The Evolution of Doubt - BioLogos and the Denial of Inerrancy

I paid a visit to the BioLogos Foundation's website and read through some articles. BioLogos is a group committed to the preaching of evolution as compatible with Christian Scripture and orthodoxy.

In the following comments, I detected the "scared cat" phenomenon which we examined in a recent post. The words are from Darrel Falk, President of BioLogos.

The BioLogos Foundation exists in order that the Church, especially the Evangelical Church, can come to peace with the scientific data which shows unequivocally that the universe is very old and that all of life, including humankind, has been created through a gradual process that has been taking place over the past few billion years. BioLogos exists to show that this fact (and it is a fact), need not, indeed must not, affect our relationship with God, which comes about through Jesus Christ, and is experienced by the power of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling presence. (Emphasis added)

Source

These are what we might describe as "errant presuppositions."

First, "scientific data" is just that: data. To be classified as scientific, a piece of datum has to be observable, repeatable and objective in nature. Evolutionary theory can't be proven, repeated or observed, but is constructed from an interpretation of the available data. The real "fact" is, all of the scientific data lends itself better to a Biblically consistent creation model than to an evolutionary view. Evangelicals can be perfectly at peace with this data, because it beautifully reflects the Truth and fact claims of the Bible. There is no conflict between science and the Bible until one erroneously accepts evolutionary theory as fact. At that point, one is more or less forced to ditch inerrancy.

Why go down the evolution road in the first place? It is unprovable as science, unbiblical as theology, and lacks any viability as a model of origins. Far from scientifically provable or even defensible, evolutionism amounts to little more than a bad guess at history, and one so unnatural as to require supernatural intervention to render it even remotely plausible. Like creation, theistic evolution is a supernatural theory. But unlike creation, it asks us to believe in the wrong miracle. It's approximately equivalent to arguing that Jesus didn't actually die and resurrect, but instead exercised His divine power to make His followers think He did. That would indeed be a miracle, but like theistic evolution it would be the wrong miracle because it is not the Biblical one. Like theistic evolution, it would violently wrench the clear meaning of the text and require a denial of inerrancy. How is it that people who claim to believe in things as intellectually difficult as the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Christ seem to lack the guts to stand up to evolutionary pseudo-science?

Second, the sheer arrogance and folly of any claim to know factually and unquestioningly, apart from divine revelation (or in this case contrary to divine revelation), events that took place in the distant prehistoric past, should be evident to all thinking persons. A callous denigration of Biblical authority is so clearly manifested in the official statements of BioLogos that all Bible believers should unanimously arise to vote down the perpetrators by calling their unbelief exactly what it is: an unorthodox denial of essential Biblical doctrine. Instead, BioLogos has become a haven for scholars like Tremper Longman III and Peter Enns - men who claim to be conservative but hold that the Bible leads us astray in some of its statements. Many who call themselves Evangelical flock there to "discuss" their denial of the Truth.

Here is a curios irony. Scholars who reject inerrancy tell us the Biblical writers absorbed false assumptions from their culture and allowed them to get into the text of Scripture (clearly denying he Holy Spirit's role as the inspiring purifier of their words). Yet these scholars themselves have absorbed evolutionary assumptions from their own culture and allowed those assumptions to distort their views of Scripture (thus elevating their own thinking as superior to the Word). So they are doing the very thing they accuse the Biblical writers of, and they are raising their own reasoning above the clear teaching of God-breathed revelation.

Since God emphatically affirms the inspiration of the Bible, and He makes no such guarantee regarding the works of contemporary Evangelical authors (but actually predicts a great deception with woolly wolves), we have good reason to set our full confidence on the facts as presented in a totally truthful Bible. Rather than rejecting inerrancy, let us summarily reject the fallacies of BioLogos and its scholars.