I guess a pivotal book for me was “The Self Organizing Universe” by Erich Jantsch. It is not a theology book but a science book. I have no theology books to recommend. I have read from some of the classics like Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, but theology wasn’t a focus of my studies really. Like I have basically explained, my 3 years at seminary was more of an introduction to many subjects important for ministry. And my particular interest has always been the metaphysical and theological implication of scientific findings.
Comparing China, Japan, and Korea is very interesting. So close together with many things shared but very different characters. One of the things that ties them together for me is the game of go – called igo in Japan, paduk in Korea, and wei chi in China. I am 3 kyu player and I spend time watching commentaries on professional games. I think probably the most important thing to understand about China compared to the other two is that it is a very big country with a very long history. My father was fascinated by China – collecting Chinese art and studying Chinese mythology. And he was a Taoist at the end of his life.
I just noticed a book review (by Jay Johnson, who hangs around here some, @Jay313 ) in Christianity Today of a book by Loren Haarsma ( who is the spouse of our very own Biologos president) that addresses this issue, and you can add to your library. Review is here: Evangelicals Have Four Proposals for Harmonizing ... | Christianity Today
Looks like a good read to help others see that faithful Christians can have different views on the subject and still embrace one another as brothers and sisters.
My personal view is that Adam and Eve are as Jay’s review describes as option #4 “ Adam and Eve are symbolic figures in an archetypal story…” but might add I think we evolved moral capacity collectively, and collectively fell into sin.
I add the collectively, as some doubts are in my mind that the fall into sin could be individual, as that would then make someone who was not morally capable due to birth or acquired disability less human in the eyes of God. I have not thought that through completely though, so still in the state of musing.
You might find it relevant to read my article on Natural Law - God’ s Law in our Hearts, in the journal Science and Christian Belief, March 2020. - Peter Bussey.
It discusses the original issue here - what is real morality about and how come we are different from animals. Does Natural Law exist?
Thanks for this title and review article.
I found the last bit of the article encouraging:
Including the minority (19%) who deny God’s involvement in human evolution, most Americans (57%) accept the scientific evidence. If a concern for evangelism is still one of the hallmarks of evangelicalism, pastors and lay leaders especially need to stop drawing needless lines in the sand on evolution and the interpretation of early Genesis. It only pushes people away from Christ.
And also confounding that 43% don’t accept the scientific evidence.
Thanks for the shout-out. Glad you liked the article. Guess it has been a minute since I chimed in here. For the record, #4 is my view too. The evolution of moral capacity definitely had to be collective, and the “fall” also. Blaming the human predicament on the singular sin of one woman and one man is unjust. Morality, like language, depends on cooperation and general agreement about the “rules,” whether that’s how to behave (moral codes) or how to use words (grammar). There’s no such thing as a private language (Wittgenstein) or a private morality. Among humans and animals, individuals who can’t follow the unwritten rules of social behavior are ostracized and separated from the group, which also makes them less likely to reproduce. Truly human morality depends on language and a “language-ready brain.” If anyone’s interested, I explain a bit more in this article from a few months ago.
Just food for thought in your musings. The point of an archetype is that the symbols (ha’adam and ha’issah) represent a universal pattern in human existence. Humanity collectively fell into selfish, sinful patterns of behavior, and each of us individually replicates that same sinful pattern in our own lives. Everyone crosses the Rubicon. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
Obviously, Paul’s statement and mine are meant to apply to people in general, not to those who don’t fit the “norm.” Some have birth defects or acquired disabilities and never reach a stage of “moral maturity.” Does this mean they are less human in the eyes of God? A tough question. Here’s my tentative answer:
Being “created in the image of God” refers to a calling or vocation to serve as God’s physical representatives on Earth. Every human being is born in the image of God because all of us, without exception, were created for that purpose. Some don’t achieve that end because of birth defects or other disabilities. This doesn’t make them any less of a human than one who dies in infancy or childhood. They also didn’t achieve moral maturity. What’s their status? The Bible is ambiguous, but I regard them as “innocent.” On the other hand, the majority in the “normal” category made a conscious decision to reject God’s calling and serve ourselves. To sum up, everyone receives the call to serve as God’s image, but I’d say only Jesus fulfilled that call.
