God’s Existence: Not Dependent on Disproving Evolution

Visualization of the Internet

As I’ve mentioned before one of the benefits of blogging is that one does occasionally have opportunity to enter into discourse with someone who holds to idea or beliefs radically different from one’s own or even antithetical to one’s own.  From these exchanges it is possible to learn new ideas and information or to get insight into the mind of people with whom one disagrees.   Of course on the Internet there are  abundance partisan polemics and “ditto heads” who read nothing other than what they already believe and who have no interest in engaging debate to increase mutual understanding or to change opinions.  It always reminds me of the adage I once heard about Bible reading:  if you read only those passages which you like or with which you agree then you really you just go to the bible to find your own thoughts rather than to hear what the Lord of the universe might be saying to you. 

In one exchange on evolution with people whose worldview is almost exclusively scientific and atheistic and who were concerned about the views of religious fundamentalists being foisted on scientists and biological research, I offered the following thoughts (which I base in the notions that truth is truth, and all truth is also Christian truth):

Perhaps the attitude needed by scientists is “whether or not God exists, what do we know and what can we know about human origins and evolution?” If evolution is true, it will be true whether or not there is a God. Evolution is not dependent on God’s existence for its verification.

Conversely for believers, the existence of God is not dependent on the certainty or impossibility of evolution.

Of course, these ideas work if one is not an absolute biblical literalist.  If one places on the bible the condition that the

Dinosaur fossil skull

bible is valuable only if Genesis 1-3 is literally true, then one certainly places a limit on the revelation of God.  Additionally one puts one’s faith at the mercy of science which then tends to lead to one opposing some scientific research because it might challenge or question one’s beliefs.   If someone wants to be a biblical literalist regarding Genesis 1-3 and to claim it is science, it would seem more reasonable to then encourage scientific research to see if it affirms the bible.  But when one’s faith is then challenged by the findings or direction of scientific research, why oppose science since one made “scientific truth” the very foundation for one’s faith? 

If God exists, He exists whether or not evolution is true.   The existence of God is not dependent on the discoveries of science.  However a literal reading of Scriptures might make one’s faith in God dependent on scientific research.  It is not science’s fault if its findings do not confirm your faith.

It is important for believers to realize the Bible itself does not advocate absolute literalism in interpreting itself.  Take a look at St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans 5:14 -  “Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.”   Notice that St. Paul calls Adam “a type” of Christ.  St. Paul sees the significance of Adam not in deciding the literalness of the story but in how Adam is a type of Christ.  Adam can only be fully understood in and because of Christ.  God intended for us as readers of the story to get beyond the literalness of the story to its true importance and meaning.   We understand best who Jesus is when we understand that Adam is a model or foreshadowing of Christ’s coming.  The plan of God being unveiled in Genesis 2 cannot be understood apart from Christ.   The story of Adam is thus not just about the origins of humankind.  For Christ, the “new Adam” reveals true humanity and humanity’s true origins.    St. Paul is not very interested in Genesis as the scientific explanation of the origins of humanity.  For St. Paul the Genesis 2 story’s significance is only understood in Christ.   To read Genesis 2 apart from Christ or to read it as science is to misread it altogether.  That is the argument and thinking of St. Paul.   (You can see more ideas about “type” in 1 Corinthians 10:6-11 and Hebrews 8:5). 

A faith in God ultimately finds its justification in God, not in science.  We hope in God.  We look for ultimate meaning in God.  We understand creation (even the vastness of the universe) as being in God and thus on the grand scale of things only a small part of all that exists.   Science studies this small part of existence.   Faith is what puts this existence into the greater context of God’s own being.

Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? (2)

This is the continuation of my blog  Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? (1).    In this blog I am reflecting on Denis Alexander’s book CREATION OR EVOLUTION: DO WE HAVE TO CHOOSE?     The answer to the book title’s question for Alexander and for my self is “no, we don’t have to choose because the two are opposed only if one demands only a literalist reading of Genesis 1-3 or if one is an atheist.”

There is a certain difficulty for Christians in accepting a notion that Adam and Eve were created as eternal beings not subject to death, for this would imply that that Adam and Eve had some kind of existence apart from earth and were not created from real dirt/dust and that life in Paradise was not subject to the same scientific law as we are today.   For example if Adam and Eve ate fruit in Eden, were the cells and plants subject to death or not?     If they had made fig leaf garments before the fall, would they garments also have been eternal?   Were all fish, amphibians and insects completely vegan and not predators or parasites?    It would imply that Adam and Eve were angelic beings who fell to earth from some other kind of place because of sin and not because God created them with bodies.  It would imply that this world is not God’s creation but a lesser world destined for beings beneath God’s dignity.  This is Babylonian cosmology but not a Biblical one; certainly this would be an idea that the Jews and Genesis would argue against as Genesis 1 unlike the Babylonian creation stories has a good God making a good creation.   Genesis 2 admittedly is more ambivalent on the goodness of creation for there is a serpent already in Paradise and a fruit that if eaten leads to death.

