One day a little girl started to get curious about where everything came from, so she decided to ask her parents. She went to her father and asked: “Dad, where did human beings come from?” He answered, “Sweetie, we are descended from apes, whom we evolved from.” She later went and asked her mother, “Mom, where do human beings come from?” She answered, “We are descended from Adam and Eve, made by God in his image, to have dominion over the earth and spread God’s reign and rule.” The little girl responded, “But Dad said we are descended from apes.” The mom replied, “I was talking about my side of the family, not his.”
Corny jokes aside, this is going to be a super, super long blog post, mainly because I’m synthesizing and updating some former posts I’ve written into this one post. The too long, didn’t read (TL,DR) version is I believe Christian faith and science can go together in a sensible way. I divide it into the following five sections: 1. A Brief History of Christianity and Science, 2. The Background of Genesis, 3. Questions for Young Earth Creationists, 4. A Potential Way Forward, 5. Conclusion
Different people would address this topic in different ways. There would be some pastors and churches who would disagree with how I talk about this, and I fully confess that I could be wrong on some things. How we answer the faith and science question is not essential when it comes to being a disciple of Jesus, but our answers still have consequences. Here’s a sobering quote from New Testament scholar Scot McKnight in
Adam and the Genome:
“The number one reason young Christians leave the faith is the conflict between science and faith, and that conflict can be narrowed to the conflict between evolutionary theory and human origins as traditionally read in Genesis 1-2.” (Venema & McKnight, 104-105). I’m not sure where he’s getting his statistics, but at the very least, the quote shows this topic carries a lot of freight with a lot of people. The two most enlightening books I’ve read on the intersection of science and Christianity are: Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight, and The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate by John Walton.
A Brief History of Christianity and Science: Framing the Questions
The history of the relationship between the church and the scientific community has largely been a harmonious one. Several great scientists throughout history were devout believers. Rene Descartes, famous for his phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” considered himself a devout Catholic. Blaise Pascal, the inventor of the syringe, was a devout Catholic and influential theological writer. Isaac Newton, the English scientist who we thank for the laws of gravity and who made huge strides in the field of optics, believed in God, though his version of Christian faith was admittedly unorthodox. Here is a quote from him concerning the planets: “Gravity explains the motion of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.” Gregor Mendel, who is considered the father of modern genetics with his pea plant experiments, was an Augustinian monk and later an abbot. Frances Collins, the man who led the team that sequenced the human genome in the early 2000s, is an evangelical Christian. So contrary to some popular narratives, Christianity and science have not always been in conflict. In fact, the very discipline of science requires a worldview that believes the world is orderly and will reward rational investigation. This is what you find in Christianity as well as other religions, and can help explain why you see scientific advances in societies shaped by religions/philosophies that believe in an orderly world.
Still, the most popular episodes that come to mind are when things haven't gone well between these two communities. Most people think of the conflict between Galileo and the pope. Galileo went with Copernicus, and said his findings were showing that the earth was not the center of our solar system. The church protested, saying that the heliocentric theory contradicted the clear, literal teaching of the Bible, which says that we live in a geocentric solar system. Heliocentrism remained controversial for quite some time. Geneticist Dennis Venema tells the story of John Edwards (not the famed American revivalist Jonathan Edwards of the First Great Awakening) who wrote an apologetic work in 1696 against heliocentrism, saying it clearly violates Scripture, which teaches the earth is the center of the universe. For, after all, Psalm 104:5 says, “the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved,” and Ecclesiastes 1:5 says, “And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place.” And how else could God make the shadow go backwards for Hezekiah in 2 Kings 20:1-11, or stop the sun in the sky for Joshua in Joshua 10:1-15? Edwards also said heliocentrism is contrary to reason. I like one of his arguments that Venema quotes:
Nay, truly, if the earth were hurl’d about in a Circle (as these Persons assert) we should feel it to our sorrow, for we should not be able to keep our ground, but must necessarily be thrown off, and all Houses and other Buildings would be thrown down, being forcibly shared off from the Circumference of the Earth, as things that are laid on a Wheel are flung off by it when it turns round (Ibid., 10).
