Belief in God in an Age of Science

Introducing John Polkinghorne

An Englishman of Cornish descent, John Polkinghorne was born in 1930 in the coastal town of Weston-super-Mare, southwest of Bristol in North Somerset. Although his parents had three children, an older sister died in infancy and his older brother, who served in the RAF Coastal Command during World War II, died when his plane was lost over the North Atlantic on a stormy night in 1942. Effectively an only child from that point on, his family nurtured him in their Christian faith, leading him to say a few years ago, “I cannot recall a time when I was not in some real way a member of the worshipping and believing community of the Church.”  (From Physicist to Priest, p. 7)

At the same time, his gift for mathematics did not go unnoticed, resulting in several years of study at Trinity College, Cambridge (where Isaac Newton had lived and worked in the seventeenth century). As an undergraduate, Polkinghorne studied applied math rather than pure math, a typical choice for someone interested in physics. There, he formed a close friendship with a classmate, Michael Atiyah, who would be best man at his marriage in 1955 to another mathematics student, the late Ruth (Martin) Polkinghorne. Later knighted, Sir Michael was President of the Royal Society in the early 1990s, the same period when Polkinghorne was president of Queen’s College, Cambridge.

​Sir Michael Atiyah (Source)

Polkinghorne was particularly inspired by the course in quantum physics taught by Paul Dirac, whom he has described as “undoubtedly the greatest British theoretical physicist of the twentieth century,” an opinion with which it is hard to disagree. For Polkinghorne, Dirac’s lectures were simply unforgettable: “so profound was the material, and so closely structured was the argument, that one was carried along enthralled by the experience.” (From Physicist to Priest, p. 26)

Paul Dirac (Source)

Remaining at Cambridge for graduate study, Polkinghorne worked under the Pakistani physicist, Abdus Salam, who later became the first Islamic scientist to win the Nobel Prize, which he shared with Americans Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for contributions to unifying the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. Then he did postdoctoral work at Caltech with Murray Gell-Mann, another future Nobel laureate for his work on quark theory, and attended the famous lectures by yet another future Nobel laureate, the late Richard Feynman.

After Caltech, Polkinghorne taught briefly at Edinburgh before returning to Cambridge, where he was soon elected to a new professorship in mathematical physics. Quantum mechanics (QM) is his specialty; his writings on both QM and its interaction with theological ideas are numerous. His book, The Quantum World, has sold more than 100,000 copies, and when Oxford University Press wanted a book on this topic for their highly successful series, “A Very Short Introduction,” it was Polkinghorne who wrote it. His former students include Nobel laureate Brian Josephson, “the most precociously brilliant undergraduate that I ever taught,” and Martin Rees, who was until recently President of the Royal Society.

Although Polkinghorne has never won a Nobel Prize, in 1974 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, the highest honor in British science. Three years later, at the top of his scientific career at age 46, he astonished his colleagues by announcing a decision to pursue ordination as an Anglican priest; two years later, he resigned his chair at Cambridge to enter seminary. Partly, he felt played out. As a former physics student myself, I do not find his diagnosis hard to accept: “In mathematically based subjects you do not get better as you get older. Somehow one needs mental agility more than accumulated experience, and it becomes progressively harder for an old dog to learn new tricks. It is unlikely that most people do their best work before they are 25, but most do before they are 45.” Or, to put it more succinctly, “I simply felt that I had done my little bit for particle theory and the time had come to do something else.” (From Physicist to Priest, p. 71)

Nevertheless, he also felt a genuine call to the ministry, for “Christianity has always been central to my life” and ‘becoming a minister of word and sacrament would be a privileged vocation that held out the possibility of deep satisfaction.” (From Physicist to Priest, p. 73) After seminary, Polkinghorne served as a parish priest for many years and later as canon theologian of Liverpool Cathedral. He was knighted in 1997—although, as an ordained minister, he declines to use the title, “Sir John Polkinghorne”—and was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2002. It has been altogether a life well lived for the kingdom of God.

Looking Ahead

I’ll return in about two weeks with a summary of Polkinghorne’s basic attitudes toward science and religion, which (in his view) have a “cousinly” relationship. In the meantime, readers are invited to read Zeeya Merali’s essay, “The Priest-Physicist Who Would Marry Science to Religion,” from the March 2011 issue of Discover magazine, and “An interview with John Polkinghorne,” by philosopher Paul Fitzgerald.

