Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the creation of life and biological diversity, part 28.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Last time I argued that apart from Young Earth creationism and a literal interpretation

of Genesis 1, there's just no incompatibility between Genesis 1 and the modern scientific

theory of biological evolution.

The scriptures don't say anything about the mechanisms that God might have used to create

life or bring about biological complexity.

And so it's hard to see how apart from the Young Earth interpretation there could be any

incompatibility between what

the Bible says and modern evolutionary theory.

Now some Christians would disagree with this because according to the standard theory of

evolution, the mutations which serve to drive the evolutionary process forward are

random and therefore cannot be designed or occur for a purpose.

But this inference involves a fundamental and very important misunderstanding about what evolutionary

biologists mean when they use the word random.

When biologists say that the mutations responsible for evolutionary change occur randomly, they do not mean by chance or purposelessly.

If they did, then evolutionary theory would be enormously presumptuous, since science is just not in a position to say with any

justification that there is no divinely intended direction or goal of the evolutionary process.

How could anyone say on the basis of scientific evidence that the whole scheme was not set up by a provident God to arrive at Homo sapiens on planet Earth?

How could a scientist know that God did not supernaturally intervene to cause the crucial mutations that led to important

evolutionary transitions. For example, the reptile-to-bird transition. Indeed, given divine

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