Knowing what we know today, it may be a bit humorous to read an argument for being slung off the earth like a ball from a fast-pitch machine if the earth is really rotating and orbiting as fast as those heliocentrists say it is. Copernicus’ ideas had been around for about 150 years by the time Edwards wrote, and some of the science was still coming in to confirm heliocentrism. The vast majority of Christians (and probably people in the West in general) had been geocentrists for a long time. Today, the tables have been reversed, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who claims to believe the earth is the center of the universe. And what of John Edwards’ claims that the sun being the center of our solar system is contrary to Scripture and reason? Hardly anyone sees it that way now. Bit by bit, as more and more research confirmed heliocentrism, people started to wonder if they’d been interpreting those Scriptures improperly. Now that we’ve put people into space and on the moon, it’s against all reason to think otherwise concerning the sun being the center of our solar system. While initially some were against it because of Scriptural and rational questions, the church shifted.
Another famous conflict was the Scopes Trial that was argued in 1925 in Tennessee, where substitute high school teacher John Scopes violated Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of human evolution in a state-funded school. The trial brought to light a conflict within the church about the nature of how to interpret Genesis, and it also publicized conflict between certain sectors of the church and the scientific community. The trial garnered great attention and was even put on the radio. Largely (though not totally), the church identified with an anti-evolutionary stance during this debate and in the decades that followed. More and more evidence has come in confirming evolutionary theory, and just as the church wrestled when it came to heliocentrism, it has been in the midst of debate for some time in how to deal with evolutionary science. While a harmonious view between faith and science has been growing amongst those who are religious in our population, there is not currently consensus within the church.
Now I'm not a scientist, I’m a pastor. In seminary they focus on how to interpret the Bible, preach, do some counseling, think about leadership, spirituality, and so on, but going hard and heavy into science was not part of the curriculum, so I hope you’ll have some grace if I’m ignorant or not precise in some things.
When it comes to the sciences, physicists are telling us that the universe didn’t originate a few thousand years ago from a six day creation, but from a big bang 13.8 billion years ago. Our universe took shape over billions of years (the earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old), and evolutionary science is indicating that life on earth evolved slowly but surely over several billion years, with modern humans arriving on the scene about 250,000 years ago. It also shows that humans didn’t come from one original pair, but from a pool of about 10,000 hominins during a bottleneck about 150,000 years ago (Adam and the Genome, 44).
Genesis 1-11 tells the story of a God creating all that exists in six days, an original human pair (Eve and Adam) who sinned in the garden of Eden, their exile from the garden, a murder of a brother, a worldwide flood, the building of a tower, the confusion of languages, and several genealogies. Elsewhere, the Bible depicts much of humanity being descended from Adam and Eve, including big names like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and Jesus (Luke 3:23-38). Paul teaches in Romans 5:12-21 that in Adam, sin was introduced into the world and because of that, death came to all people (see also 1 Corinthians 15:21-22).
It’s not hard to see the challenges. Which is it? Six days or billions of years? An original pair of humans or a pool of 10,000 hominins? Have organisms been dying for billions of years or did death only come into existence when humanity sinned? Were Adam and Eve real people? If they weren’t, how are we to understand sin and how Jesus might save us from it? Are these two worldviews irrevocably contradictory or can they go together? Can you believe in evolution and still take the Bible and Christian theology seriously?
These competing claims have led people to different responses. Person A will take science, its methodologies, its explanatory power, and its technological progress and leave behind a Christianity she or he considers intellectually vacuous. Perhaps another worldview, like atheism, agnosticism, Buddhism, or the like wouldn’t hold such dissonance as do the claims of science and claims of Christianity. Person B will live with the tensions and believe in Christian faith as well as evolutionary theory, though they're not sure how it all might go together. Person C will take God, the Bible, the morality it teaches, and the spirituality of a Christian faith walk, and reject science—at least evolutionary science—holding to a literal six day creation. This has often been labeled the young earth creationist perspective. Some have gone so far as to champion young earth creationist science, a banner carried by people like Ken Ham and the organization Answers in Genesis, centered
here in our good ol’ state of Kentucky (there are others as well). Young earth creationist scientists deny some core aspects of evolutionary theory and any scientific data that goes against their literal interpretation of the Genesis creation narratives, and they work to prove their interpretation scientifically. I’ll say more on their position in the Questions for Young Earth Creationists below. Young earth creationists see evolution and the Bible as inevitably conflicting, and to unite the two into a synthesis is like trying to make oil and water mix—you can shake things up a lot, but in the end, they just don’t go together.
