How can Genesis be interpreted to agree with Theistic Evolution?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Part of what gives me pause here is the use of the word ‘good’ in Genesis 1, particularly in Genesis 1:31 where ‘God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.’ This is understood to be perfect and without any defect in any way. This would of necessity require a Fall to mar that goodness and to create the need for redemption through the Gospel and eventually a new heavens and a new earth. Romans 8:18-21 and context speak specifically of this, namely, that the creation was subjected to futility due to Adam’s sin, yet this was part of God’s original plan to bring about redemption and restoration and to show the majesty of His character in a way that no other plan could (see Ephesians 2).

The plain meaning of the redemptive flow of history seems impossible to reconcile with the theistic evolution view. Under that view, at what point would one say that the creation was good, and at what point would one say that it fell? Beyond that, how would one be able to define that restoration to that original goodness?

“Let all the earth fear the LORD; Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.” (Psalms 33:8-9, NASB)

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I still feel like you’re saying that the Fall and original sin is a new position. This is orthodoxy through the centuries.

I’m not sure how you can talk about the “reality” of our fallen state while dismissing its historicity. If it didn’t happen, I don’t think it is reality.

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Actually, fwiw original sin was not well established pre-Augustine, and is still not well-established in the Orthodox (capital-O) churches today.

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That we are fallen is nothing new. How (and how fast, and how important the historicities of these details are) is necessarily a new thing because it is a reactionary position to something that didn’t exist until recent centuries: the notion that the earth and life in it is ancient far beyond previous assumptions. There had never been a reason to suspect this, and thus it wasn’t even on their radar.

Regarding the reality of our fallen state; so are you implying that before something can be a reality, its historicity must be completely and correctly apprehended according to modern historical-analysis standards? On that logic, if, say, the American civil war and the reasons for it had gotten a bit murky … maybe historians are even just wrong about some things, would the discovery of that error force us to conclude that the civil war never happened? Or perhaps a better example, your and my ability to read this English prose is obviously beyond dispute. But I seriously doubt anybody will ever be able to point to the single day in their history before which they could not read, and after which they could. So if somebody had a narrative about how they became a reader, but then we came to doubt their narrative (or our understandings of their narrative, rather) … would our skepticism about the details of how they learned to read call into question their present ability to read? Not at all! So too, the reality of our sinful state does not rise or fall on this issue.

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There are ways of ways that evolutionary creationism/theistic evolution that can include a Fall. Check out this table link and go to Sin/Sinning and Compatibility with Paul’s statements on Adam.

@Noza I suspect you may be somewhat overwhelmed by this discussion. Two suggestions: 1. Check on the link above and the website it is part of, and 2. Try using Evolutionary Creationism (vs Theistic Evolution) Interpretation of Genesis instead. Evolutionary Creationism is the term that is more widely used these days. Biologos is the leading site for that and has an overwhelming amount of material on Genesis. Neither it or my linked site above has one single view of what went on, because that is never detailed out in scripture, but there are 4 or 5 major ‘plausible scenarios.’ It shouldn’t surprise us that from a God who is so far above us. There could not be any explanation that would be understandable from ancient times through modern times. He never gave us natural world/scientific explanations throughout scripture. I think that he designed discoverable natural laws that can be more thoroughly revealed as time goes by.

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@freddymagnanimo,

The Fall was an image crafted by a Greek theologian! In my profile, I have this exact quote:

“The phrase “The Fall” was coined by a Greek church father named Methodius of Olympus - - sometime in the 300’s CE.”

In the book “The Story of Original Sin” by John Toews (2013), we read:

“. . . the term “the fall” was first used with certainty . . . by the Greek church father Methodius of Olympus, late third or early fourth century (d. 311), as a reaction to Origen’s [typo corrected!] teaching of a pre-natal fall in the transcendent world. . . . . Why is it profoundly significant that this much later Christian and Greek “fall” construal is not stated or even suggested in the [Hebrew] text? Because that means the story of salvation history, which is a fairly normative interpretive framework for a Christian reading the whole Bible does not begin with “the fall.” Rather, it begins with broken relationships and exile, which is a very Jewish way of reading the text. And lest we forget, it was Jewish people who wrote this text originally for Jewish people, probably for Jewish people living in exile trying to understand the profound tragedy of the destruction . . . “ of their paradise on earth.

