But these historical realities within Scripture are not the point of Scripture, and do not mean that all of Scripture is necessarily an accurate historical account. Scripture contains poetry, it contains metaphor, it contains allegory, and it contains historical fact…and in all of these, it contains and conveys a message of faith, hope, love, and salvation. And it is the message, and not necessarily the incidental aspects of the text, that is important for us to hear and learn. Thus, it was the message, and not the presentation of a completely accurate historical account of creation, that must have been important to the Lord when He inspired the authors of Scripture.



(9) Moses wrote that plants were made before the Sun was brought into being (Genesis 1:11, 14ff.) while, as everyone knows, evolution affirms that the Sun was burning billions of years prior to the first plant.



Plants cannot live without the Sun. This isn't a chicken and egg argument; the Sun clearly had to come first, because plants require the light of the Sun for the photosynthetic processes they use to manufacture food for themselves.

And as was previously discussed, the Genesis account actually does leave ample room for the conclusion that the Sun was created prior to the Earth, and therefore plants. The existence of day and night, evening and morning, and visible light in the early verses of Genesis all suggest that this is, in fact, the case.



(11) The Mosaic narrative reveals that living creatures were created according to individual groups, and that thereafter, each reproduced after its own "kind" (Genesis 1:11,12,21,24-25). According to the evolutionary myth, all living organisms derive from a common primitive source.



There's really nothing in evolution to suggest that Genesis is wrong about the issue of reproduction: creatures of a species produce offspring of that species. Things like environmental pressures and mutations can cause phenotypical or genotypical changes in organisms over subsequent generations, and at some point (the boundary, as I understand it, is a tad nebulous) these changes bring about a variant or offshoot species…but even then, that species will reproduce after its own "kind" from generation to generation, until environmental or mutational changes cause further changes in subsequent generations.

Evolutionary theory does posit an initial common ancestor for all living things, and this is evidenced by the fact that all living things share a few base commonalities in their DNA…even plants have some genetic similarity to human beings. But then, Genesis 2 relates how God fashioned the first man and all life out of the Earth; is there really a gulf of difference here?



(12) The Bible teaches that man was fashioned from the dust of the Earth (Genesis 2:7; 3:19; 1 Corinthians 15:45; 2 Corinthians 5:1), but evolution suggests that we came out of the seas.



This is actually more deliberate mis-representation on the part of the would-be apologists. Evolutionary theory, if you actually look back to the theories pertaining to the origin of the first living organisms, posits an abiogenic emergence of life from extant minerals and proteins. Is it not possible that the Spirit, in speaking of humanity being formed abiogenically from "the dust of the Earth," left us a subtle, if poetic, hermeneutical clue in the text of Scripture?

Personally, I don't see where the conflict is here: if God made us by fashioning the first life out of proteins and minerals, and then evolving us from that basis, does that really conflict with the poetic depiction of God making man out of the Earth?



(13) The Bible teaches that Adam, the first man (1 Corinthians 15:45), came into being as a result of a miracle, hence, never was born.Evolution claims that all men have arrived as a result of the biological reproductive process.



Hey, I thought that evolution teaches that "we came out of the seas" (as per point 12)? These would-be apologists are struggling to keep their stories straight.

We need to discuss, just briefly, something called "one seed theory" here.

Ancient peoples — not just the Hebrews, mind you, good Reader — tended to understand the world through agrarian metaphor. This was certainly true of their limited understanding of human reproduction, which was thought to work in a similar way to the growing of grain. It was believed that the man "planted" the "seed" of the child in the womb of the woman, in the same way that grain was planted in the dirt of a field, and that the only function of the womb was to grow the seed into an infant. The idea that the woman would contribute "blood" (e.g. genetic information) to the infant was not in the heads of the ancients.

And we have to interpret the description of the origin of humanity in light of this. To the author of Genesis 2, there was simply no way that Adam — the first man — could have been "born," because birth required a male pregenitor to plant a seed to grown the man out of, in the same way that a stalk of wheat required a farmer to plant a seed grain at some prior point in time.

Of course, it should be noted that in Genesis 1, there is no description of the specific process of the creation of men and women; according to this creation account (which was written after the account in Genesis 2, even though it appears before it), God simply created humanity "male and female" in His image and likeness.

