Christians and evolution

The assumption that Christianity and evolution are locked in irreconcilable conflict is a product of specific cultural and historical circumstances — principally American Protestant fundamentalism of the twentieth century — not a necessary feature of Christian theology. Throughout the history of evolutionary science, some of its most important practitioners and defenders have been devout Christians who saw no contradiction between their faith and the evidence for common descent. Major Christian denominations representing well over a billion believers have officially affirmed the compatibility of evolutionary science with Christian doctrine. The historical record demonstrates that Christian engagement with evolution has been far more diverse, nuanced, and accepting than the culture-war narrative suggests.^{8, 10}

Asa Gray

Asa Gray (1810–1888), professor of natural history at Harvard and the foremost American botanist of the nineteenth century, was Charles Darwin’s closest scientific ally in the United States and one of his most important correspondents. Gray reviewed On the Origin of Species favorably in the American Journal of Science in 1860 and spent the following decades defending natural selection in American scientific and public discourse. He was also a devout Presbyterian who saw no tension between evolution and divine providence. Gray argued that natural selection was the mechanism through which God directed the development of life, a position he articulated in a series of essays collected as Darwiniana (1876).^{1, 10}

Darwin himself recognized the significance of Gray’s position. In their extensive correspondence, Darwin pressed Gray on whether the random variation that drives natural selection could be reconciled with divine design, and Gray maintained that it could — that God could work through natural processes without violating them. Gray’s position made him one of the earliest and most articulate proponents of what would later be called theistic evolution.^{1, 8}

B. B. Warfield

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851–1921), the principal theologian of Princeton Theological Seminary during its most theologically conservative period, is perhaps the most surprising figure on this list. Warfield is best known as the architect of the modern doctrine of biblical inerrancy — the view that the Bible, in its original manuscripts, is entirely without error. He is regarded as a founding intellectual of the fundamentalist movement. Yet Warfield accepted biological evolution, including the evolution of the human body, throughout his career.^{2, 10}

In a series of articles and reviews spanning three decades, Warfield argued that evolution was compatible with both Calvinist theology and biblical authority. He distinguished between the mechanism of evolution (which he considered an empirical question properly settled by science) and the ultimate cause of creation (which he held was God). Warfield accepted that the human body had evolved from earlier forms, though he maintained that the soul was a special divine creation. As Mark Noll and David Livingstone have documented, Warfield’s position demonstrates that accepting evolution and insisting on biblical inerrancy were not viewed as contradictory even by the most conservative theologians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), a French Jesuit priest and paleontologist, contributed directly to the science of human evolution through his fieldwork in China, where he participated in the excavation of Homo erectus fossils at Zhoukoudian. Teilhard’s theological project, developed across a lifetime of writing largely suppressed by the Vatican during his life, sought to integrate evolutionary science into a comprehensive Christian cosmology. In The Phenomenon of Man (published posthumously in 1955), Teilhard proposed that evolution was a divinely guided process moving toward increasing complexity and consciousness, culminating in what he called the “Omega Point” — the final convergence of all creation in Christ.^{3, 12}

Teilhard’s synthesis was controversial within both scientific and ecclesiastical circles. Scientists criticized the teleological framework he imposed on evolutionary processes that are, from a biological standpoint, undirected. The Vatican’s Holy Office issued a monitum (warning) against his works in 1962. Nevertheless, his influence on Catholic theology was substantial. Pope Benedict XVI cited Teilhard favorably in a 2009 homily, and Pope Francis quoted him in the 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’.³

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975), one of the architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis and among the most important geneticists of the twentieth century, was a lifelong member of the Russian Orthodox Church. His landmark 1973 essay “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” — the single most famous title in the history of evolutionary biology — was written explicitly as a response to creationism and included a forthright statement of his personal faith. Dobzhansky wrote: “I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God’s, or Nature’s, method of creation.”⁴

Dobzhansky’s religious convictions were not peripheral to his scientific work; he reflected on them throughout his career, arguing that the grandeur and creativity of the evolutionary process were evidence of, not arguments against, divine purpose. In unpublished notes and correspondence archived at the American Philosophical Society, Dobzhansky described evolution as a process “loaded with meaning” and incompatible with the atheistic materialism that some of his colleagues preferred.^{13, 4}

Francis Collins

Francis Collins (b. 1950), a physician-geneticist who led the Human Genome Project to completion in 2003 and later served as director of the National Institutes of Health from 2009 to 2021, is the most visible contemporary example of a Christian who embraces evolutionary science without reservation. Collins is an evangelical Christian who converted from atheism to faith in his late twenties, influenced by C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. In The Language of God (2006), Collins described the evidence for common descent as overwhelming and argued that DNA itself — including shared pseudogenes, endogenous retroviruses, and syntenic chromosomal arrangements between humans and other primates — demonstrates the reality of evolution beyond reasonable doubt.⁵

In 2007, Collins founded the BioLogos Foundation, an organization dedicated to demonstrating the compatibility of evolutionary science and Christian faith. BioLogos has become the leading institutional voice for evolutionary creationism (the preferred term among its scholars), publishing scholarly articles, hosting conferences, and providing educational resources for pastors and laypeople. The organization’s advisory council has included prominent evangelical theologians and scientists, and its influence has been significant in shifting evangelical attitudes toward evolution.^{5, 11}

Denominational positions

The institutional Christian response to evolution extends far beyond individual thinkers. The Catholic Church, representing roughly 1.4 billion baptized members, has officially accepted evolution since Pope Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, which stated that the Church does not forbid research and discussion regarding the doctrine of evolution insofar as it inquires into the origin of the human body from pre-existing living matter.⁷ Pope John Paul II strengthened this position in his 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, declaring that “new knowledge leads us to recognize in the theory of evolution more than a hypothesis” and that the convergence of independent lines of evidence gives it significant weight.⁶ The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that faith and science cannot truly contradict each other, since God is the author of both creation and reason.¹⁴

The Anglican Communion, the third-largest Christian body globally, has no official statement opposing evolution, and the Church of England issued a formal statement in 2008 acknowledging Charles Darwin’s contribution and expressing regret for the anti-evolutionary rhetoric of some nineteenth-century churchmen. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Church of Christ have all issued statements or resolutions affirming the compatibility of evolutionary science and Christian faith. The Eastern Orthodox churches have no centralized doctrinal authority on the question, but Orthodox theologians have broadly accepted evolution, following a long tradition of treating Genesis theologically rather than scientifically.^{8, 12}

The fundamentalist exception

The organized opposition to evolution within Christianity is concentrated in a specific and historically identifiable tradition: the fundamentalist and young-earth creationist movement that emerged in the early twentieth century in the United States. As Ronald Numbers has documented in The Creationists (2006), young-earth creationism as a movement dates not to the early church but to the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris, which revived and popularized the “flood geology” of the Seventh-day Adventist George McCready Price. Before this, even conservative evangelical leaders like Warfield, James Orr (a contributor to The Fundamentals), and Charles Hodge accepted an ancient earth and, in many cases, biological evolution.^{9, 10}

The claim that evolution is incompatible with Christianity is therefore not a statement about Christianity in general but about a particular strand of American Protestantism that emerged in the mid-twentieth century. The vast majority of the world’s Christians — Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant, and a growing number of evangelicals — live within traditions that have accepted evolutionary science as compatible with their faith. The early church fathers who interpreted Genesis non-literally, the Reformation theologians who articulated the principle of accommodation, and the modern scientists and theologians surveyed in this article represent the broader and deeper Christian tradition on this question.^{9, 8}