With tensions now revealed, let’s explore some background to Genesis.
The Background of Genesis
Genesis 1-3 are some of the most important chapters of the Bible. By anyone’s estimation, if you were given the exercise of compiling the 50 most important chapters of Scripture, I’m sure these chapters would make everyone’s list. They tell us much about God, human beings, the created world, and what’s wrong with the world. The question is, how are we to interpret these passages, especially in light of the findings of science?
For any close reading of the Bible, we need to work to understand the genre of a particular text and the background out of which that text arose in order to best interpret it. First, genre. Take, for example, Psalm 22:12-13, which says “Many bulls encompass me; strong bulls of Bashan surround me; they open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion.” Knowing that the genre of the Psalms is poetry makes me think that the psalmist isn’t giving a literal, historical account about an unfortunate instance where he was surrounded by bulls that gnashed their teeth at him, although I’m sure that’d have been an awesome story to share later with friends. Rather, he is using metaphor to tap into our emotions and carry us along with him, conveying a sense of fear, danger, and overwhelming odds against him. A good question we should ask of any text of Scripture is what genre it is. Knowing the genre helps us know how best to interpret.
Second, background. A good example of background informing our understanding of a text would be women’s head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11, a passage that strikes many modern Western readers today as odd. In Craig Keener’s
The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, he writes “Women’s hair was a common object of lust in antiquity, and in much of the eastern Mediterranean women were expected to cover their hair. To fail to cover their hair was thought to provoke male lust as a bathing suit is thought to provoke it in some cultures today” (p. 475). There also were tensions between women of different socio-economic statuses in regard to head coverings and hair styles. Knowing the background might help us understand a bit better what Paul was dealing with and the reasoning behind his arguments. It also can help us ask the interpretive question of whether women wearing head coverings is a transcultural command for all times and places, or something which through cultural background work we can better understand the "why" behind Paul's commands in order to pull out principles from the text, though we may not apply the principles in exactly the same way in our culture. That's part of the work of cultural translation we do when we study the Bible. Cultural translation is why we don't greet each other with "holy kisses" in many churches in the West, though Paul repeatedly commands it. We pull out the principle of greeting each other warmly and kindly, but literally obeying that command could create a lot of wrong impressions in our culture which would not have been the case in Paul's culture. We need to be careful students of background to help us know how the original audience would've understood a text, and we need to be thoughtful on how that we might apply that text today.
Let’s look at some background concerning the world in which Genesis was written. The ancient Israelite concept of the cosmos was that the sky was hard (Genesis 1:6-8; Job 37:18) and held some waters above it, while the earth is held up by “pillars” or “foundations” (Psalm 18:7; 82:5) below. The earth is described as flat and having four corners (Ezekiel 7:2; Revelation 7:1). Whenever it rained, they thought God opened the floodgates (see Genesis 7:11; 2 Kings 7:2; Isaiah 24:18) to let the waters above out and then shut them to stop the rain. Sheol was the holding place of the dead, not quite as developed theologically as what we think of as paradise or hell. A good picture of how they viewed the world is in this image from Bible scholar John Walton:
With this background in mind, it behooves us to ask: Would God deliver a 21st century science lesson about a big bang, the evolution of life over billions of years, bacteria and cellular development, common descent, a round earth, etc. to people who didn’t have the foggiest idea about electricity, atoms, germs, or the sun being the center of our solar system? It’d be gibberish to them. In chapter 6 of Adam and the Genome, McKnight shows that Genesis 1-11 is probably fitting the genre of an Ancient Near Eastern creation narrative, and has similarities with others like The Epic of Gilgamesh, Atrahasis, and Enuma Elish, but also is different from them in some crucial respects. This goes to show that God speaks to his people in ways we can understand, accommodating our limitations in order to communicate critical truths to us. Also, the purpose of Scripture isn't necessarily to teach us science, but to teach us about God and how we can walk in faithfulness to him (2 Timothy 3:16-17). So Genesis may not be a modern scientific account, but based on the worldview people had at the time, Genesis 1-3 articulates some of the most important things we can know about God, humanity, and the rest of the world. Let a brief summary of some key points everyone agrees on suffice here:
God–God alone is the one supreme God and he is creator of all that exists. God creates by speaking and creates out of peace, not out of violence, unlike the other creation narratives. God wants to be in relationship with human beings and cares for his creation, unlike the gods of other creation narratives. God creates human beings with a purpose and is patient with a disobedient humanity, disciplining them for their mistakes but also tenderly caring for them.
