Mythbusters: Creative Evolution

A message from Genesis 1 by Don Heatley from Vision Community Church 3/8/09

It doesn’t matter where you grew up, in a city, the suburbs or out in the country, every neighborhood has THAT house.  You know the one.  The one with the strange family, the parents who don’t act like the other parents on the street.  The kids seem strange.  Even their pets are a little odd.  It’s the house your parents always warned you about.   Yet, growing up in that neighborhood, you were always curious about that house and that family.  You would occasionally meet the kids and talk with them and they didn’t seem that weird.  In fact, they even seemed nice.  You wondered what all the fuss was about.  How were you supposed to reconcile the horrible things your parents and the others in the neighborhood told you about that house, with the good experience you actually had when you got to know that family.  Although no one could quite tell you why, or explain what would happen if ventured into that yard, the message was clear, “Stay away from that house!”

In the neighborhood of church, the theory of evolution has often been THAT house.  It’s the theological house on the street about which we are warned by some to “Stay away!”  Yet your experiences in life, your education, even your own sense of reason have led you to wonder, why are some people in churches so opposed to evolution?  You may have no objection to the concepts of evolutionary biology, but you have always been uncomfortable talking about them in church.  Perhaps you had the experience of voicing your thoughts in a church and were promptly corrected or even told your weren’t a Christian. 

Somewhere along the line, you got the impression that Christians cannot believe in evolution. If you did, you had to keep it quiet, sometimes to prevent being attacked, sometimes to avoid upsetting people.  Some well-meaning moderate pastor may even have told you he agreed with you, but patronizingly advised that verbalizing those thoughts could destroy the faith of a less enlightened Christian.

Why are some Christians so adamant in their insistence that you cannot be a Christian and accept the discoveries of evolutionary biology at the same time?  I feel bad for Charles Darwin.  Although some churches celebrated Darwin Sunday a few weeks back, we didn’t here at Vision because I knew we would be covering this topic this week.  But poor Darwin.  His theory has been blamed for everything from the Holocaust to homosexuality.  It is true that a century ago, that under the name Social Darwinism, Darwin’s theories were used to justify some reprehensible ideas and acts in human history.  Eugenics, fascism, ignoring poverty and even genocide, all perversely twisted the Darwinian concept of “survival of the fittest.” 

However, dismissing evolutionary biology because of how some of its concepts have been misused, is as wrong as dismissing Christianity because of the evils of the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition.  I realize that many of Christianity’s most hostile critics, people like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher, do exactly that.  Their arguments are as flawed as the Creationists, whose demonization of evolution, they criticize.

Poor Darwin gets blamed for everything.  I even read an article last week in which Sean McDowell, a popular Christian apologist, blamed Darwin for the recent chimp attack in Connecticut.  His reasoning was that teaching evolution to our kids has made our culture elevate animals to the level of humans and therefore, more comfortable bringing them into our homes.  This, in turn, set the stage for the tragedy of the woman who was almost killed by her friend’s pet chimp.  I don’t want to sound like another famous McDowell (Roddy, that is) and become a champion of simian rights, but obviously, some Christians have an inordinate sensitivity to this whole ape thing.  Notice no one ever claims teaching evolution is responsible for pit bull attacks.

There is something about evolutionary biology that gets under some Christian’s skin.  This is expressed in much more personal ways than the escalating cartoon war between Jesus fishes and Darwin fishes.  Back in 2005, voters in Dover, PA voted school board members out of office who condoned teaching Creationism in public schools.  In response, televangelist Pat Robertson warned the residents of Dover, “If there’s a disaster in your area.  Don’t turn to God.  You just rejected him from your city.”  In other words, explore any interpretation of Genesis other than a literal one, or the one a particular group deems as literal, and you run the risk of incurring God’s wrath.  Never mind honest questions, reason, or scientific discoveries, there’s only one way to look at creation.  Furthermore, God has the cocked and loaded gun of eternal damnation pointed at your head and if you’re not a creationist he is ready to pull the trigger.

This motivation of fear permeates much Creationist rhetoric. In his book The Battle for the Beginning: The Bible on Creation and the Fall of Adam, biblical literalist John MacArthur says, “Tamper with the book of Genesis and you undermine the very foundation of Christianity…If Genesis 1 is not accurate, then there’s no way to be certain that the rest of Scripture tells the truth…If you reject the creation account in Genesis, you have no basis for believing the Bible at all.  If you explain away the Bible’s account of the six days of creation, where do you put the reigns on your skepticism?”

