Mechanistic Evolution . The theory of organic evolution holds that all living forms in the world, plant and animal, including humanity, are descendants of one or of a few simple organisms, which in turn arose by chance from nonliving matter. It is held that the present level of development has been accomplished by the cumulative effect of small changes from generation to generation over a vast period of time, possibly 4 billion years or more. Simple, primitive, archaic forms are supposed to have given rise to a variety of types, which by continued divergence would produce a branching treelike mosaic of life. The majority of present-day biologists hold that this process of descent with modification, whereby new species and basic types are supposed to have arisen, has occurred by a strictly random or chance process, with natural selection eliminating the less fit. This concept is called mechanistic evolution, or materialism.
Theistic Evolution. Because of the overwhelming complexity of even the simplest forms of life and the improbability of life arising spontaneously from inorganic matter, some allow that the original simple forms may have been specially created. Others hold that the entire evolutionary process has been under the guidance of a Supreme Being of infinite wisdom—that God has “created” all things by this method. A common view among both Catholic and Protestant scientists and theologians, including some evangelicals, is that when humanity had reached a certain evolutionary level—a few thousand years ago at the “creation week”—the Creator endowed humans with those characteristics by which they became moral beings capable of recognizing the difference between right and wrong, capable of sinning, and with the capacity for appreciation of esthetic, ethical, and spiritual values. These concepts are all forms of theistic evolution.
Seventh-day Adventist Position. SDA theologians and scientists reject both mechanistic and theistic evolution, on both scriptural and scientific grounds. In 1864 Ellen G. White pointed out that “when men leave the word of God in regard to the history of creation, and seek to account for God’s creative works upon natural principles, they are upon a boundless ocean of uncertainty. . . . His creative works are just as incomprehensible as His existence” ( 3SG 93).
“The genealogy of our race, as given by inspiration, traces back its origin, not to a line of developing germs, mollusks, and quadrupeds, but to the great Creator” ( PP 45).
Some years later L. A. Smith pointed out that any attempt to explain Creation by evolution is beset with “insurmountable difficulties” ( Review and Herald 81:4, Sept. 15, 1904).
Advocates of the theory of evolution generally assume that the Bible precludes the possibility of any change of species, and that evidences of such change therefore disprove the Bible and confirm evolution. The typical attitude is reflected in a sentence from a letter written by Darwin in 1844 to a close friend and eminent botanist Joseph Hooker: “I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable” (E. Nordenskiold, The History of Biology , pp. 463, 464). But while the Scriptures mention a great variety of different, complex animals and plants as being present at the end of Creation week, it does not indicate that changes would not take place, especially after sin entered the world. In fact, the curse of Gen. 3:17 , 18 implies that unfavorable changes would occur. From the first, SDA writers have recognized change of species (G. W. Amadon, in Review and Herald 16:122, Sept. 4, 1860). But this, of course, is very different from the sort of change required for the origin of new higher categories—the orders, classes, and phyla of animals and plants.
Ellen White’s reference in 1864 to the almost “endless variety of species of animals” indicates that new species have been formed ( 3SG 75). In 1902 G. M. Price noted that the real point of difference between the Genesis record and the Darwinian philosophy is not whether sufficient variation has occurred to “produce practically new and distinct species. The fossils show us that species have varied sufficiently to produce very distinct morphological and structural difference. . . . But the real question is whether the general run of these changes have not all been in the direction of degeneration” ( Outlines of Modern Science and Modern Christianity , p. 199).
It might be noted that many of the most evident changes in nature—such as parasites with rudimentary digestive systems, flightless birds, and beetles with fused wing covers—represent reductions or loss of structures, or specializations.
Fundamental arguments against evolution used in recent years by SDA writers include: (1) the improbability of spontaneous generation of life from nonliving material, inasmuch as scientists still do not know what life is; (2) the inadequacy of known mechanisms of change to bridge the gulf between widely different structural and physiological characteristics by which the major groups of organisms differ from one another; (3) the unfitness for survival of hypothetical intermediates, incipient stages between many delicately balanced organ systems; (4) the tremendous preponderance of harmful or lethal effects in hereditary changes such as mutations and chromosomal aberrations; (5) the total absence of transitional series of forms connecting different major types in the fossil record of past life—higher categories such as classes, orders, and nearly all families as well (if the various phyla and orders arose by evolution, at least a few of the transitional sequences, or missing links, should have been preserved, but such series are not known to exist); (6) the presence in the lowest sedimentary rock layers in which an appreciable number of fossils occur in any abundance—the Cambrian—of a wide variety of highly complex animal forms wholly modern in structural detail; and (7) the existence of an evident design and purpose in nature, of features that exhibit a degree of complexity far beyond our ability to comprehend. Divine creation seems to be the only reasonable solution.
Analysis makes it abundantly clear that nearly all the valid scientific evidence for evolution is, in fact, evidence of change of the type that SDA creationists accept as having certainly occurred since the Creation as they conceive of its having occurred. Support for the more fundamental changes required by the theory of evolution is tenuous, uncertain, and completely inconclusive. No scientific discovery has yet given an informed creationist reason to doubt the Bible record of a fiat creation. It is the theories, not the observed facts, of the natural world that are in conflict with the Scripture record. See Creation ; Science and Religion .