Evolution
Essay title: Evolution
Theistic Evolution is one of three major origin-of-life views, the other two being Atheistic Evolution, commonly known as Darwinian Evolution, and Special Creation. Atheistic Evolution says that there is no God and that life can and did emerge naturally from preexisting non-living building blocks under the influence of natural laws. Special Creation says that God created life, either from scratch or from preexisting materials. Theistic Evolution says one of two things:
That, while there is a God, he wasn’t directly involved in the origin of life. He may have created the building blocks, He may have created the natural laws, He may even have created these things with the idea of life in mind, but at some point early on he stopped and let his creation take over. He let it do what it does, whatever that is, and life eventually emerged from non-living material. This view is similar to Atheistic Evolution in that it presumes a naturalistic origin of life.
Where life was not able to evolve naturally, God supposedly stepped in. This view is similar to Special Creation since it presumes that God acted supernaturally in some way to bring about life as we know it.
There are a lot of differences between the Biblical Special Creation view and the Theistic Evolution view. I think the most significant is their views on death. Theistic Evolutionists believe that the Earth is billions of years old and that the geologic column containing the fossil record represents long epochs of time. Since man does not appear until late in the fossil record, Theistic Evolutionists believe that many creatures lived, died and became extinct long before man came around.
Biblical Special Creationists tend to believe that the earth is young and that the fossil record was laid down during and after Noah’s Flood.
Another big difference between the two evolution theories is how they read Genesis. Theistic Evolutionists tend to subscribe to either the Day-Age theory or the Framework Theory, both of which are allegorical interpretations of the Genesis One Creation Week. Biblical Creationists tend to subscribe to a literal 24-hour reading of Genesis One.
Both of the two Theistic