Host of "Questions" argues theistic evolution contradicts Christian orthodoxy by positing death existed before Adam's sin, violating Genesis 2:17 and Romans 5:12-17. Since the gospel hinges on Adam's trespass introducing death requiring Christ as the second Adam, accepting billions of pre-fall deaths makes God the author of death rather than man. Consequently, believing in evolution fundamentally alters the explanation of sin and salvation, placing adherents outside traditional Christian doctrine where a literal creation is essential to the narrative of redemption. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Can Evolution Be Christian00:02:09
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All right, welcome to our show called Questions.
The question for today is this Can a person believe in evolution and be a Christian?
Can a person believe in evolution?
And be a Christian.
To flesh the question out a bit more, we've got this Does theistic evolution fall under the banner of Christian orthodoxy?
Can a person believe in evolution and still be a Christian?
Or put another way, is believing in a literal six day creation, a relatively young earth, and a relatively young earth a gospel issue?
Let me say it again Does theistic evolution, right?
So there is a God, but he's using evolution as his tool in order to create the world and create human beings in his image.
Does theistic evolution, that idea, fall under the banner of Christian orthodoxy?
Meaning, maybe it's wrong, maybe it's right, but can I hold to theistic evolution and still be orthodox, still be Christian?
Or, put another way, can a person believe in evolution and still be a Christian?
Or, put another way, is believing in a six day, a literal six day creation, six 24 hour days, and therefore from that, a relatively young earth, is that idea?
Six day literalist creation.
Is that idea, young earth, a gospel issue?
Is it primary?
Is it necessary?
Is it salvific?
Is it necessary to be orthodox?
All right, so here are my thoughts.
One, one thought.
And this is the biggest thought.
This gets to the heart of the question whether or not it's a gospel issue, whether or not this makes the difference in orthodoxy or being outside of orthodoxy.
Is Young Earth a Gospel Issue00:08:26
The Bible says that through sin, Death entered the world.
Let's just use the Bible.
Let's look at this.
All right.
This is Genesis chapter 2, verse 17.
So let's start with Genesis.
Genesis chapter 2, verse 17.
All right, it says, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.
Right?
So, man, in the day, and not a day before, not a single day before, not a minute before, not a second before, not a moment before, but only if you eat of the tree that I forbid you from eating from, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
If you disobey, if you sin, You shall surely die.
So, right there, we see that death enters the world through sin.
Now, if you feel like, well, I don't know if that was clear enough, okay, then let's just make it really clear.
Romans chapter 5, verse 12 through 17.
Romans chapter 5.
All right, here we go.
Romans chapter 5, verse 12 through 17, starting verse 12.
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned, for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given.
He's speaking of the law given at Mount Sinai, the law given on tablets of stone, the Ten Commandments, Moses, right?
Israel wandering in the desert.
So ultimately, what Paul's saying is this sin was alive and well in the world.
Long before the law was given through Moses.
The law was given through Moses because of the prevalent sin problem.
But sin was not in the world before Adam sinned.
So, well, maybe it was in the world a second before Adam sinned when Eve sinned.
But even that was Adam's sin because he was there in the garden with her and he abandoned his post.
He was called to provide and protect, provide and protect.
Adam should have stepped right in there the moment the serpent started talking to Eve and said, Hey, talk to me.
Don't talk to my wife.
Talk to me.
What are you saying?
Are you questioning what God said?
Okay, yeah, get out of the garden or I'll kill you.
You're not allowed in the garden.
That was Adam's job to work and keep.
Work and keep.
Work meaning to provide, to nourish, to, I would argue, even to expand the borders of the garden so that the garden would eventually take over the whole earth.
Because Adam, we know that the earth was, when God first created it, it was void.
It was dark and void without form, but then God began to bring sustenance into the world, bring shape, bring form.
But even when God was done with all that, when he lastly created man, the Bible says that he created man in the wilderness, actually.
So there were still wildernesses, deserts, things like that, like we still have today, arid places.
And God created Adam in the wilderness, but then put him in the garden.
He placed him in the garden.
So I believe that Adam, you know, two main commands to work and keep.
Which is ultimately the dominion mandate that he would work, and in his work, he would be nourishing and providing for the garden, and of course, for his wife and posterity, but providing for the garden, and in that, expanding the garden would grow under his care as he worked the ground, worked the garden, worked the fruit and the plants.
They would grow, and the garden would expand and eventually take over all these deserts and wilderness places, and the whole earth would become the garden.
