Thank you for your reply. You brought up some points I found interesting. I used to believe in
Jesus, I went to a PCA church for nearly 20 years. I felt the Holy Spirit dwelled in me and gave
me wisdom when I read the bible. I even lead my wife and others to salvation, or what I thought was salvation at the time. I liked the point you made that Christians don’t believe in the bible they believe in Jesus. I think that was a critical issue for me. My faith was in the whole bible which supposedly all pointed to Jesus. I guess for me it is too much a stretch to
believe in Jesus because I feel like I would be picking and choosing. Again, I am not meaning to offend with my response I just want you to know where I am coming from. I had one question about your response. Can you explain to me in more detail, what you mean when you say, establish a valid theology of science?
Thank you for your response. What is a PCA church?
Who is God? God is the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but no one has seen the Father. God the Father sent the Son, the Perfect Image of the Father, to reveal Who God is. We know God through the Bible, but unless God, esp. Jesus Christ, God with us, is real and alive the Bible does not mean anything.
It is not possible to talk about a theology of science in this medium, but if you send me a private message we can work something out.
Thanks again for your reply. I enjoy discussing these things in a non-confrontational way. I used to believe like you said, God was real and alive. However, once I started to have doubts about my theology and the bible, I started wondering if I was just projecting my own idea of God. The complication of it all also makes me wonder about God’s personality. For example, why wouldn’t he just reveal himself in an obvious way if he wants to have a relationship?
The PCA is the Presbyterian Church of America. They describe themselves as reformed so they maintain a more literal interpretation of the bible. But this differs even between churches. For example, I went to a San Diego PCA church and evolution was never brought up a single time. I moved to the Georgia and the church I attended would bring up something negative about evolution nearly every week. This made me uncomfortable since I am science teacher. I started researching it more online and I was surprised to find Peter Enns was in the PCA. I think he might have left but anyway I was encouraged to see someone who believed similar to me but was realistic about science. I read his book the evolution of Adam but instead of finding answers it just lead me to having more questions and more doubts. I would like to hear more about theology of science, I have to learn how to send a private message on here, my email is tedfrancis280@gmail.com
I think this is well stated. I was actually at a conference this week (which is why I haven’t participated in this discussion as much as I would have wanted) where I talked to the head of a major creationist organization about the topic of whether we can find “primitive cosmology” in the Bible. Specifically, we were talking about whether the Bible (in Genesis, Isaiah, and other places) really refers to a solid sky-dome above the Earth. He said to me, “well, the problem is that if that the Bible really has a solid sky dome in it, then I can’t use those passages to lead scientists to Christ. They won’t take the Bible seriously if there’s a sky dome in it.” I think this is enormously revealing, because it shows the extent to which a desire to defend our faith can actually force us into worldly categories of what counts as truth or untruth.
Hi @tfrancis! Welcome to the Forum. I’m glad you’re here. I would say, in response to your question, that if God had revealed modern science to the people who wrote the Bible, it would have been totally incoherent to them. Why would God have given them a message that they could not have understood at all—just so that people thousands of years later could use science to decode what it meant? It makes more sense, in my mind, to say that God inspired Genesis in such a way that its figurative meaning could speak revelation to people at any place in the history of science.
The subject of Adam, Eve, and sin is indeed a tough one, and I completely understand why it has caused you to doubt your faith. It was one of the things that almost led me away from the faith as well. I think the underlying problem is a bad understanding of the whole story of the Bible. Many Christians today read the Bible in terms of a perfect, death-less creation followed by a “Fall” that screwed everything up. Of course, if evolution is true, then death and suffering have been around from the beginning of life itself. But the Bible never explicitly says that death and suffering were absent from the original creation—this comes from a bad interpretation of several verses in Romans, as well as a mis-reading of what it means the creation was “very good” in Genesis 1. God’s creation exists at the dynamic intersection of chaos and order, death and life. Humans are called to “image” God by cultivating and subduing the Earth (Gen 1:28). This implies that there’s things in creation that need to be subdued.
