You can affirm God as Creator and still ask honestly whether one popular bridge actually carries the weight.
Theistic evolution is the attempt to hold two things at once: the Christian confession that God made all things, and the mainstream scientific account that all living things, humanity included, arose through a long, unguided-looking process of common descent. On this view God is the author of evolution — He used the process the way He uses rain and seasons, and Genesis is read as theological poetry about who and why, not a record of how or when.
I want to begin by taking the position seriously, because the people who hold it are often serious. Many are devout believers — scientists who worship Christ on Sunday and work in genetics on Monday — who feel they are simply refusing to make the Bible say something about biology it never meant to say. They remember how badly the church handled Galileo. They do not want faith held hostage to a scientific claim that might be overturned, and they do not want a young person forced to choose between the lab and the Lord. Those are honorable motives, and a Christian who disagrees with theistic evolution should still be able to say so. But honorable motives do not settle whether the view is true, or whether the bridge it builds can actually bear the doctrinal weight the gospel places on it. I do not think it can, and the cracks show up not in the science but in the text.
The Load-Bearing Wall: A Real Adam
The first strain appears at the historical Adam. Most evolutionary models require humanity to have emerged as a population, not a pair — there was never a first single couple from whom all people descend. To make peace with that, theistic evolution generally has to treat Adam as symbolic: a representative figure, a literary Everyman, or a chieftain God selected from an existing population, rather than the first human from whom the whole race sprang.
The problem is that the New Testament does not treat Adam as a symbol. Paul builds the entire logic of salvation on Adam being just as real and just as historical as Jesus:
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned…
Romans 5:12 (NASB1995)
One man. A specific act. A real entry point for sin and death into a world that did not have them before. Paul then runs a sustained parallel: as in Adam, so in Christ. He makes it explicit elsewhere:
For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.
1 Corinthians 15:21–22 (NASB1995)
The architecture is load-bearing. The reality of the second man depends on the reality of the first. If Adam is a literary device, the parallel wobbles — and Paul’s argument for why the cross fixes anything at all begins to lose its first term. You can try to keep Christ historical while making Adam symbolic, but Paul welds them together on purpose. Pull out the one and you have put a crack in the structure that holds up the other.
The Deeper Strain: Death Before Sin
The second crack runs deeper, and it is the one theistic evolution struggles most to seal. Evolution by natural selection requires death — millions of years of predation, disease, struggle, and extinction are the very engine that produces new forms. Death is not an intruder in that story; it is the mechanism. But Scripture says the exact opposite. Death is not the engine of creation. It is the wage of sin, an enemy that broke into a finished and “very good” world:
The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:23 (NASB1995)
If human death — and the groaning of creation itself — is the result of Adam’s sin, then it cannot also have been the means God used for millions of years before Adam to create. Paul says creation was “subjected to futility” and waits to be “set free from its slavery to corruption” (Romans 8:20–21), as though the brokenness is a wound, not a feature. The theistic evolutionist must say death was present and good and creative for ages before the Fall; the apostle says death is an enemy that came in through sin and that Christ came to destroy:
The last enemy that will be abolished is death.
1 Corinthians 15:26 (NASB1995)
You cannot easily call death both a good tool in the Creator’s hand and the last enemy He must abolish. That is the tension at the center of the bridge, and it is a theological tension, not a scientific one. It would remain even if every fossil were exactly where the textbooks say.
What Jesus Assumed
There is also the matter of what Jesus Himself took for granted. When He taught on marriage, He reached back not to a late-arriving population but to the beginning:
“But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.”
Mark 10:6 (NASB1995)
From the beginning — not after billions of years of one creature becoming another. Jesus locates the first human pair at the start, not at the end of a long branching tree. A believer who trusts Christ’s authority has to reckon with the fact that Christ read Genesis as describing real beginnings and real first people.
Naming the Real Question
Let me be careful and fair here, because caricature helps no one. Believers in theistic evolution are not denying that God is Creator; they are denying a particular timeline and mechanism, and they are usually doing it because they think the scientific consensus is simply too strong to resist. The honest question, then, is not “do you love Jesus?” — many of them plainly do. The honest question is: when the biblical text and a reigning scientific model pull in opposite directions on a doctrine the gospel depends on, which one gets to be the fixed point?
Theistic evolution, by design, makes the text the variable and the model the constant — Genesis is re-read to fit common descent. The older Christian instinct is the reverse: where the gospel hangs on a historical Adam and a death that came through sin, the text is the constant, and we hold the science more loosely, knowing that scientific consensus has been revised before and will be again. This is not anti-science. It is an honest ordering of authorities. The man who says “the Word of God is my fixed point” is not afraid of evidence; he is simply not willing to dissolve the foundation of the gospel to keep step with a model that is still moving.
Why It Matters
Some will ask whether this is worth the argument. It is — not because we must win a debate, but because the gospel itself is on the table. The good news is that the second Adam undid what the first Adam did. Strip the first Adam of his history, and the second Adam’s work loses its shape. Make death a good and ancient tool rather than a defeated enemy, and the resurrection becomes less a triumph and more a footnote. The doctrines stand or fall together.
So weigh the bridge honestly. Hold your scientific questions with an open hand — there is genuine mystery in the rocks and the genome, and humility belongs to everyone in this conversation. But hold the text where the text speaks plainly and the gospel leans its full weight: one man, real sin, real death, and one greater Man who entered our death to end it. The Creator who spoke galaxies into being did not need eons of death to make a man. He formed him from the dust, breathed life into him, and one day will raise our dust to life again. That is a Creator worth trusting all the way down — and a story too important to quietly rewrite.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist