The TE challenge

Theistic evolution confronts a major problem.

This idea proposes that evolution occured and was 'used' by God as his creative mechanism.

It is yet to be explained how a long history of waste, futile genetic dead ends, the death of the weak or less adapted and the relentless march of chance either reflects and fetches praise of the God who is love, or represents the basically personal nature of the Christian 'first philosophy' to use Plantiga's term.

Evolution is impersonal, de-humanising, loveless, and requires waste, destruction and death on its march to oblivion. Nothing like what we read of the warm love in fellowship between God and creature in Genesis 1, and, implied in Proverbs 3:19, the exercise of God's wisdom in achieving his ends. Indeed, evolution reveals the very opposite: haphazard foolishness and dissipation.

Wright and Christ

NT Wright has recently been to a Biologos conference and inferred that if Christ is creator, then evolution makes sense. It seems that Wright looses the plot as to the ontology of the Bible: creation in Genesis does what he sees as important in the temple, it brings God and man to fellowship.

In creation this is only so if the creation's reference is tangibly real, otherwise it refers to some other thing that, if it is evolution, points away from God (e.g. Peter Singer's views on Darwin de-linking humanity and Christian tradition), but whatever it is, it is not what the Bible reports and therefore we cannot rely on the creation account to show God in fellowship with man, or man as God's image.

Therefore, there emerges pretty quickly an epistemological problem: which bits of Genesis 1-11 attach to what is real, and which do not; and how would we know.