God and evolution

tdavis@mcis.messiah.edu
Tue, 28 Jan 97 11:44:00 -0500

I agree with David Eby and Terry Gray, indeed
strongly agree with both. My statements were
deliberately brief and (perhaps) not as
direct as I might have liked on this issue.

In particular, Terry is "right on" about Darwinism
and Calvinism -- a point Jim Moore made some years
before Livingstone. Evil (formally, theodicy) is
the ultimate conundrum. This is why I have been
saying that YECs can't accept an old earth, precisely
because of what death before the fall implies about
theodicy: they can't make sense of all death coming
from Adam. Evolution compounds this: if we assert
that God's means of creation is evolution, then we
get God creating "higgedly-piggedly," as the
fundamentalists would have said in the 1920s, and
apparently creating by "evil" means that employ
death, extinction, etc.

Calvinism might offer some ways to get at this,
with foreknowledge of the fall and all that, but
it still isn't easy.

Of course, we knew that, didn't we?

The fact is that God didn't make heaven now, and may
have made the world he did make with "evil" (as I
defined it above) built into it. If so, then theodicy
ought to turn not to creation for answers, but to
redemption. GOD suffered unto death. What does
this suggest about suffering and "evil"?

Ted Davis