People–Humans are God’s special creation, and both males and females are made in his “image.” In the context of the time, images had connections with temples and with kings. Idols were images that represented the presence of the divine, and in temples an image or idol of a particular god was put up as a representation of their nature. Similarly, kings would put up images of themselves throughout their empires to remind people of their rule. For human beings to be made in the “image of God” probably means that the earth is God’s temple/dwelling place, God is King over all the earth, and we are representations of something of God's nature to the rest of the earth, and are meant “to rule over creation” under God's authority, exercising something of his power and reign in the earth (Ibid., 129). Humans are called to work the created world for it to develop and blossom; they bring out some of the latent potential within creation and are co-creators with God in this way. People are gendered, husband and wife are designed for a “one-flesh” union, are created with the potential for procreation, and are called to mutuality with each other (Ibid., 133). Humans are endowed with a measure of freedom and have the capacity to choose something other than God’s desires–we can step outside of our God-given boundaries, which is part of what sin is. Choosing contrary to God’s will ends up leading to shame, fear, blame, the damaging of relationships, and loving discipline from God in order to limit the spread of the consequences of sin.
Creation–The created world–plants, animals, sea creatures, and all–is good. Human beings are supposed to rule over them like God does, with loving care, and to develop them. Human disobedience has led to damage and frustration in the rest of creation.
Questions for Young Earth Creationists
With some of the background of Genesis out on the table, I think there are both biblical and scientific questions that young earth creationists need to deal with.
Which Literal Account? The first issue you run into if you treat this as a scientific, historical account is that the chronologies of the two creation narratives are different. What do you do with the discrepancies? For instance, in Genesis 1, God creates the trees (1:11-13), then later sea creatures and birds (1:20-23), then the animals (1:24-25), and lastly he creates humans together (1:26-31). In our second creation narrative starting in Genesis 2:4, however, God creates the man first (2:7), then he creates the trees (2:8-9), and then in 2:19 he creates the animals and brings them before the man to name them, and lastly he creates woman out of man (2:21-25). The Hebrew word yatsar in 2:19 is past tense (formed), not pluperfect (had formed) like some translate it in an effort to try to infer an earlier creation and smooth over the differences (Ibid., 102). What we have are two separate creation narratives with different chronologies of creation. If God meant for us to read Genesis 1-3 as purely historical narrative, then couldn’t God at least get the sequence to agree between the two narratives?
Selective Appropriation of Scientific Claims in Scripture–If you believe in a literal view of Scripture concerning Genesis being a scientific, historical account–do you also believe the earth is flat and set on pillars? Do you believe the sky is hard and God has to open up windows or floodgates in the vault to make it rain? If you want to be fully literal, you probably shouldn’t just be a 6-day creationist. You need to be a 6-day, hard sky, geocentric, flat-earth-balanced-on-pillars kind of Christian if you want to make the Bible a science textbook. What gives you permission not to treat as scientific some claims from Scripture pertaining to the earth and cosmos while you do take seriously the early parts of Genesis?
Bad Science–The theory of evolution is not a theory in crisis in the scientific community. According to a
study published by Pew Research Center, when they asked actively working PhD trained scientists who were members of the American Association of the Advancement of Science if they believed humans have evolved over time, and 99% of them responded yes. It seems safe to say that if 99% of those scientists trust in the theory of evolution, the matter isn't hotly contested or debated within the scientific community. It is widely accepted. Young earth creationist scientists sometimes try to claim that evolution is a theory that is losing ground in the scientific community because of some of their critiques. These folks are hailed by many in the scientific community as practitioners of pseudo-science, often presenting technical answers and challenges to largely non-scientifically trained audiences (people like me) who don’t have the foggiest idea about all the data out there. It would be like someone wanting to have an in-depth discussion with me about software programming or internal medicine. I might recognize a few words here and there, but largely I’m going to have no idea what you’re talking about and I’m going to trust that you know more than I do on this issue. But for those who do have more background in evolutionary science and are cognizant of the data, they recognize that something fishy is going on in many young earth creationists' scientific critiques of evolution. Venema is quite helpful in this regard in the
Adam and the Genome book, demonstrating that yes, evolution actually can explain fish turning into primates, and lays out the genetic arguments for why that’s the case. Young earth creationist scientists are undoubtedly good-hearted in why they do this–they want people to trust in Jesus and take the Bible seriously. Unfortunately, if the church becomes a repository for straw-man arguments and bad science, it’s not hard to see why some people who have a genuine thirst for knowledge leave God and church behind. Why is the overwhelming scientific consensus arrived at through multiple paths of inquiry that that the earth is billions of years old, that life evolved, and that human beings evolved as well, if that’s not true? If God really did create the world in six literal days and everything’s only 6,000-10,000 years old, why doesn’t scientific dating and inquiry prove that? That’s why I like
Biologos as an organization–they chart the course of holding some sectors of the church responsible when it perpetuates bad science and sloppy thinking, while also critiquing what they see as some of the limitations that come from a purely secular view of the world and of scientism–the belief that science is the only and best way to discern truth.
