Straight Talk

Those BioLogos Unbelievers


Douglas Wilson
Blog & Mablog



INTRODUCTION:

Eugene Genovese once wrote that, during his atheist days, whenever he was in the company of a liberal Christian, he always felt that comfortable sense that he was in the presence of a fellow unbeliever. Unbelief is a thing.

And that matter of faith is always the basic issue. One of the New Testament names for Christians is the simple term believers (Acts 5: 14); 1 Tim. 4:12. When Jesus would admonish His disciples, one of the ways He would do it was through His stinging phrase “ye of little faith” (Matt. 6:30; 8:26; 14:31).

The Westminster Confession is full of pastoral wisdom, and does know that saving faith can be “different in degrees, weak or strong” and “may often and many ways [be] assailed, and weakened” (14.3). But at the same time they do not allow the frailties and foibles of various Christians to be the determining factor in defining the essence of what saving faith is always called to do. “By this faith, a Christian believes to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word” (14. 2).

This would have to include Genesis. Saving faith believes to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word. Mull that over.


And Genesis was not composed of some gumby-like material, and is not a text that can be shaped into whatever form is currently needed to maintain respectability out there in the world. Someone who can read Genesis and find millions of years in there, not to mention those years occupied with turning crickets into condors, is someone who could be appointed to the Supreme Court, open his copy of the Constitution, and discover in it that we are supposed to have three senators from every state.

Believers are supposed to, you know, believe things. And they are supposed to believe what was written. So when it comes to the first eleven chapters of Genesis, when someone in the church tells us they “don’t believe that it means . . .” our response should be, “Exactly so. And that’s the problem. Not a small one either.”

Cancer doesn’t arrive all at once, pervading the body in ten minutes. The cancer of unbelief will take root in one place, and then spread to the others. Too often our debates about theological liberalism (just a fancy name for this unbelief) are over whether the patient has died yet, when they ought to be over whether the patient has cancer yet. There is a type of naïve observer who will accept that a denomination is going liberal after it has died of that liberalism. They will only accept a diagnosis of liberalism from the coroner, never from the doctors. So prior to that point where the farm is actually purchased, when something could still be done about it, denial is the name of the game. And so it is—anyone who admits any kind of funny business into Genesis 1-11, while they may not be dead in their liberalism, they do have a case of it.

The evangelical church today is shot through with this spirit of unbelief; we are riddled with cancer. We flat don’t believe “whatsoever is revealed.” It perhaps began with a few in the pews who have trouble with this or that. Then it spreads to men who are great when it comes to the New Testament, or with systematic theology generally considered, but who function with a quiet unbelief running in the background when it comes to things like theistic evolution. There have been more than a few evangelical worthies who have made their quiet peace with this kind of evolution,adopting some theistic form of it—men like John Stott, or J.I. Packer.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Until Someone Unsettles It

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

2 February, 2015

The creation account in Genesis is read in different ways. It would be easy therefore, to jump right into the Genesis text and show that I read it in one of those different ways.

I do read it in one of those different ways, and bringing out arguments accordingly would be easy. Before getting to my main set of points, let me give just one example. All sides agree that the Hebrew word for day — yom — admits of different meanings, just as the English word day does. For example, I could say, “Back in my grandfather’s day, he was a champion at picking corn, and, while it was day, could average ten bushels a day.”

Now several things are true about this. One is that my grandfather really was a champion at picking corn, but that is another story for another time. The second thing is that day has three different meanings in the course of just one sentence. Day first means time, “in my grandfather’s time.” Second, it means “while the sun was up,” day as opposed to night. And third, it meant “twenty-hour increments,” Tuesday and then Wednesday, and so on.

But the third thing to note about this is that for native speakers of English, the different uses of day do not throw us in a state of consternation. We pick up on all kinds of contextual clues that enable us to tell what is going on.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Natural Evil and the Classical Christian School

Blog and Mablog

Douglas Wilson

December 17, 2014

One of the central arguments that materialistic atheism offers against the Christian faith is that the reality and universality of suffering is inconsistent with the doctrine that we were created by, and are loved by, a gracious heavenly Father. If we intend to do our job in training our students to be able to defend their faith as they go out into the world, it seems to me that we ought not to begin by granting the foundational premise of unbelief.

Believe me, the pressing reality of natural evil is a major argument that the atheists use, and the theistic evolutionists will have to do a lot better than they have done thus far in mounting a reply.

If evolution was God’s means of creating, then this means that pain, struggle, suffering, agony, and torment were His means of creation, and He pronounced all of it “good.”

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

7 Reasons Why BioLogos Is A Threat to Classical Christian Education

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

December 3, 2014

Before getting into the thicket, let me briefly define my terms and say a few preliminary things about my concerns. First, by BioLogos I mean this particular project as an attempt to harmonize biological evolution and Christian faith. Second, while I believe that this attempt (however well-intentioned) is a threat to every form of Christian education, I am focusing on classical Christian education because that is where my labors have largely been. And third, nothing said here is intended to question the sincerity or niceness of any particular BioLogos brothers and sisters. I believe their vision is destructive, but if a destructive vision is being promulgated here by very nice people, it wouldn’t be the first time.

There are many places where I could launch this discussion, but I think I will start with the historicity of Adam and Eve.

“Genetic evidence shows that humans descended from a group of several thousand individuals who lived about 150,000 years ago. This conflicts with the traditional view that all humans descended from a single pair who lived about 10,000 years ago. While Genesis 2-3 speaks of the pair Adam and Eve, Genesis 4 refers to a larger population of humans interacting with Cain. One option is to view Adam and Eve as a historical pair living among many 10,000 years ago, chosen to represent the rest of humanity before God. Another option is to view Genesis 2-4 as an allegory in which Adam and Eve symbolize the large group of ancestors who lived 150,000 years ago. Yet another option is to view Genesis 2-4 as an “everyman” story, a parable of each person’s individual rejection of God. BioLogos does not take a particular view and encourages scholarly work on these questions.”

1. The first thing to notice is that while encouraging “scholarly work on these questions,” they are not subjecting their own options to any kind of rigorous or logical analysis. So genetic evidence shows that humans descended from a group of several thousand about 150,000 years ago? Now when walking upstream like this, one wonders why they stopped right where they decided to stop.

More Contradictions Than Oxymoronia

A Devolved Human Being

Consider the following statement by Jacques Monod, reacting to unfaithful Christians who have embraced "theistic evolution".  Monod is a Nobel Prize recipient in molecular biology and an atheist.  He both points the finger at one of the stumbling stones in theistic evolution theories and manages to self-condemn at the same time.  Not a bad effort.  Two for the price of one.

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.