According to reports (e.g., Baptist Press, August 10, 2005) Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler believes a person cannot be consistently both Christian and believer in evolution.
I wonder what he would say about the book Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought by David N. Livingstone (1984)?
Interestingly, Old School Princeton theologian and inerrancy defender Benjamin B. Warfield (generally considered a hero by conservative evangelicals) believed in evolution. I guess he would just say Warfield was inconsistent. But Warfield was trained in both science and theology.
In all this hoopla about Mohler and evolution I have so far to read anything about what is called “progressive creationism.” That used to be the standard evangelical middle ground between Darwinian evolution and young earth creationism.
I was educated and mentored in and by a type of evangelicalism that distinguished itself very strongly from fundamentalism. What I perceive happening is that line is becoming blurred. People who are really more fundamentalists (at least as I learned what that means) are now being touted publicly by even the secular media as leading evangelicals.
This is why I call myself a “postconservative evangelical”–to distinguish my own flavor of evangelicalism from (what seem to me to be) fundamentalists parading as “conservative evangelicals.”