ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN
The Bloopers of Blending
Why evolution and creation can never meet -Tinus de Bruyn
Many Christian authors happily blend the theories of evolution and creation. This way, they hope to keep everyone happy and win some people for Christ. Unfortunately, good motives are not enough; a theory has to deal with the whole spectrum of its implications. Blend theories fail in at least two ways:
Blend theories are cumbersome:
Blending theory is a bad way to start, because blending means that you are
building double explanations where there are simpler ones. Blend theory will for
instance say, “God made life on earth and life evolved from there,” where
evolution will simply say “life evolved,” or creation will say “God made
life.”Scientists tell us that the simplest answer is most likely to be the right
one (“Occam’s razor”), and blend theories never give us the simplest
answer. Like our little man in the picture, blend theories carry double the
baggage.
Blend theories are inconsistent with themselves: There are scores of books proposing some or another “blend.” C.S. Lewis held such an unfortunate, compromising position. In his book; “The problem of pain,” he struggled with (and failed to resolve) the obvious consequences of this choice. We should forgive him this error; he lived in a time when evolution first appeared on the scene, and when very little intelligent Christian opposition was on offer.
Blends take on as many forms as there are proponents. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the liberal theologian, has proposed “theistic evolution,” Arthur Custance, Thomas Chalmers and most notably, the Scofield Reference Bible, preferred the “Dispensational Gap Theory,” and Hugh Ross and Gerald Schroeder suggested the Progressive Creationist theory. The world is full of books suggesting similar solutions, but they all fail on the same grounds; never resolving their own internal inconsistencies. By joining religion with evolution, they mess up both.
MESSING UP THE BIBLE:
Painting God cruel: The Bible tells us that God is good and we should love him, but blend theory tells us that God created us by killing billions and billions of life forms and proto-humans. If death has always been part of God’s plan, He is far less moral than we are. If God orchestrated it so that, for billions of years, creatures have been suffering from disease, eating each other and dying in catastrophic circumstance, we cannot expect him to treat us any better. The God of blend theory is a sicko. The child who cries over his dead dog is more moral than this. Hitler, Stalin and Mao, who have killed many millions of innocent people, don’t come close. Can you love such a cruel God?
Sin is God’s fault: If killing was part of God’s plan, right from the start, He is to blame for death and sin. If man has always been created imperfect, as a result of a process of evolution, there is no justification for holding him responsible for anything. The God of blend theory needs to redeem himself, not us. Blend theory cannot tell us why Jesus had to die on the cross, but it certainly wasn’t for our mistakes!
Image of God: Blend theory is actually blasphemous, because it creates a God that is completely contrary to the Biblical God. Blend theory says man has been made in the image of a primate, and before that, worms and before that, mud. By contrast, the Bible tells us that man was made from the earth, in the image of God.
In conflict with clear scriptures: The Bible tells us very clearly that Jesus died on the cross for our sins (John 5:24, Rom 3:25, 4:7, 11:27, 1 Cor 15:3), that we are born sinners because of Adam’s sin, and that we are saved by Jesus (Rom 5:14, 1 Cor 15:20-45). This is the most important message of the Bible. The Bible goes to great lengths to show us that God is not a monster that kills innocent creatures in cold blood. Instead, Adam and Eve are blamed for the appearance of death (Gen 3:18-22). The Bible also tells us that God made the whole world in only six days (Genesis 1; Exodus 20:11, 31:17), not billions of years, and in a very different sequence to what evolution says (Gen 1). The only way to accept blend theory is to change the Bible completely. Why believe in something you have to change to believe? Why not just make up your own story, consistent with everything that you would like to believe?
Spiritualise: Blenders try to evade these problems by spiritualizing problematic Bible texts. They will for instance say that these scriptures are “poetic,” “mythical,” “allegorical” or “symbolical,” pointing to a “deeper spiritual truth.” This approach present its own problems:
1. It creates valid doubts about other related scriptures: If Genesis 1 is “spiritual,” then Genesis 2 has to be, and Genesis 3, and so on. Genesis has a storyline, and gives us no sensible point where we can draw a line between spiritual myth and literal history. Where does the myth end and where does reality start? It also creates problems in understanding the rest of the Bible. What do we for instance do with the Pauline doctrines of the first and last Adam?
2.
It fails to tell us what the symbols
mean: Symbols are fine as long as they tell us
something. Where the Bible uses symbols, their meaning is clear. Even today, in
the electronic age, these symbols still convey meaning. No one needs to be told
the symbolic meaning of eagle, lion, river, tree, dragon, etc. They are
efficient, exactly because they are universal. Even the fables of Jesus have
retained their clarity. Everyone can relate to a parent’s love, a son’s
rebellion, or a poor widow’s hunt for her coin. If Genesis 1 and 2 are
symbolical, they must be the most diabolical of symbols, for no one knows what
they mean.
3. Hebrew versus Greek: The higher critics regularly make the mistake of reading the Bible from a modern perspective, not taking into account that their ideas prescribe to Greek thought, rather than Hebraic. The very idea of separating the spiritual or symbolical realm from the physical is a Greek invention. As Francis Schaeffer points out in “Escape from Reason,” (2006, USA), the old reformers knew that the Bible viewed man as a whole being, and not separate, compartmentalized units. Spiritualizing is not a Biblical approach. Spiritualizing always leave us with the complexity of having to explain why Jesus literally died, when Adam was only a symbol. It cannot be done without perverting Paul and John’s doctrines.
Putting God back in: Blend theories also mess up evolution. The theory of evolution was especially developed to cut God out of the equation, but blenders put him right back in. It is a self-defeating exercise.
Blocking up the holes: Blenders know there are many things that evolution can’t explain, and see these shortcomings as an opportunity to introduce God. God becomes a crack-filler, to fix up the holes. The result is inelegant and improbable.
People who make blend theories want to be “peacemakers,” pleasing everybody, but instead, they mess up badly. The best is to simply believe either the Bible or evolution, and leave it at that.