Pastor Mark Driscoll: Evolutionary Thinking vs. Biblical Thinking — Pastor Mark Driscoll

God is the author of life. God is the one who is sovereign over life. God has all authority over human life. That’s exactly what it’s going to say in Genesis chapter 9, verse 6. ‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.’ In the previous book of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, it says you should not kill anyone, and if you murder anyone, to be more specific, you should not murder anyone, and if you murder someone, then you should be murdered. Because people bear the image and likeness of God. So this is biblical thinking. This is not evolutionary thinking. In evolutionary thinking, human beings are just lucky animals. In biblical thinking, they are image bearers of God.

Pastor Mark Driscoll, “Evolutionary Thinking vs. Biblical Thinking — Pastor Mark Driscoll” (2014)

Nothing too objectionable, in fact, to the value in not murdering or killing arbitrarily. It can be seen as a justification to argue against capital punishment.

The fact one needs a transcendent justification is the concern. How does one need an ancient series of texts to know killing is wrong? Outside of personality-disordered people, we don’t need religion for this.

The culmination of this clip is to split the idea of a creation account of origin of life in the Bible as “image bearers of God” from an evolutionary view with “lucky animals.”

It’s not that it’s a way of thinking to see us as “lucky animals,” but, rather, the fact that we are animals and then must formulate the view of the world from this.

The theology cannot dictate the facts of the world because the facts of the world are the facts of the world. Our conceptualization about the facts of the world must follow from the fact and then the theology must ground itself through this.

Otherwise, it’s merely following a fantasy. Most people have come to the generally accepted conclusion arbitrary murder is wrong as more time has accrued. Most of the major faith preach this. Secular views of ethics do too.

So, perhaps, it’s something universally emergent in cultures as other facets of human life and social organization are figured out that Christianity merely co-opts. Christianity as a moral graft on universalisms, where Christianity becomes a particularist, parochial moral frame stretched to universalisms due to wider contemporary moral conversations.