Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Why Evolution and God Driven Creation Cannot Co-Exist

John Edwards, Democratic presidential candidate, likes to believe that the idea of God creating the universe and the Theory of Evolution can co-exist. His beliefs reflect the attitudes of many Christians who wish to maintain their faith while not appearing ignorant and stupid to the world around them. So, they make a proverbial deal with the devil and compromise on the creation account, saying oh sure God created it but he used evolution to accomplish his goal. It does have a certain appeal particularly for people such as myself who believe that science can be in service to God's will and help us to be better stewards of His creation. However, the two ideas cannot mesh together for one simple reason. Evolution presupposes a process of creation by purely naturalistic means. Whereas, the Biblical account presupposes divine intervention (go figure, eh?).

The two are mutually exclusive. Either God created all living creatures or he didn't. There is no middle ground. People have countered that God guided evolution. Bah! The Genesis account gives lie to this idea. How? When God created the universe he called it good. Good in the vocabulary of God means perfectly pure, no mistakes, no errors. Evolution on the other hand is based on the mutation of the genome. Mutations by their very nature are deviations and are impurities. Our bodies have been equipped with mechanisms to correct and prevent mutations. God would not call a process based on impurity, good. He would call it bad. Look at what he did with Adam and Eve, when they brought about impurities in the Garden of Eden after they listened to the serpent. They were declared dead because of their impurity and summarily kicked out.

There is another part that gives lie to the idea that evolution and Divine creation can co-exist. Evolution claims that modern man is the result of a gradual transformation from an ape-like ancestor that we share with modern apes. This cannot be true if the Genesis account is true. The one time Genesis goes into any detail is when it talks about the creation of Man. In the second chapter we see that God forms man personally with His own hands and gives him a spirit through the breath of life. This passage negates any possibility that man is the result of evolution. Again I can hear the conciliators saying but that could mean He personally guided the evolutionary process. Oh please, how does forming man out of clay equal guiding evolution? It doesn't.

Evolution and Divine creation cannot co-exist because they are by their very essence mutually exclusive. This, of course, does not take into account that science is wasting its time trying to prove the means of origin through the use of faulty data, but that is a discussion for another post.

No comments: