I went into great detail in order to answer Mike Gantt’s questions—but other readers may want to save time by skimming to the bold-faced portions of my post for the major ideas.
[quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:20, topic:36078”]
To name some obvious ones:
- Evolution says “creation” is still taking place; Genesis says it’s over.
- Evolution say “creation” is one continuous process; Genesis says it was a multi-stage process.
- Evolution says all living things have a single ancestor; Genesis says living things have distinct and differentiated ancestors.
I don’t see how any of these truth claim conflicts are removed by merely saying that Genesis should be interpreted figuratively.[/quote]
I appreciate your honest struggling with these issues. First, I would note that just the way you frame the question starts you off on the wrong foot. Immediately, what “Evolution says” and what “Genesis says” are set in opposition. Instead, look at the text of Genesis 2:2-3. What is its main focus? Look at the repetition of “seventh day” and ceasing from “work.” The author is intent on establishing the pattern of six days of work and Sabbath rest in imitation of God and according to the Sinai covenant. Now, some theologians have inferred from Gen. 2:2-3 that God ceased creating/working after Day 6, but this runs into John 5:17 – “My Father is working until now, and I too am working.” In fact, there are theologians who support the idea of “continuous creation,” in that God’s sustaining and providing for the creation is a continuous act of creation. Consider also Job 31:15, and the fact that we believe God made and created each of us individually, despite the fact that we can explain the process in physical terms, too. In this case, “Genesis says it’s over” is an oversimplification of the Biblical data. For a similar idea, consider that “Adam” still has not completed its task of naming all the animals. (I hear somewhere that ichthyologists are actually running out of names, if that’s even possible!)
Likewise, your second point is not quite so clear-cut as it seems. I can look at a continuous process, such as a child growing from infancy to adulthood, and define many “stages” to it. I can even look at the continuous process of evolution and define it by the same stages as Genesis uses: the appearance of plant life, the appearance of life in the sea, the appearance of life on land, the appearance of birds, and, lastly, the appearance of mankind. Honestly, this sounds like an anti-evolution polemic that actually has little to do with the text of Genesis. It’s certainly not a conclusion that seems to flow from the text itself.
On your third point, it’s once again not so obvious. Genesis 1 says nothing of “distinct and differentiated ancestors.” That is placing a far more restricted interpretation on “according to their kinds” than the phrase requires. Certainly, it can be read that way, but must it be read that way? Even conservative commentators on Genesis differ on that point, so I would suggest it is not the hill to plant your flag and die on. (Figuratively speaking. haha)
Again, not so clear-cut as has been supposed. The NT authors used a hermeneutic similar to the Patristic interpreters, in that they usually had two interpretations of a particular passage – a literal understanding, and a figurative (typological) understanding. They considered both “valid,” and did not confine themselves to the idea that there was only one proper interpretation of any particular passage. For example, consider Paul’s treatment of Sarah and Hagar in Galatians, or his discussion of the rock the Israelites drank from in 1 Cor. 10. We demand either literal or figurative, but the earliest Christians did not. Perhaps they were right?
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Amen. Anyone who has traced the Hebrew word for KIND (MIN) through the OT soon realizes that it doesn’t (and can’t) pertain to some strict taxonomic term or classification. Ken Ham says that it is usually a taxonomic family—but AIG literature seems to vary from treating it as a species (when convenient) and even an entire taxonomic domain! (e.g., “That’s not evolution from one kind to another! The bacteria is still a bacteria!” There are so many things wrong with those statements that I won’t even try to tackle them here.) In ancient Hebrew, a MIN (kind) was simply a convenient, layperson’s label for “some type of animal”. Thus, when speaking of various unclean animals, “each according to its kind”, raptor types of birds which we would consider closely related species were called “different MIN” in the Pentateuch.
Indeed, “all kinds of animals” in Hebrew was a way to refer to black kinds of birds and white kinds of birds, wild kinds of animals and tame kinds of animals. We use “kind” in English in similar ways: “My neighbor has all kinds of tools in his garage.” Nobody would assume that my neighbor has LITERALLY all of the types of tools which exist on the planet—even if I said he has “every kind of tool in his garage.” We could just as easily say, “He has all sorts of tools in his garage.” The English usages of words like “kind”, “type”, “sort”, and “category” can be very similar to how the ancient Hebrews used the word MIN.
