Theistic Evolution - an Impossible Middle Position

In his book titled God and Evolution, Jay Richards and other contributers to this book present convincing arguments that theistic evolution as incompatible with the Biblical Christian faith. One of their goals is to persuade atheists that there is a God who has worked over eons of time. But evolutionism is a faith-based natural philosophy that takes no prisoners! Theistic evolutionists do not and have not appeased the atheistic scientific community controlling the teaching of biology in public. And some theistic evolutions have gone so far as to repudiated their Christian beliefs, proving once again that compromising the doctrine of creation is a dangerous path for believers.

Selections from  Thedore J. Sick's book review of God and Evolution, by edited Jay Richards.

(These selections, edited by Marko Malyj, are of the book review published in Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal, Volume 47, Number 4, Spring 2011)

Howard Van Till, now retired from Calvin College, is typical of theistic evolutionists. His own proposal is the “Robust Formational Economy Principle,” is that from the beginning God endowed the universe with the full capacity to evolve by providing the primordial state with all the necessary capacity to organize and transform by random events and natural selection. This sounds like some form of emergent evolution. Richards (p. 129) notes that Van Till, like many intellectuals who were once nominally Christian, has repudiated his Christian beliefs, proving once again that compromising the doctrine of creation is a dangerous path for believers.

But how can God direct an undirected process? In his section, Steven Meyer lays bare the problem. Lamoureux, a theistic evolutionists, proposes a front-loaded view of intelligent design in which the initial conditions of the universe are arranged or designed in such a way that life will inevitably evolve without any additional input or activity of a designing intelligence. But when and how did the spirit and soul of man come onto the scene; when did man obtain the “image of God”? Meyer points out that the origin of specified information is not considered by theistic evolutionists.

Evolutionism is a faith-based natural philosophy that takes no prisoners. Even setting up the whole process prior to the beginning by God or godlike force is forbidden by this comprehensive atheism.

In his section, John West makes the statement that the doctrine of redemption depends on the doctrine of creation and the Fall (p.34). At this critical point young-earth creationists insist that the fall depends on a historical Adam and Eve. This then leads to the obvious questions of the age of the earth and humanity.

(God and Evolution, edited by Jay Richards, Discovery Institute Press, Seattle, 2010, 387 pages, $22 paperback.)

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