Demeaning God the Creator
A Bible that cannot be understood literally calls into question the Person of God Himself and leads to speculation about God’s relationship to His creation.
The Bible says God is unique and separate from His creation. He brought all things into existence: “For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him” (Col. 1:16; cf. Jn. 1:3; Heb. 1:2).
In stark contrast to Colossians 1:16 are statements by the popular Rev. Michael Dowd, a “religious naturalist,” whose best-selling book Thank God for Evolution smacks of Monism, the pagan worldview that sees no distinction between the Creator and His creation. Wrote Dowd,
The whole of reality is creative in a nested emergent sense, and we are part of the process. Like nesting dolls, smaller realities are contained within larger ones—from the infinitely small to the infinitely vast—and every one of them is divinely creative….Ultimate Reality, or God, is the One and Only Whole (Holy One) that is not part of some larger, more comprehensive reality.1
So he falsely concluded, “God is that which sources and infuses everything, yet is also co-emergent with and indistinguishable from anything.”2
Twisting the Bible’s words to suggest it teaches a convoluted evolutionary process shows staggering audacity. Dowd also equates God with various New Age and pagan concepts: “Here are some names that have been offered for this unseen, nonmeasurable, non-material realm: the Implicate Order, the All Nourishing Abyss, the Void, the Vacuum State, the Akashic Field, the Mother Universe, or simply, God.”3
His website, michaeldowd.org, calls him a popular “evolutionary evangelist” who is bringing “what may be his boldest message yet to fellow Christians: ‘The New Atheists are God’s prophets, and believers need to listen up.’”
Believers need to listen to the apostle Peter: “There will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction” (2 Pet. 2:1).
ENDNOTES
- Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution, Kindle ed. 2008 (New York, NY: Viking, 2007), 84–85.
- Ibid., 119–120.
- Ibid., 125.
