The Theistic Evolution Virus

[I did an online debate with “Redeemed Zoomer” recently and below is a slightly revised version of my opening statement.]

Introduction 
While I do believe that Theistic Evolution is not compatible with biblical Christianity, I do want to say at the outset that I don’t believe that this means no one who holds to Theistic Evolution can be saved. I believe there have been many sincere Christians who have erroneously believed that God used macro evolution to create everything that has come into existence, and many of them are in Heaven now and they know better. 

At the same time, by saying that theistic evolution is not compatible with biblical Christianity is to say that it is inconsistent with Scripture and reason and therefore ultimately unhelpful, antagonist, and long-term utterly cancerous and destructive to the Christian faith, and yes, I’m talking about Francis Collins.

Defining Terms
I want to define my terms a little further before proceeding. I’m here arguing against theistic macro evolution, that is, the idea that God in some way Providentially super-intended “the addition of new or novel traits (neomorphs) within a population when the ancestors neither had those traits nor the genetic information to code for them.” Here, I’m quoting Dr. Gordon Wilson’s definition and I will be drawing heavily from his work on the scientific side of things going forward and throughout this debate. I highly commend his book Darwin’s Sandcastle to everyone.

No one denies the reality of micro evolution, what Wilson describes as “the rearrangement, redistribution, removal, or remodeling of existing genetic information” in various “kinds” of creatures. This was designed by God the Creator to allow for families and kinds of creatures to adapt to different environments, which can certainly include a very wide variety of physical traits (e.g. compare the Russell terrier to a Bernese Mountain dog). But no true “neomorph” has come into existence in that great variation. Size, shape, colors, hair length and numerous other details shift and change, but no dog has ever yet grown feathers or a turtle shell or sprouted a trunk. And despite Darwin’s great hope in the fossil record, nothing has turned up. And that is because his theory is illogical and utterly impossible and flatly contradicts the text of Genesis and Scripture as a whole. 

The Theological & Scriptural Case
So let’s begin with Scripture: Theistic evolution posits that God used the “natural” process of natural selection, mutation, adaptation, and billions of years of suffering, violence, death, and destruction to bring about the current state of the world. But it does not make it better to say that “God used” violence and death to create the world. It does not make it better; it makes it worse. Some might point to the Biblical doctrine of Providence that God works all things together for good, including evil to try to justify theistic evolution, or what Joseph told his brothers: what evil men meant for evil God meant for good. 

But if Genesis 1 is a poetic description of the evolutionary process, what does “good” even mean? If the fifth day describes millions of years of mutation, suffering, violence, and death of sea creatures and birds, and God saw all of that and said it was good – what does “good” even mean? This introduces massive moral confusion into the text. This point is underlined on the seventh day and the final appraisal of all of creation: And God saw all that He had made and behold it was “very good.” The whole point is that there is no evil in the world. But if God is evaluating millions or billions of years of mutation, suffering, violence, extinction, and death, that introduces a radical category confusion of goodness to the Bible. 

When God providentially works His good purposes out of contrary evil purposes later in history, He as at war with those evil purposes. But theistic evolution blesses them. Theistic evolution must say that the fact of the strong preying on the weak is “good.” But the Bible teaches that death is an enemy, an enemy to be destroyed, and a very crucial point is that it is an enemy that Jesus conquered in His death and resurrection. God is at war with death. 

The biblical doctrine of supernatural creation insists on a base line of goodness and perfection. And in that first week of the universe, death and suffering and violence were not present, but that also means they were not at all natural. It is utterly abhorrent to call violence, suffering, mutation, and death “natural.” The whole point of the curse of sin and death is that it is a curse. It is unnatural. It is not the way it’s supposed to be. To call millions or billions of years of predation, suffering, and extinction “natural” is to make the Fall normal. It has become what seems natural and normal to fallen men, but as Romans 8 says, all of creation has been subjected to futility, not willingly, and it groans in eager expectation to be delivered from the bondage of corruption – from the curse of sin and death. If you try to press that groaning back into the billions of imaginary years prior to the existence of Adam, when did it begin to groan? When was it subjected to bondage? Theistic evolution in effect says that that world has always been cursed, always groaning. And somehow the curse is good. But if that is the case, then why did Jesus have to die? He didn’t have to die. God could have just used more theistic evolution to “evolve” our fallen natures into unfallen ones. If He can use natural processes to turn rocks into buffaloes, then He could do the same thing turning sinners into saints. 

The Bible clearly teaches that death did not enter the world until Adam sinned: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Rom. 5:12). Closely related would be Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death.” The death of men and animals did not happen until man sinned. 