References

John Polkinghorne, From Physicist to Priest: An Autobiography (2008).

That may seem strange. Many people wouldn’t start with the Bible when talking about a scientific theory. But I’m a theologian, and I take the Bible with utmost seriousness. Talking about the Bible is a natural place for me to begin, both because the Bible was principally important in my youth, and because it remains so for me today.

I don’t mean to snub science. Science is important too. I read a lot in the sciences, and I think the evidence supporting the theory of evolution is strong. I try to take this and other evidence with great seriousness.

But the real story – for me – starts with the Bible.

Centrality of Scripture

Fortunately, my parents were committed Christians. Our family was one of those “attend-church-three-times-a-week-and-more” families. My parents were significant leaders in our local congregation, and I began following their footsteps early in life.

I doubt I missed more than a handful of Sunday school classes before I was twenty years old. And I always attended Vacation Bible School – even winning Bible memorizing competitions on occasion. (John 11:35 was my friend!) I participated on youth Bible quizzing team for a while too.

While growing up, I don’t recall anyone telling me that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. But my passion for Scripture and my Evangelical community inclined me toward that position. Scripture was central in my life.

Besides, I wanted a failsafe foundation for my beliefs. And how could I convince my Mormon friends to become Christians if the Bible was not true in every sense, including literally true about what it said about the natural world? Witnessing to God’s truth seemed to require that I believe the Bible was without error on all matters, including matters related to science.

An Inerrant Bible?

My view of the Bible began to change when I went to college. It wasn’t that a liberal Bible professor brainwashed me away from the positions of my youth. Instead, I started reading the Bible carefully and the work of biblical scholars. I began to think it important to love God with my mind in a more consistent way.

And then I took a class in koine Greek, the language of the New Testament. In this course, I discovered several things. First, we have differing English translations of the New Testament, because the biblical text allows for a number of valid translation options. (When I later took Hebrew class, I found the diversity of valid translations even greater!) Second, we do not have access to the original biblical manuscripts/autographs. Our Bibles come from later manuscripts, the earliest of which are not complete. And, third, the oldest texts we have differ in many ways – although most differences are minor.

I also discovered discrepancies in the Bible. For instance, in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus curses a fig tree and it withers immediately (21:18-20). But in Mark’s version of the same story, the fig tree does not wither immediately and the disciples find it withered the next morning (11:12-14; 20-21). Mark says that Jesus heals one demon-possessed man at Gerasenes (5:1-20), while Matthew says there were two demon-possessed men involved in that same miracle (8:28-34). Jesus tells the disciples to take a staff on their journey as recorded in Mark 6:8, but Matthew says Jesus told the disciples not to take a staff (10:9-10). Jesus says Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly. Then, making an analogy with his own death, he says the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Mt 12:40). But Jesus was not dead three days and three nights!

I mention only a few of the many internal discrepancies. Once I discovered a few, I noticed more. This, of course, made me question whether I should say the Bible is inerrant in all ways.

What’s the Bible For?

I’m persistent. I don’t settle for easy answers, ignore problems, or appeal to mystery at the drop of a hat. I want to give a plausible account of the hope within me.

My quest for better ways to think about the Bible prompted me to read theologians and Bible scholars from the past and present. What I found surprised me! I had assumed believing the Bible is inerrant in all ways was the traditional position of Christians throughout the ages. I assumed it was the position of my own Christian tradition. I was wrong.

Few if any great theologians argued the Bible was absolutely inerrant. Augustine did not affirm inerrancy in this way. Thomas Aquinas didn’t. Neither did Martin Luther or John Wesley – a least in a consistent way. And I discovered through reading and conversations that those considered the leading biblical scholars and theologians today also reject absolute biblical inerrancy.

I did find a few teachers who said the Bible was inerrant. But when I read their explanations of the Bible’s discrepancies and their views about the differences between the oldest manuscripts, I found they stretched the word “inerrant” beyond recognition. Their meaning of “inerrant” was nothing like the usual meaning. And it was certainly not what most Evangelicals meant when they called the Bible the inerrant Word of God.

Perhaps even more important was my discovery that great theologians and biblical scholars of yesteryear believed the Bible’s basic purpose was to reveal God’s desire for our salvation. Many giants of the Christian faith could agree with John Wesley who said, “The Scriptures are a complete rule of faith and practice; and they are clear in all necessary points.”

