All Articles For Why Evolution?

In a recent issue of The Banner (12/8/86) the Q & A department carried a question from an Indiana reader as follows: “Why is evolution taught at Calvin College? More than a year ago The Banner acknowledged this, and no one has ever challenged these views on the pages of our church magazine. However, Christian Renewal (Feb. 3, 1986) discussed this problem openly. What can be done about this?” This question was referred by Q & A Editor Rev. W.D. Buursma to Calvin College, and an answer was furnished by Dr. Howard J. Van Till of the department of physics and astronomy. Dr. Van Till is...

The first main section of Dr. Howard Van Till’s The Fourth Day is entitled “The Biblical View.” It is against this section that this critique is directed. His position stands or falls with this section. His “The Scientific View,” the second main section, stands if his “The Biblical View” meets the test of Scripture and the creeds; it falls if this test is failed. What is this Biblical view, according to Dr. Van Till? Chapter 1 is entitled “Taking The Bible Seriously.” To take the Bible seriously, according to him, “means to respect the Bible for what it is and to respond...

We should remember that our little digression into what John Calvin thought was after all not fundamentally a digression, but intrinsically related to our subject. Dr. Van Till in his The Fourth Day only does lip service to Calvin’s teaching on this subject. That is, he does not really believer that we can only properly view God’s book of creation and history through the spectacles of the Scriptures. Instead, he constantly adjusts Scripture in the attempt to make it conform to his evolutionistic view of the universe. This has become evident in our consideration of Van Till’s view of Scripture thus far...

Chapter 4 of Dr. Howard Van Till’s The Fourth Day is entitled “The Form and Content of Scriptural Talk about Creation.” Incidentally, unless otherwise indicated, when he speaks of Scripture and quotes from Scripture, he is referring to the Jerusalem Bible. I have not mentioned this previously; neither do I intend to discuss this. I only want to say that’ the use of the Jerusalem Bible ought to be repugnant to any right-thinking, Reformed Christian. But if one analyzes Van Till’s book carefully, he will discover that there are reasons for his using this version. Its language suits his purpose. If I...

In our critique of Dr. Howard Van Till’s The Fourth Daywe are up to a consideration of Chapter 5, entitled, “He Made the Stars Also.” This is the chapter in which the author’s denial of the Biblical truth of creation and, in fact, his denial of the authority of Scripture come into sharp focus. Before we enter into a critique of this chapter, however, I wish to remind the reader of two things. In the first place, the fact that one does not agree with Van Till’s billions of years of stellar evolution does not necessarily shut one up to the...

Last time [cf. June issue) we paid attention to the way in which Dr. Van Till rids himself of the clear testimony of Genesis 1 by resorting to the so-called “framework hypothesis”—a theory which has been thoroughly refuted and discredited by many conservative students of Scripture, so thoroughly, in fact, that I am surprised that anyone would resort to it at this late date. You see, anyone who wants to introduce evolution and its inconceivably long periods of time, but at the same time leave the impression that he holds to Scripture must somehow get rid of the plain testimony of Genesis 1....

In our previous editorial on this subject we were trying to discover what Dr. Howard Van Till means by “primeval history.” You will recall that he classifies the first eleven chapters of Genesis, in distinction from the subsequent part of Genesis, as “primeval history.” However, he fails to offer a succinct definition of primeval history. The reader, therefore, is left to his own devices to discover this meaning from the several paragraphs which Van Till devotes to this subject. It became very plain last time that the “stories” of primeval history (Dr. Van Till repeatedly speaks of “stories”) are not...