Naturalism is a philosophy that looks to science to fill in the details. It is based on putting becoming before being, contrary to the classical and Christian assertion that being precedes becoming. We have to know what or who something is before we can understand how it got that way, or what we’re even talking about. But evolutionists reverse that and say that knowing how something came to be tells us what it is.
So evolutionists do not begin with a taxonomy except to criticize its shortcomings. Taxonomy for evolution means populations over time, not something with being that is trans-temporal. Louis Agassiz saw this immediately and completely rejected evolution in the 19th century.
Many who are not evolutionists are following their lead in emphasizing how life and the universe as it is today came to be rather than focusing on what life and the universe are from beginning to end. We are trying to understand creation as becoming rather than as being as created by God.
How God created life and the universe are less important than that God created them and that what they are is what God created them to be. We should emphasize questions of what and who rather than how and when. If we do this, we will find ourselves in a philosophical debate more than a scientific debate. I know that makes some people uncomfortable but that is where we should be.
January 2015