Footnote 29 “. . . the word used by Methodius and the later Latin Fathers was ‘Lapsus’ not the ‘Casus’ of IV Ezra. The Latin translation of the 9th century would appear to reflect the dominant understanding which ‘fall’ language achieved in the Western Church. . . .”
[END OF CLIPS]

The Fall is hardly the concept that the Hebrew intentionally transmitted; for the Hebrew it was an EXILE . . . not a Fall. Women do not have birth pains because her physiology responded to her moral violation; women suffer this because God chose this punishment. Men do not become farmers because their brains instantly became agricultural at the moral violation; men are decreed to work by the sweat of their brow as a PUNISHMENT… not because of their FALLEN nature.

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Yeah, my understanding is that the orthodox view of the Orthodox is that we inherited the propensity to sin, but not Adam’s guilt. I could be wrong though.

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We might be talking past each other a bit. So, I guess you’re not dismissing the historicity of the Fall. You’d say it happened; we just don’t know when or how it happened.

Yes, we know the Civil War happened. We know that we learned how to read and write sometime in the past. But it’s not at all clear that we have fallen. The fact that humanity does bad things is not the same as being in a fallen state.

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Thank you! This chart is great. I’m currently reading Denis Alexander’s Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose, which seems to layout similar scenarios.Are you, or anybody else, familiar with the ““Progressive” responsibility, just as children progress as they grow up” model from this chart? Christianity doesn’t seem to leave much room for gradualism. You either have the image of God or not. You’re either going to heaven or hell. I’m not sure how progressively gaining a spiritual soul/deserving damnation plays with this paradigm.

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Thanks for the book recommendation. I will check that out. I definitely agree that Genesis 3 has been misused by Christianity (but Paul didn’t make it very easy on subsequent generations). I am curious though, does the book by Toews claim that women suffer pain in childbirth as a punishment, or are you saying this? This still sounds like a serious event, whether we call it a Fall or an Exile.

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@freddymagnanimo,

I do not know who else may have made the same analysis.

For Generations, Christians have described the Fall as if it was now IMPOSSIBLE for Adam and Eve to remain in Eve. And so it is a Fall.

But Genesis does not describe it this way. God evicts them from Eden … because he does not want Adam and Eve to become GODS!

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I have presented a “short” version of my ideas on how the Bible and science tell the same story.

It is based on a poetic format. I am trying to not distort the biblical text as stated in the article Christy provided. Sadly I got very little help when I posted. I did get a lot of “Don’t even try.”

I disagree with this statement “If God’s purposes in Genesis 1 did not include teaching scientific facts to the Israelites, then we should not look here for scientific information about the age or development of the world.” It starts with a faulty assumption, not a fact, but treats it like a fact. Genesis 1 taught the Israelites that the cosmology of their neighbors was false. If God inspired this text, then it should should match nature, its main subject, even if 4000+ years have passed without human understanding. Too many people have accepted that science and theology are not compatible.

I believe Christology is distorted by how we interpret the Genesis texts. Most traditional readings start with a perfect creation followed by a world no longer perfect. Perfection and the loss of perfection are not in the texts. Where God speaks to Eve and Adam, we title the passages with the word curse. God cursed the serpent but the text does not say He curse the people, ground yes, people no. These beliefs distort the relationship God has with humanity.

In most Christologies, the “fall” (concept not in the Bible) dictates the reason Jesus came to redeem people from sin, so the theologies falls apart with a non-historical reading. I believe Jesus had to die because of Genesis 15, not the garden story. The fruit and the humans can be historical or not. Either way, the story holds details that can be supported by science. Death and sin are part of God’s creation. God judges the heart, not our individual missteps. God says that even sin cannot stop His love for us.

