Can the Book of Genesis Be Reconciled with the Evolutionary History of the World Without a “God of the Gaps”?

Faith & Science Conversation
, ,
1

Hello. My name is Roman. I recently joined the forum and would like to put forward for discussion a philosophical and theological hypothesis that is being developed within a small collaborative project. Several participants discuss emerging ideas and help with the development of the texts, but here I am speaking in my own name and take responsibility for the arguments I post.

Russian is my native language. I use translation and language-editing assistance to prepare the English versions of my posts. If any wording is unclear or ambiguous, please ask, and I will do my best to clarify exactly what I mean.

I am a Christian, and my professional background is in management; this work is not part of my professional or academic activity. It grew out of a personal interest in the dialogue between science, philosophy, and faith and, in particular, in the tension between some traditional readings of the Genesis text and the modern scientific reconstruction of the history of the world.

I am interested in whether it is possible to preserve a theologically substantive reading of the structure of Genesis while fully accepting the real cosmic, geological, and evolutionary history of the world, without inferring the Creator’s action simply from the fact that some transitions have not yet received a complete natural explanation.

We call the proposed position Evolutionary-Phase Theism (EPT).

It is a philosophical and theological hypothesis, not a scientific theory and not an attempt to prove the existence of the Creator scientifically. It accepts modern science’s reconstruction of the history of the universe, Earth, life, and humanity as the real history of the created world itself.

The basic idea is simple:

the world is created, and the world has a genuine history of its own.

Stars and planets really do form through natural processes. Life has a real evolutionary history. Homo sapiens emerges within a population-level evolutionary history, and its genetic ancestry cannot be reduced to a single original pair.

Natural causation therefore operates fully within the range of what is already attainable. An Act of Creation does not replace a natural process or do in its place what is already attainable within the created order itself.

This is where the central distinction of the model arises.

An Act of Creation marks a proposed root-level threshold at which the range of what is genuinely attainable is established or expanded.

A phase is the subsequent natural unfolding of a possibility that has already been opened.

If new forms of organization and new properties arise within the available order through interactions among already existing components, EPT treats them as cases of natural emergence, rather than as a new Act.

A miracle, if one occurs, belongs to a different category: it is a special action of the Creator within an already established order, not the opening of a new range of what is attainable.

For example, the emergence of heritable life is treated as a working correspondence of the Fourth Act, whereas the subsequent evolutionary history of life—heredity, change, natural selection, increasing complexity, and diversification—belongs to the natural unfolding that follows.

A different case is subjective experience. In EPT, subjective experience and the subject of experience are not treated as a separate Act; they belong to the natural-emergent history of sentient life and neural organization. The Sixth Act concerns a different kind of threshold: the emergence of the personal subject and normative authorship.

More broadly, the model proposes to read the days of Creation not as seven identical twenty-four-hour intervals but as seven cycles of meaning corresponding to seven root-level thresholds: from the gift of being and the possibility of physical history, through the stability of the material order, terrestrial conditions, heritable life, and integrated living organization, to the personal subject and normative authorship, and finally to the completion of the initial establishment of foundations and to a morally and spiritually open wholeness within which personal relationship with the Creator continues.

This map is not presented as a scientific result. Scientific knowledge plays a different role here: it allows specific proposed correspondences between the structure of the text and the real history of the world to be tested.

And this is precisely where an obvious objection arises.

Is EPT simply a more elaborate version of a “God of the gaps”? Science has not yet explained a certain transition, so an Act is placed there; if a natural explanation later becomes available, the Act can simply be moved to the next unresolved problem.

There is a real issue behind this objection, because EPT does associate some Acts with transitions for which an important question remains open: was the relevant novelty naturally attainable from the possibilities available at the preceding level?

But scientific ignorance by itself neither determines the location of an Act nor counts as evidence for one. The proposed correspondences arise from our reading of the structure of Genesis and its comparison with the scientifically reconstructed history of the world; scientific gaps by themselves do not choose the locations of the Acts.

For that reason, each proposed correspondence must have a defined scope in advance: it must be clear what kind of novelty is being claimed and what, according to the hypothesis, becomes attainable for the first time.

If scientific reconstruction shows with sufficient confidence that the proposed novelty was already attainable from the possibilities available at the preceding level, that particular correspondence loses its force. The Act cannot then be moved to a different kind of novelty or to the next unresolved problem simply in order to preserve the map.

If a correspondence fails, it fails.

This does not mean that a scientific explanation has disproved the existence of the Creator or shown the Genesis text itself to be false. The conclusion is much narrower: what has turned out to be wrong is our particular proposed correspondence between that threshold of meaning in the text and a specific transition in the history of the world.

