R.C. Sproul/Ben Stein (cont.)

Here's my current viewpoint, so we're clear. I am a Christian and believe in the doctrine of creation and the inerrancy of the Bible. Evolution (the whole shebang, from single cells to man) could have occurred (in accordance with the scientific evidence and the consensus of the scientific community who studies that stuff) and is not necessarily contradictory to the idea that God created us. I wish we could all sit down and listen to this excellent lecture together. I have it on my iPod and I listen to it in the car like a (really long) favorite song.

Take a look at that word - evolution. I've already written it twice in this post, multiple times in previous posts, and will most likely continue to use it frequently. To our current brand of 20th/21st century Western evangelical Christianity, it's the e-word! Even just seeing or hearing the word, you have an emotional reaction, don't you?

We've fallen prey to the false dichotomy of evolution OR creation. At some point in the early 20th century (a study of this would be fascinating; I'm sure someone's done it and I just haven't gotten around to finding it), it began to be woven into the fabric of our thinking and belief system that evolution is intended to explain away God, and a naturalistic process (evolution) and God's act of creation must be mutually exclusive. To me, this is illogical if you stop to consider that you believe that God created you, while at the same time believing that you came from a single cell and developed by the well-known (but not yet fully understood, of course) natural processes of genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, etc. I've never heard:

"Well, if you believe that you came from a single cell and you're the result of two people having sex, and the natural process of developmental biology that follows it, then you reject the involvement of God and there's no basis for morality."

But I have heard the viewpoint that if we evolved from a common ancestor that we share with all other organisms on the planet (from the "primordial soup" as creationists love to put it), that leaves no room for the creative acts of God and no basis for morality. It seems to me there are multiple parallel ways of describing the same thing. I was healed of cancer* by medical science and by God - both at the same time, not medicine doing part and God doing part. I was created by God and by sexual reproduction. Life on earth developed by evolution, and was created by God. Believing in the doctrine of creation does not require one to believe that life on earth was zapped into existence a short time ago more or less like it is now, any more than it requires one to believe that a human baby is created by God fully formed and brought by a stork.

All you have to do is believe in that one false dichotomy, and of course Christians should reject evolution, because we know God created the world! From there we get the whole spectrum of creationist and Intelligent Design viewpoints and rhetoric we see today. Notice I haven't talked at all about science, or about the Bible. I haven't proven evolution scientifically, and I haven't defended it from a Biblical perspective. All I'm talking about is that one philosophical stumbling block. At the risk of oversimplification, almost all of what I've seen/read/heard from creationism and ID boils down to adherence to that dichotomy.

To further confuse the matter, we see atheists (many of them well-known scientists) glory in claiming that evolution explains away the need for God's creation and "makes it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist" (Richard Dawkins). By concluding that a naturalistic process precludes a parallel supernatural involvement, they subscribe to the same false dichotomy. In the process, our mental association of evolution with atheism/philosophical naturalism is strengthened and the false dichotomy gets perpetuated. I am somewhat ambivalent about the "Darwin fish" car emblem; on the face of it, I appreciate the humor, but I am also dismayed (though perhaps not for exactly the same reason that you are). To me, it's a statement that seems to say "not Jesus, Darwin" or "not Jesus, evolution," which frustrates me, not as a rejection of Jesus or Christianity (which we can expect from the world at any and all angles), but because it perpetuates the false dichotomy above.

So I feel that the dichotomy described above is a false one, and should not be a reason for rejecting the theory of evolution. What am I missing?

We are going to get to that Sproul/Stein interview . . .

*Really! 7 years cancer-free this Spring!