Alexander however sticks with his Genesis-Jeremiah notion that the Biblical story is not meant to be read as science but rather offers a cosmological understanding of creation in which ultimately “Physical death has no place in the fulfilled kingdom of God, the new heavens and the new earth.”   Sin and death are part of this world, but this world is only a small part of the entire story which God is telling beginning with Genesis.   For Alexander the coming of Christ is inaugurating that hoped for new age in which the rules of nature (which science studies) have no final say:  the healing ministry of Jesus points not back to a pre-fallen state but looks forward to the new heaven and new earth.   The Bible’s account of creation from Genesis to Revelation is thus not intended to be science but rather God revealing His own plan which gives this world meaning which is outside of the study of science.  To try to force the Scriptures to be science is in fact to limit them and reduce them to this world rather than tying this world into the world to come.

Turning to look at some scientific concepts which are part of an evolutionary worldview, Alexander notes, “The term ‘survival of the fittest’ has sometimes been used to describe natural selection, but is not very accurate because survival is not really the main point in this process… the key point about natural selection is the successful reproduction that ensures that an individual’s genes are passed on to the next generation.”   The concept of “survival of the fittest” has been co-opted by secular social scientists and political ideologues and used for all kinds of purposes that are far removed from the original idea of natural selection.   Natural selection is a creative and life giving process not a political justification for oppressing the weak.

Alexander also notes that there are philosophical assumptions at the basis of evolution which are a matter of faith.   “Chance is simply a handy description that we humans use for our beliefs about the properties of matter.  There is no such agent as ‘metaphysical chance’, but there is the human belief held by some people that the universe has no ultimate meaning.”  In other words chance is a concept we put apply to how we perceive natural selection working.  The reality is we cannot know scientifically whether events we perceive of as chance are part of a pattern and plan that we cannot detect. 

“Evolutionary history on this planet displays overall increased complexity, genomic constraint and convergence.  …   an ‘atheism-of-the-gaps’ type of argument in which atheists seek to support their disbelief in God based on interpretations of scientific data which appear initially plausible due to lack of knowledge about the data, but appear less believable as our understanding of the process –  in this case the evolutionary process – become more complete.”

It is not only believers who have to choose faith in a God who guides the universe.  For non-believers “chance” is just as much an issue of belief because there is no way to prove that events are random rather than part of a pattern we cannot detect.

Alexander is a Christian believer, a theist and a scientist, whose writings have won him praise from evangelical Christians as well as from scientists.  He has not embraced the ideas of Intelligent Design because he feels that is an “argument from ignorance” – because we currently don’t know how complexity could emerge spontaneously does not mean that it can’t or didn’t.  It only means our ability to know is limited.  This however is the same argument he applies to atheistic scientists – we do not have the complete picture about God and His role in creation and so concluding there is no God is an assumption based in incomplete evidence. 

Next:  Evolution from Creation to New Creation (1) 

Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? (1)

This is the 2nd blog in this series which began with Journey into the Unknown:  Science and Religion.    In this blog I will look at Denis Alexander’s book CREATION OR EVOLUTION: DO WE HAVE TO CHOOSE?    which I had previously commented on back in March 2009 in my blog  Creation vs. Evolution: The Imaginary Divide.

Rather than simply write a review of Alexander’s book or to evaluate his theory on how science and Christianity can not only co-exist but co-operate with one another, I want to look in the next couple of blogs about some of the assumptions Alexander makes in concluding that we need not choose between creation and science (a conclusion with which I agree).   Some of the issues raised – those related to the Jewish rejection of Babylonian mythological creation stories –  I mentioned in a previous blog The Literal Value of Genesis.  I am going to look more at the theology he presents than the science, but his arguments rely a great deal on scientific fact to support his contentions.

One of the key factors which shapes the science vs. religion debate is the effect of the Enlightenment on how we understand truth.  (I’ve written about this in several past blogs, one of the longer pieces being:  Christianity and Science).  Alexander writes:

“Western readers, in particular, are not very practiced at reading ancient literature and have a tendency to interpret with a wooden literalism.  This is because scientific literature has become so dominant in our culture, influencing the way in which we instinctively read even those texts that come from a pre-scientific age.”

In other words, part of the fundamentalist debate against science and evolution is based in the fact that these Christians insist the bible must be read literally and as if it is science to be true.   The literalists are allowing science to define truth and arguing on scientific terms.  The Bible however was written in the pre-scientific age and while speaking of eternal truths is couched in the language, assumptions, knowledge and perspectives of the people inspired to write God’s revelation to humanity.   This is part of what inspiration means – God works in, through and with the humans He has chosen to reveal His plan and will. 

