Spurgeon on Evolution

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The Following excerpt is from Spurgeon's autobiography.

t one of the memorable gatherings under "The Question Oak," a student asked Mr. Spurgeon, "Are we justified in receiving Mr. Darwin's or any other theory of evolution?"

The President's answer was:—"My reply to that enquiry can best take the form of another question,—Does Revelation teach us evolution? It never has struck me, and it does not strike now, that the theory of evolution can, by any process of argument, be reconciled with the inspired record of the Creation. You remember how it is distinctly stated, again and again, that the Lord made each creature 'after his kind.' So we read, 'And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.'

"And again, 'And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.'

"Besides, brethren, I would remind you that, after all these years in which so many people have been hunting up and down the world for 'the missing link' between animals and men, among all the monkeys that the wise men have examined, they have never discovered one who has rubbed his tail off, and ascended in the scale of creation so far as to take his place as the equal of our brothers and sisters of the great family of mankind.

"Mr. Darwin has never been able to find the germs of an Archbishop of Canterbury in the body of a tom cat or a hilly goat, and I venture to prophesy that he will never accomplish such a feat as that. There are abundant evidences that one creature inclines towards another in certain respects, for all are bound together in a wondrous way which indicates that they are all the product of God's creative will; but what the advocates of evolution appear to forget is, that there is nowhere to be discovered an actual chain of growth from one creature to another,—there are breaks here and there, and so many missing links that the chain cannot be made complete. There are, naturally enough, many resemblances between them, because they have all been wrought by the one great master-mind of God, yet each one has its own peculiarities.

"The Books of Scripture are many, yet the Book, the Bible, is one; the waves of the sea are many, yet the sea is one; and the creatures that the Lord has made are many, yet the Creation is one. Look at the union between the animal and the bird in the bat or in the living squirrel; think of the resemblance between a bird and a fish in the flying fish; yet, nobody, surely, would venture to tell you that a fish ever grew into a bird, or that a bat ever became a butterfly or an eagle. No; they do not get out of their own spheres.

"All the evolutionists in the world cannot 'improve' a mouse so that it will develop into a cat, or evolve a golden eagle out of a barn-door fowl. Even where one species very closely resembles another, there is a speciality about each which distinguishes it from all others.

"I do not know, and I do not say, that a person cannot believe in Revelation and in evolution, too, for a man may believe that which is infinitely wise and also that which is only asinine. In this evil age, there is apparently nothing that a man cannot believe; he can believe, ex animo, the whole Prayer-book of the Church of England! It is pretty much the same with other matters; and, after all, the greatest discoveries made by man must be quite babyish to the infinite mind of God. He has told us all that we need to know in order that we may become like Himself, but He never meant us to know all that He knows."

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Something Good at Huffpo

Order, Chaos, Common Sense, and the Failure of Materialistic Naturalism
by Phil Johnson



o rarely do I find anything worth recommending at The Huffington Post that when something good does show up over there, it's almost a disorienting experience for me.

This article is one of those rare gems. It is a fine application of the teleological argument, mathematically debunking the materialistic assumption that the order and intricacy we see in the universe arose by sheer chance out of chaos.

The article quotes Stephen Barr ("Modern Physics and Ancient Faith," Notre Dame, IN: University Press, 2003) to demonstrate why trying to account for an orderly universe by "proposing an infinity of unobservable entities is no more scientifically defensible than proposing a single unobservable one (God).

"Indeed, sustaining a purely materialistic view of the universe, Barr asserts, requires repeatedly pleading for a multiplicity of envisioned infinities—of universes, planets, durations, realities, observers, etc.—a habit that severely undercuts the materialist position."

Exactly.

Here. Read the whole thing; then come back:

Are Infinities More Scientific Than God?

This is not complicated truth: Nature is governed by laws. These imply the existence of a lawgiver. Earth's seasons follow a complex rhythm established by the rising and setting of the sun, the tilt of the planet's axis, the speed with which we circumnavigate the sun, the temperature of the sun, and the distance between earth and sun—plus a host of other considerations. It is an extremely precise timetable. Change any of those factors by a few percentage points and the earth would eventually become as uninhabitable as Mars or Saturn. That kind of orderliness implies to reasonable minds that our world was made by intelligent Master Designer.

Such a common-sense observation, however, is rejected out of hand by virtually all modern rationalists, materialists, atheists, and philosophical naturalists. They insist it is more reasonable to assume that nobody made the universe; it just happened. All that order arose spontaneously out of chaos. In short, everything originally came automatically, by accident—out of nothing.

On the face of it, that's a totally absurd idea. Order implies thought, purpose, design. Only intelligence can devise and design order into a system. And (whether you observe particles with a microscope or planets with a telescope) the vast layers of intricate complexity and painstaking order we observe in the known universe argues powerfully for an intelligence more boundless than even the most sophisticated human mind could ever begin to comprehend.

(Incidentally: anyone who truly sees that point should not be awed or intimidated by mere academic or scientific credentials—especially when we realize that philosophers and scientists are forced to revise their theories all the time. And that has been the case since the beginning of creation.)

Even on a relatively small scale of complexity, simple common sense grasps the incontrovertible truth of this argument. You could take a bag of watch parts and shake it for all eternity, and a working watch would never emerge from the bag. The only way to get a watch is to have a watchmaker design and build it. The same thing is true with the universe. It could not have happened by accident.

Ronald Nash, in his book Faith and Reason (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994, p. 135.), writes this:

Suppose the first American astronauts to walk on the moon had brought back, along with moon rocks, an oblong black box that appeared from the outside to have been crafted by machines. Suppose further that, when opened, the box contained the workings of a camera: it had parts that functioned like the lens, shutter, and other components of a camera. Obviously, such an object would excite enormous and justifiable curiosity about how it came to be. It is hard to imagine any skeptic's gaining respect by maintaining that the principle of sufficient reason did not apply to such an object. Equally absurd would be efforts to explain the box in terms of chance, natural forces. The very nature of the object pointed to its having been made by an intelligent being. The human mind properly balks at the suggestion that a cameralike object was produced by chance, natural forces. But then how much more should we reject claims that something far more intricate, such as the human eye, resulted from anything less than an intelligent being.

