Truth and Tension in Science and Religion

While evolution deserves theological support and inclusion in schools, the consensus views, Darwinian or neo-Darwinian evolution, present problems. Darwin presented two arguments: 1) that evolution, descent with modification, has occurred, and 2) that its “cause” is natural selection, the focus of neo-Darwinism. However, the products of natural selection, adaptations, are often not congruent with the lineages produced by evolution and its demonstrated effects are within species. The difficulty of using natural selection to explain evolution is used by proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) to denigrate evolution and to argue for the inclusion of ID in biology classes. However, the force of the arguments in favor of ID disappear when evolution is viewed as an informational phenomenon. Evolution, like development, is a system of increasing complexity, and emergence the inevitable outcome of the transformation of matter whereby the information in DNA is expressed that accompanies energy dynamics. Evolution is witnessed by studies in comparative biology that reveal groups of related organisms and homologies, both the result of descent with modification.