Evolution did not sneak up on the Church. It has been aggressively banging on our door for 2,000 years, and even before Christianity, Jews faced similar mythology. Pagans like Greek philosopher Anaximander (610–546 B.C.) taught that human beings originally resembled fish. Democritus (460–370 B.C.) believed that human beings originally spoke unintelligibly, however "gradually they articulated words." Epicurus (341 - 270 B.C.) taught that there was no need to invoke an intelligent designer of the universe, because it supposedly formed by a chance movement of the atoms. You see from just these three examples that Evolutionary ideas have been around for thousands of years, not just 200. In spite of this, it is only within the last 200 years that the Church begun falling for them.
Those who have fallen for them often quip "the Bible isn't meant to be a science book!" And they're right. It's not. What it is supposed to be, however, is the infallible word of God. When adequately translated, there are no errors. This, in itself, is where many Theistic Evolutionists tend to leave the discussion. After all, if you're going to agree with the atheistic creation myth, why not agree with the atheistic assertion that the Bible was written by a bunch of primitive goat herders?
But I'm not here today to address that kind of heretic. I am here to address those who acknowledge the infallibility of Scripture without actually acknowledging what it says. There are those who follow "the Bible isn't a science book" with "Genesis is only supposed to tell us that God created, not how God created". Yet, this strange assertion would lead us to conclude that it took God 299 verses to explain what the Theistic Evolutionist has explained in just one.
As it turns out, Genesis alone has a single verse that tells us that God created. It's simple: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." (Genesis 1:1). There you have just one verse telling us that God created. But God follows that up with 298 other verses, detailing a rather large amount of things that do not make sense if God intended us to accept Evolution. Nor does it seem that any prominent Jewish or Christian author, congregation or denomination did so for the first 1,700 years since Christ ascended into Heaven.
After explaining that God created, Genesis continues to:
- Give a brief overview of how God created, including detailing the 6 day period it took for God to finish the job.
- Tell us how wonderful it was when that job was finished.
- Tell us what God did after finishing that job.
- Zoom in on the 6th day, in which the first, and at that time only two people were created.
- Explain why the wonderful job God did ended up becoming not so wonderful, particularly why there is sin and death in the world despite God creating neither of these things.
- Give a detailed genealogy from Adam to Noah, including the age of each patriarch when they begat the next.
- Explain who Noah is, specifically noting that he and 7 of his family members were the only survivors of a global flood, which killed all land-dwelling, air-breathing life except that which was on his boat.
- Explain that God would never send an identical flood again.
- Give yet another detailed genealogy from Noah and his sons, explaining how all nations are descended from them.
- Tell us about a time when humanity as a whole was all gathered in one place, and God confused their languages so they'd split off and form the aforementioned nations.
And the rest of the Bible repeatedly refers back to all of this as an authoritative, historical foundation for a number of very important theological issues! In other words, not only is God rather intent that we be Creationists, but if we disobey Him in this, we end up disobeying Him on a lot of other things, too. Evolution, in its modern form, is a scam designed to destroy the Christian faith. For proof of this, let us look no further than the words of the man himself, Charles Darwin: "I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament (...) was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian". My brethren, it is imperative that we, as Christians, maintain our historical position on Creationism, for our book is certainly to be more trusted than the beliefs of any barbarian. Why? Because the words of the Lord are pure. If you don't believe that, you may as well do what Darwin hoped his "theory" would cause you to do: apostatise.