The garden would cover the face of the earth, and so too, he would have to fill.
This ever growing garden with image bearers of the living God by having children and their children having children and children and children.
And so I think that was Adam's thing to work, which is to nourish the garden to where it would expand, advance, and of course, to love his wife and produce children and love them and teach them so that humanity also expanded.
So the garden, the borders are getting bigger and humanity is getting bigger.
But the second command, that's all under the banner of work, but then keep.
That's not provision, but protection.
And when the serpent wandered into the garden and started questioning the integrity of God and what God had said and the validity of what God said, did God really say?
The Bible says that when Eve took of the fruit and ate, Adam was there with her.
So Adam was there.
He saw this occur and he did nothing.
So, all that being said, you could argue that Adam sinned before Eve, even though she ate of the fruit before Adam, he sinned by doing what many men today do, which is abdicating his.
His responsibility of leadership and under the banner of leadership, provide and protect, work and keep.
And he was not in that moment keeping, protecting.
So, all that being said, that's when sin entered the world.
And when sin entered the world, death entered the world.
That's what Paul says.
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, he's talking about Adam, and death through sin, not a moment before.
Death came into the world through sin.
And so death spread to all men because all sinned.
For sin indeed was in the world before the law was given.
So, sin was in the world before Moses, but sin was not in the world before Adam.
And therefore, death came through sin.
So, death was not in the world before Adam.
But sin is not counted where there is no law.
Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, not before, but from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come, a type of Christ, the second Adam.
Verse 15 now.
But the free gift, talking about salvation and justification, but the free gift is not like the trespass.
For if many died through one man's trespass, every person who's ever lived has died.
Because of one man's sin, Adam.
I know there are a couple exceptions.
Enoch was taken up with God, Elijah.
But other than that, every single man has died and will die until Christ returns.
But all this because of one man's sin.
So, for if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man, Jesus Christ, abound for many.
And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin.
For The judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification.
For if because of one man's trespass death reigned through that one man, much more, here it is, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
So, all that being said, here's the point Adam, through one man, Adam, there's two Adams, the first and the last.
The first Adam, He brought sin into the world, into a sinless world.
Until he sinned, there was no sin in the world.
He brought sin into the world.
And when he brought sin into the world through sin, he opened the door, right?
His opening the door was sin.
And then death came through it into the world.
So Adam brought sin into the world.
And by bringing sin into the world, opening the door of sin, he let death into the world.
There was no death before Adam sinned.
And Jesus, as the second Adam, brought righteousness into the world and through it life.
And life abundantly, not only for himself, but for all those who have a union with him by grace through faith.
Okay, so first Adam, last Adam.
This Adam, the first Adam, sinned and brought death.
This Adam obeyed and brought life.
Does Evolution Deny the Gospel00:09:02
Okay, now here's the gospel issue, right?
Is theistic evolution, this idea that God created man, you know, but he did it through evolution, blah, blah.
Is it a gospel issue, right?
Can you, you know, if you hold to that, does it make you outside the banner of orthodoxy?
This is what I would say.
Evolution, in a nutshell, is the idea that you have two, you know, husband and wife, man and woman, you have two fully made, fully functional, healthy, developed Homo sapiens standing on top of a mountain of millions.
Probably billions, perhaps even trillions of bones.
That's evolution.
Evolution in a nutshell is this death made life.
Life started with a single cell organism and it lived for a little bit, but it died.
And out of this primordial soup, eventually you got multiple cell organisms and then you've got the tadpole, and there's maybe hundreds or thousands or millions of them, and they all die, all of them.
Three of them cross the evolutionary threshold and become frogs.
And then blah, blah, blah, blah, species after species after species.
And at first, it's small single celled organ, but eventually you're talking about a Homo erectus and man like creatures, if you hold to evolution.
So far more complex and developed than gorilla or chimpanzee, the missing link, something in between, Lucy, which is just a joke.
We found three bones and we're going to say this, you know.
But so all of that, and again, you have millions of them dying so that a couple can transcend and hit the next evolutionary bump to the higher species and higher species.
So essentially, if you hold to theistic evolution, right, the idea that, okay, it's basically everything that evolution teaches except replace the Big Bang with God.
That's theistic evolution, right?
So instead of the Big Bang, you know, you've got God at the very beginning.
But then God uses evolution as his tool to produce life and specifically the life of Adam and Eve, the life of the human race.
