As one of the commentators said:
Good. That settles the evolution thing. Now we can concentrate on loving each other.
on Ken Miller, Chromosome Fusion
As I’ve said before, take Scripture seriously and Why I’m Against ID
“Myth is never plausible narrative. It asks for another kind of assent. To anyone for whom it does not strike an important equipose, it seems absurd. The myth of the Fall makes it possible to think of humankind and the world as at the same time intrinsically good and intrinsically evil. Those to whom this vision is not compelling grumble about the apple and the snake.”
[HT: McGrath]
I came away with any suspicions that the young earth creationists might be wrong, it came from my developing an appreciation for Biblical interpretation, not from the Biology lab. Secular science didn’t turn my head. I learned that the people waving the Bible around weren’t necessarily treating it with the respect it deserved.
What became clearer to me over my seminary career was that many of my evangelical and fundamentalist brethren were not willing to let the scriptures be what they were or to let them speak their own language.
But Ham assumes that anyone who doesn’t interpret Genesis exactly as he does is rejecting the Bible as truthful.
Making this into a literal and “scientific” description as a condition of inspiration is wrong.
I don’t even need to add anything. Thank you Michael
Over at Science and the Sacred. If I was into the Hebrew Bible, I’d consider studying under this guy. Much to learn.
And he thinks death was part of the material world prior to Genesis 1, but not death to the Eikon of God.
http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2009/08/genesis-one-10.html
Undoubtedly any attempt to include evolution in a Christian theology has to square with death. Death in both the New and Old Testament (as well as the secondary of these times) is the result of sin. There are several ways one can take this. It can mean a “spiritual” death – though that seems, especially in light of Walton’s thesis – an incredibly ‘modern’ take on the text. It can mean that death is now theologically imbued with another meaning and consequence, though there doesn’t appear to be any of that in the text. The most straight-forward way has always been to suggest that no death occurred before the fall. This is the approach of all fundamentalists. However, Walton’s functional approach might bring a more meaningful conclusion to a theological approach. It also can suggest additional meaning behind being made “in God’s image”. I’ve read Walton’s Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible and was very impressed. If he continues in that vein, I look forward to reading more of his work.
If his theory of evolution by natural selection is the best theory in town that explains the evidence (palaeontological, morphological/taxonomical, molecular/genetic) – and it is – deal with it. Of course refute it on empirical grounds if you can, but don’t rubbish it because you don’t like its theological or moral implications, or because you have a political agenda. Fight science with science
Genesis is not science. Again I’ll stand on the side of ancient Near Eastern context and take Genesis for what it is – a creation account of God placing the functions and ordering of the universe. Not God manufacturing and telling us how – as if we could ever understand that in its entirety, theologically or scientifically.
But it is a good start to know exactly what Darwin did and didn’t say: he never claimed to account for the origins of life from inorganic matter, let alone ex nihilo; rather he argued that his theory explained how present-day species evolved from earlier ones. Even the later Darwin could speak of life being “breathed by the Creator”.
This is what we should be talking about when we say “Creator”. The originator of life, the “intender” of life. This is no way implies a deistic stance that God “made it and left it” either.
observes Diogenes Allen, “Darwin supplied what Hume lacked”: in contrast to the prevailing Aristotelian view of the fixity of species, “an account of present-day life forms arising by natural processes from earlier ones. The argument for a designer, which moves directly from present-day life forms to a designer, can no longer be employed because the only alternative to chance is not design.” Allen correctly continues: “the fundamental issue nature’s order poses is whether it is intended, not whether it is designed.”
The Genesis accounts do much less explanation of “how man came to be” than its contemporary literature. But it does indicate intention, and the good kind. Not the kind where man is the servant of the gods, to do their work. But rather as God’s very image.
Scientific theory and philosophical considerations, however, were relatively light loads in the cumulative burden that eventually flattened Darwin’s faith.
Despite what some use evolution for – an out to excuse their lack of faith – Darwin did not. He flatly denied that The Origin of Species was an atheistic book whatsoever.
