This is a follow-up to yesterday's post, in which I barely touched upon evolution. There are many reasons for rejecting this religion of origins--contradictory or inconclusive evidence, its speculative quality, etc. And though I agree with lots of different arguments against it, there is one primary reason that I reject evolution as an origins explanation.
Evolution conflicts with the biblical account of the Creation. After God had finished with His masterpiece, Genesis 1:31 tells us: And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
Later, God laid down one restriction for Adam and Eve to follow. Genesis 2:16-17: 16--And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; 17--But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Pretty straightforward, huh? He apprised them of the restriction, and He explained the consequence of disobedience.
But that's not the end of the story. Adam and Eve ignored God's command, thus committing the first sin of humanity. Being a just and truthful God, the Lord had no choice but to carry through with their punishment.
He cursed the creation and all of its parts--including mankind. This is known as the Fall. Among other things, a major element of the Curse was death. Genesis 3:19: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
This is a classic case of cause and effect. The key to understanding this event is twofold: 1. God made His pronouncement as a response to Adam and Eve's sin. 2. Death entered the world as a direct result of Adam and Eve's disobedience. I cannot over-stress this point.
In summary:
1. God created.
2. The creation was good.
3. Humans disobeyed God's command.
4. Death resulted from their disobedience.
Since we're not in Sunday School, you may be asking yourself "So, what's your point?" right about now. Fair enough.
My point is that this is in direct, irreconcilable opposition to evolutionary theory as currently propagated and understood in the scientific realm. Evolutionists believe that the cycle of life (or circle of life, for The Lion King fans) had been in motion for hundreds of millions of years, before the first near-human creature clambered down out of its tree and began contemplating itself and the universe. Birth, infancy, adolescence, adulthood, dotage, and death had played itself out on the world scene over and over ad nauseum before the first human evolved. A brief chronology of evolution looks something like this:
1. The world coalesced out of the solar system's particles.
2. Millions of years later, life spontaneously erupted on the earth. Inanimate matter became animate.
3. Life arose in the seas and eventually emigrated to land, evolving into higher forms of life as it did so. This took millions of years.
4. Life, death, and the survival of the fittest finally produced mankind, after countless millennia.
Death was an active part of this process, from the beginning. It was death itself that filled the geological record to overflowing. This is the selfsame record of which evolutionists claim an unfettered understanding. And it is the backdrop they use for making the evolutionary case.
Now come the questions: If death was a by-product of Adam and Eve's sin, then how does this fit the evolutionist's notion of a continuous line of pain, suffering, death, and decay reaching all the way back to the beginning of this planet's existence? Would God dub such a state of being "good?" Giving evolutionists the benefit of the doubt for argument's sake, two logical possibilities come to mind: Either there is no God, or God exists, but He's evil. For the atheistic evolutionist, the answer is elementary, Dear Watson: "I know there is no God," he proclaims, quite comfortable in his own demigodhood. But for the theistic evolutionist, this poses a conundrum for the ages; how to reconcile evolution and Genesis? I would not wish such cognitive dissonance on anyone.
The good news is that death has not been with us always. It is not a natural part of God's good creation. And someday, this malignant intruder will be expelled.
Forever.
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