Theistic Evolution

As I mentioned a few blogs back, there is renewed effort to send the Bible’s account of creation and Adam and Eve to the garbage dump. I also mentioned that this renewed effort is being made not only by atheist Darwinists, but by some Christians and other religionists. They call their theory of the origin of life “Theistic Evolution.” These are people who believe in God but who reject the creation account in Genesis. Personally I do not know how you can believe in God and yet reject the beginning of the Scripture as fantasy. If you can’t trust the beginning of the Bible how can you have faith in another section of Scripture (a topic for another blog)?

Theistic evolutionists propose that after the initial “Big Bang” God unleashed evolution to do its work. Thus trees, frogs, birds and man were not created by a specific act of God, but slowly came into being by a process of random acts of evolution that took billions of years.

One such theistic evolutionist is scientist Francis Collins. Collins is a brilliant scientist who once headed the Human Genome Project. This was the monumental and successful endeavor that mapped the 3.1 billion letters of the human genetic code. Collins work is to be applauded heartily. President Obama appointed Collins to direct the National Institute of Health.

Mr. Collins has said that God might have known and perhaps even determined the outcome of evolution, but nevertheless made it look like it was produced by random and undirected processes. My question to Mr. Collins would be “Why?” Here is Collins in his own words:

“…evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God’s perspective the outcome would be entirely specified. Thus, God could be completely and intimately involved in the creation of all species, while from our perspective, limited as it is by the tyranny of linear time, this would appear as a random and undirected process.” [my emphasis] (F. Collins, “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence For Belief,” New York Free Press, 2006, p. 136)

Call me dumb, but why would God do that? Why would He tell us in the Bible that He specifically created each and every species “according to its kind (Genesis 1), but then make it look like He didn’t? Why would He tell us one thing but then make nature look as if it came about by random acts of evolution over billions of years? To paraphrase the words of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings: “Sneaky little God. Wicked, tricksy, false!”

But wait a minute, you better be seated, Collins a Christian Darwinist believes that God made nature to look like life evolved randomly. But, Richard Dawkins, an atheist Darwinist asserts that the world of nature is full of “complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” [my emphasis] (Richard Dawkins, “The Blind Watchmaker,” NY: W.W. Norton, 1996, p. 1).

Confused yet? Collins says that life looks like it came about randomly and without a purpose and Dawkins says life looks like it was designed for a purpose? Holy thought transference Batman!

You should know that a growing number of scientists question the validity of Darwinism and the idea that life arose from undirected, natural selection and random variations. A study published by Douglas Axe in The Journal of Molecular Biology details the amazing rarity of certain working protein sequences, raising important questions about how blind, random chance could generate them. Axe states that the possibility that these protein sequences evolved is “less than one in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.” (John West’s article in Evolution News and Views, Jan. 10, 2007

University of Wisconsin-Superior biologist Ralph Seelke has demonstrated that natural selection and evolution cannot produce complicated life. Seelke tested “the ability of evolution to produce a new function when two changes are needed at effectively the same time…in a population of trillions of bacteria and over thousand of generations.” What happened? “A requirement for two changes effectively stops evolution.” (BIO-Complexity 2, 2010, pp.1-9)

I could give you even more examples of research that stops the theory of evolution in its tracks. Over eight hundred scientists from places like Princeton, Ohio State, University of Michigan and MIT have signed a statement expressing their serious doubt that Darwin’s theory of evolution can explain the complexity of life (http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org/).

So what are we to do? How about we seriously take God at His Word? “In the beginning God created (Genesis 1:1).”