While you have probably run across it on the site, N. T. Wright’s talk at the Biologos conference used the example of how the gospel is spread and compared it to evolution. It certainly does not reconcile it in a fact based way, but does find common ground conceptually.
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Just a thought but here goes. Evolution says all living things have a common ancestor but as life developes you reach a point where there are many different forms of life that are different from each other. You could even call them kinds. This is where Genesis comes in. Genesis just doesn’t address the time before the set of differentiated ancestors.
So, what did you find objectionably about Walton’s distinction between functional and material creation? In that model, the seventh day does not refer to a ceasing of making things but to taking up official rule in the newly ordained sacred space of the earth. There is pretty good support from ANE scholarship as well as consensus among OT scholars that ANE origin narratives and temple inauguration narratives were tied together. There are also parallels between the biblical creation narrative and aspects of the establishment of the tabernacle (see here for example)
Evolution actually supports the idea that everything reproduces according to their kind. Dogs have baby dogs. Orange trees produce oranges.
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@jpm (Phil),
Thanks; I had not seen this. I just now watched the 4-minute clip twice as well as the entire 30-minute talk to make sure I gave it due attention.
Generally speaking, I found Wright edifying…as usual. I’ve always liked him, even though the breadth of his scholarship has always been too great for me to fully appreciate. However, as to the point of our discussion here I did not find him succeeding at the attempt he was making - that is, his attempt to portray the spread of the gospel as analogous to evolution.
In the first place, his reference to Jesus’ parables of the kingdom demonstrate just how easy it would have been for God to inspire a creation account that did not clash with evolution. And while the Genesis creation account (with its prominent references to seed and fruit) lay a good foundation for Jesus’ kingdom parables, the reverse is not true. That is, to say that creation was like seeds sown, in all the ways that Wright drew from the kingdom parables, conflicts with the creation account in Genesis 1-2 (which show God producing finished products with seeds in them, rather than seeds which someday will turn into finished products).
The second problem with what Wright was attempting to do is that evolution is like a seed-to-harvest in only the most limited way. Any sustained comparison of these two growth paradigms reveals sooner rather than later that their differences overshadow any similarities. For example, a seed progresses to a fruit than can be known ahead of time while growth by evolution leads to who knows what. For another example, mutation is an aberration for the seed-to-fruit but a necessary step in the evolutionary process. This is one of the biggest struggles I have with trying to reconcile evolution with the Bible…and it sits outside of the Genesis creation account issue we have been focused on so far.
By “biggest struggle” I mean that the overarching paradigm for God-given growth is growth to maturity (i.e. seedtime and harvest) while the overarching paradigm for growth in evolution is survival of the fittest by random mutation and natural selection. These two paradigms are radically dissimilar. It’s like comparing the growth of a human body to the growth of a cancer. The first represents growth to maturity; the second is growth without restraint or conclusion. When the Bible calls us to “know God’s ways,” which way is it?
I think, once again, that the weight of scientific evidence for evolution is considered so heavy that Wright can convince himself and his audience of compatibility with the Bible by means of a minimum of biblical analysis and argument. The similarities between the spread of the gospel and evolution that he cites are scant and superficial, but no one seems to care.
Thanks for the suggestion but since Genesis frames its account as what happened “in the beginning” I don’t know how to conceive of it as an account of things that happened long after the beginning.
I accept the similarities of ANE origin narratives and temple inauguration narratives. I also accept the linkage between the biblical creation narrative and the establishment of the tabernacle. However, I do not see these parallels eliminate the truth claim conflicts between evolution and the biblical creation account that I enumerated in part for you above.
As for Walton, he seems to me to be making a distinction without a difference. Yes, we can view the Genesis narrative as a temple inauguration account - but the temple in view is God’s creation, so the presence of a temple inauguration narrative does not equate to the elimination of a creation narrative. In fact, the creation would be the whole point - that is, creation is God’s temple.
Evolution actually supports the idea that everything reproduces according to their kind. Dogs have baby dogs. Orange trees produce oranges.
I can see how evolution can be consistent with the idea that dogs have baby dogs and that orange trees produce oranges, but I do not see how it “supports” those dynamics. In evolution, those outcomes could only be guaranteed in the short term. Long term, anything’s possible because of random mutation and natural selection.
You don’t see any difference between functional and material origins?
Of course. I just don’t see how Walton’s identification of a functional perspective requires the material perspective to be ignored.
I don’t think he’s ignoring it so much as saying the how and when of material origins are not a concern of the original audience or author of Genesis, so we aren’t going to learn any details about it from Genesis. Material creation is presumed to be created by God. What they really cared about was the assigned functions.
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Does this mean you believe Walton’s interpretation of the Genesis creation account is the correct one?
The simple statement that God created the heavens and the earth “in the beginning” doesn’t mean “at the same time”. As Churchill famously said, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Beginning doesn’t always refer to a point in time but can refer to a period of time. In this case the period is just 4.543 billion years for the earth, 13.82 billion years for the heavens.