It's nice, for once, to see an article in The Huffington Post saying essentially the same thing.

But it's doubly ironic when you realize that there's a droning nest of nattering voices over at Biologos relentlessly insisting that teleological arguments are "unscientific" and therefore invalid, And most of the contributors there claim to be Christians.

Just as the material universe reflects the order and arrangement of a far Greater Intelligence, the intellectual climate of the world today (including the religious world) reflects the chaos that is the inevitable fruit of sin. Romans 1:19-32.

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What did Jesus (not) say about... how to understand the OT (full post)

by Dan Phillips

"You know where you really go wrong? You just read the Torah 'way too literally."

A reader wrote me saying he'd been troubled to see a Buddhist lecturer being hosted at a Methodist church. He wrote the pastor, expressing his concern and citing John 14:6. In his response, the Methodist pastor said something like "I don't take the Bible as literally as you."

One hears this quite a bit. We are cautioned against taking Genesis too literally, against taking the history of Israel too literally. Usually in these cases, "literally" is a code-word meaning "to be true." So the problem is that we take Genesis 1—3 to be true, to actually relate events that happened in space and time exactly as recorded.

Of course our grand concern should not be to take Scripture literally or non-literally. Insofar as we claim to be Christians, our goal must be to take Scripture as Christ took it. Otherwise, we might as well claim to be "SpongeBobians" as "Christians."

Jesus lodged a great many charges against the religious leaders of His day. He complained that their righteousness fell short of that of the Kingdom (Matthew 5:20), that they didn't practice what they preached (Matthew 23:3), that they made proselytes who were worse than they (Matthew 23:15), and a host of other accusations.

But did Jesus ever fault them for being too literal?

I'd say the opposite is the case. If anything, Jesus faulted them for not attending closely enough to the details Scripture.

For instance, He faulted them for failing to learn from David's history (Matthew 12:2-4) and from the practice of the priests (v. 5). He did not suggest that either was a myth or a cultic legend with a general meaning that bypassed the text. It was from the text that He derived the meaning.

Again and again Jesus clashed with the Pharisees' traditionalism. But His problem with this plague was not that it harped too closely on the letter of the Torah, but that it completely ignored it at will, as He illustrated at length in Matthew 15:1-9. Jesus in no way suggested that the Pharisees needed to loosen their grip on Scripture; rather, they needed to tighten it (vv. 3-4, 6, 9).

Jesus accuses the Sadducees of not having a sufficient grasp of Scripture: “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God" (Matthew 22:29). The He presses a seemingly minor point of syntax (v. 32) to demonstrate the resurrection (v. 31).

Then He rounds on the Pharisees, pressing a literal reading of the title of Psalm 110 to make a major point which would collapse otherwise (22:41-45). Jesus took "of David" to mean "of David," and not "David-like" or "from the Davidic school."

Or let's go right to the first bail-out point for Christianoids who want the world to think well of them: Genesis 1—3. Is there any hint that Jesus saw these chapters as metaphorical, poetic, mythological? Indeed no; the genre and canonical location clearly identify them as historical prose, and Jesus accepted this. Seamlessly combining Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, Jesus said

“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female [ Genesis 1:27], and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’ [Genesis 2:24]? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (Matthew 19:4-5)

As in everything, Jesus puts it down to a lack of faith. Jesus Himself was in no doubt that the entire OT was the very Word of God. What the Torah said, God said. Therefore, the problem of the Pharisees was not that they clung too tightly to Moses, but too loosely. Hear Him:

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. ...Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.  But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?" (John 5:39-40, 45-47)

Anyone backing away from the full truthfulness and authority of every word of the OT should have the honesty not to appeal to Jesus, for Jesus showed no such spirit. The only Jesus who ever really lived fully affirmed the OT as God's word. If we are going to propound some other view, we should say up-front that we reject Jesus' cosmology and feel free to disagree with Him where His thinking varies from ours. But then it seems to me that we need to take the next step and disassociate ourselves from any thought that we are believers in, or students and followers of, Jesus.

One may with integrity say he believes Jesus and owns Him as Lord, or he may fret at length about the horrid evils of taking the OT too literally.

He may not do both. Not with integrity.

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What did Jesus (not) say about... how to understand the OT

by Dan Phillips

"You know where you really go wrong? You just read the Torah 'way too literally."

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Don't Bow to Worldly Wisdom

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The Following excerpt is from "The Key-Note of a Choice Sonnet," a sermon preached at the Metropolitan Tabernacle sometime after 1861, first published in early 1880.

f all the philosophers in the world should contradict the Scriptures, so much the worse for the philosophers; their contradiction makes no difference to our faith. Half a grain of God’s word weighs more with us than a thousand tons of words or thoughts of all the modern theologians, philosophers, and scientists that exist on the face of the earth; for God knows more about his own works than they do. They do but think, but the Lord knows.

With regard to truths which philosophers ought not to meddle with, because they have not specially turned their thoughts that way, they are not more qualified to judge than the poorest man in the church of God, nay, nor one-half so much. Inasmuch as the most learned unregenerate men are dead in sin, what do they know about the living things of the children of God? Instead of setting them to judge we will sooner trust our boys and girls that are just converted, for they do know something of divine things, but carnal philosophers know nothing of them.

Do not be staggered, brothers and sisters, but honor God, glorify God, and magnify him by believing great things and unsearchable—past your finding out—which you know to be true because he declares them to be so. Let the ipse dixit of God stand to you in the place of all reason, being indeed the highest and purest reason, for God, the Infallible, speaks what must be true.

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My last post on BioLogos

by Frank Turk

I was going to go on this back-half of the year taking a look at the BioLogos positions on the Bible and especially origins, but they're going to take all the fun out of it.



