Why Theistic Evolution Is Impossible

In public school, they taught me about the Big Bang theory and about man evolving from apes. I believed it.

In Sunday school, they taught me about God's creation of the world in six days, Adam and Eve, and the fall into sin. I believed it.

At school, they told me that the story from the Bible was wrong. I didn't believe that. After all, what else would you expect them say?

But I don't think anybody ever told me that the evolutionary tale they taught me at school was wrong. My Sunday school teachers and parents and pastors told me what was right, but I don't think they ever told me that my school teachers were wrong.

Sometime in my late teens, the conflict between evolution and creation was pointed out to me. For a while I thought theistic evolution -- that God created the world through evolution -- might be a plausible theory. So I do realize that just because somebody believes in evolution does not mean they are damned to hell and standing outside the Church in rejection of Christ's atonement. Christians often live with inconsistencies in their theology and philosophy and worldview.

For a long time, "because the Bible said so" was reason enough to believe that God created the world in six days. And it is reason enough. Not exactly an evangelical, gospel-oriented reason. But definitely a good enough reason. But there was always that little, nagging voice that said, "How do you know for sure that God didn't create the world through evolution? And why does it matter, anyway?"

It matters because of what the Christian Church teaches about sin and grace.

The wages of sin is death.

If that is true, then there was no death before the Fall into sin. If there was no death before Adam sinned, then the whole evolutionary process could not have occurred. According to evolution, amoebas and worms and fish and birds and reptiles and mammals died for millions of years before that first person appeared on the scene.

If you want to believe in evolution, you can do that. It may fly in the face of fossil evidence. But people are free to believe what they believe.

But you cannot believe in theistic evolution and be a Christian. It's an impossibility. It's inherently self-contradictory. If you believe in the triune God who made man and grieved over His creation's turning from Him, then you believe in a God who took man's sin upon Himself and who died in the flesh to satisfy the Law's demand that "the soul that sins shall die."

To believe in so-called theistic evolution means that
you must accept death as a "natural" part of creation,
which would ultimately mean that death is not a result of man's sin,
which would mean the forgiveness of sins has nothing to do with restoring life and undoing "the wages of sin,"
which would make Christ's cross irrelevant and meaningless.

Theistic evolution may fit with some religions. But it cannot mesh with Christianity, where we believe in a God who died to atone for sin and to give life to those who plunged the world into death & decay.