[I have submitted several notes to the Answers in Genesis website informing them of this letter and asking for a response. I have received none.]
Dear Sirs: I agree with you that there are answers in Genesis, but not to the kinds of strictly scientific, material, uniquely modern-day concerns with which your website attempts to deal. I fall under the category of "theistic evolutionist," and in the characterization of this position in general offered by your website's materials, I found some very fundamental confusions arising from failure to distinguish between the essential and inessential features of a thing (in common with many other confusions that I found represented on your website). Your organization as a whole appears completely convinced that it is absolutely needful to hold to a "literalist" interpretation of the entire Bible, most saliently certain portions of Genesis, in order to cleave with full devotion to Christian faith. Moving from there, you are only being completely consistent with this first principle in your characterization of Christians who accept evolution as "compromisers."
I can only wonder if you would so roundly condemn others as (at best) second-class Christians to their face as quickly as you do so to an anonymous class of unknown persons, but in any case, I for one take exception and profound offense at being summarily slapped with the label "compromiser." It is as if my profession of belief in an "old Earth" automatically gives you, without knowing a single thing else about me personally, immediate information about inherent weakness in my faith in Christ and in the God of the Bible. This position must be confronted in some form, and therefore I feel compelled to cite myself as a living counterexample to some of the sweeping pronouncements made on your website about "theistic evolutionists." Below, by way of responding in substance, I address Werner Gitt's "10 Dangers of Theistic Evolution" point by point. I hope you will forward this to Dr. Gitt, as the below is addressed to him.
Warning of “dangers” of the slippery-slope variety is harmless and unoffensive (although it should be said that wherever there is a slippery slope there is usually also in the vicinity a baby in danger of being thrown out with the bathwater!). But you do not do this with your “10 Dangers of Theistic Evolution,” but rather give a series of misrepresentations and non sequiturs in an attempt to argue for the idea that biological evolution is in general untenable to the Christian. I shall address each of your points in turn.
Danger no. 1: Misrepresentation of the Nature of God
Theistic evolution gives a false representation of the nature of God because death and ghastliness are ascribed to the Creator as principles of creation. (Progressive creationism, likewise, allows for millions of years of death and horror before sin.)
This is only the case if you consider animal death to be essentially evil and horrible. Do you really? If so, should you not therefore hold that Christians should be vegetarians, or at least feel pangs of terrible remorse every time they eat meat? The no-animal-death-before-the-Fall notion is not stated in the Bible; it seems to be frequently inferred from certain statements in scripture, but I cannot hold to this interpretation seeing as how the results are nonsensical, given certain empirical zoological facts. For my part, I honestly cannot understand how this idea can be considered at all tenable after even a moment's reflection on its natural implications. Am I to think that all carnivores were created by Satan? Or, did felines derive their agile grace and elegant hunting skills as a result of sinful corruption? Is the wonder of a spider's web, beautiful in design as well as fantastically strong as well as light, a product of evil? I do understand the slight pull toward thinking of even nonhuman death as intrinsically ghastly, but consider the Fall and its consequences on the human psyche: might our instincts about that just be confused and wrong?
Danger no. 2: God becomes a God of the Gaps The Bible states that God is the Prime Cause of all things. ‘But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things … and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by Him’ (1 Corinthians 8:6). However, in theistic evolution the only workspace allotted to God is that part of nature which evolution cannot ‘explain’ with the means presently at its disposal. In this way He is reduced to being a ‘god of the gaps’ for those phenomena about which there are doubts. This leads to the view that ‘God is therefore not absolute, but He Himself has evolved—He is evolution’.
I am in agreement with you that "god of the gaps" thinking must be vehemently resisted (this is the main reason why I see all anti-evolutionism as worse than useless as a Christian apologetic: but anti-evolutionism is what AiG is all about). Part of the reason for that is my Biblical understanding that God sustains all things and causes things to work according to His will, rather than setting up clockwork and intervening at certain points to set things right (which would seem to be what an excessively anthropomorphic god would do).
While science by itself can by nature only see chance wherever there is complexity and contingency, this does not in any way preclude God's determination of particular outcomes. Given simply material evolution, there's no reason one should expect complex multicellular organisms, let alone human beings, to result. Stephen Jay Gould remarked with wonder (in his book Wonderful Life) at how vastly "improbable" it should be that we should have come into existence. That our existence has been brought about, despite such vast "improbability," is a fact that Christians can actually echo the wonder of; furthermore, that sentiment can find its completion in Christian thought, when we acknowledge that God was in fact working purposefully in it all: for a Christian, any way you slice it—gradual evolution or sudden creation—"probability" doesn't enter into it! And actually, the way I see it, theism makes sense of evolution like nothing else can.