I am therefore especially interested in criticism of two points.

Does this architecture genuinely avoid a “God of the gaps,” or does it simply move the uncertainty from an unknown mechanism to an unknown boundary of natural attainability?

Does this reading preserve the substantive content of Genesis, or does it reshape the text too extensively to fit the modern scientific picture of the world?

I would especially welcome reasoned criticism focused on these two boundaries.

2

I am not a scientist but believe in Theistic Evolution.
It would seem to me that what you are explaining is the difference between a purely scientific view and “God of the Gaps”
My argument with scientists is not that they are completely wrong, but that the theory is incomplete. God of the Gaps implies an ex-nilo intervention, where as I have always believed it is more a case of mechanisms that science either cannot or will not see, such as some sort of bias, or coding tat funnels developments in a certain direction, or allows evolution to “beat the odds” and have an appropriate development that would seem nigh on impossible by just chance or random deviations That would mean the emergence of at least two, if not more changes simultaneously to “jump” the Gaps, rather than just create it from scratch.
I am not sure if this aligns with EPT or not, but it would appear to.

Richard

1 Like
3

Hi Richard, thank you for the thoughtful and friendly response, and for sharing your perspective.

I think there may indeed be some overlap, but I am not yet sure I understand exactly what you mean by “bias” or “coding” that channels development in a certain direction.

Do you mean some real feature or constraint built into the natural order itself, which makes certain evolutionary pathways more accessible than others? Or do you mean that God guides particular evolutionary changes toward a specific outcome?

I am also not quite sure what you mean by evolution being able to “beat the odds.” Do you mean that the relevant developments are naturally possible but extremely improbable, or something stronger than that?

Those distinctions matter quite a lot for EPT. I suspect that I agree with part of what you are suggesting, while another part may be somewhat different from what I mean. If you clarify those points, I can give you a much more precise answer.

4

Beware, my views are not popular on this forum.

Yes, If Evolution works by changing DNA there could be weaker links or maybe a limited number of options too the changes like an inbuilt base Code (to use computer symbology) Such things would be invisible to human diagnostics athough they might be measurable iif we could view enough data. The problem with Evolution is that most of it happened before we knew anything at all about DNA and the data is lost in the mists of time. (But don’t say that to a scientist, who thinks that fossils give us enough data to form definitive conclusions)

Again, this is controversial
Scientists will tell you that random does not necessarily mean unpredictable or chance and that probability is not a good litmus for the deviations that cause change. However, traditionally evolution relies on these changes to adapt and adjust, so that if a change is advantageous it stays, and if not it disappears again (until or unless it becomes advantageous somewhere else.

The so called “gaps” are not identified because Scientists think that any change is possible over a given length of time and no “gap” cannot be breached by deviation and natural selection. Irreducibilty is claimed as a fallacy, or that it does not mean it can’t be built slowly, only that it is coherent at the end. Claims of improbable or even impossible are not recognised or taken seriously.

However, once again, if there inbuilt guidelines that made change less random then it also changes any probablity figures.

Forgive the tentative response but eventually one of my nemeses will find this thread and…

You will probably see for yourself.

Richard

1 Like
5

Richard, thank you — that helps a lot. I think I understand your view much better now.

The possibility you describe — that the natural order itself may constrain the range of evolutionary changes, making some pathways more accessible than others — would not conflict with EPT. If such constraints are real features of the natural order, EPT would treat them as part of natural causation. They could still be very important features of how the created order is structured.

The distinction I would make is between improbability and attainability. A transition can be extremely improbable and still be naturally possible within the existing order. For EPT, that alone would not be a reason to place an Act there. The stronger question is whether the relevant kind of novelty was naturally attainable from the possibilities already available before that threshold.

So I think there is a real point of overlap between what you are suggesting and EPT, although the Act/phase distinction is doing somewhat different work. If you are interested, I have set out the fuller version of EPT here: Evolutionary-Phase Theism

And I’ll keep your warning about the thread in mind — I suspect I’ll find out soon enough. :slightly_smiling_face:

6

To me this is like asking if botany can be reconciled with Joyce Kilmer’s poem Trees.

