Viva la Evolution?
A response to Denis Alexander
by David Anderson
Composition of images from stock.xchng and Wikipedia.com
Should Christians celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday?
Theistic evolutionist Denis Alexander has a new book coming out, entitled Creation
or Evolution—Do We Have to Choose? To give this effort some publicity,
Third Way magazine published an article by Dr Alexander, ‘Viva la
evolution’, which translates loosely as ‘Long live evolution’
(http://www.thirdwaymagazine.com/334).1 I have many points of disagreement
with the article, but here I want to respond to Dr Alexander’s theological
arguments and draw attention to the biblical and philosophical flaws in his position.
Dr Alexander argues that Christians should, in the 200th anniversary
of Darwin’s birth next year, ‘be celebrating Darwin enthusiastically,
for he has provided us with a great theory that provides the framework for all contemporary
biological and biomedical research. All truth is God’s truth.’ This
closing statement is the deeply misleading ‘two books’ teaching. It
claims that there are two ultimate, equal and independent sources for truth, which
are perfectly complementary. These are God’s written word in Scripture, and
secondly nature which is interpreted by scientific study.
According to Dr Alexander, (evolutionary) science and Scripture provide two parallel
stories, neither contradicting the other, and we can embrace both. Science gives
us accurate facts about the past. The book of Genesis identifies the person (God)
ultimately responsible for those facts. Science tells us what went on; the Bible
gives us the meaning of it. This is the classic ‘fact/value’ divide
that has ruined the Christian culture of the West in the recent centuries. The everyday
things of life—the things we can see, touch and observe—are handed over
to science, relegating religion to just providing a separate interpretation. Science
is the reliable teacher of (objective) truths for public life, and Christianity
provides (subjective) values for the private individuals who happen to believe it.
Science is an unbiased, self-interpreting and near-infallible voice that we can
rely on, and it and not religion (which is uncertain and personal) should be our
final authority.
In his opening words, Dr Alexander laments that Christians should be wasting their
time on talking about evolution when thousands and millions of poor people are living
without Jesus (cf. ‘You should
be feeding the Hungry’). This false dichotomy is an indication of where
Dr Alexander is heading. He goes on to explain that evolution is simply a brute
fact with no ideological implications. (By ‘evolution’ he seems to mean
mainly common ancestry, as he concedes that the following are all still under dispute—the
mechanisms of speciation, the level at which natural selection actually operates,
and what the supposed ancestries of living creatures actually are!) We may be descended
from monkeys, and be part of the same family tree as gnats and nettles, and we may
have only risen above them in the history of the world because our ancestors were
the fittest to survive—but these facts, Dr Alexander says, do not mean anything
and it is wrong for atheists to use them against Christianity. On the other side
of the coin, the early chapters of Genesis give us no real information about anything
in the history of humanity or the world. They simply explain that it was the God
of Israel who was responsible for what happened. Science tells us what happened:
Genesis tells us who was driving it all.
One book, not two
Ilustration by Tim Newcombe
When people try to mix the Bible and evolution, the Bible’s message always
suffers.
The Bible does not endorse this ‘two books’ approach to truth, where
Scripture and science are each given complementary roles. It is true that the created
world is revealing truth to us (Psalm 19), but in the Bible this is always in terms of an
immediate and infallible declaration about God’s glory and power (e.g. Romans 1:18), not about the uncertain results obtained
as inferences from scientific study. Neither does Scripture teach that its own authority
is limited to matters of private interpretation and the providing of values to be
added to the information found from somewhere else. The Bible claims to be fully
and finally authoritative on every subject on which it speaks (2 Timothy 3:16). It does not limit itself to statements
about spiritual truths, but speaks, sometimes at length, though often very briefly,
on all kinds of matters relating to e.g. history, geography (the first five books
of the Bible in particular) and even biology, which we will come to
later. The Son of God declared that ‘Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or
one tittle shall by no means pass from the law [i.e. Moses’ writings], till
all be fulfilled.’ He himself referred to statements in the Old Testament
about the beginning of the world (Matthew 19:4), about the history of ancient cities (Matthew 11:23), about an act done by David as a fugitive
from Saul (Matthew 12:3–4), and about the time spent by Jonah inside
a large fish (Matthew 12:39). Jesus accepted the clear testimony of the Old
Testament in general and Genesis in particular without question, without giving
any hint that his interpretations were subject to past, present or future scientific
verdicts.
