I’ve been deeply engaged with how ancient Near Eastern context, modern science, and a supernatural biblical worldview can come together in reading Genesis. Drawing from scholars like John Walton (Genesis as polemic), Michael Heiser (divine council and unseen realm), and S. Joshua Swamidass (genealogical Adam/Eve), I’ve written a monograph exploring this “bigger story”—including guided evolution over deep time, a de novo Adam and Eve in an ancient world, rebellious Watchers/Nephilim, a regional flood, and ultimate restoration in Christ.
The core idea: God wrote two books (Nature and Scripture) that complement each other—science answers “how/when,” Scripture “who/why.”
For supernatural events. So there is almost no overlap between the two.
Not as both are supernatural.
It helps you understand what Genesis meant to the original audience but says nothing about evolution or deep time. Conflicts only arise when you try to make scripture a science text.
Personally, I think the GAE model was generated to support a belief in Original Sin and fail to see how it helps. We know genealogy/family trees are just lines on paper. Once you go back a few generations there is no way a great-great-great grandparent would have any influence on you. The original audience did so I consider the whole idea just an accommodation to their understanding. The only way Original Sin could work is if it is magically applied to a person at conception, birth, or some other point in time.
And for the record, I don’t accept Original Sin. Our sin nature, if you want to call it that, comes from the fact that we are evolved animals with inherited behaviors. Behaviors that do get modified by our social upbringing. This gives rise to the idea of two natures, flesh and spiritual, which used to be used a lot in sermons in my younger days, but no so much any more.
Edit to add:
If you want to drop Adam as the cause then evolution could well be how Original Sin came to be. This would be a case of science helping us to understand scripture.
Maybe because the inference is that good can only be accomplished by the spiritual. That notion has long been proven as false despite those who cling to it as a justification of their faith.
Science and scripture generally answer different questions about God’s creation. But there is sometimes overlap between the two though. People–even us Christians on this forum–often question Christian doctrine and belief in light of science. It’s naive to suggest otherwise. Reality is a bit messier than the neat categories and models we put things into. Just as we can misunderstand scripture, people can over-extend what a scientific theory teaches. So just as we can confuse “our interpretation of scrupoture” with “what God says” people can confuse their interpretation of reality with “what science says.”
These two books do not contradict. They cannot contradict because they were never meant to compete. They were meant to complete each other.
Details in scripture can certainly contradict. Parts of the Bible refer to the four corners of the earth (Is. 11:12), think thoughts come from our kidneys (Psalm 16:7), believe there is a solid firmament in the sky (Gen 1:6, Job 37:18), proclaim the earth is immutable and does not move (1 Chron 16:30, Ps 93:1, 96:10, 104:5; Is 45:8), that the earth is flat (Mt 4:8, Dan 4:10-11), stars are small and close enough to the earth they can fall from the sky and land on it (Rev 6:13-16, 8:10; Mt 2:10, 24:29; Dan 8:10). We could add many more examples to this list. I think what you mean to say is:
“What I think God is trying to teach–sometimes through material falsehood and the mistaken beliefs of ancient authors–when properly interpreted, cannot contradict accurate scientific knowledge.”
But just as the Bible is not a science manual, I would say it’s not a modern historical textbook, a philosophy textbook or systematic theology textbook.I am not sure why science is so special? If God doesn’t weed out mistaken scientific knowledge, do we need to assume he would weed out mistaken theology, philosophy or history? “Science” is just a name for how we classify a certain type of knowledge that is obtained in a specific way.
The best way to understand Genesis 1 today is probably in how it rearranges Mesopotamian furniture to teach us theology. We could say this genre consideration dictates that any substantial errors in the text should be with the things it intends to teach through its material content and belief. But for all I know, the original author may have actually thought the world was created this way. That scripture corrects and rearranges Mesopotamian furniture does not exclude this view. When ancient authors treated scripture in an allegorical fashion, more times than not they accepted its literal dimension as well. The only reason I have to think the author did not believe he was writing a literal description of creation is because I think God inspired it and that such a description is wrong. We like to imagine these ancient authors were modern literary critics and could never believe these things.
I just recently made a new thread on this here.
I don’t see many challenges. Just a few details to hammer out. I think God took two humans and gave them rational souls. Given I am not an atheist, or swayed by philosophical naturalism, I don’t think a full human is fully reducible to material processes. What makes a human distinct is our intellectual and spiritual capacity. So I don think God made two humans de novo with the appearance of age. I find Genesis 1-11 to be largely mythological.
But I do accept the universal nature of the flood. Since only the genealogical ancestors of Adam and Eve had souls, I can see the flood wiping out all humans except Noah and company. Other “humans” spread around the world were biological animals lacking the rational soul.
