I read with interest a recent article at Ligonier Ministries titled “Theistic Evolution and Creationism,” https://learn.ligonier.org/articles/theistic-evolution-and-creationism written by Dr. Keith Mathison, professor of systematic theology at Reformation Bible College. As a confessional Reformed Christian who has spent two decades writing about the science–faith conversation with a particular interest in those conversations within reformed denominations, I pay close attention when an organization with the stature of Ligonier weighs in on origins. Ligonier Ministries’ founder R.C. Sproul’s teaching shaped my own understanding of Reformed theology in important ways. So when Ligonier publishes an article telling Christians how to think about evolution, I take it seriously.
Dr. Mathison’s short piece encourages Christians tempted by theistic evolution (or evolutionary creation) to slow down, do their homework, and reconsider. That is a reasonable pastoral instinct which I can appreciate. The trouble is not the call to careful research. The trouble is what appear to have been Dr. Mathison primary resources for his research leading him to arrive at his own conclusions. After reading his piece, and re-reading an earlier 2012 article of his on the age of the universe at the same site, I felt compelled to share my thoughts.
Where the Article Gets Things Right
Let me start with what I appreciate. Dr. Mathison is correct that since 1859 Christians have wrestled with the implications of Darwin’s theory, and that evangelicals have responded in a variety of ways. He is also correct to note that some critics of theistic evolution, including those associated with the Discovery Institute, base their objections primarily on the empirical evidence rather than on direct biblical argument. And he is right to encourage believers to do their own research (I do recoil a bit at this phrase “own research” because of how misused it is) rather than passively accepting whatever they are told.
I would only add that the encouragement cuts in both directions. Christians should also explore the topic deeply before accepting the confident claims of those who tell them, with equal self-assurance, that the case for evolution “isn’t airtight” and that Darwinism is just one more scientific fad waiting to collapse. The standard of careful research applies just as forcefully to popular critiques of evolution as it does to popular defenses of it.
“Darwinism” Is Doing a Lot of Work in This Article
The first thing I noticed on a re-read is how often the word “Darwinism” appears. Dr. Mathison uses it repeatedly — “naturalistic Darwinism,” “the case for Darwinism,” “how weak the case for Darwinism really is,” “it might not include Darwinism yet, because that’s the only option for atheists.” This is not a neutral choice of vocabulary. “Darwinism” is a term working evolutionary biologists almost never use to describe their field, and for a good reason: the science has moved a long way past Darwin.
Charles Darwin, writing in 1859, did not know what genes were. He did not know the specific mechanisms of how heredity worked. He did not know that DNA existed. He did not initially know about Mendel’s experiments with peas (which were happening at almost exactly the same time and were generally ignored for forty years). He did not know about plate tectonics, radiometric dating, neutral theory, horizontal gene transfer, evolutionary developmental biology, or the molecular clock. Modern evolutionary biology incorporates a century and a half of additional discovery built on top of Darwin’s core insight that organisms share common ancestry and that descent with modification accounts for the diversity of life over deep time.
Calling all of that “Darwinism” is a bit like calling modern physics “Newtonianism.” Newton was a giant, but no working physicist describes the discipline by the founder’s name. The reason Dr. Mathison’s article reaches for the term, I would argue, is that “Darwinism” carries a particular rhetorical charge. It evokes a theory frozen in the 1860s, and implies that any new scientific finding is a potential death blow to the whole enterprise. If we want to talk about the actual state of the field, we should call it what biologists call it: evolutionary biology, or simply evolution. And if we want to assess the evidence, we should look at where evidence has actually accumulated since 1859, not at where Darwin himself was uncertain in 1859.
Lastly, by referring to evolution as “Darwinism” it implicitly adds non-scientific ideas, mixing philosophical and social views with evolutionary theory. This lets critics attack those ideas to weaken evolution as a scientific concept.
