Struggling With My Faith

Faith & Science Conversation
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Good morning.
This is my first time posting.
I’ve been listening to the BioLogos podcast for a while. I’m almost finished with The Language of God.
I’m really struggling with my faith and I’m reaching out to get perspectives from other Darwinist Christians.

I grew up in a very conservative evangelical non-denominational church. My family prescribed to the Intelligent Design view point.
When I was 18, I started dating a seminary grad student who convinced me that YEC was the only biblical worldview. (We eventually broke up)
I went on to get a BS in Biology, and then a MS in Wildlife Biology.
I held on to this YEC view, following ICR and others.
As I have developed my faith, I’ve come to prescribe to the Anglican way.
Changing my religious affiliation has opened up all this doubting in my mind…
I’ve also started my PhD in Biomedical Science.
Developing in my scientific training, I can no longer deny that evolution is our origin story.

I cannot articulate the depth of my doubting, only to say I’m questioning everything I’ve ever been taught and prescribed to.

My biggest questions are:
What does it mean for our relationship with God if he just watched life on earth for millions of years, watching natural selection occur until hominids evolved to the “right” place to call them “humans” and “create” them in his image?

  • This established for me this idea that God just sits back and watches us squirm and evolve until we pique his interest. That doesn’t insight this close relationship the bible talks about.

What does it mean if everything in Genesis 1-10ish is just myth? Is the Fall real? Is sin real? What is sin then? What other teachings in the bible are not real? Can I even trust the bible at all?

If anyone has struggled with these questions, how did you reconcile it and fully devote your mind and soul to God and Christ Jesus?

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Hey, welcome to the forum! I’m not especially active here…but I’ll venture a part of a reply…

I think there’s a problem with the implication of “just myth.” By “myth,” do you mean “fake story”? Because a functional definition of “myth” is more like—foundational, explanatory stories intended to inform worldview and shape societal and individual attitudes and behaviour. Like “The Little Engine that Could” is a cultural myth today.

As for some kind of Epicurean or deistic God, in Christianity, God is fully revealed in Jesus—incarnational, enculturated, intimately involved with humans.

There are still struggles with things like “the Fall,” but I wonder if the Fall is less “etiological” (how things “came to be”) than it is about how things are, like…all the time (e.g., the temptation to bypass God’s intent and grasp that desirable fruit for myself).

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Welcome, @MychaAshlee !

You have found a good group to ask. There are many scientists here. I am not one of them, however. I’m a humanities person and a Christian, who never questioned that both an evolutionary perspective and Christianity could be simultaneously true. So I’m not approaching the questions at all the way you are. However, I am from a church background that doesn’t see an alternative to YEC or IR, as you are as well.

You may not find answers you are looking for quickly or easily, and they might not be what you thought they would. That’s ok. You can still have faith in Jesus and know God’s love, even while you are sorting things out.

I hope you get to meet @klw, @beaglelady, @KateKnut, @Christy, and @CReyes-Ton soon!

See you around the forum.

Kendel

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Hi Mycha,
Welcome to the forum! I’m glad you’ve found your way here, and I’m sorry these questions are troubling you.

I think evolution is just how God created us. I don’t get the idea that he “just watched” until we reached a specific point, but more that revealing himself to us was possible in a different way once we became capable of understanding. YEC apologetics will often pose things as all-or-nothing propositions – as in, either God is involved with creation or he’s just sitting around watching and not doing anything. I reject that idea – I think God has always been actively involved in creation, just not always in a way we can scientifically perceive.

I think humans do sin in the sense that we are not in fellowship with God the way we want to be. I’ve heard some describe Adam and Eve’s sin as a “spiritual death.” They were no longer able to fellowship with God – it wasn’t that physical death had never happened before.

