Genesis is history and can't be forced to fit with evolutionary theory

Faith & Science Conversation
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Jesus was often found of saying things like “have you not read…” and proceed to quote. So, I’ll quote some of him in answer to your statement, “in what way…” so we come to a conclusion that Jesus believed Genesis was not allegorical…

  1. Marriage, literal view
    “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female…Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” ([Matthew 19:4-5]

Did he just not understand science and evolution?

  1. Flood. Literal view
    “For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” ([Matthew 24:37-39]

Now, did he, Christ just not have a good grasp on sedimentary deposits and the difference between a local lake and global flood?

Now, to me, there is nothing here that is figurative in the Mind of Christ, and we could go on and on… as Christ in the old testament is from the beginning of the old to the end of the new (jn 1.)

The most striking ones to me, His testimony of Abraham, who rejoiced to see his day, Moses, who “he wrote of me”, and David of course who “called me Lord”…
Jn 5:46, Jn 5;39, et…
‘‘Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me; for he wrote of Me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?’’ ([Joh 5:46,47]
Jesus and the gospel stand on the viability of Gen.

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Welcome to the forum, Randy. Good to have your thoughts in the conversation.

I have read this narrative, so I can understand what Jesus is referring to. The fact that he asks if I’ve read it doesn’t in any way mean “this narrative is literal history.” I don’t understand how you make that logical jump. I don’t have to believe that Adam and Eve were historical individuals to accept as true that God ordained marriage or to believe any of the other theological implications of that passage.

Of course Jesus did not understand ancient earth and evolution. He was a first century Jew.

Who is to say he would not have employed the same teaching strategy even if he had? He is making a didactic point about coming judgment. You can make that point effectively using a reference to Noah, whether Noah is a historical or literary figure.

Okay, but that is just your opinion about what was going on in Jesus’ mind.

For the record, I personally think that Gen 1-11 is a different category than the rest of the book. I think Abraham and David are historical figures.

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And here we go. A major reason why millions of young folks have lost faith in just the past decade.

I’m quoting this because it bears repeating and I can’t give it more than one “like.”

YEC is engaged in the opposite of evangelism. Is there a word for that?

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Wrong, Christianity was founded on the teachings of the risen and alive Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus teachings go off the Old Testament and show that He is Lord and Messiah. Also a lot of the Early Church Father’s took Genesis at in some spiritual and allegorical way, even the ones who somewhat took it literal didn’t see it in the way and fashion of how modern YECism takes it today. The main concern for the Early Church Father’s was that God made a material universe and that it was good in order to combat Gnosticism which said a material universe was bad and the Greco-Roman mindset of some who saw the universe as eternal. While Genesis is somewhat a historical book, it isn’t a scientific book on geology and cosmology and biology. The only thing it talks about is God making humans in His Image and forming a relationship with those early humans but sin gets in the way and separates us from God and how it’s the start of God’s plan of salvation. Genesis 1-11 goes into the issue of the broken relationship between man and God, man and other fellow humans and man and nature.

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I would call it counter-evangelism. and yes, YEC sets up the mindset of compromise, “either the Bible or science” when in truth we an have both.

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There can be many beginnings, but Mark’s version of this saying is more specific, “from the beginning of creation” (10:6). So, how should we understand “creation”? Is creation an event that took six days? If so, the beginning of creation would be the first day, or at least surely not the last day of creation. But according to Genesis 1, it was only on the last day of creation that humans were made, male and female. Since that reading leads to Jesus saying something obviously wrong, perhaps we shouldn’t understand “creation” as referring to the entire creation event.

The context of both Matthew and Mark’s versions of this saying is divorce, a decidedly human activity. And Jesus is referring to what was made “male and female,” which is not rocks, bacteria, bees or dandelions. Jesus isn’t talking about all creation, he’s talking about humans. If we interpret this saying as speaking about human creation, it makes a lot of sense: our Creator made us male and female from our beginning. Science has no disagreement: there never was a time when humans existed without being male and female.

The trouble, perhaps, is that once the verse is interpreted in a way that doesn’t contradict Genesis, it also doesn’t contradict mainstream science. But should that really be a problem?

I don’t see anything about a global flood in that passage. If you think “swept them all away” could only mean a global flood, do you also think “destroyed all of them” in Luke 17:29 speaks of a global cataclysm? I think Luke’s parallel shows that Jesus had no problem using regional events to speak of what the day of his coming would be like.

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The Bible is a book. Evolution is reality. So the only question here, is what kind of book is the Bible? Fantasy? Comedy? Farce? I don’t think so! But that means that we don’t read it in the same way we do a comic book. It is a collection of many kinds of literature, including historical narrative, law, poetry, homily, prophecy, proverbs, apocalyptic, and letters. It is not history by any standard of modern historical scholarship. Nor is it a science text by any standard of modern scientific review.

So when the option arises to choose between the meaning of a particular portion, do we choose those which contradict reality like we do when we read a comic book? Or do we look for a more symbolic and metaphorical meaning of the text which tells us about something reality? For example, consider the following 4 passages.