The necessary points of Scripture refer to instruction for our salvation. They indicate that, as the Apostle Paul puts it, Scripture is inspired and “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The purpose of the Bible is our salvation!

I also discovered Christian leaders over the centuries did not feel required to search the Bible for truths about science. In fact, they sometimes used allegorical interpretations that seem silly to me now. The vast majority of Evangelical scholars with whom I talked also didn’t think the Bible has to be inerrant about scientific matters.

After my studies, I came to believe that the Bible tells us how to find abundant life. But it does not provide the science for how life became abundant.

Tomorrow, Tom will discuss what his evolving view of the Bible has to do with evolution.

The majority of health care workers deal with the confusing issues of life, death, and the apparent random tragedy of disease that can devastate families emotionally, financially, and spiritually. In fact, when I separate myself from the sterile aspects of a lab test review or ordering of radiographic images, I often find myself extremely saddened by the reality that children suffer from chronic disease, and in that aspect, I have found my faith to be a salve for me. I have been involved in the field of medicine for a relatively short time, only 21 years since first starting medical school. I marvel daily about the advancements of this tool that we have named “modern medicine”. Indeed, in the past 20 years alone, the progress we have made in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and infectious disease has been seemingly unstoppable. Despite these advances, we have not adequately addressed how we handle various aspects of suffering (physically, spiritually, and mentally) in long-term hospitalized patients, in patients with chronic disease, and in the elderly.

I have often been asked if my faith has been affected by being exposed to illness and death. I would resoundingly say “No”, but I know health care workers run the entire gamut of a belief in God. There was a time when I would have said otherwise; however, my lay interest in the processes of our Earth (biologic and geologic) has convinced me of a Creator. I am a Christian, and this essay will discuss how I use my scientific and medical background to justify my faith. If you are an atheist reading this essay, you will have realized that you and I have belief differences from the beginning of this writing. If you are an evangelical Christian, I want you to realize that I am not going to talk about my conversion or my baptism. That aspect of my life is not the point of my essay, but you should know, for background, that I do accept Jesus Christ as my Savior.

I was born and raised in central Texas where a large percentage of the population is evangelical Christian. As I progressed through public education, I had convinced myself that I was agnostic. This was a personal decision, not based on any family influence. In fact, I had Christian parents who were educators and who had an interest in my pursuing a science career as a way of opening my mind to the needs of humanity and intellectual fulfillment. However, my trail away from my Christian faith lasted about 15 years and was most influenced by many of my evangelical classmates, especially in high school and college. I was exposed to Young Earth Creationism (YEC) by many friends, and at that time, I did not think it was even possible to reconcile a Christian faith with my interest in science.

In particular, I was interested in pursuing a career in paleontology or ecology, and I became even more convinced in college, that I had to make a profound choice – either I chose a career in science and reject YEC claims that had no basis in reality, or I would have to abandon a science career all together. I was only aware of those two options at that time and was not aware of a third way leading to a reconciliation of my faith. I will admit that I was fairly angry about the absolutism provided by so many of my YEC-minded friends in the face of massive amounts of biologic and geologic data. I became angry about the concept of religion in a very self-centered sort of way. Eventually and after much contemplation, I ended up going to medical school after college as opposed to a career in natural history, as I decided that the job market was more stable in medicine.

Two particular events enabled me to completely reconcile my faith with science. First, I took a field research class that involved traveling through the southwest United States during the summer of my junior year of college. Seeing geologic layering and signs of erosion up close in areas such as the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon, as opposed to hearing about the concepts in the lecture hall, made me truly appreciate deep time (Figure 1). For example, although random events over millions of years formed beautiful geologic structuring of hoodoos in Bryce Canyon, the wind and rain making these amazingly beautiful sandstone columns spoke of the mechanistic properties of erosion. Seeing the effects of long-term erosion as being “beautiful” led me to wonder in my tent at night why consciousness was formed to allow humans to appreciate the majesty of nature. I was able to see the Milky Way at night as I camped in the various national parks, and I further contemplated the mechanisms of gravity, light, and star formation. I was captivated by this imposed beauty on the desert floor around me, the stark ruddy canyon walls, the conifer-filled woods, and the cloudless night with a waning moon. I kept a journal during my trip which I wrote in daily. I have read it again years later, and there are passages written, crossed out by pen, then written out again with some my first inklings that I likely believed in a Creator God.

