An Analogy For Theistic Evolution

That God created the universe in a certain initial state in no way means that it remained static.  What Christian thinks that in Genesis saying that God created landscapes and oceans, those landscapes and oceans were unable to change?  I have never once heard anyone proclaim that God would never allow laws of nature and the resulting phenomena on the planet to erode landmasses, shift waterways, or change the colors of environments.  Even the most idiotic evangelicals I have met have never insisted that the Bible actually teachers that it is impossible for the natural world to have changed over time away from the exact status it held when God first brought its components into existence.  When it comes to the development of living things in the natural world, though, suddenly the issue of whether God allowed his creations to change over time is regarded as extremely controversial and philosophically incompatible with Biblical doctrines.

Nowhere does Genesis 1-2 describe Yahweh as allowing the first life in his cosmos to come into being through abiogenesis and evolve from there.  Abiogenesis is indeed foreign to the text, although the necessary existence of an uncaused cause does not contradict abiogenesis, which is not logically impossible, just empirically unlikely.  Abiogenesis, however, is not evolution: evolution would be the changes in creatures which already live as those changes erupt or deepen across generations of descendants.  Macro-evolution, even if it is a real occurrence, does not require abiogenesis, and vice versa.  Life could arise from an arrangement of physical particles, creating consciousness that transcends matter, and then not evolve.  All of these are logically possible.  What really follows from these ideas is not at all what most Christians or secularists think, as only the handful of rationalists are even capable of understanding these things.

Again, nowhere does Genesis 1-2 teach that God permitted abiogenesis to occur, but there is something that even literal creation days would not exclude.  God creating living things encompassing plants, animals, and humans exactly as the account describes would not mean that those animals did not or could not have evolved from their initial forms.  In fact, even if macro-evolution never happened, which is unknowable one way or the other because scientific epistemology cannot provide the absolute certainty that logic does, it is still logically possible that it could have.  There is nothing logically impossible about species yielding new species as traits are passed on gradually even if the days of creation in Genesis elapsed exactly as the text says; this does not contradict logical axioms or anything that follows from them, and it does not even contradict any idea taught in a strictly literal version of the Genesis creation account.

I come back to the analogy of the environment itself.  From day to day, things like weather and soil erosion could change.  Over even a mere hundred years--a very short time compared to the thousands of years evangelicals typically assume or the billions of years that scientific evidence suggests the universe has been around for--the environment which humans and animals inhabit can undergo great changes.  Never is this what people reading the Bible deny is compatible with it.  They would be fools to, since Genesis never says that the universe itself would not change after God created it.  It never says that the life God created in the universe would not change either.  Of course, evangelicals and non-Christians tend to think far too highly of scientific epistemology and the laws of nature, confusing them for the laws of logic or thinking that they are the foundation of certainty when both the scientific method and the observed world are, beyond conceptual truths, some grand conclusions that logically follow from them, objective possibilities, and subjective sensory perceptions, there is absolutely nothing that can be known about scientific matters.

Scientific epistemology is something only fools think is certain, and thus no one can have the right or rationalistic justification for believing even that there really is a stone or a spider's web in front of them just because they perceive it.  One's sensory perceptions are absolutely certain, for the most part, only in the sense that one is experiencing them, not in the sense that they even correspond to a real external world of matter at all.  Making assumptions about past events is all someone could do if they actually believe they can know what took place years ago based on anything from fossil records, geological strata, or other evidences that fall short of logical proofs.  Even if human limitations were removed, scientific phenomena and sensory perceptions are still inherently secondary to the laws of logic, which ground all truths, possibilities, and knowledge.  Theistic evolution is logically possible even if the literal creation story of Genesis is history.  That this is logically possible is all that one needs to know with absolute certainty to know that the Bible does not teach the assumptions of evangelicals, though theistic evolution is logically possible whether or not the Bible is true.  Evolution just comes nowhere near the place of philosophical prominence that so many non-rationalists think it does one way or another.