The tenets of Christianity are based upon God’s revelation through divinely inspired Scripture and through God’s historical performance of miracles on Earth. Our response to God and our adherence to the mandates of Scripture, on the other hand, are carried out within the context of the natural world in which we were born and in which we live our lives. Each of us was born of the flesh of our ancestors in the natural world. As the Reverend Michael Dowd aptly noted, “We were not thrust into the Universe, we were born out of it.” We are the product of an inheritance bequeathed to us by ancestors. Yet, we are not carbon copies of either one or both of our parents. Each of us is a new and unique individual, possessing our own free will, not copied but evolved from our predecessors. Because of this reality, each of us as individuals bear our own accountability and responsibility to ourselves, to others, and to God.

Christianity teaches us that the natural world, therefore, is the foundation or the platform from which we must rise and exercise our free will in accepting and obeying the call of what Saint Augustine termed Eternal Truth.

Of course Christianity is also based on an understanding that God is a living God. He is active in the world and, most importantly, He is active in our own lives when we invite Him into them. But we know that God is not in direct control of everything that happens in the world or in our own lives because such a notion would implicate Him as an accomplice to the evil that we see around us and that we perpetrate.  Instead, God’s creation is a free and independent world, the natural world that resulted from the singular act that Thomas Aquinas described as “first cause”—God’s primary act of divine creation from which all of the natural world and all natural consequences have emanated.

Regardless of how each of us may come to an understanding of other tenets of faith or an understanding of how our natural world conforms to those tenets, we can undoubtedly see that the concept of the free will of individual human beings is foremost among Christianity’s essential doctrines. We can also reason that our ability to choose or reject such concepts and our ability to choose or reject the mandates of God can occur only within a physical universe much like the one in which we find ourselves. That is, a universe where those choices have consequences—a universe where our choices and our behavior, along with all other events, will necessarily produce contingent effects—a universe that is, inevitably and continually, undergoing the processes of evolution.

Excerpted from Exploring Faith and Reason: The Reconciliation of Christianity and Biological Evolution