Because the fact that “the causal heart of Darwinian theorizing is against the idea of progress” (Michael Ruse) clears an intellectual space for biblical eschatology: more precisely, for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the world’s apocalyptic counter-evolutionary moment in which the weakest kata sarka turn out to be the “fittest” kata pneuma. John Howard Yoder famously said that “those who bear crosses are walking with the grain of the universe.” Strictly speaking, that should be: against the grain of “nature, red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson; cf. Romans 8:22), and with the grain of the new creation
Now that is a spectacular image of Christianity defined over and against the contemporary culture holding to a social Darwinism (however large or small). We shouldn’t be arguing whether or not nature works in such a way – but arguing that humanity should not!
John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, reflecting on how Darwin’s theory has influenced our understanding of the deity, suggest that “two images of God took a beating”: “the artisan or mechanic”, and “the magician” of special creation. Which perhaps invites us to re-imagine the Creator more as an improvising artist or musician. John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”, anyone?
I’ll leave that last one for you.
Over at Jesus Creed they’ve been exploring Genesis as it interacts with science and faith. I’ve not done a specific study, but I’ve read a book or two on Genesis from the Ancient Near Eastern perspective. Of course if you have been living anywhere other than a cave you’ve heard from the not-so-new atheists about how science and faith are incompatible, and you can’t live without science, so you must drop your faith. As if it were so simplistic – they should be scolded. The recent Pew data should show them that Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus – by percentage – believe in evolution more frequently than the “Unaffiliated” group (which I would imagine includes atheists). Religious belief is certainly compatible with science – even evolution. Perhaps if they were to change their rhetoric to “Fundamentalist Protestant Faith is incompatible with science” then they might have a case. But since not everyone is a Protestant, let alone a Fundamentalist, there is plenty of room. Or at least there should be.
As I am not a fundamentalist (any longer), they very idea of death and sin (or original sin) requires a major effort to understand. This one post, which really needs to be re-categorized, talks specifically about the understanding of death and its relation to sin.
My understanding as it is now is that death is the cessation of life. Man is a one-part being, the soul or spirit of a man (God’s ruach or pneuma in Genesis) combines with the “dust/clay of the ground” to form a being. The clay was not a “living being” (nephesh) alone, nor was the “breath” alive on its own. Only when combined do they form a living being. This seems to be a very simple, and to me, uncontroversial, point. Death then is the reversal of this process, the separation of these parts, the undoing of life.
I fundamentally disagree with Calvin’s guiding hermaneutic that mankind was not destined for an earthly existence. That flies directly in the face of all Jewish theology in the 10th and 8th centuries BC as well as Second Temple Judaism (I needn’t back this point up, Daube, Sanders, McKnight, Evans, NT Wright, as well as so many others do it quite well). NT Wright at least has a foothold to stand on when he writes:
One potentially helpful way of understanding the entry of death into the world through the first human sin is to see “death” here as more than simply the natural decay and corruption of all the created order. The good creation was nevertheless transient: evening and morning, the decay and new life of autumn and spring, pointed on to future, a purpose, which Genesis implies it was the job of the human race to bring about. All that lived in God’s original world would decay and perish, but “death” in that sense carried no sting. The primal pair were, however, threatened with a different sort of thing altogether: a “death” that would result from sin, and involve expulsion from the garden (Gen 2:17). This death is a darker force, opposed to creation itself, unmaking that which was good, always threatening to drag the world back toward chaos. Thus, when humans turned away in sin from the creator as the one whose image they were called to bear, what might have been a natural sleep acquired a sense of shame and threat.
His assertion would be that mankind was not meant to live forever, just an incredibly long and full life. He uses some natural revelation to back this up, the transient seasons, etc. I have to agree that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are mytho-historic and in direct relation (sometimes implicit agreement, other times explicit contradiction) with other Ancient Near Eastern beliefs surrounding them. Being in the middle of his 700pg Resurrection of the Son of God gives me plenty of other thoughts surrounding the very idea of resurrection and ‘life after death’/'sleep’/'soul sleep’/etc in pagan and Jewish contexts. Perhaps this is just another turning point.
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