Finally, as far as Scripture goes, the Bible also clearly teaches that the earth is relatively young. The Hebrew word for day “yom” is almost always used to describe an ordinary 24 hour day, and when it isn’t, the context is very clear that it isn’t. In Genesis 1, Moses knows that someone might ask about the length of days given the fact that the sun, moon, and stars are not created until day four, so Moses tells us exactly how long the days were: there was evening and there was morning, the first day, the second day, the third day. How did God cause an evening and a morning before there was a sun? The same way He spoke the sun and moon into existence from nothing. We also know that the Bible intends to describe how young the world is because Jesus explicitly says that Adam and Eve were created at the beginning of the world (not after billions of years):“But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” (Mk. 10:6). 

A Failed Scientific Theory
Theistic evolution is also repugnant to reason and science and is an attempt to salvage a completely failed scientific theory. And here, I want to be clear that faithful scientific research and study is a central mission of biblical Christianity. The Dominion Mandate given to Adam and Eve includes the use of obedient reason, research, and examination of creation’s evidence. 

But theistic evolution contradicts reason and science beginning with its flagrant disregard for the Second Law of Thermodynamics or Entropy which states that things in nature tend to move from order to disorder – energy spreads out and becomes less useful over time. And no Big Bang, even set off by God, can give us zebras, solar eclipses, and J.S. Bach. Not only is this true in general, it is also true in particular with regard to information. Nothing in this world naturally goes from no information to some additional information by itself. Give the universe billions of years, and the ocean will not carve up an exquisite sand castle on a beach in Fiji. Leave an old IBM computer buried in a land fill, and give it billions of years, and it will not become a MacBook Pro or an AI supercomputer. But these are the ludicrous assertions of evolution. 

Natural selection and mutations only account for the rearrangement, redistribution, removal, or remodeling of existing genetic information. As Cornell University professor John Sanford has demonstrated through his ground-breaking work in genetics, genetic mutation has never been demonstrated to mutate in a truly new and beneficial way. Mutations are always deteriorations, even if some tiny fraction of them happen to aid in survival. Likening the beauty of the universe to bacteria developing immunity to penicillin is pretty hilarious.  

Furthermore, Darwin’s great hope in the fossil record has been a colossal disappointment, including to such famous Darwinian paleontologists as Stephen J. Gould who in one moment of honesty admitted, “The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Most species exhibit no directional change… 2. a species do not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.’” To which Gould and others have attempted to cover this lack with what they call “punctuated equilibrium,” which is a technical scientific term for “we couldn’t find any missing links.” And that’s because they don’t exist, and that is because all the families of creatures were spoken into existence by the Word of God from nothing as distinct supernatural acts. 

Conclusion
So theistic evolution is incompatible with biblical Christianity because it is unfaithful to Scripture’s central story: God created a good and sinless world which was rocked by the sin of the first man, and that sin brought the great curse of sin and death into this world. This sets up the Grand Narrative of God’s war against evil, culminating in the sending of His Son who lived a sinless life of obedience, died as a new Adam in our place, bearing the first Adam’s curse, and when He cried ‘it is finished,’ the power of the curse was broken, and at the resurrection, a new creation began to fill the world. Theistic evolution makes peace with sin and suffering and death and even blesses it. Theistic evolution plays fast and loose with God’s clear word on the age of the earth and the distinct creative acts of God in the successive days of creation. And finally, theistic evolution is offensive to biblical Christianity because it is repugnant to reason, defies fundamental laws of science, and is trying to prop up a theory that even its own advocates admit lacks evidence. 

I will leave you with one additional thought: we are living in the cultural and scientific fallout of evolutionary science. While a distinctly Christian worldview has managed to persist in bits and pieces, a culture that aborts millions of babies in the name of health care is the fruit of evolutionary science. A culture that celebrates hormone blockers for kids and mastectomies for teenage girls is the fruit of evolutionary science. And if all that were not enough, we just emerged from several years of scientific and medical madness in the Covid scam. From playing god in labs with gain of function research to the mass hysteria over a bad flu virus to the experimental vaccines and all the demands to “trust the experts” and “follow the science,” the scientific community has utterly beclowned itself. The same scientific establishment that has been predicting catastrophic rising sea levels and melted polar ice caps has been soberly insisting that we evolved from cat fish. This puts us in a very dangerous place since I certainly do not want to throw the baby of true science out with all this delusional bathwater. I’m grateful for antibiotics and good vaccines, but evolution is a mind virus in our cultural system and theist evolution is a particularly virulent strain. 

Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash