<<In 2 Peter 3:4-7, I see a God who intervenes in dramatic
ways....So I have a question: How does the picture of God portrayed here fit
with the oft-expressed idea that God "created" the world through the laws that
ordinarily govern the universe (I hope I'm not the only one who sees a
tension here)?>>
The Bible also teaches a God who creates ex nihilo (out of nothing), which is
another hurdle for TE (rather, it creates a presumption in its favor, which I
don't see TE overcoming).
There are other major problems with TE. To quote Wheaton's P.P.T. Pun:
"If man is a product of the chance events of natural selection, [TEs] have the
problem of convincing the secular world of the biblical basis of humans as
created in the image of God and of the first sin....In their efforts to
reconcile the naturalistic and theistic approaches to the origin of life they
have inadvertently put themselves into the inconsistent position of denying
the miracles of creation while maintaining the supernatrual nature of the
Christian message....This runs into the difficulty....of compartmentalizing
reality into separate spiritual and physical realms...." [from "Evolution" in
Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Baker)]
TE sprang up as a way to accomodate modern science, just as Berkhof expressed
in his quote, 'theistic evolution is really a child of embarrassment'. We must
travel back to Scopes to understand the desire to escape such embarrassment,
which persists to this day. Anyway, this motivation causes some Christians to
"reach" for TE justification, IMO. Terry Gray, for example, has formulated his
doctrine in part upon his church's creed (see his post of Tue, 7 May 1996).
Howard Van Till reaches his "gapless developmental economy" in part through a
creative reading of Augustine. As an evangelical, I have a slight problem with
these extra-biblical justifications.
The final, major problem is the TE's overconfidence in the data as interpreted
through naturalistic science. The more we see that the Darwinian emperor has
no clothes, the more uncomfortable it's going to get for TEs, who will have to
admit they were oversold.
Jim