The idea that death and suffering can actually be creative forces is not foreign to the Bible. In fact, it’s extremely biblical. Jesus says that only death can lead to new life, and in many places, suffering is seen as part of development towards faith, rather than a bad thing. They are God-given parts of the existing order of creation. Of course, this creation does indeed long for the coming of Christ to renew all things (Romans 8:22, Revelation 21). But this groaning is described as being like labor pains before childbirth, which means that the death and pain currently in creation will ultimately lead to something so beautiful that it will vindicate the suffering. So it makes a lot of sense that evolution, which is driven in some ways by death, would be God’s way of bringing about something beautiful. This is mysterious, to be sure, but it’s coherent enough to see a lot of ways in which evolution resonates with the biblical narrative.
So Adam and Eve (as well as the garden of Eden) represent our inherent need for God, our universal loss of innocence, and our hope for eternal life that is inside all of us. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t an original pair that God revealed himself to in a special way, but neither science nor the Bible gives us the specific details of that encounter. The Bible’s account of Adam and Eve is not a historical account in the way in which we think of history now.
What is sin? It’s a failure to love God fully, and a decision to turn away from him. But we can’t love God fully until we fully understand his love for us, which he demonstrated in Christ. So it’s in Christ that we have the power to defeat sin. God didn’t create sin, but he created beings that make free choices, which includes the possibility of sin. I don’t see anything there that is at odds with what we know from evolutionary science.
I would love to continue the conversation, if you’d like.
I almost forgot: You mentioned the PCA denomination. Tim Keller, the most famous PCA pastor in the world right now, is an evolutionary creationist who wrote this essay series for us: http://biologos.org/blogs/archive/series/creation-evolution-and-christian-laypeople. I suspect it will be very helpful for you. (Keller and I disagree a bit on Adam, but we agree on everything else).
Excellent point, Brad. About the groaning terminology. It’s tempting to view this as a negative, but in John 16:21 it says that, “A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow for her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for JOY that a man is born into the world.” — if the present condition of the creation itself is described as such, then it would not imply anything negative … Unless one wishes to think that pregnancy itself is an accursed thing.
In my opinion, it verges on secularism to imply that all pain and suffering (in any form) is intrinsically negative. I also think that the negativity towards carnivores, and the animal kingdom at large, is rather regrettable. For 1500 years of Church History, the near universal Christian opinion was that the creation is STILL very good, and never stopped being very good. But in today’s world it seems that we arbitrarily define certain creatures as being “cursed” like carnivores, porcupines, spiders, viruses etc., — you just don’t find this level of negatively towards Creation in the Bible. The times it does bring up carnivorous activity (like Job and Psalm 104) it glorifies the very nature of the creature that we deem “accursed”. Like eagles, ravens and lions, and how it is God provides them with food.
-Tim
Hi Brad,
Thank you for taking the time to explain what you are thinking on the topics I had mentioned.
After reading over your response and thinking about it, it lead me to some additional thoughts and questions related to sin and suffering. You shared verses showing it was biblical for death and suffering to be creative forces.
I don’t mean to offend with what I am going to say but I am being honest in how I feel. It is difficult for me to imagine a God who is all knowing and all powerful is demonstrating love when he utilized so much suffering and death as a major role in the creative process. If we are to believe he created us purposefully and our knowledge of evolutionary history
is close to correct, he evolved us over billions of years from a single celled organism. If this is true, what does
this say about his character using the death of the majority of living things to finally create us after five major extinction events over 3.5 billion years? It is difficult for me to imagine allowing 99% of species created to go extinct being done in a loving manner. It just seems like a large stretch of the imagination for me. When I used to have a more literal
interpretation of the creation event in Genesis I still questioned why God allowed Adam and Eve to sin at all. Couldn’t he have prevented the fall and all the unnecessary death that is mentioned in the Old Testament? I was always taught that death entered the world because of Adams sin. Imagining a “De novo” creation is more appealing in a way since then you can imagine that God created everything perfect and man messed it all up. You mentioned sin is failing to love God fully. When I consider all the blood and guts of history, I really can’t think of a reason to love the God described in the bible. Also, if he truly wants a relationship, why not just present himself in way that is obvious to all instead of trying to weed out everyone except the true believers?
