When
I was homeschooled in the seventh grade, my science curriculum, published by A
Beka Books, convinced my impressionable 12-year-old mind that the theory of
evolution was a bunch of hogwash. It equipped
me with loads of ammunition to take into battle against the evolutionists I
would undoubtedly encounter in high school and college. Now, a full twenty years later, I still
consider myself to be an evangelical Christian, but one who accepts the theory
of evolution. In my own case, this
dramatic change in perspective did not result from the study of science, but
actually from the study of the Bible. In
this paper I hope to summarize in accessible language the nature of that shift
in the hopes that it would edify the faith of others who wrestle with similar
questions.
Although some of
my friends have chided me for “compromising with the world” and “trusting in
man’s wisdom rather than God’s revelation” by embracing evolutionary theory, I
remain convinced that God gives humans a natural curiosity about the world and,
since our God is the God of all Truth, we who follow him
have nothing to fear in exploring his world.
Undoubtedly, many mysteries will remain in the mind of finite humanity,
but I reject the all too frequent charge that Christians, as people of faith,
should avoid seeking to understand such things through human reason. This proclivity to pit faith against reason
needs to be rejected. No question is out
of bounds for the Christian.
I
have never written a paper like this before.
Although it will be submitted for a grade at my divinity school, I’m
really writing this paper for my many friends and family members who are
evangelicals, mostly laypeople and non-theologians, and who want to know why I
believe in evolution (hence the very informal and non-academic language). I do not pretend that my answers will be
satisfactory for all, but I do hope to shed some light on the issues and, at
the very least, provoke some further thought into the matter.
So
why does this ongoing debate between creationists and evolutionists
matter? Just a few months ago, I
received an e-mail from a friend that I used to mentor during college and who
is now a graduate student in ecology. He
was wrestling with how to take the bible seriously while also taking seriously
the scientific evidence for evolution that he was learning about in his
coursework. This is a very common issue
for students seeking to integrate faith and learning, particularly those in the
scientific disciplines. For some,
encounters with Darwinism prove to be a major threat to the faith itself. Forced to choose between science and the
faith that they inherited from their childhood, many turn their backs on the
church and loose their faith believing that what they had been taught as
children is irrational. The Barna Group, a Christian polling organization,
recently concluded a study in which they found the following:
One of the reasons young adults
feel disconnected from church or from faith is the tension they feel between
Christianity and science. The most common of the perceptions in this arena is
"Christians are too confident they know all the answers" (35%). Three
out of ten young adults with a Christian background feel that "churches
are out of step with the scientific world we live in" (29%). Another
one-quarter embrace the perception that "Christianity is
anti-science" (25%). And nearly the same proportion (23%) said they have
"been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate."
Furthermore, the research shows that many science-minded young Christians are
struggling to find ways of staying faithful to their beliefs and to their
professional calling in science-related industries.
As this research shows, this issue
does matter,
especially among younger evangelicals.
When the church engages in pseudo-science – the kind of science I
encountered in my seventh grade textbook – it damages the reputability of the
faith, alienates people from the church, and dishonors Christ.
I
am not writing as a scientist and so the bulk of this paper will not deal with
the scientific evidence for evolution. I
will not discuss, for example, the results of the mapping of the human genome,
the fossil records, carbon dating, and so on.
But we might note briefly, however, that the theory of evolution is one
of the most widely accepted scientific theories in our world today. According to the Pew Research Center, 97% of
scientists today believe in evolution.
(It’s hard to find 97% of scientists who
agree on anything!) Faced with this
fact, creationists are forced to ask why such a huge majority of scientists disagree
with their own view. As a creationist
myself for many years, I was convinced by my subculture that there was a
widespread conspiracy among scientists to prove evolution since they
wanted to believe that there is no
God. How else, it seemed to me, can we
explain the almost unanimous acceptance of evolutionary theory? But I eventually concluded that this conspiracy
theory hardly seems plausible. In my own
experience, most scientists are eager seekers of truth without a hidden
agenda. They use their minds to the best
of their ability in seeking to understand the cosmos and we are wrong to
question their integrity without evidence.
Instead
of addressing the scientific end of the debate, I want to look at Scripture and
how Scripture is interpreted. As an
evangelical, I am committed to the authority of Scripture and believe that it
is inspired and God-breathed. As I
mentioned, my own journey away from creationism to becoming a theistic
evolutionist came as the result of study of the Bible. Since I am writing this paper to my fellow
evangelicals, I hope that we can agree upon the authority of Scripture as a
common starting-place.
