The Creation-Evolution Debate and the Genres of Genesis 1 & 2-3

A lot of people have been talking this week about the Bill Nye/Ken Ham Debate on Creationism vs. Evolution.  So I decided to weigh in with where I stand on this issue.

When I converted to Christianity at the age of 15, I was taught that one of the things I had to embrace if I was going to follow Jesus was young-earth creationism.  The Bible "clearly" taught that God had made the earth in six 24-hour days and that the earth is 6000 to 10,000 years old. So I read several books that supported creationism, and as far as I could tell with my not-particularly-scientific mind, it made sense.  I left what my parents and my teachers had taught me and became a creationist.

Something happened when I was nearly through my college years, though, that shook me up a little.

A public debate was scheduled on my college campus between a local biology professor and Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research, who had flown in specially for the event.  Since most of my fellow church members were attending, I went along.  As I listened, I couldn't help but think Dr. Gish was winning the debate.  After all, he was a gifted debater and public speaker, while the biology professor was-- well, a scientist who taught classes now and then.  And the audience was clearly on Gish's side.  Whenever Gish spoke, he was applauded.  When the local professor spoke, he was booed and hissed at.  And most of my friends were gleefully joining in.  This clearly bothered and rattled the poor guy-- and that was where my cognitive dissonance started.  My sympathies have always lain with the underdog, and I simply couldn't understand why good Christian people who were supposed to be following Jesus' teachings on loving your neighbor, would treat this poor man with this abysmal rudeness.

I left the debate wondering how, if we were in fact so very right, we could be so totally wrong about it.  I knew that what really mattered, what Christ really cared about, wasn't whether we believed single-celled organisms could slowly become human beings.  It was how we treated actual human beings.

I walked away from that debate feeling ashamed. I couldn't bring myself to join in with my fellow church members as they rejoiced in how thoroughly the biology professor had been humiliated.  As far as I could see, the main thing he was going to take away from that debate was not the reasonableness of creationism.  It was how little Christians actually practiced what they preached.

Years later, when I began the process I've mentioned before of laying all my beliefs on the table and finding what held true for me, creationism was one of the things that I took another look at.  I bought a book called A New Look at an Old Earth by Don Stoner.  He discussed how early Christians had considered God to have "written" another "book" in addition to the Bible-- the "book of nature," and how the created universe itself was meant to testify alongside the Bible, just as Psalm 19:1 and Romans 10:18 said.

He also talked about how very un-Christian it was to mock and ridicule evolutionists in public debates.

I thought he made a lot of sense.

So for a while I became an old-earth creationist and stopped believing that the "days" in Genesis 1 referred to actual 24-hour periods.  But I had learned in the process of re-examining my faith to hold my view lightly.  What I believed about human origins wasn't essential to my faith in Christ, and I knew I wasn't a science expert.

I kept on reading, and I kept on examining.  And some of the books and articles I read actually made even more sense than Don Stoner's book.  One of them was The Language of God by Francis Collins. Dr. Collins is the founder of the Biologos Foundation, and his view is called "evolutionary creation" or "theistic evolution."  Collins believes in the same foundational Christian doctrines that I do: in the Incarnation, death and Resurrection of Christ as the Son of God, in the authority of Scripture and the work of the Holy Spirit.  And the genetic evidence for theistic evolution presented in his book is hard to deny.

So the one obvious thing I have come to see is that it's quite possible for sincere Christians to believe any one of these positions.  So who is right?

I think the most compelling scientific view definitely lies with theistic evolution.  But I am an English graduate from the University of Oregon, and the best way for me to approach the topic is to look at it in terms of one thing I do really feel I have learned well-- how to read and understand a text.

So here's the thing.  Both young-earth and old-earth creationism approach the first two chapters of Genesis as if they are historical/scientific prose about the origins of the universe and of humanity. Young-earth creationism says that each detail should be read according to its most obvious, plain-sense reading, including the "days" as literal 24-hour periods.  Old-earth creationism says that the "days" actually represent periods of time lasting thousands and thousands of years. It says that the passage that says that God made the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day should be understood as God revealing the functions of the sun, moon and stars as they would exist for humankind.  It says the current Cenozoic period is the extended "seventh day" of the creation.  But it still approaches the text as a scientific, historical narrative.

And that is exactly what I can't, as an English graduate, view as the actual genre of these first chapters of Genesis.

I find, in fact, that I agree with Old Testament Theologian Bruce K. Waltke in his article The Literary Genre of Genesis Chapter 1, when in response to the identification of Genesis 1 as a "straightforward historical narrative"  he says, "The text, however, is begging us not to read it that way."

