If anyone works at a large corporation, there’s a good chance they will have to take a training session in communication… where you are asked to learn about “the Elevator Pitch”; this is where you have about 30 seconds to summarize the most compelling parts of a proposal for a colleague or manager as you share an elevator. It’s the sales pitch of your life … and you want him to understand the whole picture by the time the elevator opens and let’s him/her off !!!
So what would be your elevator pitch on God-Guided Evolution? What would you have to say to be optimally convincing? On an earlier thread, I proposed my Elevator Pitch for BioLogos. But this time I’m just going to list what I think is the most convincing evidences for God-Guided Speciation. I encourage others to offer their own versions … improving on whatever I have managed to throw together.
[[ IMPORTANT NOTE: After finishing this, and with the feedback of at least one other, I think it’s safe to say we wouldn’t actually want to inflict this kind of thing on anyone in the SPOKEN format. But as an exercise to strip one’s favorite talking points into the tiniest possible coherent sentence, I found this to be a very valuable approach! ]]
THE BROOKS VERSION:
What has most convinced me that God created all the animals on Earth through his use of Evolutionary laws is a combination what God shows us through science - and - that God intended for some parts of the Bible to be interpreted only figuratively, while we understand God’s theology literally.
ONE: While God taught us about the sacrifice of Jesus to atone for the imperfections of all flesh, he doesn’t expect us to think God would really make the Earth and everything living in Six days. If God had wanted a literal creation story, he would have created the Sun on the first day - - not on the fourth day, making the first 3 days meaningless references to time.
TWO: If God expected us to believe Jesus knew everything the Father knew, he would have had Jesus teach what nobody knew in those days - - such as diseases are caused by germs, as well as demons - - or that God did not intend for us to tolerate slavery for centuries more, rather than letting Paul teach that even imperial tyrants are established by God. Or Jesus would have taught that stars are bigger than planets, rather than let the Bible teach ". . . a third of the stars of heaven [will be] … cast … to the earth. . . " even before Jesus returns!
THREE: If God expected us to take his creation story literally, he would have happily described the millions of years it took to create the Earth with thick layers of complex sediments, with its ocean depths with shifting patterns of magnetized rock, and great trees with hundreds of years of tree rings, instead of letting a scribe repeat a typical pagan myth that the Earth or living things could be made in hours and yet have the appearance great age.
FOUR: We can have the confidence in the testimony of our own eyes that God never expected us to take a six day story of Creation literally when we can see for ourselves that instead of finding human fossils mixed in with dinosaurs and elephants; or whale fossils mixed in with marine dinosaurs and sailors; or both placental and marsupial mammals all mixed together on Australia and New Zealand, because both kinds of mammals would have been able to step onto these massive slabs of dry land BEFORE they out into the middle of the Indian Ocean.
AND FINALLY: if God wanted us to believe that Noah’s ark really did survive a world-wide flood, he would have mentioned all the millions of terrestrial species he would have created once the ark had landed - - so that just three or four thousand years later, we would know where the present day’s millions of species came from, rather than creating the impression to all humanity that all these species evolved from the much smaller number that Noah could have saved.