I don’t know exactly how to view the first few chapters of Genesis. John Walton’s book “The Lost World of Genesis One” has been helpful to me in this area (and he has others too), explaining how easy it is for us to read Genesis from a Western materialistic perspective, and thus assume a lot of things that they original audience would not have. I’ve come to the point where I’m okay with it either way – I see Adam and Eve as real people (but not the first humans), but if they weren’t, it’s not what my faith is based on.

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Welcome to the forum! Your dilemma is really why God put this here, in many ways. I think many of us have walked and still walk on your path.
My personal thoughts are:

Concentrate on how the Bible should be read. I would suggest some on the books on Old Testament interpretation by Walton as a good place to start. Biblical interpretation is where most of our conflicts originate, and where we need to go to resolve them.

Concentrate on commonalities with people who disagree that you are in relationship with, not the differences. Many of my friends are YEC or look at ID as the answer, and that is fine if that gives them assurance.

Hang out here and ask questions. Being an open forum, you may not get the right answers, but it is a safe space to discuss things, and hear different views. The resources on the home page are also great to give a balanced perspective, and the podcasts and articles are relevant to our lives.

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Welcome to the conversation! I also want to congratulate you on your studies and affirm that science is a Christian vocation and nothing you learn about God’s world is going to be a threat to God or something he doesn’t want you to find out.

I think evolution was God’s creative process and he was active in creation and engaged with care and provision for his creatures the whole time. I don’t think God just set things in motion and waited around passively for millions of years and then just started caring when highly evolved hominins appeared on the scene. Why wouldn’t God delight in dinosaurs too? He takes care of sparrows, and they are dinosaur relatives.

My understanding of humans being made the image of God is that it means that when the time was right, God chose humans for a special calling, to represent him and help bring about his ongoing purposes for creation. That he would want our help caring for creation to me speaks to both his love of all creation and his special love of humanity, who he picked to be his children.

I think the Incarnation of Christ as a biological human is a monumentally significant event for understanding God’s relationship to his creation. He doesn’t just watch us and then when he thinks he can get something from us like worship, he engages. No, he became part of creation to be with us. And the Bible says Jesus was resurrected into a new imperishable human body, he ascended into heaven in that human body, and rules the universe as a human. Our hope as Christian humans is that Christ will return to resurrect us to imperishable human bodies and God will live with us in creation made new, permanently united and part of his creation, forever. This to me speaks of the tremendous worth of humanity in God’s eyes. We aren’t just another species on the evolutionary timeline, we are the children God brought into his family, gave his name and inheritance to, and chose to live with for eternity.

C.S. Lewis wrote some about the ideas of Logos and Mythos. If I’m getting it right (it’s been a while), the idea was that there are multiple vehicles of Truth. We can communicate and access truth rationally, through propositions and logic and fact (Logos), and we can communicate and access truth relationally, through story and testimony and sharing human experiences (Mythos). So Genesis 1-11 would be an example of communicating truth through Mythos, through metanarratives that tell true stories about human existence and human reality. We can access the Truth of the Mythos by relating to God and other humans, we don’t have to convert the Mythos to Logos and try to distill out of it some historical facts or empirical evidence. It’s the story that tells us the truth about who we are, who God is, what our purpose is on earth, and how we can be reconciled to God who loves us.

Is the Fall real? Maybe not in the Logos sense of two historical individuals named Adam and Eve eating fruit in a Garden as the first humans ever who disobeyed God. But it’s real in the Mythos sense of telling the truth about humanity, about humanity’s propensity to rebel against their creator in pride and selfishness, and about God passionately pursuing humanity to make things right again. We know it’s true, not because we historically fact-check it, but because we relate to God and to other humans and we know our own hearts, and we can see it’s our story. Of course we are fallen. Of course our sin separates us from our creator. Of course we need grace and redemption and those things are transformative. We can experience this story and we can see it play out in the lives of other people. Of course it is real.