On 2 Sept 2010, they tipped their hand the rest of the way -- and let me say it plainly: we told you so. Phil and I told you that they could not start down the path they were on hermeneutically and not end up here:

In the final chapter of Evolution Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (2008), Denis O. Lamoureux opens, “My central conclusion in this book is clear: Adam never existed, and this fact has no impact whatsoever on the foundational beliefs of Christianity.” This is the first entry in a three-part series, in which Lamoureux answers the question: Was Adam a Real Person?

So all the folks defending BioLogos have to face up to it: it was never about whether or not there were days or ages in Genesis 1; it was never about reconciling Gen 1 and Gen 2 to "science". It was always explicitly about what it means to say, "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth," and then "the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature" without it meaning that God actually, really, historically did something.

Instead, Biologos says explicitly, "Genesis 1 does not reveal how God actually created life." and then again it says explicitly, "And just like His use of ancient astronomy, when He separates the waters above from the waters below with the firmament in Genesis 1, His forming of Adam from the dust of ground never happened either."

That's really all that needs to be said: they reject the historical Adam. After that, it's only a matter of a few faculty meetings before they have called Jesus a manifestation of first century Jewish imagination and a deconstructing of Greek ethos to suit the likes of Philo and Paul.

Don't think so? You didn't think they'd reject Adam as a historical person, either. There's no sense fighting about it when any milestone that can be set up and then passed by these guys is not seen by their advocates as the bridge too far.

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Walking the Dog

by Frank Turk

After much waiting and a very severe lack of time for me in the last two weeks, finally we get to Pastor Tim Keller's paper, available at the BioLogos website, regarding "Creation, Evolution, and Christian Laypeople." Let me say this clearly: I think the people who run BioLogos didn't actually read this paper. In fact, I think a lot of people who have criticized this paper have not read this paper, so have a synopsis of the work itself with some analysis, and then come closing remarks.

Keller wisely breaks the paper up into clear subheadings:
1. What's the Problem?
2. Pastors and people
3. Three Questions of Laypeople
4. Concluding Thoughts

Keller defines the problem as he sees it precisely:

Many  believers  in  western  culture  see  the   medical  and  technological  advances  achieved  through  science  and  are  grateful  for  them.    They  have  a   very  positive  view  of  science.    How  then,  can  they  reconcile  what  science  seems  to  tell  them  about   evolution  with  their  traditional  theological  beliefs?

And as I blogged last week, there's no reason to think it's either science or religion -- it's entirely right-minded to see science as a tool which man uses in his God-ordained place to be in dominion over the world.

In his second section, Keller also wisely sees the problem as having four main points of difficulty for orthodox protestants: Biblical authority; the confusion of biology and philosophy (I would say the problem is "conflation", but let Keller have his own say here); the historicity of Adam and Eve; and the problem of evil. And the reason for his lining out of these problems is explicitly pastoral -- that is, these are the questions real people have when they come to their pastors because we live in a world where science is seen as somehow prophetic, somehow authoritative and able to speak to all things when in fact it only speaks to a few. But as he moves to the three main questions these four points of difficulty make obvious, Pastor Keller says this:

if  I  as  a  pastor  want  to  help  both  believers  and  inquirers  to  relate  science  and  faith   coherently,  I  must  read  the  works  of  scientists,  exegetes,  philosophers,  and  theologians  and  then  interpret   them  for  my  people.  Someone  might  counter  that  this  is  too  great  a  burden  to  put  on  pastors,  that  instead  distilling  and  understanding  the  writings  of  scholars  in  various  disciplines,  how  will  our  laypeople  do  it? This  is  one  of  the  things  that  parishioners  want  from  their  pastors.  We  are  to  be  a  bridge  between  the know  that  there  has  ever  been  a  culture  in  which  the  job  of  the  pastor  has  been  more  challenging.   Nevertheless,  I  believe  this  is  our  calling.

And he's right: it is actually part of the pastoral calling to be a voice of discernment for the people he is shepherding -- and sometimes that's going to including knowing more than what's printed on the page of the English Bible. We call that "apologetics" in most church circles -- and it's a godly pursuit when followed for pastoral reasons.

So here are his three questions:

1. If God used evolution to create, then we can't take Genesis 1 literally, and if we can't do that, why take any other part of the Bible literally?

2. If  biological  evolution  is  true, does  that  mean  that  we  are  just  animals  driven  by  our   genes,  and  everything  about  us  can  be  explained  by  natural  selection?

3. If  biological  evolution  is  true  and  there  was  no  historical  Adam  and  Eve  how  can  we  know   where  sin  and  suffering  came  from?

Before covering his answers to these questions, let me suggest something: the first significant error in this paper is that Pastor Keller is being too simplistic in the answers he gives to these questions. For example, his answer to question 1 doesn't address at all that, in spite of the alleged "genre" Genesis, the most time-honored and ancient reading of Genesis 1 is that this is the history of creation and not some other liturgical/poetic section of Scripture intended to convey "Truth" but not actually describe any true things.

What Pastor Keller does in answering these questions has a pastoral motive -- but it also has another motive which I would suggest is competing with his better angel, and that's the motive to speak to the fears inherent in unbelief.

So in answering the question of whether we can take any of the Bible "literally" if Gen 1 is not "literal", Pastor Keller forgets to include the copious references from the rest of the Bible to Genesis 1 which make it clear that God created in days, and that these days formed our concept of the week, and that his rest at the end of it created the sabbath. He forgets the copious references in OT and NT to Adam as a person who lives in a lineage which leads to Jesus. He forgets that the Serpent in the garden is the father of all lies, and was a murderer from the beginning. Instead he gives an alternative explanation for Genesis 1-3 which is meant to allay fear in the supernatural aspect of the events, and to appeal to people who have other intellectual commitments. I find this interesting from a fellow who speaks so vibrantly elsewhere on the subject of the Gospel destroying our idols.

In the second question, he then turns to the problem which his first question actually creates: that is, doesn't factual evolution trump literary or poetical conceit? Doesn't the fact that man is an animal like all the other animals (rather than the special creation who was given to name all the animals) make man morally just another animal? Keller's answer here is not very convincing -- even if its pastoral stripes show.

