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In an effort to protect the inerrancy of the Bible, these same Christians have adopted a compromising position, saying that both the Bible and evolution are true. Through much mental gymnastics and questionable hermeneutics, they have developed a theory of origins called “theistic evolution” which basically says that everything secular scientists believe about our origins – the Big Bang, the millions of years, the gradual deposition of the geological column – are all true. The only difference is that theistic evolutionists add the qualifier, “God-did-it.”
There are several reasons I reject theistic evolution so I thought I'd make a post and discuss a few of them. I thought about making this a series; instead, I'm going to make all my points in one post. It's going to be longer than usual so I apologize in advance.
It is contrary to a plain reading of the Scriptures
One way to “reconcile” the Bible with evolution is to claim the creation account isn't meant to be understood “literally” but rather as a poem or a parable. Genesis, they will say, only tells us that God created everything but science tells us how. I beg to differ. The Bible very clearly tells us how; God spoke and it happened. Genesis 1 offers a detailed account of the creation week. It's very specific, detailing the events of each day: on the first day, evening and morning, God did this; on the second day, evening and morning, God did this; etc.
What other parts of the Bible do we read in the same way some Christians read Genesis? Think about these questions:
How many days was Jonah in the whale?
How many days was Lazarus dead?
How many days did Joshua march around Jericho?
How many days did God take to create the universe?
It's easy to answer the first three questions. It should be just as easy to answer the fourth. Yet, because some Christians put their faith in science above the revealed word of God, they get confused over what should be an easy question. How many days was Jonah in the whale? “Three,” they answer. How many days did God take to create the universe? “We don't know,” they answer. What? Um, yes, we do know!
A usual argument employed is to say that the word “day” can mean something other than a day. True, but it can also mean a day. In fact, it usually means a single day. When God commanded the Jews to work six days and rest the seventh (Exodus 20:8-10), do you think they asked themselves, “I wonder how long the Lord means by 'six days'?” In the same commandment (v. 11), the Bible says, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them.” In that context, how can anyone seriously suggest that “six days” really means “millions of years.” Genesis 1 modifies each use of the word "day" with the modifier, "1st day," "2nd day," etc. It also modifies each use with the phrase "morning and evening." When Genesis 1 so emphatically uses the word "day" in the same way we would describe an ordinary day, why should I even bother to consider that it means something other than a 24-hour day?
It diminishes the character of God
Evolution is a very slow, cruel process. Richard Dawkins describes nature this way:
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives whimpering with fear, others are slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.
An often spoken criticism used by atheists is, if God is good, why do bad things happen? To believe in evolution is to believe God intended the world to be full of death, disease, and suffering. It is saying that bad things happen because God wants them to happen and the bleak picture Dawkins paints of nature is exactly how God planned things to be. It would be a very capricious god who would waste billions of years of pain and extinction only to look back on everything he had made and describe it all as “very good” (Genesis 1:34).
There is also the fact that God said He made everything in six days as cited above. Theistic evolutionists often claim God simply explained the creation in terms that an unscientific people could understand. In other words, God is a liar and an imbecile, who couldn't figure out how to explain “billions” to uneducated readers so He just said, “six days.”
To say God used evolution to create us in an insult to who God is. I believe in the all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God of the Bible who spoke the universe into existence. How dare people make Him into the clumsy, cruel, and deceitful god of evolution!
It diminishes the sacrifice of Jesus
One reason some Christians capitulate on evolution is that they don't see it as an important issue. They claim the origins issue isn't relevant to salvation so let's not worry about that and just tell people about Jesus. What these same people don't realize is that our understanding of our origins has a direct effect on our understanding of Jesus.
Jesus came to fulfill the law. He said this overtly in Matthew 5:17, Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. But what does it mean to “fulfill” the law? He accomplished this in several ways. A Savior was necessitated by Adam's sin in the garden. When Adam fell, he brought death into the world and death has passed on to all men because all have sinned (Romans 5:12). But even as God judged with the Curse, He also promised a Redeemer, the Seed of the woman who would crush the head of the Serpent (Genesis 3:15). Jesus fulfilled that promise.
When Adam and Eve sinned, the Bible says their eyes were opened and they saw that they were naked (Genesis 3:7). They tried to cover themselves with fig leaves but God killed an animal and made skins to cover their nakedness. This is the first recorded death in the Bible and ushered in an era of sacrifices where the followers of God would sacrifice animals as a covering for their sins. But the system of sacrifices proscribed in the Old Testament was only temporary; they were pictures of the ultimate sacrifice that would come: Jesus, the Lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world (John 1:29). The death of Jesus did away with the need for animal sacrifices. He fulfilled the Law by covering our sins permanently with His own blood.
But what if there was no Adam? No first sin? No Fall? According to theistic evolution, death is just the way it's always been and not the judgment for sin. Then what did Jesus fulfill? It would be like having the answer to a question that was never asked. 1 Corinthians 15:45 says, “And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” If the first Adam never lived, what need is there for a second Adam to quicken us? The Incarnation of Jesus was only necessary because there was a literal Adam; if you remove a real Adam, you diminish the need for Jesus. One, outspoken atheist, Frank Zindler, described it this way (as quoted by William Debski):
The most devastating thing, though, that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people, the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve, there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin, there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation, there is no need of a savior. And I submit that puts Jesus, historical or otherwise, into the ranks of the unemployed. I think that evolution is absolutely the death knell of Christianity.
It
gives the wrong impression of death
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The Bible is very clear that death is the judgment for sin. There are several passages that illustrate this: For the wages of sin is death, Romans 6:23. By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, Romans 5:12. He which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, James 5:20, et al.
Christ conquered death for Christians but, for the lost, death still holds sway. We seldom know when death will overtake us so we need to make a decision for Jesus while we have the opportunity. If a person dies before he has repented, he has forever lost the opportunity for salvation. Ezekiel 18:21-23 says, “But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him: in his righteousness that he hath done he shall live. Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?” God wants all people to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). The certainty of death and the realization that we will someday be judged by God should create a sense urgency about our salvation.
In an interview with the NY Times, Bill Nye made these following comments:
NYE: I think the fear of death figures prominently in creationist thought. That the promise of eternal life is reassuring to people who are deeply troubled by the troubling fact that we’re all going to die. And it bugs me, too. But I press forward rather than running in circles screaming.
NY TIMES: And ultimately, death is a part of evolution.
NYE: It’s the key. The key is that you can pass on improvements by having kids. And there aren’t enough resources for any population to go completely unchecked, whether the population is humans or crickets. There isn’t enough for everybody, so you compete. And this is one of Darwin’s enormous insights.
According to Nye, death is the key to evolution. You see, it's not just that death happens during evolution, death is prerequisite to evolution. It's the hero of the story. Because it plays such a key role in evolution, some people almost regard death as noble. Biologos, a group that identifies itself as Christian, has an article titled, Death and Rebirth: The Role of Extinction in Evolution. Wow, “death and rebirth”! It almost seems to put evolution on equal footing with the Resurrection! In the article, the author makes this claim:
Extinction is actually a common feature of life on earth when viewed over long (e.g. geological) timescales. By some estimates, over 99% of the species that have ever lived have gone extinct [this is a lie, by the way].... Such an extinction event (of a single species, or perhaps a handful of species) alters the environment of other remaining species in an ecosystem. This, in turn, may influence the ability of some of these remaining species to reproduce compared to other species.... As the ecosystem landscape shifts due to loss of species, new biological opportunities, or niches, might arise. These new niches are then available to support new species to fill them.
There you go. Animals go extinct but that makes way for new animals to evolve. It's the circle of life. When a tsunami or earthquake kills thousands of people, critics often say that such tragedies are evidence there is no God. They also say that such events have happened frequently in the world's history and that they are mechanisms that give some species the opportunity to evolve.