I think there is a segment of American Evangelicalism that treats faith like it means believing the right things and their interpretation of the Bible like the contract we sign on the dotted line to show we have faith. The Bible is “the foundation of our faith.” I don’t think that is what faith is at all, or what the Bible is for. Faith is encountering God and knowing he is who he has revealed himself to be. Faith is accepting God’s grace and trusting that his Spirit in us can make us new and unite us to God so we can fulfill our purpose and live in our identity and privilege as God’s children.

The texts of the Bible were God’s communication to his people long ago, and the Holy Spirit can speak truth through them to us today. God can use the Bible to help us understand his love, his holiness, his desires for how we should worship him and treat our fellow humans. The Bible helps mediate God’s relationship with us and reveal God’s character and faithfulness. But the Bible isn’t the only way God relates to us. God is present with us by his Spirit and we can experience and know who he is as a Person by loving and serving God directly, not just by reading and obeying the Bible. We can experience God through others who are united to Christ and embody God’s love for us.

So, I think for me personally, approaching the Bible not as a list of facts I need to believe and rules I need to follow in order to pass a faith test, but instead approaching it as a vehicle for God to communicate who he is and how much he loves his people has been a key component of dealing with doubt. I don’t think we need to rationally figure everything out. I think we need to regularly experience God and be transformed and see our personal place in the larger story of humanity the Bible tells.

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I grew up in a YEC home and church culture (if I ever grew up anywhere :grin:), and never bought into the explanations of light’s existence before the sun was created in Genesis 1 – they always seemed lame and contrived and without any solid biblical support. But I didn’t know there was any other way, since I was also taught that ‘believing’ in evolution necessitated atheism.

My most recent reference to my ‘journey’:

And similarly:

I have been shown much grace because my coming to endorse biological evolution as a person of faith has been almost entirely without trauma. Even when I explained my revised perspective to my wife (she’s no dummy), she was accepting of it. Of course, her strong faith in our Father’s loving care and providence was a big part of that (not so much my skillful explanation ; - ).

I do have to be careful at church to whom I divulge it, let alone anything about the antiquity of the earth and the cosmos, so there is a sadness in that. But my closest Christian friends besides my wife are okay with it too, even accepting of it. So I’m thankful.

My story may not directly address your questions except maybe the last one, but @Christy did a good job with the others.

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Forgot this earlier. Perhaps of interest:

The American Scientific Affiliation
https://network.asa3.org/

CHRISTIAN WOMEN IN SCIENCE
https://network.asa3.org/group/CWIS

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Ah, that reminds me of Katherine Hayhoe, well known to BioLogos and without even following your links – this just yesterday:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/14/us/national-climate-assessment-extreme-weather-costs/index.html

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It seems that you definitely are very qualified to understand the science of it. Theology and philosophy comes at it in many different ways. I am a fan of this podcast as well, but it’s often a bit often just scratching the ground on with theology. The podcast “The Bible Project” and “The Bible for Normal People” both dig far more into the theological aspects of these kinds of questions.

If you are in America, and have a public library card you can download free apps like Hoopla Digital and Libby and often find a decent amount of books on theology or ones by the same authors you hear mentioned in those podcasts.

These two biblical scholars often have some good books and seem to usually be found as audiobooks or ebooks on one of those two apps.

Pete Enns / Peter Enns ( sometimes some books come up depending on how you spell his name. ) He is also one of the hosts of “ The Bible for Normal People “ .

This is just to make sure you have the right authors.
https://www.amazon.com/Books-Peter-Enns/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3APeter+Enns

The other is John Walton.

In here you’ll see a wide range of views. Some believe that God somehow was involved in guiding evolution, or setting up the original laws of nature by using a god of the gaps style argument and some believe that he was less hands on.

I fall into the later camp. Im not a deist. I believe that God interacts with humanity through his holy spirit. I don’t think it overrides free will. I think this Holy Spirit is there not just for humans but all life. Even there for the Lion that is starving to death and there for the lion chowing down on a zebra and for the zebra that escapes and the one that is being eaten.

I’ll be back and edit in the rest of my thoughts.

