One friend wrote:

Whatever academic qualifications a person may have or none of them, a person is an Atheistic Evolutionist who accepts that from an original unicellular organism, or organisms (that magically came into existence without the creative powers of a Supernatural Living Being – an event that is outside of science because a scientific principle is that living begets living, either in cellular division or in sexual procreation) all living organisms – plant or animal – have gradually evolved over millions of years. Theistic evolutionists accept that a Supernatuaral Living Being created and then either left that organism or those organisms to change without any further intervention or that Supernatural Living Being guided the change over millions of years. Ken, would you agree with the above?

Ken replied:

No.

There are many Christians, like myself, who refuse to be described as either evolutionists or creationists, with various qualifying adjectives.

The major problem is confusion of categories. Evolution is a topic in science, and, as such, deals only with the natural world. This implies nothing about the existence or non-existence of anything which isn’t part of the natural world – that is the province of philosophers and religious writers.

Evolution is not just a theory of the last almost 150 years from the time of the publication of The Origin of the secies by Charles Darwin. I hope my memory is correct. The term goes back to Axamander – a Greek Philosopher – date I can’t recall. I could have checked it before starting this posting.

We all know that “evolution” in the broad sense in which you appear to be using it has a long history. But in science it is restricted to the change in the genetic makeup of groups of living organisms. We’ve been through all this before, and once you try to extend evolution beyond this you are not talking about evolution as the word is used by scientists. That is, as long as you use “evolution” by itself. Phrases like “the evolution of the universe” are quite common in other fields of science, such as cosmology, but this is clearly understood by scientists. As is the use of “creation” in phrases like “creation operators” in quantum mechanics.

And the word “creation” was commonly used by scientists to refer to the origin of the universe – I could cite a number of books with this word in the title, going back many years.

Now, however, creationists have taken over and many Christian scientists (note the small “s” at the beginning) can no longer use the word for fear of being labelled a creationist.

Salaam

Ken Smith