For this reason, I’m inclined to think that Noah was told to take “all sorts of animals” into the ark which were familiar to him in his area. (After all, when pilgrims prepare for life in a new place, they commonly take along a lot of the animals in order to make a new start.)
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I wish I had the answer key. 
I think more in terms of: Is this interpretation more or less plausible? Is it more or less internally coherent? Does it more or less take into consideration what we know from linguistics, archaeology, and comparative lit studies? If it requires reworking traditional understandings of doctrine, is the result more or less acceptable? Is it more or less exegetically responsible (does it deal with everything there, does it dismiss parts out of hand, does it take into consideration other relevant Scripture)? So, I don’t know if Walton is correct, but I think his interpretation is preferable to a lot of others I’ve seen for being on the “more” end of the continuum for those criteria.
There are other interpretations and focuses I also think are good and bring important things to the table.
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Honestly find the account quite compatible.
The land and sea gave forth plants and animals of many kinds.
Adam is formed from the dust of the earth, and then God breathes the breath of life into him.
It could have said…
God poofed plants in animals into existence out of nothing and confined them to only reproduce after their own kind.
God poofed Adam into existence in a sudden instant, starting from nothing.
But Genesis did not say this, despite what you may have heard. Got no problems with the text of Gensesis, but I do wonder about the anti-evolutionism in our interpretations.
So I suppose I just read it differently than you, and I do not (by the way) see it as figurative. I think God by His grace gave us an account that is entirely compatible with evolution, even though we are an anti-evolutionist people.
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Have you heard of Creatio Continua? This the historic doctrine of God’s continual acts of creation.
Well Evolution is a multistage process!
Where does it tell us this in Genesis? I did not read that anywhere.
You might want to look at my book, Genesis Revealed. You can access most of it for free in Google Books. I think that the specific events described in Genesis 1 have corresponding events in natural history (and unnatural history)
I appreciate you posting your book in here. I am not sure about the idea that ‘scientific truth has approached the truth of Genesis’ which is evidence that ‘Genesis is absolute truth.’ Especially given the eye squinting that needs to occur with some of the text and pseudoscientific claims like mammals were created supernaturally and then allowed to evolve. Maybe @Mike_Gantt will like your book though.
Also, photosynthetic organisms arose long before the land and the sea were separated but if you are inferring that the separation of the land and sea was not actually the rise of continents then I suppose you are fine. I am glad for you personally but your scientific concordism seems pretty crazy to me. You clearly know more about the Hebrew language than me which I can respect but at the same time, the exact meaning seems to be chosen after you want the text to say. In other words, like Hugh Ross who claims the Bible taught the Big Bang first - you also have a general idea in your mind about how the Earth came into being (which is remarkable enough via only natural mechanisms - like this book on Amazon (A Most Improbable Journey: A Big History of Our Planet and Ourselves)). Your mind starts piecing things together like this (taken from Sean Carrol’s The Big Picture and his Planets of Belief chapter)-
Either way, it’s an impressive work to me and you may be right! In some sense I wish I had your conviction over the text of Genesis and modern science. I was reminded of Andrew Parker’s The Genesis Enigma which has a much less Hebrew in it but he also was blown away by finding modern science in Genesis (albeit a different concord than yours).
Thank you all very much for the abundance of comments that were made yesterday. I say “abundance” meaning not just the number, but also the meatiness of what you had to say. It will take me a while to respond to all of them. There are books and websites to check out, various rationales and arguments to consider, and so on. You’ve given me a lot to chew on. I am not, by the way, asking you to slow down the responses. I hope they keep coming.
The software of this forum advises me to make general responses (as I am doing here) more than individual ones. However, I do plan to individually respond to each of you. I think you deserve individual responses because, among other reasons, your comments are so different from each other. In fact, the variety of your positions is so great, I can’t help perceiving the Biologos view of the harmony between science and the Bible as based not on agreement about what the Bible says about evolution, if it says anything at all about it, but rather based on what it does not say. In other words, the people here who profess belief in evolution and the Bible seem united not by an interpretation of the Bible but rather by a non-interpretation of the Bible.
I do not mean by this that none of you believes that the Bible speaks to this issue, but that you interpret what it does say (I’m speaking primarily but not exclusively of the Genesis creation narrative) in so many different ways. And even some individuals among you are open to more than one interpretation. Thus the openness to multiple Bible interpretations exists not just in the group but also in many of the individuals in the group. Therefore, it seems to me at this point, BioLogos adherents are united less by what they think the Bible says but more by what they think the Bible does not say. To be specific, I get the sense that you don’t care so much which interpretation of the Bible a person holds just so long as that interpretation doesn’t deny evolution.
