Denis Alexander On the Barriers to Traditional Creation Theology

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Today's video features Denis Alexander. Denis Alexander is the Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, to which he was elected a Fellow in 1998. Alexander writes, lectures, and broadcasts widely in the field of science and religion. He is a member of the International Society for Science and Religion.

In this video Conversation, Denis Alexander addresses the most prominent barriers to accepting a traditional Creation theology. While he acknowledges that the broader culture—including the New Atheists—play a role in this by arguing that a belief in God doesn’t coalesce with scientific thought, perhaps the most significant barrier actually comes from the Christian community itself.

Part of the problem, Alexander asserts, is that contemporary Christians are not taking the early chapters of Genesis seriously. While many evangelical Christians may see their literalistic privileging of Genesis 1-3 as a serious approach, it runs counter to the way that the early church fathers actually read the text.

Alexander attributes such a literal, “wooden” reading of Genesis to the influence of science—that is, readers have allowed the external forces of science to encourage a “scientific” reading of a text that was not intended to be read in such a way. In fact, such a reading would have been alien to Old Testament authors because scientific literature did not even exist at the time that Genesis was written. By reading literally, then, we are doing the text a great disservice and run the risk of missing the inspired message that the authors were trying to impart.

Commentary written by the BioLogos editorial team.