Believers are Evolutionists
by Perry Kemplin
Denton, Texas

I've gone through a million miles of print and words about evolution, including a three-credit course at Villanova University on the subject. I recently sat in on a dissertation about Evolution vs. Creation and that called for a thought or two.


It is time to note that all believers in the Bible and in our Lord Jesus Christ are believers in evolution; we are just not believers in the Darwinian variety or the atheistic variety. The word, evolution, is properly described as change. The opposite term is devolution which also denotes change but of a negative nature.

The first chapter of Genesis gives the wondrous change from a world that was waste and void to a world of sun, moon, stars, life, and all of the needed appurtenances of life. That is God's kind of evolution. I love it.

Christians believe that there was a developmental change of an even more wondrous nature from Adam and death to Jesus and life. We use a relatively short time span for that. During that time promises were given and deeds were done. The promises of God were fulfilled and the deeds (of a relatively instantaneous nature) were set in as a part of developmental process. There was the Passover with life relating to the blood, life coming out of the death scene of the flood, life when Isaac was spared the knife, the forgiveness of Joseph, the heavenly trip of Elijah, the domination of the physical by Samson, the law giving of Moses, the kingship of David--and much much more. I will coin a term and call these preliminaries Jesus-oids. I do not know why God evolved the matter as He did, but that is the way He evolved the process of our salvation. We are surrounded by evolutions. A fertilized cell normally takes nine months to be ready for birth, and there is a lot of evolving to do after that. We are surrounded by a myriad of developmental schedules that quite properly come under the term evolution. It would help our cause if we would be more careful and accurate with our terminologies.

It is interesting to note the way God works as well as the way He reveals His way to us. He does a gradual buildup of electrical tension and then there is the instantaneousness of lightning. There was a promise to Abraham, then a gradualization for 400 years, and then the relatively sudden (just ask Pharaoh) departure as a nation from Egypt. We find much of the gradual buildup with preliminary indications followed by sudden action. We see a lot of this in the workings of God and it could be one of the better arguments for the 24/6 idea of Creation. The day/yom argument falls rather flat and becomes somewhat of an embarrassment to serious students of the Word. Yom was the all-inclusive time word in the Hebrew language.


I listened to the thought of man and dinosaurs being contemporaries because someone found a drawing of a man next to a drawing that certainly appeared to be a dinosaur. But it occurred to me that our civilization might well end (they always have in the past). So, two thousand or so years from now some diggers and observers note pictures and statues and such like in about the year 2004. The pictures include people with the dinosaurs. Conclusion: people and dinosaurs lived together in the year 2004. And I might add that the Indians of the thousands of years before us had the same dinosaur bones available to them that are available to us. We need to be cautious and careful with our argumentations.

Back to Contents Does God Exist?, MayJun05.