Well, then what you essentially have is you have Adam and Eve standing, not so much on a garden.
They're standing in a garden, sure, but the garden is really a graveyard.
Underneath that garden, those flowers and those plants and fruit, is trillions by this point, if you add up all the different species, trillions of skeletons, skulls, bones.
And then Adam sins against God.
So essentially, what you have is this by the time sin enters the world through Adam, death had long before entered the world.
Death was massively prevalent.
There was virtually nothing but death.
Life, right?
Life was the exception, death was the norm.
Tons and tons and tons and tons of death.
And eventually, it produced the life of Adam and Eve who sinned.
Which ultimately doesn't just mess with Genesis chapter 1 and 2.
And this is what you got to get.
If you mess with Genesis 1 and 2 and 3, then you mess with the whole Bible.
Everything else is on the bedrock of Genesis 1, 2, and 3.
So Romans 5 stems from Genesis 2.
So that's why I read Genesis 2, verse 17.
And then I read Romans 5, verse 12 through 17.
Romans 5, verse 12 through 17 is on the foundation of Genesis 2, verse 17.
And so, if you get rid of the idea of Adam sinning and through his sin, that's how death came into the equation, then ultimately, what you have is not just an undoing of Genesis 2 17, but an undoing of what I read in Romans chapter 5, which undoes Christ.
I mean, the gospel is literally, the gospel is through one man's trespass, sin entered the world, and through sin, death.
And it affected all men.
One man sinned, and that caused all to become sinners and all to be under the threat of death.
But the second Adam, the better man, the God man, by his perfect obedience, he brought life into the world, and that life is given to all those who have faith in him.
Theistic evolution says that that's not true.
The gospel, I think it's a gospel issue.
The gospel is not true.
That one man's sin is not what brought death into the world.
God, Brought death into the world.
And he brought death into the world, not on some minor scale, not because I'm fine with a mitigated entropy.
Just what is mitigated?
Mitigated entropy is just a phrase that I would use just to say that, like, I'm fine with Adam and Eve, for instance, having certain skin cells dying and then new skin cells being reproduced as they're walking with God in the cool of the day before the first sin, before they sinned against God.
And, you know, some troll on YouTube is going to say, see, death was in the world before they sinned.
Okay, mitigated entropy is not the same as trillions of not just single celled organs, a skin cell, but trillions of creatures, multifaceted creatures, including Homo erectus, according to evolution, like almost people, almost man, communicating, talking caveman, basically, millions and millions and millions, and between all the species, trillions dying.
Before sin enters the world.
See, in theistic evolution, in that worldview, you ultimately say man did not bring in the problem of death by his sin, and therefore Christ brought in the solution of life by his obedience.
Instead, God brought in the problem of death, and God lied to Adam when he pinned it on him, saying that Adam's sin was the problem.
Adam, you brought death into the world by sinning.
And then God's snickering in the background.
Actually, I brought in death.
Like, he should look, you know, if he digs six feet under the ground where he's currently standing, he'll find more skeletons than, you know, than anybody could count, right?
And God's, you know, maniacally laughing.
No.
Adam brought death into the world because Adam brought sin in the world.
It's sin.
God created the world and it was good, it was a place of life.
And God's not the author of death.
Man brought death into the world through sin.
And the God man, Christ Jesus, The perfect Adam, the last Adam, he brought life back into a world that had been tarnished by death and destroyed by death because of sin, and he did so by his obedience.
That is the gospel.
And evolution messes up that.
And theistic evolution also still messes up that.
Theistic evolution, just for the record, theistic evolution is evolution to the T. Just replace God with the Big Bang.
And all that does theologically is it just says, God is responsible for death instead of a cosmic accident.
But it still actually indicts.
They think they're giving credit that God exists.
None of this could happen without God.
But what couldn't happen without God?
Trillions of deaths.
God is the author of death.
And Jesus ultimately isn't really even coming back to fix Adam's problem of sin because sin didn't bring death into the world.
God did.
God used death to create life and theistic evolution.
So Jesus is really just coming back to fix God's problem.
So, evolution, I think, denies the gospel.
Theistic evolution, likewise, denies the gospel.
Theistic evolution, evolution says, secular evolution says God doesn't exist.
Theistic evolution says God does exist and it's his fault.
So it's almost even worse.
So theistic evolution, yeah, I don't think it's under the banner of orthodoxy at all.
I think if somebody holds theistic evolution, it's a denial of the gospel.
So there's my thoughts.
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