Can Creation And Evolution Both Be True?

Introduction

I’d invite you to be opening your Bibles to 1 Peter chapter 3. 1 Peter chapter 3. And we want to begin tonight by looking at verse 15. It is certainly a wonderful privilege to be together tonight. It’s the end of a long weekend and kind of a dreary day, and sometimes that can kind of take over our personalities a little bit. I’d like to challenge you this evening, though, for just about a half hour to tune up your minds because we’re going to be talking about some things that I think are so very important in view of what’s happening in our culture, and encourage you to join right along in with our study. In 1 Peter chapter 3 and verse 15, Peter says, But sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence.

We have been suggesting for the last several Sunday nights that as we go out to share the gospel with other people, it is unavoidable that we’re going to face questions. And while it will never be possible to anticipate and to know in advance the answer to every potential question that we might face.

Part of our ongoing work as Christians, part of our ongoing maturing, is the readying of ourselves and the deepening of our faith to be able to share with others the reasons for what we believe. And it has been that purpose that has behind been behind our study for the last couple of Sunday nights. We’ve been talking about questions. Questions that are on the minds of people in our culture, questions that we’re likely to encounter if we’re faithful to go tell other people about Jesus Christ. And we’ve been trying to look in these lessons at some Bible answers to these important questions. Well, last Sunday night we talked about this question. We asked, did God create the world? And in that lesson, we looked at this conflict that is going on in our culture between creation and evolution.

Did God create the world in six literal days as the Bible describes it? Or has everything evolved over billions and billions of years as evolution teaches and as our children are taught in the public school system. Well, we spent some time last Sunday night exploring that question. You know, to most of us in this audience, creation and evolution are mutually exclusive positions. That is, we see those two things as hopelessly opposed to each other. Either you believe in creation or you believe in evolution, but I imagine most of us would think it impossible to believe in both, wouldn’t you? However, in recent years, there has been a growing chorus of voices that are suggesting that the seemingly opposite points of view may not be so far apart as we once thought.

Maybe it is possible, some have suggested, to combine the ideal of God and the teaching in Genesis about creation to combine that with the theory of evolution. And there have been some who’ve tried to construct theories to put those together. It’s known as theistic evolution. Back in 1991, U.S. News and World Report carried an extensive article under that cover that explored this very issue. The article was entitled The Creation, but I want you to notice, I don’t know if you can read it, but the little subtitle underneath said this. It says, on the question of human origins, religion and science have shared little common ground since the time of Darwin. But now, some theologians are trying to make room for biological data. In other words, what they’re saying is now we’re coming into a time where maybe religion and science, as they like to term it, are beginning to come together on this.

And in the article, they go on to talk about some of these current theories that try to bring together the biblical teaching about creation and the idea of God and what science says about evolution. Now, what I found very interesting is that this article also carried a Gallup poll or the results of a Gallup poll that I want you to notice with me this evening. A Gallup poll taken in 1991 found that 47% of all Americans believe in what is essentially the biblical account of creation. And that same survey also found that 49% of Americans believe in evolution. But what is interesting is of that 49%, and that’s the two bottom numbers together, only 9% of all Americans believe in what we might call atheistic evolution.

That is, evolution that says God had no part in the process, that it was all just natural forces working on their own. Only 9% of the 49% say that it was atheistic. God wasn’t even in the picture. 40% of all Americans believe that somehow God was involved in the process. 40% find themselves migrating toward this idea of theistic evolution. Clearly, there is a large segment of our culture that believes that if we’ll just rethink this thing, if we’ll look at it again, we may find that biblical creation and evolution are not so far apart. And I want you to know that people who are of that persuasion or who are migrating that direction have some significant backing for their persons. If you’ll remember back about four years ago, there was quite a stir cause when the Pope, who obviously believes in God, made some, or released some official statements in which he made some comments supporting the idea of evolution.

And you’ll also find that a number of mainstream denominations, typically of the more liberal variety, more and more there is the acceptance of this idea that maybe we can bring the two together. My point is that clearly there’s a segment of our culture who no longer see creation and evolution as mutually exclusive, but believe there is a middle ground to be found there. And that middle ground is theistic evolution. I think folks are headed in this direction. Because, to be honest with you, they find it quite satisfying. I think satisfying on two fronts. On the one hand, it enables you to appear to be up to date and in line with current scientific thought, at least as they perceive it on this issue. But at the same time, it lets you keep God in the picture.

And for some, even to keep the Bible and Genesis in the picture. It brings it all together. So you’re up to date with science as they perceive it. And yet God and the Bible is in there too. Makes a nice neat package, doesn’t it? But let me say to you, folks, that the important thing is not what is appealing. The important thing is not what is found to be acceptable by at least some of the scientific minds in our culture. The important thing is not what the statistics say about what most Americans believe. The important thing is what is true. And I hope you agree with that tonight. Is theistic evolution true? Can you really combine the Bible and the theory of evolution? Well, I’d like you to spend some time with me tonight.