The role of death in evolution is the complete opposite of what death truly is. Death is an intruder into the creation. It is the consequence of Adam's sin and later, of our own sins. It is an enemy that will one day be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26). Death should be dreaded by the lost and they should seek a way to avoid it. The gospel – the good news – is that there is life in Jesus!!
I'm not sure that the Bible attributes the death of nonhuman species to the sins of Adam (don't you, in an earlier post, argue that many references to "the Earth" refer to its inhabitants rather than the planet? is it not equally plausible, if not more so, that "death entered the world" applies only to humans?), but yes, even that limited sense is hard to reconcile with evolution.
ReplyDeleteBut as far as "the way some Christians read Genesis" goes, virtually all Christians read Genesis that way; some just go further than others. The Bible consistently attributes the weather to God, whether opening and closing the hatchways in the sky to let the rain through, or through some other mechanism; how is meteorology, which attributes weather to unguided naturalistic mechanisms like humidity, air pressure differentials, and temperature, compatible with the windows of heaven spoken of in Genesis? How is developmental biology compatible with the assertion that God personally fashions humans in their mothers' wombs? How is heliocentric astronomy compatible with the idea that the sun and moon were created three days after the Earth itself? It's one thing to put on a roof after you lay the foundation of a house; a heliocentric reading of Genesis implies that the foundation was put in after the roof!
Of course, the whole idea of waters above the sky is a bit hard to reconcile with modern meteorology and astronomy.
In the other direction, the identification of the serpent in Eden with Satan raises the question of why the serpent is punished by being turned into a modern snake, without legs. The story doesn't, on a plain reading, have anything to do with Satan; it's an etiological account of why snakes don't have legs and why humans don't get along with them. You have to read a lot into the text to get a reading consistent with the rest of your theology.
Steven J,
DeleteYes. I believe the terms “world” or “earth” in the Bible usually mean “the people of the earth.” The Bible is also very clear that the Curse affected the physical creation as well as man. Consider these verses:
Genesis 3:17-19, “And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
Neither did carnivory exist prior to the Curse. Genesis 1:29-30 says, “And God said, Behold, I have given you [Adam and Eve] every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.”
So we see, prior to the Curse, things like thorns and thistles did not exist, animals ate plants rather than each other, and (at the very least) man didn't die. None of these things comport with the theory of evolution.
I've talked before about the ordinary use of language. It's simply more natural to say something like, “The sun went behind a cloud” than to say, “A cloud moved to block the sun.” Even today, we use expressions like, “It's raining buckets.” I acknowledge that some people in the past may have taken figurative passages from the Bible and claimed they were meant literally. They were wrong to do this. Even now some people use figurative passages to support ideas like a flat earth. It's foolishness. To believe every word of the Bible is meant to be literal is as grave an error as saying every word is meant to be figurative. Jesus said He is the vine and we are the branches. Are we “literally” branches? Are we literally sheep? Is He literally a door? Do we literally eat His flesh and drink His blood? Claiming every word of the Bible is literal makes the entire Bible nonsense.
Finally, the serpent mentioned in Genesis is the devil. Paul affirms this in Romans 16:20. I may be at odds with many Christians but I don't believe the serpent was necessarily even in the form of a snake. Also, no where does the text say he was a snake with legs or that God removed his legs. It merely says he will go on his belly and eat dust. Of course, ordinary snakes don't eat dust so I again say this wasn't an ordinary snake. I believe that going “upon thy belly” is God's demotion of the serpent from his exalted position as Lucifer (light bringer) to Satan (adversary). Furthermore, the dust, I believe, is a reference to the flesh of Adam (as in Genesis 3:19).
There's a lot more I can talk about. I intend to do a detailed expository of the 6 days of creation but that will have to wait. Thanks for your comments.
God bless!!
RKBentley