Notice the language MacArthur uses.  Searching for truth is a “Battle” with presumed winners and losers.  Admitting that we all interpret the Bible and then seeking an interpretation that resonates in our scientific age dismissed judgmentally as “tampering” or “explaining away.”  It is assumed that Genesis, in fact all the Bible, needs to be “accurate” in the same way a piece of journalism or scientific paper is accurate.  This is ironic, since both journalism and the scientific method are products of the same modernity which creationists claim is the source of all the world’s evils.   Furthermore, he raises the slippery slope argument.  Question one part of the Bible and the whole thing may fall apart, leaving you faithless, hopeless and godless.

In one sense, he is right. The endless creation/evolution debate is really a debate about the Bible and whether one must take its words literally.  Creationists argue that Genesis is an omniscient perspective of what happened at the beginning of the world.  It accurately describes how the earth, sun, moon and discreet categories of plants and animals were created by God as ready-made entities in six literal days.  Curiously, they never admit that saying  that’s what the text says is in itself an interpretation.  Of course how one measures days without a sun, moon or earth is not explained.  However, as we know there is overwhelming evidence that the earth and its life forms emerged over billions of years and not one week.

So some Christians suggest that each of Genesis’ “days” stand for time periods of millions of years.   In the story God creates vegetation on the third “day” and the sun on the fourth “day”.  If each day represents millions of years we have a problem.  Plants could not have existed for millions of years without the sun.  In addition, modern Biblical scholarship has demonstrated that there is not one creation story in Genesis but two (one in Chapter 1 and one in Chapter 2).  They each have their own style, their own Hebrew name for God and appear to come from two different Hebrew traditions and time periods.  The first account in Genesis 1 may have even been written as a liturgy for worship designed to contrast God (Elohim) with the Babylonians gods of the moon and sun and their creation myths.

That’s just a small sample of some of the challenges to interpreting Genesis literally.  There isn’t time here to go through all the flawed logic and questionable credentials of so-called Creation Science, or Intelligent Design,  a term used to denote differing beliefs but often is merely Creationism’s face-lifted cousin.    There are plenty of resources, both Christian and secular, which do that. 

The bottom line is, that if these arguments were compelling, most of the scientific world would believe them - and they do not.  There would be no reason for the scientific community to deny Creationism if its claims were true, unless you want to go down the road, as some Creationists do, of suggesting that Satan has deliberately created false fossils and geological evidence to deceive us.  At which point, why not just go all the way and believe that all of life and knowledge is a Satanic deception?

The same genetic science that we all accept when it comes time to convict someone of a crime, is the same genetic science that tells us we share over 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees.  The same scientific method that led to the development of the internet where Creationist web pages can reside, is the same scientific method that led to the conclusion that all life on earth shares a common family tree and that those life forms change over time.

Last Fall, during our series on stewardship, I said that the first step in getting our finances in order was to face reality. Likewise, when it comes to Genesis, we Christians must face the reality that a literal reading of the text simply doesn’t work anymore.  I might add that everyone from the Pope (hardly a flaming liberal), to most of our Jewish brothers and sisters, to Mainline Protestants would agree with me on that point.

So does that mean the Bible is wrong?  St Augustine, again not a liberal, said that when our understanding of Scripture contradicts reason, it is not Scripture that is wrong but our understanding of it.  According to Creationists, interpreting this story in any way other than literal is to call it untrue, false, or inaccurate.  Was Genesis 1 intended to be a scientific or journalistic description of how the universe and life began?  Can stories be true without being journalism or science?

As a pastor, parents often approach me with questions about their kids.  The most common question they have has nothing to do with sex or drugs.  It has to do with this topic.  Parents and children want to know, how do I reconcile the Genesis story with evolutionary biology?  Are my only choices to be a Creationist or an atheist? So I sit down with their kid and tell them this story.

Imagine you have a school assignment about the same subject for two different classes.  Your English teacher assigns you to write an essay about a flower and your Science teacher tells you to write a paper about a flower.  Those two assignments are going to be very different.  The paper you write for science class will describe all the parts of the flower, the pistol, stamen and petals.  It will describe the process of pollination.  The essay you write for English class will explore things like the beauty of the flower, the wonderment you feel when looking at it, or the bigger themes the image of a flower might suggest.  Two very different papers about the same subject, yet aren’t they both true?  For the English essay to be true, does the science paper have to be wrong and vice versa?

I think some Christians have mistaken Genesis for a science paper when, in fact, it is more like the English essay.  That doesn’t make it untrue.  It just means it is describing a different kind of truth - actually a more profound an deeper level of truth.  Approaching the story in this way is not “tampering” with it or “explaining it away,” but may open the door for taking it much more seriously.  Genesis is not so much about the facts of how God made the universe as it is that God made the universe and why God made it.

Mistaking the Creation Narratives for science is understandable since the past two centuries have been an era of reductive materialism.  This thinking reduces the universe down to its simplest components.  There is no meaning or purpose in the universe, only the material world, just particles, laws of physics and random chance occurrences.  Unfortunately, some of the most public faces of science have been evangelists for this worldview.  Dawkins, Sagan, Hawkings, while brilliant scientists, have often strayed beyond the empirical world and into the area metaphysics and philosophy.  They have even taken things a step further to say that science, and evolution in particular, disproves not only the narrow slice of the religious world that is Creationism, but religion altogether.

Many Christians wrongly assume that if we accept evolutionary biology, we must become materialists or reductionists.  In other words, we have no choice but to conclude that life is a meaningless collection of matter and random events.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  There are other choices.

Sometimes Christians, even Creationists, unknowingly buy into that reductive materialist worldview.    We look to God to be merely the explanation for the universe.  So every time science explains something about the universe, we fear there is less reason to believe in God.  Theologians call this the “God of the Gaps” theory. God, we think, only operates through unexplainable phenomenon.  If science explains everything, we assume there is no reason to believe in God.  So some Christians desperately defend the last gaps in our knowledge as supernatural in their origin, as if they are needed so God has some place to live. To say God only operates by stepping in where science has no explanation, reduces God to a mechanic who tinkers with an incoherent and illogical universe.  That is not the God of the Bible.

That’s falling into the trap of reductive materialism.  Christianity did not originate as an explanation for unexplainable phenomena.  It originated in people’s experience of God in a real person.  The reason we believe in God is not because we interpret Genesis 1 literally.  We believe in God because of how we experience that God’s ongoing creative power in this universe and because we meet that God in the person of Jesus Christ.

What if the Materialists have it wrong that God never intervenes in the universe?  What if the Creationists also have it wrong, that God only intervenes on special miraculous occasions? What if, instead, all of this, the whole universe, including the evolutionary process, is God’s intervention?  Rather than look for God in the rapidly shrinking realm of what science cannot explain, or fighting, against all reason and evidence, scientific explanations, perhaps it would be more fruitful for Christians to worship the God of the explainable universe that is all around us. 

In his book Thank God for Evolution, the Rev. Michael Dowd uses a term “The Great Blasphemy”. He says, “When I suggest that our time in history may come to be known as ‘The Great Blasphemy’, what I'm pointing to is the fact that hundreds of millions of religious believers around the world not only are unable to see the entire 14-billion-year history of the Universe as holy—indeed, as the primary revelation of God—but many even consider evolution ‘demonic’. “ 

Or as a character in Brian McLaren’s “A New Kind of Christian” puts it, “What if evolution is one of God’s coolest creations?”

Like Christianity itself, the ideas of evolutionary biology can be used for good or bad.  Instead of leading us to devaluing life, evolution can lead us to value it even more.  The main idea behind evolution is that all of life shares one family tree. Jesus said “what you do to the least of these, you do to me.”  The apostle Paul said we are members of one another.   One common body, interconnectedness, interdependence, we were saying this stuff 2000 years ago. To say that all life is part of a common heritage is not contrary to our faith, it is the core of it.  Evolution does not weaken Christianity. It vindicates it.  It doesn’t lead us to treat people like animals.  It inspires us to look on all of God’s Creation with the holy reverence it deserves.

So I believe the Creation story is true.  Not because humans cannot explain life otherwise, but precisely because we can.  Albert Einstein once said, “The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” 

I imagine that hundreds of years from now, the field of evolutionary biology may look very different.  New discoveries will be made.  Some of the beliefs science holds today may be proven wrong.  That’s to be expected.  However, despite that, I would bet that we will not discover that the earth was created in six literal days or that each species was created separately, or that human life began from scratch with no biological connection to what came before.  Instead, I believe that science will challenge us even more deeply to take our commitment to our Creator even more seriously.

The time has come for the church to stop letting the most fearful members of the Body of Christ, with the most fragile faith, to hold that same Body hostage to their literalistic beliefs.    To be a Christian, does not require you to be a Creationist and believing in evolution does not require you to be an atheist, materialist or reductionist.  Yes, you can believe in evolution and be a Christian.  Rather than weaken our faith, it empowers us to say with even more conviction and more integrity, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” 

Next week we bust the myth that Christians are intolerant of other religions.

So feel free to wander down to THAT house on the block.  It may just be that evolution is the strange house where God is doing his most amazing work.

Comments

[rico001]

I feel you sre wrong in that the bible is historically accurate and true? Pre-Origin Of Species, some people believed in a young Earth

[rico001]

http://evolution-facts.org/Handbook%20TOC.htm

They also may have taken the flood story out of current evolutionary theory.

[volter]

The detailed info and biography of Charles Darwin incuding some of his theories is covered in the book "The genius of Charles Darwin" ( http://rapid4me.com/?q=The+Genius+of+Charles+Darwin ). It's very cognitive.