How would young earth creationism explain the details that point toward common descent? For instance, when it comes to our sense of smell, humans have some pretty damaged genetic material, which can help explain why our sense of smell is shoddy in comparison to a dog or a cat. What’s interesting is that when you look at the sense of smell of other primates, they too have a lot of mistakes, sometimes down to the very same malfunctioning genes that are in humans, which suggests common ancestry. Orangutans, our furthest primate relative, share one malfunction in common with us, guerrillas share two malfunctions in common, and then our closest ancestor, chimpanzees, share three malfunctions in common with us (Ibid
., 34). That sure does look like some of the malfunctions happened to our common ancestors. If God created us 6-10,000 years ago, why did he create stuff like this, stuff that looks like common descent over millions of years? Or what about damaged genetic material in our bodies that used to have a function, but no longer does? McKnight tells the story of someone who noticed the “latent but inactive remains of the Vitamin-C producing gene” shared among humans and primates and wondered: If God created all there is a few thousand years ago, why did he put stuff like this all over the place that seems to point to evolution? Having a latent but non-functioning gene for producing vitamin C would make sense from an evolutionary perspective, but just seems baffling from a young earth creationist perspective. Why would God put non-functional, “junk” material in our bodies (Ibid., 172)?
A Way Forward
I've highlighted some questions I have for young earth creationism. But is there a better way to put everything together? It’s one thing to say you believe Christian faith and science can go together. It’s quite another to make a convincing case for how it might be so. Is it possible to be a Christian who takes the Bible seriously while also believing in evolution, or are these two things inherently incompatible? This is an exciting area of theological reflection and development at present, and the wider church hasn’t yet landed on a unified interpretation of how this all fits together. I want to offer some thoughts on what I see as a potential way forward.
There are varying degrees in how interpreters treat the opening chapters of Genesis. Most of them believe some degree of symbolism and poetry is present there, with some believing in a real, historic Adam and Eve, and others considering chapters 1-11 as being mythological or allegorical in nature. Myth doesn’t mean something is a lie or is irrelevant–Jesus’ parables were myths in the sense that they were stories that didn’t happen in real time and space. There was no prodigal son. There was no good Samaritan. These are stories that Jesus made up, but they teach profound truths. Novels are myths in the same sense, but we can learn a great deal from them. Something doesn't have to be historical for it to be "true." There can be some good reasons within the text of Genesis itself to think that some things we’re reading aren't literal history. This quote from Scot McKnight is very good in that regard:
Genesis itself awakens us to fresh reading of itself because the text itself has some mighty unusual features that make an honest reader wonder whether they are meant to be strictly historical. For example, the earth has a dome over it, the man is formed out of dust while the woman is formed from removing a rib (or more) from the man, their names are fraught with meaning (the Earthling and the Mother of All Living), a snake talks and fools two non-sinners into sinning, there is this majestic Garden of Eden (or “park”) with angels twirling swords at the entrance, Cain finds a wife when there was every reason to believe there weren’t any women other than sisters available, Cain is given a mark to distinguish him and protect him, the names Cain (“spear”) and Abel (“fleeting breath”) seem allegorical, people live to incredible ages, a flood covers the whole earth leading to nothing less than a cosmic do-over starting with eight human beings who immediately do stupid things, and then we get a group of humans intent on building a tower into the skies, and so God sorts them out into different languages. If these features don’t at least make you wonder about what kind of literature this is, then nothing will. (Ibid., 96).