You bring up some good points, and my take away is that like most analogies, if you take them too far, they break down, but are sometimes helpful in making difficult concepts understandable.
On the surface, this seems a reasonable statement, but if you look at the cultural setting, such a writing might well have been disruptive and most importantly would have taken away from the message God was trying to communicate. I could see how a story regarding heliocentrism and the earth spinning in empty space at a thousand miles per hour would have been bewildering to the original audience, and the underlying message of God as creator and the relationships we have to him and one another and to creation would be either pushed aside or laughed at and ignored. Evolution would be seen the same way.
This seems to confirm that in neither case is Genesis or Jesus talking in scientific terms, but rather in ways that the audience was very familiar with, and could relate to. We tend to want to read science into the text, but ultimately, both speak to the life and times of the audience. [quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:25, topic:36078”]
a seed progresses to a fruit than can be known ahead of time while growth by evolution leads to who knows what.
[/quote]
In this day of hybridization of plants, the seeds may grow “who knows what” also. I have found that growing volunteer tomato plants sprouting from last years tomatoes is pretty much an exercise in futility, and should be done for fun rather than for food. As to evolution, I think most of us around here would agree that God guides and sustains and is the “Who” in “who knows what.” Exactly how that happens is a mystery that has been discussed elsewhere (and still remains.)
Your comments and observations are certainly thoughtful and interesting. Thanks for sharing!
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Why? Because chronology wasn’t something they were worried about. As I mentioned, the Hebrew language doesn’t even have our type of past/present/future tense inflection verb inflection system! (I intentionally and whimsically worded that statement to express the beginning Hebrew student’s typical frustration with a language and culture which doesn’t share our priorities----and doesn’t necessarily consider chronological order and time spans central to a descriptive text.)
I understand your frustration. Why don’t other cultures share our priorities? To us, it seems obvious that a creation account should tell us how long ago or how long it took. It is very frustrating for us to notice that the text speaks of DAYS (YOM) well before the Day #4 when the sun appears. And how can there be evenings and mornings before there is a sun? How is that conceivably possible? Was the author of Genesis 1 sloppy about chronology? Indeed, let’s look at YOM #4:
14Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years;
The text says that one of the purposes of the creation of the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies is for the reckoning the units of time: the years, the seasons, and the days!
Yet, Genesis 1 describes days 1 through 3 even before the sun defined a day on day #4. It speaks of evenings and mornings even before there was a sun to give evening and morning any meaning.
Any good commentary on Genesis will discuss what—to us—seem like major self-contradictions within the text. And the evening/morning and day problem is only the beginning of several obvious chronology problems. (Plants appeared before the sun existed.) Were the ancient Hebrews low on common sense? Why didn’t they resolve and reshuffle the text in order to avoid these problems and satisfy our chronology concerns?
This topic always brings to mind a conversation I had with a colleague back in the 1970’s, my first Hindu friend. I was baffled at how a brilliant physics PhD could believe that the world rested on the backs of elephants. At the time, I thought he was making desperate “excuses” for his favorite sacred texts–but not until I wrestled with ancient Near Eastern cultures just a few years later did I start to get a glimpse what he was talking about. (I’m not trying to be an apologist for Hindu cosmology. No, my point is that his explanations were most certainly flying right over my head because I had no understanding of Sanskrit and the ways in which explanatory stories are used in Hindu culture.)
Let’s look at an example from ancient Greek literature: the Aesop Fable about the fox and the grapes. A zoologist would be frustrated with the story because grapes in any significant quantity are toxic to canids—and even though they are omnivorous, they vastly prefer meat. Thus, a zoologist who specializes in canid behaviors and physiology has to put aside the “obvious” scientific facts of the animal’s diet or miss the entire point of the ancient tale, which is actually about typical HUMAN behavior! Should the zoologist say, “Aesop should have been smart enough to choose an animal which doesn’t risk being poisoned by the grapes. It entirely messes up the story!” (Compare this with Bible critics who complain that Jesus spoke of the mustard seed being the smallest all seeds when a botanist would disagree.)
Whenever I explain such phenomena, I always recall an anecdote told by Gary Larson, The Far Side cartoonist. His book includes lots of complaint letters from people who followed his syndicated cartoon strip which used to appear in hundreds of American newspapers. One letter came from a U.S. Forest Service biologist who pointed out that a bear would be unlikely to be confronted by a ground hog on Ground Hog Day because the bear would still be in winter hibernation. Larson said that he didn’t reply to the man’s letter, be he imagined himself writing something like this, “Yes, you are probably right. But, for that matter, bears living in forests also don’t normally drive cars, draw on blackboards, and neither bears nor ground hogs have humorous conversations among themselves or between species. As a cartoonist, realism and the peer review of the science academy is not so much my focus.”
