The Idolatry of Theistic Evolution

Right now a debate is raging in Christian academic circles about how God Created the earth. Francis Collins and Karl Giberson just published a book this year called The Language of Science and Faith which is a frontal assault on all other creation models. They attack Old Earth, Young Earth and Intelligent Design theories, banishing them all to the realm of the "unscientific". There are many sweeping statements in the book like:

The evidence for macro-evolution that has emerged in the past few years is now overwhelming. Virtually all geneticists consider that the evidence proves common ancestry (for all life forms) with a level of certainty comparable to the evidence that the earth goes around the sun. - Page 49

Something like that coming from Francis Collins, one of America's leading geneticists, sounds quite authoritative and scary for those who do not believe God used evolution to create all forms of life from an original cell.

Is he correct?
Is it unscientific to believe that all living organisms did not originally come from a single cell billions of years ago? Thankfully Francis Collins is not the only Christian geneticists to have explored the subject. A. E. Wilder-Smith was a leading geneticists in Europe between the 1940's and 1990's, and a firm believer in Creation.



He once gave a lecture at Christ's College which is part of The University of Cambridge and especially known for their Biological Sciences. The lecture was entitled Is Biogenesis Scientific?. In this talk he explains that the evolutionary theory (or model) for the origin of life is: matter + time + energy. The Creation model for the origin of life is: matter + time + energy + information, and this is actually the model for all science. He contends that scientists have brains and they use them when doing research and discovering how the created universe works. If they didn't use them then they wouldn't be doing science, or much of anything else.

So whats the problem with Theistic Evolution?
Dr. Wilder-Smith points out that information is needed to store thought and to organize it. Evolution claims that cells become more organized as they heat up, but the third law of thermodynamics tells us the opposite, that entropy (the tendency of everything to break down) decreases as the temperature decreases. One of the problems with Theistic evolution is that in order to get around this problem it has to attribute to nature organizational qualities that it does not have.

Mother Earth, the god of Evolution
Dr. Collins says that "Science claims with remarkable clarity that nature has built in creative powers" but then quickly adds "this does not imply that nature is personal or has intentions". But in facts Collins is wrong, this does imply that nature is at some level personal. Dr. Giberson and Dr. Collins claim that God has given nature a level of freedom that accounts for the death and evil in the earth, but then they quickly say that this does not mean that God is the author of evil (page 134). But if nature is not personal then that means that God is the author of all the death and destruction in the physical universe. But if it is in fact as they say, "these powers came from God and are wielded by nature", then in order to excuse God, nature would have to be a morally responsible entity with a free will and the ability to create. If creation did have these powers it would be a personal, very powerful being, a lesser deity, a god.

Where did all the death and disease come from?
The Bible clearly says that "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned" (Romans 5:12). If God created the universe and the cause of death and destruction is anything but a free moral agent He created, then God is responsible for all the evil in the universe. The only free moral agents in the universe are God, the Angels and us. Collins says that it can't be any of these three, so he is left inventing a new morally free agent, nature. Unfortunately Collins has fallen back into the same slew that he has been trying to lead his atheistic colleagues out of; by rejecting God, they make nature their god, ascribing to it creatorial powers that it does not have. Giberson and Collins have mistakenly done the same thing, but in a polytheistic way. They have not rejected God, but they have invented another one.