How many lies has God told us in the Bible? That is, if billions of years of dog-eat-dog-survival-of-the-fittest competition of the strong over the weak were true, then how many lies were we told in the Word of God?

For starters, if evolution is true, our God lied to us about the origins of death. Romans 5:15 says “as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned,” a theme repeated in Romans 5: 15, 16, 17, and 18. Each verse which implies that Adam, “one man,” brought death, is a blatant lie if aeons of death predated any “Adam” to begin with. If what the evolutionists say is true, then the Lord also pulled the wool over our eyes with 1 Corinthians 5:21, which reads, “for since by man came death,” even though it was by death—by billions of years’ worth of death—that man came instead. That, at least, is Darwin’s narrative.

Next, in any evolutionary model, Genesis 2:1-2 tell three lies. “Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.” First, Genesis 2:1, which says that the original work of creation was “finished,” would be a lie because science claims that the creative process, evolution, is still going on. (Google Is evolution still happening? or the like). If so, then the work of creation has not ended, even though Genesis 2:2 says that God “ended His work which He had done.” Genesis 2:2 also says that God rested on the seventh day from all His work.  The seventh-day of what? Creation (we’re told) took billions of years, and counting, and so this verse about Him resting on the seventh day “from all His work which He had done” must be another lie, but only if God used billions of years of evolution to create us.

So, if one counts Romans 5:12, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 1 Corinthians 15:21, that’s six untruths, and, with the three in Genesis 2:1-2, we’re up to nine.

Meanwhile, Genesis 2:7 reads, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” A fully formed human (with nostrils, which means lungs, which means blood, which means a heart, which means a nervous system, which means a brain, etc.; yes, a fully formed human)—who, only after being fully created, is then given life? It’s hard to imagine a creation account more at odds with what we’ve been assured really happened: billions of years of blunders eking out a hominid who was, somehow, translated by a genetic mutation (how else?) into the first human, Adam. Of course, if this scenario, or any version thereof, were true, then the Lord amplified the untruth in Genesis 2:7, didn’t He?

But Genesis 2:7 wasn’t half the lie starting 21 verses later (again, if evolution were true). “And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man” (Genesis 2:21,22). What a contrast to what evolution teaches; the same billions of years that, by chance, created Adam with his reproductive organs also, by chance, created Eve with hers (ovaries, womb, eggs, fallopian tubes, etc.). Compared to that story, the biblical account sounds much more plausible. Otherwise, what? The farfetched and impossibly implausible theory that, among all the other evolved organs and their functions, human sperm mindlessly evolved in a male while human eggs mindlessly evolved in a female? And that sperm and that egg, when together, just happened to be the start of another human being? That’s the story we’re expected to believe, which means that Genesis 2:7, 21 and 22 take us to lies 10 and 11. And what doozies too, if evolution were true.

And then there’s Genesis 1 itself, with the six-day creation of our present earth and life on it. Each day was unambiguously delineated an “evening and morning” (Genesis 1: 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31), which, like ours and Moses’ 24-hour days, are made of an “evening and morning” as well. If creation took billions of years, as evolution teaches, but the Bible teaches six days, then we can count each day’s biblical account a lie. Six more, which now bring us to number 17.

Then these verses. “For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression” (1 Timothy 2:13, 14).  And, “But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:3).  Pointing back to the Fall, the texts are simply reiterating the account in Genesis 3:1-6, which—if Darwin were right—must be a lie (number 18), and a big one, too. Especially because, Paul numerous times in Romans 5 attributes the origin of death to Adam, a scenario not even close to what science theorizes. (And, of course, each time in Romans 5 Paul links what Adam did--bring death—to what Christ did--bring life.  But what if Adam really didn’t bring death, as he couldn’t in any evolutionary model. . . ?)

And what about the Ten Commandments, “written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18)? Surely there could be no lies there, right? Well, part of the fourth commandment reads: “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it” (Exodus 20:11). Either, as the text explicitly says, God created the world in six days and blessed the seventh—which, as a literal day, is kept as a memorial of the literal six—or He didn’t. If evolution were true, He didn’t, which makes this bald-faced lie in the fourth commandment especially problematic because of the ninth commandment, which forbids lying. Could God lie to us in the fourth commandment but, in the ninth, command us not to lie? This (number 19) would make God, not just a liar, but a hypocrite as well. That is, if evolution were true.

Scripture tells us that “it is impossible for God to lie” (Hebrews 6:18; see also Titus 1:2). Yet, in a Darwinian world, God started lying to us from the first pages of the Old Testament, and hadn’t stopped in the New, either. But if God cannot lie, then evolution cannot be true; otherwise God would be lying, which contradicts Scripture.

Unless the texts which declare that God cannot lie are, themselves, lies? After all, if God in His Word would lie to us 19 times about the origins of life and of death—why trust what He says in about anything else, including that He cannot lie? That’s number 20.

It all boils down to one question. What do we believe: God’s Word or humanity’s? When praying to the Father, Jesus declared, “Your word is truth,” (John 17:17) unless, as we have seen, Darwin’s is instead—which puts us at 21. 

Clifford Goldstein is the editor of the Adult Bible Study Guide.