I don’t see the story saying there is a break or a fall. As in evolution, it is a point of divergence from what was before. A point where humans become aware of evil. God does not condemn for stupid wrongs as long as we learn to take responsibility and repent of those wrongs.

It is in the correct scientific order if read as circular poetry.

Read my above link

What we understand and what it actually means are probably two very different things.

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Thanks! In the links below the table, there is more detailed information from the people who seem (to me) to have best articulated them, including on the progressive model, aka The Retelling Model.

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So … here is the SUPPOSED FALL:

Gen 3:19+
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.

Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden . . .

. . . and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."

OBSERVATIONS:

  1. God describes Adam and Eve as “becoming as Gods” << NOT the Fall.

  2. God says that eating from the Tree of Life will make them immortal << NOT the Fall.

  3. God places a flaming sword to keep the way of the Tree of Life - - because otherwise, Adam and Eve will get back into the Garden! <<< NOT The Fall.

So, where, exactly is this FALL? A FALL implies that they have degenerated and are not able to enjoy life as they once could. But this is purely situational… not existential. If God did not evict them from Eden, they would CERTAINLY enjoy being immortal!

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I agree. My view is almost the same as yours. Also, to make sense of Genesis 2, go to post 163 in topic What are the arguments against Theistic Evolution? What specific scriptures do you think contradict Theistic Evolution?

There is a natural break between Genesis 2:4 and Genesis 2:5. In Genesis 2:5 and throughout the story of Eden, we translate Eritz as land, and we thereby resolve the apparent contradictions between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. Eden is a land, Eden is not the world. Eden is local, not global. This resolves the following apparent contradictions:

Genesis 2 has creation in a different order from that in Genesis 1. Genesis 1 has plants, then fish (and dinosaurs and birds) created before mammals, and then last, man. Genesis 2 has Adam created first, then trees and last, animals. If Genesis 1 is the story of the creation of the earth and life on earth, but Genesis 2 is the story special creation in a garden, then there is no contradiction. God created the earth and people, and then later God created Eden’s garden and Adam.

Local Eden answers the question of where Cain’s wife came from. She came from outside the Garden.

Local Eden answers the question of who Cain was building his city for. He was building it for some of the people who lived outside of the garden.

Local Eden answers the question of how the genealogies can indicate Adam lived 6 to 10 thousand years ago, but people have been around for 100,000 years.

Local Eden answers the Problem Of Pain and eliminates the need for the false doctrine of Original Sin. I have written about this in other places on the Forum. In a nutshell:
Only God is perfect.
We are not God.
Therefore we are not perfect and will inevitably sin.
Adam was not perfect, because he was not God, but Adam was blameless because he did not know the difference between good and evil.
Adam chose to gain the knowledge of good and evil.
When Adam gained the knowledge of good and evil he became culpable for his actions and was no longer blameless.
All humans, given the choice would have made the same choice as Adam.
All humans, because we desire to know the difference between right and wrong and make our own decisions, we require something to make decisions about.
The evil in the world is composed of challenges to overcome or be overcome by, alternatives to choose from, and people who choose to do evil and these things are all necessary consequences of or prerequisites for moral freedom of choice.
God is not evil for creating people he knew would sin and a world with evil in it; because the evil in the world is made necessary by our own desire for the knowledge of good and evil.
I call that the doctrine of inevitable sin.

Local Eden makes a nice foreshadowing of a local flood. A local flood fits with the geological column and the distribution of fossils from complex to simple as we move downward through the column.

The fact that Eden and the Flood were local fits more correctly with the actual text of the bible.

