God could have used evolution!

I've heard it, you've probably heard it: modal logic to the rescue as a way out of the direct sense of Genesis 1.

Disregarding the propositionally self-revealing God, with no commitment made, no evidence or argument required, he just could've. So there!

But what are the implications?

    1. an indeterminate god without a nature or declaration of 'scope'

    2.  recourse to an old pagan tale (the eternal or 'self-making' global biota)

    3. not the God of the Bible, the self-declaring God.

The first seems to prefer a non-communicating god, a god to whom can be attached any mode of operation and interaction with the creation, indeed, merged into the creation without distinction. The unknown God, perhaps the one lauded in Paul's Athens. Not the God who created definitively!

The second: ancient Epicureanism to the rescue. It's a self-making material world after all, with an inexplicable tendency to 'self-improve' on the graves of millions of 'failed' creatures. Oddly, we seem to still have millions of 'lesser evolved' creatures, so what gives with that? This is the god disappeared into the land of illusion. On this implication god ceases to be removed from the creation and his words about it leave the real world: reality collapses to illusion.

The third is the worst. It changes who God is from who he reveals and declares himself to be in the terms of the creation he has made (e.g. using the days that pace our life, and the contents of each day), the God who shows us relationship and rationality, who is present and active in our world, the God who acts in concrete history to frame our relationship with him and his creation, and the reality of that creation.

It changes this God into a cypher-god. Anonymous, or the deist god, or the incommunicado god. This makes God the god of an exilic religion where reality is illusory, or a mimetic religion where human actions 'act out' religion. Flipping between similarity to Eastern religions or Ancient Roman paganism.

Either choice is not good. No longer the creator God of the Bible, the covenanting God who speaks in reality, in whose image we are made for fellowship with him. It makes the incarnation a side-show where Christ is reduced to some sort of 'guru': not God at all.

De-historicizing the creation by moving it out of our world, symbolicising it or mythologizing it or abstracting it, severs the synchoronal and commutative nature of the relationship shown in God's creating in the days of our life-world, of him thereby positioning us and him in communion (from Genesis 1:26ff, 3:8). He thus underscoring the reality of our fellowship with him in time and space, in history, in the real time-bound material world where propositions are meaningful and relationships objectively real. All gone in any maneuver which serves to obliterate God's participation in our world through creating in our history and in the terms of our real, concrete life-world, from his loving hand.

(see Westphal, God, Guilt and Death, for explanation of religion types.)