2. In the Bible, physical death is the judgment for sin. It is the last enemy of mankind to be destroyed. But in the theory of evolution, God created death and used massive amounts of death through evolution to bring about mankind. You can play all the hermeneutic games you want to with Genesis, but adopting the theory of evolution destroys the logic of salvation and makes Christ’s coming pointless and arbitrary.

1. In the Bible, Christ came to rescue mankind from the consequences of willful rebellion, but according to the theory of evolution there was no rebellion at all; God simply changed his mind. Evolution teaches that mankind evolved from animals, but animals have no moral faculties. Animals depend upon instinct. We recognize that when we don’t apply the category of murder to acts of killing by animals. However, when mankind evolved from animals into humans, the acts that were innocent before the change suddenly became immoral without any choice or action on our part. God made us the way we were through the process of evolution and then declared what he had made to be evil when the evolution reached a certain point of maturity. God becomes the author of sin. Creation was not good; sin did not enter through the rebellion of one man, Adam; the reason for Christ’s coming is destroyed.

While I intend to read “Science, Creation and the Bible” by Richard F. Carlson (Books and Culture), I hope it’s more honest than the review of it by Christopher Benson. Benson repeats the mistake of claiming that science says anything. Science is a method for discovering the truth. It cannot speak. Science is mute. Only scientists can say anything. Carlson wants to pretend that science can speak because people consider science to be infallible while scientists are not. Scientists are burdened by prejudices. Science is not. Creation scientists are scientists because they use the scientific method in their investigations, and creation scientists say that evolutionary scientists are wrong and they are wrong because they are prejudiced against the truth. I have read articles that claim to do what the book does and I hope the book has more to offer. I have problems with the attempt to reconcile the theory of evolution with the Bible. Here are a few:

The reason why I continue to believe in Creation and not evolution is twofold: One, the biblical teaching of the Fall means that for humanity to be a fallen race per the biblical account, there had to have been an original "first couple"--i.e., Adam and Eve. Second, the problem with such hybrid positions as "theistic evolution" is that it concedes too much ground to evolution, and eventually leads to a rejection of the biblical teaching of Creation, as well as a rejection of the miraculous events of the Bible. Furthermore, I believe that as science discovers more about the universe, the scientific narrative about our origins will increasingly resemble the Genesis account. (For example, a number of scientists now hypothesize that gas giants formed in a period of only a few hundred years, rather than over the millions of years we were taught decades ago.)

The problem, which usually gets glossed over, is that contemporary evolutionary theory makes any reference to God in the process of evolution a stationary target for "Occam's Razor". If the phenomenon of speciation can be understood exhaustively in terms of environment acting on random mutations over geologically significant periods of time, then any reference to teleology, intentionality, intelligence, or Divine action becomes just one more of LaPlace's unnecessary hypotheses. That is the central challenge, quite arguably both decisive fatal, that evolutionary theory poses to theocentric notions of creation: the idea of purpose, intelligence, and design has been rendered superfluous, just as the idea of a "luminferous ether" was rendered superfluous by the classical Michaelson-Morley experiment. Pretending otherwise is just whistling as one walks past the graveyard. JC

I would like thank Christopher Benson for his thoughtful review of Richard Carlson and my book. I agree that it is way to early to announce "Mission Accomplished," but it is high time that we evangelicals come to grips with the overwhelming evidence in support of evolution as the means by which God created human beings. And as an OT scholar even more we need to come to grips with the fact that Genesis 1-3 is written in a way that requires that we take into account figurative language and its interaction with ancient Near Eastern claims. The important point is that to accept evolution does not conflict with the highest view of the authority of Scripture. Our book is not an attempt at an exhaustive treatment of this subject. We must read Scripture according to its intention and when we do, it is my view that it does not conflict with science on this matter.