Sometimes when I read the Book of Genesis in one sitting, the first chapter reminds me of the opening page of some of the oldest books in my library. Even scientists and historians would sometimes start their books with an excerpt from great literature, perhaps from Homer, or Dante, or even Shakespeare. The Book of Genesis is the basically the history of the beginnings of the Children of Israel. Genesis 1 and 2 are two “oral histories” which had probably been well-known for many centuries before they were first written down as a kind of Preface to the Pentateuch. We don’t know how many languages and cultures had produced various versions of them. We just know what came to use through the Hebrew Masoretic Text.
There’s another way to look at Genesis 1 which I find can help students to consider an alternate look at the chronology. God exists outside of time. Indeed, because time is an attribute of the matter-energy universe—and can only be measured in terms of energy-change events involving matter—time did not exist prior to the the creation. (If you think time existed before creation, try to describe how it would be measured.) God is not bound by time because God created time when he created the universe. God cannot be bound by that which he created. Thus, God is omnipresent in all times just as God is omnipresent in all places. The Bible says “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” not “I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” To God there is no unique “now” as we know it. Instead, God can see all time “simultaneously” in terms of directly observing all events in all times and all places without being restricted to a single now. (In other words, God is not trapped in the river of time. God is not subject to the arrow of time.)
How does this relate to Genesis 1? Consider reading Genesis 1 as Six Days of Proclamation. That is, to accommodate time-bound humans, creation is described as a series of days in which God issues commands. But there is no reason to restrict the fulfillment or realization of those commands as taking place in a 24 hour period. God is not bound by time so God’s will can be expressed in any way he wills. And so God could order “Let the waters bring forth” and “Let the land bring forth” (a choice of words which certainly implies growth and multiplication over time) on a given “day of proclamation” even though God in his omniscience can observe the fulfillment and “end result” of that command as it takes place over a a period of millions of years. God can describe it as “very TOV/good” long before it has come into being in its most complete sense.
Also, there is no reason why the fulfillment of God’s various commands (which Genesis 1 organizes into a six day framework) can’t share extensive and overlapping periods of fulfillment. So I also see no problem with the commandments and realizations of those commandments of the six day framework overlapping. But it is easier for humans to think them as being rigidly sequenced as the typical Sunday School handouts depict them. Just as a parent speaks to children on their own level, so does God speak to us on our child-like level.
“Let the land bring forth…” sounds much more like what scientists describe as the evolution of diverse ecosystem on earths over many millions of years—instead of some INSTANTANEOUS “poofing” into existence that many Young Earth Creationists assume. Did vast expanses of mature timber forests suddenly appear in a fraction of a second? Or perhaps in half a day? That’s what Ken Ham and many others claim. But why? We know that plants and animals multiply and mature and grow and colonize new areas. Doesn’t “Let the land bring forth…” sound unlike an instantaneous “poofing” into existence? (All, the text suggests that the land does the producing and creating on an ongoing basis. God need not resume his creative acts. The universe keeps on creating things, just as God willed.)
I believe the God of the Bible can decree his will and know exactly how the fulfillment of his will is going to play out over vast periods of time. So describing God as issuing “creation decrees” over a six-day workweek is an accommodation to human thought. And I see no reason why “And God saw that it was good” can’t be understood as God “looking ahead” billions of years and being pleased with what he created and will create. (To put it another way, verb tenses are human accommodations. Past, present, and future is a human perspective, not God’s, because he is outside of time.)
Yes, God “in the beginning” established the universe and “completed” his creative works—but he created a universe which keeps on generating new kinds of organisms and new rocks and new stars, just as we observe, because God set a “creative universe” in motion. So I really don’t see why anyone would think that an “end of God’s creative acts” would somehow disallow biological processes like evolution from continuing to operate. (Does the fact that new people are being born every day, unique individuals who never before existed, mean that God’s creation didn’t cease? I don’t think so. So why would evolutionary processes be any more restricted?)
Of course, when we use words like “God commands” and “God speaks into existence”, few of us assume that God takes a deep breath and speaks a string of words at some impressive decibel level. God the Father has no physical body and no lungs and diaphragm to produce audible speech. Even those types of “word pictures” in Genesis 1 and elsewhere in the Bible are just human approximations to help us comprehend and refer to that which is entirely outside of our matter-energy bound experience. No matter how much we may want to interpret Genesis 1 and the rest of the Bible in an extremely literal way, we are forced to acknowledge lots of non-literal accommodations to human thought.
Yes, God “expressed his will” when he commanded the creation of the universe—but even though the text says, “Let there be light!”, I don’t think an eyewitness would have heard God exhaling literal English or Hebrew words that sounded like a Cecile B. DeMille movie.
I haven’t been concise because I don’t know of a good way to answer your question with a brief summary. I went through a long process to reach these kinds of conclusions but I can now say that I see no conflict between Genesis 1 and the evolutionary processes I observe around me. I believe God’s creation and God’s scriptures speak in harmony—but only if I hear them as originally intended and not just in conformity with the cherished traditions of my particular church denomination. (I come from a Dispensational fundamentalist background. It took me many years to think in any other way.)
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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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