The classic view of creation is that God crafted all life by hand exactly as it is today.  In such a view, God takes the role of a master artisan or director who assembled each of us from a preset plan.  Doesn’t such a view, which invokes a craftsman’s care, provide the most loving image of a creator?

In their book Questions of Truth, John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale argue that evolution instead is more consist with the loving nature of God.  If God has shaped the world as it was from the beginning, the universe seems reduced to a mere puppet stage where God the Puppet Master pulls all the strings.

Instead, God in his wisdom has provided a system in which creatures can make themselves.  God has given us great potentiality through fine-tuning and other processes, but it is through the exploratory nature of evolution that we fully reach it.  Polkinghorne and Beale compare this to a performing orchestra:

“The history of the universe is not the performance of a fixed score, written by God in eternity and inexorably performed by creatures, but it is a grand improvisation in which the Creator and creatures cooperate in the unfolding development of the grand fugue of creation.”

–Questions of Truth, Page 15.