Time Magazine's 'Evolution Wars' Features Albert Mohler
In the Aug. 15 issue of Time Magazine, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) President Albert Mohler Jr. tackles the controversy over Intelligent Design in the magazine's cover story 'Evolution Wars.'
In the Aug. 15 issue of Time Magazine, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) President Albert Mohler Jr. tackles the controversy over Intelligent Design in the magazine’s cover story “Evolution Wars.”
Mohler, featured with three other scholars in a forum addressing the question “Can You Believe in God and Evolution?” argues that the belief in both Divine creation and evolution is “inconsistent.”
“Given the human tendency toward inconsistency, there are people who will say they hold both positions,” said Mohler of the topic discussed recently even by President Bush last week. “But you cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant model of evolutionary theory at the same time.”
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According to a statement released by the SBTS, the president of the SBC’s flagship seminary calls himself a “young-Earth creationist” and makes a claim that “the most natural reading of the Bible points to a six-day creation.”
Mohler further contends in the article that even the most ardent academic defenders of evolution are moving from any claim that evolution was God’s means of bringing life into being.
“More of them are saying that a truly informed belief in evolution entails a stance that the material world is all there is and that the natural must be explained in purely natural terms," he said. "They're saying that anyone who truly feels this way must exclude God from the story. I think their self-analysis is correct. I just couldn't disagree more with their premise.”
Michael Behe, the Lehigh University biochemistry professor whose view was also addressed in the article, believes the two beliefs are consistent.
“Sure, it's possible to believe in both God and evolution," said Behe, who is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute, a leading proponent of ID think tank in Seattle. "I'm a Roman Catholic, and Catholics have always understood that God could make life any way he wanted to.”
“If he wanted to make it by the playing out of natural law, then who were we to object? We were taught in parochial school that Darwin's theory was the best guess at how God could have made life,” he continued.
Steven Pinker, Psychology professor at Harvard University, and Francis Collins, Director at the National Human Genome Research Institute, shared views similar tp Behe's.
“It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer,” said Pinker. “But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.”
Meanwhile, Collins said, “I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature."
“God, who is all powerful and who is not limited by space and time, chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create you and me, who are we to say that wasn't an absolutely elegant plan? And if God has now given us the intelligence and the opportunity to discover his methods that is something to celebrate,” he added.
The Aug. 15 edition of Time is currently available on newsstands.