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Thank you for your thoughtful response.
The second part to your response is truly profound to me. Eye opening, in fact.
Would you be okay with me private messaging you to chat further?

Thank you.

  • Mycha
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Thank you. I will definately look for these authors. I look forward to the rest of your response.

  • Mycha
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  • @marta You’d better get over here, sooner than later.
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To continue. I think that the holy spirit is active in the life of everything. I just don’t think it’s anything that can be scientifically tested. Or at least not any more tested than our reaction to things in general life how we respond to music written by a long dead artist. We can see how it affects us but we can’t test to see if some ghostly specter of the artist is moved by our reaction. For me God is the same. We can obviously see how “spiritual” things can affect us but we can’t see how we affect God outside of his letters to us.

So I personally don’t believe in anyone having a personal relationship with God. I think the terminology is deceitful myself. Like how I don’t know you, I would not say we have a personal relationship. Your best friend could though. Even if you wrote an autobiography and I read it and your letters I would not know you personally like your friends do. So when it comes to God, I think we can only know them as much as anyone else can. We all have the same access and the same resources. No one can tell just tell us what is God’s favorite fruit, or favorite color of bird feathers or which human musician has the music he thinks sound best, or if God is even capable of that kind of thought.

But that does not mean he is absent. Im sure there are things in your life that you find meaningful just like myself and others do. I think all animals can claim that. I think my cats somehow experience the holy spirit in a way I can’t understand. I think as far back as there has been life, even the first single cell organism, God has been there somehow interacting with it in ways we just can’t understand.

I think the term myth for genesis 1-11 is great. It’s the name one I use. It sounds just like any other myth and the purpose of a myth is not to deceive us but to share truth in a way that’s not the same as truth being revealed to us in a scientific textbook, historical account and so on. Stories are meant to convey something to us. Im a big horror fan. If I watched the Stepford Wives and treated it as a documentary I would be widely misinformed about reality but if I treated it as a social commentary on patriarchy and toxic masculinity then I would have a far better grasp on the story. If you google “ stepford wives “ as social commentary you’ll find a lot of links. If you look for things like tropes and go down the tunnel of criticism, analysis and so on or even look into things like who did the special effects and so on you’ll learn tons about the film that just a face value watch.

The Bible is the same. It was written by ancient Jewish people thousands of years ago in another language. Their culture, their worldview and so on is vastly different. It’s like watching a video of a gay man visiting his husband at an elementary school. Most likely, online, you would find two very different sets of views based on a persons amount of or lack of hateful stupidity aka political views. That’s just within our nation and even our same towns. So we can imagine that divide just really gets wider as we go back thousands of years and into other cultures and ethnicities with a different language. A ancient Mesopotamian would understand the subtle clues far better than modern people would.

So God inspired a story that was meaningful to them directly. We get meaning from that story by translating it and then trying to fit it within our understanding. Just like even if we go back to reading Shelly’s Frankenstein or watching a film based off of it. We are not afraid of a man recreating a “monster” from various body parts and then using electricity to revive it, but in the early 1800s when Mary wrote it the people were a bit unsure of what galvanism would do. For us perhaps our modern Prometheus would be an AI robot, a cloned man gone mad or so on. In a 5,000 years from now the technological horror will probably be something we can’t even speculate on.

One exercise that may help is how many times in your life, have you’ve been certain that some doctrinal belief you hold to is definitely true and you’ve studied it and you’re just positive only to jump ahead 5 years and you now interpret all of those verses differently. So differently that the old version of you would accuse the new version of being a heretic. This is the same story, just a different face. It’s like changing out the ghost face with a hocky mask or a leather face. Same basic slasher in a nutshell. You were confident and now you’re not so confident but you’ll become confident again and then you’ll open up a new door and be in a new room with its new challenges.

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Yes, certainly.

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Thanks, Skov for that vivid illustration of your point.

