It is important to Christian doctrine that death came as a result of sin. If death, disease, and bloodshed existed for billions of years prior to Adam’s sin (as the evolutionary worldview tells us), then these things are included as something that God called very good (Gen 1:31) and the curse of Adam’s sin was not all that distinct from processes that had existed since the beginning. Genesis 3:16-19 reads:

To the woman He said, ‘I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing’…Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.

Adam’s sin brought death and pain into the world, but the evolutionary view tells us that death over billions of years brought mankind into the world. Romans 5:12 “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin.” Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death.” The evolutionary worldview tells us that by the countless deaths of billions of intermediates, human kind was brought about. The two views are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled.

Some will say that Adam only brought spiritual death upon himself and his descendants. This argument fails in part because, if it was a spiritual death only, then why did Jesus have to die a horrific physical death to pay the penalty for our sins? If spiritual death was the only punishment for Adam, then why did Jesus not have to die only a spiritual death as payment for sin? But Jesus did die a horrible physical death for our sin (Heb 9). He took every curse of sin upon himself in our place.

Others might say that it was just human death as part of the curse. They contend that animals have been dying for billions of years.  If it was just the physical deaths of only humans that Adam’s sin brought, then why did Jesus sacrifice an animal right there in the garden to cover their sins and nakedness (Gen 3:21)? Why was the picture of covering sins to sacrifice an animal until Jesus came (Ex 24:8)? If evolution were God’s creative mechanism, and the trivial death of animals had been happening for billions of years, would this natural/trivial process be an adequate representation of the excruciating death of the Creator of Life that the Hebrews were told to practice for thousands of years in anticipation of the Messiah (Heb 9:22)? Because the bloodshed of an animal without defect (Ex 12:5, I Pet 1:19) was a picture of the coming bloodshed from the Messiah, it does not align with the theistic evolutionary idea that the curse of sin did not also include animals. People have told me that Adam’s sin brought only human death because animal death is not really bad…it’s part of life. It’s always been part of God’s plan. But this is in direct opposition to 1 Corinthians 15:26 “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Death is not some benign counterpart of life. It is a curse of sin. It is an enemy that we all have to face and that Jesus had to face to pay for our sins.

Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, but Yahweh provided an animal to take his place.

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Genesis 2:18-25 God brought all of the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air to Adam. Adam named them and found that none of them were suitable helpers for him. Once God had made Eve from Adam’s rib, in 3:20 “Adam named his wife Eve because she would become the mother of all the living.” This defeats the argument that there were other pre-Adamic races of people. Some old earth believers say that there were other groups of people with whom the line of Adam could inter-breed, but scripture clearly does not accommodate this view because Adam looked through all of the animals and found none of them suitable as companions. They were all animals that Adam named. In addition to this, the other groups of people would not be eligible to come under the redemption that Jesus provided. To the serpent in the garden, God said,

“And I will cause hostility between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and her offspring.
He will strike your head,
    and you will strike his heel.”

The kinsman redeemer was promised to come from Eve’s descendants and redemption is tied to the blood. Other fictional tribes would not be blood descendants.

Acts 17:26 “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.”

From that passage, you can see that not only does Luke see Adam as a real person, but he states explicitly that there were not pre-Adamic races of people with whom Adam’s family intermarried.

If we look at the words of Charles Darwin from The Descent of Man, we see the inherent racism of an evolutionary mindset:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Do we as Christians want to endorse this racist philosophy by incorporating evolution into our teachings?

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What? How about time-keeping genealogies.

Genesis lays out the genealogies from Adam through Abraham and the actual amount of time between them is easily computed since the genealogies are linked by the father’s ages when each son was born. These genealogies are confirmed in the gospel account of Luke, who actually takes the ancestry from Jesus to Adam. The arguments I have heard from  theistic evolutionists, is that they are incomplete or incorrect, but their arguments are not supported by anything other than eisegesis. Ignoring or disparaging the parts of God’s Word that do not fit a theory is dangerous to the trustworthiness of God’s Word.

The chronologies of the genealogies are calculated to limit the age of the Earth to about 4000 BC. Without the deep time, there could not have been evolution on the grand scale that the theory requires.

UPDATE: Here’s a fantastic video confirming the accuracy of the chronogenealogies. You can skip to minute 22 of the video to see just the specific parts about the genealogies.

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Each day is proclaimed by God to be good or very good.

Genesis 1:10 And God saw that it was good.