1. What Is Theistic Evolution?

Thinking about that question, examining the evidence, looking at the facts, and see if the two can reasonably be reconciled. To begin with tonight, I’d like to talk a little bit about what theistic evolution is. That may not be something that you spend some time talking about before breakfast every morning. But it is something that I think we need to be familiar with. Something that we need to have some knowledge about, because as we said, it’s something that folks are talking about, and clearly a large segment of our culture is convinced of. What is theistic evolution? Let me tell you there are two basic parts of it. First of all, theistic evolution says that what we’ve been told about evolution, what all these young people up here have been taught about evolution in their science classes, what we’ve been told about evolution is essentially true.

That billions of years ago, non living matter came arise and eventually, or came alive and eventually, given enough time, evolved into all the plant and animal life that we see around us, including man. Theistic evolution says that basically that’s how the processes work. Many who believe in theistic evolution will start with Big Bang and say Big Bang started the universe, and from that point all that the planets that we see around us evolved. And they would go on to say that life began as these small life forms, these one self life forms in the primeval oceans, and that those gradually evolved into more complex life forms as we were talking about last Sunday night and eventually into man. Essentially, they say that evolution is true. However, theistic evolutionists do not see our universe and life as a grand cosmic accident like the atheist does.

You see, the atheist just says it all just happened to work out that way. No, no. Theistic evolutionists do not believe that all this happened by chance. Instead, they see a role for God in all of this. Hence we get the theistic, theos meaning God of theistic evolution. They see evolution as the mechanism that God used to create the world. God still did it, but he did it through evolution. He provided the materials. He began the process. He established the laws that govern it. So you’ve got God using evolution to create all this. That’s how it works. Now, if you’ll think back to what we talked about last Sunday night, I would suggest to you that that really helps evolution with a couple of its critical problem areas.

2. It Helps Evolution With Its Critical Problem Areas

Remember last Sunday night we were talking about the two big hurdles that evolution is going to have to get over if it’s ever even to be considered rational. The first big hurdle that evolution faces is the beginning. Where did that first matter and energy and the ignition come from to start that big bang, and now that’s just something they can’t deal with? Now they can. Now they have an adequate way in their minds to deal with the beginning. God. He created the matter, he created the energy, he got it all started, and bang, that’s how it began. And the second hurdle we talked about was life. How do you go from non living things to living things? And you see, for theistic evolutionists, they don’t have to say life came from non life, which isn’t rational.

3. The Obvious Glitch Is Genesis Chapter 1

And they don’t have to believe that aliens planted life here, like some scientists do today. They say God started it. God took that first non-living matter and created life. And from that it began, and evolution took over from there. So really, they kind of help out the theory of evolution. And a lot of people are really attracted to that position. But you know, there’s one obvious glitch that immediately comes to mind when you start trying to put these two pieces together. And that obvious glitch is Genesis chapter 1, if you’ll be turning back there. Clearly, the book of Genesis gives us a much different story about creation, about the beginning, than evolution does. Genesis teaches that God created the world, spoken into existence by his word over six literal days.

Look with me in Genesis 1, starting in verse 1. It says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, Let there be light. And there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness, and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening and there was morning one day. And that’s the process. On the second day, God created some more things. Then on the third and the fourth and the fifth and the sixth. Now, folks, that doesn’t sound anything like evolution.

4. Some Dismiss the Genesis Account Altogether

How could you possibly fit those two together? Well, to get around the problem, theistic evolutionists do a number of things. We don’t begin to have the time to address all the different ways they try to get around the discrepancies between Genesis and evolution. I do want to mention two tonight for the sake of our study. Some deal with the problem by simply dismissing the Genesis account altogether. Some theistic evolution would look at Genesis and they would look at you and they would say, come on, you don’t really think God meant you to take that literally, do you? Come on, six days. No one honestly can think that the world was created by God over six days. He didn’t mean us to take that literally. This is a figurative passage.

And it’s just trying to describe metaphorically the relationship of God to his creation. It’s not meant to be a literal or scientific or historical account of what actually happened. Nobody really believes that anymore, do they?

5. The Day Age Theory

In other words, what they say is do what you will with Genesis. That’s not how it happened. There are others, however, who are not so ready just to explain away Genesis so lightly. And who would seek to tie evolution more closely with what Genesis actually said. For example, there are some who have proposed what is known as the day age theory. And what they would tell us to do is to go back to Genesis and take a closer look at those six days that are mentioned there. They would argue that the days of Genesis were never meant to be understood literally as 24-hour periods of time, but instead they argue that each day represents an age of time. An age perhaps lasting billions, millions or billions of years in length.

Now don’t be so quick to dismiss that, because they would point out that we often use the word day in just that way. And they’re right about that. I could talk to you about what happened in Thomas Jefferson’s day. What do I mean by that? Do I mean one 24 hour period back when Jefferson lived? No. When I talk about what happened in Jefferson’s day, you all understand I mean an age of time. Not a 24 hour period. We do use the word that way. And what some theistic evolutionists say, well, that’s all that’s happening in Genesis. Is that the word day is just referring to an age of time, and then if we have ages of time, then what we have is.