Theistic evolution (also known as theistic evolutionism or God-guided evolution, or alternatively called evolutionary creationism) is a view that God acts and creates through laws of nature. Here, God is taken as the primary cause while natural causes are secondary, positing that the concept of God and religious beliefs are compatible with the findings of modern science, including evolution. Theistic evolution is not in itself a scientific theory, but includes a range of views about how science relates to religious beliefs and the extent to which God intervenes. It rejects the strict creationist doctrines of special creation but can include beliefs such as creation of the human soul. Modern theistic evolution accepts the general scientific consensus on the age of the Earth, the age of the universe, the Big Bang, the origin of the Solar System, the origin of life, and evolution.

Supporters of theistic evolution generally attempt to harmonize evolutionary thought with belief in God and reject the conflict between religion and science; they hold that religious beliefs and scientific theories do not need to contradict each other. Diversity exists regarding how the two concepts of faith and science fit together.

Francis Collins describes theistic evolution as the position that "evolution is real, but that it was set in motion by God", and characterizes it as accepting "that evolution occurred as biologists describe it, but under the direction of God". He lists six general premises on which different versions of theistic evolution typically rest. They include:

The executive director of the National Center for Science Education in the United States of America, Eugenie Scott, has used the term to refer to the part of the overall spectrum of beliefs about creation and evolution holding the theological view that God creates through evolution. It covers a wide range of beliefs about the extent of any intervention by God, with some approaching deism in rejecting the concepts of continued intervention or special creation, while others believe that God has directly intervened at crucial points such as the origin of humans.

In the Catholic version of theistic evolution, human evolution may have occurred, but God must create the human soul, and the creation story in the book of Genesis should be read metaphorically.

Some Muslims believe that only humans were exceptions to common ancestry (human exceptionalism), while some give an allegorical reading of Adam's creation (Non-exceptionalism). Some Muslims believe that only Adam and Hawa (Eve) were special creations and they alongside their earliest descendants were exceptions to common ancestry, but the later descendants (including modern humans) share common ancestry with the rest of life on Earth because there were human-like beings on Earth before Adam's arrival who came through evolution. This belief is known as "Adamic exceptionalism".

When evolutionary science developed, so did different types of theistic evolution. Creationists Henry M. Morris and John D. Morris have listed different terms which were used to describe different positions from the 1890s to the 1920s: "Orthogenesis" (goal-directed evolution), "nomogenesis" (evolution according to fixed law), "emergent evolution", "creative evolution", and others.

The Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was an influential proponent of God-directed evolution or "orthogenesis", in which man will eventually evolve to the "omega point" of union with the Creator.