Hi, @St.Roymond. I think you may have been directing this post to Mycha rather than me. Just wanted to let you know.
Welcome.
The problem is that the issues have been wrongly defined. The Bible is composed of two parts, the Old Testament (Covenant) and the New Te4stamert (Covenant.) A Covenant is an agreement between two parties which defines the relationship between them.
GOD in particularly through Jesus Christ has invited us to become partners in building GOD’s Kingdom of Love on earth. If we believe that to be true, then that has little to do with science, except GOD does not try to force us into some predetermined designed forms, but works with us to determine what is best for all.
Also. Darwinism teaches that life is conflict with others, while Jesus teaches that life is best lived through love for all. The interdependence of ecology fits into the Christian world view much better than survival of the fittest…
Been there done that…and I am not in grad school! Everyone should be thinking, rethinking, exploring issues…I am not sure, for one thing, that we should assume,—given the theories or speculation or 'current state of knowledge "-- that God was passively watching the Australopithecine
,(sp) evolve on their own, as you seem to wonder…You and I don’t know what God was doing…I have read and considered a number of “explanations” for the Genesis creation account…One argument that seems most sensible is that Genesis1-11 is written to people who lived long ago—millennia before Charles Darwin…they were interested in other issues…not the results of carbon dating, which they had never heard of. God was addressing THEIR concerns…not yours or mine, except to say that a single Creative Deiry— who must be beyond smart, all things considered --worked with intentions, creativity, and sometimes a sense of humor— and is aware of it all. Were God to tell us the full story today, even, it might make our brains explode…We still do not know everything…only God does
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Congratulations on a journey well begun. Having only a bifurcated BA (Math, English) “I am not worthy” sounds correct. That being said I’ve devoted the past three years of retired life to drafting an answer to your specific quandary.
Converting 99 pages to a couple of paragraphs:
Genesis 1:1, 3 declare that I AM cause the Big Bang.
Genesis 1:2 on the other hand grandfathers in the prior pagan cosmology, for the simple reason was those issues of watery beginning and firmament with gates holding up an everlasting supply of rain had nothing to do with the Creator. Genesis presents God who is One (sort of - reference to Spirit brooding over the waters, and let US make man in OUR image) powerful enough to speak the universe into being, intentional since the universe’s purpose was to house US and for us to have dominion. God is pure and holy, wishing us to be the same.
Here’s the sticky part; the Big Bang isn’t something anybody ever conceived of prior to the 20th Century, and it took us into the 21st to commit to a number [13.78 billion ± 20 million years] Our sun is a 4th(ish) generation star, age 5 billon years. All of the planets in the solar system seem to have congealed about 4.5 billion years ago. Life began ~3.8 billion years ago. Evolution is God’s palette, and abiogenesis is the primer coat (so to speak).
This means that every forbear all the way back to that first cell managed to survive and “reproduce” - nobody has a direct ancestor that died an incel, eh? We thus are hypertuned to survive and reproduce.
Greater love hath nobody than to lay down His life for another - Jesus. Every other human is sinful by default.
OK so far? Genesis is, exactly like all other first-roots Beginning Legends, crated with enormous logical holes yet condensing profound notions to the point where Sunday School children get the idea, as well as illiterate ordinary folk. Story’s power is to be crisp, simple, easy to remember, and show a pointed lesson or outcome or result. The Fall is just such. Due to events long before our time, we are born compromised and corrupt.
Final test of Chapter 1: Day Two sets the vault of the sky (firmament) to separate the waters from the waters, with seas left below and vast waters (why is the sky blue? hint hint) above it. Then Day Four places the rest of the visible universe (sun moon stars) crossing the heights of the vault of the sky, thus necessarily beneath all those waters. Creation cannot lie and does not mislead, yet features Planet Earth orbiting the nearest star, with the moon orbiting earth.
Those dots do not connect.
Genesis is truth yet not fact.
Facts have no value until a mind conjures up meaning, importance, and/or consequence.
Truths are believed else they, too, would be fact.
Belief unites us with God. Truth in Genesis is God’s great self-reveal: it is about the Creator desiring us and wanting to relate to us. The Creation itself is fact.
Start there.
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Mycha - I’d be happy to help, having been down the same roads you have (and I too have ended up in the Anglican camp - that is, high church Episcopalian). If you will write to me at roy.a.clouser@gmail.com I will be able to send you some helpful material.
Roy Clouser, Prof Emeritus
The College of New Jersey
A comment on each of the questions you asked:
- I think we must consider the possibility that God did more than watch, that there was occasional direction — just as the Holy Spirit sometimes directs people in the church. Yes, much of the activity and history of the church appears to be evolutionary also, but the activity of prophets and dreams and miracles still occur.