One interesting point Alexander (pp 154-155) makes about the Genesis creation story is that Genesis 1:2 says the earth was “formless and void”.    In this first chapter of Genesis this is where God’s creative process begins for the very thing God is going to do is to impose order on the chaos and to fill the emptiness with life.    As Alexander notes about the days of creation the formlessness is given order:  on day 1 – God separates light and dark, on  day 2 – God separates waters of the sea from waters of the sky, and on day 3 – God separates the sea from dry land which allows for the creation of plants.    On the world now formed and ordered, God fills the emptiness:  on day 4 – lights are made to rule day and night, on day 5 – birds and fishes are created to fill the sky and seas,  and on day 6 –  God creates animals and humans to fill the land .       Later in the book (p 263) Alexander mentions the Prophet  Jeremiah lamenting a reversal of the process of God filling the emptiness due to human sin.  The “Disobedience of God’s people is unraveling the beauty of the created order.”  Alexander sees this as the Biblical meta-story – the Bible was never intended to be a science text book, but by placing this world in the eternal plan of God gives all things on earth including life, death and evolution meaning.

I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void (same words as Genesis 1:2);

and to the heavens, and they had no light.

 I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro.

I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled.

I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the LORD,

 before his fierce anger.   (Jeremiah 4:23-26, NRSV)

The creation story of Genesis is placing before us the story of humanity and the world in God’s terms.  It is not giving us an exact scientific framework for understanding creation.  If we miss that point, we misunderstand a great deal about the Scriptures of God.

One of the difficulties Christians face in reading the scriptures and accepting the scientific account of the world’s history is why there is death in the world.  Christians in the Patristic age concluded death was the result of human sin, and thus God is not to blame for the mortality of His favored creatures.  It was not God’s plan for humans to die, but human choice inflicted death not only on humanity but also on all creation.  Many of these ideas are gleaned from St. Paul’s reading of Genesis, for the Old Testament itself makes virtually no reference to the effects of the fall of Adam and Eve on humanity (2 Esdras 3 does).  Alexander however notes:  “Nowhere in the Old Testament is there the slightest suggestion that the physical death of either animals or humans, after a reasonable span of years, is anything other than the normal pattern ordained by God for this earth.”   This is true of the current Jewish and Protestant scriptures.  However, the early Christians relied on the Septuagint version of the Jewish scriptures and in Wisdom 1:12-16 it is made clear that God did not make death and that it is the unrighteous who have summoned death into being.   The notion that humans would have lived eternally if there had been no sin is not spelled out in Genesis or in the Jewish canonical Scriptures.   In general the notion of the immortality of the soul is a more Hellenic idea than biblical one.  Certainly even in the New Testament the resurrection of Christ is nowhere connected with the immortality of the soul but rather with the resurrection of the body.  Alexander’s reading of the Scriptures brings him to this conclusion: “It is clear from these contexts that it is not death per se which is caused by sin, but rather premature death which is seen as specific punishment for specific sins.”

Next:  Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? (2)

Being Fruitful, Multiplying, Filling the Earth and Time

Trudging along the paths of Bill Yeck Park, I was thinking about God’s command to us in Genesis 1:28 to “be fruitful and multiply.”  So much thought has gone into the rest of the verse about subduing the earth and filling it and having dominion over every living thing that moves on the earth.  God the creative Creator whose making of the cosmos in Genesis 1 is done with poetic license (the word “made” in Gen 1:1 in Greek is the same word that our word poem or poetry comes from), endows humans with creativity as well.  In Genesis 2:19, God awaits to see what the human will call each animal which God has made – it is left to the human to creatively name the animals, God does not tell Adam their names nor how to name them, but watches as his human creates names and words just like God formed words which created all things.  Thus God imbues humans with a creative nature like His own, except we do not create out of nothing – we creatively name the creatures which in biblical thinking gives us some mastery over them.   “Hippopotamus,” says the man.  “Interesting,” says God.  Would God have thought of that name Himself?  (In the Quran God is overpoweringly omnipotent not leaving any room for human creativity or error, for Allah does not let the human create names, but rather tells the human their names and then tests the human to see if he remembers – the human cannot freely choose, he can only obey and his every act is under judgment.  Thank God for Genesis 2 and the freedom and creativity with which He entrusts us!)

“Be fruitful and multiply…”  {A joke comes to mind:  Why did all of the children in the Christian fundamentalist school refuse to do any division in math?  Because God only commanded them to be fruitful and to multiply.}

“Be fruitful and multiply… fill the earth…”   The creativity that God bestows upon us includes making use of the time He has given us.   We have to fill our time, not just the earth.  We are to be creative and to make beauty just as the Lord did – poetry, art, music, imagining, paintings, sculpting, prose, dance, photography, graphics and animation are among the ways humans are given by God to create beauty in time.   Boredom and wasting time are lost chances to create beauty and to fill time itself with things which give glory to God.   Creativity is a gift from God and a way to use time.