Examples like these destroy the idea that modern science can make statements without
coming under the Bible’s scrutiny. It is as certain a finding of science as
any that dead men do not rise. The Bible, though, asserts that the most important
fact in all human history is that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead—and that by His life we
may also live (1 Corinthians 15:3).
Unbelieving theological liberals reject miracles a priori, so will tell us that dead men do not rise, and that
therefore the resurrection stories must be given another meaning—such as saying
that the vision and power of Jesus live on, though not His body. Evangelical Christians
rightly reject this idea, because it gives the opinions of men more weight than
the plain words of the Bible. Attempting to harmonise evolution with the Bible is
the same mistake.
The issue is one of authority. Dr Alexander is claiming for ‘science’
a voice equal and greater in authority to that of Scripture. In his article, he
begins by asserting that evolution is an indisputable fact, and that the reliability
of peer-reviewed journals establishes it. Here we come face to face with another
modern secular myth: that of the impartial scientist, the value-free investigator
of reality who comes to his work with no bias, is able to rise above his culture
and background, and to sift the evidence until he reaches a certain conclusion.
This view of man does not come from the Bible, but from the Enlightenment, a seriously
anti-Christian movement whose ultimate aim was to replace the Bible with man as
the final arbiter of truth. What the Scriptures actually state about man is that
‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked’ (Jeremiah 17:9) and that unbelieving men are continually
involved in a battle to suppress the truth about God, our Creator (Romans 1:18ff).
Ultimately science, at its best, represents man’s current thoughts and ideas
about reality, based upon many guesses and uncertainties. It is always subject to
future changes in the light of new research.
Ultimately science, at its best, represents man’s current thoughts and ideas
about reality, based upon many guesses and uncertainties. It is always subject to
future changes in the light of new research. It is fallible and has often gone down
vastly mistaken paths. Few people today will defend racism or eugenics on scientific
grounds, though they did in the past. In this very decade, mothers have been jailed
as child murderers and then freed as scientists changed their minds on how to interpret
the statistical likelihoods that their babies died naturally—known as ‘cot
deaths’.
In contrast to all of this, the Bible is perfect, complete and unalterable (Psalm 119:89, Proverbs 30:5–6). It is the authoritative voice
of God and can never lead us astray (Psalm 119:105ff). It contains its own rules for interpreting
itself, and if these are obeyed then we cannot be led into any error by it (only
by ourselves). The ‘two books’ idea is, in the final analysis, a form
of blasphemy, bringing the perfect word of God down to the same level as the ideas
of self-deceived, fallen man.
We see the effect of this error in one of the examples that Dr Alexander uses. He
asks the question, ‘How do we understand the Fall in the light of evolution?’
To him, evolution is a fact; but the Bible’s account of the Fall is highly
flexible, and we must adapt our interpretation of it in order to fit in with what
Darwin said. God’s word is not a fixed body of truth which can interpret itself
and then be used to judge other ideas. That prime role goes to evolution, which
then gets to pass its verdict on how we are allowed to understand the Bible. What
this ultimately means is that nobody even had a chance to understand the Fall properly
until Charles Darwin came along and gave us the missing science. Generations of
Christians limped along with missing knowledge and could never have hoped to get
a proper understanding through it. This blasphemy is the result of making the opinions
of men of equal authority with that of God.
What of Genesis itself?
