The Diablogue Who is fearless enough to be wrong?

(This is a repost from my old blog)

There’s been a few times in my life when I’ve been asked to explain my thoughts on the Creation stories in Genesis 1 & 2, this series is an attempt by me to explain my interpretation of Genesis and the reasoning behind it. Its my prayer that I and all who read this may approach the subject with humility and faith looking to God for answers.

So now that we’ve considered the history and context of Genesis 1&2, lets move on to the theology of it, along the way exploring what a Creation theology that embraces Darwinism would look like. First of all, what are the most vital points of the Creation story that? Christian theology and dogma relies heavily on the following points:

1. God Created.
2. Humanity was created in God’s image.
3. Man sinned and was cursed because of it.

The first point I believe is pretty obvious and self explanatory. It goes right along with the very first verse of the Bible “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” God is the most important actor in the Creation myth. Without God nothing is and nothing will be. The Bible is pretty clear that the universe did not create itself.

Secondly, and very important for a lot of Jewish and Christian theology is the idea that Man was created in the image of God. No one really knows for sure what that idea means, but it separates Humanity from the entirety of the created order. From the beginning humans are set apart for a special purpose as the very pinnacle of creation, an integral part of God’s grand plan.

Thirdly, and especially stressed by a lot of evangelicals is the idea of original sin. God setup a paradise for Adam and Eve with only one rule: do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Yet, we went and did it. From then on sin became an endemic part of the human experience and with it the curse of death, toil, and suffering.

You probably noticed that I did not include the length of the days as an important theological point. I did that for one very important reason: it’s really completely irrelevant. God is not any less God, nor is creation any less created if the days of his creation were exactly 24 hours, or 24 hours and 16 minutes long, or even if they were 47,899 years. Additionally, there are no passages later in the Bible that make reference to the days of creation requiring that they be exactly 24 hours to make sense. As Augustine said: “we should not think of those days as solar days…. He made that which gave time its beginning, as He made all things together, disposing them in an order based not on intervals of time but on causal connections” [emphasis added]. We should really think of the days not as literal risings and settings of the sun — after all, three of them were before there even was a sun — but more as metaphoric logical dividers that setup a pattern later on for the sabbath rest.

So, how can these three most vital points work with Evolution? Quite easily really. First of all, for a Theory of Evolution to be Christian it absolutely must affirm the first point. Evolution must be a God guided, God instigated, and God powered process. Secondly, man must be created in the image of the Creator. This is a little more difficult to enumerate, and Theistic Evolution sometimes causes objection with this point since it affirms that man is similar in some ways to animals. But from a Christian perspective it also emphasizes that there is a huge gap between Adam and apes in that man is the pinnacle of the creation process explicitly endowed with God’s image.

Lastly, there is the issue of sin and the curse. This is understandably a big stumbling block for many people. The problem is that evolution, with its long time frames and evolutionary failures, requires death to even operate. However, Genesis 3 is when God explicitly curses humanity with death. So it would seem that there was no death before the first sin. This assumes two things: first, that no creatures ate during the first three chapters and secondly, that the first three chapters of Genesis are literally the way creation happened and are not stories meant more to explain theology and to make a point.

The first assumption applies to both Theistic Evolution and Young Earth Creationism. I don’t know of any interpretations of Genesis holding the belief that digestive systems were created after Adam and Eve ate the fruit, so lets assume that creatures of all types functioned essentially the same before sin and after it. Therefore every animal in the Garden of Eden had to eat something. I’ve heard it argued by some biblical literalists that the animals in the Garden were all vegetarian, but that is not only a little silly but denies the fact that plants  would have had to die en masse to feed these ravenous herbivores. Secondly, that assertion assumes that God “adapted” all the future carnivores after sin was introduced, essentially “evolving” them to fit a niche as of yet unfilled. It becomes a rather counter productive argument when phrased that way. Theistic evolution on th other hand usually deals with this issue slightly differently, which leads me to the second assumption.

Many Theistic Evolutionists prefer to skirt this whole issue and assert that the Creation stories are mythology meant to explain theology and put the supernatural into more understandable terms. This, as I’ve touched on in part 2, is not a new idea by any means but a fairly established belief in the Christian tradition. Essentially for a Theistic Evolutionist this means that death has always been a part of Creation. Theologically this is difficult to explain, but Augustine says it well: “For He has wrought them all in His wisdom, which, reaching from end to end, governs all graciously; and he leaves not in an unformed state the very least of His creatures that are by their nature subject to corruption, whose dissolution is loathsome to us in our fallen state by reason of our own mortality.” Simply put, just because man was created immortal doesn’t mean that animals were meant to be the same way.

Theistic Evolution is the belief that God chose to use Evolution and perhaps even the Big Bang as a means  to create. It meshes well with accepted scientific evidence and doesn’t contradict the Bible, however, it does necessitate a belief that God inspires and works through mythology.

That is a quick overview of the theological basis and issues with Theistic Evolution, unfortunately due to time and space constraints I may have to go more in depth if I ever get around to writing a book.