My preliminary and tentative conclusion at this intermediate stage of my project, therefore, is that commitment to an interpretation of nature (evolution) rather than a commitment to an interpretation of the Bible is the reason that my initial request at the launch of this topic has proven so hard to fulfill.
I hasten to add, however, that even in my initial review of your latest responses (and perhaps a few of your earlier ones) some of you actually do specify a conviction about a particular interpretation of the Bible that you carry as strongly as you do your interpretation of the natural world. As promised, I will work through all these.
In the meantime, I hope you as a group will consider what it might mean that the harmony BioLogos sees between science and the Bible seems to be based on a uniform interpretation of what science is saying about creation (i.e. evolution) and a non-uniform interpretation of what the Bible is saying about the same subject - an ostensibly asymmetrical yoking.
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Actually, @Swamidass, all of those quoted statements belong to @Mike_Gantt, not me. I was responding to him in post #33.
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You can ignore the computer overlords if they seem to be giving bad advice.
Part of this assymetry you observe is because science and theology/Bible scholarship are very different ways of arriving at truth. Although I don’t think any human knowledge is free from the subjective biases of our worldviews and conceptual frames, some kinds of knowledge more closely approach objectivity. Much of the “truth” claimed by the evolutionary model can be verified by calculations and those calculations can be cross-checked using various methods. So that gives a different degree of certainty of “correctness” than when you are trying to recreate an ancient cultural context in order to understand a divinely mediated human communication (or a humanly mediated divine communication?) to a different audience in a language no one speaks anymore. You can’t cross check your exegesis with math. So I don’t think what you are observing is indicative of anyone intentionally prioritizing science over theology and going from there. It’s more just a reflection of the different kinds of knowledge we are working with.
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Thanks for your insightful analysis of my book. I can understand your hesitation about my statement that scientific truth has approached absolute truth (the Bible). It appears that I make this statement based on my subjective adjustment of Guyot’s interpretation and thus I am subjectively fulfilling my own desire for concordism. However, the sequence was different from that. I wrote a book (Designed to Evolve) and attempted to copyright it many years ago, before I had ever heard of Guyot or his concordist interpretation. I had only heard of Hugh Ross, and while I have great respect for Hugh, I didn’t agree with many of Hugh’s interpretations; however, when I compared my interpretation with Guyot’s, the same interpretation was better 130 years after Guyot.
You make the point that it is pseudoscientific to claim that mammals were created and then allowed to evolve. Maybe if I explain my philosophy, then it will make more sense. My philosophy is “directed evolution,” which is that God designed natural processes to evolve in a certain direction (strong anthropic principle) but that God also steps in adjusts the natural direction of evolution if it is not proceeding in the direction that God desires. For example, 65 million years ago (65 Ma), the earth was ruled by the dinosaurs, and there were no placental mammals. Mammals would never have never evolved to become humans or any of the other placental mammals that we all know and love. You can believe it was divinely orchestrated or not, but an asteroid 65 Ma hit the earth and killed all the large dinosaurs and most of every other species on earth. This allowed the placental mammals to evolve. According to the directed evolution perspective, God adjusted the bioreactor and eliminated the dinosaurs so that placental mammals could evolve. My belief is God also adjusted mammal DNA at that time in order to create certain placental mammal characteristics such as two or three orifices, divided brain, etc… I would not adamantly argue for this, but there is a major problem with the molecular clock and the origin of placental mammals. According to my philosophy of directed evolution, if an adjustment needed to be made to placental mammal DNA in order to result in the animals that we all know and love, then God would be free to make this change.
You are correct that photosynthetic organisms needed to appear after the continents, but I don’t see a problem with this. Photosynthetic organisms arose after the Late Heavy Bombardment ended 3.85 billion years ago (Ga). There is much debate about the intensity and timing of the Late Heavy Bombardment, but many models have it causing a molten surface of the earth or at least causing molten regions of the earth. I think that most geologists agree that the type of continents and seas with plate tectonics that we have today were not established until the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment. The first possible fossil (chemical and microbial mats) evidence of photosynthetic life is 3.83 Ga, but these fossils are very controversial.
I looked up the book you referred to but it was written by Walter Alvarez, and I didn’t see the chapter title inside the book. Is this the astronomer Sean Carrol or the biologist Sean Carrol that you are referring to?
