Evolution and God in Harmony?

Our Dilemma: Should a person be a true, Bible-believing Christian and believe in evolution at the same time?           

Answer: No.

My Reasons:

Reason 1: God created the world in seven days, not billions of years.  (Genesis 1)

            Christian Evolutionist’s Defense: 1 Peter 3:8 ~ “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day.”  This verse puts all the “days” specified in the Bible into jeopardy – how do we know something took as long as it says it did?

            My Defense: Genesis 1:5b ~ And there was evening and there was morning – the first day.

Here, God makes it very clear how long the creation of the heavens, earth, light, and darkness took him.  One evening.  One morning.  What does that equal? One day! The above refrain is repeated after each day of creation. 

Also, God knows how confused we would get trying to figure out, ‘hmmm – now is this really twenty-four hours we’re talking about here?’ He created the sun and the moon and stars to dictate our days and years (Genesis 1:14, and He created the days and years for us as well.  He wrote the Bible for our use, not His (He already knows everything in there), so He’s going to use our concept of time, not His.

            There are also other references to days in the Bible that are very clear “days.”  Like the story of Joshua when the sun stood still? Joshua 10:13 says that it stood still in the sky for about a full day.  And Joshua only lived for 110 years, so how could that day mean one thousand years? 

What can you conclude from all this?

Conclusion: God created this universe and beyond in only seven days.  He didn’t only create a few bits of matter, either.  Not even only two fish meant to mate and reproduce and mate and reproduce until more species developed.  He made everything.

Reason 2: God says He made everything according to its kind.

            Christian Evolutionist’s Defense: ---

            My Elaboration: In Genesis 1, everything is again made crystal clear.  God says that every plant was made “according to its kind.”  Every bird was made “according to its kind.”  Every sea creature was made “according to its kind.”  Every land animal was made “according to its kind.”  And what about man, God’s masterpiece? Something able to think, reason, question, worship, figure…

God did not take two monkeys and say, “Keep breeding and be fruitful – in several thousand years you will produce a creature who is able to think, reason, question, worship, and figure.  I will call him man.”

He said….

Genesis 1:26 ~ “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

Conclusion: Land creatures did not come from birds or fish.  And man is not just a more intelligent form of ape.  God gave us all the animals to rule over and all of the green plants to eat. (v. 29) The whole earth is ours to fill.  (v. 28) Everything was made according to its kind.

Dilemma Solved!

1 Chronicles 16:31 ~ Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let them say among the nations, “The Lord reigns!”

Love,

Ellyn

 ---


Side note: I’m not disputing microevolution here.  I’m talking about macroevolution.  Microevolution is like a wolf breeding into a samoyed.  We’re making new dog / cat / chicken / younameit breeds even today, and that doesn’t conflict with the ‘according to its kind’ way God made animals.  Macroevolution is like a wolf breeding into a giraffe.

Side note 2: All a person needs to do to go to heaven is ask Jesus into his/her life.  Believing in evolution or not believing in evolution has no say in that.