When
we open up the Bible to read its first pages, we must recognize what questions we the readers bring with us to the
text. Some of the questions that we ask
as 21st century interpreters of Scripture might be different than
the questions burning in the minds of the original authors. For example, we might come to Genesis 1-2
with the question, “How did the earth and the universe come to be? Why is there something rather than
nothing? What is a history of what actually happened at the beginning of
the world?” Yet what if these were not
the questions in the minds of the original authors of Genesis? What if their concerns were entirely
different than our own? What if they
wrote Genesis for a different reason than providing a science book about the
origins of the universe?
Whenever
we read Scripture, it is essential that we establish the genre of what we are
reading. Understanding the genre is half
of the battle. I used to tell my
parishioners that there is a difference between a love letter from my wife and
my 2001 Toyota Camry Owner’s Manual.
Both are printed words on a page, but that is where the similarities
end. If I opened up my wife’s letter and
read it as though it were my car owner’s manual, I would quickly end up very
confused. In the same way, when we open
up Genesis and expect it to be a recorded history of actual events or a
scientific textbook about the origins of the universe, we will immediately
embark on adventures in missing the point.
Just
try to read the first few chapters of Genesis literally. It quickly becomes rather absurd. We then find ourselves asking questions like,
“How could there have been days one, two, and three without a sun or moon
(which were created on day four)? Why
are there two creation stories instead of one (Genesis 1:1-2:3 and
2:4-25)? Why are plants created before
man in the first account, but man is created before plants in the second
account? And in Genesis 4, from whom is
Cain fearful of retaliation for murdering his brother? Who are these people “in the land of Nod”
that Cain goes to live with if Adam and Eve’s only remaining child is
Cain?” And then there is the ever-embarrassing
question asked in Sunday School classes by countless children: “Where did Adam
and Eve’s children find husbands and wives to marry?” These are just a few examples of the
questions that emerge from a purely literal reading of the first few chapters
of Genesis.
At
this point, I think a word about taking the Bible literally is in order. I can already hear the objections: “But I believe this is God’s Word. God says what he means and means what he
says. If we can’t trust the Bible in one
place, then we can’t trust it at all. We
have to take it literally because if we don’t then how do we know if any of it
is true?” First, there is a difference
between taking the Bible
literally
and taking it
seriously. Sometimes to take the Bible seriously (i.e.
on its own terms as it was intended to be read) means precisely that we do
not take it literally. If I tell you that it is raining cats and
dogs here in Durham as I write this, I hope that you won’t take me
literally. I hope that you will not go
to YouTube in hopes of finding videos of Siamese kittens and Rottweiler puppies
falling from the North Carolina sky (as entertaining as that might be). Of course, you would understand that I am
using an expression that I did not intend to be understood literally. If you
did
take me literally, then you would not be taking me seriously. After all, Jesus didn’t want his own hearers
to take him literally all of the time.
Much to his audience’s consternation, Jesus frequently
told confusing parables – stories about things that never actually happened but
that nonetheless contain deep truths. We
would be wrong to criticize him for failing to speak literally. The moment we in the audience start bickering
about what city the prodigal son visited in his escapades or in what year this
or that parable took place is the moment we miss the point entirely.
Similarly,
Genesis should be read as a story containing deep truths, but not necessarily
as a true story in the same way that,
say, James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom
recounts the history of the Civil War.
Unfortunately we oftentimes import our own modern understanding of
history onto the Bible. But what we understand to be history (akin to Joe
Friday asking for “just the facts, ma’am” in Dragnet) is quite different from what ancient peoples understood
history to be. The ancients preferred to
tell stories for their explanatory
and moral power, as opposed to our
concern for accurate chronology. And so
when we open our Bibles, we must always remember that we are eavesdropping in
on a conversation that took place in a foreign land among a foreign people with
very different values and thought patterns than our own.
In short, my main
idea is this: Genesis is not (and was
never intended to be) a scientific guide to the origins of the universe. Nor was it intended to be a factual history
in the same way that we think of factual histories. To read it this way sets us on course for a
multitude of absurd questions. And,
worse, we are in danger of missing the point entirely.
Genesis,
like the rest of Scripture, was written to teach God’s people about God – about
his nature, about his relationship to creation, about his covenant love for the
nation of Israel, and about his salvific purposes for humanity. When we read Genesis, we are reading
something
theological, not
scientific. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the
entirety of the Bible was written for this purpose: to disclose the nature of the One True God
and to reveal how we might have restored relationship with Him. But when we start reading the Bible as though
it exists to teach us scientific truths about the world, then we fall into the
same trap that led the church of late medieval Europe to condemn those first
astronomers for claiming that the earth revolves around the sun.
