BIOLOGOS, THEISTIC EVOLUTION, OR THE BIBLE

The Biologos Foundation is committed to promoting evolution among Christians and within the Church. However, apart from their commitment to evolution, the Biologos statement of faith seems quite sound:

·       At BioLogos, we present the Evolutionary Creationism (EC) viewpoint on origins. Like all Christians, we fully affirm that God is the creator of all life including human beings in his image. We fully affirm that the Bible is the inspired and authoritative word of God. We also accept the science of evolution as the best description for how God brought about the diversity of life on earth.

However, appearances can be deceiving. In “Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique,” edited Stephen Meyer, J.P. Moreland, et. al., Wayne Grudem has explained that this position statement is not as it seems:

·       They frequently mean that God created matter in the beginning with certain physical properties and then the properties of matter were enough to bring about all living things without any further direct activity by God.

Well, if God didn’t directly create us in His image, then His matter created us without any further assistance from God, a modern form of idolatry - worship of matter.

Did God then create us or just matter? This question seems to parallel their next assertion “that the Bible is the inspired and authoritative word of God.” However, who can we take such a claim seriously, when Biologos rejects the consistent Biblical claim that Adam and Eve had been the first parents of the human race? Grudem claims that the founder of Biologos denied their historicity:

·       Francis Collins writes, “Population geneticists . . . conclude that . . . our species . . . descended from a common set of founders, approximately 10,000 in number, who lived about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago.” Similarly, Denis Alexander says, “The founder population that was the ancestor of all modern humans . . . was only 9,000-12,500 reproductively active individuals.”

To deny the Biblical revelation of Adam and Eve is to deny the origin of sin, the Fall, Jesus as the “Second Adam,” and the rest of Biblical theology resting upon this foundation. Grudem points to 12 additional problems:

1. Adam and Eve were not the first human beings (and perhaps they never even existed).

2. Adam and Eve were born from human parents.

3. God did not act directly or specially to create Adam out of dust from the ground.

4. God did not directly create Eve from a rib taken from Adam’s side.

5. Adam and Eve were never sinless human beings.

6. Adam and Eve did not commit the first human sins, for human beings were doing morally evil things long before Adam and Eve.

7. Human death did not begin as a result of Adam’s sin, for human beings existed long before Adam and Eve and they were always subject to death.

8. Not all human beings have descended from Adam and Eve, for there were thousands of other human beings on Earth at the time that God chose two of them as Adam and Eve.

9. God did not directly act in the natural world to create different “kinds” of fish, birds, and land animals.

10. God did not “rest” from his work of creation or stop any special creative activity after plants, animals, and human beings appeared on the earth.

11. God never created an originally “very good” natural world in the sense of a world that was a safe environment, free of thorns and thistles and similar harmful things.

12. After Adam and Eve sinned, God did not place any curse on the world that changed the workings of the natural world and made it more hostile to mankind.

Consequently, even though Biologos affirms the infallibility of the Scriptures, they don’t seem to pay much attention to it. Interestingly, Biologos pays full attention to the evolutionary narrative.

Grudem then lists a summary of several other problems with the Biologos’ narrative:

1. A nonhistorical reading of Genesis 1–3 does not arise from factors in the text itself but rather depends upon a prior commitment to an evolutionary framework of interpretation, a framework that the science and philosophy chapters in this volume show to be unjustified.

2. Several literary factors within Genesis itself give strong evidence that Genesis 1–3 is intended to be understood as historical narrative, claiming to report events that actually happened.

3. Both Jesus and the New Testament authors, in ten separate New Testament books, affirm the historicity of several events in Genesis 1–3 that are inconsistent with the theory of theistic evolution.

4. If the historicity of several of these events in Genesis 1–3 is denied, a number of crucial Christian doctrines that depend on these events will be undermined or lost.

In conclusion, despite Biologos’ affirmation of the Biblical account, we are confronted with a clear choice - either choose the Biologos narrative or the Scriptures.