Are Evolution and The Bible Contradictory?
A biblical analysis of evolution, Genesis 1, and why it matters today more than ever before.
"In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”
The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Saint Augustine of Hippo
I remember every detail - the concrete walls, the rickety white chairs my youth group and I sat in, and the look on my friend’s face when he said, “I think there are Christians that believe in evolution.”
It’s etched in my memory like a monument of stone.
“No, surely not. Those people must not be serious Christians. The Bible is so clear. Just read Genesis. It’s evident that the Christian faith and evolution can’t stand together. You’ve got to choose between the Bible or evolution. It’s really just that simple.”
In my fervency for faith, I excluded these Christian-evolutionist from my category of “serious Christians”. Turns out 15 year old Hudson had some things to learn.
Spoiler alert: I’m now a Christian that believes in evolution. The technical term would be “theistic-evolutionist”.
But I don’t give a rip if you believe in evolution by the end of this article. My goal is not to convince you of evolution’s scientific validity or refute every biblical rebuttal of it. I’m fully aware that the acceptance of evolution brings up more theological questions1. Real theology always brings up more questions.
Rarely is the “slippery slope” to disbelief as slick as people say. Mature Christianity knows how to navigate this, balancing a curious search for truth with an unwavering trust in a real God.
There are; however, false paradigms setup by well-intentioned people, like 15 year old me, demanding your choice between one or the other.
Let me ask a hypothetical question.
If evolution happens to be true, what have we, as Bible-believing Christians, done to our evangelistic opportunity by barring evolutionist from the community of faith?
Why do we expect non-believers to follow the evidence for the resurrection or the historical reliability of the Scriptures when we ourselves don’t follow (or even acknowledge) the evidence where science may lead.
It’s quite the double standard… and I don’t want to give the world any more ammunition for their all too common “Christians are hypocrites” accusation.
I don’t believe God set up all this evidence for a universe billions of years old or implemented “fake” genetic sequences that continually confirm evolutionary theory just to confuse people. He’s not sitting up in heaven with a mischievous grin, wondering what people will choose: apparent evidence or genuine faith.
God is not deceptive. All truth is his truth.
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for a non-believer to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show a vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but the people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books and matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learned from experience in the light of reason?”
The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Saint Augustine of Hippo
I’ll Take the Monkey, Hold The Roulette
What do I mean by evolution though? We all have different assumptions we bring into these types of discussions, so I find it helpful to first deconstruct the basic ideas in hopes of better understanding each other and the language we use.
There’s two forms of evolution in my mind: God-breathed and God-less.
God-less evolution (the popular kind in western culture) kicks God to the curb and substitutes him for an Almighty Randomness that gradually creates new forms of life over really long periods of time. It writes off the spiritual aspect of our existence to some “undiscovered evolutionary function”. If we don’t fully understand something yet, whether it’s a miracle or some other spiritual experience, don’t worry - it’s not God! We just need to keep evolving…
Christians see this and recoil (rightly so), but evolution isn’t the problem.
Culture is desperate to replace God, whether through the meta-verse, the human mind, or evolutionary theory. If you do not want God, you will find a way to replace him.
It’s this worship of Randomness, not the evolutionary theory itself, that creates a shallow worldview ultimately leading to the degradation of morals, Relativism, and Hollywood imagining we could’ve ended up with hotdogs for fingers.
After all, both atheistic and theistic evolutionist admit evolution can’t answer questions like, “How did the first life form begin?” Or “what happened before the Big Bang?”
Evolution is the simple observance of how life has developed - not how it was created. So long as we recognize God as the Creator, we are given lots of theological wiggle room to discuss how he actually created.
There are plenty of non-random theories of evolution too.
For instance, Process Structuralism is an evolutionary theory that proposes if we re-wound the clock of history all the way to the beginning of time, we would end up with a very similar world as we have today. Process Structuralism affirms that evolution is guided by the laws of physics, not randomness. And who created the laws of physics? You see where I’m going with this…
I don’t even think this is needed though. Christians have every right to accept popular Darwinian evolution (random genetic mutations being the driving force of change), but simultaneously accept that God has guided it to the point we’re currently at. Just because it seems random to us, doesn’t mean it’s random to God.
Logically, these are two completely separate realms of inquiry. One is natural and one is metaphysical. They don’t compete in the same arena.
I’m not alone in thinking this. Here’s some famous Christians who agree:
“I don’t think that there’s any conflict at all between science today and the Scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we’ve tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren’t meant to say. I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man. […] whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man’s relationship to God.”
Billy Graham
And if you need even more convincing, Darwin himself didn’t think evolution automatically replaced God.
Contrary to popular belief, Darwin was never an atheist. Nothing in his scientific findings caused him to suddenly denounce his faith. He slowly went from an Anglican Christian to an agnostic due to his observance of evil and suffering, something clearly observed with or without an evolutionary understanding of the world.