I came upon a plant which I could not identify but the shape of the leaves caught my attention because it showed such imaginative form.  What variety in the leaves of plants – shapes, colors textures.  It seems to me one could spend days on end just photographing the different shapes and sizes of plant leaves, in that alone is there a multiplication of life as God commanded the earth to do (Gen 1:11).  There is a question which is hotly debated today between believers in God and believers in evolution.  Some believers in God claim all the species on earthy – plant and animal had to have been created by God in the six days of creation.  Believers in evolution say not so, plant life continues to evolve with some new species being formed and some others becoming extinct.  Those believers in God say new species cannot form from old ones since God commanded that plants and animals bring forth new life “according to their kind.”  Yet for me, as I read Genesis, I see God saying, let the earth bring forth the herb, the grass the plant bearing seed and the trees.  It doesn’t seem to me that God put any time limit on that.  The earth and the waters are continuously to bring forth life of all and varied kinds.  The text doesn’t say that God made every species, He commanded the earth and the waters to become creative and life giving.  God bestowed upon His creation the ability to creatively bring forth life. Nothing in His command forbids speciation and in fact God seems to value the goodness He sees in the earth and the waters creativity.  Besides if one understands speciation, even if the seed created by any plant species are in fact a new species they do bear the DNA of their parent plants, so they are of the same kind as their parents.  Speciation is not in opposition to what Genesis says – it is in fact the multiplication of which God commanded all living things – not only offspring but new species as well.    With the amazing variety of life we can already find in creation, why would God be opposed to new varieties or variations?  Why some feel the need to limit God’s ability to bring forth new things is beyond me.   Speciation is another form of miracle and a means for God to actually intervene in creation with something new.  He is the Lord and giver of life after all!

The Defeat of Death and the Beauty of New Creation

 Great and Holy Friday

In Orthodoxy, the Genesis story of the creation and fall of humanity is what gives rise to the need for salvation – the very particular salvation of God becoming human in order to restore humanity to God.   If we understand the story of Genesis 1-3, we can make sense of the purpose of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and how Christ, as a new Adam, not only undoes all that the first Adam did wrongly but He does all that Adam left undone, all that Adam failed to do in and for creation.  So the comparing and contrasting of the first Adam in Paradise with the new Adam, Jesus Christ, who restores us to Paradise is a common theme in Christian writing – it helps us both understand the real meaning of Genesis (not its mere literal reading which does not reveal the full purpose of the story) because Christ becomes the key which unlocks the meaning hidden in the Genesis text.  In Christ we finally understand what it is to be human – it is to be in full communion with God.

This is what I mean: Adam rightly died, for he had sinned; the Lord died unjustly, for He sinned not. Until the Lord’s crucifixion death rightly had dominion over men. But since the Lord was sinless, what right did the devil have to put Him to death? Unjustly subjected to death, the Lord vanquished the one who put him to death and, so doing, freed Adam from the death he deserved as a sinner. Moreover, consider the two chief passions which held sway over the human race-pleasure and grief. Neither could conquer Christ when He became man. First the devil attacked Him on the mountain tempting Him with pleasure [Mt. 4:3-9]. Finding Him invincible, the devil then employed the cunning snare of grief to defeat Him, if he could. Again the Lord prevailed. No matter what kind of sorrow the Lord faced-the disciples’ denial, the soldiers’ mockery, the blasphemies of the bystanders- the devil found Him to be unconquerable. Not even the grief of crucifixion could induce the Lord to hate His murderers…. Instead, He loved them and prayed for them saying, “Father, lay not this sin to their charge.” See how He conquered by the very means which seemed to accomplish His defeat! Therefore, the cross has become His exaltation and His glory.” (The Blessed Theophylact, THE EXPLANATION OF THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN)

The story of Christ’s death and resurrection is the story of humanity restored to God and of the promised new creation.  The sin of Adam and Eve led to humanity being exiled from Paradise, and the entire Old Testament is a repeating story of humans falling short, falling into sin and being left outside of the promised land.  In Christ humanity’s exile from God ends.

The theme of the new Eden (the thorns and briers of Genesis 3 replaced with beautiful shrubs) picks up one of the main subtexts of the whole biblical story.  Ultimately, the real exile, the real leaving-home moment, was the expulsion of humankind from the Garden of Eden.  Israel’s multiple exiles and restorations are ways of reenacting that primal expulsion and symbolically expressing the hope for homecoming, for humankind to be restored, for God’s people to be rescued, for creation itself to be renewed.  And one of the main themes that comes back again and again, bubbling up unstoppably and echoing around the ancient prophecy as it echoes around the human heart, is the beauty of the new creation, of Jerusalem and its inhabitants, of the landscape filled with peaceful animals, of the mountains and hills singing for joy.  Isaiah never forgot that the reason God called Abraham in the first place was in order to put the entire creation back to rights, to fill heaven and earth with his glory.