When I look at other portions of Genesis, this is the type of thing I read:

After Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Abram's wife Sarai took Hagar the Egyptian, her maid, and gave her to her husband Abram as his wife. (Genesis 16:3)

That's it.  Straightforward prose, recounting events more or less in chronological order.

When I read Chapter 1 of Genesis, however, here's what I see:

Then God said, "Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind, with seed in them, on the earth; and it was so.  And the earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit, with seed in them, after their kind, and God saw that it was good.  And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.

The italicized parts mark phrases that repeat themselves over and over throughout the text. The two phrases picked out in green mark text that repeats itself within the same section.  The entire chapter works this way.  Each section has a "Then God said," a statement what He is making, then a phrase "and it was so" noting what God has made, followed by a repetitive detail of what was made. Then, each time, God sees that what He has made is good, and we get a repetition of "there was evening and there was morning," denoting a day.

This is not quite poetry, but it is, as Dr. Waltke says, highly stylized, didactic prose, intended not to give a straightforward recounting of events so much as to show the power of God and the order and beauty of His work:

[W]e argue that [this text] cannot give a satisfying scientific account of origins, for it is not scientific literature. . . The Bible is concerned with Ultimate origins ("Where did it all come from?") not scientific questions of proximate origins ("How did A arise out of B, if it did?").  [Also] its language is non-scientific. The account reports the origins of the cosmos phenomenologically, not mathematically or theoretically. . . We come back to [this] genre identification: it is a literary-artistic representation of the creation. To this we add the purpose, namely, to ground the covenant people's worship and life in the Creator, who transformed chaos into cosmos, and their ethics in His created order. [Emphasis added.]  

I also note that as far as the specific things being made, there are three pairings, occurring in two groups.  On the first and fourth days God creates light and the orbs that convey the light. On the second and fifth days God sets apart the "expanses" of the sea and the air, and then makes creatures (birds and fish) that will live in them.  On the third and sixth days God makes the dry land and its vegetation, and then the animals (and finally humans) that will live there.  The whole pattern up to the seventh day goes as follows:

Creation of an element (light)
Creation of an element (air, separated from water)
Creation of an element (land) 

Creation of things for the light (sun, moon, stars)
Creation of things for the air and water
Creation of things for the land

I find this reminds me of the kind of stylized, didactic order shown in parts of the Proverbs, such as in Chapter 2, where the pattern is:

My son, receive my wisdom
Here are the results of my wisdom 

For the Lord gives wisdom
Here are the results of the Lord's wisdom 

They will keep you from the ways of evil
Here are the results of the ways of evil 

So you will walk in the way of the good
Here are the results of doing good
And here are the result of doing evil.

In short, I think the first chapter of Genesis is a kind of didactic prose, similar to but not identical to the opening chapters of Proverbs.  I think it was written for the purpose of revealing the nature of God as Creator, not for the purpose of detailing scientific facts about the processes of our origins.  Dr. Waltke says that "Genre identification depends on a text's contents and function."  By the context and function of Genesis 1, it simply is not in the genre of historical/scientific prose.

Similarly, when I read the second and third chapters of Genesis, here is what I see:

A garden at the source of four great rivers
Two highly symbolic trees: the "tree of life" and the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil"
A serpent that talks
God walking in the garden
A prophetic speech of God (the curse) spoken in the prose style of the Books of the Prophets

I don't actually know of any Christian group that takes all of this literally-- particularly not the talking snake. Based on other biblical texts such as Revelation 20:2, Christians identify the serpent with Satan-- that Satan appeared in the form of a serpent, not that Satan actually is a literal serpent. Similarly, when the text says God "walked" in the garden, most Christians don't take this to mean that God literally has legs like a man.  Christians believe, on the basis of texts like John 4:24, that God is a Spirit, not a big manlike being like the Greek god Zeus.  The walking of God in the cool of the day may mean that God appeared in the form of a man, or it simply may be a metaphor for the Presence and Voice of God moving through the garden.

Since no one knows what kind of fruit a "life" fruit is, or a "knowledge of good and evil" fruit is (it's only tradition that calls it an apple), these trees are meant to be symbols.  Were they also literal trees, somehow bearing these abstract concepts as actual fruit?  I'm not at all sure that we're meant to understand the text that way.