Danger no. 3: Denial of Central Biblical Teachings
The entire Bible bears witness that we are dealing with a source of truth authored by God (2 Timothy 3:16), with the Old Testament as the indispensable ‘ramp’ leading to the New Testament, like an access road leads to a motor freeway (John 5:39). The biblical creation account should not be regarded as a myth, a parable, or an allegory, but as a historical report, because:
Biological, astronomical and anthropological facts are given in didactic (teaching) form.
The main point of the first portions of Genesis is basically as a polemic, and one whose purpose is to oppose pagan cosmologies popular at the time of writing. Among the important theological points that it means to get across are that one God created the universe and everything in it, that he did so as an act of goodness rather than as an act of violence, that the sun and moon and all other celestial objects are inanimate and without any religious significance per se, that "the Earth brought forth" all living creatures as was God’s design and intention for it to do, and that likewise humans were formed from the Earth's elements and not placed in it artificially like figurines in a china cabinet (in this paragraph I simply paraphrase from Peter van Inwagen's magisterial "Genesis and Evolution").
...In the New Testament Jesus referred to facts of the creation (e.g. Matthew 19:4-5).
These verses say:
"Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'?"
I would not think of denying that human beings are essentially sexual creatures, and that this fact plus their personhood is the reason God ordained monogamous marriage for us; this is nothing more or less than exactly Jesus' point here.
...The doctrine of theistic evolution undermines this basic way of reading the Bible, as vouched for by Jesus, the prophets and the Apostles. Events reported in the Bible are reduced to mythical imagery, and an understanding of the message of the Bible as being true in word and meaning is lost.
This is not the case if one pays attention to context, which is everything towards determining essential meaning. Seeing the first portion of Genesis as a creation story whose purpose is to convey certain theological-anthropological truths, not mere physical facts that are totally irrelevant to our salvation, does not mean treating the entire Bible as if it were mere sentiment.
Danger no. 4: Loss of the Way for Finding God
The Bible describes man as being completely ensnared by sin after Adam’s fall (Romans 7:18-19). Only those persons who realize that they are sinful and lost will seek the Saviour who ‘came to save that which was lost’ (Luke 19:10). However, evolution knows no sin in the biblical sense of missing one’s purpose (in relation to God). Sin is made meaningless, and that is exactly the opposite of what the Holy Spirit does—He declares sin to be sinful. If sin is seen as a harmless evolutionary factor, then one has lost the key for finding God, which is not resolved by adding ‘God’ to the evolutionary scenario.
Sin is a result of the Fall, and as a Christian "theistic evolutionist," I certainly believe in a historical Fall. Anyone who would reduce sin to a "harmless evolutionary factor" would, ipso facto, not be a Christian. But belief in evolution per se does not in any way eliminate the possibility of belief in traditionally-theologically understood sin. Any time you try to envision a "theistic evolutionist," I hear you describe what sounds like just an atheistic evolutionist that for some reason claims to believe in God. As a living specimen of a real theistic evolutionist and not a strawman, I hope my responses will help in crystallizing the real issues at stake, and in making clear that atheism is not a necessary concomitant to acceptance of biological evolution. The two have a strong psychological association in the minds of many, but simply rejecting each along with, and in the same capacity, as the other is simply a textbook case of "throwing out the baby with the bathwater."
Think of it this way: as Christians, we already know that physical facts, whatever they turn out to be, do not determine moral and ethical values. So, if biological species simply evolved by whatever means, we should already realize that this is not at all effective to debunk traditional values. If an atheistic evolutionist tries to convince you that it is, you and I should in principle be able to agree that he is simply wrong about thinking that physical facts determine ethical ones; whether he is wrong or right about evolution is actually a separate issue, and strictly a scientific one.
Danger no. 5: The Doctrine of God’s Incarnation is Undermined
The incarnation of God through His Son Jesus Christ is one of the basic teachings of the Bible. The Bible states that ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’ (John 1:14), ‘Christ Jesus … was made in the likeness of men (Philippians 2:5-7).
You do not present any argument, so I have no idea what you are after here. I cannot think of how biological evolution in and of itself undermines the Incarnation.
Danger no. 6: The Biblical Basis of Jesus’ Work of Redemption Is Mythologized
The Bible teaches that the first man’s fall into sin was a real event and that this was the direct cause of sin in the world. ‘Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned’ (Romans 5:12). Theistic evolution does not acknowledge Adam as the first man, nor that he was created directly from ‘the dust of the ground’ by God (Genesis 2:17). Most theistic evolutionists regard the creation account as being merely a mythical tale, albeit with some spiritual significance. However, the sinner Adam and the Saviour Jesus are linked together in the Bible—Romans 5:16-18. Thus any theological view which mythologizes Adam undermines the biblical basis of Jesus’ work of redemption.
I do believe in a real Adam and Eve. They may have been specially created by God, but if they were two of a population of homo sapiens that were specially "breathed upon" by God to know and relate to Him, this does not preclude a historical Adam and a Fall. See also my answer to "Danger no. 4," above.