His answer is that it's actually only a prior commitment to naturalism which makes this logic necessarily true. He references Plantinga on this point, and says that "Christian  pastors,  theologians,  and  scientists  who  want  to   argue  for  an  [evolutionary process]  account  of  origins  must  put  a  great  deal  of  emphasis  at  the  same  time  on  arguing   against  [grand evolutionary theory]." But the question he leaves unanswered then is "why?" Why argue for the evolutionary process as the one which produces both chimps and Pastor Kellers only to say, "but that doesn't mean anything metaphysically?"

The argument to go there, he says, looks like this:

Does  natural  selection  (alone)  give  us   cognitive  faculties  (sense  perception,  rational  intuition  about  those  perceptions,  and  our  memory  of   them)  that  produce  true  beliefs  about  the  real  world?  In  as  far  as  true  belief  produces  survival  behavior, yes.  But  who  can  say  how  far  that  is?  If  a  theory  makes  it  impossible  to  trust  our  minds,  then  it  also  makes   it  impossible  to  be  sure  about  anything  our  minds  tell  us-­‐-­‐including  macro-­‐evolution  itself-­‐-­‐  and   everything  else. Any  theory  that  makes  it  impossible  to  trust  our  minds  is  self-­‐defeating.

It's one of those arguments, as they say, which destroys the village in order to capture the village. Sure: it's sort of a classic presuppositional argument which may be logically flawless, but it is also one of those arguments too smart by half which leaves most people feeling like you're trying way too hard.

What if you said instead, "well, it seems to me that if I have to posit the supernatural anyway to be epistemologically-sure that my perceptions of my personhood are true, I'll trust the whole shootin' match for meaning to what God has said -- and then science can then be my servant rather than a competing master."

The reason to say that, btw, is to avoid having to say what Pastor Keller says in his third Q & A. But before we get to his third answer, we should read carefully his disclaimer:

I  find  the  concerns  of  this  question  much  more  well-­‐grounded.  Indeed,  I  must  disclose,  I   share  them.  Many  orthodox  Christians  who  believe  God  used  EBP  to  bring  about  human  life  not  only  do   not  take  Genesis  1  as  history,  but  also  deny  that  Genesis  2  is  an  account  of  real  events.  Adam  and  Eve,  in   their  view,  were  not  historical  figures  but  an  allegory  or  symbol  of  the  human  race.  Genesis  2,  then,  is  a   symbolic  story  or  myth  which  conveys  the  truth  that  human  beings  all  have  and  do  turn  away  from  God   and  are  sinners.

See: this is perhaps the key reason I think that maybe the folks at BioLogos didn't read this paper very carefully: Tim Keller believes that Adam was a real guy, the first man after which the race was named.

And his concern here is for exactly the right reasons: he fears that discounting the historicity of Adam will impact our belief in the trustworthiness of Scripture. He fears that the problem of sin and the solution of salvation in Christ will be ruined into mythology and not real and present facts of human existence.

Isn't that a bizarre thing to say after answering as he did his Q#1? Why lay the groundwork for the antithesis of a belief in a historical Adam if in fact you see Adam and his sin as the lynch pin of the theology of human fallenness and a need for a savior?

But that objection aside regarding Q1 and Q2, Pastor Keller is exactly right in his answer to Q3 -- and in that, the curators of BioLogos need to think hard about the solution to the problem he is posing. Tim Keller is not posing the same problem they are -- because he doesn't see Gen 2-3 as myth but as "high history". So the solution He is posing does not work for the problem BioLogos is posing.

Now: to overcome all the baggage Keller has essentially stipulated to in Q1 and Q2, he resorts to the theological hypotheses of Derek Kidner to reconcile evolution to the fall of Adam. But does this actually buy either of them more credibility in the world of process evolution advocates? In Kidner's view, Adam was taken from among the "tool users" who has evolved and given the gift of imago Dei, and then God uses special creation to make Eve! That is, God makes Eve from Adam as it says, but Adam was not made from the red clay but from a lesser primate.

I wonder if someone who accepts the biological explanation for evolution will find that more credible than what it actually says in the Bible -- or if any of the BioLogos advocates would buy Kidner/Keller's exegesis here as more compelling than what Al Mohler would have to say about these passages. And in that, I wonder if someone who has accepted Pastor Keller's answers to Q1 and Q2 wouldn't feel somewhat put upon to accept the answer to Q3 -- because the question of God's supernatural power has only been shifted from Day 1 to Day 6.

So what are Pastor Keller's concluding thoughts? He says it plainly: "We  must  interpret  the  book of nature by the book of God." However, he also states plainly "Christians  who  are  seeking  to  correlate  Scripture  and  science must  be  a 'bigger  tent' than either the anti­‐scientific  religionists  or  the  anti-­‐religious  scientists."

If we are serious to do what Tim Keller says to do -- and use Scripture as the governing authority over what we observe in the world, especially when we are talking about the fundamental metaphysicaland ethical conditions man finds himself in -- then the potential solutions he poses here are not really sufficient to meet the task. But the interesting thing is that they are supported by the tribe at BioLogos as somehow compatible with their view of science and religion.

Do you think they read this paper? I don't think they did. But if they did, I think their motives are an interesting case study. We'll talk about that next week. You probably won't wait that long and will unload your conspiracy theories in the comments.

Have at it.

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When the Dog runs the House

by Frank Turk



Yeah, I ran out of week before I could give you the full treatment on the Keller paper from Biologos – and forgive me because I’m actually in Amsterdam for work committing random acts of evangelism (no fruit yet, but you could pray about that).

So rather than leave the blog blank, or publish a “best of” as a poor substitute for the Keller paper, I wanted to talk about something which is very central to thinking about the BioLogos issue: the old duckling of “Science”.