3 Likes
7

The warning of a “God of the gaps” originates from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s letters : " Wie falsch es ist, Gott als Lückenbüßer für die Unvollkommenheit unseres Wissens zu gebrauchen. Wenn tatsächlich die Grenzen des Wissens weiter und weiter zurückgedrängt werden (und das muß der Fall sein), dann wird Gott mit ihnen zurückgedrängt und ist daher ständig auf dem Rückzug. Wir sollen Gott in dem finden, was wir wissen, nicht in dem, was wir nicht wissen.", reminding us to find God in that what we understand to structure reality and not in what we do not understand. It is interesting that this is exactly how atheist claim Christians to see their God in the things that is outside of our understanding, and the common phrase used by Christians, that God is “beyond our understanding” facilitates this critique. The mistake is to think that natural laws exclude God because we understand how they work - one cant be more stupid but that is how atheist logic works. If God transcends nature a Venn diagram would show God and Nature being a part of him. If I understand it it cant have anything to do with God :slight_smile: as God is in that what is beyond our understanding :slight_smile:

Now any serious Christian scientist thinks that we understand things because of God as we see him as the source of order and we do science to understand his creation better as in the two books concept https://biologos.org/articles/the-church-fathers-and-two-books-theology. And this is how as a scientist I look at Genesis, as an way to describe the origin of our life on earth in a poetic language that allows even people who could not read and write to form a meaningful relationship with reality but with a truth included that allows a learned reader to understand the deeper meaning of the text. I remember how people ridiculed Genesis for describing plants to arise before the sun and the moon governed the day and night as if the old primitive goat herders were so stupid and clueless. It was only when I understood that the plant life was necessary to clear the atmosphere to make them visible as before that the atmosphere was acting as a diffusor and you might have experiences more of less dim light as shown in the image below for a simple illustration

IMG_0054
IMG_00541280×1189 157 KB

A LASER shining through a milky medium surrounding the mock planet in a wine glass to give an idea of the diffuse light distribution, illustrating the lack of “DAY and NIGHT” in a diffusing atmosphere.

Similar to describe the gaining of consciousness as God breathing life into the human is a good reference to human experience, particularly to first aiders who do experience the return of spontaneous respiration following prolonged resuscitation, but also resembling the picture of a baby taking its first breath.

Problems arise when people expect Genesis to read like modern scientific literature, demanding explanations that only emerged thousands of years later. Its poetic language is timeless, not technical. The real tension lies between two extremes: taking it literally and rejecting science — often encouraged by those who profit from sowing distrust — or dismissing its divine wisdom altogether in the name of secular rationalism.

Brutally put, poetry speaks to those who can still feel as well as think. It reaches the illiterate but eludes the emotionally numb — those so bound to a materialist worldview (not in the sense of consumerism, but of metaphysical reductionism) that they have acquired, metaphorically, a heart of stone.

The most common misreading of Genesis is to imagine an omniscient God asking Adam and Eve for their physical location — “Where are you?” — as though He needed a geolocation update. In truth, the question is an invitation to self-reflection, a call to moral awareness. Likewise, when God says, “If you eat from that tree, you will surely die,” He is not threatening punishment but explaining the logical consequence of becoming a temporal being — of defining oneself by one’s own moral authority within a finite body rather than living in God’s eternal existence. The tragedy is not divine retribution, but the existential cost of autonomy.

1 Like
8

St. Roymond, fair analogy — and a good poem. :slightly_smiling_face: Let me give you a small challenge in return: try explaining the beginning of physical reality to someone who has neither modern physics vocabulary nor the conceptual framework behind it, using only images and distinctions available to ordinary human experience. You don’t even have to post the result if you don’t want to. Then compare what you came up with to Genesis 1, and we can see whether this really is just botany versus Trees.

9

Gerhard, thank you. The Bonhoeffer passage is very close to one of the main concerns behind EPT: understanding more about the natural order should not push the Creator further away. If anything, an intelligible natural order is itself part of what needs to be understood as creation.

I was particularly interested in your example about vegetation, the atmosphere, and the later visibility of the sun and moon. Whether that specific reconstruction is correct is a separate question, but the kind of move you are making is very close to one of the questions I am trying to explore: can a poetic, pretechnical text preserve a real relation to physical history without functioning as scientific description? Later, however, you read God’s “Where are you?” not as a question about their physical location, but as an invitation to moral self-reflection. I would be very interested in what principle you use to decide when an image in Genesis should be related to physical history and when its primary meaning lies on another level.

10

So you are ignoring the second version of the creation story not based on 7 days?

1 Like
11

Bill, if by the “second version” you mean the Eden narrative in Genesis 2, then no — I am not ignoring it. In my reading, it is essentially a closer and more detailed unfolding of the human part of the sixth day. If you see a specific tension between that reading and the text, I’d be interested to hear where you see it.

12

A nice harmonizing interpretation which fails on Genesis 2:19, unless you fudge the English translation from the Hebrew to “had formed”.