But new creation will come about only through one final and shocking exile and restoration.  The themes of king and Temple, of Torah and new creation, of justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty, come rushing together in the dark theme which lies at the heart of the same book of Isaiah.  The king turns into a servant, YHWH’s servant.    (N.T. Wright, SIMPLY CHRISTIAN: WHY CHRISTIANITY MAKES SENSE)

The crucifixion story is that final shocking exile revealing how far humanity has fallen away from God.  Yet God overcomes that distance and that exile and in His love He transfigures and transforms fallen mortal creation, raising Jesus from the dead, destroying the power of death, and thus revealing the beauty of His creation and its power over death.

Repenting from the Heart

Great Lent is said to be a “school of repentance,” meaning that in the season of Lent, by honestly facing up to our sins and rejecting them for the evil they are, we learn how to repent and the importance of repentance in our daily lives as Christians (We pray that we might “spend the remaining time of our lives in peace and repentance” – repentance is not a 10 minute spiritual talk in confession, it is a way of life involving self understanding as well as a way of understanding the world; it involves a life time of orienting one’s self to God’s will.)

To understand repentance, we have to understand the nature of sin.  There are some false notions of sin, of which we should be aware.

One idea of sin which is not Christian is based in a notion that the human body is evil and the body is the cause of sin.  

  “Christian tradition vigorously denies that our bodies are the real cause of our sin. This is the Manichean heresy that Christians repudiate. Yet while the chief sins are spiritual rather than carnal, we are still called to order the life of our fleshly sins.”  (Ralph C. Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien) 

Any religion which teaches the physical body is in itself evil is based in some form of dualism, but is not biblical.   God is the creator and fashioner of the human body in biblical thinking and the body is also part of what God sees as good in the universe He made.  Jesus is God incarnate – God in the flesh – where the flesh is savable, good, and capable of bearing God.  Mary, the Theotokos, gives flesh to the God incarnate.  The physical body, including human sexual organs, was fashioned by God to be good, as part of God’s plan for humanity and for salvation.

Ideas that the body somehow belongs to the evil part of creation are ancient – predating Christianity, but they are not biblical.  Sometimes it is possible to read in Orthodox hymns about the flesh dualistic ideas and to imagine that one’s body is evil and the cause of all sin.  But we are not trying to escape the body; the body is saved in the resurrection of Christ and in the resurrection of all the dead in the world to come.   The body is thus not the source of sin, though we do sin with our bodies.   The real culprit is the will – we desire things and so sin with our bodies, but we choose this sin.  Our lives are not totally predetermined nor predestined by having bodies, though some forms of atheistic materialism would claim that we are nothing but genetically determined through our bodies.  This again is not biblical.

A second error in thinking about sin would say that Satan or the devil is the cause of all of our sin.  This idea too is not biblical.  Satan is not God’s opposite and equal.  The very point of Genesis 1-3 is that God alone created the heavens and the earth.  Satan had no part in the creation of the world, and is a creature himself.  Satan is not eternal as God is eternal.  Satan’s powers are extremely limited, and in Christian thinking Christ has defeated Satan.  In the baptismal service we say that Satan doesn’t even have power over swine.   Satan cannot make us do anything, but we can choose evil and can cooperate with evil.   In Genesis 6:5 and 8:21 it is clear that God sees the human heart as being the locus of evil in humans.  God does not blame Satan or anything external to humans.   Jesus Christ repeats a very similar idea in Mark 7:20-23 -

“And he said, ‘What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’”

This is why repentance involves looking into one’s self, to see the sins within one’s own heart, to expose them to the light of Christ, to confess them in order to over come them.

Thus sin is not caused by Satan, nor is it external to us.  Sin is found in our hearts and this is where the spiritual war against “the flesh” and against evil and against Satan must take place.   This is why repentance involves looking into our hearts and openly confessing to Christ what we see there – so that Christ can take away this sin and bring healing to our hearts.

Repentance and fasting do not have as their goal the destruction of the flesh, but rather the destruction of the passions which come from the heart which stimulate our flesh to turn away from God and to seek pleasure and delight only in things which take us further from God.    Sex for example can be part of the sacramental life of marriage, and as such be a way of experiencing love and union with God.  On the other hand, sex can be turned into self love, and godless self-centered passion which does not lead us to God but away from Him so that we can pursue our own pleasures and desires.

To say that I sin only because Satan tempts me or only because my evil body drags me into it, is to deny personal responsibility for sin, it ultimately even blames God for giving me a body or for allowing free will.   Repentance means acknowledging that one has free will and makes real choices in life.  It means acknowledging that there are real temptations and that good and evil are both equally appealing to us.  It means acknowledging that we must CHOOSE good over evil. 

