Paul says creation is groaning and waiting to be delivered. Theistic evolution has to explain what it is groaning about.
Most arguments about theistic evolution get stuck in Genesis and never leave. How long is a day. Whether the genealogies are tight or gapped. What yom can carry. Those are real questions and honest believers land in different places on them.
But there is a passage outside Genesis that puts the question with more force, and it is rarely brought into the room. It is Paul, writing to Rome, in the middle of the greatest chapter in his greatest letter — and he is not doing origins. He is doing hope.
For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. (Romans 8:20–22, KJV)
Two KJV words are doing heavy lifting there and both are easy to skim past. Creature here does not mean an animal; it is the created order, the whole thing. And vanity does not mean conceit — it means futility, emptiness, a thing running and producing nothing. The creation, Paul says, was made subject to futility. Passive voice, by someone’s decision, at a point in time. And it is groaning under it now, like a woman in labor, waiting to be let out.
Now put that next to the standard theistic-evolutionary account and ask a simple question: when did the subjecting happen?
The Shape of the Problem
Let me state the view fairly, because it is held by serious Christians who love the Lord and are not trying to evacuate the Bible.
Theistic evolution — or evolutionary creation, as many prefer — holds that God is the Creator and that the mechanism He used was the long process biology describes: descent with modification, natural selection, deep time. On this view the fossil record is a record of God’s creating, not of a curse. Death, predation, disease, and extinction are not intruders in the system. They are the system. Selection cannot operate without differential death. Remove the dying and the mechanism stops.
That is not a caricature. It is the position, stated by its own advocates: the process that produced us runs on death, and God chose that process.
Which leaves Romans 8 sitting there with a question. If death and futility are original features of the design, then the groaning Paul hears is not a wound. It is the engine noise. And the deliverance he promises is not a restoration of anything — it is the cancellation of the method God chose in the first place.
Three Words Paul Uses That Resist That Reading
Look at the vocabulary, because Paul’s word choices are not decorative.
- “Was made subject.” Passive, and Paul specifies an agent — him who hath subjected the same. This is an act performed on creation, not a description of how creation was assembled. Something was imposed. You do not impose a design feature; you install it.
- “Not willingly.” Creation did not volunteer. Paul personifies the created order as an unwilling party to its own condition. That is strange language for a state of affairs that was always the plan.
- “Bondage of corruption.” Not process. Not development. Bondage. Slavery. A condition to be delivered from, and the deliverance is set in parallel with the redemption of our bodies four verses later. Whatever happened to creation is in the same category as what happened to us — and what happened to us was not a design stage.
And Paul is not innovating. He is reading Genesis 3, where God says the ground itself is cursed for thy sake (Genesis 3:17, KJV), and thorns and thistles enter the picture as a consequence of a man’s act. The curse in Genesis lands on the soil, not merely on the sinner. Paul in Romans 8 is telling you that soil is still under it, and that it will not always be.
The Verdict That Has to Mean Something
Then there is the other end of the story. Genesis 1 closes with an assessment.
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. (Genesis 1:31, KJV)
The honest question is not whether “very good” means “perfect in every conceivable sense.” It is narrower than that, and harder: can “very good” be pronounced over a system whose defining feature is that hundreds of millions of years of creatures suffered, starved, were torn apart, and went extinct in order to produce the observer who would eventually read the sentence?
Some believing scholars answer yes, and their argument deserves a hearing: God’s “good” is fitness for purpose, not absence of pain; predation and decay are what make an ecosystem function; and the Bible’s own descriptions of wild creation in Job 38–41 present lions hunting and ravens fed by God without a hint of embarrassment. That is a real argument, and it is why this remains an in-house disagreement among people who all confess Christ.
But it has to carry weight it strains under. Because the Bible does not merely describe the wild world; it tells you where the wild world is going. Isaiah says the wolf will dwell with the lamb and the lion will eat straw like the ox (Isaiah 11:6–7). Revelation says there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, and gives the reason: for the former things are passed away (Revelation 21:4, KJV). Former. Belonging to a state that is being left behind.
Scripture’s arc is not creation, mechanism, upgrade. It is creation, ruin, redemption, restoration. Take out the ruin and the fourth term has nothing to restore.
Where It Touches the Gospel
This is the part that makes it more than an academic dispute.
Paul’s argument for the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 runs on a specific claim about where death came from: For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead (1 Corinthians 15:21, KJV). And he calls death an enemy — the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death (v. 26). Not a tool. Not a stage. An enemy, in a war, scheduled for destruction.
If death entered by a man, then it is an intruder and Christ’s victory over it is a rescue. If death was God’s chosen instrument for four billion years and only became a problem when it started happening to us, then the cross addresses a grievance we developed about a mechanism God installed. Those are different gospels wearing similar language.
I want to be careful here, because this is where these conversations usually turn ugly. A brother who holds an old earth, or even an evolutionary process, and who confesses a real Adam, a real fall, a real cross, and a bodily resurrection is a brother. This is not a salvation question. But it is a coherence question, and coherence questions have consequences downstream. What you say about the origin of death determines what you can say about its defeat.
What to Do With a Groan
Step back from the argument for a second and notice what Paul is doing with all this. Romans 8 is not a chapter about biology. It is a chapter for suffering people, and the futility of creation is offered as comfort.
His logic is this: the wrongness you feel about the world is not sentimentality. It is accurate perception. When you stand at a graveside and everything in you says this should not be, you are not being childish — you are agreeing with the apostle, and with the God who subjected creation to futility in hope. Those last two words are the whole argument. The subjecting was never the end of the plan. It was done by Someone with a stated intention to undo it.
That is why this matters for a man who will never read a paper on population genetics. You are living in a world that is not the way it was made and not the way it will be. The groaning is real, it is temporary, and it has a terminus with a name.
Creation is not malfunctioning on its way to nowhere. It is in labor. And Paul says, in the same breath, that we groan along with it — waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.
The One who subjected it is the One who entered it, died under it, and came out the other side of the grave with a body that will never groan again. That is the answer to the futility. Not that it was always fine. That it will not last.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist