Genesis chapter 1 describes six days in which God made everything. Genesis chapter 2-3 says God made "the man" (Adam), then Eden, then animals then Eve. A serpent tempted them to eat a forbidden tre., After this, God said the offspring of the woman would be hated by the snake's descendants, but would crush the serpent's head..

Today the claim is commonly made both by militant atheists, and by Christians who believe the earth made in six literal days, that a "true" Christian cannot accept evolution. Is this true?

It may first be noted that some Christians were involved in developing evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin himself had lost any faith in a loving God by the time he wrote the Origin of Species in 1859, and later doubted there was any God at all. One of his friends and co-evolutionists, T H Huxley, was a militant agnostic. But not all his associates shared the religious views of Darwin or Huxley. Darwin's main American supporter at this time was the Harvard Botanist Professor Asa Gray, who was an evangelical Christian. Amongst the British Darwin-Huxley circle was the Methodist W K Parker who had a "lifelong almost rustic piety" with an "exuberant belief in the Old Testament miracles" and an "abiding sense of the Divine presence." There was also J W Hulke, a "deeply religious Calvinist" who was Huxley's formidable ally. Coming into the twentieth century, militant atheist Richard Dawkins says R A Fisher (1890-1962) "could be regarded as Darwin's greatest twentieth century successor" and was "the greatest biologist of the twentieth century." Fisher's collected papers report he "attended chapel regularly" and "even on occasion preached in his own characteristic style." Dawkins also identifies as "the chief architect of the selfish gene theory of family planning the great ecologist David Lack." Lack (1910-1973) became a Christian in his late 30's and joined the Anglican church. Both had devoutly Christian wives.

Well, OK, but were any or all of these "true" Christians? Without wishing to be judgemental, let us think in particular about Christian "fundamentalists" in the original sense of that term rather than the modern term almost of abuse. The term comes from a series of papers written between 1909 and 1912, called the Fundamentals. Really the writers were simply evangelicals, reasserting five basic principles: (1) the Bible is error-free (2) Jesus Christ was born of the virgin Mary (3) Christ died as a sacrifice for our sins (4) Christ rose again bodily and ascended to heaven (5) Christ worked miracles "not contrary to nature but superior to it". In practice they also emphasized a personal response to, and relationship with, God. So supposing, for argument, that we take this as a fairly restrictive definition of "true Christian", can even such people believe in evolution?

Asa Gray's circle believed the five principles later adopted in fundamentalism, and generally accepted evolution but rejected the naturalistic assumption that there was no design behind it. Charles Hodge (1797-1878), Principal of Princeton Theological Seminary, wrote What is Darwinism? It is Atheism (1874). In it, however, he was happy to accept Asa Gray's version of evolution by natural selection; what he objected to was the agnostic version of evolution that assumed there was no design. An undersigned universe implies there is no God, the evolution of animals does not. The greatest Baptist theologian sympathetic to the "fundamentalist" ideas was Prof A H Strong (1839-1921), who accepted the partial truth of Darwin's theory as a method used by God. Amongst the various writers of the Fundamentals were some "big name" scholars sympathetic to the harmony of the Bible with a form of divinely directed evolution: Congregationalist Prof G F Wright (18238-1921), Presbyterian Prof James Orr (1844-1913), and the Princeton Prof B B Warfield (1851-1921). In The Fundamentals itself Wright wrote: "By no stretch of legitimate reasoning can Darwinism be made to exclude design…if…species have developed from others of a lower order…it would strengthen rather than weaken the standard argument from design." James Orr wrote: "Later evolutionary theory… leaves the story open to a conception of man quite in harmony with that of the bible…Man's origin can only be explained through an exercise of direct creative activity, whatever subordinate factors evolution may have contributed" Some less eminent "fundamentalists" of the time did reject evolution (though all thought the earth was very old), but these leading figures accepted evolution as the possible means God used, and as consistent both with the bible and with divine design.

This pattern has been repeated. Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, countless numbers of evangelical Christians have believed and do believe that evolution was probably the method God used to create species. Some of these appear on this website eg: Dr Denis Alexander, Prof R J Berry, and Dr Francis Collins. But how exactly, then, can they combine acceptance of evolution with a personal faith in Jesus Christ and belief in the inspiration of the bible?

Well, throughout history Christian leaders have recognised that the God can sometimes work in instances where the usual natural cause-effect sequence is broken (as when Jesus turned water into wine). But they have also recognised that God can work through natural processes because all of these are upheld by the word of his power. Thus Jesus said that our heavenly father feeds the birds (Matthew 6:26), but obviously God does so through natural processes - there is no daily "special creation" of worms for birds. Likewise the Bible says that God creates the wind (Amos 4:13). The word used is bara, the strong word for "create" used for creating the heavens and earth (Gen 1:1) and creating mankind (Gen 1:27). This is present tense, God creates the winds and forms the mountains in an ongoing way through natural processes. So could God have created living things through the natural processes of evolution by natural selection? Christian teachers have always recognised, of course, that the Bible uses "observer" or everyday language rather than scientific terms. Thus the sun and moon are described in Genesis 1:16 as "great lights" - though actually the moon is a mirror reflecting the light of the sun. This is not a "mistake" but the use of everyday observer language. How, then, would God describe a process of evolution in such observer language if this was how he chose to create the species? Well actually, strictly speaking, in the Genesis creation account God says (i) let the earth sprout vegetation: plants yielding seed…and it was so, the earth brought forth vegetation (ii) let the waters swarm with living creatures and (iii) let the earth bring forth living creatures. The account in Genesis 1 could hardly give a more "naturalistic" description if it tried. Even the creation of humankind in Genesis 1:26 makes no departure from this pattern, and no indication of whether God used some natural process. No one reading it, of course, would arrive at an idea of evolution by natural selection over millions of years - any more than the reference to the firmament would indicate the size of space or that to the moon would indicate it was reflecting sunlight, or that to being "fruitful" would give the idea of DNA. The Bible isn't that kind of book - it isn't intended to teach us science. But its language of creation is still remarkable "naturalistic".

Later, in the account in Genesis 2-3, we find a completely different order of creation (though the orginal Hebrew has the same past tense as in Genesis 1). In this comes the reference to God making "the man" from dust, and "the woman" from the side of "the man". But Christian leaders back to Origen (184-254) and Chrysostom (347-407) have warned against taking such things "literally". It isn't a book about lopsided male anatomy, tree planting and snake biology. It is about the fall into sin of humankind when tempted by Satan. When Jesus referred back to Genesis 3:15 and the "brood of vipers" (Matthew 12:34; 23:33) whose father was the original liar Satan (John 8:44), he was talking about humans, not literal snakes. Genesis 2-3 is about real events but speaks symbolically. All this explains why so many sincere, bible-believing Christians over the last 150 years have come to believe that some kind of evolution was the means God used to make the diversity of living creatures. Whether or not they are right, the historical and logical evidence shows that a true Christian can believe in evolution just as a true Christian can believe the earth moves and the moon reflects light.