I’d love to read your piece. Is a pdf available on the web? If not, shoot me a PM if you can email a copy to me.
I would like to read more on option #4, but I don’t know where to begin. That idea has been in my mind for many years, maybe even since High School, but I haven’t read any thorough treatments of it. Do you know if the book cited in the article gives such a treatment, or is there another resource which is better?
Thinking again about the title of this thread, what stands out is the expression “a mere animal”. I’m pretty fascinated by animals and the other creatures we share this planet with. The more you get to know any one of them, the less “mere” they come to seem.
For me fallenness has to do with separation from God. We no longer have to live in the same world from whence we came and in which all the others still do live, the world which includes God as a constant force and presence. That is really what sets us apart from all our fellow creatures. Our language using minds give us the necessary distance to be objective and somehow, in the process, God becomes one hypothetical reality amongst the many others we can easily imagine. What is good for us becomes something abstract which must be rediscovered and deliberately chosen or else we remain in alienated confusion. We left the garden when we wondered into the labyrinthine corridors of our own minds. Was this an elevation and an improvement? The jury is still out. If our fellow creatures were the jury to whom we must plead our case, would they thank us for our dominion? I don’t think God thinks our departure from the garden was a mistake but I imagine He would be happier if more elected the grounding He still offers.
I don’t think this fallenness makes us closer to God in the sense of being more like Him. I’m never sure what to make of the idea of us being His “image bearers”. I would hope that would be held as something more aspirational than as an inherited title with all the accompanying self importance. Reflecting God isn’t something one can do by one’s own efforts. It won’t be by our cleverness or power. An image is a reflection and there is only one creature on the planet who doesn’t always already reflect God and we’re it. If we ever succeed it won’t be because of anything we do but because we finally stop channel surfing those corridors of our mind and keep it tuned to Him instead even as we move through all the activities of our lives.
Thanks for the various thoughts. You should be able to download my article, and since it says things much better than a Biologos response can, I won’t be trying to say much more here. Historically, there must have been a first occasion when a human being said NO to God. Did this then set a trend, or was it just the first voice in the crowd? Interesting question.
I’ll look your article up. Here’s how I put it in the article I linked above:
Logically, one could point to a “first” morally culpable sinner among a population, but that’s not much different than saying that an individual within a population had the first mutation that eventually became fixed within the population. The mutation still must spread to the rest to have an impact and become meaningful. The “fall” wasn’t immediate and simultaneous, just as the man wasn’t rendered guilty as soon as the woman ate of the fruit. There was a period of time, who knows how long, when humans were just beginning to think metaphorically and abstractly about the codes of behavior they’d inherited from previous generations. One can call this a “probationary” period, or just the fuzzy demarcation between maturity and immaturity. It’s not hard to understand. We’re intimately familiar with the process. Children follow the same pattern.
Yes, Walton acknowledges the facts of evolution, but he advocates for what Haarsma would call Option 1 – God selected two individuals to represent all humans in the Garden. He also fudges on his definition of “archetype.” In some verses it’s the accepted literary definition, and in others ha’adam isn’t a prototype, but a “federal head” of the human race. In this particular instance, it seems to me that Walton’s Reformed theology is driving his interpretation. Other than that, I love the guy. Most everything he writes is worth reading.
Haarsma’s book does a good job covering all the bases, if you’re unsure where to start. You asked about books on Option #4. For the folks who didn’t read the review:
Adam and Eve are symbolic figures in an archetypal story. Over a long period of time, humans became morally accountable through general revelation (Rom. 1:18–20), yet they chose sin.
If you’re looking for books that specifically argue for that option, I think Haarsma’s examples were Pete Enns Evolution of Adam and Denis Lamoureux Evolutionary Creation. Articles along the same lines are Middleton Reading Genesis 3 Attentive to Human Evolution and my own (pardon the hubris) Adam as Archetype.
Thanks, Mark. I miss talking to y’all. This one has run long, so I’ll make a separate post to reply to your thoughts.
