I have been on an arduous road these last years of recognizing that people cannot be tricked into the gospel by seeker and the health wealth churches as a subset of these across the globe. The reason for my journey is because about 5 years ago these types caused for direct significant negative against my very own family…long story.
Anyway for example, telling a group of people that if you have faith enough to get that great job and be enriched and then give lots of your money, you will thrive…then they say, by the way the gospel of Jesus saves you from your sins. The thunderous applause coming from engaging the sinful flesh for material success will drown out the noise from any gospel message to do with God and eternity and this may very well cause the gospel seed to never grow. the leader will get a lot more seat warmers and givers to the ministry but not fruit.
And I believe that theistic evolution is no different. I have read a lot of your articles. You literally suggest that studying the presence of such and such on the cellular level combined with the fact that there has been lot so time suggest a reasonableness for this time, chance, mutation and energy to form complex life of the likes of sexuality, the brain, eyes, flying birds etc. Then to proceed with telling the gospel of Jesus. What may be going on in the heart of hearts in the hearers of this message is that this model so similar to that of those within the godless naturalistic zone (albeit incredulously statically unreasonable) would be that the gospel gets drown out from the noise of hope in naturalism and since God gets pushed so far down the road in peoples thinking anyway about how creation came to be, the gospel prayer may be nothing more than an acted recital and a pathway to meet new friends who will provide a meal when I get sick instead of receiving the very best gift of God Himself as my Creator, sustainer, provider and Lord. To your point about being thankful. I can tell you that for myself who is brutally honest with myself, thanking God for a process of Him evolving me to what I am by the powers of energy that all of the naturalists believe would be me acting. I would be blushing to thank God my creator when I was not really truly believing Him. Acting was deposited as the most serious of all offenses in Jesus ministry in the gospels and needs to be serious contended against in our ministries. So if my honesty with myself is any indication about what goes on in the heart of hearts in the masses in hearing a message, then the church needs to steer this ship a different direction.
I am telling you, this does not work. And I don’t see enough science back your claims that all of life came from a single source. I have not read one article that proves this…not even close. I see a lot of guessing but not a lot of evidence. A bacteria adapting is still always a bacteria and time does not prove that it will become anything but bacteria. Any form of young or old earth creationism has not only more reason for how we got here but it is also better founded upon faith in God as Creator as found throughout the Bible and not on a substitutionary faith in amounts of time and energy making complex life possible. And it better conforms for tilling the soil of one’s heart for the gospel seed to actually grow. Look at Jesus parable of the sower in Mt 13 and in Lk. The statistical unreasonableness of evolution and closeness of conformity of naturalisms evolutionary worldviews that theistic evolutionists claim to be well meaning pathways for reaching the lost to me are nothing more than any one of the soils in these parables where the gospel does not truly sprout effectively unto salvation.