Four Reasons Why You Can’t Believe Both Genesis And Evolution At The Same Time

1. In Genesis, God is the central figure, creating, shaping, evaluating, blessing, commanding. But the evolution concept was deliberately devised to make God unnecessary. As Charles Darwin himself put it, in a letter to the British geologist Charles Lyell shortly after the publication of Origin of Species:

   I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent. . . . If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish.
   

   (cited in Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. 1995. The Sciences35(3):34-40)
   

2. When we attempt to add God onto an evolutionary worldview, we inevitably find that we have seriously distorted the character of God as seen in the Bible.
   

   What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin’s Galápagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror. . . .
   Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may be like, He is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not. He is also not a loving God who cares about His productions. . . . The God of the Galápagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.
   

   (David L. Hull, The God of the Galápagos. 1991. Nature 352:485f.)
   

3. If evolution is true, then death came before sin, and death therefore cannot be the penalty for sin. This completely undermines the gospel of Christ.
   

   Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god. . . . If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing!
   

   (G. Richard Bozarth, The Meaning of Evolution. American Atheist, Feb 1978, pp. 19, 30)
   

4. The order of events in Genesis contradicts the order given by the standard evolutionary story. In Genesis (but contrary to evolution):
   
   • The Earth existed before light energy, and before the Sun and stars.
     
   • Initially the Earth was cool (covered by water); land appeared later.
     
   • Plant life existed before the Sun was formed.
     
   • Fruit trees (land organisms!) existed before fish or any marine life.
     
   • Birds and flowering plants existed before insects (“creeping things”).
     
   • Birds existed before dinosaurs.
     
   • Adult chickens existed before eggs.
     
   • Man and dinosaurs existed at the same time.
     
   • Man existed before rain, before any animals became carnivores, before any mass extinctions, and before any fossils were formed.