An Old Argument from Incredulity
The scientific objection in Dr. Mathison’s article is essentially a single move, repeated in three different forms. He writes:
But how did the process of reproduction (a mind-bogglingly complex biological process) itself evolve without an already existing process of reproduction?
He then points readers to Stephen Meyer’s 2010 book “Signature in the Cell” for the origin-of-information argument and to Michael Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box” for irreducible complexity. These are the foundational texts of the Intelligent Design movement, and the question Dr. Mathison raises about reproduction is a long-standing ID-style argument.
The origin of life (the abiogenesis question) is genuinely an open scientific problem, and any honest evolutionary biologist will say so. The mechanisms by which the first self-replicating molecules emerged is an area of active investigation. Currently, I serve on the committee of a doctoral candidate whose research focuses on self-replicating RNA molecules in clay substrates. This work continually uncovers previously unknown capabilities of these molecules including far more self-replicability than recognized before. While the ultimate direction of this research remains uncertain, it is notable to observe the development of new scientific insights. So if Dr. Mathison’s point is that we don’t fully understand how reproduction first arose, he is correct but it’s an open rather than a closed question.
But notice what he is doing with that observation. He is taking a current gap in our understanding of one specific question (the origin of the first replicators) and treating it as evidence against an entirely different and well-established field of inquiry (the descent of organisms from common ancestors). The two are simply not the same problem. Common descent does not depend on having a worked-out theory of abiogenesis any more than the germ theory of disease depends on having a worked-out theory of how the first cells originated. The evidence for common ancestry — nested hierarchies of homologies, the fossil record, biogeography, comparative genomics, endogenous retroviruses, pseudogenes and so on — stands on its own merits.
More importantly, the structure of the argument is a classic argument from incredulity dressed up in scientific language. “I cannot see how X could have arisen by natural processes, therefore X requires direct supernatural intervention.” That is the form. And it is precisely the form of argument that thoughtful Christians have historically been most cautious about. It is, in my mind, a God-of-the-gaps argument.*
Calvin himself, in the Institutes of Christian Religion, was insistent on the doctrine of secondary causation — the conviction that God ordinarily works through means and through the regular operation of the natural world he upholds. The God of Reformed theology is not a deistic absentee who only occasionally tinkers when natural processes hit a wall. He is the One “in whom we live and move and have our being” — the One who upholds every electron, every chemical bond, every act of cellular reproduction at every moment. Identifying gaps in our scientific understanding and then plugging God into those gaps does not magnify divine sovereignty. It actually shrinks it. It implicitly concedes that the parts of nature we do understand — the parts that operate by lawlike regularity — are somehow less God’s work than the parts we don’t.
Dr. Mathison himself reaches for an analogy that, on closer inspection, makes this point against his own argument. He notes that theistic evolutionists compare God’s creation of species through evolution to God’s creation of each of us in the womb. We can describe in remarkable detail the natural processes by which a fertilized egg becomes a human being — cell division, gastrulation, organogenesis, the differentiation of tissues. We can describe these things without reaching for any supernatural interruption. And yet the Psalmist still writes, with full conviction, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Confessional conservative Christians has never had any difficulty holding both of these together. Why should we have difficulty doing it on the larger scale of speciation?
“Scientists Have Been Wrong Before” — Which Way Has the Self-Correction Gone?
A second rhetorical move in the article needs to be addressed. Dr. Mathison writes:
Furthermore, take a look at what scientists fifty years ago, one hundred years ago, or 150 years ago were boastfully claiming to be “the assured results of modern science.” Some of it is quite silly. I have no reason to doubt that scientists one hundred years from now will be looking back at some of today’s “assured results” with the same head-shaking disbelief.
This is a familiar move, and on the surface it sounds reasonable. Of course scientists have changed their minds before. Of course they will change their minds again. What’s the harm in pointing that out?