  1. Genesis 3:1 "Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?”
  2. Genesis 4:14,17 “I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will slay me… Cain knew his wife and she conceived and bore Enoch.”
  3. Genesis 2:7 “then the Lord God formed man of the dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”
  4. Genesis 6:1-4 “When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.”

So the choice here is to make up things like sisters, incest, and butloads of children never spoken about in the Bible in order to make this contradict science, OR to see that some of these passages as a bit metaphorical in nature in order to agree with science.

  1. So is this really a talking snake or does the snake represent something else? Talking snakes belong to Walt Disney productions for children, like Robin Hood and not anything people are suppose to believe is real. Thus Christianity has long understood this “snake” to represent an angel referred to by the name “Lucifer” which fell from heaven to become our adversary “Satan.”
  2. So do we accept the scientific reality that the earth was filled with people for millions of years or do we bend over backwards trying to come up with excuses for why Cain was so afraid of all the people all over the earth which couldn’t possibly come from Adam and Eve? The fact is that science demonstrates conclusively that the earth was filled with people and people-like creatures for millions of years and so it makes perfect sense that Cain would be afraid of people out there who might kill him if he became a wanderer over the earth.
  3. So do we go with the Walt Disney comic book version of ancient necromancer creating golems of dust and bone, or do we go with something more informed by scientific discovery such as God creating mankind from the elements of the earth according to the laws of its nature and then giving them the inspiration (divine breath) which would make them human beings and His children?
  4. So do we go with the more common understanding of sons of God in the OT which refers to God’s chosen people or the very rare use for angels? The former then explains the wives of Cain and Seth without inserting sisters and incest into the text, while the latter helps prop up this anti-science interpretation of the Bible even if you have to insert the fantasy of angels having sex (contradicting the Bible elsewhere which says angels don’t even have a sex) with women and giving birth to fairy tale giants.

So the question becomes… just how far are we expected to bend over backwards to make the Bible disagree with the findings of science? And why? Why go to such trouble to oppose the results of honest scientific inquiry? Frankly I think this is about power, pure and simple. The religious establishment and Pharisees want to forbid science from asking certain questions so that they can dictate the answers to people which best serves their agenda to control the minds and thinking of those people.

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All the fossils are not in a single contemporaneous layer. For example, human fossils are not mixed with dinosaur fossils. While there were catastrophic Ice Age floods, none were global.

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I suggest this as an understanding of Genesis 2:

The story of the Garden of Eden is an Exodus story ( Genesis 2:4 – 3:24 ). It is the first Exodus story and the story that arches over and encompasses and undergirds the rest of the Bible. As an Exodus story, it is a story of God providing deliverance from bondage. The story tells about the ensuing roundabout journey into the freedom of the wilderness. It is in the wilderness where we have a continuous opportunity to discover God and to experience God and to learn how to be in relationship with God and through that relationship be resurrected and transformed into the here-and-now Kingdom of God.

The construction and activity of this magnificent chaotic universe guarantees the existence of free-willed sentient life. Without the power and opportunity to say “no”, free-will cannot exist. Within the Garden of Eden story; if Adam and Eve do not defy God, if they do not say “no” to the limitations imposed by God, they will not have free-will. The Garden of Eden will not be a utopia, it will become a zoo, the ultimate gilded cage – a life without freedom, a life without hope, a life without a future. Eden becomes a place of bondage.

Instead, by defying God, the Garden of Eden becomes an incubator and a proving ground. Being driven from the Garden of Eden into a stark wilderness is not a punishment – and it is not an Exile because we are never going back, should not go back, cannot go back. Our hope and our future is in front of us – toward wilderness and discovery and a journey with God.

The journey out of Eden is an Exodus. Like any Exodus, it is a roundabout journey away from bondage (and a place to which God never wants us to return and a place to which we should never want to return) into the freedom of the wilderness. Outside of Eden is where Adam and Eve and all the people of the Bible and all of us are to discover God. In the wilderness is where we learn how to be in relationship with God. Ultimately, how to be – here and now – a community of love and grace; of equality and inclusion; of justice as repair, rehabilitation, restoration, and hope for reconciliation; and of compassion as a personal virtue and a communal identity – how to be the Kingdom of God. The story of the Garden of Eden is not a story of failure, it is a story of success – for God and for us. It is not a story of condemnation, it is a story of affirmation. Free-will would be meaningless if God did not expect to be surprised by us.

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Ern, thanks for chiming in.

Surely ‘every word of God is tested’ (that is, proves true, see Proverbs 30:5), and as a pastor friend of mine once said, science will eventually catch up to where God’s word has been all along.

Mark

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The Bible has nothing to do with science. It ain’t no science book. It is a book on moral and spiritual truths based on the prophets of God from the Old Testament and from Jesus Christ and the apostles from the New Testament.

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I think the intent of that affirmation is that we can bank on the fact that God is ultimately faithful to his promises. It doesn’t necessarily mean that every proposition you can hypothetically derive from a Bible verse has a positive truth value. The mustard seed isn’t the smallest seed, after all. Our faith is supposed to be in God’s character and Christ’s work, not in the idea that the Bible can (or will eventually when we know more science) pass any fact checking test we throw at it.

