Are Evolution & Creation Compatible if Genesis is Interpreted Metaphorically

Hi Anthony, I think it’s a shame that it seems your acceptance of evolutionary theory has lead you to give up your faith. I understand where youre coming from, but I think the problem lies in your apparent insistence that Genesis 1 & 2 must be understood literalistically, like a scientific textbook. I would suggest it wasnt written as such and was never meant to be understood in that way.

To me, the Genesis story of creation was written primarily as a polemic against other existing Near Eastern creation stories. For example the author describes the sun and moon simply as ‘lights’ with certain functions instead of naming them as sun and moon which would have been more natural. He likely did this because the sun, moon and stars were typically viewed as ‘gods’ to be worshipped in other stories, and he wanted to negate such a view - it was God who created these objects with specific functions - they are not gods.

There is also evidence of poetry and chiastic forms in the original Hebrew which we tend not to see in English. Further evidence that it should not be read literalistically.

That is not to say the text does not speak truths. For example, when the Big Bang Theory (as it became known) was first being proposed, a number of scientists openly said they didnt like the idea, compared to the Steady State Theory, because it agreed with Genesis 1, ie there was a definite beginning to the universe! Rather ironic that the proposer of the BBT was a priest, initially brashly rejected by Einstein.

In the end, your faith should not be based on a very specific understanding of Genesis, but rather on the truth spoken by Jesus of Nazareth. If you believe he spoke the truth about himself, why would you lose your faith?

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Genesis is the declaration of the one true God to the people Israel living in a world with hundreds of other gods. It’s not about science. People wouldn’t understand. Nevertheless – while not exact – the order of creation fits pretty well (humans last) with the evolutionary tree.

Edit - Once I was in a creative mood and tried to explain Genesis 1 with nowadays science by reading into it. Meaning, don’t take it too serious, but with a smile.

http://rebel13.nl/home/bible/yec.html

Hi Pculbert, thanks for your response. Evolution isn’t the only major reason I’m no longer a christian. There are other reasons too. I have no problem with Genesis containing metaphorical truths rather than scientific facts. But if it was really divinely inspired, I would expect the metaphoric truths to be consistent with science like what you said about the beginning of the Universe. I tried to distill these metaphorical truths from Genesis that are relevant to evolution, although I could have made errors. My argument isn’t affected by whether you believe Adam & Eve / the Garden of Eden / the snake etc really existed or whether the days of creation were literal days or epochs etc. What do you disagree with in the second paragraph of my original post?

I agree with you that the purpose of Genesis was not to present scientific facts. Please see my post directly above to Pculbert

Thanks for your response.

God clearly gave us a choice, which means that he allows us to fail. Allowing us to fail is not the same as setting us up to fail. The thing is that sin (disobedience toward God) is not a one-and-done proposition. We all sin. It is a fact.

Why do we all sin? I think you would say its human nature. Well if god used evolution to give us our nature and that nature makes it impossible to avoid sin, then isn’t god setting us up to fail? Note that I’m not saying that we aren’t responsible for our actions though

When you say that we fail and he punishes us, what do you mean?

By punishment, I refer to the eternal consequences of sin

You realize from the entirety of the remainder of scripture that God has provided a way out, right? We don’t disagree about this, do we? Faith in Jesus Christ’s resurrection and work on the cross are sufficient to overcome all of our failures.

Yes, I realize that he gives us a way to avoid the consequences of sin, but that is a separate issue. Besides not everyone gets the opportunity to take advantage of this e.g. Muslims who lived and died without ever hearing about Christianity

Right. Some aspects of humans are not uniquely human.

I guess my point here was that it may seem like humans are distinct from animals, but this only because our evolutionary ancestor species are extinct. If all these species were still alive, the distinction between human and animal would be much less clear than it is today. I just have this image of a father and son in my mind, where god considers the father an animal, but the son human. It seems completely bizarre because they would be the same species

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Gen-1 is framed in a Jewish understanding, God worked for 6 days, rested on the seventh. Symbolism for the Sabbath.

The days can be read as symbolism as well, every day ends with: And there was evening and there was morning, the x day. And it’s only at day-4 that:

14 - And God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night.

A literal reading would mean a giant contradiction.

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Hi Laura, I’ve updated my original post to reflect the comments I’ve received and to try clarify my points. If you have time, I would really appreciate your thoughts?

what do you think god is trying to tell us with Genesis? And what do you think about the paragraph in my original post titled “metaphorical truths from genesis”

Thanks for your response

I do not think there was ever a time when the members of the homo sapiens species or the organisms of any species never experienced death or suffering. Life and death, happiness and suffering are two sides of the same coin. Without death and suffering life would not exist.

Isn’t death and suffering a consequence of sin and we all sin because of human nature? If god used evolution to give us our nature and if this nature is the reason we cannot avoid sinning, doesn’t this mean that god set us up to fail and when we do fail (which is 100% certain to happen), he punishes us. Free will, if it exists, only gives us a way to escape that punishment? This makes no sense to me

I have wrestled with the same question. My extended version would be, I am because 2 people had sex, I never had a say in that, never had the same chance as A&E in the Garden and thus I shall face death, meanwhile on my way to hell, if not…

I like to keep that to myself for the moment because it’s a heretical view of what happened in the Garden according to the 3th century early church father Origen whose teachings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church in the 5th century.

