To preclude the conflation of them (either through ignorance -- or in deliberate attempt to confuse the issues for dogmatic purposes -- I propose (and have long been using) the following:
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The universe DEVELOPED from its inception state into its current state (IMHO, under the plan, design and guidance of our Creator).
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According to Darwin, et al, life "EVOLVED" (under the "random" driving force of mutation[s]) -- purely without guidance.
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As far as I have been able to determine, LIFE also DEVELOPED from its inception state into its current state (IMHO, under the plan, design and guidance of our Creator).
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So... for clarity, (and to avoid the opprobrium attached to it) I propose that we "ONLY" use the term, "EVOLUTION" and its derivitaves -- when specifically discussing "BIOLOGICAL DARWINISM" and its derivatives.
And, that we use the term, "DEVELOPMENT" and its derivatives when discussing "how things -- both living and cosmological -- came to be as they now are" .
The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, coupled with In the beginning was The Word and The Word was with God and was God ... and without Him was nothing made ... well coupling those two need not have a temporal limits added which is not stated by God about His methodology. With ALL of time, God could allow a random system to run until The Word to be made flesh and dwell among us became possible in the parameters of the random processes. It would still be God's doing, not randomness manifesting.
And, that we use the term, "DEVELOPMENT" and its derivatives when discussing "how things -- both living and cosmological -- came to be as they now are" .
Now either God spoke and revealed Himself to man in Jesus Christ or He didn't. If He did then we know that He spoke creation into existence in six days. All of the early Church Fathers who wrote on Genesis expounded the literal six day creation. For instance, St. Cyril of Alexandria argued that higher theological, spiritual meaning is founded upon humble, simple faith in the literal and historic meaning of Genesis and one cannot apprehend rightly the Scriptures without believing in the historical reality of the events and people they describe. (Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, Fr. Seraphim Rose, p. 40)
In the integral worldview teachings of the Fathers, neither the literal nor historical meaning of the Revelations of the pre-incarnate Jesus, the Angel who spoke to Moses, can be regarded as expendable. There are at least four critically important reasons why. First, to wrest and distort Genesis so as to conform it to Big Bang and other secular scientific assumptions is to contradict and usurp the authority of God, ultimately deny the deity of Jesus Christ; twist, distort, add to and subtract from the entire Bible and finally, to imperil the salvation of believers.
It matters not that Hugh Ross arrogantly appropriates God as the igniter of his Big Bang system or not because the consequences remain the same. By consequences, I mean application of Big Bang and old earth assumptions to the Bible results in an upside-down exegesis consisting of an abundance of inconsistencies that imperil the salvation of believers.
Hugh Ross's inverted creation account is in the claim of a six day creation that occurred at the end of billions of years of evolutionary process. Logically, this means that billions of creatures lived and died long before man arrived on the scene, making the Word (John 1:1), our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ the cause of death and suffering rather than the fall of Adam. By making the fossil record the measure of a sequence of long ages, God becomes the cause of death and suffering because the history of life appears to be a record of ineptitude, extinctions and constant brutality for billions of years. In the words of the atheist astronomer and evolution promoter Carl Sagan (1934-1996), if God,
"....is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why is he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition." (Refuting Compromise, Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D., F.M., p. 220)
The Big Bang, old earth view also leads to a philosophy of moral relativism because if men were once something else, a genderless blob of matter and then later on lizards and even later still some kind of ape-like creature, then not only are we going to become something else–maybe divine supermen, god-men, super robots or cosmic beings—but nothing can be said about transgender, ‘gay,’ and lesbianism since all life forms ascended from a genderless blob of matter generated by the inexplicable explosion of a Cosmic Egg which may or may not involve a stumbling God shaped and molded by theologians who require Him to ignite the Big Bang.
With regard to soul/spirit, if life arose from chemicals/matter and then billions of years later man evolved from lower life-forms, then his rational nature, his soul, differs not qualitatively but only quantitatively from the beasts. Like beasts, man is not a person but a creature of the earth. Like them he has no spirit—free will, higher mental faculties, and conscience. He is a fleshy androgynous robot or hominid whose brain is organized by the genome and the genome shaped by natural selection.
Dr. Sarfati argues that denial of the literal and historic meaning of Genesis (young earth view) is foundationally the result of 'imposing outside ideas upon the Bible.' Thus, it has 'baneful consequences which don't just stop with Genesis,' but adversely affect many areas. The atheist Frank Zindler enthusiastically agrees:
"The most devastating thing that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve, there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation there is no need of a savior. And I submit that puts Jesus...into the ranks of the unemployed. I think evolution absolutely is the death knell of Christianity." ("Atheism vs. Christianity," 1996, Lita Cosner, creation.com, June 13, 2013)
Westernized evolutionary cosmogonies emerged out of the Renaissance when certain Christian theologians, scientists and scholars rediscovered occult science in the form of Hermeticism and esoteric Cabbala. Then like Pico della Mirandola they claimed the only way to understand and interpret Scripture was through the lens of occult science. When much later Darwin published his theory, highly placed occult-elite Westerners jumped on it and promoted it to the public as science, not because they accepted it, they did not, dialectical theorists for example contemptuously labeled Darwin's theory "vulgar." Darwin's vulgar theory was promoted because occultists and like-minded people required a vehicle for the negation and destruction of the six day account of creation.
Westernized evolutionary cosmogonies posit an inverted exegesis causing men who embrace them to think upside-down. Frank Baumer agrees. He observes that evolution has,
"....persuaded people to think of everything in nature as the fruit of a gradual growth rather than an original creation." The sweeping acceptance of evolutionary thinking means that it is "now difficult if not impossible for an educated man to conceive of a primitive revelation such as traditional Christianity taught, or even of an original natural religion from which men had declined." This difficulty arises because "in an evolving world, perfection obviously lay, not in the past, but in the future." (Religion and Rise of Skepticism, p. 147)
I truly hope not to impute the second part of the above statement to dear spirited.
I also truly hope not to offend anyone by offering the following observations (but will probably manage to do so anyway, may God forgive me):
Hope springs eternal....
The YEC/sola scriptura position seems to want to dump the Revelation of the Book of Nature altogether; and by so doing, inadvertently shifts the Revelations of Christ Incarnate and the Holy Spirit with us into the shadows. The Holy Bible itself becomes the object of worship. The danger here, it seems to me, is that, without the complementing rounding-out and balancing of the other three Revelations, the sola scriptura position places one at risk of falling into a state of bibliolatry — perhaps the most subtle form of idolatry there is.
And we Christians all know that God detests idolatry of any shape or form....
Dear Brother, I am in total agreement with you that the following is the best policy:
...for clarity, (and to avoid the opprobrium attached to it) I propose that we "ONLY" use the term, "EVOLUTION" and its derivatives — when specifically discussing "BIOLOGICAL DARWINISM" and its derivatives.... And, that we use the term, "DEVELOPMENT" and its derivatives when discussing "how things — both living and cosmological — came to be as they now are."I will try to make that my rule, going forward.
Thank you dear Brother in Christ, for your outstanding observations!