You Can Believe in Both Evolution and Creationism

Pretend for a moment that you are God. You've decided to create the universe, the Earth, and all of the people on it. You also decided that people should be able to make their world into a better place:

• sturdy shelter
  
• antibiotics and vaccines
  
• indoor plumbing
• I Love Lucy
• etc.

To accomplish this, you decided to create a world which obeys a set of rules:

• gravity (e.g., what goes up must come down)
  
• evolution (e.g., survival of the fittest)
  
• math (e.g., 2 + 3 = 5)
• etc.

And you decided that the rules should not change:

• Water will not suddenly become poisonous.
  
• Chickens will not start exploding when you cook them.
• The Earth won't escape the Sun's gravity and float off into cold, dark space.
• Etc.
  

And you decided to give people the intelligence to understand those rules. However, you're not doing the work for them; they have to discover and learn how to use those rules on their own.

The problem at this point is, if you create a universe without a history, it is going to be so much harder for people to discover the rules that you so carefully created:

• How are they going to learn that rivers will smooth the edges of rocks if the rocks you put in the rivers you created are the same as the rocks on the banks?
• How will they know that each tree grows a new ring each and every year if all of the trees you create have no rings?
• After some observation, they will learn that a layer of sediment is left every time a floodplain floods. But, what is going to tell them whether a newly discovered plain is safe to life on or not if you don't put layers of sediment on the floodplains that you create?
  
• How are they going to figure out that evolution, that awesome process you created, affects – and will always continue to affect – all life on Earth so profoundly if you do not put fossils in the ground when you create the Earth?

People need to be confident that the set of rules that the universe obeys are reliable so that they can make their world into a better place. You could send your word; but, you already know that not everyone is going to believe. Since you love all people (including the disbelievers), you decided to create a universe with a history that can be found in the plants and animals, in the ground and air and water, and in the stars of deepest space.