Mohler contended that views of evolution were being proposed to justify atheism. “Modern science,” he said, is mounting “an intentional challenge to the Christian account of the meaning of things.”

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, has been involved in a sharp Internet debate with a Baptist physics professor over whether accepting Christian doctrine requires a rejection of evolution.

The debate centers on a speech Mohler gave at a conference earlier this year in Orlando, Fla. In it, he declared anew his long-held contentions that evolution cannot be reconciled with Christianity and that the age of the earth is likely in the thousands rather than billions of years.

The professor, Karl Giberson of Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts, wrote that this view can’t be squared with science. Giberson — author of “Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution” — said Mohler is forcing young people to choose between faith and science.

“We believe that the scientific evidence so strongly supports evolution that we must take it seriously and, if this brings us to new understandings of the Bible, then we will wrestle with those, fully aware of the challenges,” Giberson wrote on the BioLogos Forum.

But Mohler said there’s a “head-on collision” between evolution and core theological principles — such as that the biblical Adam literally existed and fathered the human race. It follows from that, Mohler said, that after Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden in what’s called the “fall” of humanity, Adam passed down his sinful nature to all his descendants.