How can Genesis be interpreted to agree with Theistic Evolution?

Faith & Science Conversation
29

Greetings @Noza

There is, it seems, a number of different interpretations of Theistic Evolution. As for myself, I argue that, while the biblical text is pretty clear that God is continuously involved in His ongoing creation, what to call it is not (to me at least). Here, for example, are three claims the [inspired] author asserts in the text that are germain to your question.

First, the author uses the Hebrew word normally translated as ‘day’ in a spatial sense, namely as a lighted region of space, not the passage of time (“and God called out to the light, ‘Day’ and to the dark He called out ‘Night’” - Genesis 1:5). This is how the author sought to represent God as outside of time and over space. This makes sense textually AND historically for those who believe (as I do) that Genesis 1 is a radical polemic against the existing pagan creation narratives (the surrounding pagan theologies described their gods as in and of the world – subject to the time and fate).

Second, He judges the outcomes of His creative work for 6 of the 7 days of creation. The author here claims that the light created by God (Genesis 1:3) was not certain to meet God’s requirements. It did and He moved onto the second day. This uncertainty is manifest in verses 1:11-12 in which what God wanted (trees of fruit making fruit) and what was produced (trees making fruit) didn’t match. Notwithstanding the failure, God accepted the outcome as ‘good’. The main point here is that this lines up perfectly well with the idea that God created an indeterminate universe - a basic prerequisite for evolution (and other scientific phenomena). Thus, its very indeterminacy must have been pleasing to God. By the way, this also argues against the Deists who posit a watchmaker God. An indeterminate universe cannot be left alone.

Third, the seventh day has not yet ended and God has not yet pronounced His judgment. Ergo, God is not through with us yet.

Finally, whether the first creation story is a poem is often used to argue that the Genesis story is not to be taken as a description of material creation. In my own view, Genesis 1 surely contains poetic elements (along with its high prose and majestic cadence), but it also contains a literary device very common in ANE metaphorical literature – a numerology of 7 (see Numerology and The Number 7). ANE authors (of which our inspired author was one) when writing metaphorical narratives, took great pains to choose words for the numeric symbolism over and above their literal meaning. Thus, by its high prose, its majestic cadence, its poetic elements, and the deep symbolism of God’s perfective actions (the number 7), I argue that the story is not to be taken as a natural history, but as a beautiful statement about God’s purpose in making mankind and HIs continued concern (worry?) about our conduct.

Blessings,

Michael

30

Maybe, I don’t know. But I’m not sure that removes the problem. [quote=“BradKramer, post:27, topic:5065”]
So why can’t we affirm the universal brokenness of human beings without needing to identify the precise moment when they became broken?
[/quote]
My problem is not pinpointing the precise moment of the Fall. My problem is with the notion that there is such a moment. Did something really break? Evolution rolls onward and then at some unknown point God hits the stop watch. Game on. From now on you’re all doomed for being the way you are. Are we supposed to be some other way? I’m not sure why we’d need a savior for being this way.

31

Hi Mervin, I don’t think I share your sentiment that we’ve fallen to a lower place, whether suddenly or gradually. No doubt people do horrible things, but on balance, I think we are rising. I definitely wouldn’t want to go back to Old Testament times! Overall, we’re less tribal, women are treated better, gay people are treated better, animals are treated better. The list could go on. We have a long way to go, but our general sense of morality grows more enlightened. I hope I don’t derail the conversation, steering into morality, culture, etc. but I just don’t see this concept of brokenness or fallenness as an easy fit.

Also, if you’re asserting that a historical Adam, Eve, and Fall is a modern interpretation, I’d have to disagree.

1 Like
32

For all sin and come short of the glory of God. All mortal beings are imperfect. All nature is imperfect, or unable to match the glory of the Divine.

God offers Jesus to bridge the gap from mortal imperfection to the realm of the Divine.

It’s really not that complicated.

Think of it this way … if humans were capable of attaining the divine … why do we all have to shed our LIVES to await the resurrection?