Thanks, Anthony. It’s best not to edit the original post because now it looks like we’re all replying to something that’s different than it was when we actually wrote our responses. If you want you can copy it into a new post or just summarize the main changes and I can restore the OP to the original.

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Yes please restore my OP to the original. I will create a new post instead.

Thanks – that will help us see the progression of the discussion here in the thread. :slight_smile:

Anthony, you are so thoughtful! I really appreciate your line of questions. They are very good and hopefully, together, we’ll point you the right direction.

One of the main purposes of the Adam and Eve story (IMHO) is to explain that all people will sin. As I said before, even two people, communing with God, in paradise, given just one rule, will sin. Cain kills Abel, just a generation later, and so, humanity has run the sin gamut. So, if you also accept this, you will agree that humans will sin.

So why? Only humans sin, right? Animals may do things that we consider to be bad, but they are animals. They do not have the soul of a human. They possess human-like characteristics, like the way a dog loves its master, but they never look at a sunset and wonder who are we that we are so lucky to experience this? This humanness, however it was bestowed upon man, is an aspect of the image of God that differentiates us from the animals. But, it is a double-edged sword, because now, possessing a soul, we decide where and with whom we want to reside for all eternity.

Too much chocolate is bad for us. Would we be better off if it had never been invented? I’m diabetic and cannot eat it, but I remember it. There is great pleasure in eating it. Is chocolate bad because it harms some of us, or good because it gives pleasure? By bestowing the image of God and free will upon humanity, God gave us the opportunity for communion with him (which he desires) as well as exclusion from him (which he does not.) That’s the rub. What we do with our humanness is our choice. You can look at it in terms of God presenting the opportunity for us to fail, but God created the opportunity to live with him forever in paradise. You cannot have love without hate. No good without bad.

I don’t want to write too much, but I (and others, I’m sure) would like to continue the conversation. You’ve raised many great points. Does this make sense so far?

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I’ve always seen it as an allegory for maturing into adulthood. You start out innocent, not knowing of good and evil. Over time you start to learn of the world, and once you gain that knowledge and sense of morality there is no going back to that innocent place you lived in as a child. This is further supported by Adam and Even needing clothing, which relates to becoming a sexual being.

I also think the story tries to get at the heart of basic moral philosophy. What is morality? How did we get this moral sense? What does it mean to be innocent or sinful? Tying intelligence, knowledge, and morality together seems like a good way to approach these questions.

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@T_aquaticus That’s an interesting perspective and I’ve not thought of it that way. Being a Christian, I look at scripture and ask myself “what is the purpose.” I think that the purpose of the creation days is to explain the difference between the creation and the Creator. God made these things and so, is to be worshipped, and the things made are not to be worshipped. This theme continues throughout scripture, and maybe especially at the end of the Torah as the Jews are being led out of Egypt. With Adam and Eve, the concept of a moral law (as you mention as well) that has been set upon our hearts and sin (which people often do not wish to accept) are also themes continued throughout scripture, culminating in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Me neither which is why I do not believe any of that stuff.

All throughout the Bible you see a description of two kinds of life and death. There is the life of the body and the life of the spirit. Otherwise you have God lying to Adam and Eve and the snake telling the truth for Adam did not die (physically) on the day they “ate of the fruit.” So Jesus says in Luke 9:60 “let the dead bury their own dead,” which makes no sense unless there are more than one kind of death.

By the time we learn to speak it is inevitable that we pick up a few bad (self-destructive) habits of thought and action. So you can say that with the memetic inheritance from which we have our humanity we also get these bad habits as well. To be sure what habits we acquire vary considerably from person to person but they are degenerative in nature, eroding our integrity and potential, so given enough time they will consume our free will and everything good within us.

God created life which is a self-organizing phenomenon. And thus you can say that we largely create ourselves except for the fact that we do not do this in a vacuum but in an environment which includes parents and teachers (including God). So it is a participatory process – the creation of life is always like that. It is the difference between a creator of non-living things like a watchmaker and a creator of living things like a farmer, shepherd, teacher, or parent.

So we are not products of design but of our own choices in the context of an inheritance from several different sources. We certainly did not get any tendency to sin from God. So no, I do not believe that God set us up to fail. It has never been the teaching of any part of Christianity that Adam and Eve sinned because of some sinful nature that God gave to them.

Perhaps but the purpose of punishment is behavior modification and we can use every help to shed these self-destructive habits of ours. But I would guess that you are speaking of hell which cannot be a matter of punishment but is rather the consequences of letting our bad habits consume us.

No, that also has never been the teaching of Christianity. Free will is the essence of life and it exists because God created us for a parent-child relationship. But sin destroys free will because it is habitual. The teaching of Christianity is that salvation comes by the grace and work of God. But it is wrong to think that salvation is any kind of get out of jail free card that allows us to avoid the consequences of our choices. Rather it is about dealing with those consequences in a productive manner, doing whatever it takes to stop these destructive habits and replace them with better habits.

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Then end goal of creation is the glorification of Christ.

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Plus joy for Father and family. (Hebrews 12:2)

Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.