The term refers 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 continued intervention, and others seeing intervention at critical intervals in history in a way consistent with scientific explanations of speciation but with similarities to the ideas of Progressive Creationism that God created "kinds" of animals sequentially

This view is accepted (or at least not rejected) by major Christian churches, including Roman Catholicism and some mainline Protestant denominations; some Jewish denominations; and other religious groups that lack a literalist stance concerning holy scriptures. Even certain Biblical literalists accept this stance, including evangelist Billy Graham, who is also open to theistic evolution.

With this approach toward evolution, scriptural creation stories are typically interpreted as being allegorical in nature. Both Jews and Christians have considered the idea of the creation history as an allegory (instead of an historical description) long before the development of Darwin's theory. Two notable examples are the writings of Philo of Alexandria (1st century) and St. Augustine (4th century). Today, many individuals continue to stress that it is inappropriate to use Genesis as a scientific text, since it was written in a pre-scientific age and originally intended for religious instruction; as such, seemingly chronological aspects of the creation accounts should be thought of in terms of a literary framework.

The term evolutionary creationism is used in particular for beliefs in which God transcends normal time and space, with nature having no existence independent of His will. It allows interpretations consistent with both a literal Genesis and objective science, in which, for example, the events of creation occurred outside time as we know it."—Wikipedia
 

  
MUST READ:
   
Origin Views — Creation/Evolution Comparison Chart
 

 
"Theistic evolution holds that the religious acceptance of evolutionary biology is not fundamentally different from the acceptance of other sciences, such as astronomy or meteorology. The latter two are also based on a methodological assumption of naturalism to study and explain the natural world, without assuming the existence or nonexistence of the supernatural. In this view, it is held both religiously and scientifically correct to reinterpret ancient religious texts in line with modern-day scientific findings about evolution.

This synthesis of the teleology underlying faith and religious teachings with science can still be described as creationism in holding that divine intervention brought about the origin of life or that divine Laws govern formation of species, but in the creation-evolution controversy its proponents generally take the "evolutionist" side. For this reason, some on both sides prefer to use the term "theistic evolution" over "evolutionary creationism" to describe this belief.
 
Evolutionary creationism describes an approach to the biological world that accepts the scientific concepts of microevolution and macroevolution while retaining the theistic belief that the world is ultimately the result of divine creation, of which evolution is held to be the mechanism."  — Wikipedia
 

  
MUST READ:
   
Origin Views — Creation/Evolution Comparison Chart