fundamentalists and atheists don't like each other very much but one thing they agree on is that Evolution contradicts the Bible but they're both wrong people think this cuz the Bible says God made everything and they assume that if life developed by the natural process of evolution it means God didn't make it but they would say God made them even though they developed by a natural process God didn't just snap his fingers and make them fully formed they developed over time but God was still in charge of the whole process cuz God made space and time
so God made things evolve exactly as he wanted them to yes Evolution depends on random mutations but nothing is truly random since God controls everything Proverbs 16:33 says that even when humans make a supposedly random decision like rolling dice God still determines the outcome in the Bible there are two ways that God does things the first is supernaturally like The Parting of the Red Sea where God actually suspends the laws of nature to directly use his miraculous power but God also does things providentially like in the stories of Esther and Joseph where God arranges all
events in history to accomplish his purpose that's why Genesis 50:20 says you meant it for evil but God meant it for good who caused Joseph to be sold into slavery was it his brothers or God the answer is both his brothers meant it for evil but God meant it for good God is like the author and our universe is like the story that the author is writing just because things cause other things in stories doesn't mean the author didn't cause all of it so creationists would say that the creation of all life in the world
was Supernatural but we would say that the creation of the world was providential and the evolution of all life is something that God wrote Into the story of our world but even if evolution is theoretically compatible with creation people still make a lot of biblical objections we need to address Genesis 1 says the Earth was made in six days but we have to ask what day means here Moses who wrote Genesis 1 also writes in PSM 90 that a day for the Lord is like a th years and a thousand years are like a day
at least that's how Peter interprets Moses in second Peter the Bible and modern science teach us time is relative after all the ancient neare Eastern culture that produced Genesis had a much more flexible concept of time CU they didn't have clocks like we do a day for them wasn't defined by this idea of 24 hours it was defined by the sun which wasn't visible in the sky until the fourth day so it doesn't make sense to say that the days in Genesis are literal 24-hour Earth days if you have a more flexible definition of day
then Genesis 1 lines up beautifully with the biological timeline of when things developed on Earth First Light became visible on Earth then the Earth was covered in water then volcanic action made dry land appear then photosynthetic life cleared the sky so you could see the sun moon and stars remember the Bible doesn't say the sun moon and stars were created on day four just that they appeared in the sky on day four science has revealed that before photosynthetic life produced oxygen the sky was too thick and cloudy to see the sun moon and stars then
the Cambrian explosion produced lots of Aquatic Life the water creatures and after that mammals formed on land and then humans formed Genesis 1 first says God created Adam or man but then it says God created haadam or the man which implies first a general creation of human creatures and then a specific creation of Adam some people say God made Adam from the dust so that means Adam didn't not come from other creatures but the Bible says you were made from the dust but you still had ancestors so why couldn't Adam have ancestors as well science
has revealed that the first single celled life did come from the ground and everything else is descended from that but some people ask what about the image of God because if humans gradually evolved from animals then at what point did we start being made in the image of God but we have to ask is the image of God mainly physical or spiritual cuz if it's physical well chimpanzees share 98% of the same DNA as us and celery has 50% of the same DNA as us our chimpanzees 98% in the image of God is celery 50%
in the image of God so we need to say the image of God is mainly a spiritual status this is the traditional interpretation the image of God is a rational Soul which humans have but other animals don't even if they're structurally very similar so we went from animals to people in the image of God once we got this rational Soul a long time ago the earth was crawling with a bunch of Almost Human creatures maybe neanderthals or other hominids and God set apart one of them put him in the Garden of Eden and gave him
the breath of life which is the rational Soul so he became the first creature to be made in the image of God and then all his children were also made in the image of God and also had rational Souls So Adam was still truly the first human now if death entered the world through Adam which the Bible says then how was there death before the fall of Adam which Evolution says well why couldn't this be true two verses later it says death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses but there was
still death after Moses so why not before Adam the next verse says that Grace came through Christ just like death came through Adam but the grace won by Christ still chronologically applied to people that came before Christ so why should the death that Adam brought not chronologically apply to creatures that came before Adam remember God is outside of time some people still think the Bible says there was no death before the fall of Adam but it teaches the opposite in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were not allowed to eat from the Tree of