This is why the sacraments are so important to our lives – for in them we are united to Christ, and thus have Christ, the Son of God, as an ally against evil and choosing evil.  The sacramental life does not take away our free will and responsibility, but rather is an aid in helping us see goodness and to choose it, and to recognize evil and to deny ourselves choosing it.   The sacramental life helps to transfigure and transform “mundane” bodily experiences into means of communion with God.

Creation vs. Evolution: The Imaginary Divide

The one who first states a case seems right,

until the other comes and cross-examines.

(Proverbs 18:17)

I don’t know how often it happens that a person reads something which actually changes their mind on an issue, but I will say that reading CREATION OR EVOLUTION: DO WE HAVE TO CHOOSE? clarified enough issues in my mind regarding creation and evolution to put me more firmly in one camp in this debate.

A dozen years or so ago I began teaching an Introduction to Religion course at the University of Dayton which had as one of its required readings Genesis 1-3.  The students in my class held to a wide range of views on the issues related to creation versus evolution, and their questions and attitudes caused me to constantly reflect on my own beliefs regarding these issues.  I previously wrote about my own evolution in thinking on these issues in my blog Christianity and Science.

I held some vague ideas that Genesis 1-3 was true, and that evolution was true, and that these two sets of truth were somehow compatible, though I hadn’t thought out clearly what that meant or even if that was possible.  Years of teaching the Introduction to Religion course forced me to investigate more about the claims of evolution, of creationists, of intelligent design advocates, and of what truth meant when applied to Genesis 1-3.   I read books defending evolution and others advocating intelligent design.  I read more into how the Church has understood and used Genesis 1-3 in its own theology, Christology and soteriology.  The reading in Genesis, theology and hermeneutics caused me to realize Genesis 1-3 was not written to be science but was really geared to speak to the question, “For a theist, what does it mean to be human?”   Doing a detailed study of the text showed me that reading it absolutely literally was not the best way to understand the text (see my book QUESTIONING GOD). 

While I became more informed on the issues, the polemics and the polarization which pervade the creation versus evolution topic, I was willing to live with the ambiguities of how to live with the contradictions which the various points of view represented.  The contradictions did not seem to have any real resolution since each author would dismiss the claims of his or her antagonists and no one seemed capable of considering the merits of other points of view.

In CREATION OR EVOLUTION: DO WE HAVE TO CHOOSE, Denis Alexander does a wonderful job of looking at the issues of evolution and creation both from the point of view of science and that of Christianity.   Alexander is unabashedly Christian and unapologetically a scientist.  He does in his book what I had looked for the longest time to find: he considers both issues, evolution and creation from the two different perspectives of science and Christianity.  I found his writings balanced, informative and illuminating.  His book is endorsed by the Evangelical great J.I. Packer and by Dr. Francis Collins, Head of the Human Genome Project, USA.  He lays out the argument for evolution, and explains the theology of creation and Genesis, and makes an effort to weave the two together.  He points the serious scientific shortcomings of intelligent design and shows it to be more a culture war proposition than a scientific one.  The evidence for evolution is there, and Alexander makes a strong case for why evolution is not and need not be opposed to Christian thinking on creation, despite the attempts of a few atheists and creation scientists to declare them as incompatible.  For me the book removed from my mind notions that there is of necessity an incompatibility between evolution and Christianity.  The issues no longer seem ambiguous to me, nor do I feel ambivalent toward them.   Truth is truth – scientific truth reveals to us what God is doing just as much as biblical truth does.  The antagonism between Christianity and evolution does not need to be there and Denis Alexander shows us why.

