The mechanisms that theistic evolutionists
propose are the means by which God created
are themselves demonstratively not creative.
That’s a big problem—a scientific problem.
Mutation and natural selection, for very many
reasons, are now understood to have very limited
creative power.
In particular, they don’t seem to be very
good at generating novelty: new form, and
the new information necessary to build it.
These are true mechanisms.
No contributor to *Theistic Evolution* doubts
that natural selection and random mutation
or random variation is a genuine biological
process.
What we do doubt is that those mechanisms
have the power to generate fundamentally new
forms of life and even fundamentally new proteins,
which are part of the smallest unit of innovation
in the history of life.
To build anything new in life, you’ve got
to have new DNA code, which would produce
a new protein fold.
For some technical reasons, we don’t think
that the Darwinian mechanism can generate
novel protein structure, and many other scientists
are questioning the idea that it can generate
new biological form, new body plants for example.
So, you hear lots of evolutionary biologists
today saying things like natural selection
explains the survival, but not the arrival
of the fittest.
It does a good job of explaining things like
beaks getting a little bit bigger and a little
bit smaller.
Add that adapdation to environmental change,
but it doesn’t do a good job of explaining
where you get birds in the first place.
So, to attribute to that mechanism the creativity
of the Creator is scientifically problematic
because the mechanism lacks creativity.
Why would you say "that’s God’s way of
creating" when the mechanism itself lacks
creativity?
Leading people in evolutionary biology today
are providing very good reasons for doubting
precisely the capacity of that mechanism.
