Most Christians 'believe' Evolution because they do NOT know what their Bible says. If, as they say, they 'believe' the words of Jesus and the New Testament writers, they have to decide what the following verses mean:
Acts 17:26-27
26. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.
27. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.
Romans 5:12-21
12. Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned--
13. for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law.
14. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.
15. But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!
16. Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification.
17. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
18. Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men.
19. For just as through the disobedience of the one man, the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
20. The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more,
21. so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
If there were no
one man, that means SIN did NOT enter the World thru him.If
Adam was NOT the one man, that means SPIRITUAL DEATH did not come thru him.If SIN did NOT enter the World thru the
one man, that means Jesus does not save from SIN.Are we to believe that the
one man is symbolic? Does that mean Jesus is symbolic as well?The Theory of Evolution states that there WAS no one man, but a wide population that managed to inherit that last mutated gene that makes MEN different from APES.
Acts 17:24-26 24. "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. Was LUKE wrong about this? 1 Corinthians 11:8-9 1 Timothy 2:13
If so, is GOD so puny that He allows this 'inaccuracy' in His Word?? |
What I find bizarre about the allegory argument is that one almost couldn't write a worse piece of allegory.
Paul and Luke got that part of the story a little bit mangled.
Sin didn't come into the Earth because of one man, Adam. It came into the earth either because of one woman, Eve, or because of two people, a man and a woman, Adam and Eve. Eve committed the original sin. Adam merely followed her lead and seconded it.
So, we need to read Paul in Romans and Luke in Acts as writing poetically, not literally. Taken literally, they are wrong, because they have mistaken Adam for Eve, or Adam alone for Adam and Eve together. Sin didn't come into the world because of one MAN, unless "man" means "woman", or unless "one" means two.
Genesis literally conflicts with Romans and Acts here on this point, if we are going to be literalists.
We really don't need to be that literal, because it's really not important. We live in a world in which mankind has brought sin down upon us all, with the poison of it working through the generations. We need redemption from it, and mitigation of its effects, and we have Jesus and the Church. The poesy of the Adam and Eve story teach a literal message about the reality of sin, but it doesn't matter a jot whether Adam and Eve were as depicted in the Hebrew creation myth, or if they were autralopithecus. Nor does it matter if they ate a particular piece of fruit or not. Nor does it matter than Paul and Luke both got the sex of the first sinner in Genesis wrong, and should have written "because sin came into the world because of one WOMAN" if they were trying to write a literal blow-by-blow account. Truth is, they were males in an ancient society, and Adam was more important to their view of things than Eve, and it doesn't matter that they transposed the first sin, because the Genesis story is an allegory anyway, and the literal blow-by-blow is really quite irrelevant.
Even Jesus said so when he said that "Love your neighbor as you love yourself, and love God above all" was the point of the law and the prophets (which is a nice ancient Jewish way of saying the Torah and the prophetic books).
Literalism ends up being a death trap of faith, because a bunch of men not focused on details, getting their inspiration from a God trying a tell a PARTICULAR story, and NOT trying to tell another one, ends up having conflicts of fact in it.
Indeed, from those conflicts of fact the better lesson is that God didn't intend for us to take the parts like that where the facts are in direct collision literally.
Sort of like Jesus saying that not a jot nor tittle of the law shall be changed, and then saying that men can't divorce their wives even though Deuteronomy - the law - tells them how to. So, Jesus changed THAT jot and tittle. The real lesson there is that what's written in Dueteronomy that conflicted with Jesus actually was NOT inspired by God, in that particular portion, and was a purely human tradition creeping in. Which is why it's bad news to hold up the Bible and call it God. It's got errors in it. Jesus said so.
You yourself highlighted a transpositon error of Paul and Luke: the first sinner wasn't Adam, after all. Sin came into the world via Eve, the first woman, not the first man. (And redemption came into the world by way of the womb of a woman too, let us not forget. Luke and Paul don't stress that, but it warrants stressing).
The letter kills, the spirit sets free. Don't forget that.