See: one of the features of the Keller paper is that it questions putting “Science” and “Faith” at odds – and I think it’s right to question whether that’s a fair way to position the discussion. I mean seriously: this is a blog about the orthodox Christian faith on the internet which uses all kinds of science – not incredulous pleas to magic or pneumenological phenomena – to deliver commentary, preaching, and fun to your very door. It’s somewhat stupid to say that we take science for granted or are somehow “ag’in it”.

But there I am, if you follow the “BioLogos” tag on the blog, berating “Scientists” for their claims that you don’t have to read Genesis the same way you read the newspaper in order to be a Christian. Am I not anti-Science for that?

In a word? No.

I take Lipitor. I use Naproxen Sodium. I use disposable razors. I drive a car. My kids go to the Doctor when they swallow nickels – not the shaman, and not the evangelistic faith healing service held every other Thursday at the Pentecostal church. When I’m in Amsterdam, I Skype my family – which is better than a phone call. I use zip-loc bags to keep food fresh. I wear glasses. I wear shoes with rubber soles. I mean: the only thing Science doesn’t do for me is blog. I still write my own blogs – until such a day when they can program a bot to do it, and then I’ll probably comment on his blog because it’ll be quite a slow-motion car wreck.

And the other thing that Science can’t do for me is save me from my own wickedness. Listen: I had dinner this week with a guy who told me that until Science could prove to him that Jesus walked out of the tomb, he would remain agnostic (at best) about the subject – and he was the one who brought it up! And Science, frankly, is not working on that project – because let’s face it: Science doesn’t care about that project.

See: Science is worried about replicating what happened at the sub-atomic level at the moment of the start of time and space – without regard to the fact that the experiments they are running under the cover of time and space. Science is worried about how many planets are like the one we are on in the hope of proving we are not unique in the universe – in spite of never once finding any traces of creatures like us in the known universe. Science cannot decide whether or not a baby which does not receive normal gestation while in the process of sex differentiation is a patient needing treatment, a citizen with rights, or a blob of tissue which ought to be scraped out.

So Science has managed to give us some really cool stuff, but when it comes to knowing something about us for the sake of telling us about who we are, and why we are here, and whether or not we are valuable? It falls a little flat.

I see Science like a really amazing dog: he can do a lot of stuff when he’s trained the right way, but if you give him the run of the house, he’ll be teaching you all kinds of stuff that, let’s be honest, you otherwise wouldn’t be caught dead doing. I had some great examples of that which I thought would make a great title for this post, but I'll spare your the vulgarities.

Science is not made to run the place: it’s made to serve, and to be a tool as we do what God intended – which is to rule over the Earth, and have dominion. It is not fitting for a fool to live in luxury, much less for a slave to rule over princes. Under three things the earth tremble -- under four it cannot bear up: a slave when he becomes king, and a fool when he is filled with food; an unloved woman when she gets a husband, and a maidservant when she displaces her mistress.

Ponder that, and I hope to do right by you and Pastor Keller next week.

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False Alarms

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson



The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The Following Excerpt is from "Discipline in Christ's Army," a sermon preached on Sunday evening, 13 July 1879.

t is a very great sin on the part of Christian soldiers, to make false alarms to discourage and dispirit their fellow-soldiers. There are some professors who seem to delight to tell us of a new discovery in science which is supposed to destroy our faith. Science makes a wonderful discovery, and straightaway we are expected to doubt what is plainly revealed in the Word of God.

Considering that the so-called "science" is continually changing, and that it seems to be the rule for scientific men to contradict all who have gone before them, and that, if you take up a book upon almost any science, you will find that it largely consists of repudiations of all former theories, I think we can afford to wait until the scientific men have made up their minds as to what science really is.

At all events, we have no cause to be distressed concerning science, so let no Christian man's heart fail him, and let him not raise any alarm in the camp of Christ.

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Lloyd-Jones Saw It Coming

posted by Phil Johnson



ere's an audio clip well worth listening to—especially in light of our recent posts about BioLogos and the growing pressure to abandon the biblical account of creation in favor of an evolutionary narrative:

"The Narrow Way" (1st 10 minutes)

The sermon is from a series delivered by the Doctor in Pensacola in 1969. The whole series is downloadable for free, courtesy of The Martyn-Lloyd-Jones Recordings Trust (a ministry worthy of your prayers and financial support).

In the above excerpt, Lloyd-Jones is decrying the church's inordinate fear of being called "narrow." This anxiety is exacerbated in our generation, he says, because modernity has tainted our worldview. We are too easily intimidated by the feigned authority of so-called men of knowledge. The result, Lloyd-Jones says, is an unwarranted capitulation to the authority of science (falsely so called). Here's a partial transcript to whet your appetite:

The Christian church in her utter folly during this present century has been recognizing a new authority. And the new authority of course is the man of knowledge, the man of culture, and particularly the man of scientific knowledge. And the church has been at great pains to do everything she can to please this new authority.

This man of learning must never be offended. And in order to please him and duplicate him, the church has been ready to take things out of the Bible. She rejects and throws out the whole of the first three chapters of Genesis, much of the other history, throws out all the miracles . . . She'll throw out anything in order to make her message pleasing and acceptable to this new authority—the man of knowledge, the man of learning, the man of science.

—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

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The Great Blue Ox of History, um, I mean Mythology

by Frank Turk

Let me say that this subject is completely astonishing for three reasons:

1. It is stunning in its plain-spoken objectives.
2. It is stunning in its unqualified rejection of historical categories.
3. It is baffling in its appeal that it is “compatible” with faith in Jesus Christ.

