Westside church of Christ - Irving, Texas

Evolution Sunday

by Mark Roberts

Westside misses it again! Once again Westside blew it. We're just so stuck in the dark ages, I guess. Somehow we missed Evolution Sunday! Evolution Sunday, you ask? Yes, that is the date that hundreds of churches all across the country sing the praises of evolution!

Steve Blow wrote a column about it in the Dallas Morning News recently. His column was miserably biased and a good example of how the media loves to make Bible believers look like morons. Blow interviewed Rev. Timothy McLemore, the senior pastor at Kessler Park United Methodist Church in Oak Cliff and finds McLemore saying "Evolution Sunday offers an opportunity to educate our congregations that science is a gift. If we believe God is truth, we don't need to shrink from truth in whatever way it presents itself. We don't have to be threatened."

Who would argue with that? Bible-believers are not threatened by truth. The article goes on to say, however, "Evolution is well settled among scientists but remains controversial in some religious circles. Dr. McLemore said, 'because it strikes at the heart of how we interpret the Bible.'"

Now wait just a moment. When did evolution become "well settled?" McLemore has been fooled, along with the mainstream media, into thinking that all of science is in agreement about the theory of evolution. That is totally not true. First, scientists who do believe in evolution don't all agree about the how, when, and where of evolution. Secondly, scientists are not unaminiously agreed on evolution by any means. In fact, Ben Stein is releasing a major motion picture this spring titled Expelled which documents how bigtime, credentialed scientists who make the mistake of publicly disagreeing with evolution get ridden out on a rail. Big-science is afraid of dissenters and works very hard to squelch these people. Wait a minute. I thought McLemore said Christians were threatened by the truth?

McLemore goes on to say that he does believe the Bible, but in a limited way. He says "The Bible is true when it teaches who God is and what God is like. The Bible is true when it describes the human condition. The Bible is true when it teaches us about human relationships." The column talks of how McLemore grew up in a very strict Bible-believing background but began to question that. The column then says "That search ultimately led him away from the intellectual contortions required by biblical literalism." I wonder if the columnist means that deciding when the Bible is true and when it is not true doesn't require intellectual contortions? That looked very contorted to me!

Blow concludes by saying "Evolution Sunday is an outgrowth of The Clergy Letter Project. Dr. McLemore is among more than 11,000 clergy who have signed an open letter calling for evolution to be taught in schools as settled science. The letter says in part: 'We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as 'one theory among others' is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.'"

So somehow Westside missed Evolution Sunday. What were we thinking? Apparently we should've taught people that evolution is "settled science." When we did that, of course, that would mean as well that we were teaching people that Genesis 1 and 2 are not literally true. That might cause some of the sharper cookies in the audience to wonder if Genesis 3 isn't literally true either, and how did we know that the myths ended in chapter 2 and truth began in chapter 3? I guess we'll have to call Timothy McLemore over and get him to go through the Bible a chapter at a time for us telling us "yes" or "no" because we sure wouldn't want to get involved in the intellectual contortions believing the Bible causes! And I guess we'll stop believing in Jesus too. After all Jesus said "God made them male and female" (Mt 19:4) and that isn't right. If Jesus was wrong about that wonder what else He was wrong about? We will also stop believing in Paul because he appeals to creation several times as well (for example 1 Cor 11; 1 Tim 2:13). In fact, since Creation is one of the primary reason that we are to obey God - we are the created and thus subject to the Creator (see Romans 1:19 for example) - we'll quit teaching about obeying God too. Maybe by the time we get done with Evolution Sunday folks won't even need to come to church!

A final note: there is no way to harmonize Darwinian evolution with the biblical account of creation. Evolution is bad science and not the truth. Evolution is like a fishing net - a bunch of holes held together with a piece of string. Don't be intimidated by it and the mainstream media's love affair with it. Further, bending the Bible to accommodate man's latest schemes is a terrible mistake. In the end, when Darwin's name has long been forgotten God's Word will still stand strong and true. "Let God be true and every man a liar" (Romans 3:4).

Related

Abundant Life: May 2008