BIOLOGOS AND EVANGELIZING THE CHURCH FOR DARWIN

The Biologos Foundation has been generously funded to push evolution on the church. To achieve their goal, Biologos has recently come out with a book containing 25 testimonies in an attempt to prove that Christians can come "to terms with the science of evolution while maintaining a vibrant Christian faith."

In the introduction, Karen Applegate writes:

• The majority of committed Christians are unaware that it’s possible to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution while maintaining a vibrant faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. 

However, there are reasons for skepticism about Applegate's claim:

1.     It is difficult to know if someone does in fact have a "vibrant faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior." Besides, the fruit of serving these two masters—EVOLUTION AND  FAITH IN CHRIST—may not become evident for decades.

2. Many credentialed scientists disagree that there is "overwhelming scientific evidence for [macroevolution]." Some even contend that it is both mathematically and evidentially impossible.

3. There are many indications that marrying Darwin to Jesus has already proved to be highly destructive of the biblical faith.

For one thing, it is dangerous to allow our presuppositions to dictate biblical interpretation.

The Church has a sad history of embracing errant scientific theories like “geocentrism” and "steady state theory," lest she be seen as backward and mindless. In order to do this, the Church imposed these presuppositions on to the Scriptures, coercing the pertinent verses to agree with the later discredited theories.

Today, theistic evolutionists (TEs) insist that there is no contradiction between Scripture and evolution since, according to their paradigm, evolution is about the physical world while Scripture is about the spiritual and theological.

However, such a distinction is utterly insupportable. For example, the theology of the Cross requires the actual, physical, historic event of the Cross. If Jesus did not historically die for us, there can be no theology of the Cross.

To make matters worse, TEs insist that the Bible is often wrong about scientific and historical matters. According to this line of thinking, who cares about these errors? After all, the Bible is only concerned about spiritual matters, as TEs assert.

However, Applegate fails to acknowledge these core problems. Instead, she claims that it is the church's unwillingness to accept evolution that has had the most "devastating impact":

• Pastors and educators in our community see firsthand the devastating impact of the false creation-or-evolution dichotomy our Christian subculture has embraced so thoroughly.

TEs lament the fact that Christian college students are torn between their faith and evolution. This kind of tension is unavoidable. However, TEs erroneously conclude that there is only one way to resolve this tension—by showing that Jesus and Darwin can live together harmoniously.

TEs conveniently fail to mention another solution—that evolution is neither biblical or scientific.

However, Applegate insists that the two are easily and fruitfully harmonized:

• The stories collected here give overwhelming evidence for the fact that serious Christians, who love Jesus and are committed to the authority of the Bible, can also accept evolution.

I also have a collection of stories. I have had dialogues with many TEs and have found their faith and confidence in God's Word to be horribly compromised. They have spiritualized their interpretation of Scripture—carving out a “hallowed” space for evolution—to such an extent that they can no longer be confident about the Bible’s teachings or even the authority of those teachings.

Consequently, their views have become indistinguishable from secular university culture. And this has happened to such an extent that atheists feel more at home on theistic evolution websites than creationists.

At one site, after I made this observation, I asked for opinions about same-sex marriage. I got two answers, both affirmative!

Meanwhile, they claim that we need to be humble about our interpretation of the Scriptures. If only they were equally humble about their interpretation of the scientific evidence!