Blog

by Steve Risner

[This blog post is part of a series. The previous one is here, and the next one is here.]

A major problem with theistic evolution, in my opinion, is that they take the humanistic/secularist idea of Darwinian evolution and try to incorporate Almighty God into it. Biblical creationists have, for decades, taken solid scientific information and incorporated it into our origins model. Do you see the difference? Starting with man's idea and trying to find a place for God in it is backwards. We take God's idea and see how man's observations of nature can be incorporated to fit with that. After beginning with the wrong starting point (man's ideas on origins), the theistic evolutionist will take God and distort His very clear Word to allow for the possibility of universal common descent. For me, the starting point should always be God and His Word. We then see what we can make of the world around us—naturally, philosophically, culturally, politically, morally, etc. We should never start with the word of man in his ever fallen state and trust him to show us truth without God as his foundation.

This week, I'm taking a small break from the blog post by Tyler Francke he calls “10 Theological Questions No Young-earth Creationist Can Answer.” The subject for today will be theistic evolution, which is in line with the series connected to that blog post, but I will not be addressing any of his erroneous claims this week. I felt like a brief intermission was appropriate. We can take advantage of this time to make some general statements about theistic evolution and why it doesn't hold water on a variety of levels and for a variety of reasons. The first, and what I think is the most important, I've already stated in my opening paragraph—they start with man's ideas and try to see how they can incorporate God into it rather than taking God's Word and seeing how our observations can fit with it.

I also find that it's a little disturbing that God is reduced to a gap filler in the story of theistic evolution. He's not the Almighty God who is the Creator and Sustainer of all things. According to 1 Corinthians 8:6, “There is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.” In the theistic evolution account, we have “nature” doing whatever it does until it finds a bump in the road. At this point, God, who has been off in the corner not really doing much, gets involved and moves the process forward. In fact, I'm not sure God has much to do with the story at all apart from creation ex nihilo and putting a spirit within man whenever it was that He decided man had evolved enough to acquire such a privilege. He may have been involved in the primordial soup that spawned life, but that depends on who you talk to. Where else is God needed in this story? God is reduced to an explanation when none is possible according to naturalism. The God of the Bible is unimaginably amazing and huge and powerful and He's desperately in love with His creation and is intimately involved in it. This, to me, seems contrary to what we hear from those who want to meld their belief in evolution from a single common ancestor with the Bible. We also find that God, who is described as love in the Bible, created everything “very good” (and this being in relation to Himself—the only appropriate standard by which He would make such a statement) so it could rely on death, struggle, mutation, disfigurement, and disease as well as a variety of other unlovely things to progress. Death is not the result of sin. It's the mechanism He chose to make His creation better. Seems rather odd to me.

God's Word is called into question in the version painted by theistic evolutionists. I say this because the book of Genesis is written in a teaching/historical form called didactic form. This means the context and writing style indicate the author intended it to be taken literally. There's no way around this if we're honest. So if this is the case that the book is written as though it was historical, giving us names of people and places, giving us biological and astronomical and chronological details that can be traced, but the story is nothing more than a mythical account for us to learn something important about God, this calls God's integrity into question, as well as His ability to communicate. Why does every mention of the creation account in the Bible seem to reflect the author believed it to be a literal historical account? God based our week of 6 days and a Sabbath on a story that wasn't true? He retold the story in Exodus saying, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” Since, according to the theistic evolutionist (and the old earth creationists as well), the meaning of the word “day” can mean all sorts of things, I wonder what they think this verse means. What's a day in this text? How do they know? The fact is that there is nothing anywhere in Scripture that would lead us to take the creation account as anything but a factual, historical report. There are such glaring inconsistencies in their theology, and in their logic, that it's unbelievable to me that anyone holds to this sort of idea. Perhaps I’m just not smart enough to get it.

It also seems striking that sin is exceptionally deluded in the theistic evolutionist's worldview. Man is born into a sinful nature. Why? Because of a mythical person that disobeyed God? Come now. That would mean Jesus, the one who made a way for this problem to be corrected, was also mythical and we all believe in nothing real. It also seems strange that the first man (whoever this was) that God breathed into, giving him a spirit, all of sudden had a code of conduct his father didn't have. Before man was somehow created in God's image, he was like the animals—with no ability to sin. But after he was made in God's image, he had the option to sin. Does that make sense? Was this first human being given a spirit at his birth? Was it later on in his life? How do we know? The Bible is no help here.

And, speaking of the Bible, whenever a new scientific theory, idea, finding, or what have you is announced, the Bible will need to be reinterpreted for the theistic evolutionist. What an awful place to anchor your theology. The sifting sand that is the ever-changing but currently popular idea of society is not a sure foundation. The Bible, solid and trustworthy, is where I would encourage you to begin building the foundation for your worldview. The theistic evolutionist makes many claims about this, but their theology shows us differently.

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