The following blog entry will probably be a little bit more controversial, than others from the past.It is my personal opinion, that evolution and theism (especially the 3 Abrahamic religions) are very hard to reconcile. I think it is possible to reconcile them and I applaude everybody, who accepts the fact of evolution but I do think acceptance of evolution raises serious theological issues, that need to be addressed.
I do by no means attempt to talk anybody out of his faith here, or even worse talk anybody out of his acceptance of evolution, I am merely listing the problems, that I see with theistic evolution. It should also be noted, that I am not too familiar with organisations like BioLogos who seek to reconcile the two. I haven’t delved too deep into their work. Without further ado, here are the problems, that I see with a God guided process of evolution:
The first major obstacle, that I see are the extinction events, that happened during the Earth’s History. There have been a total of 5 major extinctions. In order to believe in theistic evolution, one would need to believe, that it was God himself who caused the Permian Triassic extinction during which 57% of all families went extinct. It must’ve been God who threw the Asteroid into Earth’s direction causing the Dinosaurs to go extinct.
This is an outright cruel way, to accomplish the rise of his crowning species known as homo sapiens. This takes the problem of evil to even more extreme heights. hundreds of millions of animals dying, because of this and a great amount of suffering in the aftermath, for those species who were lucky enough to survive as they struggled in the radically changed environment where food was scarce.
The second problem I see (mainly with Christianity but also the other Abrahamic religions) is that evidence indicates, that the human bottleneck was never even close to just two people (or six in the case of Noah later) and therefore we have a problem with Adam and Eve. As far as I’m concerned, besides Jesus, Adam and Eve are the most crucial figures to Christianity. No Adam means no sin, no sin means Jesus died for something else, not the reason that the Bible indicates, if his death had a purpose at all. Now I have heard of the proposition, that God might have selected out of the group of the first humans and from those 2 people (Adam and Eve) we descended. I fail to be convinced by this hypothesis.
The last problem, that I see is that it is clearly an ad hoc justification. The Bible is straight forward in Genesis, that God created life ex nihilo. Now one might wave that away by saying, that this is an allegory and that God just described it this way for the people of the time. Any attempt to add evolution into the Bible or the Torah or whatever, will be just that: Adding evolution into the Bible, because the Bible needs to be rescued. It is clear, that the people in biblical times did not believe in evolution.
Before I close let me reiterate once again: If you want to reconcile evolution with your theology, please do so. These are my reasons, why I am not convinced. I don’t want to talk you out your faith with this, I definitely don’t want to talk you out of evolution with this. I am merely stating why I am not unconvinced, that theistic evolution is true.
Goodbye from yours truly,
Rene von Boenninghausen @Renevelation
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