By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
Among the positive feedback on my column was a very informed reader who suggested I refer to the Global Methodist Church Book of Doctrines and Discipline (2014, Seedbed Publishing).
On page 59, it says, “We pray that all should be allowed to freely follow their vocations, especially those who work on the frontiers of truth and knowledge… We acknowledge that science and technology are gifts of God intended to improve human life, and we encourage dialogue between faith and science as mutual witnesses to God’s creative power.”
Many will interpret the above sentiment as permission to reject Jesus and accept evolution as our creator. Evolution is actually a worldview, not a science, that attempts to obtain support from science.
True empirical science is overwhelmingly against this worldview, as I have documented in over 2,100 peer-reviewed publications. No reason exists for God-believers to accept a view that science has falsified. Atheists, though, have no other option but to accept evolution as the creator.
John Wesley’s Creation Teaching
John Wesley accepted the literal teaching of Genesis. He emphasized that God created humanity in His image as the pinnacle of His creation. Humans did not evolve from some unknown ape, the common ancestor of humans and modern apes, as taught by the atheistic origins story.
Adam was specifically formed from the soil and God’s breath on the 6th day of Creation. Furthermore, Wesley correctly observed that “Nothing causes its own beginning.” Wesley attributed the order of the universe to the first cause, namely, God.
He recognized that the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that neither energy nor matter can be created or destroyed by natural means, but only transformed from one form to another.
Evolution ignores this law, concluding that in the beginning was nothing, and then the “primordial egg” miraculously appeared. It then exploded, causing the Big Bang, which created everything. Scientists add that they still have to work out the details, exclaiming that this is the only time the First Law was violated.
Wesley held that God “created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh. Wesley agreed with Bishop Ussher’s chronology that the creation was very recent, a mere 6,000 years old” (John Wesley, 1872. The Works of John Wesley, 34 volumes. From Volume 2, page 407).
When scientists use the term ‘evolution’, they mean the atheistic origins story (i.e., ‘macroevolution’). When creationists use the term ‘evolution’, they refer to variation within the Genesis kinds (i.e., ‘microevolution’), not the atheistic creation story.
Lesson Six of the Leadership Guide of the Global Methodist Church (GMC) outlines the denomination’s teaching about Creation. The Guide is, at best, vague, but close to the United Methodist Church’s (UMC’s) position. It says that the GMC “does not have specific statements about how God created the Earth and universe.
We do not take a specific position on whether God created our world in seven literal twenty-four-hour days, or seven periods or eras of time.
We leave it open to the study and understanding of our members to determine [whether], (if at all), the record of creation in the Bible is compatible with evolution.”
The reason scientists postulate that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old is because if it and all life evolved, it would require at least 4.5 billion years. If it was created, the 4.5-billion-year date is nonsensical.
Did God create the Earth as a functional entity able to support life, then sit around and do nothing for 4.5 billion years?
The problem scientists have is to explain, by evolution, how the Earth evolved to be enormously different from every other known planet and moon.
As of May 2025, 891 confirmed moons exist in our solar system, including those that orbit planets, dwarf planets, and asteroids. Not one of them is even close to the design of the Earth, which is required for life. Even the planet closest to Earth in size and structure, Mars, is aggressively hostile to life.
The Importance of This Issue
The GMC position is close to identical to those of the denominations that have largely rejected belief in Biblical creation and the Bible as well. Most of the large Protestant churches attempted to mesh the atheistic origins story with Genesis by calling it “theistic evolution”, an oxymoron.
When I ask people what God did in theistic evolution, I usually get a blank stare. Sometimes people claim that whatever process was used, God was behind it. Theistic evolution would mean that God used damage to the genome, called mutations, to produce genetic variety, and then natural selection killed off the less evolved life.
However, God is not the author of death, but of life. Theistic evolution has a firm Darwinian foundation with a thin coat of theism. Mainline Protestant denominations, including the Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church of America, Roman Catholic Church, and the United Methodists, all officially accept human evolution from some primitive primate as compatible with their faith, viewing it as a God-guided natural process.
Darwinists view these churches as “useful idiots.” All of these denominations are also rapidly losing members. Furthermore, the God-guided evolution position is not a true evolutionary theory. As Darwin and modern evolutionists made clear, if one accepts God’s intervention in the evolutionary process, they have no use for this theory.
In conclusion, consider the following:
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection proposes that the diversity of life arises through natural laws, without needing divine intervention to create each species.
While he did not explicitly demand that one must reject God, his scientific model was incompatible with the idea of God directly and miraculously creating each species.
Darwin’s position was focused on explaining biodiversity through natural processes, not theological ones. (“Charles Darwin vs. God: Did the ‘Origin of Species’ cause a clash between church and science?” https://www.historyextra.com/, 20 October 2024.)
In short, Darwinism is the door to atheism, and as most Mainline churches have opened this door, the result is that atheism is growing and Christianity, in the US at least, is shrinking.
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Dr. Bergman is a multi-award-winning professor and author. 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.