Word Weld

Recently, I saw a video from Ken Ham, the famed Christian apologist and creationist (I personally think the two should be synonymous, but not so). In it, he addresses an argument that many Christians make, who want to reconcile God with evolution. Now, to me, knowing what I do about God and evolution, the two are unreconcilable. Christians have been trying to make it work for decades, since the Day-Age Theory, and possibly beyond that, and why is that? I don’t know exactly, but I have a few guesses. After all, Darwin posited his theory of evolution as an alternative to Christian doctrine about life, and that is how literally everyone in the world views evolution: its purpose is to discredit God, pure and simple. Some atheists will even say that out loud.

Richard Dawkins, the famed apostle of Godlessness, when pressed on what it would take for him to believe in God, once stated:

Well, I’m starting to think nothing would, which, in a way, goes against the grain, because I’ve always paid lip service to the view that a scientist should change his mind when evidence is forthcoming.

Richard Dawkins

And Dawkins’ honest admission is not alone. Ernst Mayr, the evolutionist biologist of some repute, once said:

Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causations.

Ernst Mayr

Science historian Will Provine said it thusly:

As the creationists claim, belief in modern evolution makes atheists of people. One can have a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if the religious view is indistinguishable from atheism.

Will Provine

Christians, thus, are the only ones that try to reconcile the theory of evolution with God. Evolution, according to its own creators and adherents, is a weapon in the war against God. Darwin himself, at least from what I have learned, seems to have not rejected the concept of God, yet posited a theory that was taken and used as one of the most potent tools of the godless world and Satan. What was he after, then? And what are Christians after who wish to believe in evolution, or who wish to somehow shoehorn this anti-God scientific theory into Scripture? It is, I posit, an avenue for limiting faith. It is a way of pulling an omnipotent God out of the un-science where He exists and place Him more on more familiar footing. A God that is bound to use science is easier for some to believe in, simply because today we do not see miracles. I say, we do not see miracles, instead of miracles do not exist, because I firmly believe unworldly forces do work and miracles do happen even in our time, but not openly, as they did in Christ’s day and the thousands of years before. In those times, the supernatural was uncommon but not unheard of. In our day it is unheard of, so we assume it to be non-existent. So we read the Book of Genesis and recoil at God breathing life into a man, forming him from the dust of the earth, taking a rib from him to make a woman, and so forth. These things simply take too much faith to believe, or so we tell ourselves, so we slap “poetic license” on them and come up with our own theories to explain them away.

This is interesting, because I do not see many Christians attempting to scientifically explain how Jesus walked on water, or how He raised Lazarus after he had been dead for days, or how He created a huge amount of food out of a little amount of food, or how He turned one substance into another at a molecular level (with the appearance of age, no less!). Why do Christians balk at Genesis but swoon at the Gospels? Which is harder to believe, that God created everything from nothing and of His own mind decided to create in a certain way, or that a man walked on water? Jesus emphasized that belief was paramount in each of His miracles. To attempt to reconcile evolution with God is to not take God at His Word; it is a vehicle for limiting your faith by making God seem more reasonable. And I could go on, but I want to focus in on something I have before, in a long-ago article on Halloween, and it ties together with the Ken Ham’s video and western Christianity’s desperate attempts to still manage to believe in evolution as well as God.

Evolution’s Core

I’m going to spoil the rest of this article right here and state the point: Christians have no business trying to fit evolution into Christianity, because evolution is underpinned by physical death. I say physical death because of some counter arguments I will discuss at the end of this article. The process of evolution rests upon death. Carl Sagan, famed astronomer who posited many speculations about aliens (I’ll do an article about how that belief relates to Christianity sometime as well), once said:

The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

Carl Sagan

The most famous rule of the theory of evolution is “survival of the fittest,” or the idea that natural processes result in the vast majority of creatures dying out, while a few are able to avoid death by adapting to the things that killed the others, given enough time and a tremendous amount of luck. So really, we can add “luck” to Sagan’s Secrets of Evolution, because mathematically probability does not guarantee that even given an infinite amount of time that one of a species will be able to survive, especially since what killed off the others may simply be beyond the concept of adaptation (i.e. a volcanic eruption, tsunami, etc). But we can at least agree, I think, that death is an integral part of the evolutionary process. After all, if creatures do not die, then there is no need for adaptation. In a perfect world, therefore, or a world without death, evolution cannot be present. Death is the core of evolution, its heart, its soul. Logically, without death evolution would not be possible, because it would not be needed. Survival is what drives evolution, and death is the impetus for survival.

Now, death is not a peaceful process, as Ken Ham says in his video. Death involves pain, either through violence and trauma, starvation, through gradual corruption by old age or disease. Once death is finished, it also involves rot, decay, and additional violence as other beings or creatures consume the flesh of the dead creature. Death also relies on the gradual decay of things from a state of order to disorder. That’s why my lawn doesn’t stay mowed, and why a cat struck by a car slowly withers away as it is torn violently apart by scavengers or consumed by bacteria, instead of gradually healing itself.

Simple question: does this sound like Eden to you? Does the world God created and called “very good” sound like a world in which these processes went on regularly? If God had created the world using evolutionary processes, then God would have created the concept of death right at the very beginning, long before Adam’s sin. Does death predate sin? Are decay, disorder, and chaos concepts that God would have established with Eden? Are they consistent with His character? Does He consider them “good?”

Problems With Death Before the Fall

To many Christians who simply go to church and believe whatever their pastor or denomination teaches, death is a sticky, unpleasant topic. They haven’t typically thought much about it at all, let alone pondered the ins and outs of death. But it’s worth thinking about, because ignorance as to the nuances of death as a concept has led to many errors. Even people that I have argued with have agreed to this fact: death must be present for evolution. Thus, in order to reconcile the Bible with evolutionary theory, they postulate that death was indeed present in the beginning, before Adam sinned and he existed with Eve in the Garden. Now, Adam and Eve were apparently familiar with death as a concept, and some might say that is evidence that death was indeed present and they had witnessed it. However, it is just as plausible that God had explained it to them as a part of His warning to not eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But we have bigger problems if we are to assume that death was present before the Fall of Man.

The Problem of Violence

One problem we run into is the idea that the pre-Fall world God had made and declared to be completely “good” contained violence. Violence is a fundamental part of evolution, and is integral to death itself. Part of the reason for adaptation is a hostile environment, one in which animals struggle against one another, and hunt, attack, and kill one another, which forces the stronger creatures to adapt by evolving defense mechanisms and introducing new strategies to improve their chances of survival. Now, I have a hard time imagining that violence is something that God called “good,” but let’s say for sake of argument that He did create the animals to engage in violence and death resulted, and all of that was somehow “good.” We are still left with many problems that don’t agree with Scripture. For one, the environment of the Garden of Eden was such that Adam and Eve walked naked at all times, as they had no need of clothing until after the Fall, so it is reasonable to conclude that the climate was pleasant and that they were not afraid of physical harm. Another, far larger problem with this is that Scripture declares that all of the animals were vegetarian.

 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

Genesis 1:29-30

Now, as much as I love to eat a juicy steak or a chicken dinner, the Hebrew word translated “meat” simply means food, which makes sense considering that herbs cannot be “meat,” no matter what unrepentant humans try to do with cauliflower these days. If the environment was pleasant and there was abundant food (Genesis says the whole earth was well-watered by a mist), and animals only ate the food that was readily available, where would this violence and death come from?

While violence is necessary because of evil, violence itself is not something God wanted and it is contrary to His nature. This is nowhere better testified to than in Genesis.

The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.

Genesis 6:11

When I think of the earth being “corrupt” because of being “filled with violence,” I really think about a world governed by evolution. Now, I am not claiming that this was the case; the violence spoken of in Genesis 6 was man’s violence. But if God was so displeased with the constant violence of mankind that He decided to overthrow the world with a flood, why would God create a world where this kind of violence was the natural order of things. This is inconsistent with God’s character.

The Problem of Entropy

Entropy is the scientific name for the fundamental principle that all things in the universe move toward a state of chaos and disorder. It is so fundamental that it is expressed in its own scientific law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which essentially puts entropy on the same scientific footing as gravity. The existence of entropy itself as a concept is, in my opinion, logically sufficient to disprove the theory of evolution outright, since evolution claims that complexity grows over time with adaptation. According to the theory, so-called “lower” forms of life adapt and survive and become more “advanced” forms of life, taking us from amoebas with only a single cell all the way to complex creatures like humans, with trillions of cells working together in various ways. This swims completely upstream of physics itself and thermodynamics in particular. In no other field of science would we be willing to assume that given enough time, more complexity will result if there is no external force acting to counteract entropy. No number of explosions will result in objects forming that are more complex than the ones destroyed by the explosion. No number of hurricanes will result in more complex homes being created by the destruction of homes by the hurricanes. No number of gunshot wounds will result in a victim being somehow stronger or better able to heal from gunshot wounds as a result. Only in the extremely complex and technical field of evolutionary biology do scientists completely abandon entropy as a concept and simply accept that somehow more complexity can be randomly added to a system if given enough time.

But entropy as a concept is contrary to God, as well. Decay, chaos, disorder, and corruption are all contrary to God’s nature and would not be present in His perfect, pre-sin universe:

 For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.

1 Corinthians 14:33

 Let all things be done decently and in order.

1 Corinthians 14:40

For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work.

James 3:16

Chaos, confusion, and disorder, along with death and violence, are not direct creations of God. Rather, they are the results of man’s sin which has corrupted God’s perfect universe. As a result, some animals no longer eat vegetable matter, but through violence eat each other resulting in death. Every time we pick up the Bible and read about God’s character, it shows Him on the side of order, purity, holiness. Consider the law of Moses, which God gave to the Jews to follow as a way of proving that man cannot satisfy God’s rules or attain to His level of order and perfection. The very things that evolution is built upon are contrary to God and His nature, and entropy is a perfect example of this.

The Problem of The Afterlife

We have one more problem to address when we assume Death in Eden, which gets very sticky and I do not see how it can be reconciled, and that is the problem of the afterlife. In our current age, we live and then die, and if we are saved by the power of Christ by believing in Him, our spirit is immediately received into Heaven, as the Bible states that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. So our physical body remains, and we are not reunited with it until the Second Coming, when Paul tells us that the dead bodies of the saints will be physically resurrected and we will be complete, just as Christ was after He rose. Revelation even tells us that the spirits of countless saints are in Heaven asking God how long it will be until their blood is avenged upon the unrepentant. So death results in a separation of spirit and body, in which the spirit immediately ascends to God and the body remains on the earth until it is resurrected and freed from corruption. Consider:

Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

1 Corinthians 15:51-53

It is not easy to see how death would work in Eden. Adam would grow old and die, or be killed by an animal (he could not be killed by another human because doing so would be murder which is a sin), and then he would leave his physical body behind and what? Be immediately present in Heaven with God? He was already present with God, in the Garden itself. Remember that they, Adam and Eve, spoke directly to God, who walked in the Garden with them. Also note that at this time there was no sin, so there was no corruption. This flies in the face of 1 Corinthians 15, which states that the dead will be raised incorruptible, meaning that they were corrupt, and are now being made not corrupt. So how can we reconcile the need for Adam’s body to be made incorruptible, when it would never have been corrupted if he and Eve had not sinned and Adam had died of natural causes? And if we ignore this problem, how could Adam’s spirit and body be recombined, if Adam had died of natural causes and sin had come later? Would Adam have existed as a spirit forever, his body remaining on earth eternally?

If this sounds convoluted, it’s because death in a pre-sin world creates confusion. Death was never intended to be experienced by man or animal. God is contrary to death and He specifically calls it an “enemy.”

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

1 Corinthians 15:26

And let’s read a bit more of 1 Corinthians 15, shall we?

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law.

1 Corinthians 15:54-56

Look at the connection between death and sin in that verse. It is clear and present. Death does not belong in Eden, nor will it be present when the world is cleansed of sin’s effects in Eternity:

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

Revelation 21:4

God of the Living

Scripture is plain that death is not a concept that we should consider to be a neutral idea. Neither mankind, nor the creatures of the earth were ever meant to experience death, nor will we in the world to come, thank God. I’m now going to read the most clear evidence from Scripture that this is the case, but I will address an argument you will hear often to confuse these verses.

 For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.
For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.
Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.
For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet.
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

1 Corinthians 15:21-26

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:
(For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law.
Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.
But not as the offence, so also is the free gift. For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.
And not as it was by one that sinned, so is the gift: for the judgment was by one to condemnation, but the free gift is of many offences unto justification.
For if by one man’s offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.)
Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.
For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.
Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound:
That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 5:12-21

It is clear through these verses that death entered with Adam, that is, with Adam’s sin. Adam’s sin changed everything, the entire universe. With Adam’s sin, animals behaved differently, and were physically altered to use violence; decay and entropy became fundamental to the world that Adam occupied, causing him to have to work by the sweat of his brow against it; Adam’s muscles would grow weary and his body would itself decay and become weak over time. Adam’s sin did not just doom him to suffering in this life and eternal fire in the next, but it also corrupted the entire world and everything in it.

For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.
For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope,
Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.

Romans 8:19-23

Paul calls the death and suffering that came about “the bondage of corruption” and states that the whole creation is suffering in pain because of this corruption, which Adam brought upon the whole earth.

When the Jewish leaders tried to trick Jesus with a story about a woman having multiple husbands, in an effort to discredit the resurrection of the dead (that physical bodies do not rise from the dead) Jesus replied thus:

And Jesus answering said unto them, The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage:
But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage:
Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.
Now that the dead are raised, even Moses shewed at the bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him.

Luke 20:34-38

This has been a long article, but I think it is clear that God is not the God of the dead, as Jesus put it so perfectly, but of the living. God’s attributes are light, life, and hope, and what is contrary to Him is darkness, death, and despair. And the latter is all the evolution offers: an endless cycle of pain, misery, and death which could never be considered “good,” not by us, and not by God in Genesis. Furthermore, God said in Genesis that when He had created all of the animals, plants, and such that He was finished. There was no more creation going on. If evolution is a tool of creation, to create more and more creatures each more advanced than the ones before, how can God’s creation be considered to be “finished?” And how could God have watched over the millions of years it took evolution to make man, walking amongst all that death and corruption? God cannot even look upon our sin, so how could He have tolerated the presence of violence and death for millions of years?

Why would I take such time to write such an article if the point is so obvious? Because evolution is being used to undermine the Bible, and corrupt God’s church. This religion of death is being taught as fact, to the point where Christians are also taking it as fact and believing it, despite the clear contradictions of Scripture. And this error is undermining the church as well. This article will not dispose of the error: it is too accepted by the world and too many Christians have bought into it. Many, like Ken Ham, have been trying for years to clarify God’s position on it, but people would rather believe a world-supplied theory than the Word of God, and attempt to push and ramrod evolution into the Bible until it fits, like a square peg into a round hole. But it is important to keep sounding the truth as much as possible, because God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

Parting Thoughts

Having argued these thoughts with others, I have come across a few arguments and refutations to what I have laid out above. As a matter of apologetics, I have taken the time to include them if you want to read them, along with my own rebuttal.

Death is Not Bad, but is Morally Neutral

If this statement smells of Eastern Mysticism, it should, because this belief is based on the doctrine of “balance” taught by adherents to Dualism, which underpins most of the Eastern religions. In this view, the ideas that what we refer to as “good and evil” are actually complimentary concepts that cannot exist without being in balance with one another. Similarly, death and life exist in harmony according to Dualism, and one cannot have life without death. This is contrary to Christian doctrine, as good and evil are not equal. God is not just good, He is the definition of good, and because He is self-existent, He does not need evil in order to exist. Evil is merely a corruption of Good and cannot exist without it. Similarly, death is merely a corruption of life. Life is elevated in Scripture, whereas death will ultimately be done away with, according to the Apostle Paul as well as the Book of Revelation. The life that God offers, like the life in the Garden of Eden, is eternal.

The Tree of Life Proves Death in Eden

This argument seeks to undermine everything we have just talked about based only on the existence of the Tree of Life. The argument goes that since there was a tree of life, death was a reality prior to sin. There are two facts known about the Tree of Life through Scripture. One is that it was a tree, one of many in the Garden of Eden and one of which Adam and Eve were permitted to eat. Second, it was able to grant eternal life, necessitating God to post an angel to keep Adam away from it, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” To put it simply, we have no idea what the Tree of Life is, exactly what it did, or why it existed at all. God did not see fit to expound this concept to Moses when He explained these events to him, and thus we only know that it was a tree and that somehow it was able to make one live forever, even after sin entered the world and the universe was cursed, creating the need for God to guard it so long as it existed. Critics of my point argue that the Tree of Life is what granted eternal life, and that eating of it continually granted Adam longevity, and that not eating from it caused him to physically die. The implication here is that before Adam disobeyed, if he had failed to eat of the Tree of Life, he would have died. There is no evidence for this in Scripture at all. It is not implausible that the tree was able to grant immortality to an unrepentant sinner, causing him to live physically forever, but that before that Adam was already created immortal and had no need of eating of the tree. There is simply no way to know from studying the few verses that talk about the Tree of Life, and thus it cannot disprove the preponderance of evidence teaching that there was no death whatsoever in Eden. However, while we cannot say definitively that the Tree of Life did not prevent Adam from dying physically before he sinned, there is no evidence to support that it did either, and the idea that the largely unexplained Tree of Life kept death away before Adam sinned seems to be a stretch, given what we have read above. There are many things in the Bible that we do not understand, and that is ok. What is not ok is inferring a massive shift in God’s character (he was ok with everything dying and killing each other in a perfect world) from this one thing that we do not fully understand.

When the Bible says “death” it Means Spiritual Death

This argument is simply annoying and is fairly simple to refute, but it is common and persistent. It is true that there is a metaphorical concept in the Bible that can be called “spiritual death.” An example of this is found in Ephesians 2:1, “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins,” and another in Colossians 2:13, “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh…” The problem is that the words translated “death” in both Hebrew and Greek can be treated as literal or figurative, and thus the meaning is dependent on the context. The argument here is that when Paul wrote that sin entered by Adam and death with sin, it is solely referring to spiritual death, a metaphorical concept. However, the context of chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians, is not metaphorical, but literal. In the letter and specifically the chapter, Paul is refuting the claims that the bodily resurrection of Christ is not possible because dead people cannot rise again. Paul was not arguing for a spiritual resurrection, and he was not talking about a spiritual death when he said in verse 22 “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” He is saying that in Adam all die physically through his sin, in Christ shall all saved people be made alive physically at the resurrection at His second coming. To claim that Paul was speaking metaphorically simply does not fit the context of his letter, as a metaphorical death would undercut his premise.

And one other thing about the metaphorical death argument: the argument goes that when Adam sinned, he dies spiritually, but note that spiritual, metaphorical death leads to actual, literal death in Scripture. Notice in James 1:15: “Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” First desire, then sin (which the argument equates with spiritual death), and then death (actual, literal death). In other words, metaphorical death and physical death are connected in Scripture, I would say inseparably so. When God told Adam that if he ate of the tree he would die, he was not speaking metaphorically. He was not telling Adam that he would be separated from God in a spiritual sense, though this would and did happen. He was letting Adam know that actual, literal death would result, and not death just for Adam or his wife, but death for all of creation. Spiritual death and literal death entered at exactly the same time. That is why death is the last enemy, and that is why in the End it will be defeated once and for all, and we thank God for the fact that when we rise again, we shall rise to live forever, as Adam was meant to.