By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
A new Pew survey found that only 26 percent of evangelical Christians accept creationism as the explanation for the origin of humans, and fully 65 percent accept theistic evolution.
When I was moved to Montpelier, 44 percent of evangelical Christians accepted the creation worldview. The main reason is that evolution is now taught in most high schools with the goal of converting students to this worldview.
When I taught high school biology, evolution was only in the last chapter, which many teachers never got to.
That has changed now, and evolution is in almost every chapter to ensure that this worldview is fully covered. Most students buy into this worldview and rarely hear the other side.
The result is Christians’ attempt to combine the two contradictory worldviews, producing theistic evolution. This belief involves God using the natural evolutionary processes to create the universe, life, and humans.
Adherents falsely believe that this perspective allows Christians to accept the mainstream scientific views of eons of time and biological common ancestry while attempting to maintain their belief in God.
The idea that God used evolution to create life is dismissed by many prominent scientists. Richard Dawkins famously dismissed theistic evolution as a “superfluous attempt” to “smuggle God in by the back door.”
He reasons that mutations and natural selection completely explain all life without needing divine intervention. Lawrence Krauss also argues against theistic evolution because he believes natural processes provide a sufficient explanation for life. No need exists for a supernatural director. None.
Christians hold varying views on exactly how much God directly interacts with, or guides, the evolutionary process. The four main views are:
1. Planned Evolution: God established the initial conditions of the universe with all of the necessary material, forces, and scientific laws for life to naturally evolve. There was thus no need for God to intervene or “tinker” with natural history afterward.
2. Directed Evolution: God is actively involved in the evolution of the universe and life, causing specific genetic mutations to ensure that specific outcomes (especially related to human beings) emerged. This guidance is not scientifically detectable by secular tools.
3. Naturalistic Theistic Evolution: God allows natural laws to run their course, hoping His end goal will result.
4. Supernaturalistic Theistic Evolution: God supernaturally augments the evolutionary process only at crucial evolutionary junctions (aka “Progressive Creationism”).
Reconciling biological human evolution with the Adam and Eve Genesis narrative is a major area of controversy. Many unorthodox Christians believe that Adam and Eve were real, historical persons that God chose out of an existing, evolving hominid population.
God endowed them with His image and Spirit, and placed them in the Garden of Eden with other human-like beings. Genesis 1-2, however, teaches that Adam and Eve were the only two individuals on Earth before the Fall into sin recorded in Genesis 3.
Critics correctly argue that, if Genesis 1-3 is treated as non-literal, it weakens the historical foundation for vital Christian doctrines, including the Fall of Man and the origin of sin.
The many problems with the theistic evolution view include:
The evolutionary view claims our early ancestor was an Australopithecus that lived approximately 3.2 million years ago. In contrast, the Biblical timeline places Adam at roughly 6,000 years ago. Therefore, the timeline from Australopithecus to modern man would be close to 3.2 million years.
Judging by the fossil record, the theistic evolution progression leading to humans would involve six steps. The first step for God would be to select a male and a female Australopithecus, presumably those that had slightly fewer australopithecine traits.
He would then modify the eggs and sperm in their gonads with a few hundred mutations. Too few mutations, and it would take evolution far beyond the 3.2 million years to evolve humans.
Too many mutations, and Australopithecus would not be able to survive. God also could not add harmful mutations, but only the mutations that allow survival.
This is a problem because the vast majority of mutations are harmful and produce deformities or disease. A Cleveland Clinic medical center study determined that mutations produce most cancers and up to 10,000 other diseases.
Furthermore, our proto-Adam and Eve must not be allowed to interbreed with other australopithecines; otherwise, the unique pre-Adam traits will largely be lost in the existing gene pool. The rest of the current estimated two million australopithecines will have to be destroyed to prevent interbreeding.
Thus, this bottlenecked population must repopulate the Earth. The problem is, in a real-world scenario, a population beginning with just two individuals would go extinct within a few generations.
Over a timeframe of 500,000 years, for each specific progression of human evolution, severe inbreeding, genetic drift, the build-up of deleterious mutations, and disease or famine would completely wipe them out. So, we must assume that God somehow would not allow this to occur.
This extinction scenario would not happen with the Genesis Adam and Eve history because their offspring would be much closer to genetic perfection than the evolutionary Australopithecus. And with Adam and Eve, only 6,000 years existed from their creation to today, not 3.2 million.
After 500,000 years ago, the final population size would be limited only by Earth’s carrying capacity, ultimately reaching between 8 and 11 billion people before stabilizing due to resource limits. Consequently, God must control the population to ensure that it does not reach even close to this number.
Evolution would assume that the population reached one million when it was time for another set of genetic modifications described above. This would have to be repeated until, after six 500,000-year generations totaling 3.2 million years, God has finally reached a human close to modern man like the Neanderthals.
The process would have cost multimillions or even billions of lives. Thus, on its face, this scenario is absurd and contrary to both science and theology. No small number of scientists have acknowledged this problem.
One example is that surveys have shown that 98 percent of the mainstream scientific community accepts standard evolutionary theory and has rejected theistic evolution.
The Scriptures clearly teach that “(God) made out of one man every nation of men to dwell on the entire surface of the earth” (Acts 17:26): Furthermore, Genesis 3:20 says, “After Adam was created, ”Adam named his wife Eve because she was to become the mother of everyone living.”
The Bible teaches that physical death and suffering entered the world because of Adam’s sin, and only after Adam’s sin.
Theistic evolution requires millions of years of death, disease, and predation before modern humans were created using an evolutionary process driven by survival of the fittest and extinction that makes God the author of a cruel system. Theistic evolution is clearly an unbiblical compromise.
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Dr. Bergman is a multi-award-winning professor and author. He has 9 degrees and has taught at both the graduate and undergraduate level for over 40 years. His over 2,100 publications are in both scholarly and popular journals. Dr. Bergman’s work has been translated into 15 languages. He has spoken over 2,000 times to college, university and church groups in America, Canada, Europe, the South Sea Islands, and Africa. He lives in Montpelier and is available to present in churches and schools. Jerry can be reached at JerryBergman30@yahoo.com Bergman’s website is: https://crev.info/author/jbergman/