• Genesis 1:18 And God saw that it was good.
• Genesis 1:21 And God saw that it was good.
• Genesis 1:25 And God saw that it was good.
• Genesis 1:31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

Since the days are proclaimed as very good and the curse of sin (pain, death, thorns and bloodshed) have yet to be introduced, it is clear that God’s intention for his creation was not to have to experience these sufferings. Throughout scripture this word, good, is used to describe purity, bountiful, prosperous, and excellence. To believe that evolutionary processes (mutations, bloodshed, suffering, and death) have been at work all throughout history prior to Adam’s sin would be to say that God called each of these things very good. Did God proclaim that his creation filled with violence, bloodshed and death is very good? What does this say about the character of God?

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The six days of Genesis are specifically marked with recognizable the boundaries of evening and morning as well as sequential ordinals (i.e. The first day, the second day…)

• Genesis 1:3 And God said, “Let there be light…” and there was evening and there was morning – the first day.
• Genesis 1:6 Then God said, “Let there be a firmament between the waters…” and there was evening and there was morning – the second day
• Genesis 1:9 Then God said, “Let the dry ground appear…” and there was evening and there was morning – the third day
• Genesis 1:14 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the heavens…” and there was evening and there was morning – the fourth day
• Genesis 1:20 Then God said, “Let the waters teem with living creatures…” and there was evening and there was morning – the fifth day
• Genesis 1:24 Then God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kind…” and there was evening and there was morning – the sixth day

It would be correct to say that a day can be used as referencing a period of time (i.e. “In my day…” or “In the days of the Romans…”), but this is not properly applied to the days of Genesis 1 because of the boundaries of evening and morning as well as the ordinals. John Walton, in his book The Lost World of Genesis One seems to think that the days can be interpreted more broadly to incorporate long time frames. But this is inconsistent with the majority of Hebrew scholars:

Walton admits that his view is not one which would be supported by many other scholars (p. 44) and, indeed, this is true. James Barr, who was Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford University, wrote:

“ … probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that

1. creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience

2. the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story.

Walton seems also to have changed his mind regarding the historicity if the Genesis account after getting a grant from BioLogos in 2013 to tour the country because in 2001, he wrote:

“We cannot be content to ask, ‘Can the word bear the meaning I would like it to have?’ We must instead try to determine what the author and audience would have understood from the usage in the context. With this latter issue before us, it is extremely difficult to conclude that anything other than a twenty-four hour day was intended. It is not the text that causes people to think otherwise, only the demands of trying to harmonize with modern science.” -John H. Walton, Genesis, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 81–82

It seems clear that in order to combine the elements that are required for the evolutionary origins story with the Bible, people are having to invent new ways to interpret scriptures. This process is called eisegesis, which is defined as “an interpretation, esp. of Scripture, that expresses the interpreter’s own ideas, bias, or the like, rather than the meaning of the text.” What is truly needed when looking at the scriptures for interpretation is exegesis, which is “critical explanation or interpretation of a text or portion of a text, esp. of the Bible.”

More than anything else, Paul encourages the young believers in the 1^st century churches to beware of false teachers who try to bring their false doctrines into the church. In I Corinthians 11:3, Paul warns the Corinthian church to beware of the temptations that the serpent used to deceive Eve. Looking back in Genesis, we see that the serpent began to put doubt into what God had said. What did the serpent say to Eve in the garden to tempt her? “Did God REALLY say…?” We see this same question come up in regards to the Bible today by those who would try to inject the evolutionary origins story into the Bible. To get it to fit, God’s Word has to be questioned or reinterpreted. “Did God REALLY say that he created in six days?” “Did God REALLY say birds and fish were created on the 5^th day?” When people questioned the validity of God’s Word in the garden, it brought terrible pain for all of mankind. When people question God’s Word today, they are ignoring Paul’s warning to the Corinthians. Paul’s warning to the Corinthians is poignant even today.

Some have said that the days of Genesis refer to eras of creation, or that perhaps the days that are talked about in Genesis 1 are the same types of days that are talked about in the poetic Psalms 90, “For 1000 years in thy sight are like yesterday when it is past.” If it is the case that each day refers to eras of time rather than 24 hour days, then how did the plants (created on day 3) survive for millions of years without the sun (created on day 4) and billions of years without pollinating insects (created on day 5)? How did the carefully balanced ecosystems survive without their symbiotic partners which would have been created millions or billions of years later?

I have heard it said that since the sun was not created until day 4, how could the first three days have been 24 hour days? That is like saying that time could not exist without watches. The sun was not created to MAKE time, it was created for us to measure time as it says in Genesis 1:14-18 “Then God said, “Let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night. Let them be signs to mark the seasons, days, and years. Let these lights in the sky shine down on the earth.” And that is what happened. God made two great lights—the larger one to govern the day, and the smaller one to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set these bodies in the sky to light the earth, to govern the day and night, and to measure time. And God saw that it was good.” It is clear that God created time including days (morning and evening) prior to the creation of the sun. The sun was created in part to be as a time-keeper for us here on Earth.

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