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Hi, @MychaAshlee. It’s nice to meet you. This is your first day posting, and this is my first time posting in a few years. I’m not even sure how long it’s been, but today I received an unexpected email from BioLogos to welcome me and thank me for subscribing (odd, since I first signed up in 2017 and never deactivated my account). So I thought maybe I should visit and see what’s up. (I always try to listen to the nudges I receive.)

I have a very different background from yours, but, like you, I’ve decided to set myself down in the Anglican camp, where I don’t have to yield either my trust in science or my trust in God.

I just wanted to say that it’s really hard work to question everything you’ve been taught (especially since your brain has to do all that network rewiring it doesn’t want to do), but there’s probably no better way to close the gap between you and God. You’re wondering how to reconcile it, and to that I would say it’s a journey that will take you up and down and back and forth until you either decide to stop trying or you draw your last breath. It’s worth it, though, to try, especially if you can find others to share the questioms with.

There’s the “Big Pattern” of evolution on Earth (which involves all life here), and there’s the individual pattern of evolution, which is just as important to God as the “Big Pattern.” This is a challenging thing to accept when so many theological doctrines try to undermine your sense of being worthy in God’s heart and mind.

I hope the members of BioLogos will be able to help you sort out your valid and meaningful questions.

God bless,
Jen

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I regard it as an artist spending long amounts of time filling most of the canvas until he gets to a very special spot. It isn’t “sitting back”, it’s setting the stage.

“Myth” is a literary category and it doesn’t mean “fiction”. I prefer to call the stories “mythologized” to make the point that they are built around truth but have poetic and hyperbolic and symbolic and other elements to catch the imagination and make them memorable.

Yes. The worldview back then was not the scientific, materialistic one that dominates out culture (and gave rise to YEC); the importance of a story was not measured by its conformity to scientific and historical ‘facts’ but by who it came from and the status of that source, and it was accepted that truth can be told by authoritative sources using what we would call “made up” stories.

The Gospel does not depend on Genesis for a simple reason: the Bible is not a philosophical treatise out to establish a logical foundation and then build on it, it is a set of stories and other writings given to illustrate the nature of God and His relationship to us. The foundation of the Bible is the Incarnation; Christ is the center on Whom all else depends. We trust the scriptures not because they measure up to some modern scientific standard of truth but because Jesus treated them as having authority.

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I think this distorts God and exaggerates the difference between human beings and the rest of living things. Its like saying God will ignore any plant, cat, or dog in the house and only get involved when a person comes into it. I don’t believe it.

To be sure a baby in the house will certainly grab our attention with the highest priority but a good person will still not ignore the plants and animals. God created the universe and life for a relationship and just because the plants an animals don’t offer the intensity of relationship He can have with human beings doesn’t mean a relationship with the plants and animals will not interest Him.

I think Christianity loses too much. It means too much of what God tells us in those stories will be ignored. I think a far better approach is simply to treat the stories as really happening, while acknowledging that we don’t know all the details. There probably weren’t any magical fruit, talking animals, or a creation of people by magic… but cannot those just be unimportant details. The flood was probably a local flood, but again isn’t that just a detail? I think it is the relationships that matter… the thinking and feelings involved and that is what we should be focusing on to understand what God is communicating in these stories.

Yes. Though what that means exactly is a matter of considerable wrangling and dispute.

Yes, of course. But again I will probably disagree with many regarding what sin really is.

I am not sure what this has to do with whether those stories are mythical or not. I believe sin to consist of self-destructive habits. That is what makes sense of the Bible to me.

I am struggling to understand what it even means to say a teaching is not real. As a physics teacher I can teach you about the concept of electrons and the role they play in chemistry and electronics. If someone says the electrons are not real, it doesn’t make those teachings any less real. Whether electrons are real or not, those explanations of chemistry and electronics remain valid regardless.

Have you actually read it?

I would suggest that the real question is whether you can trust what people tell you the Bible says. And I think the answer is no! You cannot!

