The story is told of an atheist who was walking through the woods, admiring all the “accidents” that evolution had created. “What majestic trees! What powerful rivers! What beautiful animals!” he said to himself.
As he was walking alongside the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. Turning to look, he saw a 7-foot grizzly bear charge towards him. He ran away as fast as he could up the path.
He looked over his shoulder and saw the grizzly was closing. Somehow, he ran even faster, so scared that tears came to his eyes. He looked again, and the bear was even closer. His heart was pounding, and he tried to run faster. He tripped and fell to the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up, but the bear was right over him, reaching for him with its left paw and raising its right paw to strike him.
At that instant the atheist cried, “Oh my God!”
Time stopped. The bear froze. The forest was silent. Even the river stopped moving.
As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky, “You deny my existence for all these years, teach others that I don’t exist, and even credit creation to a cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer?”
The atheist looked directly into the light and said, “I would feel like a hypocrite if I became a Christian after all these years, but perhaps you could make the bear a Christian?”
“Very well,” said the voice.
The light went out. The river ran. The sounds of the forest resumed. Then the bear dropped his right paw, brought both paws together, bowed its head, and spoke: “Lord, for this food which I am about to receive, make me truly thankful. Amen.”[1]
One interesting thing to me about that story is that it assumes that evolutionists don’t believe in God and that Christians don’t believe in evolution. Which brings us to our final question in this series on Ultimate Questions. A member of our congregation sent me the following email one week ago:
Feel free to condense this into a concise question, but...
Given the age of science that we live in, how do you meld Creationism and Evolutionary Biology? Is it one or the other?
I spent 11 years teaching middle and high school Biology. Obviously creationism is not taught in our local schools, but I would preface my unit on Darwin and evolutionary biology by explaining the religious context of the time and why Darwin’s views were so extreme and revolutionary at the time, but so accepted today. When my students and co-workers found out that I also taught Sunday School, they would call me a hypocrite. How could I believe that God created the world as explained in Genesis, but also believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution? I believe that this is one of the major uphill battles that the church has in gaining new members. The adults of my generation and younger are all taught evolutionary biology in school, with hard scientific evidence to back it up. If you haven’t been raised in a church, trying to explain to someone why they should come to church and believe in creationism is a hard sell without any tactile evidence to back it up.
I have read many books on the topic and have had to come to a place in my mind where they can coexist, but I am curious to hear your take!
Allow me to respond to our questioner’s statements point by point. First, what is creationism?In researching this topic online, I found that the Pew Research Center had a helpful article. In that essay, they defined Creationism as follows: “The belief that the creation story in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible book of Genesis is literally true and is akin to a scientific explanation for the creation of the Earth and the development of life.”[2]
I do not believe in “Creationism” as defined. The reason I am not a creationist is because I think creationists are reading Genesis 1 incorrectly. They are reading Genesis 1 as though it were a scientific or historical text. I do not believe that Genesis 1 is either of those.
People often ask me if I read the Bible “literally” to which I reply, “No, I read the Bible literarily.” What I mean by that is this… The Bible is filled with all sorts of literature. There is historical narrative in the Bible. There is poetry. There is wisdom literature. There are parables. There is apocalyptic literature. There are letters. I could go on. The Bible is not one book. It is a library of books. In each case, we need to read each part of the Bible according to the type of literature it contains.
Now let me ask you a question, if you were perusing a library and happened to come upon a book that contained stories about talking animals, what would you think? Well, I am fairly confident that almost every person above a certain age would realize that they were reading a fable.
Are fables true? Well, they certainly are not true in any historical or scientific sense. But fables are often true in a much more important sense—in the sense that they teach us deep truths about life.
After reading and studying the book of Genesis for many years, I have come to believe that what we have in the first 11 chapters of Genesis is a collection of some of the most meaningful fables, or folk tales, ever written. These stories teach us deep and important truths about God and about life. But they are not history and they are not science.
I am not alone in reading Genesis in this way. Most modern biblical scholars would agree. Richard Elliott Friedman, my professor at UCSD, writes this in his Commentary on the Torah:
Attempts to reconcile this seven-day creation story with evolution and geological and cosmological evidence of the age of the universe are absurd, requiring a twisting of the words of the text in ways they never remotely meant. Arguments over whether the biblical or the scientific picture is correct are pointless. Of coursethe biblical picture is not a factual, literal account of the universe’s origin. The evidence to this effect is overwhelming. It is, however, a meaningful, valuable, instructive account: It conveys a particular conception of the relationship between humans and the cosmos, of the relations between the sexes, of the linear flow of time, of the Sabbath. It sets the Bible’s story in a context of a universe that starts out as good, with God being initially very close to humans.”[3]
Furthermore, even before the modern age, Christians did not always interpret the Genesis account of creation literally. Dom Bede Griffiths, author of The Marriage of East and West, published in 1982, touches upon the literal interpretation of the Genesis creation account by the ancient school of Antioch and the symbolic interpretation of the school of Alexandria. He writes,
But there was another school, represented by St. Gregory of Nyssa in the East and St. Augustine in the West, which held with the school of Alexandria that the world was created at a moment of time by a single act of the divine power, but that it was produced not in the form in which we know it but in its “potentiality.” According to St. Gregory of Nyssa, God created not the forms of things as they now exist but certain “powers” or “energies” which were destined to develop in the course of time into the present forms of nature. The seven days of creation were interpreted simply as the stages in the evolution of these primordial energies according to what he called “a necessary order.” In the same way St. Augustine spoke of the world being created in its “causes” or “seminal principles” (rationes seminales), that is to say that certain principles were implanted in nature from the beginning like seeds, which were destined to develop their specific forms according to the laws or tendencies inherent in them.[4]
Thus, some fifteen hundred years before Darwin, two great thinkers in the Christian Church, articulated an understanding of Genesis and the creation story that is in amazing harmony with modern science.
