What’s worse? Outright denial of God through approval of evolutionism, or thinking God would use a mechanism such as evolution over millions of years to create and sustain? I don’t even know how to begin to answer a question like that, nor do I intend to do so. This is not God. Theistic evolution portrays God as weak and having to resort to other means than his spoken word to create and sustain. God is not glorified in any way by this. When through a scientific discovery we see his sovereignly creative and providential hand and say, “How great is our God in this wondrous act (not extremely long process), and how weak is man!” then God is glorified.
How is this even an issue in the church today? How can it be an issue? This is basic theology. God is sovereign over all. He knows all; he created all; he sustains all. God’s very being demands sovereignty. Do not think of God’s attributes as comparable to those of an earthly king. A sovereign king is merely an earthly, sin-tainted depiction of what sovereignty actually is. If you want to see true sovereignty, look to God. God does not reflect sovereignty, he is sovereignty. God is his attributes. God is mercy; God is holiness; God is wisdom; God is sovereignty. This is in part where proponents of theistic evolution go horribly wrong. Their view of God is tainted in that they do not see God as sovereign over all. In the end their view depicts a weak God. This is clear denial of Scripture. That God is sovereign is evident from his name, Jehovah; he is self-existent and eternal.
Theistic evolution is a great contradiction. If we were to pin a world view to theistic evolution, which attempts to combine two world views that are polar opposites of one another, it would be common grace. Common grace is the thief wearing a ski mask that says, “REFORMED!” on the forehead. In reality, common grace robs God of his glory. Common grace lets in his crony, a non-literal interpretation of Genesis. A non-literal interpretation does not see the importance of God’s sovereign hand in creation and calls it irrelevant in the scope of eternity. With a non-literal interpretation of Genesis comes the destruction of the creation ordinances. Creation did not occur in six days with one day of rest, so the Sabbath day is desecrated without a thought; marriage is not for life any more, and remarriage is allowed; women are not called to be submissive to their husbands because God did not create Eve out of Adam. Do you see how destructive this worldview is? Not only is God’s hand in creation muted, but every other area of life is tainted and twisted.
Post-modernism contributes heavily to theistic evolution as well. The spirit of the age in which we live that denies knowing truth or the possibility of truth is highly conducive to reinterpretation of the first chapters of Genesis, and the whole of Scripture in general. Man says we don’t really know—besides some sort of process of evolution over millions of years which God may or may have not started—how the universe originated. Post-modernism has permeated the church and perverted many people’s thinking into a denial of knowing absolute truth when it comes to origins. Some say that there is no need for us to know the truth about origins, and that it has no bearing on the scope of eternity. What they are doing is denying God when they say this.
By way of denying the absolute truth of creation by God in six literal days, as it is clearly portrayed in Scripture, many put their children in danger. An example can be seen in the life of the Intelligent Design[1] heavy mover, Michael Behe. What makes Behe different from many other proponents of Intelligent Design is that he believes in common descent. This is the idea that all living organisms can trace their origins back to one common ancestor. You might call Behe a hybrid Intelligent Design proponent, almost a theistic evolutionist. Behe’s son Leo grew up with his father’s unbiblical stance on origins and became an atheist over a period of six months. While Leo went from being a devout Roman Catholic to an outspoken atheist, the same can and does happen to Reformed Christian young people. What follows is an excerpt from an interview with Leo Behe in Humanist magazine.
There was a lot of buzz about The God Delusion back in 2008 when I read it, and it seemed to be having an impact on a lot of Christians’ faith. I had recently decided to turn my interest in apologetics toward atheism, and Dawkins’ bestseller seemed to be a good place to start. The God Delusion has been criticized for its allegedly infantile treatment of metaphysics, but that aspect of the book was not what originally challenged my faith. The point that hit me hardest while reading was the fallible origin of Scripture, which I had never considered (to my own surprise). That point in particular was what originally shook my specific faith—Catholicism—and planted seeds of skepticism, which continued to grow as I expanded my knowledge through other literary works on both sides of the issue.
The journey from very devout Catholic to outspoken atheist took about six months total. Once my trust in the Bible was shaken, I still believed strongly in a theistic god, but I realized that I hadn’t sufficiently examined my beliefs. Over the next several months, my certainty of a sentient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity faded steadily.[2]
What Leo Behe reveals throughout the course of this interview should not be surprising to us. This sad chain of events brings out the importance of not only teaching the God of creation, but also of condemning evolutionism and any view that contradicts Scripture. Young people go off to college and are ruthlessly attacked by evolutionism, not to mention the plethora of other temptations they face at those institutions. Universities are the devil’s playground, and the game is life or death. Young people must be prepared by their parents in the home and especially in the Christian schools for the onslaught so that they don’t “drink the Kool-Aid” with the rest of the world and die denying God.
While I was conversing with a theistic evolutionist about the transition in recent history from most people’s holding a literal six-day creation to theistic evolution’s millions of years, the man said something along these lines: “If they (‘they’ being anyone who held to a literal six-day creation from the beginning of history until the prominence of evolution in the 19th and 20th centuries) knew back then what we know now, surely they wouldn’t have taken the Bible literally. Back then man was ignorant.” Not only does this man have the wrong idea of Scripture, namely, being unclear on origins, but he also has the idea that man was a grunting, knuckle-dragging, club-wielding, cave-dwelling creature with no intelligible thought process. In reality, ancient men were geniuses. Much of the architecture and engineering of today is based on “early” man’s design. More importantly, would the Great Shepherd pull the wool over the eyes of his own sheep for thousands of years? This argument about the knowledge of man is saying that God tricked senseless pre-scientific man, from creation until the scientific age, into thinking that he created the universe in six days. How ridiculous!
God created us with the sole purpose that we glorify his name alone. This is not accomplished by denying his sovereign hand in creating and sustaining the universe and all it contains. This is not accomplished by changing the days of Genesis 1 into long periods of time. We could discuss all the different categories of Theistic Evolution, but time and space prevent us.
Think about some of the attributes of God. His mercy, his righteousness, his sovereignty, his holiness, and his infinite wisdom all make sense in when you confess literal six-day creation. Thanks be to God for giving us a system of beliefs that makes sense! Could it be any other way?
[1] Intelligent Design, according to the Discovery Institute (an organization dedicated to studies in Intelligent Design), “holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” Notice it claims, “an intelligent cause,” not the creator God of the Bible. Our next article in this series, Lord willing, will focus on the Intelligent Design movement.
[2] “The Humanist Interview with Leo Behe,” by Ryan Shaffer, Humanist, September/October 2011, http://thehumanist.org/september-october-2011/the-humanist-interview-with-leo-behe/