What is Deistic Evolution?

Richard Dawkins, an expert on the theory of evolution, states, “Evolution is actually a fact—as incontrovertible a fact as any in science.”¹ But it’s just a theory, right?

The word theory does not mean the same thing in science as it does in general conversation. In science, a theory is “a hypothesis that has been confirmed.”³ So no, evolution is not a theory in the sense of being a guess or mere speculation; it is an established fact.

Deistic evolution is the view that God began the process of evolution with the big bang, implementing within creation the laws that govern its development. Thus, God programmed the process and then withdrew from active involvement with the world.³

God is the Creator, the ultimate cause, but evolution is the means, the proximate cause. From a deist perspective, once creation began, we deny that there is any direct activity by God during the ongoing creative process. Deistic evolution has no difficulty with the scientific evidence.

So the only difference between Richard Dawkins and myself is that I believe God began the evolutionary process, whereas Richard Dawkins believes that nothing began the evolutionary process. It just sort of happened.

Charles Darwin was right: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”⁴

Endnotes

¹ Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (New York: Free Press, 2009), xiii.
² Oxford English Dictionary.
³ Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 504.
⁴ Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 490.