Has Evolution Changed Your Bible?
The impact of Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species is well known. It led many to question the Biblical account of origins or to try to reinterpret it according to biological and geological evolution. Yet the truths of the first few chapters of Scripture are foundational to everything else. Redemption and the Gospel depend on an understanding of creation and the fall, with death being the consequence of sin. Of course, the very reliability and authority of Scripture itself were called into question too.
Darwin’s theory arrived at the time when higher or historical criticism was gathering momentum, and shared many common characteristics with it. Evolution claimed that the world was not what we had previously believed it to be; rather than the handiwork of a Creator, it was instead the random result of the blind progress of impersonal forces slowly developing species through a process of trial and error.
The higher critics likewise asserted that the Bible was not as previously believed; rather than the fully inspired Word of God it was a more man-made document, a patchwork of many dislocated and even contradictory sources and documents… [keep reading]
