I was reading this book review of Science & Christianity: Four Views, and amongst other things, I noticed that, especially in the discussion of evolution, there is a very definite distinction made between God’s interaction with the world and natural processes. That is, God does some things, but other things naturally happen.

I have seen the idea of biological evolution criticised a number of times based on this way of thinking — evolution is a natural process that is guided by chance and is therefore opposed to the belief that God created the world. Louis Berkhof says this in his Systematic Theology, Wayne Grudem also says this in his Systematic Theology, the author of the aforementioned book review assumes it, and I have seen this argument expressed in many other places.

However, to me, this argument does not seem valid if one accepts the doctrine of the sovereignty of God as it is commonly understood in Reformed theology. If God is sovereign, then chance events — like the rolling of a dice (Proverbs 16:33), or the random errors that occur in DNA replication — are not really random from God’s perspective. In fact, God is in complete control of it all, and everything is happening according to his sovereign will. Natural processes are one of the things that God does.

Consider the weather. The Bible is quite clear that God is in control of the weather (Psalm 42:7; Psalm 135:6-7; Psalm 148:8; Jeramiah 10:13). But we also know that the weather is a natural process. We know about the hydrological cycle and meteorologists are able to predict the weather with some success (the atmosphere is a chaotic system which makes it very hard to predict, but that is beside the point). The point is: the weather is a natural process, but this does not mean that God is not in control of it.

As an aside, this is something that the peoples of the Ancient Near East kind of got right (still wrong, but for different reasons). According to John Walton in his book Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, “the term ‘natural world’ would be meaningless or nonsensical to them. There was nothing about the world that was natural. There was no purely natural cause and effect, no natural laws, no natural occurrences…” The gods, according to ANE thought, directly controlled everything that happened in the world.