Evolution is OK!

If you don’t believe in evolution (if asked) it doesn’t bother me, nor is this post really for you. This is more directed at those who try to convince the world (at great detriment to the gospel) that evolution is wrong and their single interpretation of some Bible passages is correct. Those like those at Answers in Genesis and Ken Ham, who wasted 102 MILLION dollars! to shove it down the throats of those who oppose. Anyone who is already a evolutionist will just laugh and be turned away further from the gospel. I would be very confident that very few if not zero people turned to God through this exhibit. It pains me greatly to know how much that money could have helped all the various missionaries throughout the world, who are actually sharing the love of God and the gospel to the world, fulfilling the great commission. I hate to bash on the guy, as I assume he means well, like Paul meant well when he approved of the persecution of those proclaiming Jesus’ name, in defense of God. Until he learned it was God, and that passion turned from persecuting those to joining them. I can only pray the same will happen of Mr. Ham and his staff. I don’t know what he is doing with the proceeds he receives, though I hope he is at least using it at a way to fund missionaries, though at the cost of (hopefully unintentionally) swindling 99% Christian guests, I am not sure if that is even good.

Recently, in a Sunday school class a teacher was going over the book Daniel. The book speaks of end times and other things, and some try to use passages in it to claim they know “the end is near!” “They are missing the entire point” says the teacher. Daniel is a book written to exiles to give them hope and faith, that God is, and always will be in control, despite your current conditions. Daniel is not about end of time events predicting. It has some of the examples of that are how He can humble the mightiest king and have them repent and praise God, or how the mightiest king who is prideful will be defeated. And many other stories to show this, but it isn’t about teaching us a secret end of times knowledge. Only God the Father knows the end of times, that is right in the Bible, spoken by Jesus.

I feel the same needs to be said about Genesis. The point of the book is to tell a nation surrounded by pagan’s, who created the world and why. It is NOT a geological or astrological map or a scientific book! I like another way of looking at the creation story than traditionally taught. That it is a home story and not a house story. This is something I borrowed from John Walton, a fellow brother in Christ, who also happens to be a linguist and this is how he would read the story from a non-religious stand point. I recommend you watch some of his videos on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8xzLFfju_4 if you are interested.

In the ANE (ancient near east) when something was said to exist or not, it was when it had purpose.

The tabernacle and/or temple had a “holy of holies”, a sacred place, where if you entered and were the wrong person at the wrong time, or if you didn’t do the right customs or were impure, you would die. Or the examples of the Levite’s who touched the ark (with arguably the right intentions of preventing it from falling) and died. There are plenty of examples of this. What about the guy putting the temple floors in or the curtain up? What about the guy hammering out the cherub wings? Or the one placing the cover/lid on the ark for the first time? These are just materials, nothing holy about them…. until they are given purpose and meaning. Same with the universe. It could have existed for billions of years (13.8 as science measures it), but it didn’t matter, it was just stuff, until God gave it a purpose. Yes God did create this stuff, but we don’t know when, nor does it matter when, what mattered is the purpose He gave it.

The “creation story” isn’t about God saying, there was foundation built, then a roof, then plumbing and electricity, it was a beautiful house. Rather, there is a room for you to eat, I want to have a place for you to live, and I can dwell with you in this loving home.

I see two possibilities. The earth is 13.8 billion years old, as we measure it, OR, the universe was made matured to appear to be 13.8 billion years old. Like when Jesus turned water into wine. The people drinking it tasted the wine and thought it to have been aged years, not seconds. So was the wine seconds old or years? By the tastes measurement, years, by actuality seconds. Or the fish that Jesus fed the 5000 with, seconds old (caviar) or years (a nice sized salmon to fill the stomach)? God can do either.

Some theistic evolutionist argue it must be 13.8 billion, because that would be deceitful of God to make false history, to make this bone be buried under millions of years of sediment. I don’t think God was trying to deceive anymore than He was when He made wine or fish. But I don’t know if evolution is real or not. I tend to lean that way, because not leaning that way alienates a massive amount of people from us reaching. As Paul said he became a Jew for the Jewish and became all things for all, I think the same. We shouldn’t get wrapped around 1 interpretation of the Bible, that is very inconsequential to how we should actually live (especially because it might not even be right). Especially because in the process we alienate so many from knowing God. God isn’t going to say in heaven “you believed in evolution, so you go to hell, or you didn’t believe so you get to heaven”. It is going to be “well done good and faithful servant, you loved me with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and others, live under my rule for eternity”.

Just because we have a scientific understanding of something, that doesn’t take God out of it. The Bible speaks all over of how God makes it rain. I do believe He makes it rain, I also believe (through science) that water gets heated, evaporates, condenses, and falls from the sky. I know God does it, and He happens to use a process that we can measure and understand scientifically. Evolution could be the same way. Yes, God did create man. Maybe the process of which He used to create man was evolution?

