How Evolution Undercuts a Key Attribute of God

“Cal, the message of the Bible is really just about Jesus. Whether the earth is young or old or whether or not God used evolution to create—those are all just distractions from telling people about Jesus. Why are you so hung up on all of this Bible and science stuff?”

While I can see where they’re coming from in their eagerness to try and avoid conflict and simply share the gospel, I often think that perhaps they are underestimating the intellect of many of those they are trying to engage with.

They want to share the goodness of God and the grace of Jesus’ gospel with family, friends, and neighbors, but we should consider this: Can believers truly justify the meaning of goodness without the plain reading of the Genesis creation account? I would argue “no” for the following reasons.

Jesus—Our Example of What Good Is!

In Acts 10:38, the Apostle Peter made an overarching statement about Jesus’ ministry: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good.”

Those who’ve read their Bible know of the good things that Jesus did, such as healing lepers, causing blind people to see, repairing crippled legs and hands, calming a storm, and even raising people from the dead. But how do we know that what Jesus did was good? Well, that’s pretty simple. We know because what he fixed is bad (disease, suffering, affliction, and death)!

Ask a child what the opposite of good is, and they will almost certainly say “bad.” And even a simple right-click to look for synonyms for the word bad in my Word document that I’m writing this in results in a list containing words like evil, wicked, corrupt, immoral, depraved, debauched, unscrupulous, ruthless, merciless, and cruel.

Head over to thesaurus.com, and you’ll find that the strongest synonyms given for the word bad are awful, cheap, dreadful, inferior, lousy, poor, and terrible.1 And its corresponding strongest antonyms are good, great, high-quality, OK, pleasing, superior, well-made, and wonderful.

If you’re wondering why I’m wasting so much time stating what should be glaringly obvious to everyone, I’m doing so to make sure there’s no wiggle room for Christians who will try to squirm out of my forthcoming argument, attempting to redefine the meaning of good.

Where Can We Add “Millions of Years” to the Bible?

Now, let’s ask another question. What if instead of saying God created ex nihilo (from nothing) in six literal days approximately six thousand years ago, as the Bible clearly states, we say God created over millions of years (whether using evolution or not).

Many may not yet understand how this relates directly to God’s goodness, but for those who want to head down the road of attempting to add millions of years to the Bible, let’s see where this takes us and ask this: Where in the Bible would you insert that many years, since “millions of years” isn’t evident from the text?

The chrono-genealogies that extend from Adam onward in the Old Testament simply don’t allow for any logical insertions of excess time within them. As a result, those who want to add vast amounts of time to the Bible must attempt to do so somewhere in the six days of creation.

Why Do Christians Want to Add Millions of Years to the Bible?

Let’s take a moment to ask another question. Why would a Christian want to add deep time to the Bible in the first place? What would be the motivation for doing so, since the Bible doesn’t speak of it anywhere and most of Christendom prior to the last few hundred years never saw the need to try?

Why would a Christian want to add deep time to the Bible in the first place?

Well, of course, the answer is “because of science,” specifically the supposed proofs of millions of years from the secular scientific community. They tout distant starlight arguments from astronomy, fossil finds from paleontology, and radiometric dating and slow-and-steady sedimentary rock deposition derived from secular geology as evidence for deep time.

The Biggest Objection to Belief in God—The Problem of Evil.

Here is the theological sticking point between these Bible and science issues. When people ask Christians the number-one philosophical objection to belief in God—the question of theodicy (why would a good God create a world with so much death, suffering, and evil in it)—the believer’s best answer is to quote Genesis and explain that everything in God’s original creation was pronounced “very good” upon completion at the end of the sixth day of creation (regardless of what you think those days were).

And furthermore, quote Genesis where it says that bad things came into the world after God declared it “very good.” Adam rebelled against God and was punished for his transgression, resulting in the sin-cursed world in which we now live. This, of course, is reiterated in the New Testament passages such as Romans 5:12 and 8:22, where they explain the fall of both man and the creation.

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. (Romans 5:12)

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. (Romans 8:22)

Adam’s sin is why bad things—like storms, disease, suffering, and death—are now in the world. When Jesus came, he combated these things and reversed their effects by “doing good” (Acts 10:38).

Pulling It All Together.

OK, so let’s pull all of this together. We know Jesus is good and that he modeled goodness during his ministry by fixing bad things (things that are the opposite of good), and we know that the Bible states the original creation was very good. And that makes sense because in speaking about Jesus, Colossians says the following:

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. (Colossians 1:16)

It makes sense that Jesus created everything as very good because he himself is the definitive example of good. Death and suffering (all of the bad things) came into the world because of Adam’s rebellion, which took place after the day of rest on day seven of creation week.

However, many modern Christians insist that a literal six-day creation week should not be our understanding of the Genesis text because science has supposedly demonstrated that the earth is billions of years old and that the universe is over three times older than the earth.

But as we’ve seen, the only place in the Bible to put the supposed billions of years is in the six days of creation and explain them away as perhaps six vast time periods, rather than literal 24-hour days. Which then reveals the dilemma. What is that dilemma?

If most of the rock layers we see all over the earth (the initial evidence proposed by secular scientists insisting the earth is very old) are truly millions and billions of years old (rather than the traditional Christian understanding they were deposited in the Genesis flood), then what is found within those rock layers are also millions and billions of years old. And what we find trapped within the layers is a record of death, suffering, and disease revealed in the fossils, the sheer number of which is truly staggering.

And so within that worldview, all of that death, suffering, and disease (the very things that Jesus healed while here on earth) would have occurred prior to Adam sinning. This means Jesus would have created the world using billions of years of death, suffering, and disease (which is biblically the result of Adam’s rebellion) over those six supposed eons of time, then at the end pronounced it all “very good.” If this is true, then death, suffering, and disease would have to be described as very good.

But if death and disease are very good, why would Jesus fix them while he was here on earth?

But if death and disease are very good, why would Jesus fix them while he was here on earth? Why would fixing those things be described as him “doing good” if he was reversing what he called very good in the beginning? If he was reversing what was good, wouldn’t that actually be him doing a bad thing?

How then can believers know what good or bad is if we have no clear definition of those words? This doesn’t sound like clarity in Scripture, does it? No, this sounds like a confused and muddled mess of a worldview. And inconsistencies like this always remind me of Isaiah 5:20 where it says, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”

However, some Christians who believe in theistic evolution or long ages have come up with ways to try to deal with the obvious contradictions we’ve been discussing. So join me for Part 2, where we’ll explore several ways that Christians have attempted to skirt or explain away the “death-before-sin dilemma” introduced by the inclusion of a “millions-of-years” timeframe into biblical history.