It is the text of Genesis itself which deals the most telling blows to Dr Alexander’s
theory. In his view, the creation account really says no more or no less than if
Moses had written ‘The God of Israel is the one who created everything’,
and left it there: a word about who did it, nothing more.
What Moses actually wrote is vastly more than this. The conflict between the idea
of common ancestry and the Bible is not difficult to understand. Genesis 1 describes separate acts of creation which result
in living creatures which reproduce ‘after their kind’. Birds reproduce
after their kind, and fish after theirs. Man, though, the crowning glory of creation,
is of another kind—he was made in a separate act of creation, from the dust
of the ground (Genesis 2:7; see also 1 Corinthians 15:39). In Darwinism, reproduction has
unlimited powers—every living being ultimately forms a single family tree
with every other. In Christianity, reproduction happens within limits (the Genesis
kinds), and we are explicitly told that man exists in his own distinct family which
was not created out of one of the others.
Darwinism is ultimately the creation story of naturalism and atheism. It seeks to
explain how, without any external involvement or outside control, the living world
developed. It tells us that there is no need for any oversight or guidance, because
the law of natural selection working upon random mutations inevitably leads to every
niche being filled. Dr Alexander summarises this view well when he says, ‘On
a planet of light and darkness you need eyes, so eyes are what you’ll get’.
You’ll get them by the inevitable working out of the Darwinian process. The
book of Genesis, on the contrary, states that eyes and every other part of the body
were not the result of a gradual and lengthy development. They were the result of
an immediate divine Word—‘let there be … and there was.’
Evolution teaches that the world began in a chaotic state and has slowly been rising
to a more complex and ordered state over the passage of vast amounts of time. The
Bible says that the world was created in a number of immediate and distinct acts,
and then fell into a state of corruption because of the entrance of sin (Genesis 1–3).
A telling science
Ultimately, ‘theistic evolution’ is a contradiction in terms. Evolution
asserts that the world already contains within itself the powers needed to develop
all of its order and complexity. Christianity claims on the contrary that the order
and complexity of the world comes from outside the world, not from within it. It
did not come from a series of inevitable events over a long period of time, but
through immediate responses to the voice of God.
It is helpful to step back and look at what theistic evolutionists are not saying,
as much as what they are saying. It’s worth noticing that, like others, Dr
Alexander does not attempt to take the account of Genesis and show how its narrative
perfectly follows the same sequence found in Darwinism. He does not argue that evolution
was taught either explicitly or implicitly in the Bible long before science described
it in its own way, or even that there were lots of telling clues that we can now
notice with hindsight. He does not show us how Jesus or the apostles took the early
passages of Genesis and used them in the same way that he does. No—he simply
argues that Genesis does not contain any information that has any overlap with history
or biology, and that it leaves us the space to insert anything we like into the
gap. This way of arguing gives the game away. Ultimately there is no way that anyone
would read the book of Genesis and think, ‘Ah, yes—evolution!’
The best that theistic evolutionists can hope for is just to persuade us that Genesis
doesn’t really have any bearing on the subject, leaves us a large silence,
and then they come in with evolution to fill that void. Increasing numbers of Christians
are waking up to the fact that there is no biblical or theological integrity in
this method. Moses was not only inspired by God in order to refute the mistaken
creation ideas of pagans and polytheists in the east. He was inspired by God to
give a true account to all peoples in all times, also refuting ancient and modern
naturalists who believed that the world developed itself through impersonal processes.
He was inspired to explain that the world was created by God in six days, each of
which was a day with an evening and morning, the kind of day that came to be marked
out by the action of the sun and the moon. On each day God spoke and immediately
it was done. Moses was not only inspired to refute polytheists who were already
living, but also mistaken souls who would be born many centuries in the future,
such as Charles Darwin.
Further reading
Related resources
References
- Spanish spelling would be ‘evolución’, with the ‘c’
pronounced like ‘th’ in ‘moth’. Return
to text.
Published: 3 September 2008(GMT+10)
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