knowledge but they were allowed to eat from the Tree of Life which grants immortality what's the purpose of a tree that grants immortality if death isn't even a thing yet that directly implies that death was already a thing in the world we know that evil was already a thing because Satan was already in the garden tempting them so the fall of Satan and the angels must have been before the fall of Adam and Eve Adam and Eve rejected eternal life with God just so they could sin so the fall of humanity was not the introduction
of evil into the world it was Humanity siding with evil over eternal life with God that deserves hell if anything does John Calvin and many other theologians say that the substance of the tree of life is the same as the substance of the Eucharist which is Union with Christ hypothetically if Adam had eaten of the tree of life and rejected Satan he would have immediately had perfect union with Christ been perfectly Sanctified become immortal become God's kingly representative on Earth and become a great warrior who defeated all evil and inaugurated God's Kingdom in all the
universe it's pretty clear from scripture that the Garden of Eden was very good but not perfect and work still needed to be done which Adam should have done but failed to do because Genesis 1:4 says God saw the light was good and separated it from the darkness which implies the darkness is not exactly good maybe not evil but at least imperfect because evil is just a deprivation of good it's generally understood that in the new heavens and the new Earth everything is going to be perfect in a way that the Garden of Eden was not
you might ask why would God allow this why would God allow imperfections in his creation from the beginning and why would God create using a process of evolution that requires so Much Death now this connects to the broader problem of evil which we will address in a future video but generally the reformed interpretation is that God allows evil so that he can be glorified in defeating it through Christ that's the whole theme of the Bible God brings good out of evil God brings light out of the darkness and evolution is consistent with this theme in
evolution life comes from Death because death drives natural selection which produces more beautiful and complex and Advanced life in fact the worst event ever was the death of Christ but that brought about the best event ever which is the resurrection of Christ so evolution is the creation model that is most consistent with the gospel and The overarching Narrative of scripture and in general whenever God creates things in scripture It's Always by an organic evolutionary process for example God didn't just snap his fingers and create the entire church at once Jesus said the kingdom of God
is like a mustard seed which starts small and grows into a big tree with many branches when God created Israel he started with Abraham and branched out into many different tribes when God created all of humanity he started with Adam and Adam had many descendants that branched into many different nations so it's perfectly consistent to think that God made all of life this way starting with one common ancestor and branching out into all the different species evangelicals are always wondering why the Bible has all these seem seemingly unimportant family trees maybe take a hint and
realize that's how God creates things speaking of genealogies some people point out that if you add up the ages of the Patriarchs in Genesis then Adam lived 6,000 years ago and this is technically true if you take a very literalistic reading of Genesis but this video from inspiring philosophy shows that the ages of the Patriarchs are most likely symbolic numbers rather than their actual historical ages many reasons for this but the biggest one is that they're not randomly distributed all the ages of the Patriarchs are some ideal number with some symbolic significance and ancient Hebrew
culture was very into the symbolic meaning of numbers and often adjusted genealogies so that they would fit some important number that raises the question are we supposed to take Genesis literally it's not a strict yes or no because many of the early church fathers especially of the alexandrian school did not believe in a literal 6 24-hour day creation and this was over a thousand years before Darwin so they weren't just capitulating to his the John Calvin did believe in a literal 6 24-hour day creation but back then there were no scientific reasons not to but
Calvin does say we should trust the findings of secular science we do know that the Bible often makes accommodations to human limitations Jesus said that Moses made accommodations due to the limitations of the people during his time and Moses wrote Genesis so we shouldn't be surprised if Moses simplified things so that people would understand if the bible really explained explained in detail how the world was created nobody would understand it so the Bible is an oversimplified narrative especially in the portions that talk about the creation so people can understand it cuz the purpose of the
Bible isn't to teach us about science it's to teach us about Christ all of divine revelation is God condescending to our level that's what the Incarnation was all about as John Calvin said the Bible is God's baby talk
