7.6 Danger No 6: God Becomes a God of the Gaps

The Bible states that God is the Prime Cause of all things: “Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live” (1 Cor. 8:6). God thus created everything through Christ, as is emphasized even more in other passages (John 1:3; Col. 1:15–17; Heb. 1:3). Whether or not we understand the scientific details of creation around us from the viewpoint of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, physiology, or information science, all phenomena are His handiwork and embody His ideas (Col. 2:3).

The only workspace allotted to Him is that part which evolution cannot explain with the means at its disposal.

The striking title of J. Illies’ book The Delusion of the Century may raise the expectation that Darwinism is denied in favor of the biblical account of creation. But, amazingly, one is disillusioned by a firm confession of evolution [I4, p. 188]: “The mountains and lakes of this earth are there for all to see; in a similar sense evolution is not a theory. . . . The transformation of the animal and plant world during the course of the epochs of earth’s history towards continually higher forms, until eventually man himself developed in an uninterrupted chain from generation to generation, is just as visible a fact for the biological specialist [but only when he thinks in an evolutionary manner!] as the existence of mountains and lakes is for the geographer.” Evolution is thus regarded as a fact. But Illies acknowledges that the evolutionary factors, mutation, selection and isolation, are unable to pass across the boundaries separating the various kinds: “Nobody, even if he has many millions of years at his disposal, can run peas and lentils through a screen and obtain beans” (p. 57). Now theistic evolution reaches the point where God is “switched on.”

The atheistic formula for evolution is:

EVOLUTION = matter + evolutionary factors (chance and necessity + mutation + selection + isolation + death) + very long time periods

In the theistic evolution view, God is added:

THEISTIC EVOLUTION = matter + evolutionary factors (chance and necessity + mutation + selection + isolation + death) + very long time periods + GOD

In this system, God is not the omnipotent Lord of all things whose Word has to be taken seriously by all men, but He is integrated into the evolutionary philosophy. The only workspace allotted to Him is that part which evolution cannot explain with the means at its disposal. In this way He is reduced to being a “god of the gaps” for those phenomena about which there are doubts. In such a conceptual structure, “God’s housing shortage” (as E. Haeckel called it) becomes steadily more acute. Theistic evolution deviates from the biblical concept of God, and this view has recently become all-important. E. Jantsch describes a god who himself has become evolution [J1, p. 412]: “Hans Jonas grandly formulated this evolutionary concept of God by saying that again and again He gave himself up in a sequence of evolutionary developments. He transformed himself in this immersion with all the risks caused by uncertainty and free will in the interplay of evolutionary processes. God is therefore not absolute, but He himself has evolved—He is evolution.”

It is clear that all man-made concepts of God are fundamentally false if terminology like the “God of evolution,” the “God of the philosophers,” or the “God of the physicists” is used. In this respect, the commandment of the living God of the Bible, the Father of Jesus Christ, is highly significant: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:3).