I was once asked to assess a preacher and his preaching. (From here on I will refer to him simply as “the preacher”.) Some were positive about his preaching, so I was surprised that, in two sermons, on Genesis ch 1 and Genesis chs 2-3, he spent more than half his time promoting Theistic Evolution and ridiculing the idea of Six Day Creation.
This, despite insisting it is not the most important question, and can give rise to endless fruitless debates. The Bible says: “Avoid foolish and ignorant disputes, knowing that they generate strife” (2 Tim 2:23). Yet he still chose to spend most of his time promoting what he acknowledged was “just his opinion and he may be wrong”.
Fabricating Problems with the Text
If a person dismisses the idea of Six Day Creation I would expect he would at least try and present his case against such a view thoughtfully and honestly. But this was not so.
Here were his seven reasons, along with my comments.[1]
1) “The sun moon and stars are not created till the 4th day; so there can’t have been ‘day’ and ‘night’ for the first three ‘days’; these therefore can’t have been days as we know them. So, neither need the others be actual ‘days’.”
But this ignores that the Bible specifically states that day and night were created on the 1st day (Gen 1:3-5), when God created light. Light, once formed, exists independent of its source; and in this case, God, the Source, was present there from the beginning.
2) “Plants need sunlight; plants were created on the 3rd day, but the sun not till the 4th. How could they have survived?”
But this is a sleight of hand, suddenly introducing “old earth” time scales into “young earth” explanations. If they are literal days, there is no problem. The plants in our yard have no difficulty surviving one night of darkness.
3) “On the seventh day God “rested”. But God doesn’t need to rest; He is God, He doesn’t get tired. So, this must be figurative.”
But the Hebrew: shâbath simply means to “cease”. God’s creative work ceased on the seventh day; His work of providence began. There is nothing figurative about that.
4) “I don’t think anyone reads that first chapter literally. The reason I say that is because it says God sees stuff, and God speaks. And yet God doesn’t have human eyes, and He doesn’t have a human mouth. It’s what’s called an anthropomorphism. What’s happening there, God as He inspires the human writer, is accommodating Himself so that we can understand.”
But nowhere in Genesis 1 is a “mouth” or “eyes” mentioned (not that it would be a problem if it was, eg. Isa 40:5). But there is nothing figurative in God “speaking” or “seeing”. What sort of figurative voice does the preacher imagine Moses heard on Mt Sinai; or the “still, small voice” Elijah heard on Mt Horeb; or the “voice from heaven” that was heard at the baptism of Jesus: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” What even is a “figurative” voice? “Thus says the Lord” is everywhere in the Bible. “Thus says the Lord” IS the Bible. If that isn’t to be taken literally, then what is?
5) “Notice the anthropomorphic language: God is not a man but like a gardener we are told He plants a garden, like a potter He fashions the man, like a lifeguard He breathes into the man’s nostrils giving him the breath of life, like a builder He constructs the woman from a rib, and like a man He walks in the garden in the cool of the day. Why depict God as a man if He is not a man? Hence, I don’t think a straightforward literal reading is intended, or even possible.”
But why would God’s actions (planting, fashioning, breathing, constructing, walking) not be taken literally? They are not “impossible”, and do not have to be considered anthropomorphic; or else we have to discount all preincarnate appearances of the Lord in the Old Testament.
6) “Adam and Eve were real people, but what we are told about them is highly symbolic.”
But why would Adam and Eve in the narrative be real, but everything said about them be symbolic? Did they just “symbolically” eat the forbidden fruit? Was that symbolic too?
7) “There are strange things in the story in Genesis 2-3 that you might have noticed: things like a subterranean stream that waters the surface of the earth, that comes to be replaced by four rivers that diverge, unlike normal rivers that converge. Then there’s two magical trees, and a woman who’s made from a man’s rib, and a talking snake.”
But again, why would Adam and Eve in the narrative be real, but everything around them like this be figurative?
If you want to be taken seriously you have to do better than setting up straw men like this and positing problems from the text which are just not there.
Defending Theistic Evolution
The preacher claimed he bnelieved in God as the Creator, but said that the method God used in “creation” was evolution, which he defined as follows (I quote): “All living creatures today are genetically descended from living creatures that lived a long time ago, millions of years. And the way that this chain of descent happened was, just like now, there was random variation occurring among members of a species. And depending on environmental factors, various members of a species produced more offspring than other members. And so over time there was inherited change… God could have used an evolutionary process that seems to us random and blind in order to produce something, namely humanity according to His definite plan.”
The preacher recognised there were problems with this world view. (Again, I quote): “You cannot completely reconcile the theory of evolution with Genesis 2 and 3, especially with our understanding of what sin is and what death is… Evolution doesn’t fit very well with what we call the doctrine of original sin. The doctrine of original sin lies at the heart of the gospel.”
This brings me to:
The BIG THREE Questions
The basic problem here is one’s world view. Belief in Theistic Evolution warps one’s world view and your peaching will suffer accordingfly.
That is why, if someone says to me they believe in Theistic Evolution, before I debate other issues, I go to these three questions which define one’s world view:
1) Is the World a Mess?
Easy question: Yes! Whether it is “natural” disasters: pestilence, famine, fire, floods, earthquakes etc; or man-made disasters: war, fighting, domestic violence, child sexual abuse etc.
Yes, the world is a mess.
2) Why/When/How did the Mess begin?[2]
Death entered the human race when Adam sinned (Rom 5:12, 1 Cor 15:21-22). The preacher said he accepts (what he called “the only essentials in Genesis 2-3”) that (I quote): “Adam and Eve were historical people, and before they sinned there was no human death. That’s about it.”
