Theistic evolution (also called evolutionary creation) has been and is gaining influence in evangelical circles, and many are concerned. But is it the real problem? In this article, I argue that theistic evolution is based on a deeper problem of the acceptance of millions of years, which is ultimately rooted in a rejection of the authority of Scripture in response to the claims of the scientific majority.
Theistic evolutionists are generally professing Christians; many are even professing evangelicals.[1] They believe that God created the original matter that “exploded” in the “big bang” about 13.8 billion years ago. In their view, God built into that original matter the laws of nature that scientists have discovered. By natural processes that matter evolved into stars, galaxies, planets, and the first living cell. Over the last 3.5 billion years, that first cell has evolved by natural selection and mutations into all the plants, animals, and people that have ever lived, including you and me. Most theistic evolutionists hold that either Adam and Eve were myths, or if historical they evolved from some ape-like creature over millions of years.
1. Most Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and liberal Protestants are theistic evolutionists, as are some Jews.
Surprisingly, this view is heavily promoted in churches, seminaries, and Christian colleges by The BioLogos Forum in the USA and by The Faraday Institute in the UK.
Recently, twenty-five Christian scholars concerned with the rising influence of theistic evolution wrote a 962-page response. This book was entitled Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique (2017). Its 33 chapters present very strong reasons for rejecting biological evolution (i.e., neo-Darwinian evolution), including human evolution.
Theistic evolution is indeed a problem. But is it the problem? In what follows, I will argue that the problem is any view of creation and the age of the earth that denies some or all of the accurate history of Genesis 1–11. Failing to read Genesis 1–11 accurately significantly undermines the authority of Scripture and the foundation of the gospel, as I will show. That is what all old-earth views do.[2] While rejecting biological and anthropological evolution, they attempt to harmonize the Bible with the story of millions of years of geological and cosmological evolution. But such attempts fail for these five reasons.[3]
2. E.g., gap theory, day-age theory, framework hypothesis, gap-day-gap-day view, analogical-days view, cosmic-temple view, theistic evolution, progressive creation, etc.
3. Further arguments for my position can be found here.
1. All old-earth views are false because they deny the Bible’s clear teaching that God created in six literal days just a little over 6000 years ago.
The days of Genesis 1 are clearly literal, 24-hour days like our days. As noted by Jason DeRouchie and Kenneth Gentry, context always determines the meaning of a word in any language. The Hebrew word translated “day” is yom. It is defined literally in Genesis 1:5 as one cycle of a dark period (called night) and a light period (called day), just as we define day today. Six times yom is modified by a number and the refrain about evening and morning, which everywhere else in the Old Testament means a literal day (as context makes clear). Yom is defined literally in 1:14, where God says He created the sun, moon, and stars so we could measure literal periods of years, seasons, and days.
Also, consider that if God created over long ages (i.e., millions of years), he could have indicated that using other Hebrew words. He could have used dor (translated as time, period, or generation).[4] Or, he could have borrowed an Aramaic word, such as zeman or iddan (translated as season, time or period).[5] Or, he could have used some phrases such as “after many days,”[6] or “after some years,”[7] or “thousands of ten thousand years,”[8] or “years of many generations.”[9] All of these options were available to our omniscient and infinitely wise God, but he didn’t choose any of them. Instead, he used the only Hebrew word that means a literal day.
4. See, e.g., Genesis 7:1, Exodus 3:15 and 31:13, and Deuteronomy 32:7.
5. See, e.g., zeman used in Nehemiah 2:6 and Daniel 2:16, 2:21, 4:36, and 7:25, or iddan used in Daniel 4:16, 23, 25, and 32.
6. E.g., Joshua 23:1 and 1 Kings 18:1.
7. E.g., Daniel 11:6.
8. Similar to the wording in Genesis 24:60.
9. E.g., Joel 2:2.
Most tellingly, Exodus 20:11 is God’s own commentary on Genesis 1, and clearly this verse states that God created in six days. How do we know? Because he grounds the Sabbath commandment for man in the formation of the world in six days, with God’s rest on the seventh. Exodus 20:11 stands as an insurmountable stone wall against any attempt to fit millions of years anywhere into Genesis 1, either in the days, in between the days, or before the days, because God says in six days he made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them. Since the earth was made in Genesis 1:1, Exodus 20:11 informs us that the first day of creation began in Genesis 1:1, not 1:3. There was no time or creative acts before the six days of Genesis 1.
So, how long ago were those literal days of creation? Only a little more than 6000 years have passed since creation week. The genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 indicate about 2000 years from Adam to Abraham. Several verses in the Old and New Testaments pinpoint Abraham at about 2000 BC. While theoretically there could be missing names in Genesis 5 and 11 (because the Hebrew word for “begat” or “became of the father of” in the Old Testament doesn’t always mean a literal father-son relationship), there can be no missing years because the age of each father is given when the “son” was born.[10]
10. See my article entitled “When Was Adam Created?” which is chapter five in Searching for Adam
2. All old-earth views are false because they contradict the Bible’s teaching on death.
The idea of millions of years of earth history was developed by deist and atheist amateur geologists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (fifty years before Darwin published his theory of evolution).[11] These men consciously rejected Genesis and assumed that creatures in the fossil record of the sedimentary rock layers existed long before man was created.[12] But the fossil record is a record of death, disease, carnivorous animals, thorns, and mass extinction. So, in any old-earth view, death came before man on a massive scale for millions of years. But in the Bible, man was created before any human or animal death entered the creation.
