It’s a mystery. I’m content to leave it at that.
Nobody has “unfertilized embryos.” People have gametes (eggs or sperm). Upon fertilization, the egg becomes a zygote, which develops into an embryo, which develops into a fetus. (I don’t have a clue as to how the virginal conception of Jesus came about!)
I think your post nails the heart of the main issue. America is so polarized along conservative/liberal lines, and the lines between politics and theology are so blurred that people only listen to each other long enough to pull out something they can slap with a liberal or conservative label. And the liberal or conservative label equates to a righteous or evil value judgment. (And I am well aware this works both ways - I spend time a lot of time with people who are both far more conservative than I am politically and theologically and I have in-laws and friends that are much more liberal than I am politically and theologically.) People think that they can nail you down and put you on an appropriate team based on where you went to school or whose book you quoted on your blog or what page you liked on Facebook. And once you are assigned to the other team everything you say can be discounted as probably corrupted by your evil liberal/conservative ideas.
I don’t think there is anything a blog post or two can do to change this unfortunate dynamic. And it makes it awfully hard to build on common ground as Christians and have a productive conversation. The fact is not a single person I know of who is firmly planted in the conservative camp wants to be associated with BioLogos. Every single writer we have could be written off as untrustworthy and compromised by some association they have. Just writing for this website has cost several people their jobs or made them unemployable in certain circles. So I guess maybe what I’m saying is that even if we changed our messaging to be more Bible-belt acceptable, we still wouldn’t get a hearing, because BioLogos, and the schools and organizations our writers represent are already on the guilt by association list. I am pretty sure any such attempt would be called out by many influential voices as some kind of dastardly wolf in sheep’s clothing ruse.
I congratulate you on getting 3 YECs to see Noah’s Flood as a local flood. I just wish you could have convinced them that “local flood” happened 10 million years ago!
But frankly, I would have lost a bet if I had thought they could have never had their minds changed about the nature of the flood. You, Mr. Body, my dear sir, are not without Skills !!!
Yes, yes… my apologies. Embryos are embryos Because they have a full compliment of chromosomes. My mistake. I will make the correction in my original posting.
Thanks for catching that.
No problem! Have a pleasant evening.
@nobodyyouknow Just to reiterate what @Christy and @jpm have already said (very well), thanks so much for your great contributions on this thread. This is exactly the sort of conversation we want to have here.
BioLogos is, in some sense, predicated on the insight by Francis Collins and many others that the entire debate about faith and evolution is built on false premises and unnecessary divides. We aren’t trying to convert YECs into the “liberal” viewpoint. We’re trying to restart the conversation altogether. That’s why we call our position “evolutionary creation” instead of the older term “theistic evolution” used primarily by theological liberals.
Thus, while I agree with some of what you say here, I disagree that we need to play by the existing rules of conservative Christianity—especially as it pertains to biblical interpretation—in order for our message to spread. The existing rules of conservative Christianity are a large part of what has created the problem that BioLogos is trying to fix. We’re trying to cast a new vision of engagement with both Scripture and science, and in the process we’re trying to expose some shortcomings of the existing vision. Now, of course, it’s extremely important that BioLogos be sensitive to our audience’s concerns. That’s why almost every member of the BioLogos staff is a professing Evangelical, and most of us come from conservative backgrounds (YEC, in many cases). But ultimately, we’re trying to change the paradigm, rather than trying to fit into an existing one.
Will that make our message a harder sell among some Christians? Sure. But it’s worth noting that we aren’t aiming to convince all YECs that evolution is true. What we would like is for evolutionary creation to be seen and understood as a “faithful option” that does not qualify Christians as compromisers or worse. Of course, a lot of YECs will never admit this. We’re not naive. But we’ve already made a lot of progress in making EC more visible in the evangelical conversation, and even shifting the conversation toward more understanding on all sides. We’re proud of that.
One last note: Have you ever heard of a book called In the Beginning…We Misunderstood by John Soden? He’s a conservative biblical scholar at a conservative Bible college who came to believe that the “conservative” approach to Genesis, as you outline above, is simply inadequate when dealing with the biblical text. I’ve linked the Amazon page for it. I highly recommend checking it out. This was one of the books that first convinced me that a paradigm shift was desperately needed.
I don’t see the battle as being for evolution, it’s for the faith of the next generation. Do you believe that the rejection of evolution is the heart of the problem with kids leaving the faith in college? I think it is more that a literalist hermeneutic leaves them totally unprepared to deal with the postmodernism and pluralism that will surround them and the questions that will be hurled at them from all sides. Not just in science class, but in literature and history and psychology and political science classes. I honestly don’t think kids would be in some kind of inoculated position if they went to college with an “evolution + biblical literalism” worldview. They are still going to have to wrestle with most of the same worldview challenges as the “Creationism + biblical literalism” kids.
I have a trivial question for you … just wondering about the “marketplace” of ideas that you and we have been calling “conservative”.
Do you have any thoughts as to which denomination (perhaps not so conservative) that is most open to the idea of the Genesis Flood being Local?
That would be an interesting “diagnostic” for what ideas tend to “travel together” every Sunday morning!
Both authors graduated from DTS, and yet they promote a “liberal” view of Genesis 1?
Go figure.
I’m not Christian and don’t speak for Biologos, I just find these discussions interesting. So you don’t have to listen to me if you don’t want to. 
One thing I’ve come to understand more as an adult than I think I ever could have as a child is that the deeper you get into talking about spiritual truths, the really big complex life lessons of being human, the more you have to talk figuratively, or allegorically, or at least in ways that plain don’t make sense if someone doesn’t already have a clue what you’re talking about. So in that sense, I think an insistence on literalism can blinker people to what’s really there. Taking a book about spiritual truth literally as much as possible is a sure-fire way to miss all the most important truth in it.
Just my two cents, like I said. But I’m frequently baffled by the conservative hermeneutic you describe, so thanks for coming in and providing a perspective on it!
I agree you must look for spiritual truths in the Bible, but you cannot do that to the exclusion of the plain literal truths. You can do both. You must look at the literal truth first, and then look for the spiritual, greater meaning. Here’s an example:
In the Old Testament, God tells Israel not to muzzle an ox that is treading corn. It was a literal law, and Israel was to obey it very literally. If they ignored it and only said “well, God is really only speaking to us spiritually, we don’t actually need to take the muzzle off our oxen,” they would have been disobedient to God literally.
However, if you only stop there and say “God cared that the oxen got fed, that’s it, there’s nothing more to it,” you would have missed the spiritual truth. Paul writes about it in 1 Cor. 9:9 For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? 10 Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. 11 If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things?
So there are several layers of truth here. First in the OT is obedience to God in laws which separated Israel from other nations. Next is a moral kindness that extended even to animals, making sure they were taken care of. Further, Paul says it was written for us, to teach us that they that labor in the ministry should be fed by those who are being ministered to. Further even still is that those who are working MUST have the hope that their labor will pay them back, or else they’ll be downtrodden and quit.
So the conservative hermeneutic is not to ignore spiritual or metaphorical truths, it is to make sure and not break or throw out the literal truths in favor of the spiritual.
Can’t we have both?
I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking here, could you explain a bit more?
I think that I agree with you, but not 100%.
The problem with Genesis is theological and there are definitely a number of layers of meaning in this text.
The biggest problem however is that we are Christians and therefore we so not take the OT as the Absolute Word of God. We believe with John 1:1 that Jesus Christ is the Logos, the Rational Ultimate Word of God, not the Bible.
Sadly many “Bible-believing” Christians choose to go against the clear meaning of the Bible on this basic understanding of the Gospel…
I deal extensively with postmodernism and pluralism with the youth and young adults at church, and we do so from a conservative hermeneutic. They are very prepared to deal with those things and don’t miss out from this approach.
You see, the Bible clearly deals with those subjects literally. They don’t need to be ready to absorb ideas and have flexible Bible beliefs to grow in their belief system with every new thing they learn at college. They need to know how to correct error with the truth of the Bible. They need to know how they ought to answer every man. They need to know what is true wisdom and what is simply a rudiment of the world. They need to be…
Col 2:7 Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving.
And they need to…
Col. 2:8 Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.
Here’s another point of difference (we’re seeing more and more). What it seems like from my perspective, is that now the BioLogos approach is not simply asking to interpret the Bible using science, but we’ve already expanded it to history. Then we expanded it to language. Now we’re expanding it so that we’re interpreting the Bible in light of culture and modern philosophical trends?
The Bible stands head and shoulders above all these.
What’s funny (side note here, maybe), is that no one asks other philosophies (besides the Bible) to absorb competing and contrasting ideas into their own and change their core tenants.
Stoics are stoics, and no one demands that they deconstruct their stoicism in light of post-modern thought. They may debate them, but they don’t try to make them all compatible with each other. It would not be possible!
How would you possibly interpret the Bible in light of postmodernism, and at the same time interpret it in light of modernism? These are competing ideas. They do not cast the same light, so looking at the Bible in each light will throw off contradicting shadows and lead to confusion and ignorance. A man with two watches never knows what time it is.
This is why we must look to the light of the Bible and compare it to itself, in light of itself with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We cannot look to worldly philosophy for light on the scripture. There is only one place in the Bible where the word philosophy is mentioned, and it is not good. Paul warns the Colossians not to be spoiled by it. In Acts Paul speaks to the Epicureans on Mars hill and does not change the Bible to match their philosophy- he does not wonder that maybe Christianity should adopt the Epicurean tenant that we should not have any fear of God, for example- but rather cherry-picks from a piece of their literature that does not contradict the Bible, and preaches the Bible to them through it. He tells them that they know they are offspring of a god, and they worship an unknown god, but he does not then question whether the Bible should allow for the worship of other gods. He tells them that they need to worship the God they do not yet know.
So I teach the young adults in my church all about philosophy, but we teach them what parts of it is wrong according to the Bible. We teach them how unbelievers are “ignorantly worshipping.” If we adopted modernity in interpretation, our own worship would go from enlightened by the Holy Spirit and the scriptures, towards ignorant worship.