In fact, Genesis 2 and 3 are no more straightforward historical prose than Genesis 1 is.  This second part of the creation text is not stylized didactic prose, but bears more in common with the symbolism of the Book of Revelation, or with the metaphorical language of some of Jesus' teachings ("the tree is known by its fruit" in Matt. 12:33 is not a reference to actual trees) than it does with the straight prose of the Abraham-Isaac-Jacob narratives.

Does this mean there was no actual, real Adam and Eve?  I don't know.  Since both Paul and Jesus speak of Adam and Eve, they may actually have been real people.  They may have been the first humanoid creatures that God chose to bear His image.  Or this may be a true story of the universal human condition, told metaphorically/symbolically (that from the beginning, when free to choose to believe God or believe the serpent, humanity, as one, has ended up choosing the serpent).  In this case Paul and Jesus, understanding that their audiences also understood it symbolically, may have felt free to speak of Adam and Eve according to the truths their story conveyed without needing to mention a shared understanding of the story as non-literal-- in the same way we might speak of Dorothy and the lure of "over the rainbow" today.

You may have a strong conviction one way or the other.  But this is not a primary, foundational doctrine of the faith, so I'm simply going to allow it to remain a mystery in my mind.  Either way, there is certainly a heavy metaphorical/symbolic emphasis in the Adam-and-Eve story. And the intent of the story is manifestly not to give a scientific account of how humanity came to exist on the earth.

I don't think the original audiences, either of the oral or written traditions, thought according to our post-Enlightenment emphasis on fact and procedure.  I think God accommodated His revelation to their mindset, not to ours.  In fact, to insist on reading these stories as scientific explanations of origins is, in a way, enslaving our minds to Enlightenment ways of thought.  Rather than examining the biblical texts according to what they themselves seem to be saying they are, we impose upon them what we believe they ought to be-- and what we think they ought to be is directly determined by the Enlightenment's emphasis on fact and historicity.

According to Dr. Waltke in the article above, "Natural theology and exegetical theology are both hindered by a continued adherence to the epistemic principle that valid scientific theories must be consistent with a woodenly literal reading of Genesis."  In other words, whether our theology focuses on understanding God through the "book of nature" or the "book of scripture," when we make it a rule that the only way we can know either book is according to a strict literal reading of these texts, we keep our thinking inside a very small box and try to drag the limitless God to fit in there with us. And it doesn't really work.

What it all comes down to is that I have come to embrace evolutionary creation, also known as theistic evolution, on the basis of the biblical texts themselves. I think young-earth creationism and old-earth creationism both show too much dependence on Enlightenment mentality to be true to the pre-Enlightenment revelation of God to the pre-Enlightenment original audiences.  The point of these texts is that God created, not how God created-- and this is also the main point of theistic evolution.

Since I also find the evidence for evolution more compelling than the evidence for either young-earth or old-earth creationism, the cognitive dissonance of my college years is resolved.  But my position is based more on how I understand the Bible than on how I understand science.

So to Ken Ham and Bill Nye, I would say this.  This science-faith schism is unfortunate and completely unnecessary.  I hope that in the future we can find the openness-- and the humility-- to move past it.

This Isn't the Way to Debate an Issue

Professor Denny Burk, on his well-known blog espousing a hierarchical view of male-female relations in Christianity, recently wrote a rebuttal of a post by Sarah Bessey (author of Jesus Feminist) in which she pushed back against the view of marriage that says "the husband is head of the home."  Here is a series of quotes from Burk's article that highlights the general stance he took:

The unblushing error of this statement is breathtaking. It is a stark denial of the straightforward teaching of scripture. . . I simply want to point out that egalitarian hermeneutics are not benign. They cater to the egalitarian spirit of the age by suppressing what the Bible actually teaches. . . We are not playing games here. The hermeneutics of egalitarianism are serious error and are harmful.

Retha at Biblical Personhood and Greg at That's It on a Cracker! have done a great job of responding to Burk's actual arguments.  But I would like to talk about something else.

Here are some of the things Sarah Bessey said in the post Burk was writing about, to voice her disagreement with Candace Cameron Bure's new book:

I believe that Candace Cameron Bure is wrong here. . . This method or strategy may well be how her marriage works – and if so, lovely – but it’s not necessarily biblical. . . Not only is the idea that wives alone are to submit to their husbands poor exegesis, it is damaging. It is damaging to the image of God carried in women and in men.

