Huntsville, Alabama, has an SBC megachurch with a big problem in the pulpit, a “big-bang problem,” and its name is Travis Collins. Collins, senior pastor of First Baptist Church Huntsville, isn’t content to simply open the Bible, read what it says, and preach it. No, that would be far too provincial for a man of his refined tastes. Instead, he stands before the goats that gather around him—legs crossed, hands on their chins like they’re sitting around a campfire—soaking in a myth cleverly devised to flatter their man-centered, unbiblical worldview.

The sheep have long since fled or been driven out. What remains are the kind of people who don’t want the piercing light of truth, but a warm, intellectual night-light to make them feel safe in their unbelief.

This week’s performance was a textbook exercise in how to smuggle unbelief into the house of God under the guise of “thoughtful engagement with science.” Collins took the pulpit not to defend Genesis, but to give it a polite burial under the rubble of the Big Bang.

Not only that, but he also waxed reverent about Georges Lemaitre, a Roman Catholic priest and the architect of that blasphemous, God-dishonoring fable that the universe erupted into being from a cosmic “spark.” Lemaitre, Collins assured his hearers, was a “deeply devoted follower of Jesus.”

In reality, Lemaitre’s Jesus was the wafer-and-wine idol of Rome, and his creation narrative was cribbed from the high priests of secular cosmology. But in Collins’ hands, this Catholic scientist becomes a kind of saintly bridge between the Bible and a mythical universe billions of years old.

From there, Collins spun the familiar, sentimental wool into fool’s gold that science gives us “the beginning,” but Scripture gives us “the origin.” He quoted Psalm 104 about the Lord stretching out the heavens, as though David were a poet laureate of astrophysics, nodding approvingly at the birth of galaxies in a vacuum. It’s the same deception practiced by theistic evolutionists everywhere—take the language of Scripture, gut it of its historical content, and retrofit it to bless the prevailing pagan creation myth.

The crowd, of course, sat enraptured, not because they were learning truth, but because they were being handed permission slips to believe whatever modern science textbooks or other vain philosophies invented by demons say while still imagining themselves “Bible-believing Christians.”

Collins even trotted out the usual museum-piece history of young-earth creationism, complete with a condescending summary of Bishop Ussher’s 4004 B.C. timeline and a patronizing nod to Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter. He told his listeners that young-earth creationists “have a wonderful motive”—to protect the authority of the Bible—before casually sawing off the branch they’re sitting on.

This is the rhetorical equivalent of complimenting the chef’s passion for hygiene while spitting in the soup. For Collins, Genesis 1–2 is not literal history but “beautiful” poetry, the same way, he says, that “knit me together in my mother’s womb” isn’t meant to be taken literally. It’s a false equivalence meant to domesticate the text, making it harmless to the modern reprobate mind.

And here’s the danger. When you strip Genesis of its literal framework, you don’t just mess with a trivial doctrine that doesn’t have further ramifications. You’re ripping the biblical foundation out from under the gospel itself.

No literal Adam means no literal Fall. No literal Fall means no need for a literal cross. And no literal cross means no literal resurrection.

But Collins isn’t concerned with that. His goal isn’t to defend the faith once delivered to the saints—it’s to curate a religion palatable to the sensibilities of the “enlightened” unbeliever. These pews aren’t filled with disciples being conformed to Christ. They’re filled with spiritual tourists being confirmed in their unbelief, nodding along as they’re told the Bible is deep and beautiful but, conveniently, not binding in the places where it would most offend their evolutionary dogma.

This is not a shepherd feeding sheep or a preacher contending for the faith. It’s a showman entertaining goats, a docent leading a tour through a museum of biblical relics, explaining which ones are safe to admire without actually believing. And like so many Evangelical pulpits, it’s one more brick in the road away from biblical Christianity and toward a toothless, man-made religion that will not save a single soul.

First Baptist Huntsville doesn’t have a pastor in Travis Collins—it has a polished blasphemer with a microphone, catechizing a congregation into a worldview that leaves Genesis in the recycling bin and truth in the grave.