Did God Use Evolution to Produce Life? Why Theistic Evolution Fails

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

Some people attempt to reconcile belief in God with the standard evolutionary account of life's origins by combining the two. Theistic evolution is the view that God used evolutionary mechanisms to create life. But does this view stand up to scrutiny? Today, Dr. Casey Luskin critiques this perspective in the first half of a conversation that originally aired on the Truthful Hope podcast. The conversation kicks off with some clarity over terms, including what is meant by “evolution.” The theistic evolution perspective, also sometimes called evolutionary creation, accepts the standard scientific evolutionary account—the same view held by atheists—and simply adds the theological claim, "but this is how God did it". Critically, these proponents reject the idea that design can be empirically or scientifically detected in nature. As Luskin highlights, the central scientific problem with theistic evolution is that it inherits all the numerous scientific problems associated with the standard evolutionary account. This first half of the conversation rounds out with examples of those problems, specifically from the issue of the origin of life. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	ID The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:11.8	Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermid.
0:16.0	Today, we're sharing a recent conversation with Dr. Casey Luskin from the Truthful Hope podcast.
0:22.4	Casey critiques theistic evolution, the view that God used evolutionary mechanisms to create life.
0:29.1	The conversation kicks off with some clarity over terms, including what is meant by the word
0:33.8	evolution. The theistic evolution perspective, also sometimes called evolutionary creation,
0:40.2	accepts the official scientific evolutionary account, the same view held by atheists, and simply
0:46.1	adds the theological claim, but this is how God did it. Critically, these proponents reject the idea that
0:53.1	design can be empirically or scientifically
0:55.6	detected in nature.
0:57.8	The central scientific problem Luskin highlights, of course, is that the theistic evolution
1:02.5	view inherits all the numerous scientific problems associated with the standard evolutionary
1:08.2	account.
1:09.5	The conversation then pivots to explore the most significant
1:12.6	of these problems, the origin of life or chemical evolution. Dr. Luskin outlines several fundamental
1:19.4	barriers to explaining how inanimate matter could transition into self-replicating living cells.
1:26.8	Luskin argues that the more scientists learn about the
1:29.6	complexity of life and conduct origin of life experiments, the further away they get from finding
1:35.3	a naturalistic solution. And that's bad news for those with a theistic evolution perspective.
1:41.6	Let's join Dr. Luskin now with his host, Jacob Vasquez. I'm really excited for
1:48.3	today's episode. We're going to be discussing an interesting view held by many self-professing
1:53.5	Christians, such as Francis Collins, called Theistic Evolution. And to avoid discarding their belief in Darwinian evolution altogether,
	...

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