Is Evolution Consistent with God's Love? (Part One)

Both Christian fundamentalists and ardent atheist popularizers assert that evolution and religious faith are incompatible. Both forces assert that an individual cannot accept a full understanding of the theory of evolution by natural selection and accept the truth of Christianity.

When I was in high school, two friends of mine kept asking me how I reconciled evolution and God. I was a liberal Protestant, and they were vocal atheists. I swore up and down that their critiques unfairly represented my idea of God.

My friends would repeatedly ask me other things such as "how can you be a Christian if the Bible hates gay people?" or "how can you be friends with us if the Bible tells you not to mix with nonbelievers?". I kept telling my friends that the Christianity I affirmed was all about the love of God - with all other principles below it. The love of Jesus came to replace the focus of the Old Testament, which was solely on God's laws, instead of God's love.

I believed that loving people without regard for their sexuality expressed God's love. I believed that befriending people without regard for their religious ideas expressed God's love. I also believed that God used evolution to create the world, which He loves.

I still believe that an intelligent and perceptive reader of the Bible is under no obligation to accept that God could not have created the world through evolution. The stories in Genesis, properly understood, are literary narratives, not literal accounts. The interpretation of the creation stories Genesis has never prevented me from reconciling Christianity and evolution.

What has prevented me from reconciling Christianity and evolution is God's love, the same thing which allowed me to say I believed I could love people without regard for their sexuality or religion. I do believe that the Christian God could have created the world through evolution - I do not believe that a loving God could have. This is the biggest question for me on the subject of evolution and Christianity: is a Christian God, who creates our world through evolution, a loving God?