The harm is that it is being used here to imply that evolutionary biology is among the fields most likely to be overturned, and that simply isn’t how the actual self-correction has gone. The history of science is not a random walk in which today’s consensus is just as likely to flip as yesterdays. It has a direction. Scientists used to think continents were stationary; the evidence for plate tectonics piled up to the point that the field flipped, decisively, by the 1960s. Scientists used to think the universe was static; the evidence for an expanding cosmos starting at a hot dense state piled up to the point that the field flipped, decisively, in the mid-twentieth century. In both cases, the self-correction moved in the direction of what we would now call deep-time, large-scale, naturalistic explanations.
What about evolution specifically? When Darwin wrote in 1859, he had only the morphological and biogeographical evidence available in his day. He had no genetics, no fossils of intermediate forms in groups like whales or birds, no molecular data, no DNA sequencing. Each of those subsequent fields could in principle have falsified common descent. None of them did. Genetics fit the predictions. The fossil record produced Tiktaalik, Ambulocetus, Archaeopteryx, the australopithecines. Molecular biology revealed a nested hierarchy of similarity at the protein and nucleotide level that matches the morphological tree. Endogenous retroviruses turned out to be shared between humans and other primates in the pattern common ancestry predicts. So when someone says “scientists have been wrong before, therefore they may well be wrong about evolution,” the appropriate question is: in what specific way is the current evidence weak? Generic skepticism about the future of science is not an argument. It is a posture.
A Different Message from the Same Author in 2012
Here is where I found myself most surprised. Below the current article there is a link to a related article published in 2012. At that time Dr. Mathison published an article titled “The Age of the Universe and Genesis 1: A Reformed Approach to Science and Scripture.” https://learn.ligonier.org/articles/age-universe-and-genesis-1-reformed-approach-science-and-scripture That earlier article is, in my view, an good piece of Reformed engagement with the topic of origins. It”
It is a fine article, and I commend it. But re-reading it alongside the new piece on evolution, I find myself with a question. In 2012, Dr. Mathison was admirably honest that he himself lacked the technical training to evaluate the cosmological and geological evidence for the age of the universe. He explicitly acknowledged that those without specialized training are dependent to some degree on those who are trained to help us understand the evidence. That is exactly right, and it is the appropriate Reformed posture.
What I cannot find in the new article is the same humility about biological origins. If Dr. Mathison cannot independently evaluate the evidence on the age of the universe, then — with all due respect — he cannot independently evaluate the evidence for or against common descent either. The relevant disciplines are if anything more technical: comparative genomics, population genetics, paleontology, phylogenetics, evo-devo. And yet the new article does not say “I don’t know” about whether evolution theory has merit. It tells the reader the case for evolution is weak while appealing to ID authorities as if their theories are strong. It tells the reader that this is settled enough for Christians to feel confident rejecting it. A better version of this article would have followed the 2012 template. Sproul’s “I don’t know” is a model worth imitating. What we have instead is a confident verdict resting on borrowed authority — and the borrowing is what I want to look at next.
Borrowed Arguments from Another Tradition
The substantive scientific case in Dr. Mathison’s article rests, as I noted earlier, on two specific authorities: Stephen Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell” and Michael Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box.” These are not isolated picks. They are the two best-known popular books from the Intelligent Design movement, and ID’s institutional home is the Discovery Institute in Seattle. The argument from incredulity about the origin of reproduction, the appeal to information in DNA, the invocation of irreducible complexity — these are signature ID arguments. The article is, in effect, a short Reformed-flavored summary of the Discovery Institute’s case.
I think this should give a confessional Reformed audience pause. Not because ID movement is unbelieving — it isn’t — but because the ID movement is theologically heterogeneous in ways that matter. Stephen Meyer is aChristian, but the Discovery Institute as an organization includes Catholics, Jews, agnosticsMormons, and various stripes of evangelical, and it has explicitly avoided taking a position on the age of the earth, the historicity of Adam, or the meaning of Genesis. Michael Behe is a Roman Catholic who accepts common descent — a position that, by the logic of Dr. Mathison’s own article, would seem to be a form of theistic evolution. Whatever else the ID movement is, it is not a Reformed movement, and its arguments have not been formed by the categories of Reformed theology.
