Do Creationists Reject
All Evolution?
Not Quite.
Most people — including many pastors — have a fundamental misunderstanding about what creationists actually believe. Here’s what the science really says.
DNA: the most sophisticated information system ever discovered. Where it came from is the real question at the heart of the evolution debate.
“Do creationists really refuse to accept any change in species at all?”
— A minister, with genuine bewildermentI was stunned. Not by the question itself, but by what it revealed — that one of the most basic facts about creationist science is almost completely unknown to the general public.
So let’s clear this up.
Yes, Creationists Accept Microevolution
Creationists fully accept that species change and diversify over time within certain boundaries. Different dog breeds, different wolf varieties, different species of cats — creationists believe these all descended from common ancestors through genetic variation. Most creation scientists think God didn’t create every individual species separately, but created distinct kinds — roughly equivalent to the biological family or genus level — and that species diversified from there.
(Personally, I’m not a fan of the word “microevolution,” since the word “evolution” implies progress or information gain — and what we’re actually seeing is more like reshuffling and reduction. But since the term is widely used, we’ll go with it.)
The Bible Itself Records a Case of It
Here’s something that might surprise you: the Bible actually documents what we would today call a genetic variation — in 2 Samuel 21:20.
“There was again war at Gath, where there was a man of great stature, who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, twenty-four in number.”
This is polydactyly — the presence of extra digits — a condition caused by a real, observable genetic variation. It’s heritable, it appears in certain family lines, and it’s been documented throughout history. The Bible isn’t making a theological point about it; it’s simply recording a fact of natural variation among human beings. The kind — humanity — hasn’t changed. But variation within that kind? The Bible noticed it long before Darwin.
How Does Variety Come from One Ancestor?
It’s simpler than you might think — and it doesn’t require any new genetic information.
These offspring look and behave differently — but no new genetic information was added. Some was lost. This is how creationists understand post-Flood diversification: original created kinds carried rich, varied genetic information, and as populations separated and bred in isolation, that variation sorted itself into the distinct species we see today.
So What’s the Real Argument About?
The debate isn’t about whether species change. It’s about whether that same process can explain how bacteria became humans.
Creationists say: no. Here’s why.
Every example of “evolution” we actually observe involves either reshuffling of existing genetic information — like our Aa Bb Cc example — or loss of genetic information, like a fish losing its eyes in a dark cave. The polydactyly in 2 Samuel is the same category: a variation, not an invention. Extra digits didn’t come from nowhere — the genetic instructions for digit formation were already present and got expressed differently.
What we have never observed is new genetic information being created from nothing — the kind of gain that would be required to go from a single-celled organism to a human being.
“A business that continually loses money cannot become profitable simply by losing money more often.”Lee Spetner Physicist, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory · Not by Chance!, 1997
The Information Problem
Here’s a simple analogy. Take the Bible and the Quran. You can split the Bible into Old and New Testaments — that’s rearranging. You can mix verses from both books — that’s recombining. Evolutionists call this kind of change “evolution.”
But creationists ask the prior question: how did those books get written in the first place?
You can rearrange existing information endlessly. But getting meaningful information — a book, a genome, a functioning cell — to arise from random noise is a completely different claim.
Consider: if 10 billion people each flipped a coin once per second, it would take roughly 4 trillion years to get 100 heads in a row by pure chance. And the probability of human-level genetic complexity arising randomly makes that coin flip look trivially easy.
The evolutionary story asks us to believe that random processes wrote the most sophisticated code in the known universe. Creationists think that code required an Author.
as more rational?
Random processes writing the most sophisticated code in the known universe — or a code that required an Author?
References
- Spetner LM. Not by Chance! Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution. Judaica Press, 1997.
- Batten D (ed.). The Creation Answers Book. Creation Ministries International, 2006.
- Sarfati J. Refuting Evolution. Creation Ministries International, 1999.
- Purdom G. Variation and natural selection versus evolution. Answers in Genesis, 2009.
- Lightner JK. Identification of species within the cattle monobaramin. Journal of Creation 21(1), 2007.
- Wieland C. Muddy waters: Clarifying the confusion about natural selection. Creation 23(3), 2001.

