#969 Guiding a Son through Evolutionary Biology
December 07, 2025Hi Dr. Craig, your honest and and faithful work has ministered to me for over 12 years now, starting with your debates versus 2 of the Big 4 of New Atheism (that now debunked religion 
).
My question centers on my son. I have listened just a little to your work on the historical Adam. My son is 14 and is bright. He seems particularly interested in evolutionary development as means of explaining the way the animal kingdom has developed. One of his favorite projects in school recently has been work illustrating the hippopotamus and whale as having a common ancestor. His science teacher is now launching into a unit devoted to natural evolution. My son believes in God and Jesus and attends youth group. But I don’t think he has put the questions together yet concerning what part does God play vs. evolutionary explanations. He is a not a rebellious person and we have a good relationship, so he will be accepting of anything I want to put before him and ask him to read and consider with me.
How can I
1) Be part of this journey with him, though I am not knowledgeable in this area (willing to learn, but not sure of a simple place to start)
2) Introduce my son to the line of thinking in your work in a way that is digestible to him, particularly your thought development in investigating how scientific observation in animalia’s evolution interacts with God’s initial design and continuing work in us as creation.
In Christ and full humanity,
Caleb
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
It’s great that you want to share this journey of discovery with your son, Caleb! Learning how best to integrate Christian theology with evolutionary biology is a vital task in contemporary culture. I’ll be addressing that question in the forthcoming vol. III of my Systematic Philosophical Theology. I argue that the thesis of common ancestry, according to which all biological organisms are genealogically related, is easy to incorporate within a Christian doctrine of creation. You can therefore share your son’s enthusiasm for his learning about the common ancestry of whales and hippopotami. Moreover, evolutionary biology has moved beyond the so-called modern synthesis, and no consensus theory has been able to replace it, so that we do not really understand the mechanisms which produced the history of life on this planet.
So in answer to your questions,
(1) I encourage you to work your way through a textbook on evolutionary biology, such as Douglas Futuyma and Mark Kirkpatrick’s Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). You need not read every chapter, but you will find it to be enormously informative. That will enable you to stay several steps ahead of your son.
(2) In terms of a treatment digestible by your son, I highly recommend my Defenders lectures on “Excursus on the Origin of Life and Biological Diversity”. Unlike the secular book recommended above, my lectures will provide an integrative approach to theology and evolutionary biology.
I hope these resources prove helpful. I’m thrilled that you are doing this together!
- William Lane Craig