Christian undergraduates are sometimes surprised to find that evangelicals on the teaching and research staff of their university are, more often than not, committed to the theory of evolution.
The same undergraduates may have been taught in their home churches that evolution is evil and atheistic. So how can these (apparently) Bible-believing academics hold to such pernicious ideas? Has the peer pressure of academia turned them away from Christian orthodoxy?
Some definitions
The word 'evolution' has become encrusted with many different meanings. Historically, the theory has been used to support capitalism, communism, racism, atheism and Christianity! The term evolution will be used here in its strictly scientific sense to refer to the theory which accounts for the origins of biological diversity. This Darwinian theory claims that the form and diversity of the living world is due to a theory of variation and to a theory of selection. Variation is generated by genetic mutations which occasionally affect the survival and reproductive success of individuals. Natural selection is the process whereby genes which promote the greatest reproductive success of individuals in a given environment are more likely to be passed on to the next generation.