It was not the theory of evolution that crippled his faith, but his inability to cope with the problem of evil.
So if Darwin himself didn’t think that belief in evolution meant the forfeiture of belief in a Creator, why do most modern Christians?
I think there are two variables that play into this.
First, the Christian culture we grow up in plays a huge role in what we believe. This is normal and good, but there comes a time when you realize you want the why behind the what. This is a sign of maturity and development. Being told only what to believe is suddenly no longer satisfying. Tell me whyyyy , so that I can stand for the What with even more passion!
I want you to become a critical thinking Christian. But not in the way I did. It was very painful and disorienting for me. In my attempt to engage with culture and be a faithful Christian witness, I realized the pieces didn’t fit together as well as I had thought. Science, paradigms, and paradoxes - what is true?? Suddenly, I was tiptoeing along a knife’s edge, wondering if I was in the realm of heresy or faith, accusations coming at me from both sides - even from my own soul.
The knife is not necessary though.
It’s my goal to dismantle these false paradigms so that critically thinking Christians are equipped to engage culture in love instead of slipping off the double edged knife of Foubt (yes, faith and doubt often look the same).
Confusion about previously held doctrine and theology doesn’t mean you are doubting God or the Bible. Run to the person of Jesus, and you will find rest amidst the unanswered questions.
Okay, sorry for the rabbit-trail. Maybe a lost hiker was found at the end of it…
The second variable is far more complex and interesting. I advise you grab a snack, use the restroom, and put on your blue light glasses that make you feel smarter. It’s go time.
What We Literally Mean By Literally
I’ve heard some Christian churches say that if you don’t believe in a literal 6 day creation, then you are doubting the whole Bible; therefore, doubting your belief in Jesus and the resurrection.
I’m sorry, but this is just ridiculous.
Being a serious Bible student is actually the opposite of this. Seminary is full of theologically conservative Christians who revere and respect God’s Word, but still engage in serious discussions about these things.
It all boils down to different definitions of what “literal” means.
The churches that make such statements do so because they “take the Bible literally”. “Literally” here is defined as a straightforward reading of the text. They take pride in their unadulterated submission to the authority of Scripture. They don’t bend or sway under the influence of culture. They trust God which means trusting the Bible.
This is good to a large extent. I’d rather end up like this than end up hating the Bible and rotting in my secularism. There’s just one problem.
I take the Bible literally too, but I mean a totally different thing.
When I say literally, I’m referring to a reading of the text that best conveys the author’s original intent. What were they really saying?
Here’s an example.
Family dinners were a regular occurrence throughout my childhood. Sometimes I would ask to leave dinner early so I could go play, particularly when my mom served lima beans (which I’m convinced taste like sand).
My dad would respond with the all too familiar “not until you clean your plate”.
What do you think would’ve happened if I had proceeded to take my plate over to the sink, dumped the food down the drain, scrubbed it clean with a soapy sponge, and bring it back to the table to proudly announce, “I cleaned my plate Dad! Can I go play?”
To literally follow his orders meant to scrub my plate with soapy water until it sparkled, regardless of what I did with the food.
But to really grasp what he was saying, meant I better not get up from that table until I had eaten all the food that was on my plate.
Clean meant eating, not cleaning.
Not everything requires this level of linguistic nuance though. One time my dad said, “You can be excused from dinner if you take out the trash on the way to your friends house.”
In this case, the straightforward interpretation is correct. He meant exactly what he said. If I had skipped taking the trash out and told my dad “Oh, I thought you meant like metaphorically take the trash out. Like in my mind or spiritually or something.”
Well, that’s just dumb and my dad would not have been happy.
Good Bible reading is no different. Are we discussing the historicity of the cross and the resurrection? That’s trash - like the example. Not literally trash. Woah, okay - you see how language works? It’s weird.
According to the Bible, Jesus physically died and rose again. The Bible makes no attempt to veil this under the guise of metaphor. The gospels are true in this regard, but you no what the gospels aren’t? A botany textbook…
Jesus says, “the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds.”
Well, it’s not. An orchid seed is actually smaller. So the Gospels are “not true” if we treat them like we would a botany textbook.
But you tell me what’s more important: our spiritual life, relationship with others, eternity, the meaning of life, who God is, etc… or botany?
You see, Jesus is still conveying a real truth here, but he meets us where we’re at. He doesn’t rush in to correct their botanical misunderstanding, telling people “over in America there is actually a seed smaller than the mustard seed”.
He is trying to address deeper issues - those of our heart.
Genesis is the same. It’s conveying a real, authoritative truth, just not about evolution or carbon dating or the age of the earth.
