What About
Theistic Evolution?
By
Darren Nelson
Many Christians do not ‘get’ what the big
deal is about evolution. “God could have used evolution as His means to
create the universe as easily as speaking it into existence. Evolution
doesn’t affect the spiritual truths of the Bible.”
If ‘evolution’ is taken to mean the belief that microbes have turned into
people and everything else over millions of years, this is simply untrue.
The purpose of this article is to present some reasons why evolution and the Bible are irreconcilable. If the Bible is the book it claims to be,
evolution cannot be true. If evolution is true, God (if He exists) is not
the One presented in the Bible.
That may strike some as a huge claim, but it is actually easy to get there if
the claims of the Bible and those of
evolution are taken to their logical end.
Let’s begin with a compilation of four interrelated
truths about God and the Bible.
These are historically recognized, defining truths about the Christian faith
with
which very few Christians would disagree. The first is that God is the
ultimate Author of Scripture. Men did not write the Scripture using
their own limited knowledge and understanding. They were God’s instruments
for putting His Word on paper.
They undoubtedly wrote things that they themselves did not fully understand,
but they never wrote anything out of their own heads without the inspiration
of God (2 Timothy
Taken in conjunction, these foundational
truths form a picture of the Bible as
a reliable source of information, because it was composed by a truthful God who
wants to be known and who values His Word
enough that He has preserved throughout history the meaning He intends it to
have. This picture of God and His
Word comprises the first reason evolution is unbiblical. Evolution
simply and emphatically is not found in the Bible
in any form, hint, or insinuation. Moreover, it contradicts the plain
meaning of the inspired language, disrupting the meaning of the foundational
chapters of Genesis as well as many
other passages interspersed throughout the pages of Scripture. Evolution
is unbiblical by definition.
Let’s consider secondly the nature of God in
relation to the original Creation as presented in the Bible. The Bible
presents God as morally excellent and perfect, holy, good, purposeful,
peace-loving, a God of love. It presents Him as One who identifies with
the lowly and hopeless. Jesus teaches that the meek will inherit the
Earth. He commands us to be like God, considering others ahead of
ourselves and looking out for the weak and downtrodden of society. The Bible makes it clear that death and
suffering were not part of the original Creation but entered as a result of
man’s sin and the subsequent Curse (Romans
Consider how opposed that is to evolution,
which, by its nature, is random, cruel, thoughtless, violent, and
wasteful. It requires death and suffering. It requires individuals
to put themselves first and eliminate the weak. It is the very antithesis
of Godliness. (Even a Creation scenario that interprets the fossil record
as a testimony to long ages before man must therefore put such “bad things”
before the Fall -- a major theological obstacle.)
The Genesis
account concludes with God surveying all He has made and pronouncing it “very
good.” Can we imagine such a statement being made by a loving and
righteous God over a world that had seen billions of years of death and
suffering, inefficiency and wastefulness? The God of the Bible is not capable of such an
atrocity. If it is true that evolution was used to create the world, the
creator is surely not the God of the Bible.
That god would be closer to Baal or Beelzebub than to Jehovah.
Let’s turn to a third line of thought.
A disturbing fact with which the Christian evolutionist must reckon is that
evolution turns large numbers of people away from the Christian faith every
year. Thousands of people -- especially young people -- reject
Christianity each year because the first eleven chapters of Genesis are contrary to what is being
presented to them as undisputed truth. So evolution is in a sense, a
salvation issue. People are rejecting the truth of the Word of God because of it. This
alone should cause us to stop and seriously question the veracity of evolution.
The summation of what has been presented so
far is that the Christian evolutionist holds an untenable position in that he
must believe the following: that God created the universe over billions of
years using violence, death, and suffering despite the Bible’s emphasis that God is a kind and loving God; then He
inspired the writer of Genesis to
record the process in an entirely different way bearing no resemblance to what
actually happened despite the Bible’s emphasis
on God being a Truth-telling God -- all the while knowing that the discrepancy
would turn people away from Himself despite the Bible’s emphasis that God desires to draw people to Himself.
Could this be true? It simply cannot be.
Such a view is antithetical to the nature
and character of God. Jesus Himself said that a kingdom divided against
itself could not stand. Yet wherever we turn, evolution leads us to
logically impassable walls. There is no way around the conclusions that
either the Bible is not
“God-breathed,” that God is a liar, or that Jesus was not really divine, any of
which leave our religion in shambles.
One of the most common arguments presented
by the theistic evolutionist is that the days of Creation do not necessarily
have to be literal twenty-four-hour days, but rather ages in the order of
millions or billions of years. After all, the Bible says a day is like a thousand years to God. Also, the
Hebrew word for day (yom) can, as in English, mean “age.” The Genesis account of Creation is therefore
seen in an allegorical sense, with each day corresponding to an age in the
evolutionary/ancient Earth scheme. It is deemed that the integrity of God
and the Scriptures are preserved by such an interpretation. God is still
telling the truth, but in a poetic and/or metaphoric way.
Besides the linguistic problems associated
with it, there are several problems with this view. First, in allegory,
each symbolic element in the story corresponds to some element in
reality. The elements in the Creation account in Genesis do not correspond significantly to real historic events if
evolution is true. If the “days” of Genesis
1 were allegorical ages, then one would expect the order of the events in the Genesis account to correspond to the
supposed evolutionary order. But they aren’t even really close. For
example, the Bible states that God
created the Earth before the stars, whales before cows, bats before rats.
This is the opposite of what the evolutionary/long ages view claims. The Bible even says that plants were created
(one day) before the sun! Since we Christians claim to believe that the
Author of Scripture is God Himself, we are led back to a familiar dilemma for
Christian evolutionists. To accept the allegory as written makes God a
liar, but to appeal to the ignorance of the human authors denies the
inspiration of Scripture.
And this is the heart of the whole
matter. The sad fact is that the typical Christian has more faith in the
claims of science than in the claims of the Bible.
An uniformed Christian perceives himself caught between a rock and a hard
place. He either has to reject evolution and look like an idiot on par
with one who denies a round Earth, or he has to reject the natural reading of
Scripture. What is he to do? Well, the Bible is a religious book and therefore subjective and open to a
degree of interpretive license. Evolution, presented as objective science
and entitled to the benefits thereof, is regarded as proven truth.
Frankly, it’s often seen to be much easier to accommodate science by altering the
meaning of the Bible than vice versa.
We’ve become a Church full of rationalists,
people who put our own reason as the highest authority. Whether or not
something lines up with Scripture doesn’t appear to concern us much. If
the Bible is in any way counterintuitive
to our logic regarding the world or the character of God, we relegate the
offending passages to allegory or metaphor. They simply are not allowed
to mean what they seem to mean. We who call ourselves God’s own people
reinterpret Scripture so eagerly and willingly that we are, in essence,
creating our own Bibles and our own
religions, bearing less and less resemblance to biblical Christianity. We
are in danger of becoming a Church of individualized cults.
To confront the problems
resulting from his faith in evolution, the Christian evolutionist has resorted
to doing that which has been historically unacceptable -- removing the Bible
from its place of authority and reinterpreting Scripture as he sees fit.
This is a solution that shows neither intellectual integrity nor a respect
for the things of God. I would encourage us to face the hard issues
and to grapple with the truth of God, whose “ways are not our ways nor thoughts
our thoughts.” Ultimately, this is about getting back to a commitment
to Scripture -- to trust that God is who He says He is, that the Bible
is His Word, and to let Truth speak for itself.
Darren Nelson currently resides outside of