On 14 Aug 2010, BioLogos posted a video from Tremper Longman, and a brief essay from him regarding the historicity of Adam and Eve. Before we get into this, let’s make sure that the allegedly-meek supporters of the BioLogos site and agenda as they have manifested here have said plainly that BioLogos is not trying to re-write Christian orthodoxy – that their concern is about the stumbling block of 6-day creation and not about how we understand man anthropologically or spiritually.
But here’s what Longman says:

The description of how Adam was created is certainly figurative. The question is open as to whether there was an actual person named Adam who was the first human being or not. Perhaps there was a first man, Adam, and a first woman, Eve, designated as such by God at the right time in his development of human beings. Or perhaps Adam, whose name after all means “Human,” is himself figurative of humanity in general. I have not resolved this issue in my own mind except to say that there is nothing that insists on a literal understanding of Adam in a passage so filled with obvious figurative description. The New Testament’s use of Adam (Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15) does not resolve the issue as some suggest because it is possible, even natural, to make an analogy between a literary figure and a historical one.

This issue is an important one. It is wrong to challenge people to choose between the Bible and the science of evolution as if you can only believe that one or the other is true. They are not in conflict. It is particularly damaging to insist that our young people make this kind of false choice as they are studying biology in secondary school or college. If we do so, we will force some to choose against the Bible and others to check their intelligence at the classroom door. This is a false dilemma created by a misuse of the biblical text.

Aha. The Biblical text is misused when Adam is referred to as a historical person. So to say this:

Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, the son of Levi, the son of Melchi, the son of Jannai, the son of Joseph, the son of Mattathias, the son of Amos, the son of Nahum, the son of Esli, the son of Naggai, the son of Maath, the son of Mattathias, the son of Semein, the son of Josech, the son of Joda, the son of Joanan, the son of Rhesa, the son of Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, the son of Neri, the son of Melchi, the son of Addi, the son of Cosam, the son of Elmadam, the son of Er, the son of Joshua, the son of Eliezer, the son of Jorim, the son of Matthat, the son of Levi, the son of Simeon, the son of Judah, the son of Joseph, the son of Jonam, the son of Eliakim, the son of Melea, the son of Menna, the son of Mattatha, the son of Nathan, the son of David, the son of Jesse, the son of Obed, the son of Boaz, the son of Sala, the son of Nahshon, the son of Amminadab, the son of Admin, the son of Arni, the son of Hezron, the son of Perez, the son of Judah, the son of Jacob, the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham, the son of Terah, the son of Nahor, the son of Serug, the son of Reu, the son of Peleg, the son of Eber, the son of Shelah, the son of Cainan, the son of Arphaxad, the son of Shem, the son of Noah, the son of Lamech, the son of Methuselah, the son of Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalaleel, the son of Cainan, the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God. [Luke 3:23-38, ESV]

is a misuse of the text, dear reader.



Moreover, that Luke thought this way doesn’t speak to us at all (see above from Longman) about how Paul thought about this – because Paul’s use of the fall as evidence of all our sin is somehow the right way to see what Jesus did. Without getting overwrought here, that’s like saying, “Since in Paul Bunyan we all have a great blue Ox, so in Obama we all have the hope for the future.” It’s childish at best, and an insult to the kind of work Paul is saying Jesus -- who is God -- has done for us really and not merely mythically or somehow supernaturally.

The longer this goes on, the more ridiculous it looks to say that BioLogos is somehow preserving orthodoxy and making science’s peace with faith in Christ.

And that said, the Keller paper at BioLogos is on my agenda for next Wednesday. For those of you who haven't read that paper, find it here, and then pack a lunch.

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The One who is not Offended

by Frank Turk



Some of you will read this post as a break from the series on the issues with BioLogos. That would be an error on your part.

On my morning walk (I've been back on the horse for 2 weeks now that it's below 80 at 5:30 AM in Little Rock) I've been catching up on podcasts, and I've been listening to Tim Keller's sermons from back in February. He has a fine sermon on "Literalism" that I commend to you, but the one I listened to today was called "Meeting the Real Jesus". In it, Pastor Keller is preaching on an excellent passage from Matthew 11:

Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?" And Jesus answered them, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me." [ESV Mat 11:2-6]

I could transcript it for you, but then my point would be buried under his very-good teaching on this passage. Turns out that this is actually a sermon from 1996 according the the Redeemer web site. You will get my version of this story instead -- and why it matters to the BioLogos controversy.

Here's the place in Scripture where John the Baptist -- the guy who Jesus later in this very passage called "the Elijah who is to come" -- is in prison, and he's actually giving God some sassy lip. You know: the real Elijah burns up all the prophets of Baal, and just because he missed Jezebel he runs off to a cave to ask God to let him die because the evil queen is still threatening him. So the Elijah who is to come at least comes by it honestly.

So John sends his disciples to Jesus to ask him, "listen: I'm in jail, and I thought you were the savior of Israel, so are you going to set me free here, or is there someone else who's going to set Israel -- and by 'Israel', I mean 'me' -- free?"

So Jesus says to them, "Tell John ... blessed is the one who is not offended by me." Think about that a second: Jesus is telling camel-cloth prophet John (who baptized him) in much the same way as he tells everyone earlier in Matthew's Gospel, "blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those hungry for justice, etc.," except that rather than addressing the crowd, ("blessed are they") he's addressing one guy ("blessed is he").

But how does he say that? It's all in the ellipsis, isn't it? The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. See, John: I'm the one saving the ones who need to be saved. Pastor Keller does a very keen job of getting you there in his sermon by focusing on that key phrase I underlined -- that the poor have good news preached to them.

In fact, he makes it a point to say that this is really the central matter of the Gospel which most churches that call themselves "Christian" miss out on. Most "respectable" churches are preaching a Gospel not for people with no hope but a message for people who just need to try harder. They don't need to be saved: they just need a good example.

And in that, he says, they have lost the supernatural, culture-spanning power of the Gospel -- because they want to be for the respectable and not for the helpless. The poor, you see, understand their plight better than the comfortable: they cannot save themselves.



And this, I think is where we turn this passage of Scripture to the problem of being intellectually respectable. It seems to me that this is the central matter for the BioLogos folks: they do not want to save anybody. They want to merely do better as the world might see it.

It comes out when they say stuff like this:

The creation story of BioLogos is compatible with many faith traditions, and there is no way to give a scientific proof for one monotheistic faith over another. Therefore, this response will simply show the compatibility of Christianity with BioLogos.

