Why I Am Not An Evolutionist (Theistic or Otherwise)

I am not an evolutionist. That may startle some because I am, by most standards, highly educated. What may surprise them even more is that I began as an evolutionist, and that it was that very education that led me to my present position.

Those who espouse theistic evolution (as I once did, after earlier espousing the atheistic sort) do so in an attempt to reconcile the current state of science to the eternal truth of Scripture. They forget that “the current state of science” is a moving target. It has not been long, for instance, since prominent cosmologists believed in the Steady-State Theory, which confidently asserted that the universe had no beginning and will have no end. This denied the Biblical account absolutely, whereas the currently dominant Big Bang Theory posits instantaneous creation ex nihilo.

Yes, science has moved closer to Scripture over time, which is exactly what we would expect if there is a Creator and if He is truthful. But more to the point, Christians who sought to conform Scripture to the scientific consensus circa 1940 were not merely unfaithful to God’s revelation: they were at odds with science too, within a mere handful of years.

Evolution has proved every bit as much a moving target as cosmology, if not more so. I will leave to others the scientific arguments: that is not my purpose here. And indeed, I will not be overly concerned if, upon reaching Heaven, God informs us that He created our world using the Genesis Device from Star Trek II, and that we are all descended from Klingons or even Tribbles. I am perfectly aware that, in this regard at least, God has not given us a lot of detail.

Even so, He has given us some. And though many have turned it into their religion, science (like logic) is not an oracle but a process, one to which the “garbage in, garbage out” principle fully applies. It is a tool by which we seek to understand the many details left unrevealed. It is constantly in error by its very nature, which should not trouble us in the least: it is our glory to seek out these matters.

So the more I embraced this idea of the scientific method, and the more education I obtained – particularly in logic and law and how we discern what we think we know – the less I was able to believe that evolution was so compelling as my teachers had told me. Indeed, whether or not evolution was actually true, I came to realize I had much less reason to believe it than I had reason not to.

Specifically with regard to theistic evolution, three points struck me as quite important.

1. Assuming we believe Jesus and the New Testament writers (and I do), they uniformly take the Genesis account quite seriously. In that the writers were inspired by the Holy Spirit and Jesus was and is Himself God, by Whom and through Whom all things were actually created, we have little choice but to give that its full weight.

1. Much of what they teach seems to require a literal Adam and Eve, who were literally made perfect and who literally fell, and from whom the entire human race has literally descended. Contradicting this causes…problems.

1. Finally (and this seemed to me the rather larger point), the real issue is not whether the Earth is old or young, but the degree to which science, like everything else, rests on the testimony of others. I did not personally witness the creation, nor did I witness evolution, nor did I witness the Steady State or the Big Bang. I have no personal knowledge — nor does any other living person save God alone — of the reality or unreality of any of those events.

http://rodmartin.org/not-evolutionist-theistic-otherwise/