[Music] a listener named Kevin writes in to ask can we reconcile creation and evolution or are they contradictory Pastor John what would you say I think what I'd say first is that Evolution as it is ordinarily meant in our culture namely naturalistic Evolution Evolution minus God evolution as an explanation of the origin of life when God is not there to explain it is incompatible with creation incompatible with God incompatible with Christianity and so that's the main form we're dealing with in the world and therefore we ought to be alert to it prepare our kids to
encounter it and realize that the reason main reason Evolution has been pursued and described is because when you leave God out of account it seems like what else can it be but if you bring God into account then you might say oh well that whole effort to account for things might not be necessary if there's a God in the universe or above the universe who brought it into being another way so that's that's the first thing I'd say but probably the questioner has in mind um a a kind of evolution that would be coherent with
possibly theism or Christianity can God have been the one who so designed kind of the intelligent designer behind the process of billions of years of natural selection and the answer is theoretically yes but exegetically we've got a problem I'll just give my three or four stumbling blocks that give me very great pause for affirming Evolution and keep me from going there keep me believing that that's the way it was done one is the problem of death this is probably the biggest one for me if if there's been billions of years of of life and death
Carnage how do you make sense of Romans 5:12 that sin came into the world through one man and death through sin and if you do a study of death throughout the new and old Testament it doesn't appear that that can be conveniently limited to uh human death after God somehow turned a an apan into a human it it that doesn't work very well death really appears to be in all of its stretches a part of the the fall into sin which happened in a man so that's that's one of my biggest problems in saying there
have been billions of years of death in the world leading up to a man um the second is just the sheer textual affirmation God made the beasts of the field according to their own kinds if read that say according to their own kinds now doesn't that seem to imply that God was involved in the direct making of kinds of beasts and and birds and fish and the third one is is the way it describes man's creation the Lord God formed man of the Dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life
and he became a living Soul does not sound like God worked through billions of years of evolution in order to find a a being that he would now regard as worthy of being breathed into or something like that it's just and and the fourth thing in my own experience I mean I just have to say that intuitively as I read magazines and look at Ranger Rick and National Geographic and the blue planet and all these unbelievable portrayals of nature I just say intuitively I can't buy it the the the complexities of things including the human
eye or a little spider who lives who breathes air lives at the bottom of a pond comes up gets a bubble of air under his arm takes it down stores it under his little matte house at the bottom so he can breathe down there and have his babies underwater which is just so crazy you want to say where did this awesome display of of diversity and intricatum if not from a Creator God so here's my summary answer theoretically yes you could have a god overruling billions of years and call it theistic Evolution exegetically it's going
to be harder to make that stand theologically you got to have I believe Adam as a created person at the head of his Humanity so that Christ according to Romans 5 can be a counterpart head of his Humanity he can't have Adam being a non-historical being and then intuitively I'm just I I'm I'm just going to have to go at root here with what seems unbelievably unlikely to me thank you Pastor John and thank you for listening to this podcast please email your questions to us at Ask Pastor johd desiringgod.org at desiringgod.org you will find
thousands of other free resources from John Piper I'm your host Tony ranky thanks for listening Tony ranky thanks for listening
