The Accuracy of Genesis 1-3

Theistic evolution is a viewpoint that God created matter and after that, God didn't guide, intervene, or act directly to cause any empirically detectable change in the natural behavior of matter until all living things had evolved by purely natural processes.

But, what that belief implies is that there are actually twelve details in Genesis 1-3 that simply didn't happen. If you hold to theistic evolution (in the most common form in which it is held today), you would say:

Adam and Eve were not the first human beings, and perhaps Adam and Eve never even existed. Adam and Eve were born from human parents. God didn't act directly or specially to create Adam out of dust from the ground. God didn't act directly to create Eve from a rib taken from Adam's side. Adam and Eve were never sinless human beings. Adam and Eve did not commit the first human sins because human beings were doing morally evil things long before Adam and Eve existed. Human death did not begin as a result of Adam's sin because human beings existed long before Adam and Eve and they were always subject to death. Not all human beings have descended from Adam and Eve for there were thousands of other human beings on the earth at the time that God chose two of them and called them Adam and Eve. God did not directly act in the natural world to create different kinds of fish, birds, and land animals. God did not rest from his work of creation or stop any special creative activity after plants, animals, and human beings appeared on the earth. God never created an originally very good natural world—a safe environment, free of thorns, thistles, and other harmful things. After Adam and Eve sinned, God did not place any curse on the world that changed the workings of the natural world, making it more hostile to mankind.

Those are twelve events in Genesis 1-3 that the Bible records as historically accurate, truthful events, but that are denied by advocates of theistic evolution.

Wayne Grudem (PhD, University of Cambridge; DD, Westminster Theological Seminary) is Distinguished Research Professor of Theology and Biblical Studies at Phoenix Seminary, having previously taught for twenty years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is a former president of the Evangelical Theological Society, a member of the Translation Oversight Committee for the English Standard Version of the Bible, the general editor of the ESV Study Bible, and the author of over twenty-five books.

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