Notice what Burk does that Bessey does not.  Bessey voices in no uncertain terms that she disagrees with the hierarchical (aka "complementarian") way of reading the Bible when it comes to men and women. She states unequivocably that she believes the hierarchical view is "wrong" and "damaging." But what she does not do is attack the moral integrity of the person she is disagreeing with.  She says she believes Bure is in error; she does not call that error "unblushing."  She does not accuse Bure of being in "stark denial" of what the Bible absolutely says. She does not imply that Bure's Christian faith is somehow compromised by "catering to the spirit of the age."

The problem is not that Burk disagrees with Bessey.  The problem is that Burk couches his opponent’s arguments in such terms as “unblushing error” and “stark denial,” indicating that the opposing view isn't just disagreement or even error, but moral failing. And Burk is not the only one to use this method of debate. It starts by assuming there is only one possible way to understand Scripture unless one is actually being morally dishonest– and then uses words of righteous shock at the immorality of those who read the same Scriptures but understand them differently.  This puts the argument on a false footing from the start. The reader is encouraged not to simply examine each argument on its own merit, but to take one side because to do otherwise is sin.

Here are a few other examples, taken at random from various comments on blogs I frequent:

Paul is very clear in his writings about the role of women.Twisting his writings and trusting in feelings is unbiblical.

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[The egalitarian author] has let surrounding culture influence her view rather than the bible. Falling away takes many forms and this article is one of them.

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And another article that blatantly distorts the issue that the Bible clearly states that women are not (repeat: NOT) to be pastors in the churches.

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You ladies have really twisted scripture to fool yourselves that women can preach/teach in an official church setting. . .

This is actually a logical fallacy known as prejudicial language, which is defined as "loaded or emotive terms used to attach value or moral goodness to believing the proposition."  Words such as "twisting scripture" or "blatantly distorts" turn the simple fact of a disagreement on the meaning of a text into a moral crime.

Now of course egalitarian Christians do sometimes also use prejudicial language.  They might say a hierarchical Christian is "throwing his weight around" or "ranting" about authority and submission, for example. But it is hierarchical Christians who seem to be particularly inclined to language that implies or even states outright that those who disagree with them are in rebellion against God or the Bible or are even leaving the faith.  This may have to do with a particular approach to the Bible which theologian Roger E. Olson identifies as Christian fundamentalism (which is the position hierarchical Christians most often adhere to):

To fundamentalists, there can only be one right “biblical” belief about every given important issue of Christian life and thought. The Bible is viewed as a comprehensive source book of revealed doctrines (and ethical rules). Thus, when two Christians disagree about the Bible’s meaning as it pertains to a doctrinal or theological issue, the fundamentalist believes one of them (or both) must necessarily be misinterpreting and even perhaps dishonoring the Bible.

As I have said before, I think this way of looking at the Bible is a foundational misunderstanding of what kind of divinely inspired text the Bible actually is: that it is actually a narrative about God's redemption of mankind, inviting us to become part of the truth of that story by entering that redemption through Christ.  When we look at it that way, we become free to allow differences in belief and practice, because what really matters is Christ's redemption.  As the Bible itself says:  "Those who want to impress people by means of the flesh are trying to compel you to be circumcised. . . [but] neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation." (Gal. 6:12-15.)

To be fair, there are hierarchical Christians who do allow differences and don't resort to prejudicial language; see for example Kathleen Nielson of the Gospel Coalition addressing "My Egalitarian Friends."  Her willingness to admit that egalitarian Christians are simply "different voices . . . affirming love for the Lord and his inspired Word, as well as a desire to see that Word proclaimed with gospel faithfulness to the ends of the earth" makes her continued adherence to complementarianism look stronger than it would if she buttressed her own view by taking verbal pot-shots at the other side.

I myself believe that egalitarianism is a justice issue-- that placing men in a permanent hierarchy above women is fundamentally unjust, and I make no apology for that.  But I will admit that many Christians don't see it that way, and that many of them are sincerely trying to be as faithful to what they believe the Bible teaches as I am trying to be faithful to what I believe the Bible teaches.

The point is that if we truly believe our point of view is right, we should be able to trust it enough to let it argue for itself.  If someone feels the need to make opposing views look immoral and sinful, it can actually make their own view appear weak.

I'm hoping that many complementarians can agree with me (and with their own Kathleen Nielson) about this.  We can, as my grandmother used to say, "disagree without being disagreeable."

In the end we're all disciples of Christ, doing our best to follow Him, right? So let's not bite and devour one another. For the whole Law is fulfilled in this: "you shall love your neighbor as yourself." Gal. 5:14-15.

Let's permanently lose terms like "unblushing error" and "twisting scripture."  They're not doing any of us any good.