Figure 1: In this picture, I am showing my daughter the various rock groups of the Grand Canyon at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. My visit to the canyon in college brought home to me the immensity of deep time and the beauty of a natural structure suggesting to me, in a strong way, that God must exist. When this picture was taken, I wanted my daughters to see what I saw, felt what I felt, thought what I thought, when I began to really be convinced there was a Creator.

The second aspect that brought me back into Christianity was exposure to a pastor in my late 20s. At this point, I was deep into my medical training as a pediatric gastroenterologist, but I was starting to attend church again, although not regularly. I also was working in a lab where we were using “knock-out” mice (mice with a gene removed to assess the resultant phenotype, or the observable traits) in order to determine the mechanisms of cirrhosis of the liver. Although my contribution to the lab was not ground-breaking, I was fascinated as to how a single gene deletion could lead to down-stream effects, including morphologic changes in the liver (i.e., cirrhosis). My research had demonstrated that specific gene mutations were leading to a diseased organ, and I came to believe that the genetic code encompassed in all living creatures was not likely explained as a random, undirected process.

The pastor with whom I was interacting with at that time had trained in astronomy prior to going into ministry, and it was fascinating to hear him reconcile his belief in an ancient universe with his faith. He was not the least bit worried about an ancient Earth and a far more ancient universe. He believed in a Sovereign God who could certainly provide for the mechanisms of the Big Bang and the resultant world that we live in. Over the months, my discussions with him led me back to reading my Bible daily for the first time, really, in my life. In my very humble and limited opinion, I could see that God, especially through the Gospels, provided an answer to what my purpose consisted of during my time here on Earth. I was to love and serve others as best I could, and I should let God be in control of the big stuff of life.

Here in the lab (and previously for me in the American southwest) there appeared to be sublime mechanisms at play in the world. Even when I looked at random processes (and I do believe that God allows randomness), the grandeur of life forms that have been present on our planet for hundreds of millions of years fascinated me. I did try to convince myself that randomness was evidence of no God, but I then decided that a Creator could certainly build randomness into any biologic or geologic system to allow for the abundance of detail that we see in the natural world around us.

Taken together, all of these views of the world in the micro- and macro-scale convinced me to come back to Christianity. I believe strongly that there is God who has allowed natural mechanisms to take place, random or not so random, which are exhibited throughout the universe. I certainly know that my wife, my children, and I will die someday, but a re-reading of the Gospels as well as reading the great Book of Nature around us reinforced in me that there was something more for all of us, even after death.

I have never regretted the re-discovery of my Christian faith. I especially take these thoughts with me, when I have to talk to families about sick or dying children. These are hard conversations to have, and I find comfort knowing that evidence of a creator God is ever present around us, even as each of us heads towards the end of life and subsequently, eternity.

Conversations about science and faith can be like that. People hold clearly discordant points of view, and it would be dishonest to ignore the conflict. Yet some voices emphasize the dissonance without any note of harmony to put it in context. Too often, science and faith becomes a hostile battle of worldviews, sounding angry, dissonant chords even among fellow Christians. But civil, gracious dialogue is possible. On the BioLogos Forum, we invite authors from a range of positions, including some that don't agree with all our beliefs, but we strive to set these dialogues in a context of respect and civility. When authors are fellow Christians, we don’t shy away from disagreements, but remember the broader context of our unity as fellow believers, the harmony that binds us together.

My own story is more harmonious than dissonant. My interest in music was paralleled by my interest in math and science and my involvement in church. My family and teachers encouraged my interests in science, and I remember how fun it was to play math games with my dad and brother. And every week we were in church: twice on Sunday, plus Wednesday night club, youth group activities, and Bible quizzing. While my church accepted the young earth position, they didn’t emphasize it, and I was never told that a particular science view was essential to being a Christian. When I encountered the evidence for the age of the universe and the evolution of life, I also found Christian authors who showed me how this scientific evidence could fit with Christian beliefs.

But others have experienced more dissonance. Nearly four years ago, Dr. Francis Collins launched this website with the story of a young university student in the midst of a profound personal crisis, what Dr. Collins called “a wrenching crisis of worldviews shaking her deepest foundations.” Without a context of harmony, too many people – young and old – feel they have to choose between two incompatible positions, either Christian faith or the findings of science. BioLogos exists to show another way. We hold fast to the authority of the Bible and the core beliefs of Christianity, and at the same time, accept the rigorous conclusions of mainstream science.

