theistic evolution

as I mentioned yesterday, I read the book Who Was Adam last month.

It was interesting, but I kept having a recurring question pop into my head. The question is “why?” Why would God limit himself (in part) to naturalistic processes and a multi-billion year timeline? Why would he create several different kinds of hominids prior to creating Adam and Eve? Why? Why would God have to wait until “just the right time” to create human beings? Why wouldn’t he just create the right time and the humans for it all at the same time? If he did that, then why create the appearance of age with a fossil record and everything?

Challies mentions the book Tactics by Greg Koukl.

As quoted by Challies, Greg says the following:

These two notions, however, seem incompatible to me. It may sound reasonable for God to “use” evolution, but if you look closer I think you will see the problem.

Suppose I wanted a straight flush for a hand of poker. I could either pull the cards out of the deck individually and “design” the hand, or I could shuffle the cards randomly and see if the flush is dealt to me. It would not make any sense, though, to “design” the hand by shuffling the deck and dealing. There’s no way to ensure the results. (I guess if I were really clever I could make it look like I was shuffling the deck when in reality I was stacking it, but that would be a deceitful kind of design called “cheating.”).

In the same way, either God designs the details of the biological world, or nature shuffles the deck and natural selection chooses the winning hand. The mechanism is either conscious and intentional (design), or unconscious and unintentional (natural selection). Creation has a purpose, a goal. Evolution is accidental, like a straight flush dealt to a poker rookie.

The idea that something is designed by chance is contradictory. Like trying to put a square peg in a round hole, this just doesn’t fit.

That is why I have always been a young earth creationist, to the extent I worried about it very much. But I still wonder why God made the earth with the appearance of age.

just a mystery to ponder. Deuteronomy 29:29.