But it was not just the human race that suffered when Adam sinned; for the first time death entered the whole world. The ground beneath was cursed (Gen 3:17, 5:29) because Adam sinned; and the world above brought into “its bondage to decay” so that now “the whole creation groans and labours with birth pangs together until now” (Rom 8:21-22).
But evolution teaches that death and decay were present in the world for millions of years before this. It is unbiblical to hold that everything around Adam was dropping dead (including Adam’s hominoid forebears) even if Adam wasn’t.
3) What was the World like before then?[3]
It was all good. Over and again, in Genesis 1 (vv 4,10,12,18,21,25,31) God looked on His creation and it was all “good” – not just after He created man and woman as the pinnacle of His creation; but everything. The preacher tried to maintain that when God evolved the world: “There is nothing bad here. Everything is good; everything is very good… The all-powerful, and all wise God who made all, the God who is good, He made humanity a good home.”
But evolution teaches that for millions of years before this “nature was red in tooth and claw”. How could God look on such a world and (in the words of the preacher): “Seven times we are told that God sees that the world is good, a world that is teeming with life. God loves life… He is good, and He has created a good world which He has blessed.”
“God loves life!” But supposedly, He looked on a world like this full of mayhem and death, and pronounced it “all very good”.
Science and Science so-called
What if we can’t reconcile “science” and the Bible? What to do? The preacher rightly stated: “We will stick with the Bible, because the Bible is Scripture; it is God’s authoritative Word to us and we will sit loose with the findings of science.”
But as William M. Schweitzer (BA, BTh, MTh, PhD) points out, “science” can mean different things:
(1) “Science” can mean the objective data of nature (‘Science A’).
(2) “Science” can mean the consensus pronouncements of recognized scientific authorities (‘Science B’).
“Although these may in many cases amount to the same thing, it is clear that this is not always the case. The history of science is littered with confident but erroneous pronouncements.”[4]
Examples of Science A include eg. “‘Medical and technological advances achieved through science’ which are necessarily grounded in physical reality rather than merely in fallible pronouncements.” Under this heading would be also observations of population shift (what Darwin observed on the Galapagos, and what some refer to as micro evolution).
Examples of Science B would include most of what goes under the heading of macro evolution, since it is not based on directly observable objective data in nature.[5]
Another sad example of Science B is the “science” of gender that is promoted by many “scientific authorities” today and that children are now being indoctrinated in, in schools. High school students in Tasmania are being made in class to read aloud together pro-LGBTQIA+ chants affirming “gender is not simply male or female” and that “non-binary, cisgender and transgender” are “all valid identities”. This is also called “science”.
The instructions state: “The whole class will then read it aloud together at the same time — focus on pace, expression and reading as one group.” The passage then reads, “Gender and assigned sex are not the same thing. Assigned sex refers to the biological label — male, female or intersex — given to a person at birth. Gender, on the other hand, is how a person experiences and expresses themselves in the world. It exists on a spectrum, and understanding the difference helps us respect and support everyone around us.”
No, we do not get the culture on side by embracing theistic evolution
It is sometimes claimed that unless we embrace theistic evolution we will not be taken seriously by the culture around us. But they do not take us seriously anyway as long as we try and find a half way house, and still bring the Bible into it. The BioLogos Organisation in the U.S. has tried to do this for years.
University of Chicago Professor Jerry Coyne regards their approach as not intellectually credible, nor does he respect the gesture involved. He says, “BioLogos had the goal of turning evangelical Christians towards accepting evolution. They proposed to do this by showing literalist Christians that the Bible and Darwin were completely compatible. It didn’t work of course.”[6]
In the end, you are either on board with everything secular evolution teaches, or you are simply not credible in the eyes of an unbelieving world.
Yes, it is a gospel issue
It seems almost any time there is a debate today over what the Bible says, someone will always seek to muddy the waters with, “Did God really say…?” (Gen 3:1) and come up with an unlikely interpretation that lets them off the hook. The alternative ploy is to close down discussion with: “But is this a gospel issue?” It would be sad, indeed dangerous, if we never took a position on any issue – whether about multiple genders, same sex marriage, marriage and divorce, abortion, women in the ministry, matters surrounding Biblical inerrancy, or even the Ten Commandments themselves – because they were not overtly gospel issues.
But as even the preacher I have referred to here observed: “You cannot completely reconcile the theory of evolution with Genesis 2 and 3, especially with our understanding of what sin is and what death is… Evolution doesn’t fit very well with what we call the doctrine of original sin. The doctrine of original sin lies at the heart of the gospel.”
So does the result of original sin: i.e. death! Why did Jesus come? “Since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity so that by His death He might break the power of him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” (Heb 2:14-15)
And, as noted above, it is not only human death; the whole mess the world is in (that evolution teaches has prevailed for millions of years) is also the result on original sin. As long as we fail to face that, we are detracting from the full blessing of the gospel with its promise of the restoration in the end of the good that prevailed in the original Garden of Eden. (Rom 8:20-22, Rev 22:1-5)
[1] I would like to keep the focus on the issues, not the man. But if anyone genuinely wants to assess what I say for themselves I am happy to provide the links. [2] See also “2. Adam’s Sin Resulted in Universal Corruption and Death” here [3] See also “1. God’s Goodness Must Be Reflected in the Original Creation” here [4] William M. Schweitzer “Engaging with Keller: Thinking Through the Theology of an Influential Evangelical” p.199 [5] Nathaniel T. Jeanson in “Replacing Darwin: The New Origin of Species” rightly points out that the Theory of Evolution is based on open ended inductive reasoning, not conclusive deductive reasoning. See p.175 [6] William M. Schweitzer “Engaging with Keller: Thinking Through the Theology of an Influential Evangelical” p.205