Genesis is God’s way of telling the Israelites who he is and who they are. It’s not the science textbook we want it to be, and that doesn’t take away from its truth.
The questions we want Genesis to answer:
How old is the earth?
Was the world made in 6 days or 6 billion years?
Were dinosaurs created on the same day as humans?
Did the snake actually talk?
Was Eve actually made out of Adam’s rib? Did Adam have a belly button?
The questions the Jews were asking:
Will we survive in the desert?
We only know Egyptian gods. Do you think they’re mad at us for leaving?
Who is this God that Moses claims to know? Is he more powerful than Egypt’s gods? Where does he live?
How should we worship and sacrifice to this new God? Is he a mean or nice God? Does he get angry quickly? If so, what angers him?
You may be asking, “But if the Bible is God’s Word, then it doesn’t matter who it was written to right? It’s information is still timeless. So even if it answered those questions Israel was asking, doesn’t it also tell us about the age of the earth and creation?”
I think that’s a great question.
For The Bible [also] Tells Me So
I agree that something is wrong if it contradicts Scripture. I just don’t think evolution does, even when we examine the creation account in a purely literal way. This is me saying that even if you are the most conservative, traditional, fundamentalist Christian ever, I still think you should consider evolution as a viable interpretive option, on the basis of Scripture alone.
Saint Augustine is considered one of the Fathers of Modern Theology. His work was revered by Luther, Calvin, and other influential figures in the Protestant Reformation. His understanding of salvation by grace through faith paved the way for Christian theology as we know today.
Augustine did not think the universe was created in 6 days.
“When we reflect upon the first establishment of creatures in the works of God from which he rested on the seventh day, we should not think either of those days as being like these ones governed by the sun, nor of that working as resembling the way God now works in time…”
St. Augustine of Hippo
If we interpret Genesis’ creation account as six 24 hour days, there are a number of other questions that are immediately raised.
Genesis says God created light on day 1, but the sun, moon, and stars were not created until day 4.
Genesis indicates that there was “day” and “night” beginning with day 1, but how do you determine a day and a night without the sun?
It says God separated the light from the darkness, but we know that darkness is the absence of light, not a material substance to be separated.
Where did Cain find his wife when he went “East of Eden” after murdering his brother Abel? (Gen 4:15-17)
See, I told you good theology always brings up more questions!
The Egyptians understood their world to be a chunk of land held up by firm pillars in a vast sea of infinite water (chaos). Then there was a dome that the gods setup to hold the waters back (they thought water was behind this transparent dome and was the reason the sky is blue). Heaven was above this dome/vault and was where the gods resided.
The Israelites inherited this “incorrect” understanding of the cosmos from the Egyptian culture they lived in for 400 years, as seen in the following verse:
“So God made the vault (raquia - Hebrew for “a solid dome”) and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so” (Genesis 1:7).
Here is a slightly easier to understand, modernized version:
If we know this cosmological structure to be incorrect, why did God “play into it” when he inspired Moses to write Genesis? Why didn’t he seize the opportunity to tell them how the earth is round and the color of the sky comes from the shorter wavelength of blue light, not an ocean in the sky held back by some huge transparent dome?
Maybe God’s telling a different story than we thought.
Furthermore, the Hebrew word for “day” used in Genesis 1 is yom. In the Pentateuch alone (first five books of the Bible), yom is used to describe the following:
An eternity (Genesis 44:32)
A person’s full lifetime (Deuteronomy 4:40 and 19:9)
A season (Genesis 4:3)
40 days (Deuteronomy 10:10)
A full week (Genesis 2:2)
A half day (Genesis 1:5)
As you can see, when we read the word “Day” in Genesis 1, we bring a lot of assumptions to the table that your everyday Israelite may not have had.
Again, I give reasons to question a literal 6 day creation here, but it is not my goal to convince you of evolution’s validity (besides, reasons to not believe in a 6 day creation aren’t reasons to believe in evolution). If by the end of this article you said “yep, I’m convinced of evolution now”, honestly I would question the speed at which you change your mind. Dig in a little more and take your time!
I’m simply wanting us all to take a step back, question our assumptions, and consider how we as a church might be wrong - in the hopes that this realization will bring more lost people into the church. Isn’t that what we all want - the Good News to be proclaimed and received? Let’s tear down the walls that hinder our message.
After all, we’ve been wrong before. Take Galileo for example. He was a Christian astronomer who proposed the earth rotates around the sun - something we all know to be true today.
This was a slap in the face to the church’s current doctrine. Not just because common sense said otherwise (from our point of view it certainly doesn’t seem like we are on a circular ball spinning at 1,000 mph and flying around the sun at 67,000 mph).
The common sense aspect wasn’t the church’s primary concern though.
They were worried that Galileo’s scientific proposal would undermine the Bible’s credibility. In their opinion, the Bible clearly taught the earth was the center of the universe and couldn’t be moved.
