Blog

by Steve Risner

This is week four on this topic of “Can you be a Christian and accept evolution?” I found an article with that says, “Yes” to this question, and I took issue with much of what they had to say. Before reading this post, I would recommend making sure you’ve read my other posts here, here, and here. This post will make more sense then. Let’s jump into it.

“We’re not free to disregard the Bible because it feels outdated.” So, why are you doing this? The Bible is timeless in its principles. And when it comes to history, how could anyone argue that changes? History happened. It was recorded. No amount of time passing can change what happened.

“We’re not free… to disregard science because its conclusions are inconvenient for our theology.” As many evolutionists are, the author of this article is confused. They think “science” is what we’re talking about when it’s nothing more than philosophy or religion. Scientific “conclusions” like gravity, pH, electricity, and so on are things you can bank on by and large. But stories about chemicals turning into life and that simple life form diversifying into all sorts of highly complex, very specialized organisms is a very naïve belief system. Feel free to discard any other religion’s take on origins if it conflicts with the clear teaching of Scripture. In short, if you read the Bible and you look at nature and they don’t seem to agree, you’re very likely misinterpreting nature. One of these revelations is a written communication from God Almighty. The other is essentially art, which can be open to a million different interpretations, and none may be correct or complete. When in doubt, side with the Lord and His Word.

“Psalm 19 urges us to take both science and Scripture seriously.” It actually does not do this at all, but theistic evolutionists want it to say this, so they feel justified in rejecting Scripture. Placing the two on equal standing is not a good idea at all. In fact, it’s a terrible idea and is akin to paganism. God gave us His Word for a reason. Nature, while able to point us to our Creator, does not speak divine truth to us. In fact, the nature we’re seeing now is cursed. The Fall was accompanied by a curse that God placed not just on mankind but on all of creation. In fact, Paul tells the Romans (and us) that “creation has been groaning” since the Fall. The creation is essentially ill. The story it may be telling us now is nothing like the story it would have told us in Eden before Adam and Eve disobeyed God for the first time, introducing sin into the world. So, taking fallen man’s skewed interpretation of a cursed creation over the perfect Word of God is insane, in my opinion. What rational person would suggest we can understand more or even as much about God from nature as we can from the book He gave us?

“At the same time, we’ve got to be realistic and humble about how good we are as fallen and limited people at interpreting God’s truth.” This is partially true. We don’t know everything from the Word of God. But we can read His thoughts in His message to us, and what He clearly tells us about creation is undeniable. Either believe what it says or reject the Word. It’s up to you and where you put your final authority. I hate to repeat myself so much, but the truth here is still the same. We are fallen, and they get that right in this article. But we also have the Word of God, which is what He wanted us to know, and He has preserved it for us. Trust Him rather than sinful man’s take on origins. Man has been at war with God for nearly 6000 years. Do you think you can trust him more so than the Creator of all that is? And, again, what is easier to believe: that we grossly misinterpreted the clear teachings of God from His Word which He left for us, or that we misunderstood something we saw in nature, or we drew the wrong conclusion about something we saw in nature or we went a little too far in that interpretation—going beyond what we actually know to be true?

“When it comes to science, we can only ever work with a partial data set, and it’s not like we can do repeatable experiments where we re-run the last 4 billion years to confirm our hypothesis.” This is why origins is NOT a scientific topic of any kind. It’s impossible, and people will assault the integrity of the tool that is science by trying to force it to be something it is not and cannot be. Universal common descent is not repeatable. It’s not observable. It’s not able to be experimented on. It’s not able to have predictive power since it’s historical (you can’t predict something that will happen in the past). They’ve demolished their entire argument here by being truthful about why universal common descent is not science. It is rare to find a theistic evolutionist so honest about this, and it’s refreshing. I’ve literally conversed with hundreds over the years. Many are hostile toward the Bible and those who believe what it says. I’m thankful this person is genuine here.

“When it comes to Scripture, we’re all too prone to bringing our own presuppositions and cultural baggage to God’s word and reading into it what we want to read.” Fortunately, as a Biblical creationist, I’ve not done this to the best of my knowledge. This is precisely what others (old earth creationists and theistic evolutionists) do all the time. You need not twist Scripture with your own cultural or whatever biases to understand the creation narrative and the rest of the history found in Genesis. The book literally spans 1/3 of all of history. It’s all very important for understanding our condition and the solution that the Lord has given to us. There is no way to justify abandoning what everyone in the Bible and for almost 2000 years after Christ understood about creation. None. The cultural differences do not change what the clear teachings of ALL of the Scriptures are concerning creation (a short and incomplete list can be found here). And the culture changed over time from Adam and Eve to Noah to Jacob and his family to Moses and then David up to the time of Christ. Different languages are represented in the Bible. Different time periods. Even different locations. What culture would we be speaking about if that dictates how we understand the Word of God? If anything, the lens of our culture would force us to toss out much of Genesis and other creation passages. Thankfully, we don’t have to be blinded by our cultural biases, and we can accept God’s Word for what it says. I’ve found no reason not to after over 30 years of looking.

“Though God has genuinely made truth accessible to us via both means, we could be (and probably are) making mistakes in how we read either science, Scripture or both (and we won’t necessarily know which).” If you think it’s possible to misunderstand Genesis, then you literally cannot accept or know anything found in Scripture. None of it is able to be grasped if the opening chapters are in question. A 7-year-old can read or hear Genesis and understand the narrative. It’s very simple. The creation account, the Fall, the curse, the Flood, the dispersion, the covenant – it’s all important, all right there, and all easy to understand. Do we have everything right from Scripture? Of course not. But the odds of us having a perfect understanding of nature are far worse than us understanding God’s written communication to us. Especially if what we are trying to force nature to say to us is 100% opposed to what the Bible tells us. When there’s a conflict, trust His Word over anything else.

Again, time has run out and we are out of space for this week’s post. I hope this has opened your eyes to some of the issues with forcing the idea of universal common descent (often referred to as simply “evolution”) into the Judeo-Christian teachings on creation. Take care and come back next week as we wrap up this series.

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