Couldn’t agree more, on both points. The smallest life fascinates me. There is no such thing as a “mere animal” on any level, even our own. Chimps have first-level Theory of Mind just like human toddlers. (I know you have a mind like mine, and I can tell what you’re thinking.) The roots of human morality can be traced far back into the animal kingdom. Yet, there’s still a giant leap between human morality and the moral “innocence” of animals.
I don’t particularly care for “the fall” as a metaphor for what happened, but it’s the traditional term that folks understand. It includes the idea that humanity began with two individuals in a state of highest perfection, from which they “fell” into sinfulness. That’s nonsense. Skipping to the end of the story, all the curses pronounced upon the serpent, the woman and the man could be lumped under the mythological category of explaining present realities. Why do snakes crawl, and why do we hate them? Why do women have inordinate pain in childbirth (compared to animals)? Why is it so hard to scratch out a living from the ground? Most important are the spiritual ramifications. Why are we denied immortality and subject to death, and why are we separated from God? Those are the truly big questions.
Perhaps our fellow creatures have some sense of God’s presence. I don’t know what it’s like to be a bat. haha. (A famous essay on consciousness.) I do know that language is necessary to reason abstractly about concepts like “god,” not to mention love, good, evil, mercy, etc. The question is when humans began to entertain such concepts, because the language to describe such thoughts had to come after people began to feel them, not before.
I also think it’s possible to roughly trace the birth of spiritual awareness/“god-consciousness” in the archeological record. Homo naledi laid their dead in caves. Perhaps that’s a rough sense of the spiritual, but the best indicator of ceremonial burial is the Earliest Known Human Burial in Africa around 78,000 years ago. By 24,000 years ago, funerary practices had become far more elaborate. A double-burial in Sunghir, Russia, “of a boy and a girl, about 12–13 and 9–10 years old, respectively, were buried at the same time, head to head, covered by red ocher and ornamented with extraordinarily rich grave goods.” I think this is significant because the “grave goods” are items that the deceased would use in the afterlife. This is a pretty obvious indicator spiritual/religious thought and hope of godlike immortality, which is one of the themes of Gen 2-3 and many other myths.
On top of that, items such as “Venus” fertility figurines and “fantastical creatures” like the man with the head of a lion start to proliferate around 35,000 years ago.
All of this fits with the phenomenon of globularity, which some early researchers called “the language-ready brain.” The Evolution of the Modern Human Brain Shape “evolved gradually within the H. sapiens lineage, reaching present-day human variation between about 100,000 and 35,000 years ago. This process started only after other key features of craniofacial morphology appeared modern and paralleled the emergence of behavioral modernity as seen from the archeological record.”
Getting late here and I’ve gone on too long already. I’ll come back and finish off tomorrow. Good thoughts. Thanks.
Yes and no. There is something potentially special in the human condition but we shouldn’t emphasize only the triumphalism of it when we are also so callous and lethal beyond any need. There can be something to celebrate if we don’t burn it all down first or wipe out everything but the mosquito, roach and rat on our way to the celebration. There isn’t much which is a purely good. Language such as we have enables us to communicate precisely over great distances and spans of time. But it also ensnares us into living in the representations of lived experience language allows us to make in lieu of the actual lived world as it becomes present to us. Filtering our experience through those representations is partly to blame for losing track of the presence of that which gives rise to God belief. The God that is reasoned to and described only with great difficulty is a substitute for what gave rise to it, which was something immediate and meaningful but ineffable whose influence could be felt in many aspects of ordinary life. It didn’t require that we capture it in an agreed upon concept and didn’t require ceremonies of worship. Caring, flowing attention to quality in every aspect of life is a constantly available experience of trusting in what is greater which we can only intuit but not pin down with language. It doesn’t replace science but the same is true in reverse. Science does not apply everywhere.
Okay. Had to get that much out Will get to bed now to be ready for round two. I’m all for understanding what we can but there is reason not to explain away what is greater either with cockamamie theories like mine or with Bible verses. But I think one needs to find places in one’s life where the mystery can contribute and express itself directly rather than abstractly.
I takes some doing to find out what those four views are. They are: YEC, OEC, archetypal creation, and no historical Adam. And those 4 options frankly made me angry and disgusted (whether entirely justified or not). John Walton’s archetype idea is hardly required for a view of Adam as historical with the acceptance of evolution – quite the contrary. I have encountered many people who accept evolution and an historical Adam and the dominant feature is a great diversity of thought.
The simple fact is that an historical Adam is not only completely compatible with evolution without any fancy “archetype” rhetoric or need to be dismissive of the Biblical story, because an historical treatment of the text of the Bible does not even agree with the insistence that Adam’s family were the only people on the planet.
Imagine me saying that there are two views regarding determinism: 1. Deterministic materialism. 2. My View that…
It is insulting, isn’t it? John Walton’s view is NOT the only way of accepting both evolution and an historical Adam – not even close!
However I am watching the video on John Walton’s view in order to understand it better. (It led to adding question 3 below where I came to understand that we do have common ground). And I am realizing that rather than categorizing all views of the historicity of Adam, his book is more about his own journey to realizing that an historical Adam is not incompatible with science.
Categorizing the diversity of views accepting evolution and an historical Adam is a difficult task… but here goes
I guess the way to do this is according to the answers to a set of questions such as…
What is Adam’s relationship to the rest of us?
archetypal, genealogical, cultural, (add any others you can think of)
What kind of story is the one told in Genesis 2-3?
literal, symbolism, metaphorical, (add others you can think of)
How to understand the Genesis 2:7 description of God’s creation of Adam?
a. whose creation? Just Adam or all mankind?
b. how was this accomplished? magic, intervention, communication
(add other questions you think might be important) I thought of adding the question of when Adam’s family existed but wondered if this might not be a function of the answers given to the questions above.
Accordingly John Walton’s view seems to be one of an archetypal relationship and (in part at least) a metaphorical story, with a treatment of Genesis 2:7 as being about all mankind (that is as far as I have been able to categorize him according to what I have heard him say). By contrast, my view is a cultural relationship and a symbolism story in Genesis 2-3, with a treatment of Genesis 2:7 as being about all mankind altered by communication.
Perhaps I should explain the difference between symbolism story and metaphorical story. The symbolism story tells of real events but with elements in the story which are symbolic rather than literal – a traditional example is that of the serpent who rather than a talking reptile is commonly taken to be an angel “Lucifer” who became our adversary “Satan”. But I would treat the two trees and its fruit, as well as the flaming sword as symbolic also.
A metaphorical story considers the events themselves as representing something other than the stated account. For example we see this in John Walton’s claim that the story about Adam is actually speaking about all of us rather than just Adam (perhaps I really need hear more about his ideas on this story in order to be certain of this categorization, but I cannot see how it can be about all of us unless it is largely metaphorical). Part of the problem with categorizing him is that John Walton speaks as a scholar (who has examined specific question) rather than as a systematic theologian (trying to answer all the important questions).
And it looks like his view of the story in Genesis 2-3 is mostly that of symbolism the same as in my case rather than metaphorical.
Comparing the different ways we understand the problem of eating the fruit is interesting…
In John Walton’s case it is appropriating wisdom for their own plans and agenda rather than simply supporting God’s plans for the world.
In my case, it is about claiming authority to dictate the difference between good and evil rather than learning the difference between them from God. I connect this with having children where we are put in the position of having to teach the difference whether we really understand it or not. I think this is better explanation of how things went wrong because I don’t buy into this idea of God as the micromanaging dictator of human life, where we have to do everything as He says rather than making our own choices and using the intelligence and creativity which God gave us. This is not to say that I don’t think having God’s guidance is of any importance. But only that I don’t think this was really about our obedience and God’s control over us – I think that is a human distortion by those using religion as a tool of power. The actual learning and use of real wisdom is clearly a good thing and I cannot see that as something which has led us down the wrong path to an evil world.
My answers to those questions:
1: all of the above (though not as definite on genealogical)
2: symbolism
3: I don’t know, but might guess all mankind, and intervention.
4: Time: uncertain, but I would be inclined towards ~30-70,000 years ago.