The Lord reigns, He is clothed with majesty;
The Lord has clothed and girded Himself with strength;
Indeed, the world is firmly established, it will not be moved.
Psalm 93:1
The Dominican Father Caccini gave a sermon directly targeting Galileo in which he said, “geometry is of the devil” and “mathematicians should be banished as the authors of all heresies.”
Another priests said, “Galileo’s pretended discovery vitiates the whole Christian plan of salvation” and “casts suspicion on the doctrine of the incarnation.”
It’s easy to see how silly these accusations are in retrospect, but how do we know that we aren’t doing the same when we post something like this on a Christian apologetics website:
Ken Ham, a leading Christian apologists, says “More and more, the emphasis is on the foundational issue: compromise of Genesis, including the reinterpretation of one day to mean billions of years and the acceptance of evolution, ultimately undermines the gospel itself.”
There we have it. The exact same language as our our geometry hating priest.
All those Galileo haters were proved wrong. Everyone today believes the thing they were so afraid of - the earth does in fact orbits the sun. And you know what’s still standing strong as ever?
The Bible.
Look, I don’t care if Ken Ham (or you) believe in 6 day creation, intelligent design over billions of years, or Darwinian evolution, but please, for the love of God, don’t tell other people that they have to choose between the Bible and evolution.
It’s just not true.
Earlier this year, I was on a trip in Uganda filming with a missions organization.
Marty, one of the pastors we were working with, made 30+ jokes about how silly and dumb the idea of evolution was. He laughed and laughed about how stupid it is that some people believe humans were once a toad. Technically, he was calling me stupid.
You know what I did? Laughed with him.
Unity was far more important over the course of our two weeks there. I felt absolutely no need to correct him, assert my opinion, or prove him wrong.
This man loved Jesus with a veracity I’ve rarely witnessed. He was an absolute weapon for the kingdom of heaven, prayed like a maniac, and was instrumental in the move of God taking place in his country.
Come judgement day, God probably isn’t going to tell him he should’ve had his creation doctrine ironed out…
I want to be like Marty.
If you want more resources, the following books have been incredibly helpful in my journey through this topic. The first is written by the head of the Human Genome Project, who happens to also be an evangelical Christian who believes in evolution. It reads both personally and intellectually - 10/10.
The Language of God, A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
The most common biblical rebuttal is in regards to Paul’s statement about death entering the world through sin. Romans 5:12-13 says: “12Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned- 13for before the law was given, sin was in the world.”
There’s a lot of discussion regarding this verse and how sin and death would’ve operated in an evolutionary world. I’m not going to pretend like I can do this exegesis justice, especially in a footnote, so I’ll just leave it at that.
I don’t subscribe to the idea of evolution because it’s theologically problem free. The more you do theology, the more you see that NO system of thought is entirely problem free. The discussion must continue to be had.
C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain: “We must sharply distinguish between Evolution as a biological theorem and popular Evolutionism or Developmentalism which is certainly a Myth. […] To the biologist Evolution […] covers more of the facts than any other hypothesis at present on the market and is therefore to be accepted unless, or until, some new supposal can be shown to cover still more facts with even fewer assumptions.[4]
For long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself. He gave it hands whose thumb could be applied to each of the fingers, and jaws and teeth and throat capable of articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to execute all the material motions whereby rational thought is incarnated. The creature may have existed for ages in this state before it became man: it may even have been clever enough to make things which a modern archaeologist would accept as proof of its humanity. But it was only an animal because all its physical and psychical processes were directed to purely material and natural ends. Then, in the fullness of time, God caused to descend upon this organism, both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say “I” and “me,” which could look upon itself as an object, which knew God, which could make judgments of truth, beauty, and goodness, and which was so far above time that it could perceive time flowing past.[5]”
Pope Francis: “[God] created beings and allowed them to develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one, so that they were able to develop and to arrive at their fullness of being. He gave autonomy to the beings of the universe at the same time at which he assured them of his continuous presence, giving being to every reality. And so creation continued for centuries and centuries, millennia and millennia, until it became what we know today, precisely because God is not a demiurge or a magician, but the creator who gives being to all things. […] The Big Bang, which nowadays is posited as the origin of the world, does not contradict the divine act of creating, but rather requires it. The evolution of nature does not contrast with the notion of creation, as evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve.[8]”
Karl Barth: “The creation story deals only with the becoming of all things, and therefore with the revelation of God, which is inaccessible to science as such. The theory of evolution deals with that which has become, as it appears to human observation and research and as it invites human interpretation. Thus one’s attitude to the creation story and the theory of evolution can take the form of an either/or only if one shuts oneself off completely either from faith in God’s revelation or from the mind (or opportunity) for scientific understanding.[2]”