Along with Creationism, there is another movement current in our day called “Creation science”.Pew defines creation science as, “A movement that has attempted to uncover scientific evidence to show that the biblical creation story is true. Some in the creation science movement, known as ‘young Earth creationists,’ reject not only evolution but also the idea that the universe and the Earth are billions of years old.”
Well, I am not a “creationist” and I am not a “young earth creationist” either. I think the “young earth creationists” are trying to defend the Bible in an area where the Bible needs no defense. Just as creationists in general misread the Bible, I believe that young earth creationists do as well.
Young earth creationists have based their dating of the age of the earth upon the work of Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland who lived from 1581 to 1656. Archbishop Ussher dated the creation of the universe rather precisely to 22 October 4004 BC.
By the middle of the 19thcentury, Ussher’s chronology came under increasing attack. Many argued that Ussher’s “young Earth” was incompatible with the increasingly accepted view of an Earth much more ancient. Even in the 19thcentury, it became generally accepted that the Earth was tens, perhaps even hundreds of millions of years old. Ussher fell into disrepute among theologians as well. In 1890, William Henry Green, a professor at my alma mater, Princeton Theological Seminary, wrote, “We conclude that the Scriptures furnish no data for a chronological computation prior to the life of Abraham; and that the Mosaic records do not fix and were not intended to fix the precise date either of the Flood or of the creation of the world.” B. B. Warfield, another one of the Princeton divines, said “it is precarious in the highest degree to draw chronological inferences from genealogical tables” in the Bible.[5]
Now let’s define the word “evolution”. Again, I find the Pew Research Center helpful. They define evolution as: “The theory, first articulated by Charles Darwin, that life on Earth has evolved through natural selection, a process through which plants and animals change over time by adapting to their environments.”
Many people assume that the Church has always been against Darwin’s theory, but such is not the case. Let me read you something from an excellent web site called BioLogos:
Even before Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, many Christians had already accepted an old Earth. One of the first supporters of evolutionary science in America—Harvard biologist Asa Gray—was a devout Christian. Conservative theologian B. B. Warfield also accepted the science of evolution, and both he and Asa Gray rejected the idea that evolution leads to atheism. Even the authors of The Fundamentals, published between 1910 and 1915, accepted an old earth. It wasn’t until a century after Darwin that a large number of evangelicals and fundamentalists began to accept the combination of flood geology and 6-day creation promoted by Seventh-day Adventists.[6]
Thus, the reaction to Darwin in his lifetime, even among some Christians, both scientists and theologians, was not that of rejection, but rather acceptance of his theory.
Thirdly, many people ask: “Doesn’t Genesis teach that the world was created in six, 24-hour days?”
In order to answer that question, I invite you to notice something about the structure of Genesis 1. The author or editor of Genesis has given us three days of forming and three days of filling, followed by one day upon which God rests. The days correspond as follows…
· On day one God creates light; on day four, God creates the sun, the moon and the stars.
· On day two, God forms the sky and the seas; on day five, God creates the birds and the fish to fill the sky and the seas.
· On day three, God makes the land; on day six, God makes animals and human beings to populate the land.
So, what we have in Genesis 1 is a literary construct. Genesis 1 does not tell us that the world was created in 6, 24-hour days, because the sun is not even created until the fourth day. Genesis 1 is not a historical or scientific recounting of exactly how the universe was created. Rather, what we have is a beautiful literary construct designed to tell us notabout the “how” of creation, but about the “who”—namely God.
C. S. Lewis, in his book, Miracles, writes:
No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that “In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth.” I say “radical” improvement, because the story in Genesis—as St. Jerome said long ago—is told in the manner “of a popular poet,” or as we should say, in the form of a folk tale. But if you compare it with the creation legends of other peoples—with all these delightful absurdities in which giants to be cut up and floods to be dried up are made to exist beforecreation—the depth and originality of this Hebrew folk tale will soon be apparent. The idea of creationin the rigorous sense of the word is there fully grasped.[7]
So, are Genesis and Evolution in conflict?No, I do not believe so. Personally, I like the way that Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, leader of the Human Genome Project and the author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, reconciles Genesis and Evolution. He writes,
Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time. God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings. After evolution, in the fullness of time, had prepared a sufficiently advanced neurological “house” (the brain), God gifted humanity with free will and with a soul. Thus humans received a special status, “made in God’s image”. We humans used our free will to disobey God, leading to our realization of being in violation of the Moral Law. Thus we were estranged from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.[8]
I could not agree more…
[1]Source unknown; submitted by David Holdaway, Stonehaven, Kincardinshire, Scotland, to preachingtoday.com
[3]Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, p. 14.
[4]Quoted by Sheldon Vanauken, The Little Lost Marion and other Mercies, Steubenville, OH: Franciscan University Press, 1996, p. 240.
[7]C. S. Lewis, Miracles, end of Chapter IV on “Nature and Supernature”
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