Thank you for sharing that Tim Keller Link, I will take a look at it.
Is it hard to imagine that 100% of those people who were born today will die some time in the future? Is the answer not to bring anyone into this world, or to make this world the best that we can make it.
Why are some people horrified by the thought of extinction. Extinction means dead. Extinct dead is no different from dead dead. The dinosaurs are no more dead than the chicken I had for dinner. “Lucy” is no more dead than my father who died last month.
God’s creatures, flora and fauna, are born, live for a while and then die. Would it have been better for all those extinct species of they had never existed? Would it be better for us if the first humans and their children had never died and lived forever? You would not need more than one generation, so clearly you and I would never have existed.
@BradKramer, science deepens our knowledge of our world, ourselves, and our Creator. We would not know about the dinosaurs unless humans explored our environment. We don’t need to know about the dinosaurs to know God, but knowing how God created humans in God’s Image through evolution including the creation and extinction of the dinosaurs adds depth to our understanding of the Truth of Jesus Christ, the Logos.
Theology and Science are converging as we learn more about Science, God’s Creation, and we learn more4 about the Jesus Christ, the Logos of History. Certainly secularists deny this, but so do people like Creationists and other dualists who deny the connection between God and God’s Creation.
Interesting story. Do you think it is necessarily about defending our faith, or is it more about defending our tribe?
Based on polls, it looks like that fellow would also have to use Old Earth scenarios as well. Did you gather that this fellow was LIKELY to pursue an Old Earth scenario to appeal to scientists?
George
No, there is a difference between going extinct and dying. Check a dictionary.
How does the ascension fit into the accommodation view? Jesus seemed to hold to the three-tiered view of the cosmos (JN 17:1). Did Jesus ascend ‘up’ to accommodate the view of the witnesses? How do we believe this to be an actual event in history if it is explained using this ancient cosmology?
Extinct animals are all dead. Not all dead animals are extinct. Here we go with word games!
The use of figurative language is used to show that Jesus had “ascended” to the right hand of God. Even though God doesn’t have a right hand. Lots of symbolism is used to talk about the sacred.
Yes He does I mean Jesus had a right and left hand 
The trick here is reject the false dichotomy between the “everything in the Bible must have happened exactly as it was written or the whole thing is false” position and the “anything that sounds supernatural must be a total fabrication” position. I saw a screening of a new movie about Jesus that show the ascension as Jesus disappearing into a sort of “curtain” of light, which I thought was a good job. Jesus did indeed leave this reality in some visible way, and the disciples interpreted it through the lens of the three-tiered universe.
Good question!
Hebrew contact with Zoroastrianism gave the Jews … and eventually the Christians … Angels and an exclusive sense of the Celestial realm for heaven, God and souls.
Pythagoras thought souls came up from the ground through the roots and stems of beans.
George Brooks
A guy on the news said that in the hours before his home was swept from its foundation by flash flooding, “It was raining cats and dogs!” The fact that he used a common linguistic structure which nobody considers “literally true” does not lead me to doubt that the rainstorm was an actual historical event.
Concessions to language and culture are inevitable wherever people communicate. And if someone disregarded everything I said because my use of the words “sunrise” and “sunset” proved that my “defective pre-Copernican cosmology” rendered me unreliable, I would think them at least to be needlessly pedantic—if not also downright annoying.
When the Apostle Paul tells of one “caught up to the third heaven”, I read it not as a cosmology lesson. I consider it linguistic precision in avoiding any possible equivocation confusion.
When someone looks up (toward the sky) when praying, I don’t consider them to be facing towards God----just as someone who bows their head when praying doesn’t necessarily think that they are facing towards God because he “lives” below them. Indeed, if one believes that God is omnipresent and not geographically limited to one place, it is hard to make any sort of particular theological or cosmological argument by means of one’s prayer stance.
This is yet another theology topic where a strong background in linguistics and translation can explain a lot.
The person sitting on the right side of the king was the person with the most power and influence as in Bobby Kennedy was Jack Kennedy’s right hand man, his closest advisor and enforcer