As for me, I was not raised Christian. In high school someone asked me what I thought of the Bible and I compared it to fantasy and science fiction books. That has only changed from reading it – from how the teaching in the Bible proved meaningful and helpful for the living of my life. And since for me science has always come first, one of the critical questions has always been whether this book, the Bible, can be meaningful in the context of reality as understood by science.

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Hi @MychaAshlee .

I want to first offer you solidarity. Many of us have left conservative echo chambers and come to realize our previous thoughts on the Bible are problematic. And it’s not only Genesis 1-11. From cover to cover there are questions and problems outlined by critical historians. You are most definitely not alone. I struggle with understanding the Bible, faith and science almost daily. I write and research and write and research and it’s as much for my own edification as for others. As Myron Penner wrote “therapy as well as theory.”

You have a lot of responses and material to sift through already, so rather than directly respond to things I also wanted to maybe offer a different perspective. Marcus Borg wrote several books with interesting titles: “Meeting Jesus again for the first time” and “Reading the Bible again for the first time.” I am not saying to run out and buy these books. But you may need to “read the Bible again for the first time.”

The Bible is a Window to God
Rather than being God or the word of God, the Bible is our chief witness to the Word of God [Jesus]. It is a window that we use to glimpse the Divine on the other side. We look through that window to see what God is like and what He expects of us. We worship God, not the window. David Felten [Living the Questions], “Just because there are smudges, swatted flies, and hairline cracks obstructing our view, we don’t throw the window out. We learn to distinguish between what is part of the window and what is beyond it.” If we believe the Bible was inspired by God we must recognize that the Bible was written for us, but not to us. For example, Galatians is written to “the Church of Galatia” and Paul is “astonished” they are “so quickly deserting” and turning to “another gospel.” This is a situational letter that clearly centers around the problems and needs of the community at that time. It is written for us in so far as we can use it to learn about God, deepen our faith and draw closer to Him.

But inspired doesn’t necessarily mean God dictated or chose every word. He may have simply moved authors to write. Many of us have had this top-down view of the Bible, where it speaks truth and narrates things from God’s perspective. Its very words are literally Gods words and true and binding in all situation. In my mind this is an untenable position through and through. Rather than put our faith in a book, we should put our faith in God. God uses the Biblical narrative, it mediates the sacred. As Dale B Martin wrote:

We may trust scripture to provide what we need for our salvation. We may trust that we can read scripture in prayerful hope that God will speak to us through our reading that text. But ultimately this belief-or, perhaps better put, this stance, attitude, or habitus-is actually an expression of our faith not in a text but in God and the holy spirit. We “leave it up to the holy spirit” to protect us from damnable error in our readings of scripture. We depend on God to keep us with God in our readings of scripture. Properly understood, the doctrine of the infallibility of scripture is a statement less about a text and more about God." [The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-first Century]

In a lot of ways our reading the Bible is like the story of Jacob wrestling with God. A story that if I were honestly asked to wager on the historicity of, I would bet on fiction stemming from belief in ancient river wights. Crossing rivers in the ancient world was certainly a perilous thing. But the story is profoundly true to me. Not because I think a mere mortal actually outmaneuvered God n a wrestling match, but because it speaks to our situation. We have to wrestle with the text of scripture. It did not fall from heaven. Each work was written in a specific time and place to a particular audience addressing specific situations. These are all in worldviews very foreign to our own. This means we need to try to read it in its ancient context. We must figure out what canon to use, reconstruct the text correctly (textual criticism), translate it correctly and then finally interpret it correctly. There is a lot of “human fallibility” that exists in between what is in the Bible and what we think “God says.” At the end of the day my faith is not in a book but a person. I am a Christ-ian, not a Bible-ian. My experiences with God and salvation through the transforming and risen Jesus is why I am a Christian. I believe God spoke and revealed Himself to me as I read the Gospels. They serve his purpose, whether inerrant or not (I think the latter).

I could go on and write a 5,000 page response because your questions are so very near and dear to my heart but I think this suffices for now. Please don’t hesitate to ask questions.

Vinnie

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