The Literal Value of Genesis

In trying to sort through arguments as to whether the Patristic writers would have read the Genesis 1-3 literally or would have accepted scientific ideas and read the text more spiritually, I have a few preliminary thoughts.
Biblical scholars today seem to think that the creation stories of Genesis probably found their way into the Jewish Canon sometime around the Babylonian exile and probably in reaction against the Babylonian creation mythologies (this does not deny that the Genesis creation story may be even from the time of Moses).  Genesis, unlike Babylonian mythologies, claims:   God alone creates, the story focuses on this physical world, not on aeons or spirit worlds or heavens or hells or angels.  Humans are the main point of the story, not angels or demigods. Humans are not an after thought or the result of evil or sin or being cast out of heaven.   The good God created a good material world for the goodness of His human creatures.  The Jewish creation story focuses on humanity and answers “why didn’t God create a more perfect world?” (He did, we messed it up).    The real sinning (murder, debauchery, etc) begins AFTER the expulsion from Paradise.  Some ancient Jewish writers even saw Cain’s sin as the “original” sin.
It is St. Paul who changes thinking considerably in focusing on the sin of Eve and Adam, which leads to contrasting Paradise with this world.   St. Paul’s comments interpreting Adam and Eve Christologically seem very original and take Christian thinking in a direction different from Jewish tradition.
The Patristic writers if they read the story “literally” do so in order to refute philosophical and religious mythologies of their day.  We really lose sight of a lot if we forget what they were arguing against.  They were not railing against modern science which didn’t even exist then.   The world they needed to refute was the world of pagan mythology and philosophy. They saw Genesis as a (more) true account of beginnings than what pagan religions/philosophies had to offer.
To say that the Fathers would have opposed modern science seems to me specious and disingenuous.  The Fathers often valued science against pagan philosophy.   The Fathers would have been astounded by the discoveries of modern science, but they would not have treated them as a false mythology.  Truth after all is truth and all truth is Christian.
The Fathers were influenced by neo-Platonism and accept many of its presuppositions.  Origin took this too far (or at least so far that others recognized the problems with what he was saying).   The Fathers layer on top of Genesis a number of ideas that do not originate in the text itself (and this is where arguments about the canonicity of the Apocrypha come in with the Jews ultimately rejecting it as Hellenic rather than biblical).
Genesis 2-3 never says “don’t eat of the Tree of knowledge and you will live forever.”   And interestingly Adam & Eve are not forbidden from eating from the Tree of Life – had they done this first the text implies they would never die! That indicates mortality was part of the original creation. All Genesis 2-3 says is “eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and you will die that day.”   (It is like saying – take hold of this live 220 volt electric line and you will die today – not taking hold of it does not mean that you get to live forever, only that you will not die as a result of the electric line).
It is the fathers who add the immortality of the soul to Genesis.   But the New Testament does not discuss the immortality of the soul.   The resurrection is a bodily resurrection, not just giving immortality to the soul.  The Bible’s understanding of humanity is very grounded (excuse the pun) in the physical.
The Fathers did have an anti-material bias.  Gregory Nazianzus  says that God first created the immaterial and intelligible world, and liked it so much that he decided then to create the material world.   This is closer to Babylonian mythology than it is to Genesis 1-3.  Nazianzus goes on to say that the human is “spirit on account of grace, flesh on account of pride.”   The implication seems pretty clear – the physical self is the result of sin.  This is certainly more Babylonian than Biblical.   Gregory says humans were put into Eden to cultivate “immortal plants that is perhaps divine thoughts” (this is Patristic “literal” reading of the text! – the text does not mention “immortal” plants let alone interpreting plants as “divine thoughts” – that sounds like Gnosticism or Platonism.  I can hear Basil the Great rejecting such allegory saying, “No, grass is grass, plants are plants.”)   Nazianzus   says we were created originally as angels, but when man sinned, God clothed the human in “the tunics of skin, that is perhaps the more coarse and mortal and rebellious flesh.”   In Gregory’s thinking  the created material world seems not to be a result of an act of God but rather the result of the sin of mankind.   This is the very thing that the Jewish creation story as it is written was aiming to reject.
We still have to remember the text of Genesis 1-3 is Scripture – we have to deal with it as it is.  Interpretations of the Scripture, even by the Fathers, can indeed be very enlightening, but they are not the Scriptures .  If we accept the Patristic commentary as scripture, then we treat the Scriptures themselves as perhaps the door that opens understanding to us or as the door which stands in our way of understanding which must be pushed aside to allow us to come to the knowledge of the truth.   The same is true of the footnotes in the Orthodox Study Bible, some treat those notes as the Scriptures for it is the notes which tell us what the text mean, while the text itself is treated as that which stands in the way of our understanding God’s Word.

Speciation: It’s About Time

As the scientific community celebrates the 200^th Birthday of Charles Darwin, more articles are appearing in the popular media presenting information about his ideas and how they have influenced modern biological sciences.    One such article that applies the principles of Natural Selection to humans is David Brown’s Going Where Darwin Feared to Tread in the 12 February 2009 edition of THE WASHINGTON POST.   The article’s title acknowledges that Darwin himself knew his ideas when applied to humans might be too controversial, and so at first he applied his theories only to birds and barnacles.  Eventually Darwin did write about the effects evolution had had on human development.   As he feared, his scientific theory has spawned a huge debate more or less framed by the debate between those creationists who insist on a literal reading of Genesis and those who do not think a Creator is in the picture at all.  Of course there are a whole range of other opinions between those two including theistic evolutionists and intelligent design proponents, and many who think the bible is not science and others who think science proper has nothing to say about God one way or another. 