- I think much of the early chapters of Genesis were designed to teach spiritual truths and supplant pagan myths. The first creation story, in addition to replacing pagan myths, tells us we are to care for creation. The second creation story tells us we are to take care of your families. The fact that the two creation stories have different orders and methods of creation tells us they are not to be taken as literal history.
- Certainly humankind has fallen, in that we tend to sin, but a fall with a fruit-eating event is not literal — just as we know that the first two creation stories can not both be literal (since one has man created after plants and animals and the other has man created before plants and animals).
- Sin is real.
- Sin is doing something that harms other people, creatures that God loves.
- It is difficult to say about the Old Testament, yet the gospels are meant to be read as history.
- Yes, you can trust the Bible. That doesn’t mean it is inerrant, but it is reliable.
I hope this helps.
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Not sure if anyone responded to this:
From a comment:
@timhaldeman7285
1 year ago
The song has no title and you won’t find it anywhere but here. That’s because the singer, Ken Medema, actually composed the music and lyrics on the fly. He is blind and has the wonderful gift of listening to someone’s story and then immediately composing a song that captures the heart and theme of the story. The song simply did not exist prior to Pete Enns talking. It came into being only as Ken Medema listened to Enns describing his struggle with doubt. Amazing talent!
he is legally blind from what Insaw elsewhere and another site says he does write songs on the fly.
Walls coming down windows going up! Wonderful song.
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Hi Mycha, (nice name),
The path you have chosen can seem a little scary some times, but many people have taken it and ended up with a stronger and broader faith that encompasses science and faith without contradiction.
Stepping outside of your Fundamentalist beginnings is a first step, but you will need to replace that with a supportive faith community and a lot more information. Mainstream Christianity, as distinct from Fundamentalism, should be able to provide that. However, I am not sure what you mean when you say that an Anglican affiliation has opened up more doubt in your mind. If you can explain what you mean, others may able to be helpful.
Generally speaking, faith is not held in the absence of doubt, but in the face of it. It sometimes helps to know that those who don’t believe in a God are also involved in an act of faith. What if they are wrong?
When it comes to Biblical literature, the same phenomena occur as in English language and literature (and other languages, of course). Literature takes different forms and is meant to be read in different ways. When the author of the poem, “The Highway Man”, states “the Moon was a ghostly galleon …”, he wasn’t suggesting that Earth’s natural satellite was made of wood. In the same way, there are different genres of literature in the Bible, and they are not all meant to be read as if they were to be taken literally. Coming to terms with that requires gaining a familiarity with other literature that is contemporaneous with the Biblical literature, such as the Mesopotamian creation stories. We cannot assume that the genres of an ancient literature were exactly the same as those in English today. This brings us to a discussion of things like “myth”. What do we mean by the word “myth”. Unfortunately, there are two different meanings of the word “myth”. In common usage the word “myth” often means something is false or untrue. Like the saying, “today’s medical facts are tomorrow’s medical myths”. However, a technical meaning of the word “myth” is of a story that conveys the values of the society which created it. It should be approached in the way an indigenous person once said of his people’s stories, “I don’t know whether this story actually happened, but I know that it is true.” Obviously the truth conveyed here is not a literal truth, but a real and important one, nevertheless.
However, with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in science under your belt, and doctoral studies in science underway, I’d suggest that you approach things from the scientific side, rather than the theological. An interesting resource person for you might be Alister McGrath. McGrath was an atheist who commenced doctoral studies in biology and his studies converted him to faith in Christ. He went on to gain three earned doctorates and is a prolific writer in the field of science and faith. He became an Anglican clergyman in a country in which the Anglican Church is still called the “Church of England”. (England!)
It helps to know that science has always played an important role in mainstream Christianity – a fact about which Fundamentalism has been blissfully unaware. Science used to be called “Natural Philosophy”, and since in Christian thought God is the Creator of Nature, the study of Nature has for centuries been seen as a source of revelation about God. The study of “Natural Philosophy” gave rise to the study of “Natural Theology”. This gave rise centuries ago to the theology of the Two Books – the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. And Christians have for the past two millennia argued about the relationship between the two “Books”!
I read The Language of God and didn’t get a lot out of it. McGrath’s books have been more helpful to me: Darwinism and the Divine. Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology; takes an historical approach and helps one to avoid the mistakes of the past in thinking through this field of thought. The Open Secret. A New Vision for Natural Theology; is another worthy of your time. See McGraths website here: https://alistermcgrath.org/
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Like you, I’ve found McGrath’s books helpful. In addition to his theology books, I have a 3-volume set of his young adult fantasy novels (with Christian themes, of course). He’s a versatile fellow, indeed.
