Theistic Evolution and its Costly Compromise

People fail to perceive the implications of their worldview choices. Our presuppositions – our most basic ideas – affect everything else that we think. Certain presuppositions are so powerful that they can overthrow the Biblical faith. If we believe that the writers of the Bible were influenced by the worldview of their time and therefore wrote inaccurately about the physical world, this will affect everything else that we believe. If we believe that we therefore cannot trust what the Bible teaches about the physical world – which can be seen, measured, and proven – we therefore will find it difficult to trust what it teaches about the spiritual!

This is my problem with theistic evolution (TE) – the belief that you can believe in God’s Word but also in evolution. Compromise is inevitable when you try to combine the two. Here is my response to a TE (His words are italicized):

• “The biblical authors believed that the earth was a flat disc several layers of domes above it. They didn’t know it was a round heavenly body, and indeed, they would have no idea on how to process such information.”

This is the very kind of response that deeply troubles me (and I think God also)! In order to preserve your worldview, you seek to denigrate the Bible. How will this type of thing edify the students you seek to encourage? In fact, the Bible displays accurate cosmological understanding:

1. TIME IS NOT ETERNAL: 2 Tim. 1:9 who has saved us and called us to a holy life--not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,

2. THE UNIVERSE HAD A BEGINNING: Genesis 1:1  “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Contra the steady-state theory that had ruled science).

3. THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE PHYSICAL WORD AREN’T VISIBLE: Hebrews 11:3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

4. LAWS: Jeremiah 33:25 This is what the Lord says: 'If I have not established my covenant with day and night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth,

5. WATER CYCLE: Job 36:27 "He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams.” (Also, Amos 9:6)

6. ROUND EARTH, EXPANDING UNIVERSE: Isaiah 40:22 He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.

• “Can you not see that telling a kid that once someone finds something in the Bible that can be proven incorrect that the whole thing is false is far more dangerous than telling that kid that we need to read the Bible in a responsible and holistic fashion?”

Can you not see that your approach of Bible accommodation and compromise isn’t faithful to Scripture and to God? While you claim that you are helping your students, you are merely helping them to accommodate to modernity and it’s whole set of assumptions. Instead of critiquing modernity through the lens of Scripture, you have opted to critique Scripture by the lens of modernity. Thus, there is logically no end to the compromise.