Or this blurb from a "coming soon" essay:

Over the past few decades, sociobiologists have begun applying Darwin’s theory to many aspects of human behavior, including altruism. If evolution selects only traits that promote reproductive success, then altruistic behaviors seem contrary to the underlying principle of evolution. Sociobiology and evolutionary models can account for some elements of altruism, but radical altruism poses additional challenges.

That is: science can and does offer an explanation which we don't have to be ashamed of.

But Jesus here tells John that the one who is not offended by Jesus -- the one who doesn't necessarily protect us from persecution, but in fact saves us to take up our cross and die daily to sin -- is the one who is blessed.

It's funny that BioLogos sort of makes Isaac Newton out to be a rube because when he observed the planets in motion, he wrote this:

The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts and almost in the same plan. Ten Moons are revolv'd about the Earth, Jupiter and Saturn, in circles concentric with them, with the same direction of motion, and nearly in the planes of the orbits of those Planets. But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions: since the Comets range over all parts of the heavens, in very eccentric orbits. For by that kind of motion they pass easily through the orbits of the Planets, and with great rapidity; and in their aphelions, where they move the slowest, and are detain'd the longest, they recede to the greatest distances from each other, and thence suffer the least disturbance from their mutual attractions. This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. And if the fixed Stars are the centers of other like systems, these, being form'd by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially since the light of the fixed Stars is of the same nature with the light of the Sun, and from every system light passes into all the other systems. And lest the systems of the fixed Stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other mutually, he hath placed those Systems at immense distances from one another.

It seems to me that this sort of thing speaks plainly to their objectives -- which are not nearly and Bible-friendly and Gospel-friendly as they want to let on.

They are, in fact, offended by this sort of faith. It speaks to the kind of faith and blessing they are looking for.

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"Evangelicals" and Atheists Together

BioLogos takes their complaint against Al Mohler to Huffpo
by Phil Johnson



ast month several regular contributors over at the BioLogos blog wrote a series of posts exploring the question "How Should BioLogos Respond to Dr. Albert Mohler's Critique?"

That question was prompted by Dr. Mohler's June 19 message titled "Why Does the Universe Look So Old?" at this year's Orlando Ligonier Conference. Dr. Mohler took a position that is at odds with the central canon of the BioLogos credo. BioLogos most certainly needed to respond. The question was, How?

Evidently, the gentlemen at BioLogos have finally settled on their best strategy for replying to Dr. Mohler: Publish something at the Huffington Post accusing Dr. Mohler of dishonesty.

To paraphrase one of my Facebook friends: Even if they really do believe the abusive ad hominem argument they are making against Al Mohler, that's an interesting strategy. Let's air our differences at this bastion of secular humanism, and we'll invite some of the giants of discernment over at Huffpo to sort it out for us in their combox.

Dr. Karl Giberson, vice president of BioLogos, wrote the Huffington piece. The case he makes against Dr. Mohler has basically one point. Here it is: In his Ligonier lecture, Dr. Mohler claimed that Charles Darwin had a pretty good idea about what kind of "evidence" he was looking for before he ever boarded the Beagle; he was already sympathetic to evolutionary theory, and he was already hostile to biblical authority.

Not so, Dr. Giberson says. Darwin was a devout Christian and a creationist when he first set off on the Beagle. Giberson claims Darwin's very first doubts about the reliability of Scripture-as-history came as he collected his samples and observed and analyzed the biological evidence. Dr. Giberson evidently would have us believe Darwin was a typical evangelical until an honest inquiry into the scientific evidence forced him to take a more enlightened position.

I'm admittedly no Darwin scholar, but I do know for a fact that the only version of "Christianity" he ever adhered to was by no means evangelical. He was a product of that Unitarian intellectualism that dominated the established church in Georgian times. According to an 1887 article by Robert Schindler (published in Charles Spurgeon's magazine, The Sword and the Trowel):

If anyone wishes to know where the tadpole of Darwinism was hatched, we could point him to the pew of the old chapel in High Street, Shrewsbury, where Mr. Darwin, his father, and we believe his father's father, received their religious training. The chapel was built for Mr. Talents, an ejected minister [i.e., a Puritan who dissented from the established church order]; but for very many years full-blown Socinianism has been taught there. (Emphasis added.)

Furthermore, Darwin was enthralled with natural theology and (like BioLogos) held the truth-claims of Scripture to be less reliable and less authoritative than "scientific proofs." That was what prompted his interest in science to begun with. And—as Dr. Giberson himself notes in an earlier open letter to Dr. Mohler—"[Darwin] was a devotee of William Paley."

Perhaps the most succinct summary of William Paley's religious convictions comes to us from Sir Leslie Stephen, a younger contemporary of Paley's. Stephen was a respected English author and an Anglican clergyman. He described William Paley as "Socinian in all but name."

Given BioLogos's own theological trajectory (I'm thinking particularly of their dismissive attitude toward key doctrines like biblical authority and original sin), they may not recognize Socinianism—or its close cousins, Unitarianism, Deism, and theological liberalism—as anti-Christian worldviews. But Dr. Mohler certainly understands that those ideas are hostile to Scripture and antithetical to every major stream of historic Christian faith.

In other words, Dr. Mohler undoubtedly disagrees with Dr. Giberson's assessment of Darwin. As difficult as this may be for Dr. Giberson to receive and as hurtful as it may be to his academic ego, Dr. Mohler no doubt found Dr. Giberson's book Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution unpersuasive.

But as far as Dr. Giberson is concerned, the only possible explanation for Dr. Mohler's statement about Darwin is that Mohler simply doesn't care about truth. Giberson insists Dr. Mohler is a deliberate, cold-hearted, shameless liar.