Sure, I’ll explain the context of my question more.
There is a tendency in the Pro-Evolution camp to see all Evangelicals as more or less the same. But then you appeared!
And you described your success with three “conservative” Christians in having them accept the idea that the Biblical Flood was not a global flood. Last year I would have bet a substantial sum that nobody could convince any Evangelical that the Flood was anything other than a massive world-wrecking catastrophe.
So: in view of the “micro” miracle you have wrought (to be distinct from Macro Miracles that only God can do! 
):
One: to what denomination did these 3 conservatives?
Two: do you find that there is a particular Evangelical denomination that is most willing to take non-traditional views on the Bible when provided reasonably persuasive Biblical information?
The three I spoke to were Baptist. Two were more conservative fundamentalist type Baptists and one is more contemporary Southern Baptist.
What they had in common was that they understood how to make decisions on scripture by looking at it and seeing what it said. That as opposed to Christians who don’t particularly care to study their Bible and just listen to whatever their preacher tells them.
That is, if you talk to someone about the Bible and they look confused and say, “I don’t know about that, I just know this is what I believe…” then I’m not quite sure how to deal with that type of answer.
I think this Bible-studying kind of person is probably found across all denominations. However you interpret scripture, I think you must be the type of person with a desire to look into scripture and come to conclusions on it, to find out what you believe and why, vs. someone who doesn’t really care what they believe, they only go to church for practical or devotional lessons and don’t think doctrine is important.
I’m thinking of a close family member who would respond: “look, I just think we should all love each other, and I just believe it’s a global flood, I don’t want to argue about it.”
I’m not sure I understand what you mean here. The way I’m reading it, this would be a grave error.
We DO accept the OT as the absolute word of God. We ALSO accept Jesus Christ as the absolute word of God. There is no need to make one the rational ultimate, they are both ultimate.
That’s like saying Darwin himself is the Rational Ultimate Darwin, but “Origin of Species” is somehow less authoritative than the man himself.
That just does not make sense to me unless… are you claiming that the man Jesus Christ contradicted the written words of God?
Thank you for your work at BioLogos. I love Francis Collins’ work and the scientific work of BioLogos. Particularly appealing to me and needful is the work that sees God in nature and science. I love hearing a geneticist talk of the language of God within our DNA, and I love hearing BioLogos talk about, for example, the fine tuning that is found in nature, among many other things.
God’s work is IS FOUND IN nature. That is undeniable. I need Collins and BioLogos to show me the details on that, because I am not a scientist and do not study nature in such fine detail. I need someone who does study it, who can then pass along the results in layman’s language for all of us to enjoy, and to magnify and glorify God among his people.
Yes, there does exist a deep divide over how scripture should be interpreted. Should we interpret scripture by nature, or should we interpret scripture by scripture? It is unfortunate that BioLogos has chosen a side in that debate, because, and this is my main point, it is irrelevant to the discussion of God, nature, and science. I have come to the conclusions that BioLogos holds on science and nature, without changing my hermeneutic.
I understand where you are coming from, and agree that we should not interpret scripture through nature, but rather through the lens of Christ. In another sense however, the natural world includes language and linguistics, life experience, knowledge learned through both books and instruction, and those things are necessarily a part of how we read the Bible. To interpret scripture without them is impossible. (I do not speak for Biologos, but feel their position is compatible.)
The danger we fall into at times is that of proof texting, using selected texts to support our pre-determined position. I don’t think any are innocent of that at times, but we should be away aware of the danger.
Charles Darwin was a fallible human being who changed his mind more than once I am sure. The book Origin of Species is a summary of what he thought at the time he wrote it, but it is not all of what he thought at the height of his powers. He did write other books.
I do not believe in evolution because Darwin wrote the Origin. I believe in evolution because it is a true and accurate description of how God’s Creation works. Darwin made an important contribution to our understanding of evolution, and for that he deserves credit. He also got his understanding of Natural Selection wrong and that needs to be corrected.
I believe the Bible because it tells the story of Jesus and led to saving faith. I do not believe it because it tells the story of science or the story of philosophy. It is important however because it tells the story behind science and philosophy and those who do not understand this are misinformed, just as those who belie3ve that the Bible is a handbook for understanding the internet.
The Bible gives us a true and accurate picture of how God’s Salvation history works. However it indicates that many times God’s people misunderstood what God wanted them to do. That is very true today, so it would be foolhardy to say we have found the secret of understanding what God wants us to do when there is powerful evidence against this.
The Old Testament is YHWH’s Covenant with the Jewish people. Jesus Christ is God’s Covenant with all God’s People. The Law of the Old Covenant is not the same as the Law of the New Covenant.
The New Covenant is based on the divine Person of Jesus Christ, the Alpha and Omega of our faith, which is as complete and perfect as Jesus is. The Old Covenant based on the Torah is not.
Our faith is based on Jesus Christ, His birth, life, teaching, death, and resurrection, not the Bible, and certainly not a narrow understanding of the Bible as I have said.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.