Position · 1860

Evolutionary Creation

The view that God created life, including humans, through the evolutionary processes that mainstream biology describes, while still affirming God as creator and sustainer of all things.

Christians proposed versions of it, often called theistic evolution, soon after Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). Geneticist Francis Collins argued for it in The Language of God (2006) and founded the BioLogos Foundation in 2007. In the Roman Catholic Church, Pius XII’s Humani Generis (1950) allowed study of human bodily evolution, and John Paul II’s 1996 message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences treated evolution as well supported, while both kept the special creation of the human soul. Critics argue that it struggles to account for a historical Adam and the origin of death and suffering.