The usual frame is science against Scripture. The harder question is whose reading of Genesis you are overruling.
Theistic evolution is the most reasonable-sounding position in the room, and it is worth saying plainly why. It hands the mechanism to biology and the meaning to theology, and it lets a believer stop fighting on a front he never wanted to fight on. God is the Creator. Evolution is how He did it. The war is over and everyone goes home.
Say the honest thing first: many who hold this view are serious Christians who love the Bible, believe the resurrection, and are not looking for a way around the text. Their motive is frequently evangelistic. They watch bright young believers walk away from the faith over a science class, and they want to remove a stumbling block they consider unnecessary. That is not cowardice. It is pastoral instinct, and it deserves a real answer rather than a caricature.
But the answer cannot be given at the level most of these arguments are fought on. The question is not first whether the Hebrew of Genesis 1 permits a long process. The question is how the New Testament writers, and Jesus Himself, actually handled these chapters. Because they did handle them, repeatedly, and never as poetry about God in general.
Jesus Argues From the Detail, Not Just the Theme
When the Pharisees came testing Him about divorce, Jesus did not answer from Deuteronomy, where the divorce law actually is. He went back further.
And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE, and said, FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH?”
Matthew 19:4-5, NASB1995
Mark records the same exchange with a phrase worth weighing carefully: “But from the beginning of creation, God MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE” (Mark 10:6). Jesus places the man and the woman at the beginning of creation, and the placement is not decorative. It is the premise of the argument. Marriage is permanent, He says, because of how and when God made them.
This is where the common appeal to accommodation runs into trouble. Of course Scripture speaks in ordinary human language, and nobody thinks the Bible teaches astronomy when it mentions the sunrise. But there is a difference between using a common idiom and building a binding argument on a specific historical claim. Jesus is doing the second. The detail is not the packaging. The detail is the load-bearing wall.
The Apostles Do the Same Thing, and They Do It Constantly
This is not one text. It is a pattern, and it runs through the whole New Testament in writers with different backgrounds, audiences, and purposes.
- Luke traces the genealogy of Jesus backward, generation by named generation, and does not stop until he reaches “the son of Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38). The careful historian who promised an orderly account does not switch genres partway up the list.
- Paul at Athens, speaking to a philosophically sophisticated pagan audience, grounds the unity of the human race in a single ancestor: “and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26).
- Paul to Timothy builds church practice on the order of formation: “For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve” (1 Timothy 2:13). You do not appeal to a sequence unless you believe the sequence happened.
- Jude counts generations: “Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam” (Jude 14). Categories do not have generations. Families do.
- Peter ties the mockers of the last days to a willful forgetting of two events, the creation by the word of God and the flood (2 Peter 3:5-6).
None of these writers is teaching a class on origins. That is exactly what makes the pattern significant. They are arguing about marriage, about church order, about the unity of the nations, about false teachers, and in every case they reach for Genesis 1 through 11 as settled history and lean their weight on it.
Where the Weight Actually Falls
The heaviest text is Romans 5, and it is heavy because of its structure rather than any single phrase.
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
Paul is not making a passing historical reference. He is building a parallel, and the parallel is the argument: one man brought in the ruin, one Man brought in the rescue. He returns to it in verse 19 with the same architecture. As by the one man disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous.
He does it again in Corinthians, where the resurrection itself is explained by the same pairing:
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
And a few verses later he names them together with deliberate precision: “So also it is written, The first MAN, Adam, BECAME A LIVING SOUL. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45).
Here is the difficulty, stated as fairly as it can be. If the first Adam is a symbol for humanity in general rather than a particular man at a particular beginning, the parallel does not merely lose some color. It loses its footing on one end while the other end stays historical. The Christ of that sentence is a specific man who died on a specific afternoon under a named governor. Paul is arguing from one to the other. A symbol on one side of a comparison and a crucified man on the other is not the comparison Paul made.
An Honest Distinction Worth Making
It would be dishonest to lump every non-literal reading of Genesis into the same box, so let us not.
An old-earth creationist who holds to a real Adam, specially created, historically fallen, has kept the apostolic structure entirely intact. He may read the days of Genesis 1 differently than his young-earth brother, and that disagreement is genuine and worth arguing carefully. But it is a disagreement about chronology inside a shared framework. Both men can preach Romans 5 without flinching.
Theistic evolution as usually formulated is a different kind of proposal, because common descent by definition means no first pair specially created and no single ancestral couple from whom all men come. That is not a quarrel about the length of a day. It touches the premise the apostles built on. And the versions that keep a historical Adam by placing him as a chosen representative inside an existing population deserve credit for taking the problem seriously, but they still have to answer what Paul means by the first man, and how death entered through him if death was the engine that produced him.
Three Questions for Any Model of Origins
- Can this model preach Romans 5 without an asterisk? Not can it survive Romans 5. Can it preach it, plainly, the way Paul wrote it.
- Does it let Jesus mean what He said in Mark 10:6? From the beginning of creation, male and female.
- What does it do with death? Scripture calls death the last enemy and an intruder that came through sin. A model in which death is the creative mechanism God chose has to explain how the enemy became the instrument.
These are not gotcha questions. They are the questions any believer should be willing to put to his own position first, including this one.
Why It Is Not a Side Issue
Some will say this is all a distraction from the gospel. It would be, if the gospel did not keep reaching back for it.
But the gospel does. The New Testament explains the cross by going back to a garden. It explains the resurrection by naming a first man and a last Adam. It explains why you die, and why you can live, by telling you about two men and what each of them did with the trust he was given. That is not a myth attached to a Savior. That is the frame Paul chose to hold Him in.
So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men.
Romans 5:18, NASB1995
One transgression. One act of righteousness. If you keep both ends of that sentence as real history, the gospel holds together the way the apostles preached it, and Genesis becomes the opening chapter of the same story rather than an embarrassment at the front of the book.
The first man reached for what was not his and buried us. The last Adam gave up what was His and raised us. That is the story, from the beginning.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist