NEW YORK (ABP) – A Southern Baptist leader in the news recently for saying Christians must accept belief in a literal Adam and Eve said Sept. 22 on National Public Radio that he doesn’t buy attempts to reconcile the Bible and science when it comes to human evolution.
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, appeared on Talk of the Nation following up a program he did last month about evangelical response to genome mapping that proves there was never an original human population below about 10,000 people at any time in evolutionary history.
Daniel Harlow, religion professor at Calvin College, said his students learn that the early chapters of Genesis are “divinely inspired story, not documentary history” and that Adam and Eve are not central to biblical theology.
Mohler said no one would have thought such a thing until modern science issued a contrary and “privileged word to say.”
“The problem with that logic is that it has absolutely no end,” Mohler said. “The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the central fact of the gospel story, and yet there is no scientific basis for making that argument. And quite frankly, modern science — in terms of its naturalism and materialism — generally rules completely out of order even the question of supernatural events.”
Mohler said allowing modern science to determine what one can and cannot theologically affirm “is a disastrous route” in understanding sin and salvation.
“If the Bible is not the authoritative source for that and instead has to be corrected by modern science, then the Bible is just there for our manipulation, and quite frankly, the gospel is there for constant renegotiation,” Mohler said. “It ends up being another gospel, the very thing the apostle Paul warned against.”
Mohler repeated his earlier argument that much is at stake in denying there was a historical Fall. “That is a direct refutation of the major storyline of the Bible,” he said. “It's a direct refutation of what the apostles tell us Christ came to do for us in saving us from our sins. It is a rejection of the human moral agency that is absolutely vital to understanding why we are guilty before our creator.”
Despite all that, Mohler said evangelical Christians have nothing to fear from “legitimate science.”
“It's scientism and it's the naturalism that is the problem,” Mohler said. “I'm perfectly willing for science to tell me what the scientists are working on and how they believe the world is working. I cannot draw my conclusions about the Bible, about the gospel, from them.”
At the end of the day, Mohler said he believes there will be no final conflict between “Christian truth revealed in the Scriptures and true science.”
“But in the meantime, it's just not fair to say you have two different realms that don't overlap,” he said. “It's not just a ‘how’ and a ‘who.’ The claims of modern science go far beyond merely a ‘how,’ and the claims of the Scripture go far beyond merely a ‘who.’”
Mohler concluded: “Only of late, only those who come to the Scripture — and with a prior agenda coming from modern science — only those who try to bring genomic evidence and other things to say Genesis doesn't mean what any straightforward honest reader would think that it means.”
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Bob Allen is managing editor of Associated Baptist Press.