nature/grace premises, “What is distinctively Christian is . . . identified with and restricted to the ecclesiastical; for the world to be influenced in a Christian direction it needs to submit to the domination of the church. The nature/grace dualism also fuels the opposite of world dominaton. . . . Special revelation is not seen as entering into the fabric of the world and humanity but as floating outside and above it....
The Reformation revolted against this worldview. . . . The reality of the incarnation militates against any nature/grace dualism; the gospel is not hostile to the world as creation but to the world under the dominion of sin, the alien element that has insinuated itself into the world. Revelation and creation are not opposed to each other, for creation itself is a revelation. . . . The Reformation sought a Christianity that was hostile, not to nature but only to sin, and had a reforming and sanctifying effect upon natural life as a whole, including the world of culture, society, and politics. In the Reformation the adage came into its own: nature commends grace; grace emends nature.”
