The drive to adjust one's interpretation of the first few chapters of Genesis to the evolutionary paradigm and promote such a synthesis to Evangelicalism has been the raison d'etre of the Biologos foundation. Such a move is perceived to help the church to be not seen as dinosaurs, and thus help the church to reach the culture. Many who reject a 6-day creation narrative see holding to such an "outdated" view as wrong, and a major stumbling block to the church reaching out to modern Man. However, are holding variant views that are more accommodating to the prevailing evolutionary paradigm actually helping to reach people for Christ?
Recently, the Biologos Foundation has teamed up with the Templeton Foundation for funding Biologos'"Evolution and Christian Faith" program, a program to research how holding to evolution can function while holding on to some form of historic Christian orthodoxy. However, the atheists do not seem to be impressed. An atheist has lambasted Biologos' program as accomodationism which seeks to yoke two incompatible systems together. As he mocked,
These projects, but especially the one above [on stating that God must be hidden and utilize gradual creation in order to accomplish His purposes], are an insult to rationality. How can these scholars look in the mirror each day knowing that they’re taking money for such ludicrous projects? I can imagine Dr. Muller [sic], while shaving, telling himself, “Okay, today I’m going to make up more reasons why God is hidden.”
The translation of the above is that God should create gradually (i.e., through evolution) so that we can still remain naturalists about most stuff while the shy deity remains hidden. But God could still have done that by creating everything instantly and then leaving it unchanged. After all, we don’t have to have evolution to remain naturalists. And if God works miracles with Jesus, virgin births, and so on, doesn’t that dispel naturalism, too?
It’s amazing to me that, rather than interpret the “hiddenness of God” as evidence against God, theologians twist their brains into knots trying to explain why God would actually want to remain hidden.
As Delos McKown said, “The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike.” Much as projects like this anger me, they make me even sadder, for it shows an irremediable credulity of some humans, who waste their valuable time on this planet trying to explain why an interventionist deity can’t show Himself too obviously.
Unbelievers are not stupid. Unbelief is a moral defect, not an intellectual defect. And on some issues, unbelievers see more clearly the truth of the issue. No matter how much one tries to parse it, there is simply no way to logically accept both evolution and the Christian faith. As the atheist implies, it is ridiculous "why an interventionist deity can't show Himself too obviously," or better phrased, it is ludicrous to say that a God who says that He creates in a certain way leaves behind evidences that show that no one was creating in any way as stated in the Scriptures.
People can see when Christians are denying or redefining what our Scriptures itself teaches, in order to be more like them, and they despise such compromisers. Why then do we want to tone down what the Scriptures teach? Instead of amending the plain teaching of Scripture, we should take the fight to them, and attack their false idol of evolutionism at its core as having a defective epistemology, a defective philosophy of science, and defective science.
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