It is with these chords of dissonance and resolution in mind that I come to this opportunity to lead BioLogos. I have long sensed God’s calling to serve the church as part of this dialogue. Some of you know of me from a book I wrote in 2007 with my husband Loren, called Origins. I’ve been speaking and writing on science and faith for many years, but I did this around the edges of my primary career of teaching and research in astronomy. While I thoroughly enjoy teaching students and doing research, over the last year I have recognized God’s hand in leading me to shift my fulltime work to the science and faith dialogue. Now I’m looking forward to using and developing my gifts in service of BioLogos.

Joining me as a new member of the leadership team is Dr. Jeff Schloss, who will serve as our Senior Scholar. Many of you are already familiar with his work, and know he brings not only a strong track record of scholarship in evolution and philosophy, but tremendous skill in communicating to lay audiences. Jeff and I share a deep commitment to the unity of the body of Christ and a desire to remove barriers for people to come to Christ. I am delighted to have him on board.

Jeff and I inherit a strong and vibrant organization from our outgoing President, Dr. Darrel Falk. Darrel brought his deep love and concern for the church, along with his considerable creativity and hard work, to this effort. We plan to continue and build on the excellent programs he established.

One of the pleasures of my first few weeks on the job has been getting to know the BioLogos staff. Kathryn, Lisa, Stephen, Mike, Laura J, and LeAnne each bring key skills to the organization, as well as energy and a passion for the mission of BioLogos. The team keeps BioLogos functioning behind the scenes, from finances to computer programming to event planning. Two team members, Mark Sprinkle and Tom Burnett, have decided to move on to other opportunities after a year of dedicated service to BioLogos. As web editors, Mark and Tom revamped the blog, making it a forum for rich scholarly dialogue and vibrant testimonies, and drawing in new authors to write on a great mix of topics. They also organized the archived material, so that the best of BioLogos is readily accessible. We wish them well in their new endeavors. Joining the BioLogos team is Emily Ruppel as Interim Web Editor. You may know Emily from her work to develop and edit the e-zine God & Nature for the American Scientific Affiliation; she will join us part time at BioLogos while she continues to work with ASA.

We believe God has great things in store for BioLogos. We will continue to focus on connecting with scholars, pastors, teachers, and lay people, but in the months ahead, we will also be sharpening our vision and engaging afresh in strategic planning. We’ll be considering new audiences, new programs, and new priorities. I invite your comments below on directions you’d like to see BioLogos take.

In just a few years, this organization has impacted the lives of thousands of Christians and brought an important voice to discussions taking place within the church. Thanks to the strong support from The John Templeton Foundation and many other generous donors, the vision of Francis Collins is thriving. BioLogos is on the cusp of enormous opportunities and huge potential. While transitions are times of risk and vulnerability, they are also times of great opportunity. My prayer is that God will give us wisdom and guidance to be good stewards of this opportunity. May God continue to use BioLogos to bring harmony to a conversation that has emphasized dissonance for far too long.

The tenth anniversary of the human genome has been marked by some striking new genetic insights into human evolution and diversity. Do these new discoveries have any significance for the dialogue between science and religion in general, or for our sense of human uniqueness in particular?

The publication of the Neanderthal genome sequence in May 2010 set the pace. Not surprisingly -- given that our last common ancestor with the chimpanzee was around 5 to 6 million years ago, compared to a mere half a million years for our last common ancestor with the Neanderthal -- it turns out that we are genetically far closer to the Neanderthals than to the apes. In all, only seventy-eight changes in the genetic letters ('nucleotides') that would change the amino acid sequence of particular proteins were found in the Neanderthal DNA that were the same as the chimpanzee sequence but different in the human. Amongst other differences, 111 duplications of small DNA segments were found in the Neanderthal but not human sequence. Genetically we are closely related twigs on the great evolutionary bush of life.

But we knew that already. More surprising for many was the provocative finding that non-African humans are genetically closer to Neanderthals than African humans. In fact, the European and Asian genomes that were sequenced appear to contain one to four percent DNA of Neanderthal origin, and the gene flow that occurred appears to have been almost entirely from Neanderthal to human, rather than vice versa. How come? The most likely scenario is that there were a few instances of sexual reproduction between Neanderthals and human individuals belonging to the population that is thought to have emigrated out of Africa to populate the world sometime after seventy thousand years ago, explaining why the Neanderthal DNA sequences are not found in African genomes. The contribution of the Neanderthal genome has remained in European and Asian populations ever since.