I’ve written many blogs about my own thoughts on science and religion.  Christianity and Science is a lengthy blog describing my thoughts on the subject based on 11 years of teaching an introduction to religion course at the University of Dayton which included reading Genesis 1-3 in terms of what it means to be human which naturally led to discussion on what science contributes to that discussion.   My years of teaching Genesis 1-3 led me to write QUESTIONING GOD: A LOOK AT GENESIS 1-3 in which I do read those first three chapters of Genesis “literally” – looking at every word of the text but concluding that a purely literalistic reading of the text does not do justice to the depth and meaning which God has made available to us through those scriptures.   More recently in my blog The Year of St. Paul and Charles Darwin! I note that reading St. Paul’s epistles I do not think he read Genesis 1-3 as science and I don’t think he would have seen Darwin as a threat to truth.

Getting back to Brown’s article, the one aspect of science today which is making Darwin’s theory so important is DNA and the science of genetics – things unknown in Darwin’s day, but which seem to both offer the mechanism for how evolutionary change occurs and gives us a record of those changes which have happened through time if the theory is correct.  At the moment many of the ideas emerging from genetics are still in the realm of theory and possibilities, which Brown makes very clear in his article.   We are really just coming to understand how little we know about what it is to be human from a biological point of view.  

One new idea I got from the Brown article was this:

But Bustamante, the computational biologist from Cornell, cautions that it takes 200 generations for natural selection to show its hand — and that’s when it’s working full tilt.

That is the first time I’ve read a biologist set a time frame for natural selection, 200 generations.  According to Wikipedia.org a generation is approximately 25 years.  This means it takes about 5000 years for changes due to natural selection to work on the gene pool and become visible as physical characteristics.   That was an answer to a question I asked some time ago in my blog The Survival of the Species is not the Origin of the Species:

And the claim that “well, it takes billions of years for speciation to take place” – I would ask with physicist John Polkinghorne  give us a rough estimate:  we are talking science here, facts and figures, so give us an estimate for how many generations and how many years are necessary for a new species to emerge or for a functioning eye to appear. 

Of course Bustamante is not talking about speciation, but only the visible changes of natural selection within a species.  Nevertheless I don’t remember ever seeing a time frame offered for how long it takes for changes due to natural selection to appear.  By Bustamante’s time frame we are just now getting into the time where we might be able to notice genetic differences between ourselves and our human ancestors listed in the beginning of Genesis.

If scientists studying the Neanderthal genome are correct humans and Neanderthals separated on the globe about 800,000 years ago with Neanderthals becoming genetically distinct from humans about 300,000 years ago.  That would translate into it taking about 20,000 generations for speciation to occur.

Is There Something We Know that God Does Not?

Yeah, I was out of touch

But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough

I just knew too much

(CRAZY,  Gnarls Barkley)

“One of the cruel ironies of any literary endeavor is that the filmmaker-or the playwright, or poet, or novelist-can never truly experience the work the way the audience does.  I, who worked for six years on this movie [Field of Dreams], will never know what it’s like to see it.  To enter the theater without knowing what will unfold and give myself over to the story.  I knew too much, and if I had the ability, I would invent a machine that would selectively wipe our memory, so we too could enjoy our creations without pre-knowledge of their secrets.”   (Phil Alden Robinson, writer/director of FIELD OF DREAMS, quoted in the WILSON QUARTERLY, Winter 2009)

Those who know me will know that Phil Alden Robinson’s quote intrigues me for it makes me think about the Great Poet, the Creator God.   Genesis Chapter 1 has God speaking His poetry, which creates not only wonderful sounds, but amazing sights as well.  The creation of the universe is presented at first as a poem being told by a creative God. 

Robinson says the filmmaker or poet cannot enter into his work as the audience does.  And if we apply that thought to theology, we would have to say that we the actors in God’s great unfolding drama therefore know something that God can never know- what it is like to live as a guest in His creation.  (For in truth we are not passive audience in the history of creation, but are its actors or more truthfully its co-directors).    Is it possible that we know something that God can never know?

In the Quran at several points, Allah says to the humans “I know what you do not.”   And certainly in Judaism and Christianity there the sense that God is omniscient.  Yet is there a blind spot in his view of creation?

Of course in Genesis 2 and 3, God the Creator more anthropomorphically acts in creation itself – at least He is described as participating in the very creation He made. 

It is Christianity though which really undermines Robinson’s claim, theologically speaking in any case.  For in the Christian theology of the Triune God, one Person of the Trinity actually crosses all of the boundaries which separate Divinity from humanity, created from the Creator.  God the Word became flesh, became part of the creation, became an actor within creation, not anthropomorphically but incarnationally.   God who enjoyed the goodness He saw in His creation from the beginning, so loved His creation as to have His Son become enfleshed in what His Word had spoken into existence.

Despite the reception His Son was given by the world – nailing the King of Glory to the Cross – God continues to love His world as proved by the Resurrection.   Christ risen from the dead, destroys death, not humanity.  Christ was sent into the world for the salvation of the world not its damnation (John 3:17, 12:47).