So
what
is Genesis about? To determine this, we must first learn who
wrote it and why. The traditional view that
prevailed for many years held that Moses himself wrote the first five books of
the Old Testament (called the Pentateuch).
However, most Old Testament scholars today, both Jewish and Christian,
agree that Genesis was written much later in the post-Exilic period of Israel’s
history. The Old Testament scholar Peter
Enns summarizes the predominant view among scholars this way: “The Penteteuch
was not authored out of whole cloth by a second-millenium Moses but it is the
product of a complex literary process – written, oral, or both – that did not
come to a close until the post-exilic period.
This… is a virtual scholarly consensus after one and a half centuries of
debate.”
With this in mind,
then, we begin to understand what motivated the authors of Genesis in their
compilation of the text. We must keep in
mind that the exile into Babylon was the most cataclysmic and catastrophic
event in Israel’s history. The exile was
not simply a mater of relocating to a new land; it was, in the mind of the
Jews, proof that God had forever abandoned his people. The trauma of this event was the driving
force – the motivation behind – the creation of what we today call the Old
Testament. To quote Enns again, “The
creation of the Hebrew Bible, in other words, is
an exercise in national self-definition in response to the Babylonian
exile.”
Keeping this context in mind, then, we are
able to better understand who wrote Genesis and why. And this changes the way we read it. Rather that trying to find in Genesis an ahistorical,
objective, scientific explanation of the origins of human life, we find a
distinctively Jewish document written as a declaration to a scattered and
bewildered people, declaring, “This is who we are, and this is the God we
worship! Despite what you see, we are
the people of God even now!” The story
of Adam and Eve, then, recapitulates the story of Israel and reminds Israel
(and us in the church today!) that there is still hope and that our God has not
abandoned us.
One
other method for explaining the
aboutness
of Genesis is to compare it to other creation stories of the Ancient Near East
and notice how the biblical account differs.
The Hebrew people were not the only ones who wrote an account of the
beginning of the world. The ancient
Sumerians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and other cultures beyond
Mesopotamia did as well. The Babylonian
text
Enuma Elish, for example, is
often called the “Babylonian Genesis” because of its many similarities. Just like in Genesis 1, the
Enuma Elish describes the creation of
order out of chaos
,
the darkness that preceded creation, the light that came before the sun, moon,
and stars, the separation of the waters, and a sequence of days of creation.
The Jewish compilers of Genesis were familiar
with the
Enuma Elish, which is far
older than Israel’s creation story, and used it in editing the text that
appears in our Bibles today. But
significantly the Israelites changed some key elements of the Babylonian story. Rather than describing creation as the result
of struggle and conflict as the Babylonian story does, Genesis depicts creation
through God’s very words. In addition, the
force of chaos is depersonalized in the Bible.
What emerges, then, is a direct challenge to the prevailing creation
myths of the ancient near east. Genesis insists that God alone created the
world by an act of his own sovereign will.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the one true God and stands in
judgment over all other supposed gods.
In short, the
aboutness of
Genesis is
theological. It is a polemical theological response to the
polytheism and conflict-driven creation myths of other cultures. The Israelites were saying through their
story, “Our God is the Only God. He
alone is the Creator. He alone is to be worshiped.”
A similar
comparison between the remainder of Genesis chapters 1-11 could be made (in
particular, with the many flood narratives of other cultures such as those
found in the Sumerian Gilgamesh Epic
or the Akkadian Atrahasis) but space
will not allow it here. The important point
is that Genesis 1-11, like the similar stories found in the Ancient Near East
at the time, were not written as historical chronicles as though a newspaper
journalist was standing nearby during each event and writing down everything
that happened (for that is how I once thought of it as a child). Rather, these stories taken together
“present not a picture of history
but a picture of how Israel sees itself as God’s people and the surrounding
world. This point is essentially
self-evident and so shapes our expectations of what Genesis is prepared to
deliver for those who read it today.
These early chapters are the Word of God, but they are not history in
any normally accepted sense of the word today.
And they are most certainly not science.
They speak another language altogether.”
They speak another language altogether. In a way, that is the central idea
I want to convey to you who read
this paper. The conflict between modern
scientific teaching about evolution and the stories of creation found in
Genesis is not as great as we oftentimes think.
