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Evolution and Christianity incompatible, Mohler says in TIME story
August 15, 2005
By Jeff Robinson
Evangelical Christianity and evolution are incompatible beliefs that may not be held together logically within a distinctly Christian worldview, R. Albert Mohler Jr. says in last week's edition of TIME magazine.
For its Aug. 8 cover story, TIME solicited the views of four experts with different answers to the question "Can you believe in God and evolution?" Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, comments from an evangelical Christian perspective.
Other participants include Francis Collins of the Human Genome Research Institute who argues for theistic evolution, Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker who articulates the naturalistic evolutionary position and Lehigh University professor Michael Behe who makes a case for intelligent design.
Mohler, a young-earth creationist, says the Bible is clear about the way in which God created the earth in six days and argues that Christianity and evolution offer opposing views of human origins.
"Given the human tendency toward inconsistency, there are people who will say they hold both positions," Mohler says. "But you cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant model of evolutionary theory at the same time.
"…I believe the Bible is adequately clear about how God created the world, and that its most natural reading points to a six-day creation that included not just the animal and plant species but the earth itself.
"But there have always been Evangelicals who asserted that it might have taken longer. What they should not be asserting is the idea of God's having set the rules for evolution and then stepped back. And even less so, the model held by much of the scientific academy: of evolution as the result of a random process of mutation and selection."
Pinker argues that the moral design of nature "is as bungled as its engineering design," evidence itself that life did not arise from an intelligent and good creator.
Behe says he does not reject Darwinian evolution on theological grounds but disagrees with it for scientific reasons. God could have made life any way He wanted to, said Behe, a Roman Catholic.
"I think God could have made life using apparently random mutation and natural selection," Behe says. "But my reading of the scientific evidence is that he did not do it that way, that there was a more active guiding."
Collins, who considers himself a Christ-ian, says believers may view evolution as an explanation for the origin of the universe.
But that view usurps the biblical teaching of man being made in the image of God, Mohler says. Evangelicals must affirm the special creation of humans by the sovereign Creator who rules, cares for and governs His creation, Mohler says. The God of Scripture is not merely a "blind watchmaker" who steps back from His creation and watches in a detached fashion, Mohler says.
To view the entire article, see: www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1090921-1,00.html.
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