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That’s a good point – it would be useful to know. I basically breezed past it assuming it referred to the Anglican lack of insistence on how to read the opening of Genesis.
Yes. And it should be noted that it is not possible to tell what genre a given section is from reading it in English, especially since they had genres that aren’t found in English literature.
That’s a superb statement of how the ancient near east viewed stories about divine matters.
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It is also a very good description of Jesus’ parables (except of course that we know the events in the parables didn’t actually happen).
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I have read this book recently. He is a great man. However, to my opinion, it’s an omission that he doesn’t address the Intelligent Design Movement. In fact, for me his natural theology is superficial.
But I admit, I didn’t make the move from ID to TE yet. I am biologist and I see irreducible complexity everywhere I look in biology. The deeper you dig, the more complex. And that makes me curious about christian biologists that changed their minds.
My question to Mycha is: what made you to dismiss ID and accept TE?
Mycha. You are not alone. Faith implies that knowledge is not complete there remains always some doubt. Otherwise we would not call it faith. However, faith becomes belief and hope. We can never be fully certain but have made a decision to follow the belief.
I this regard I wrote my first book To Know with Certainty because in John 17:7 in his prayer to his father, Jesus said that his disciples know with certainty concerninhg Him. So I set out to find the evidence that we would know with certainty as well. Believe me, there is plenty.
You mentioined Genesis 1-6. I am just finishing my latest book Reflections on Genesis that aligns the evidence from science with the Genesis narrative of events. There is an amazing correlation that I believe removes any mythological label from Genesis to one of these events really happened. FYI I am an old earth creationist but always guided by the fact that the Bible tells us what God did and science tells us how He did it. Wish I had more time and space to explain.
Lastly evolution properly explained does not discount God as creator and the originator of man. Just stay away from positions that flatly promote evolution over creation when in fact evolution may be the process for creation. Also realize that evolution is not without its faults as science is beginning to show.
I too enjoyed the Language of God many years ago. The Genetic code itself speaks to an intelligent designer.
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I moved the discussion of the one vs two creation stories in Genesis to a new topic as it is has strayed from the intent of this post onto tangents.
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Welcome to the forum. I am a scientist who has also struggled with my faith in the “truth” of the Bible. I have come to realize that all translations of the original Hebrew text have been literal translations. When the Bible talks about the creation, in particular, it poses a unique problem. Scientists do not translate the data from the natural world literally. They translate it epistemically. In order to make a valid comparison between the biblical account of creation and what the creation itself tells us, they must be given the same form of translation. If we apply an epistemic translation to Genesis 1:1-2, it says, ‘In the beginning God created space and matter, and the matter was without form and void. And darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was vibrating over the fluid matter’. While the biblical creation story may be literal nonsense, it is epistemic brilliance. It gives the Bible a unique credibility. Words and their meaning are a human creation but we had nothing to do with the creation of the natural world. Limiting God to a literal translation of words is putting human limitations on God. There is more to the epistemic translation of scripture, but this is an important example. It may be useful to recognize that all scriptural and philosophical writings are ‘Opinion Literature’ that will primarily appeal to those who have an aptitude for that opinion. Truth is the opinion that you have a passion to believe.
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Thank you for what you have shared.
I often think of life as rather like crossing a river on stepping stones. There are times of apparent safety and stability (when we are standing on a stone) followed by times of instability, doubt and fear (when we put out our foot to reach the next stone.)
I do not have all the answers but personally I did it find helpful to read Melvin Tinker’s book Reclaiming Genesis : A scientific story - or the theatre of God’s glory?
Some of the talks by John Lennox (Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University) have also been helpful. These are available on YouTube.
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@MychaAshlee - humanist with a slight Quaker streak here (unfortunately, most questionnaires asking about religion don’t have an option for “it’s complicated” 
)
All joking aside, I’ve just read a transcript of a lecture by the Quaker Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell called “A Quaker Astronomer Reflects: can a scientist also be religious?”. Here’s a quote from it that I think may help with your predicament:
“Some consider doubt a weakness, but for me it is far healthier than certainty, although it does need to be seen as something open and flexible, not disabling. As has often been said, certainty rather than doubt is the opposite of faith.” Hope this helps.
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(I think fear is the opposite of faith, when we are told we have a trustworthy Father, and it is what Jesus reprimanded the disciples for when he calmed the storm on Galilee.)
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