What troubles me is not that Dr. Mathison cites these works. It is that he cites only these works, and writes as though they settle the question. He tells his readers that there have been no answers to the evidence be brings:
“Stephen C. Meyer explored this problem in his 2010 bookSignature in the Cell. To this day, naturalistic Darwinism cannot explain the phenomena discussed in that book. Similarly, examples of irreducible complexity, first explored by Michael Behe in his bookDarwin’s Black Box, have become legion, and they too are inherently inexplicable on a purely naturalistic basis.”
This is not true. Is Dr. Mathison unaware of the responses to these claims? Does he understand how little merit Behe’s examples hold today and why that is the case? There is no engagement with the substantial body of confessionally Christian scientists who have written carefully about evolution from within the church. There is no engagement with Reformed thinkers like Mark Noll or Tim Keller, both of whom have written sympathetically about evolutionary creation. There is, in short, no sense that Reformed Christians have a tradition of their own here.
And that brings me to the most ironic observation. In Dr. Mathison’s 2012 article, he listed the major Reformed views on the days of Genesis and named B. B. Warfield as a defender of the Day-Age view. Warfield is rightly held in high regard at Ligonier; he is a giant of confessional Reformed theology. What the 2012 article does not mention is that Warfield was also — and this is uncontroversial among historians of the period — a theistic evolutionist. Mark Noll and David Livingstone’s collected edition of Warfield’s writings on evolution, science, and Scripture (Baker, 2000) leaves no doubt about this. Warfield believed that evolution, properly understood under the providence of God, was compatible with the Westminster tradition. He was not a fringe figure within the Reformed world. He was Princeton. To pretend that theistic evolution is some recent compromise smuggled in from outside the tradition is to lose track of our own family history.
Final Thoughts
I want to be clear about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that Dr. Mathison must accept evolutionary creation. I am not arguing that thoughtful Reformed Christians cannot conclude, after careful study, that some form of intelligent design or special creation best fits the data. There are sincere Christians I respect on every side of this discussion.
What I am arguing is that the article, as published, does not meet the standard Ligonier itself set in 2012. The 2012 article modeled Reformed humility, deferred to working scientists on technical questions, and refused to bind consciences where Scripture and confession leave latitude. The new article does something different. It takes a confident position on a technical scientific field, frames the entire conversation through the language and arguments of one particular movement whose theological commitments are not Reformed, ignores the existence of a substantial Reformed conversation on the other side, and tells readers the case for evolution is much weaker than they may have been led to believe.
A Reformed organization committed to careful scholarship can do better. The Reformed tradition has its own deep resources for thinking about creation, providence, and the relationship between Scripture and the natural world. Calvin on natural revelation. Bavinck on God’s ordinary and extraordinary providence. Warfield on the compatibility of evolution and orthodoxy. Kuyper on common grace. Beale on Eden as cosmic temple. These are not borrowed arguments. They are our own. And they have far more to say about how a believer should think about the natural sciences than the talking points of any twentieth-century parachurch movement.
Dr. Sproul, asked how old the earth was, said “I don’t know.” That answer was praised in the 2012 Ligonier article as the wise, humble, distinctively Reformed posture. The same posture remains available, and remains wise, when the question moves from the age of the universe to the diversity of life within it. The Reformed tradition does not require us to know more than we do. It requires us to follow the truth wherever the two books — the book of Scripture and the book of God’s works — honestly lead us.
Blessings,
Joel
*Whenever I connect “God-of-the-gaps” arguments to intelligent design (ID), supporters claim they rely on scientific evidence of genuine gaps, not just invoking God. While this would be reasonable if backed by strong evidence, I often find the evidence weak, and many ID proponents and their arguments are to more incredulous than scientifically convincing.
Naturalis Historia 
Comments or Questions?