Science will not “catch up to” nor has it “passed up” the Bible because they aren’t on even the same path and it isn’t a competition. Science and biblical interpretation are two different ways of arriving at different kinds of truth.

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I agree that Genesis and the Bible is historical, but confusion is caused when we confuse different kinds of history. Genesis is the history or story of God’s plan to save humanity from its sin. We also have natural history which is the history of the physical nature in different forms. You can also have histories of ideas and institutions.

Genesis is a special divine history so it should not be confused with science. On the other hand vv. 1-5 are a remarkable snapshot of the Big Bang. Certainly the Creation is an important part of both God plan and science.

Science is generally against history, but evolution has force it to take it seriously which is part of the4 reason evolution is so controversial. It goes against the ahistorical character of traditional science and philosophy.

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Who gets to decide which parts are literal history and which are figurative? No one questions that almost all of Revelation is figurative (except the Left Behind crowd) but mention that Genesis could be figurative and people lose their minds.

Job 38
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?

But yet in Genesis 1, the stars were created on the 4th day … AFTER the earth was created.

So which is it? Who is telling the truth? The author of Genesis (whoever that is) or God speaking in Job? The stars sang when the earth was created but the earth was created four days before the stars?

The problem with taking Genesis as history and saying that believing it is insanely accurate in its accounts of Creation or the Flood or the Tower of Babel sets you up to eventually become an atheist, an agnostic, or a deceived Christian who utilizes PMMD – the Perpetual Miracle Machine Defense. Once that pillar is shaken (and it will be shaken if not completely destroyed), it becomes an either/or proposition. For too many in the YEC/AiG crowd, Genesis [as real history] has become their god.

@Sealkin said it best in a reply to @Jay313 : “I would call it counter-evangelism. and yes, YEC sets up the mindset of compromise, “either the Bible or science” when in truth we can have both.”

If Genesis is history, do you really believe that the Chinese, the Japanese, the Aleutians, and the peoples inhabiting the Americas 5000-6000 years ago all came to Egypt for grain? The Bible says that all the people of the earth came to Joseph for grain … How did they know, in Japan, when there was a great famine, that there was grain in Egypt? At some point, we have to get real.

Much of Hebrew history in the Bible is rife with hyperbole and exaggeration. That doesn’t detract from the lessons it teaches nor does it detract from the majesty of God’s creation. It also doesn’t mean that Paul, Jesus, or the disciples were uninformed idiots going about peddling a pack of lies. What it DOES mean is that you have to study to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. What is the author trying to convey? What does this teach us about God? What can we learn about his character?

What’s so often forgotten is that all these stories were passed down for thousands of years before the Hebrew language even emerged, yet we’re supposed to take these stories as if they were a blow-by-blow commentary of HOW rather than an exposition on WHO, WHY, and WHAT … all finally written in Hebrew around 800BC.

I’d recommend John H Walton’s books as well as his teachings on YouTube.

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I will get back to you on this. Here, as I stated, “you shall know them by there fruits” solidify’s this… Evolution leads to the scriptures to be “allegory”… except where it isn’t against a theory. There is no Hebrew scholar to agree with that reading from talmud to Masonic, etc.

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You will know them by their fruits… To me very fitting to the allegation “have lost their faith”… Evolution produces distrust in the written manuscript we call Bible. If evolution can be inserted in a “gap”, then why not discard the rest of scripture. “nothing was made that was not made by him”. made, as in an evolutionary process?. Its obvious it is not solid enough.

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Exactly. Which is why we shouldn’t be putting our trust “in the Bible” in the first place. We are supposed to be putting our trust in Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and exalted. Evolution and the ancient earth don’t have anything to say about whether Jesus can take away sin and reconcile us to God. And the people who believe that, believe it because they have encountered God and experienced grace, not because a perfectly reliable document tells them so. If all you have to ground your faith is a reliable document, you don’t have very solid ground.

Evolution doesn’t have anything to do with the Bible. People who interpret Genesis in various figurative ways are doing so because of the interpretive method they use to address the text itself. All the OECs reject evolution, but take parts of Genesis figuratively because of its literary form and content.

And how is quoting a verse about spiritual fruit appropriate in the context of the question “Is evolution a good scientific theory?” Scientific theories cannot be filled with the Holy Spirit or produce fruit of righteousness, only people can. Are you saying that Christians who accept evolution don’t produce spiritual fruit?

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your decision to align with Gen 1-11 to be allegorical aligns nicely with Evolutionary prof’s of many of our current academics. “you shall know them by their fruits”… To me, this is the tree of knowledge God forbade… I also find that those who support Gen 1-11 as historical, God breathed as, stand up the firmest to defending the bible. An old prof was told me the bible speaks for itself. I just run out of words trying to find one that strikes the meaning needed… “and God saw that it was good”, was not good enough, natural processes needed to finish it up

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would not any subject associated with gen1-11 be allegorical, even the sin of Adam… yet, we understand what it is he did, what Cain did, and is repeated in the NT, not as allegorical, but real figures…

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That’s an interesting allegorical take on the tree of knowledge. Clever irony!

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