@Noza

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continuing from that same older post:

I make five assumptions (at least). The first is that if you go outside in a pouring rain at twilight, the sky won’t look much like a dome, until the rain stops, at which time it will appear that the sky has been partitioned by a firmament (try it for yourself, I’ll hold the umbrella). The second assumption is that the earth’s atmosphere was overcast until the Great Oxidation Event and therefore, to an observer on the earth, the sun, moon and stars would not be visible until such an event (this is why it took so long for Galileo to catch on in London, they had never seen the sun). Third is that the 7 “days” described in Genesis 1 are actually 7 separate visions, given by God, to some nameless prophet, each of which emphasized or showed a different part of the development of our planet, and that this prophet then passed this information down in the ancient Hebrew oral tradition until it was written down by Moses. Fourth is that the prophet viewed these visions from the surface of the earth. Fifth is that the prophet had imperfect understanding (like everyone else in the Bible outside the Trinity) of what he saw in these visions and God did not narrate or explain to this prophet what it actually was that the prophet was seeing. Thus we get:

First vision. 4.55 billion years ago - Formation of the Solar System. “void”
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/timeline.html1
First vision. 4.55 billion years agoSunlight first reaches the surface of the rotating earth through the thick atmosphere. “Light”
http://www.windows2universe.org/jupiter/atmosphere/J_evolution_4.html

Second Vision. 3.8 billion years ago, it finally stops raining at the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment. “vault” BBC Earth | Home

Third Vision. 3 billion years ago - Formation of the first known continent, Ur. “land”
Third Vision. 2.7 billion years ago the earliest photosynthetic cyanobacteria appear. “plants” BBC Earth | Home

Fourth Vision. 2.4 billion years ago - The Great Oxidation Event: the Earth’s atmosphere gets oxygen. The sun, moon and stars are clearly visible for the first time from the surface of the earth. “lights”

Fifth Vision. 670 million years ago - First animals. 490 million years ago, jawless fish, To 150 million years ago - First birds. “fish and birds”

Sixth Vision. 114 million years ago - First modern mammals. “animals”

Seventh Vision. 5 million years ago - Humans split off from other apes (gorillas and chimpanzees). “male and female he created them”

Since the earth is old, why would God not have used evolution to create mankind and the animals that we see today? It is not the case that God only makes miracles instantaneously.

Mark 8: 22 They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. 23 He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”
24 He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”
25 Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. 26 Jesus sent him home, saying, “Don’t even go into[a] the village.”

John 9:4 As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. 5 While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
6 After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. 7 “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.

@pacificmaelstrom

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Hi Jo Helen,

Your link is super long. I looked but I didn’t see any reference to “creep” except for a mention of “critter” on Day 5. I didn’t see any discussion of the issue of ancient Hebrew categories that I was addressing with pacificmaelstrom at the time, and I didn’t see anywhere where you explained why the Bible would ever show the air being filled with creatures before the land when this is clearly the opposite of what the scientific evidence shows. This idea of “lineage that would one day become birds” doesn’t actually fix anything, besides just seeming really strained to me.

If you addressed all this in your link, perhaps you could pull out a quote or two.

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Nice short version of Genesis theology. I would add a definition of the word sin. As normal taught, it is vague, everything we do that is wrong, everything that we do that is a mistake, basically everything is potentially sin.

However the Bible is not vague. Sin is the transgression of law, and is mostly willful transgression. If you do not know law, then you cannot transgress law. Law condemns. There are human laws and God’s laws. Most of them are very similar. God’s laws go deeper. Example: Do not hate your brother is the same as do not kill. God wants His laws to live inside our soul.

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Yep, and what I wrote is the short version, which is why you found things missing. Then, the thread got derailed.

Creeping critters come on Day 5. Paleontology shows that the first land animals, both bugs and vertebrates, started as creeping critters and quickly became other things that did not creep. They proliferated and diversified at an amazing rate, yet some critters still creep. Diversity does not mean all things change dramatically or change at the same rate. None of the words used in this chapter define species, not even human-kind. All are groups that we would call Kingdom, Class, or Order.

Not sure what you mean by Hebrew categories unless how Day 1 and Day 4 etc. match up. That is part of the circular poetic structure. Poetic structure describes the Big Bang and the entire universe in Day 1 being filled with astral bodies viewed as viewed from earth in Day 4. The sun is not created after the earth or plants. The “out of order” of those bodies (stars should be first) can be explained as a human viewpoint, which is part of that passage. The sun defines days. The moon defines months. The stars define years.

The second set, days 2+5, opens the air and ocean and fills those extreme environments with life. The third set, days 3+6, opens the land and fills it with plants and animals.