What is even worse is when we create a “God of the gaps”. We say God makes it rain, and (incorrectly) put our faith in that. Then we learn how rain actually happens, and that removes God from that gap, and puts science there. Then when someone explains how rain happens, we either ignore their truth, making us look ignorant and foolish so they will not listen to anything we say. Or worse, we lose our faith and turn to Atheism.

There doesn’t have to be this false dichotomy here, it isn’t God or science. Quite the contrary. The more I learn about science and the world, it amazes me even more about God.

To be clear, I do not believe in evolution-ism, but a I am a creative evolutionist. I believe evolution is a very credible way to explain that it is a ‘tool’ God used it to have how we think the universe got to the state it is at now. I do not have faith in evolution-ism, a religion that takes faith to assume we all came from nothing. There is no science behind that, it is a complete guess. The big bang to me sounds an awful lot like God speaking the universe into existence to me. There are so many close minded Christians that don’t even know how evolution actually works. But they believe in this false dichotomy that forces them quit the faith or plug their ears and they don’t even try to learn about it.

One false analogy is that evolution is like a very intricate watch, and all the parts are in a box and that if you shake it enough times, a watch will come out. That is absurd, maybe why they like to use it, but it isn’t how evolution works.

One analogy I like is to think of God like a computer engineer/programmer. He thought about how the world should work, wrote code down, which means nothing at face value, just 1’s and 0’s on paper. But as soon as you hit the power button, BAM, the big bang, all those 1’s and 0’s go to work, turning 2 simple numbers into ‘phrases’ and protocol, and programs, and billions of bits (1’s and 0’s) move per second and then the operating system starts up. If the programmer was chronicling the events, they might say, on day 1, I wrote 1’s and day 2 I wrote 0’s, day 3 I made a code, day 4, protocols, day 5 operating system, day 6 programs and applications (the whole purpose for a computer is to have programs and applications) and day 7 that is when the “programmer” ‘rests’. There is no more code to write, it is up and running, now you can use it, it has purpose. It isn’t a random chance that caused it to occur over billions of years, it was an insanely precise and complex engineered process. Would the program be insulted if you said it came from 1’s and 0’s? I don’t think it is insulting the programmer either if you claim the program came from 1’s and 0’s.

If you pour water over a mound of sand at the tip, where does the water go? Do you really think God forces every molecule to go where it goes? Or do you think he put in place protocol and laws for it to follow and though the end outcome is might be known, it wasn’t forced. Evolution is as ‘random’ as that. There are laws and protocols on a genomic and molecular level put in place, and it falls as it falls (evolution-ism says it is all random). Perhaps, there is a small valley dug into one side so that more water collects there as you intended for a pond/lake to form there? God might have done that for humans.

Or there are arguments of macro evolution being fake and micro evolution real. Micro evolution was a God of the gaps, until we learned that for example, people in hotter climates get adapt and have darker skin. So then the position changed to call it micro, and still say macro is wrong. What happens when macro is proven? Molecules don’t have can’t-change-species-block programmed into them (maybe that is why from Adam to the end of the world might be less than 50,000 years, so there is no more speciation). The skin doesn’t communicate to the bone or the organs. Atrophy is real, if something isn’t used, it goes away. When you lose muscles, you don’t need bones, when you don’t need bones, skin and nerves go away, eventually (if given enough time), you will have a new species or a reverse process of gaining muscles or other organs to help survive in a new environment. We have a plenty of measurements showing a continuum of animals that make evolutionary sense, but no direct link in that continuum to prove it. Just like a human baby to child to adult, there is no way to directly see it happen or to say when one state stops being another state, it is too gradual. You find me an exact day of when an infant becomes a toddler, and I will provide you an exact day a monkey became a Homo sapien.

Another great man of God and scientist is Francis Collins, one of the founding fathers of mapping the human genome. The guy says there is no way that all of these humans could have come from 2 pairs. The more research I do, the more the scientific world sounds like they are right, and the John Walton story of Genesis and Noah’s ark are correct and not the young earth thoughts. I don’t even think young earth became a common doctrine until the 1900’s.

I don’t have all the answers, though I have some guesses on how Homo sapiens and Adam and Eve came about that I believe is biblically sound. Feel free to contact me if you are interested, but it really isn’t THAT important and despite going off on that tangent, it isn’t what I want to focus this blog on. What I want to make the most clear, is that we don’t have the 1 and only correct interpretation of the Bible, nor should we pretend that we do. God warns fairly often about being prideful. Especially on something so insignificant in the scheme of things. Jesus didn’t speak on evolution or cosmological geography, because it ISN’T A BIG DEAL! What IS a big deal, is teaching how to live to glorify the Father, to love the Father with all our being, and love others, as the Samaritan man loved the hurt stranger, not as the Jews that walked by him. Don’t use that argument that loving them is telling them the truth (or what you pridefully believe is) and thinking that insulting and berating someone who believes evolution is a way to love them. Loving them is putting their current tangible needs before yours, not some long term goal through some convoluted “scripture” based tactic.