That being said, I want to offer a word of caution when it comes to those who totally metaphorize Genesis 1-11, mainly around the topic of death. According to science, organisms have been dying for many millions of years, and long before humans showed up on the scene. Some take the more metaphorical route of interpretation concerning sin bringing death in Genesis 2:16-17, that death really refers to the death of innocence, the death of relationships, the death of peace, the death of reputation, etc. In essence, death is really a way of talking metaphorically about anxiety, guilt, pain, and shame brought on by sin. Those things certainly are associated with sin, but the death of Jesus on the cross inescapably implies that physical death is tied up with sin. Otherwise, if death is just a metaphor for pain, isolation, and anxiety, couldn't Jesus have come down from the cross after suffering a good deal of pain, isolation, and anxiety, and that have been enough to atone for our sins? But he physically died. And he physically rose again. In my mind, the death and resurrection of Jesus for us and our sins forms an irrevocable link to physical death being part of the badness and curse of sin. I wish McKnight would've dealt with death more thoroughly in Adam and the Genome, though much of the rest of it is quite illuminating. Also, denying a particular "fall moment" in history can call into question the goodness of God's creation–did God make the world evil? What would that say about God? It seems necessary to have some historical moment where humanity became responsible before God. It may not be insurmountable to have everything fit together in a totally allegorical understanding of Genesis 1-11, but I'd like to see proponents deal wisely and well with some of these issues.
Another stimulating author I’ve read is Old Testament scholar John Walton, who has written a very good book called The Lost World of Adam and Eve. I don't agree with him on everything, but he makes a surprising case for how a close contextual reading of the text can fit better with the findings of evolutionary science than many initially thought possible. He believes that Adam and Eve were a historical couple, though he does not deny that a lot of symbolism permeates Genesis 1-11. His modified historical approach would put some qualifiers in how we understand Adam and Eve. For one, they are not the first creatures, nor the first humans. Scripture itself seems to make room for this. Think of Cain’s wife (4:17)–where did she come from if Adam and Eve were the only humans around? Walton would encourage us to understand them as the first morally responsible humans, the first humans called into a special relationship with God that carried with it the potential for eternal life, though not the first humans.
What about death? There has been a long assumption in Christian theology and in interpreting Genesis 1-3 that people were made with an intrinsic immortality, and that sin led them to lose this immortality. John Walton contends that the intrinsic immortality idea is only an assumption, not a requirement from the text. The Bible never says humans were made immortal, and he contends that for Adam to be made from dust (Genesis 2:7) means that Adam was made from dying life, that he was made mortal. You see a clue in Genesis 3:19 on dust being connected to mortality–“From dust you are and to dust you will return.” Walton has this to say about that verse: “This association would make sense to an Israelite reader who was well acquainted with the idea of a corpse that was laid out on the slab in the family tomb and deteriorating to merely a pile of bones and the dust of the desiccated flesh within a year” (Ibid., 73). Adam coming from dust means he originated from dying life, and part of the curse of sin is that he will return to dying life. A further clue that humans were mortal is the presence of the tree of life in the garden–human beings would need access to this tree if they wanted immortality. “Immortal people have no need for a tree of life” (Ibid.). Thus, Adam and Eve originate from dying life and did not possess an innate immortality.
There was the potential for immortality in the Genesis narrative concerning the tree of life, but God keeps sinful humanity from it in 3:22-24. He doesn’t want corrupted, sinful beings to be immortal, but for their wickedness to pass from the earth. Immortality could have been a possibility since the tree of life was not denied the humans in the garden, but it only comes through a right relationship to God (similar to the knowledge of good and evil coming as a gift from a right relationship with God, and is not to be grasped after apart from God's will). The kicking out of the garden and separation from the tree of life needn’t be read as the loss of some inherent immortality of the first humans, but rather as the denial of the antidote to mortality. Life from the very beginning has been mortal and vulnerable, God offered the way to eternal life through a faithful relationship with him, yet humanity botched it and became corrupted, losing God’s solution to the problem. You see the tree of life show up again in the last chapter of the Bible, Revelation 22:2, an image showing that those who trust in Jesus will be given eternal life, the life that God always intended his people to have, and we will be purged from all sin by the grace of Jesus.
This is important because it shows that Genesis doesn’t necessarily teach people were originally immortal, which comports with what evolutionary science tells us: Life has been dying for a long time. It can dovetail with the notion that Adam and Eve aren’t the first humans, that they “come from dust,” from dying life, and that God provides the potential for eternal life through right relationship with him. This allows you to hold together two notions: 1.) that organisms have been dying for a long time before humanity arrived on the scene, and 2.) that death is still a consequence of sin–not as the loss of some inherent immortality, but as the loss of the antidote to mortality that God presented to the first responsible humans who blew it. This also helps us understand the physical death of Jesus Christ as a consequence of our sins.
Some would argue that God creating a world with death in it contradicts God’s declaration of creation to be good in Genesis 1, but just because something is good doesn’t mean its perfect or fully developed. Why else would God command human beings to subdue and have dominion over the earth if it was perfect with nothing more to be added to it? God has given us a call to be vice-regents and co-creators with him, helping bring out the latent potential in the earth, caring well for it, and establishing order. John Walton maintains that “good” in its usage in Genesis means “functioning as it should,” not totally perfect with nothing to be added (Ibid., 56-57). And doesn’t that sound a lot like what we see in the evolution of life–something starting off small and simple, but growing in complexity and potential? Doesn’t that sound a lot like Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed, that the kingdom of God starts off small, but then becomes the largest tree in the garden (Matthew 13:31-32)? Apparently God has a knack for starting things off small and developing and growing them into magnificent things. And he invites us into the process.
Conclusion
I’ve found Walton’s way of thinking about this illuminating and helpful, and while I may not agree with him on every minute detail, he has led me to modify some of my earlier thinking on the topic. He believes in a historic Adam and Eve, and I'm open to that. I'm also open to a sketch that James K. A. Smith articulates in his essay in Evolution and the Fall: "For example, [...] imagine a group of individuals, selected by God to represent the rest of humanity, receiving a special revelation and commissioning, 'good' (though not 'perfect') and able to obey God's just requirements, who through acts of disobedience over a discrete period of time (with a clear 'before' and 'after') fell into a state of sinful rebellion from God" (59). Whether Adam and Eve were real people or not, what seems necessary is a way to affirm goodness of creation, a moment where a special relationship between God and humans was formed and humanity became responsible to God, and a moment where human disobedience to God entered the world. To review:
- The majority of the history between Christian faith and science has been a harmonious one, though there have been some popular moments of conflict. A Christian worldview gives philosophical credence to the notion that the world is rational and worthy of investigation.
- We should interpret Scripture in light of its original context. God sometimes speaks through accommodating the categories and ideas of particular times, people, and places to accomplish his purposes. Being able to understand this can help us more faithfully interpret and apply the Bible today.
- We should be careful when it comes to treating Scripture like a science textbook, and those who do often do so selectively.
- Creationist science is motivated from a good heart, but often puts forth pseudo-science that damages the witness of the church.
- Some totally allegorize Genesis 1-11 as the best way to combine Christianity and evolutionary science, though I would like to see clearer thinking from proponents on how to talk sensibly about the physical death and resurrection of Jesus as stemming from only a metaphorical understanding of sin and death in Genesis 2-3.
- Walton's modified historical interpretation of Adam and Eve has a lot of explanatory power. Humans formed “from dust” implies that humanity originated from dying life. Cain finding a wife implies that Adam and Eve weren’t the first or only humans around. Adam and Eve had a special relationship with God that had the potential for eternal life (tree of life), but they sinned and lost the antidote God offered them for their mortality. This explains the reality of physical death happening before humanity arrived on the scene and before humanity became morally responsible to God, but also preserves the notion that physical death is part of the consequences of sin. It also preserves our ability to best make sense of Jesus dying physically in our place to bear the curse of our sin, and can shed light on how Jesus makes a way for our relationship with God to be healed, reopening God's initial promise of eternal life with him (tree of life in Revelation 22:2).
Much more could be said and will be said–things aren’t settled yet. I’ve mainly come at this in order to give some background and examine ways that Christianity and evolutionary science might go together. I’ve already written here about questions I have concerning a totally secular worldview. Evolutionary science and biblical faith don’t have to be inherently in conflict. They can go together. What do you think?