Birds are not out of order in a poetic form. They show the extent of God’s creation. From the depths of the ocean to the top of the sky, all life is created by one God. Everything within the waters and everything within the air are grouped together, just like all the universe is grouped and the life on land is grouped.

Paleontology shows that plants and animals started in the water This is not stated as such in the text, but is also an unnecessary detail like insisting the text describe microorganisms or that some mammals returned to the sea. The details listed are important steps described by science. Life started in the sea and plants were the first to colonize land. The text is an outline of what science describes in detail.

Poetry shows an understanding of cause and effect. It took a master poet to show the connection between the universe and earth, the connection between sky and ocean, the connection between sea and air creatures, the connection between all life on land. It took inspiration from God to include details that only recently have been described.

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@Jo_Helen_Cox I’m sorry to hear that you’ve received other comments as “don’t even try”. That’s certainly not the message I would like to be received here.

I think, in both your cases, and the cases of others, assumptions are involved. In your case, you are assuming that if God inspired a text about creation, then it should “match nature”, even to the point of concording with both ancient and modern cosmologies at the same time. I don’t disagree with you. Certainly, if Genesis was at odds with “nature”, that would be inconsistent with its status as Holy Scripture. But there are many ways that scriptural texts about creation “match nature”. The way that you describe—wherein the text of Genesis reveals modern scientific details and thus demonstrates its supernatural origin—is only one of the ways. The magnificent creation texts of Job and Psalms also match nature (that is also their subject), but not in the scientific details, focusing instead of the relationship between God and creation. I don’t think you and I would disagree on this point.

So I think it’s completely fair to question whether Genesis is meant to communicate scientific information to us (and thus “match nature” in that specific sense). To judge, I think we need to ask whether the creation texts of Genesis are written in such a way that their descriptions of nature can reasonably to applied, in a consistent manner, to modern scientific concepts without violating the original intent of the text. And I think the history of Genesis interpretation makes a strong argument that the answer is no. Put simply, if God wanted us to have a creation text whose words and concepts could translate consistently and clearly into modern scientific concepts, he did a bad job. There are just too many acrobatics involved in getting the text to match science.

You indicated in your longer post that your desire is twofold: 1) to come to peace about the harmony between Genesis and modern science, and 2) to demonstrate the “miraculous” nature of Genesis to “outsiders”. I totally understand where you are coming from with both of these desires, as they are very much part of my journey as well. But I don’t think your interpretive approach accomplishes these goals. At least, I don’t think it’s necessary to find a concordist reading of Genesis to accomplish them.

Let me put it this way: I don’t think Genesis is meant to be a self-evidently miraculous text. I don’t think God wants his existence validated or demonstrated by a concordance between Genesis and modern science. Genesis was written by ancient Hebrews as a counter to pagan myths, crafted from the perspective of encounter with YHWH. We receive the text as a way to encounter this God as well (from the lens of faith, not from a neutral perspective), and reflect on the relationship between God and his creation. If there are connections between Genesis and evolutionary theory, those are interesting to ponder, but they are not a “miraculous” feature because it was not written for that purpose. The poetic nature and interpretive ambiguity surrounding much of the Genesis creation texts just make it impossibly difficult to demonstrate that these connections are an actual feature of the text. This is especially true, given that the same text has been used to substantiate so many different incompatible scientific ideas (the history of interpretations of the “firmament” is a good place to start).

And, for the reasons above, I disagree with using Genesis to try to convince skeptics that the Bible has a miraculous origin. I think the skeptic can justly say, “if God wanted to give you a text which lays out, in infallible detail, a scientifically accurate story of the origins of the cosmos, why is Genesis so hard to interpret? Why do Christians disagree so much over it?” I’m curious: If a skeptic were to ask you those questions, how would you answer?

All this aside, I actually agree with a lot of what you said above, particularly about the “Fall” and the so-called “perfect creation” before it. I also love how you bring out God’s love for process from the Genesis text. I hope this (rather long) post is taken in a spirit of open discussion and not hostility. I so appreciate your presence and contributions here.

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