In a sense, the two are speaking different languages. They are talking past one another.
Evolutionary theory is a scientific attempt
to understand “what actually happened” in history and how life was
created. But Genesis is not about
that. It is addressing another issue
entirely. At the risk of sounding like a
broken record, I will say it again: the authors of Genesis were concerned with
explaining to their Jewish readers how there is still hope even in the midst of
exile, how God has a special relationship with his people, how humanity is
unique and special in God’s eyes, and how the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
is different from the false gods of the surrounding cultures. You might say these are the boundaries of the
“aboutness” of Genesis. Reading our own
modernist concerns (which extend beyond these boundaries) into Scripture does
violence to the text.
All of this might
leave you thinking, “But what does
the Bible have to say about when and how God created the material world?” The answer (which you may not like) is that
the Bible doesn’t say much at all.
Rather, I conclude from Scripture that whatever method God used for
creating this world, we can trust that his hand has been behind it. The Bible, contrary to what some have claimed
from behind the pulpit, is not God’s answer book to every possible question we
might imagine. This is not to diminish
the Bible, but merely to point out that it was written for a particular reason,
and we must respect those reasons without trying to import more meaning into
the text than was intended. I believe
that the Bible contains everything necessary for salvation. It does not
contain modern science for that is not why it was written. Failing to acknowledge that fact is like
reading a love letter from your wife in hopes that you will discover how to
repair the exhaust system in your Toyota.
There are many
questions I have not addressed here. For
example, what does a belief in evolution imply about the nature of evil in the
world? What does it mean for our
doctrine of the fall or original sin?
What are we to make of Paul’s reference to Adam in Romans 5?
If humans are evolved from other lower
species, what does it mean to be “made in God’s image”? All of these are excellent questions that
would take me beyond the scope of this paper.
I will include a bibliography at the end of this paper for further
reading if you are interested in examining these questions in more depth. What I hope I have accomplished is to open
the door to further exploration in this area and also to have given an account
of how it is possible to believe in evolution while also remaining committed to
the authority of Scripture.
If
you’ll indulge me, I want to offer one final comment. I realize that this is a highly charged,
emotional issue for many. It certainly
has been for me as I traveled the road from literal seven-day creationism to
theistic evolution. Evangelicals are a
people of the book. The reason this debate
generates so much heat is that many perceive evolution to be a threat to the
authority of Scripture and, as a result, to our way of life. Since the Reformation, Protestants have been
largely committed to sola Scriptura
(only the Bible). So when a new theory
like evolution comes along it is perceived as a threat not only to the Bible,
but also to our religious identity.
Evolution requires Christians to engage in a rather painful process: the
work of rethinking theology in light of new evidence. For some the very idea of such a project is
anathema. But I truly believe that we as
Christians must embrace the pain and ambiguity of not knowing all the answers. When we do this – when we recognize our own
limitations and remain open to the conclusions of modern science – we witness
to our faith in the God of all Truth.
And so I write this paper not as an enemy, but as an ally. I want to see the church thrive and I long to
see this “stumbling block” removed from the faith journey of so many who hunger
for God.
Bibliography
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Creation
and Fall & Temptation: Two Biblical
Studies. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1997.
Cunningham, Conor. Darwin's Pious Idea : Why the
Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans,
2010.
Goldingay, John. Genesis for Everyone. Volume 1.
Louisville, KY: WJK Press, 2010.
Hummel, Charles
E. The
Galileo Connection: Resolving the
Conflicts between Science and the Bible.
Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity,
1986.
Kobe, Donald H. "Copernicus and Martin Luther: An Encounter
Between Science and Religion” American
Journal of Physics 66.3 (March 1998): 190-196.
Northcott,
Michael S. and R. J. Berry, eds. Theology After Darwin. Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2009.
Southgate,
Christopher. The Groaning of Creation: God,
Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.
I recently heard an interview on Fresh Air with Adrian Raine, a neurobiologist, criminologist, and author of the book The Anatomy of Violence. Raine has conducted extensive brain-mapping of murderers, serial killers, and psychopaths and has demonstrated quite conclusively that violent criminals who have acted upon angry impulses very often have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the segment of the brain that provides impulse control and effectively tells us "Even though you're really angry with him, don't pull out the kitchen knife and kill him." Raine describes this part of the brain as the "guardian angel" of the human conscience. As a result of his investigations, Raine is calling attention to the fact that some criminals commit crimes due to their very biological makeup. And this not only applies to murder, but also to less serious offenses such as cheating on a test, stealing, lying, and so on.