Echoes in Eternity

Doug Wilson rightly calls Bruce Waltke, a renowned Old Testament scholar, to account for his poor reasoning that Christians should support evolution as the explanation of how everything came to be (see at the bottom of this post for the video of what Waltke said).

There are (at least) five confusions here.

First, he wants to say that if we believe that the Lord is the Giver and Creator of all life, and we do so in a way that is not approved by our secularist betters, then that means we have embraced death. To simply accept "what God says" is actually cultic. There is something counterintuitive in there somewhere.

Second, Waltke confounds "what the data requires" with "what secularists stubbornly say that the data requires." All truth is indeed God's truth, but it does not follow from this that all lies are God's truth. Suppose the data don't constitute overwhelming evidence for evolution? Suppose Christians surrender on Darwin unnecessarily? What are we embracing then?

Third, as mentioned above, he says that refusal to believe in evolution is to embrace spiritual death. But the evolutionary account of our world points to a record of death. What is the fossil record but a massive column of dead bodies? If God created by evolutionary means, then nature red in tooth and claw is "very good," and God doesn't have the problem with death that we thought He did. So maybe it might be a good thing to embrace spiritual death. Or did I miss something?

Fourth, there is a difference between "staying in the discussion" with unbelievers and sitting down and believing what you are told by unbelievers to believe. Paul was in a real dialogue with the philosophers on Mars Hill, and it did not consist of him getting into a high chair and having them cut his meat for him.

Fifth, this displays, as few other things could, the utter irrelevance of the lust for relevance.