33

I don’t put my view forward as a conjecture that we were less fallen a mere few centuries (or couple of milleniea) ago than we are now. Whatever path to fallenness [I think] we took, … and regardless of how sudden or not sudden it was … I think all of recorded history available to us is pretty much from the bottom of that abyss. Which is why my initial response to your optimism for how we are now makes me want to ask what planet you live on (and how can I move there)? I mean – I do see the things you point to as exhibits … that none of us wants to live a hundred or two hundred years ago. But that is mainly because of material lifestyle changes that make life easier now, --but (and this is important): only for a minority of us in the world. In fact that easier life is and has been mostly at the expense of others (slavery not too long ago) … and now on the exploitation of our children’s energy resources (and yes – still slavery now). How our moral fibers compare with those of our forebears as they fought through unimaginable (to us) circumstances is something that I consider to be (at best) an untested proposition. Though in these seasons here in the U.S. when so many even just have politically injected fears of things that might happen to them --and now seeing how they respond by the candidates and lifestyles they choose (with personal weapons industries laughing all the way to the bank) I must say, so far it isn’t looking too good for your optimistic thesis; but I dearly hope you are right and that I’m badly mistaken.

My reference to a “modern interpretation” was not meant to imply that an assumed historicity of Adam and Eve is exclusively new – just that the enlightenment impetus to make the story be primarily about their mere historicity is what is new.

34

In anwser to OP’s Question on how to “read Genesis”. Read it as a revelation that was given as visions.

  1. Take the Spirit of God hovering over the surface of the waters to refer to the POV (Point of View = “Sea Level”) for the subsequent narrative. The universe is created in the 1:1. The rest deals with our solar system.

  2. Take the story as explaining the origins of modern “kinds” of organisms (plants, fish, birds (remeber that dinosaurs=birds!), mammals, humans) in the order the first of their kinds evolved (the order is exactly correct).

  3. Similarly, take the story as giving the origins of the stars, sun, moon, and light/dark AS they appear to the POV observer on “the surface of the waters”. “Let there be light” is solar ignition. But note that because of perpetual overcast (like Venus today) on the early earth, the sun and moon do not become visible to the observer until AFTER the plants have removed large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.

  4. Read the “days” as poetic/organizational divisions and not literal 24 hour earth-days.

  5. Read the “second” creation story in chapter 2 as confirmation that humans were the end-goal of evolution. Consider that when abiogenisis and evolution are taken into account, science confirms that man was created “from dust”. (Also, perhaps Eve coming from Adam’s rib could be a reference to inbreeding among the first humans, in addition to it’s symbolic significance. Consider that the final mutation granting humanity would result in only one “first” human, who would have to breed with his mother’s kind to produce a human daughter which he could then marry. Admittedly I’m really reaching for this last point.)

  6. Realize that the fact that EVERY SINGLE event is in EXACTLY the right scientifically correct order when read with the above simple assumptions is a powerful witness to the truth of the bible, and that as a OEC you are essentially rejecting this witness and shooting yourself in foot.

2 Likes
35

@pacificmaelstrom But none of this is even close to what the Genesis account meant to the original recipients of the revelation. Does that not matter at all to your exegesis?

36

On the contrary I would expect that the word of God would have meaning for all times. Did God not know that this issue would arise? Is the correct ordering an accident? Surely he wrote for us as well as the ancients.
Though written in terms of ancient ideas, I find that the description is in uncanny harmony with modern science.
Why would I try to explain away the discrepancies by appealing to a need to understand the text in its ancient context when there are no discrepancies to explain away.

1 Like
37

@pacificmaelstrom

What I see is cherry picking - - in an attempt to make an erroneous creation story seem brilliant.

But in the Creation story we have light and dark existing for four days … BEFORE the creation of the sun.
And rather than spell out that the earth orbits the sun … the Genesis writer knows NOTHING about orbits.

The Earth just sat out in space, WITH DAYS AND NIGHTS, until the sun was finally placed in the sky.

Wrong.

1 Like
38

I addressed that in point 3.
Assuming a consistent POV is not cherry picking, but rather exactly consistant with what one would expect of a visual revelation.
So as it turns out, the objection you raise becomes a major strength. Who would have guessed that the sun and moon could not be seen from the earth’s surface until after the first plants had fixed carbon out of the atmosphere? And yet there it is in Genesis.

39

@pacificmaelstrom,

My dear Jamie, I think you are making this up as you go along.

If readers struggle with REAL science… how are we going to get anyone to accept your suppositions and speculations?

40

Hi Jamie,

I’m glad you’ve found a way to read this that strengthens your faith. I don’t have any interest in trying to tear that down. But you’ve put this out there and it raises some interesting questions for me, so for discussion’s sake I thought I’d bat them around with you a bit.

What do you make of the fact that the original author had different biological categories than we do today? The original author seems to make links between a kind of life and the space it inhabits. Notice the structure…

Day 1: light.
Day 2: sky / water.
Day 3: land.

