We have SEEN speciation occur in various species of plants. Evolution in action, folks. This should establish beyond all questionable doubt that evolution is a FACT!

Speciation has been observed, and Christians who deny it are denying something that has been documented in the literature. But “evolution” is one word doing at least three jobs here, and the observation only supports the smallest of them.

1. Speciation is real and not in dispute. Reproductive isolation arising between populations is documented in plants, insects, and fish. Nothing in historic Christian teaching requires denying it. Genesis speaks of plants and trees bearing seed “according to their kind” (Genesis 1:11-12), of sea creatures and birds after their kind (Genesis 1:21), and of land animals after their kind (Genesis 1:24-25). That phrase is broad enough to include the diversification we actually watch happen.

2. One word, three different claims. “Evolution” can mean (a) change in populations over time, (b) universal common ancestry — all life descending from a single ancestor, and (c) the claim that the whole process was unguided. These are separate propositions with very different evidence. Confusing them is where most of this argument lives.

3. The observation settles the uncontested premise. What was observed is variation plus reproductive isolation. What is at issue in the debate is whether that process, extended indefinitely, produced eyes, wings, placentas, and the mammalian inner ear from a single cell. Speciation is the easy half. Nobody serious is disputing the easy half.

4. The grand claim is a historical reconstruction. Universal common ancestry is not a laboratory result; it is an inference about events in the distant past, assembled from fossils, biogeography, and molecular similarity. That does not make it false — historical sciences are legitimate. But it does mean the observation of a new species is not the same kind of evidence as the conclusion it is being asked to carry.

5. Information is the crux of the dispute. The classic examples — finches, bacteria, introduced plants — mostly involve rearranging or losing existing genetic information: beak size shifts, metabolic pathways shut down, regulatory changes. What is disputed is the origin of genuinely novel information for new structures. Stephen Meyer argues this is the central unanswered question; critics say known mechanisms suffice over deep time. Both sides agree the question is about mechanism, not about whether species change.

6. The argument equivocates. Here is the turn. “Evolution is a fact” shifts meaning mid-sentence: the fact is small-scale change, and the conclusion is large-scale common descent. By the same form of argument, observing a new breed of dog would prove that dogs and whales share an ancestor. The conclusion is being carried in the definition, not derived from the evidence.

7. Darwin knew the distinction. He separated the small changes breeders could produce from the large-scale transformations he inferred, and he acknowledged that the second depended on the first operating over immense ages with a very imperfect fossil record. Whatever one concludes, the distinction is not a creationist invention; it is in the Origin.

8. A claim that absorbs everything explains nothing. If every observation — new species, stasis, sudden appearance in the fossil record, loss of function — counts as confirmation, then the theory has stopped making predictions and become a framework. Science advances by claims that could fail. It is fair to ask what would count against unguided common descent.

9. Christians disagree, and the disagreement is real. Young-earth creationists read Genesis as recent and literal; old-earth creationists accept an ancient earth and separate creation of kinds; evolutionary creationists accept common ancestry as God's means. These are not three shades of the same position, though all three confess that “by him all things were created” (Colossians 1:16). I am not going to pretend otherwise, and neither should the objection.

Speciation is real, and it is not the thing being argued about. The question is whether a process we can watch at small scale can be extrapolated to explain the entire history of life — and that is an inference to be defended, not a fact established by a greenhouse experiment.

Sources: Stephen Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt; Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box; Reasons to Believe; Henry Morris.

Related challenges:
• Doesn’t evolution account for the origin and diversity of life on earth, thereby eliminating the need to appeal to God?
• Doesn’t the fossil evidence support the theory of evolution?
• What about vestigial organs like the appendix, or the gill-slits in fetuses? CERTAINLY you can’t mean to suggest that that makes more sense given theism than evolution, can you?!