Bible: What is the Fall?

Question:  What are the implications of the Fall, if -- according to every old earth model, death and suffering was a normal part of the pre-Fall Universe?


A review of The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller
Dutton, New York, 2008

reviewed by Lita Cosner  (Creation Ministries 7/9/10)

Evolutionary stance makes for flawed answers on suffering

Keller is a theistic evolutionist, which causes him to give wrong or incomplete answers to some of the questions he attempts to answer in his book. For instance, in his chapter on pain and suffering (ch. 2), he says that God sometimes allows evil to happen in order that He may turn it to good in some way, and that Jesus died on the cross undergoing tremendous suffering to save humanity, proving that God’s reason for allowing suffering is not that he does not love mankind. He also points forward to the hope of resurrection and the end of all suffering.

The starting point should have been that humans go through pain and suffering because we are all fallen and sinful, and fallen people are capable of committing acts of tremendous evil.

While there is nothing necessarily wrong with this answer, it is still incomplete, because he does not address the reason for pain and suffering—the Fall.3,4 The starting point should have been that humans go through pain and suffering because we are all fallen and sinful, and fallen people are capable of committing acts of tremendous evil. God is, of course, capable of overriding human will, but does not always do so, because He values human voluntary will (although it is impossible, of course, to know just how often God does intervene in situations). Another aspect of the Fall is that things do not work correctly at times, including our bodies, leading to disease and death. When these things happen and we feel as if it is wrong, as if it was never supposed to be like this, it is precisely because things are all wrong. Any answer to the question of pain and suffering that does not include this sort of explanation is seriously lacking.

Incompetent exegesis of Genesis creation account:

Keller’s incomplete answer to the question of pain and suffering was an error of omission, but his chapter on science and religion (ch. 6) contains many errors of commission. He handles the issue of miracles versus science well,5 but cites the predictable theistic evolutionist line on the Bible and evolution. He asserts that Genesis 1 is a poem (p. 93), that the interpretation is up for debate,6 and that many Christians with a high view of Scripture have no problem accepting evolution without embracing materialism (p. 87).