When Darwin’s theory of evolution came out, some theologians began suggesting that God used evolution to create, calling it Evolutionary Creation or Theistic Evolution. However, the history suggested by the evolutionary theory and the history we see in the Bible are not compatible.

One thing to take into account is what is said in Genesis 1:31, “Then God looked over all He had made, and He saw it was very good!” Could a “good” God really say this if there was a fossil record lying beneath the feet of Adam and Eve in the garden speaking of millions of years of death and disease and the extinction of entire speci es from His beloved earth? This is inconsistent with what we know of His nature.

The Apostle Paul teaches that death entered the world through Adam’s sin  in Romans 5:12, linking the Fall to the origin of death. “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” — Romans 5:12 (ESV). Evolution requires death as a mechanism for progress, but if death entered the world only after the Fall, the evolutionary timeline is incompatible with Scripture.

The believers who wonder whether God could have used evolution to create should understand that thinking about what God ‘could have’ done is mostly irrelevant. It’s more productive to focus on what God said He had done Himself.

Even if God intelligently directed evolution, then why not call it Intelligent Design?  However, don’t you think that if God created through evolution, He would have had Genesis written quite differently and in the same plain language that any reader thereof would understand. It wouldn’t say that God created animals by their kinds (Genesis 1:25), but that He created the first living organism, a tiny creature which took millions of years to evolve into all the creatures seen at the time of Genesis’ writing. There would also be nothing about creating Adam and Eve. If humans evolved from non-human ancestors, it challenges the historicity of Adam and Eve  and the origin of sin, which is foundational to Christian theology. The book of Genesis we do have doesn’t leave room for an evolutionary history, unless it was wrong. If one believes Genesis to be in error, then what confidence would they have in the rest of Scripture?

In Mark 10:6, Jesus states that from the beginning of creation God made them male and female (referring to Adam and Eve). But according to evolutionary history, humans didn’t evolve until about 200,000 or 300,000 years ago, which is closer to the end of the billion-year process, not the beginning. If this is so, Jesus would have been wrong in His statement. And if He was wrong in this statement, which of His others could also have been wrong?

Atheist Richard Dawkins’ response to the question asked by Howard Conder in an interview: “Was there a particular point, or something that you read, or an experience you had that sort of said ‘yip, this is it, God doesn’t exist?” says it best:

“By far the most important, I suppose, was understanding evolution. I think evangelical Christians have really sort of got it right in a way, in seeing evolution as the enemy. Whereas the more sophisticated theologians are quite happy to live with evolution, I think they’re deluded. I think the evangelicals have got it right in that there really is a deep incompatibility between evolution and Christianity…

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