Did God Create Creatures Instantly Or Over Time?

Question: We had an inquiry from someone who is reading Genesis for Ordinary People who said, they’d been told that God would not use evolution to create life because it involved mistakes and God doesn’t make any mistakes. They had been told that there’s no law to evolution, it’s a random chance thing and God doesn’t use random chance. God, they were told, can make things in a flash. Ping, and there’s a pig etc."

Answer: Saying there are mistakes that were made as life made its way to where it is today, is not the right way of looking at creation. God uses laws, and the principles we see in creation are still around us today. For instance we could say, “Why does God need to have 100 million sperm to fertilize one egg in a woman’s fallopian tube?” God could do it with one sperm if he wanted to. Yes, he could, but he has chosen to use the principal of probability, or what is known as the law of large numbers, it’s what a layman calls the law of averages. Or we could say, “Why does it rain on the sea?” It is the land that needs the rain not the sea. Furthermore, researchers have calculated that each of the billions of the stars in the Milky Way have at least one planet. Why the need for so many planets when only earth is needed? But that’s the way God has designed the universe, things have a way of working out well using the ‘law of large numbers’. An oak tree may drop 10,000 acorns but very few germinate, but oak trees survive well. This is the "Way of God." 

The Bible teaches us to have a similar method: "Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let your hands not be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that" (Eccl 11:6). 

So to say there is no law in place as life progressed to where it is today is not correct. What we call “survival of the fittest” or “natural selection” is a delicate omnipotent sifting process, God's way of sorting the wheat from the chaff; it’s his preferred mode of working, and seems to work very well. "God made the animals of the earth after their kind... and God saw that it was good" (Gen1:25).