11. See this 1-hour, online lecture “Millions of Years: Where did the idea come from?”, which is based on my PhD research published as The Great Turning Point: The Church’s Catastrophic Mistake on Geology—Before Darwin.
12. For a better explanation of the fossil record, see the one-hour online lecture by geologist Dr. Andrew Snelling “Noah’s Flood and the Earth’s Age.”
In Genesis 1, God repeatedly says the initial creation was good, and in verse 31 he declared everything to be “very good.” Genesis 1:29–30 says that man and all the animals and birds were vegetarian before the Fall.
Genesis 3:14–19 records that when Adam sinned God physically cursed the serpent who deceived Eve, cursed other animals, cursed the ground (outside the Garden of Eden) to produce thorns and thistles. He judged Adam and Eve with the sentence of physical death in their future. From the perspective of the New Testament, Romans 8:18–25 makes it clear that the whole creation is now in bondage to futility and corruption, waiting for the return of Christ who will one day remove the curse and restore the creation to a deathless state of life and righteousness.
The biblical worldview is: Creation—Fall—Redemption—Restoration. Yet, in the scientific theory commonly called the “Big Bang,” the billions-of-years story that old-earth creationists of all stripes try to harmonize with Genesis, there is no cosmos-impacting Fall.[13] From the perspective of biblical theology and the promise of salvation to a fallen world, this is a massive problem.
13. For more on this very important issue that most old-earth proponents almost complete ignore, see my article “The Fall and the Problem of Millions of Years of Natural Evil.”
3. All old-earth views are false because they ignore or reject the global flood of Noah.
Scripture clearly teaches that Noah’s Flood was a unique, historical, catastrophic, global flood in which all people, land animals, and birds not in the Ark—along with lots of sea creatures and plants—were destroyed and the surface of the pre-Flood land radically altered.[14] It was not a myth or a local flood in the Mesopotamian Valley. Old-earth proponents ignore or reject the global Flood.
14. See a short 23-point biblical argument in defense of this statement. For a little longer article see “Noah’s Flood: a Unique, Historical, Yearlong, Global Catastrophe.”
But this is a mistake. If the Flood happened as described in Genesis, it would have caused massive erosion and sedimentation and buried lots of creatures that would later be fossils in rock layers. It could not possibly have happened and left no physical evidence all over the earth. But evolutionary geologists deny that there is any evidence for the global flood.
Accordingly, if we believe in millions of years, we must ignore or reject the global flood. If we believe God’s Word about Noah’s Flood, however, then we must reject millions of years. We cannot logically believe in both.
4. All old-earth views are false because they contradict what Jesus said.
Jesus was a young-earth creationist, as evidenced in the New Testament. For example, multiple reports in the Gospels show that Jesus took Genesis as straightforward literal history.
Consider Mark 10:1–9. In this passage, the Pharisees asked Jesus about divorce. He answered by taking them back to Genesis and affirming that God created only two genders, and God created marriage to be between one man and one woman for life. And Jesus said this was so “from the beginning of creation.” So, in Jesus’s mind, Adam and Eve were back at the beginning of creation, not billions of years after the beginning, as evolutionists claim about the origin of the first human beings.[15]
15. In a short article and an in-depth article (similar to my chapter in Coming to Grips with Genesis) I show that this statement and many other statements in the four Gospels truly reveal that Jesus was a young-earth creationist.
5. All old-earth views are false because the idea of millions of years of geological and cosmic history is based on the same naturalistic (i.e., atheistic) worldview that biological evolution is based on.
Finally, the idea of millions of years was developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, over fifty years before Darwin published his Origin of Species (1859). By 1850 most of the church accepted the millions of years and tried to fit that “deep time” into the Bible by the gap theory or day-age view of Genesis 1.[16] Through the writings of godless men like James Hutton and Charles Lyell, along with the help of professing Christian geologists who ignored the biblical text, Noah’s Flood and the biblical chronology were rejected. In their place, geology became controlled by three philosophical/religious assumptions of an antibiblical worldview I call “uniformitarian naturalism.” Those assumptions—none of which can be proven by any scientific experiment or research—are the following:
16. For a summary of these historical developments, see my 1-hour lecture “Millions of Years: Where Did the Idea Come From?” or my in-depth article “The Historical Development of the Old-Earth Geological Timescale.”
- Nature is all that exists.
- Everything must be explained by time plus chance plus the laws of nature working on matter.
- The processes of geological change (erosion, sedimentation, volcanism, earthquakes, etc.) have always been operating in the past as the same rate, frequency, and power as we observe today on average per year. It has been essentially slow, gradual change over millions of years.
Darwin applied the same assumptions to biology to develop his theory of biological evolution, and astronomers did the same in developing their evolutionary theories for the origin of stars, galaxies, planets, the solar system, etc.
From this historical perspective, Christians who resist biological evolution but accept the millions of years are not accepting scientific fact; they are unknowingly compromising with a naturalistic (i.e., atheistic) worldview under the guise of “science.” For this reason, all old-earth views are false because they involve (knowingly or unknowingly) acceptance of naturalistic assumptions.
Conclusion
In the end, all old-earth views, not only theistic evolution, reject or undermine or minimize Scripture’s clear teaching about when and how God created, the effects of God’s curse at the Fall, the teachings of Jesus that are related to the age of the creation, and the global Noachian flood. Therefore, these views undermine the gospel and the authority of the Word of God. This loss of authority is also key to understanding the moral chaos now afflicting the Western world. It really does matter what we believe about Genesis 1–11.[17]