I'm not exaggerating. Giberson loaded his Huffington article with just about every accusation and insult space would allow. He stops just short of making Mohler out to be a felon. Giberson alleges that Mohler "does not seem to care about the truth and seems quite content to simply make stuff up when it serves his purpose." "Perhaps [Mohler's] only real encounter with Saving Darwin was an instruction to an assistant to 'find something in Giberson's book that I can ridicule in my speech.'" "Mohler perhaps, is being a 'faith fibber,' something I have been guilty of, although not on this scale." "I am disappointed to realize that [skeptic Michael] Shermer, who repudiated his faith, has more respect for the truth than Al Mohler, who views himself as a caretaker of a faith that I share."

Really?

Because in the very next sentence, Giberson goes on to assert that "religious belief is complex and full of mystery, paradox, and contradiction" (emphasis added). That is tantamount to saying faith is an absurdity. I'm fairly confident Dr. Mohler would not view himself as a caretaker of that sort of faith. It's not true faith at all by any biblical standard; it's classic existential and neo-orthodox nonsense.

But anyway, let me get to the thing that chafes me most about BioLogos's answer to their own question, "How Should BioLogos Respond to Dr. Albert Mohler's Critique?"

My answer would have been, "Address the biblical and theological points he made." Dr. Mohler gave several clear doctrinal arguments to show why the peculiar brand of cosmological deism being touted by the BioLogos crew is incompatible with sound doctrine and hostile to a high view of Scripture. Their campaign is destructive to foundational doctrines of the Christian faith, starting with the authority of Scripture and the doctrine of original sin.

The theological case Dr. Mohler made was compelling. Until BioLogos responds to it, I'll stand by what I have said all along: They cannot be serious when they claim they are interested in bringing science and faith together. Indeed, they are steering people into the same spiritual blind alley that ultimately caused Darwin to abandon theism altogether. And the skeptical blogosphere is full of spiritual casualties who are living (and dying) illustrations of what happens when half-hearted faith hits that dead end.

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Weekend Extra: The Heresy of Orthodoxy

by Frank Turk



My series on Biologos is sort of a multi-headed beast because that's the problem with error: it's never a linear sliver in the body of Christ which you can extract with a sharp razor cut and the quick pinch of a tweezer, or a tick which you can pull off at once if you get a good grip on it the first time. Error, as the New Testament tells us, is more like leaven -- or maybe more like Athlete's foot: you don't just remove it, but you have to clean house and treat the afflicted in order to get it all out.

One of the key matters at BioLogos is the idea of a diversity of readings of the OT -- which is an interesting ploy as already shown in this series. The root of it is the slogan that if guys as diverse as Origen and Augustine could read Genesis non-literally, we can too and still be in the great cloud of witnesses.

My opinion is that this reasoning comes from an application of what is called "the Bauer Hypothesis", or "the Bauer-Ehrman Hypothesis" (hereafter, BEH). For those of you who live in the real world and don't find esoteric battles over the retelling of history either compelling or actually-interesting, BEH was established in the first half of the 20th century by Walter Bauer -- the same eponymous creator of the most significant lexicon of NT Greek in use today, the BDAG. Bauer's thesis -- which he never really substantially proved -- was that if you surveyed the cities in the first three centuries of Christian faith, you would not find Christianity, a unified body of beliefs and practices. You would instead find christianities, a loosely-connected body of beliefs which were not consistent from place to place and which did not all teach the same thing. This is relevant to Bauer because this is reflected in the texts of the New Testament -- there is not one orthodox faith reflected in the texts of the NT, but a diversity of confluent teachings which may or may not harmonize but are nevertheless accepted as all part of the same general faith in this fellow Jesus.

The theory is now called "BEH" because the ubiquitous Bart Ehrman resuscitated the theory after it had been widely disproven in the 70's and 80's. Ehrman's, um, improvements to the theory include the idea that the variation in texts and text-types demonstrates Bauer's thesis, and that we should see the sociological history of Christianity as one in which the narrower view co-opted the ground of "orthodoxy" from the diversity of the earlier age. If we are to return to the source, we should return to a more-diverse Christian faith in which many views -- even conflicting views -- be welcomed in as family.

So when it comes up that Augustine didn't read Genesis literally, (in the view of the BioLogos advocates) we should see that first as part of the diversity which orthodoxy ought to represent -- and not to read too closely to see that Augustine's view is actually much more radically-supernatural than the one BioLogos promotes. When it comes up that Origen read Genesis "spiritually" and not historically, and therefore BioLogos is just doing the same thing, it should not be inquired too deeply what Origen's view includes:

Origen theorized that before God created the universe, he created — before the start of time — a group of rational beings which he called logika, but which might be thought of today as “souls.” These rational beings, Origen suggested, had God-like qualities. With eternity on their hands, they passed time endlessly contemplating divine mysteries. Finally, however, these beings or souls tired of their contemplation and started drifting away from God. Time began. Souls began to have an existence separate and apart from God. The only soul who escaped this fate, Origen argues, was “the soul of Christ” who returned to point the path back to the true function of all souls, all rational beings: contemplation of divine mysteries. [source]

Certainly, the advocates at BioLogos wouldn't accept this as even remotely credible -- and whether this is an orthodox view I leave to the open discussion about Origen's own place in the history of Christianity.

The point being that BEH resides among the primary supports of the BioLogos approach -- and BEH is, frankly, a disreputable approach to the history of the faith.

Now seriously: don't take my word for it. Earlier this year, Andreas Köstenberger and Michael J. Kruger, through Crossway, published the excellent book, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, which exposes BEH for the unsustainable opinion that it is. D.A. Carson says it "patiently, carefully, and politely [exposes] this shameful nakedness for what it is." I honestly could not have said it better myself.

Köstenberger and Kruger take the time to dismantle the textual and historical misunderstandings which compose BEH, and they do it in a way which any reader can understand. Their well-documented research and arguments frankly outshine the object of their investigation because of the sobriety with which they approach the task.

So as you engage this topic, approach it with this book in-hand. Educate yourself on the history of the text of the Bible and on the origins of orthodoxy -- especially of the text of the Bible and how it was received. But don't let someone who is allegedly serious about "orthodoxy" tell you that that "orthodoxy" is about how inclusive you can be.

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