The More Things Change . . .

A Revival of Heretical Paganism

John G. West has written an insightful essay on the pitfalls and contradictions of theistic evolutionism, entitled Nothing New Under the Sun: Theistic Evolution, the Early Church, and the Return of Gnosticism.  (Jay W. Richards, God and Evolution [Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2010]).  By comparing the intellectual and theological battlegrounds of the early church with those faced by the church today, he concludes that the modern battle is "same-old, same-old".  West underscores how Unbelief always operates within the confines a very narrow tunnel.  It has to.  Rebellious creatures are, in the end, rebellious creatures.  They are not free, but enslaved.  Intellectual constructions are no exception. As the Preacher said, "There is nothing new under the sun."

Someone once observed that Unbelieving philosophical development reached its zenith with the Greeks--thereafter all succeeding generations have been merely writing commentaries.  West's essay produces evidence to support this claim.  During the first centuries of the New Covenant Church Christian theologians faced two groups who opposed the doctrine of ex-nihilo creation by Almighty God.


The first was the materialism of Democritus and Epicurus, which argued that all of being came into existence through the chance collision of atoms.  The Roman poet, Lucretius summarised the case:

. . . neither by design did the primal germs 'stablish themselves as by keen act of mind  {Instead, the colliding atoms continued] blow on blow, even from all time of old . . . into those great arrangements out of which this sum of things established is created.
West, op cit., p.34.

The Epicureans are represented today by Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolutionary materialists.  The early Church theologians rejected this as being contrary to Scripture and reason.  And, as West points out

The debates between the early Christians and Epicurean materialism bear a striking resemblance to debates in our own day between theists and the so-called "new atheists" such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. . . . In the words of Dawkins, "(t)he universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."
Ibid., p. 36. 

But the Church faced opposition to the Biblical doctrine of creation from another front.  The Gnostics, growing in number towards the end of the third century, argued that the material world had been created all right, but by an evil, degenerate power.  To know the true god (of Deism) one had to escape the realm of matter as soon a possible.  Gnosticism was neo-Platonic through and through.

In many ways, West argues, the theistic evolutionists of our day represent the same kind of attack upon the clear Scriptural teaching prosecuted by the Gnostics of the third century.  Theistic evolutionists argue that evolution explains the existence of matter, man, and the creation in total.  But it was guided by a god. 

Theistic evolutionists of Darwin's era accepted the idea that there was a long history of life and that animals developed via descent with modification from a common ancestor.  But they largely rejected Darwin's core contention that the development of life was a blind, undirected process dictated primarily by natural selection acting on random variations.  As historian Peter Bowler points out, many of Darwin's contemporaries (including those in the scientific community) embraced the non-Darwinian idea "that evolution was an essentially purposeful process. . . . The human mind and moral values were seen as the intended outcome of a process that was built into the very fabric of nature and that could thus be interpreted as the Creator's plan."West, ibid., p.39.

But of course evolutionists tell us that the process of evolution is full of errors, blind alleys, and mistakes.  (In fact, one never knows was is actually a blind alley or mistake until it becomes wasted or useless or passes out of existence.)  So, theistic evolutionists are forced to concede that their evolution guiding god has actually made a world deeply flawed, radically contingent, and unknowable in the final analysis.  The god of theistic evolution is not responsible for the "details" of creation; evolution via randomness is responsible for that.

The god of theistic evolution ends up not being the creator at all.  At best he is conceived as setting up a cosmic lottery and that given enough time it would eventually produce a jackpot--a world with human beings in it. But, theistic evolutionists also argue (necessarily) that this process is not finished and that the world is continuing to unfold.  It was not originally perfect or good.

The Gnostics rejected orthodox Christian teaching that human beings were created good and then fell through a voluntary act of disobedience.  In the Gnostics' view, the material world was never "good"; it was evil from the start.  Leading theistic evolutionists today adopt a remarkably similar position.  In their view, evolution makes unacceptable the idea that human beings were originally created good, which overturns the traditional Christian idea that human beings were created good and then fell into sin by free choice.
West, ibid., p. 47.

West cites one leading theistic evolutionist, Karl Giberson of the BioLogos Foundation:

Selfishness . . . drives the evolutionary process.  Unselfish creatures died, and their unselfish genes perished with them.  Selfish creatures, who attended to their own needs for food, power, and sex flourished and passed on these genes to their offspring.  After many generations selfishness was so fully programmed in our genomes that it was a significant part of what we now call human nature.
Ibid., p. 48.

In other words, human beings were "created" selfish, and only came into being through selfishness.  Like the Gnostic doctrine, salvation is (apparently) an escape from the evil, inadequate world that has come into existence via evolution, which compares pretty closes to the Gnostic idea of a Demiurge creating an evil world from which a god calls us to escape.

So the early Church completely rejected the Epicurean doctrine of existence via blind chance by Scripture and common sense.  It also completely rejected Gnosticism of an evil force creating an evil world from which a god will enable us to escape.  Once again, the appeal was to Scripture.  Gnosticism was both heretical and pagan.

Nothing has changed.  Nothing is new.  The Church, to be consistent with Scripture and common sense must utterly reject both materialistic Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolution, on the one hand, and theistic evolution, on the other.  Both alike are heretical and pagan.