I was reading an article by William Dembski the other day and came across this:
As Phillip Johnson has rightly observed, science is the only universally valid form of knowledge within our culture.
Whether or not you would agree with Johnson on this point, I do not know. However, what you write here (e.g. “some kinds of knowledge more closely approach objectivity”) certainly leans that direction. I don’t share the view because I don’t think the matter is that simple. For example, I don’t think scientific knowledge more closely approaches objectivity than biblical knowledge. Rather, I think that some scientific facts lend themselves more readily to certainty than others (e.g. the results of a properly-controlled experiment versus a complex theory). Likewise, I think that some biblical facts lend themselves more readily to certainty than others (e.g. “Jesus is Lord” versus the identity of “666”). To say, therefore, that scientific knowledge overall lends itself more readily to certainty than does biblical knowledge strikes me as a muddying of the water.
It is clear to me that your degree of certainty about evolution is so great that all that is necessary for you to reconcile it with the Bible is to know that there are viable biblical interpretive options available to you. You don’t even need to exercise one of the options. In fact, it seems best to you to leave all the good ones on the table, drawing the best from each while resisting any negative aspects. As for why this approach will not work for me, I refer you back to the post I wrote above at the launch of this topic.
Thanks for trying to help, but you and I just have different ideas of what it means to “reconcile the Bible and evolution.”
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Thanks for your posts.
Please tell me more. I thought YEC people were the only ones who took Genesis 1-2 non-figuratively.
No, but I read the article to which you linked, and I’d have to say it flies in the face of Genesis 2:1-3.[quote=“Swamidass, post:38, topic:36078”]
Evolution is a multistage process!
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I thought evolution was survival of the fittest by random mutation and natural selection. (Go easy on me here, as I am neither a scientist nor the son of a scientist.) What stage includes more essentials than this? What stage includes less?
The original air and water creatures came on day five. Land animals and humans came on day six. I thought evolution taught a common ancestor for all living things.
I hear you saying that you have a non-figurative interpretation of Genesis 1-2 that you believe is compatible with evolution. Could you please explain it to me in nutshell fashion?
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Thanks for jumping in. I began your book over on Amazon, but I am afraid it is too scientific for me to comprehend.
You see, I am very much a layman when it comes to science. My ignorance of the field knows no bounds. You might then ask, how do you ever expect to resolve your questions about evolution? Well, I would not be concerned at all about the issue except that as it is popularly understood, it makes claims about history that contradict my understanding of the Bible. By “history” I mean how we and the universe of which we are a part came to be. I am willing to have my understanding of the Bible changed so that it is not in conflict with evolution’s historical claims (or, you could say, truth claims), but it’s got to be an interpretation that makes sense to me. That’s what I’m searching for. Your interpretation might indeed make sense to me, but I lack the vocabulary and education to understand what you are saying. Thanks just the same.
Hello @Mike_Gantt, thanks for your thoughtful engagement here. I see you are trying to understand people who are different, not just win an argument. That is a great example for everyone. Thank you.
This article is a helpful summary that shows how some look at this.
I should add that most OEC are literalists, see reasons to believe http://www.reasons.org/. Hugh Ross actually affirms the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy that insists on a literal interpretation wherever possible. I’d also point out that most YECs take the seventh day “figuratively” as an age of time, not a 24 hour day. Also leading TE scholars like @JohnWalton and Dennis Alexander affirm that Adam and Eve are real figures in our past and the Fall was a real event. They are not talking of a figurative couple or fall.
Literal vs. figurative is not really a clean distinction between YEC, OEC, and TE.
I suppose you disagree with traditional interpretations of Scripture then. There is long theological history, totally predating evolution of God’s continual work of creation. This is rooted, for example, in God work to complete his work in us. Or to make us into a “new creation.” God clearly continues to create things in this world. You might also appreciate @Jon_Garvey’s several posts on this topic: Conceiving creatio continua via Genesis 1 | The Hump of the Camel
To be clear, this is the traditional interpretation and theology of our shared faith. None of this is invented as a response to evolution, but rather it springs from a full reading of Scripture.[quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:46, topic:36078”]
I thought evolution was survival of the fittest by random mutation and natural selection. (Go easy on me here, as I am neither a scientist nor the son of a scientist.) What stage includes more essentials than this? What stage includes less?
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Without going down the rabbit hole, I’ll just say you’ve been misled about the mechanism of evolution. There is a whole lot more to it than this. Setting that aside, the history of evolution on earth has stages
The image at the top is a good view of this. We see eras and ages in the history of life here. The story for the evolution of human is similar.
There are stages. Each era enables the next.
The order changes in Genesis 1 vs. 2, so that is a clear indicator that the specific order is not the message. See here for a comparison: 2 Biblical Stories of Creation There is debate if Genesis 1 and 2 are in parallel or in sequence, but this should make clear that the ordering is not a simple as one things from reading YEC creationism. For what it’s worth, RTB and Hugh Ross map out parallels between Genesis and the history of life, though I am not convinced the purpose here is to give us a clear chronology.
Evolution does teach a common ancestor of most living things. I see God asking the land and see to create many kinds in Scripture. In the Scriptural account, they all share common ancestry in the dust. The kinds are created by a process of evolution.
To what I have already explained, I will add that I affirm that Genesis tells us real story about Adam and Eve, two people from whom we all descend. Their Fall that brings death to all mankind, including us. I’ve done a lot of work to show that this is compatible with the evolutionary story, even if they lived as recently as less than 10,000 years ago:
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Joshua, while I accept your explanation of a genealogical Adam and Eve as plausible and in fact lean toward it in my personal belief, I wonder about one aspect. You state that all living humans can easily have Adam as a genealogical ancestor, but it would still take quite a few generations for that to occur. What about the people who lived and died without being in his genealogy? Any difference for them, or do we just live in the mystery? Any speculation?
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Thanks.
I am aware of these arguments against a completed creation, but I have not found them persuasive. I am not suggesting that God’s been a ne’er-do-well or a Deist since creation, but rather that all He has done since then has been the outworking of a completed creation, not the ongoing work of an unfinished creation. Genesis 2:1-3 is too pronounced to mean nothing. It might be figurative, but a figure has to mean something. If it doesn’t speak to completion in some sense, then I don’t have any hope of ever understanding the Bible.[quote=“Jay313, post:34, topic:36078”]
Likewise, your second point is not quite so clear-cut as it seems. I can look at a continuous process, such as a child growing from infancy to adulthood, and define many “stages” to it. I can even look at the continuous process of evolution and define it by the same stages as Genesis uses: the appearance of plant life, the appearance of life in the sea, the appearance of life on land, the appearance of birds, and, lastly, the appearance of mankind. Honestly, this sounds like an anti-evolution polemic that actually has little to do with the text of Genesis. It’s certainly not a conclusion that seems to flow from the text itself.
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Your criticism of me on this point was sharp (“anti-evolution polemic”) so I went back and re-read Genesis 1 to test its merit. What I find in the text is a heavily-punctuated narrative: “And there was evening and morning, one day” and so on. Yes, we may assign stages of growth to a human being, but such assignments are arbitrary and hardly punctuated at all. Even if one regards the days as ages, you still
have to ask yourself, “Why is the text drawing such sharp distinctions between one set of activities and another?” Indeed, the separated and differentiated stages do flow from the text.
I honestly cannot figure out how to read Genesis 1 and arrive at common ancestry. If you say you can, I believe you; I just can’t understand how you think. Help me figure out how to think like you do.
I have not contrived these three conflicts I have spelled out. They are ones that stare me in the face when I consider the subject of the Bible and evolution. I am asking for help to resolve them. What you seem to be offering is not a way to reconcile them, but simply a declaration that I have imagined conflicts between the text and evolution which do not exist. If that’s the route I have to take, it’s one that makes me feel like I’m being asked to deny reality.
Mike, I suspect you are just being modest about your science knowledge, but in reflecting on how my understanding of evolution developed, the base of my understanding was seeing the evidence of an ancient earth. Some of that reLization was from looking at fossils, but other independent lines of reasoning from erosion patterns, geologic formations and layers, and astronomical observations all led to the same conclusion of an ancient creation.
Once I came to accept an ancient earth, it then became necessary to reconcile that with the God of truth, believing that all truth is God’s truth. That of course leads to examining how you look at scripture and how that affects your theology. From there, evolution just…evolves.
Phil,
If you were to consult with my junior high science teachers (who were the last science teachers to have to endure me) they could assure you that none of my modesty on this subject is false.
Thanks for the outline of your own progression in thinking. May I ask when and how your view of Noah’s Flood was affected by this progression?