Which, it should be noted, is easily compatible with evolutionary theory.



(14) The Scriptures declare that man was ordained to exercise dominion over "every living thing that moveth upon the earth" (Genesis 1:28), but evolution alleges that multiplied billions of creatures already had lived and become extinct millions of years before man set foot upon the planet, hence, before he had opportunity to have dominion over them.



This is not actually a conflict, it should be noted. Man's dominion over the Earth and all its creatures has nothing at all to do with whether or not some or many species of creature had become extinct by the time God had finished evolving humanity. Remember: God created all living things through an ordained, sustained, design-reflecting evolutionary process; is it not possible that He saw fit to end the lines of certain species to better suit the world for mankind's eventual emergence? And would that not still reflect the dominionship of man over all the Earth?



(15) The Genesis record claims that man existed upon the Earth before it had rained (Genesis 2:5), but evolution believes that rain watered our planet eons before man crawled from his slimy womb.



This is a surprising demonstration of Scriptural ignorance on the part of the would-be apologists. One notes, for example, that Genesis 2:5 tells us that "no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up — for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground." This tells us nothing about who came first, the man or the rain.

Genesis 2:6, however, gives us the answer of Scripture: "a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground." The Lord forms man in verse 7. And if we look instead at the creation account in Genesis 1, the error in the above point is even more staggering: humanity is created in Genesis 1:26-27, plants and vegetation (and, presumably, the rains to water them that they might grow) in verse 11. Water exists in this account from verse 2 onward.

So the would-be apologists can't even get their Scripture right, it seems.



(16) The biblical document proclaims that the Earth and all created beings were brought into existence within a span of six literal days — days of the same type as the Hebrew Sabbath (Exodus 20:11; 31:16-17). Evolution claims that the origin of the Earth and its inhabitants required some five billion years.



Now, for those who are familar with Jewish custom, the Sabbath was to be observed from sundown on what is now called Friday until the appearance of three stars in the night sky on what is now called Saturday. In other words, the Sabbath's duration is intimately linked with the setting of the Sun, with evening.

And yet, in Genesis 1, as the would-be apologists would have us believe, morning and evening were marked even in the absence of the Sun.

Something doesn't add up here, as the Sun is the integral component in tracking the timing of the Sabbath.

God instituted the Sabbath as a perpetual covenant for the people of Israel, as a way for them to outwardly show a sign of respect and devotion to Him (c.f. Exodus 20:8-11, 31:13-17). Is it not possible, then, that when the Spirit inspired the authorship of Genesis, it inspired the ancient authors to re-cast the historical beliefs of the Hebrew people about the creation of the world in the mold of the seven day ritual pattern? Could not God have inspired and ordained this early covenant and its observance by using the extant historical legends of the Hebrew people to demonstrate the unity between the covenant and the creative intent and design of their Lord?



(17) The Scriptures teach that mankind has existed "from the beginning of the creation" (Matthew 19:4; Mark 10:6; Romans 1:20), thus, virtually "from the foundation of the world" (Luke 11: 50-51). Evolution contends that humanity's age is but a tiny fraction of the Earth's, thus, man is a "relative newcomer" to the planet.



And again, it must be noted that the authors of Scripture did not simply sit and take dictation from God when they wrote the books of the Bible; they wrote in a very human way, drawing upon human knowledge and human experience. They did not have secret, special knowledge of all things to come; they had the knowledge of their day, and the historical beliefs of their day.

Jesus spoke to them using their beliefs as examples and vehicles for His message of salvation, just as the Spirit inspired more ancient authors to record the historical legends of the Hebrew people in order to convey a message of faith to them, and to us. So too, the authors of the Gospels drew upon the historical knowledge of their day when they constructed the imagery presented in the Gospel accounts.

Also, it should be noted: God created humanity through an ordained, sustained, design-reflecting process of evolution. As we are the only extant creatures on Earth made in the image and likeness of God, is it not possible that God ordained, sustained, and designed the world prior to humanity's emergence in such a way as to explicitly foster the emergence of man, and to present us a world uniquely suited to our needs as a species?

And if so, then does that not mean that, from the beginning of creation, the object of the Earth was mankind, even if mankind did not emerge into the world until many billions of years after it first began to form?



