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

Today, the creation of life and biological diversity, part 34.

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

We today come at long last to the concluding section of our excursis on creation and evolution.

How might one integrate the scientific evidence that we've surveyed with the Genesis narrative?

It seems to me that so-called progressive creationism fits the evidence nicely. Progressive creationism suggests that God intervenes

periodically to bring about miraculously new forms of life and then allows natural evolutionary change to take place with respect to those life forms.

Progressive creationism differs from theistic evolution in the degree of confidence that is placed in the

explanatory mechanisms of evolutionary biology. Theistic evolutionists repose great confidence

in the adequacy of those mechanisms to produce grand evolutionary change.

Progressive creationists are more skeptical. On the progressive creationist viewpoint,

grand evolutionary change would require miraculous creationist acts of God as he intervenes in the process

of biological evolution to bring about significant evolutionary change. This does not necessarily

envision acts which are independent of natural mechanisms. Perhaps God miraculously

causes, for example, chemical combinations or mutations at key junctures that would not, in all

probability, occur by purely natural means. So this sort of creationism

is progressive over time and may involve natural mechanisms. How would this view comport with the

thesis of common ancestry?

I think that this doctrine could either affirm or deny the thesis of common ancestry.

That would depend on whether or not you think that God's miraculous acts of intervention

would be acts of creation ex. Nehalo. For example, we can imagine a bare lake

existing at some point in the distant past. All of a sudden, out of nothing, some ducks would

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