Why I Believe in Evolution

            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.[1]

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[2] 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.[3]

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.[4] 

            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.[5]  (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 21^st 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.[6]  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.[7]

            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.”[8] 

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.”[9]  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.[10]

            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[11], 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.[12]  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.”[13] 

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.[14]  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?[15]  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

Augustine. The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Translated by J. H. Taylor, 2 vols. New York:  Paulist Press, 1982.

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.

Enns, Peter. The Evolution of Adam : What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say About Human Origins.  Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012.

Goldingay, John.  Genesis for Everyone.  Volume 1.  Louisville, KY:  WJK Press, 2010.

Haught, John F. God after Darwin : A Theology of Evolution. 2nd ed.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008.

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.

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[1] Two weeks ago, I mentioned on Facebook that I would like to share this paper with anyone who might find the topic interesting.  I received over fifty requests within 24 hours.

[2] I have chosen to use the masculine pronoun for God in this paper deliberately since doing so is the common practice among those evangelicals I am addressing.

[3] Quoted in Karl Giberson, “Creationists Drive Young People out of the Church,” The Huffington Post, accessed 29 April 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-giberson-phd/creationists-and-young-christians_b_1096839.html

[4] Even St. Augustine, writing over 1500 years ago, warned against Christians taking the creation stories of Genesis literally:  “It is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these [cosmological] topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.”  Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. J. H. Taylor, 2 vols. (New York:  Paulist Press, 1982), 1:42-43.

[5] “Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.  Accessed 29 April 2013. 

[6] In Matthew 16:6-11 Jesus seems to be downright frustrated that his followers always thought so literally!

[7] There are a striking number of similarities between the current evolution-creation debate and the debate over geocentric-heliocentric models that took place during the Copernican Revolution of the 16^th century.  For a clear and accessible book on this topic see Charles E. Hummel’s The Galileo Connection:  Resolving the Conflicts between Science and the Bible.  The theologians of Copernicus’ day referred to the story of Israel’s battle at Gibeon in which the “sun stood motionless in the middle of the sky” (Joshua 10:13) as clear biblical proof of geocentrism since, in the words of Martin Luther, “Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth.”  Thus, Copernicus stood condemned because he did not take the Bible literally!  See Donald H. Kobe, “Copernicus and Martin Luther: An Encounter Between Science and Religion” American Journal of Physics 66.3 (March 1998): 190.

[8] Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam : What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say About Human Origins  (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012), 23. For a summary of these debates, see chapter 2.

[9] The Evolution of Adam : What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say About Human Origins  (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012), 28.

[10] Enns actually goes so far as to suggest that the first chapters of Genesis are not ultimately about all of humanity, but rather are exclusively about the nation of Israel.  Adam and Eve function as the archetypes of the Israelite people.  He concludes, “Adam is not a story of the origin of humanity in general but of Israel in particular.  When seen from this perspective, efforts to reconcile Adam and evolution become unnecessary – at least from the point of view of Genesis.” Enns, Evolution of Adam, 70.  To put this another way, the story of Adam and Eve is not an answer to the question “Where do people come from?” but rather “Where do the people of Israel come from?”  It is about national identity more than anything else.

[11] As a side note, most Christians do not realize this, but Genesis nowhere indicates a doctrine of God’s creation ex nihilo (out of nothing).  Genesis 1 assumes matter already existed albeit in a state of chaos.  This is much more clear in the original Hebrew.  The new Common English Bible is a far better translation here than the NIV.  This is not to say that the doctrine of God’s creation “out of nothing” is untrue – just that it cannot be derived through Scripture alone.

[12] Walton, John.  The Lost World of Genesis One:  Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity, 2009), 78-86.

[13] Enns, The Evolution of Adam : What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say About Human Origins, 50; Conor Cunningham, Darwin's Pious Idea : Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong  (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2010); John F. Haught, God after Darwin : A Theology of Evolution, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008).

[14] John Walton, professor at Wheaton College, makes a strong case from biblical studies that Genesis offers an account of functional origins, not material origins.  Drawing from his study of the Hebrew, Walton contends that Genesis explains why the Jews practiced Sabbath, why they worshipped the way they did, etc. rather than explaining material origins.  This is another variation on the same thesis that modern science and Genesis are speaking different languages.  See his book The Lost World of Genesis One.

[15] This is a particularly difficult question that Peter Enns addresses in the second half of his book The Evolution of Adam.