(18) Moses affirmed that God's work of "creation" was "finished" with the completion of the sixth day (Genesis 2:1-2). Evolution, however, requires that some sort of "creative" process has continued to hammer out new forms of living organisms across the eras of history.



Here, again, the would-be apologists demonstrate an inability to properly read Scripture, let alone interpret it. They assert that Genesis 2:1-2 means that creation is "finished" (and take this to mean that nothing new is to be created after Genesis 2:2).

Then, in Genesis 2:7, God makes Adam.

In Genesis 2:8-9, God creates plants and makes a garden in Eden.

In Genesis 2:19, God creates the animals, birds, and every other "living creature."

In Genesis 2:21-22, God creates Eve.

And in Genesis 3:17-18, God's curse upon the ground causes the creation of thorns and thistles.

Even in Scripture, then, creation is ongoing…and we see evidence of this in the natural world as well.



(19) The Bible announces that God made man in His own image (Genesis 1:26; Corinthians 11: 7). Evolution scoffs at such, and suggests that man, because of his fears of natural forces that he could not understand, created God in his own image.



This again is pure scientific ignorance: evolutionary theory has no teleological component, and puts forth no philosophical conjectures.

It is true that some people have abused evolutionary theory to propose that human evolution included the evolution of god-concepts as a form of "social glue," but other Christian apologists have noted that it may have in fact been the case that a part of humanity's being made "in the image and likeness of God" involved the evolution of the ability to perceive the supernatural.

(Note: This latter proposition would seem to offer a more sensible explanation for the reason that Religion and the quest to understand the divine has been a facet of every human civilization in history, and of why even avowedly secular people are so often taken in by the lure of the occult, the paranormal, and the mystical.)

But the fact that some people have abused evolutionary theory to make it say things that it has no ability to say does not invalidate the theory itself. Methinks the would-be apologists are confusing sin and sinner in this point.



(20) Each of the Bible spokesmen treated the Genesis record of origins as literal history — i.e., a true account of what actually happened in the beginning (cf. Matthew 19:4ff.; Romans 5:12ff.; 1 Corinthians 11:7-8; 15:45ff.; 2 Corinthians 11:3; 1 Timothy 2:13). Evolution laughs at the inspired documents, repudiating them as literal history.



There's a few points that can be made here, the first of which is that we need to differentiate between what people believe to be history and what is actually historical. 58% of Britons think that Sherlock Holmes was real, and 25% of Britons think that Winston Churchill was just a legend, like King Arthur. This suggests, at the very least, that what people believe to be historical is not always in alignment with what actually is historical fact, especially when the people holding those beliefs were not actually present to witness the events their beliefs pertain to (c.f. Job 38:4).

More importantly, though, evolutionary theory holds no religious opinion, nor does it posit any opinion about the sacred texts of any religion, including Christianity. To assert that it does, whether one is a religious or secular person, is to demonstrate one's utter ignorance of the theory itself, and possibly of much of science in general. It's just a scientific theory, and is concerned with very different things than is the Bible. So to attack it as being anti-religious is, frankly, dishonest…as surely as it would be dishonest to promote evolution as evidence against religion.

So, we come to the end, and should briefly review. We looked at twenty (well…18, with two repeats) points presented that purported to demonstrate that evolution and Scripture were incompatible. We have discovered that precisely none of these points actually served to demonstrate what it set out to do — often because of a mixture of ignorance and dishonesty on the part of the authors. In the process of this analysis, we have seen examples of how Scripture and evolutionary theory are actually compatible, and explored reasoning concerning this.

In the end, it's up to the Reader to decide which side is the more correct: Evolutionary Creationism, or Apologetics Press. Remember that the would-be apologists cited above can't even get their Scriptural interpretations correct, and are obviously uncertain about the concents of some passages of Scripture. Conversely, evolutionary creationism fully accepts that Scripture is inerrant, infallible, and sufficient…and also accepts natural revelation (c.f. Job 12:8) and the findings of research as alternative, or additional, means of revelation of the glory of God.

* * *

1) if one knows even a little bit about ancient Hebrew literature, one knows that the first line of a particular manuscript serves as the title for it. What we know as the Book of Genesis was not always called that: its title in Hebrew, translated into English, would basically be the phrase we recognize as Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."