The Logical Contradiction at the Heart of Theistic Evolution

Logical Contradictions

There are certain understandings of theistic evolution that are logically contradictory. There are some versions of it that aren’t logically contradictory, but some of them are. The most classic one is this: Evolution says that the development of life is a completely unguided process that is random and according to natural law. There’s no guiding it in any direction. There’s no end point that this is moving toward.

Theistic evolutionists accept that the theory of evolution is an unguided process. But then they say that God somehow guided the process. That’s why they’re theistic evolutionists.

Well, you can’t have a process that’s guided and unguided at the same time—that is completely contradictory.

Well, you can’t have a process that’s guided and unguided at the same time—that is completely contradictory. There are some who will say No, we believe that the process was, in fact, guided by God, so it wasn’t unguided, but if I’m going to be a good theistic evolutionist, I can’t allow anything God did to be detectable. Because if we could detect what God did, then theistic evolution would lose to intelligent design, and we would have God’s nose poking into science.

Those theistic evolutionists say Well, God guided the process as long as we can never tell what he did. I wonder if that’s any different than saying that he didn’t guide it in the first place.

J. P. Moreland (PhD, University of Southern California) is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Biola University. He is an author of, contributor to, or editor of over ninety books, including The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters.