This Monday (Dec. 2nd, 2019) at 12:30pm to 1:30pm CST, Bob Dutko (a YEC) is interviewing me on his radio show (listen at https://wmuz.com/ WMUZ 103.5 FM).
Dutko explained, earlier this year, his objections to the idea of God using evolution to create us:
According to evolution, hominids would have been evolving over millions of years, getting a little more “human” like over the years until eventually the first fully human man was born. That’s when God would have said “okay, we now have ‘man’, and I’ll call him ‘Adam’”. Let’s now compare that to how God told Moses he created Adam in Genesis. Genesis 2:7 says “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground” . Here’s where a little simple logic is required. How can anyone honestly interpret Adam being “formed from the dust of the ground” to mean “Adam was conceived and born of a part human, part monkey hominid mother”? The Bible then says that God “ breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” . However, if God really used evolution, and Adam was born of a part monkey mother, he would have been alive from the moment of conception. Medical science has now confirmed that a human embryo is a living being long before the nostrils even form. So did God breathe the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils as a fetus? If so, was Adam not “alive” as he was developing in the womb up to that point before his nostrils developed?
Then there’s the issue of Eve. The Bible say in Genesis 2:21-22 that Eve was created by God putting Adam into a deep sleep, taking out one of his ribs and creating Eve from that rib . This has incredible spiritual significance throughout the rest of the Bible with regards to marriage, because by making woman from man, she was to Adam “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). God used the way he created Eve to establish marriage as a bond between a man and a woman who would become “one flesh”. Woman came out of man, so when a woman and man are married, “the two become one flesh”. (Genesis 2:24) Jesus even reiterates this creation account and it’s significance in Matthew 19:5 and in Mark 10:8. Now compare that to Theistic Evolution which says Eve really wasn’t created from Adam, but that instead, she was created in the womb of her part monkey mother, developed into a fetus, was born and raised by her hominid parents, then ran into Adam one day and said “hey, do your parents look as freaky as mine?”
If you believe Genesis can be interpreted to say God used evolution, then you might as well throw out the whole Bible. After all, if “man was made from the dust of the ground” can be interpreted as “man was born from part monkey parents”…or if “woman was created from man’s rib” can be interpreted as “woman grew up the child of part monkey parents”…or if “God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life and he became a living being” can be interpreted as “man was already a living being before he even developed embryonic nostrils to breath into”…then why believe anything the Bible has to say at all? Why take anything Moses said seriously? Or David? Or Solomon? Or Paul? Or Jesus? If interpretation of Scripture can be twisted that far from what it really says, you can twist anything in the Bible to say whatever you want it to. Maybe we should just trust what God told us instead of trying to twist Scripture to fit what we think science tells us.
As we have seen, these objections are resolved with the GAE. Adam and Eve could have been created de novo, without parents, without contradicting what Scripture says, even if we interpret it very literally.
I’m encouraged to hear that Dutko read the GAE with interest and an open mind. I am not expecting a debate, a conversation where we might understand each other better. I hope that the understanding I presented in the GAE would work for him. Perhaps he might remain a YEC, but also, perhaps, he might see this version of TE as unobjectionable.