As for the “Nephilim:”
Either its mythological fiction or the Sethite interpretation should be adopted.
Bergsma and Pitre: “The sons of Seth interpretation, adopted here, is the common view of the Catholic tradition. Scripture and ancient Near Eastern literature employ “son” as a covenant category (Ps 2:7; 89:26-28; Ex 4:22). In the narrative of Genesis, the “sons of God” are Sethites, heirs of the covenant of adoptive divine sonship from Adam. The “daughters of men” would be the women descended from Cain, the line that has turned its back on the presence of God (Gen 4:16).
From a literary perspective, the Sethite interpretation is supported by the fact that the Pentateuch repeatedly depicts intermarriage between men of the covenant line and women from other peoples who do not worship the Lord as something to be avoided (e.g., Gen 16, 24, 26:34-35; 28:6-9; Num 25:1-5, etc.). It also makes much more sense of the Flood that follows: as a result of intermarriage, the covenant people become so corrupted that all the world is violent like Cain’s descendants, with the sole exception of Noah and “his family, the righteous “remnant” of the line of Seth.”
Overall I find you work positive and helpful to Christians struggling to make sense of scripture and science.
If you are going to just drop Adam, why not just drop sin nature. This is a case of erasing scripture to accommodate science when its not necessary.
That is a very naive understanding of original sin. Parents squandering away all their money means their children would be born without what otherwise would have been theirs. There is nothing magical about understanding original sin spreading via privation.
You can probably tie that to concupiscence, but not original sin.Two different things.
According to ChatGPT privation is the lack of “due good”. It appears to be something that is just missing from our nature with no physical explanation possible.
We lack the preternatural gifts, the original justice of the sacred space Adam and Eve are believed to have been put in where they would not taste death had they obeyed God. I talked about this in the other thread on this same issue. Original sin is a privation of these gifts, not a magical genetic disease. An inherited state of brokenness where evolution or concupiscence do what they do. I’m not sure I would accept the word “due” though. We are not owed anything.
Welcome to the forum, hope you get some good feedback if people who have time for reviewing your piece.
I co-sign what @Bill_II said. Obviously there are people with lots of different views who hang out here, and over the years there has been plenty of representation from the God-guided evolution crowd, but I think from the general “BioLogos” perspective, the main focus is the compatibility of faith and science. That is, the message that they can coexist and converse without conflict, and that our worldviews and discourse realms benefit when they are informed by both scientific study and theology. But it isn’t really the goal to come up with some kind of scientific model that sets out evolutionary creationism. Or to make the people who need a concordist fit between Genesis and origins happy. Science does not have the toolkit to describe divine action. The Bible is ancient literature, it’s not a collection of objective historical or scientific data points. You can’t “harmonize” them by making the Bible about science or making scientific models describe God. You harmonize them by trying to reduce tension at the tension points and resolve the inner conflicts and cognitive dissonance that people tend to encounter when they take both scientific realities and traditional Christian doctrine/Bible interpretations seriously.
As for GAE, you might find people reluctant to beat that dead horse. But maybe not. He who shall not be named kind of started P. Sci. because he kept claiming we were too mean to him every time we tried to critically discuss his ideas or book and he needed a place where he made all the rules to air his martyr complex. Personally, the whole topic is kind of triggering, so I avoid it. More power to everyone who thinks it actually answers any questions, may you live long and prosper.
Adam, this is off-topic. Either provide feedback on the discussion questions raised, or scroll on by. The OP did not come here to listen to creationism Gish gallops and “whatabout” tangents. If you want to talk about sulphur balls and cut and paste propaganda from other websites, start your own thread.
While we have discussed that issue before, what I was left with in a nutshell is that while ultimately not a viable idea, it is a good stepping stone to those who are moving from a literalist view to one with more nuance.
The main problem I see is individuals who are indistinguishable biologically and in every other sense being not of the image of God, coexisting with those who are. The problems that arise from both literalism and the genealogical ideas are resolved when the it is accepted that the story represents us all in a figurative sense, as well as becomes more meaningful, as it then is not a story about Adam and Eve, but about us.
I see the Genesis stories as shaped by Ancient Middle East myths and the knowledge they presumed about the world. I also note the ‘two books” idea of nature and revelation was part of medieval discussions among the Franciscans. They looked for evidence of divine causality and pointers to the nature of God as creative cause and purpose, but saw in scripture the greater revelation of God and our purpose that nature alone cannot provide.
I have seen your evidence and the evidence of many others and I still think Genesis is mythological. Your “evidence” just fails to convince me otherwise.
Did JS ever concede when pushed that he believed in GAE? I always got the impression he did not, he just thought it was a genius and heroic bridge-building breakthrough that was surely going to bring the die-hard concordists and biblical literalists onboard with evolutionary science.