Theistic evolution is the theory that God utilized evolution, as a tool, to unfold life to its current state.
If you've ever played Minecraft™, you'll find that every world is generated to be near-infinite in size, and completely unique from other worlds, each "world" has a 'seed' which an algorithm uses to procedurally generate a massive world for players to play in.
Notch, the creator of Minecraft, did not manually create the massive worlds that players play in, and he did not create millions of "templates" for player's consoles to pick from when generating a new world, both of these scenarios would be immensely time consuming tasks and there is a better way. Instead, he created one algorithm that can run its course and unfold into very complex unique worlds for any player that starts a new world in the game.
Likewise, in the theory of theistic evolution, God would not have manually created millions of varieties of creatures, though He certainly could have, but instead He created something more valuable, a pattern and set of rules (evolution) that allows His design to unfold into very complex unique lifeforms.
Evolution is merely a tool used to assist in creation the same way a hammer is a tool used to assist in creation. Just because I create a bed-frame doesn't meant I therefor couldn't have used tools to do it, according to my plan. Just because God created the world doesn't mean He couldn't have utilized time and evolution as tools to do it, according to His plan.
It is good if this is your natural next question. Not all Christians believe this and it stems from sloppy translation of the Judaic texts into English.
In the book of Genesis, the creation story is told in terms of 'On day X, God created Y; on day Z God created W'. The book of Genesis was originally written in Hebrew and the Hebrew word for 'day' used here is 'Yom', which translates various ways into English, sometimes into 'day', sometimes into 'time-period', it depends on the context.
So what is the context here? Well, the Sun was created on day 4 (Yom 4), how can you therefor have 'days' prior to that, if a day is defined as the amount of time it takes for the sun to rise, set, and rise again, the word 'Yom' was used on days 1, 2, and 3, prior to the Sun even existing. It would be illogical to translate these as 'days', therefor. Yom must be translated properly as 'Time Period'.
That is,
During the 1st time period, God created Light
During the 2nd time period, God created the Firmament
During the 3rd time period, God created Land, Sea, and Vegetation
During the 4th time period, God created Sun and other Celestial bodies
During the 5th time period, God created Life (Sea creatures and birds)
During the 6th time period, God created Life (Land animals and Man)
During the 7th time period, God rested
And He would have used many tools, such as laws of physics, lots of time, evolutionary systems, to bring about this creation.
-Albert Renshaw, Sep 11 2019
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