Day 4: sun / moon / stars.
Day 5: birds / fish.
Day 6: animals / humans.

[In my original version of this post, 1/2/3 were in the left column & 4/5/6 were in the right column, but the formatting didn’t work. You’ll have to imagine it.]

The idea is this: First three days, set up the space. Next three days, fill it with life, each in its respective order following the first three days.

As such, the Hebrew word for “birds,” in the right context, can just as well be used for insects, as in Leviticus 11:13-23.

Similarly, on the day when the earth is populated, we have not only livestock and mammals but also “creeping animals,” which seems like it could refer to, I dunno, your guess is as good as mine, but land insects? lizards? snails? Hard to imagine it means anything mammalian. Poke around in online Bible dictionaries like I just did and you’ll find lots of interesting guesses but, interestingly, they don’t all neatly fit into a single Linnean taxonomic group. Rather, they follow an ancient Hebrew ethnozoological category, which had more to do with the “creeping-ness” of the thing, whatever that meant to them, rather than some monophyletic cladogram from a high-school biology textbook.

My point being, if you look at Genesis, you see a neat progression: fill the seas and the skies with life (all kinds of life, including birds and flying insects!); then, after that, fill the land with life (all kinds of life, including mammals, reptiles and creepy-crawly insects!).

But if you look at evolution, you see multiple colonizations of aquatic animal life onto land (first various invertebrates, later vertebrates) and multiple colonizations of land animal life into the air (first invertebrates, later amphibians, later avian dinosaurs, later mammals). These colonizations are interleaved, so by the time amphibians came along, insects were already flying in the air, but bats weren’t flying around until long after other land vertebrates. You even see “backtracking” where land animals return to the sea (ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, cetaceans, pinnipeds, platypuses, penguins, etc., to varying degrees). Critically, what you don’t see is animal life going straight from sea to sky, bypassing the land. What you do see is a stunningly diverse tapestry of adaptations to different niches that doesn’t follow a neat linear narrative of sea > sky > land.

Don’t these seem like two completely different accounts of the development of life on earth to you? Don’t they seem to use completely different sets of categories for talking about the natural world? Why are we trying to force these to align? It doesn’t make sense to me, but I’m trying to understand.

42

I think you are having trouble coming up with substantial criticism.

43

No they dont seem completely different. It seems like as correct an account as could be conveyed simply through ancient terms. We aren’t forcing them to align, they seem to align pretty easily.

I understand the evolutionary order you describe, in Point 2 I note that first origin of the most important “kinds” is the point.

By all means “tear it down”. I could be wrong. This is not what my faith is based on.

And aren’t mice creeping animals?

1 Like
44

Well, if I were to dumb down evolution for, say, a kids’ book, I would start with filling the seas, then filling the land, then filling the air. That’s the order evolution actually took. There’s no reason whatsoever that the author wouldn’t have gone that direction if he was trying merely to simplify an accurate description of the evolutionary development of life for an ancient audience.

That’s not what he was trying to do.

2 Likes
45

@pacificmaelstrom

How can you expect specific criticism when no specific evidence is offered?

1 Like
46

You are basing this on the filling the spaces idea. Thus you already have an interpretation, and your interpretation leads you to conclude Genesis does not reflect the scientific reality. It is your interpretation that does not reflect the scientific reality, and you are extending that to the text itself as if you have correct/complete interpretation. However that was not the purpose of this thread as I understood it. It is entirely possible that there were multiple purposes intended and explaining evoloution was not very high on the list. The ordering is correct nonetheless.

1 Like
48

I didn’t come up with the notion of filling; the text did, in verses 22 and 28. The text has a structure that is hard to miss, with obvious parallels between days 1 and 4, 2 and 5, 3 and 6. My goal is to understand what the text is actually intending to say. I have the gall to believe that when we figure out what it is actually intending to say to its original audience, and we look at evolutionary theory, the two will not conflict. That is entirely consonant with the purpose of this thread.

And now I’m going to hit “Reply” before you edit your post again. :smiley:

1 Like
49

Well I hope you succeed. Yeah I figure editing is better than adding extra posts.

1 Like
50

Yes there’s a lot of cruelty, love, stupidity, laughter, bad luck, beauty, etc in the world; it’s a complicated picture, but I still think the trajectory is generally favorable. But whatever, I don’t think there was ever anything resembling a Fall, and Christian theology was built upon the historicity of Adam, Eve, and the Fall.

1 Like