Just the major points:

  • God creates by command vs forming and breathing
  • Man and woman were created together vs man first and woman last
  • Theme is different
  • Ending on resting vs man and woman in the garden
2 Likes
13

Bill, those are real differences between the two passages. But I should clarify what I meant by calling Genesis 2 a more detailed unfolding of the human part of the sixth day. I do not mean that Genesis 2 is a second chronological transcript of Day 6. I read it as a shift in narrative register: Genesis 1 gives the broad creation structure, while Genesis 2 turns to the human story in a different mode of presentation. On that reading, differences in sequence, theme, form, and ending do not have to be harmonized into a single chronological account; they are compatible with a change of focus and mode. That is why I do not take the differences in the depiction of human creation — command versus forming and breathing, or the different presentation of man and woman — as sufficient by themselves to rule out reading the two chapters together in this way.

Genesis 2:19 is the more specific textual issue. I do not think “had formed” can fairly be dismissed as simply fudging the Hebrew. The usual narrative force of the Hebrew verb form does favor “formed,” but there is both grammatical argument and traditional precedent for reading it as referring to an earlier action. At the same time, my reading of the relationship between the two chapters does not require every element in Genesis 2 to reproduce the chronological sequence of Genesis 1. I am not claiming that the two chapters can only be related in this way; I am proposing this as one coherent way of reading them together.

14

Including the creation of man at woman at the same time.

And this time woman is only created when man couldn’t find a suitable mate among the animals God had created. Genesis 2 is a very different telling of creation.

Which is where you should stop as that is the way the word is used in other places in Genesis.

Only by those trying to harmonize the two accounts to support a univocal reading of the text.

Given Genesis 2 has traditionally been assigned an earlier date than Genesis, 1 you need to address why you would chose the later version of the creation story to harmonize with science. Other than it is just easier to do it with Genesis 1.

2 Likes
15

Bill, what in the text supports the claim that they were created at the same time?

Bill, what is so “criminal” about trying to harmonize the two accounts, and what alternative are you proposing?

Within EPT, Genesis 2 is part of the proposed reading and is read in a different narrative register, focused on the human story.

16

I wouldn’t come up with anything remotely resembling Genesis 1, as I don’t write that kind (kinds, actually; it’s at least two genres at once) of literature. I’ve actually done the exercise in English, Latin, and Spanish.

The opening Creation account is two types of ancient literature at once while using poetic imagery and (to an extent) structure. As such, it is definitely in the category of Trees.

17

Neither one is meant as history, so harmonizing is a rather pointless endeavor. It also requires setting aside the actual points of the two stories in favor of some invented version.
Take them as the two different stories that they are, and ask what the lessons are, using their original context.

1 Like
18

St. Roymond, I think our disagreement begins with how we understand Genesis. I read it as divine Revelation expressed through human language, imagery, and literary forms available to its recipients. That does not make it a physics textbook, but literary form by itself does not settle whether the text refers substantively to the real created order.

So let me reverse the experiment by taking Genesis 1:1–5 and trying to read it through the vocabulary and conceptual framework of modern physics and cosmology. I read “the heavens and the earth” as a merism for the universe as a whole. Within this conceptual recasting, I use “earth” not for the planet Earth but for the matter content of the universe, while “the heavens” stand for the rest of the physical whole. I read the “waters” as an image of an undifferentiated high-energy medium, something like a plasma state in modern physical terms. At the physical level, I read “light” through the concept of the photon. I am not claiming that this is the only correct reading; I am offering it as a conceptually coherent possibility for testing whether the literary form of the text, together with the claim that it is “not meant as history,” is enough to rule out substantive reference to physical reality.

“In the beginning God created the universe. The universe was formless and empty; darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over an undifferentiated high-energy medium. And God said, ‘Let there be the photon,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good and separated the light from the darkness. And there was evening, and there was morning: the first day.”

The experiment concerns conceptual correspondence rather than a cosmological timeline. Human language places statements one after another, but that does not mean that the underlying physical reality unfolded in exactly that verbal sequence, or that Genesis gives us the mechanism. Changing the conceptual vocabulary does not by itself destroy the referent.

So when you say that harmonizing the two accounts requires setting aside their “actual points” in favor of an invented version, what exactly do you mean by their “actual points,” and on what basis do you take that to be the meaning of the texts themselves rather than your interpretation of them?

19

Really?

On day 6 God created humans. No mention of the animals.

Nothing “criminal” about it. You just have to realize that it is your commitment to an existing dogma that is driving this interpretation, not simply taking the text at face value. The alternative, as St.Roymond said is to take these as two different stories with two different meanings.

And if you can’t accept the text as written why should I take anything you say about the text as true?

If you ask AI it will give you a nice long list of the points that differ. I gave you a short list previously.

1 Like
20

Bill, I use translation assistance, so perhaps I am missing something in the English. Could you please point out where this quotation says “at the same time”? Could you highlight the words?