To put this in perspective, most of our genes are very similar anyway to those found in Neanderthals and chimpanzees, and to other mammals like mice. We all share a "how-to-build-a-mammal" instruction manual, and the relatively minor genetic differences between us (minor relative to those we share in common) are the icing on the cake, as it were, that make us a human rather than a mouse, a chimp or a Neanderthal.

The year 2010 saw yet another twig appear on the hominin branch of the evolutionary bush, this time one even closer to the Neanderthals than our own. This story begins with the discovery by a Russian team of a sliver of finger bone from a remote Siberian cave in the Altai Mountains, known as the Denisova Cave. The team stored it away, thinking it was from one of the Neanderthals that frequented the cave between thirty thousand and forty-eight thousand years ago. But when DNA extracted from the bone was eventually sequenced, the results -- published just before Christmas -- revealed a population distinct from both humans and Neanderthals.

The finger appears to belong to a novel hominin population that shared a last common ancestor with Neanderthals more recently than humans, and overall is genetically closer to Neanderthals than to humans. It is too early to say whether the so-called 'Denisovans' represent a separate species and fossil data will be required to clarify that question. But what the results do suggest is that Melanesians -- the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and islands northeast of Australia -- have inherited as much as one-twentieth of their DNA from the 'Denisovans', indicating that some limited inter-breeding took place between these ancient populations. Most fascinating of all is the idea that multiple hominin lineages were coexisting in Europe and Asia, along with modern humans, as recently as twenty-thousand to forty-thousand years ago.

Do these findings have any particular theological significance? It is difficult to know why this should be the case. In the Judeo-Christian tradition humankind uniquely is made "in the image of God". The suite of capabilities that emerged during human evolution is necessary but not sufficient to do justice to this much discussed theological insight. Our particular genetic instruction manual generates large frontal lobes, advanced cognitive abilities, rationality, language, consciousness and the ability to choose between right and wrong. It is this suite that gives us the ability to pray, worship and engage in communal religious practices.

But the idea of being made "in the image of God" is not encompassed simply within a static list of such human qualities. Theologians have drawn attention to the dynamic, relational aspects of the concept. It is humanity-in-relation-to-God, together with God-given responsibilities to humans in relationship with each other, that are thought to be more central to the idea. When did such spiritual capabilities and responsibilities first come into being? It is really difficult to know, but the answer certainly seems more rooted in God's intentions and purposes for humankind than in genetic change per se. Students can spend a long time being trained in the finer points of drama, but the play only gets off the ground when the actors are finally given their lines.

It seems quite likely that more twigs will continue to appear on the hominin branch of the bush of life as genomics continues to extend its reach. Such discoveries as such do not appear to raise any new theological questions. But other 2010 discoveries did highlight two genomic insights that do have relevance for religious views of human identity. The first insight comes from further Genome Wide Association studies that continue to subvert any lingering commitments to genetic determinism, for example the idea that there are genes "for" a particular human trait. The second insight comes from the finding that we are all more genetically different from each other than we realized even a few years ago. Genetics is underlining the uniqueness of each human individual. By the end of 2011 it is estimated that more than 30,000 human genomes will have been sequenced. Watch this space. Theological reflections on these findings will be the topic for Part 2.

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.¹

– St. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430)

For a good portion of my life, I had an extremely difficult time admitting that I was wrong. To do so was an admission of intellectual failure, faulty logic, or simple ignorance—not knowing everything about everything.² Being wrong is a hard pill to swallow sometimes, because in many cases it equates to losing face. As it pertains to the creation-evolution debate, I believe that we evangelical Christians tend to express that fear by “holding the line” against certain areas of scientific study, rather than being willing to admit that we might be wrong. In most cases, we have no problem accepting the authority of the world’s best physicists, chemists, meteorologists, engineers, and physicians. Our problem tends to be with scientific authorities in only certain areas of study, such as biology, anthropology, paleontology, geology, and astronomy. Why? It’s because the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God and these areas conflict with the plain reading of Scripture, right?

When we evangelicals come to the table of scientific discussion, we tend to pick and choose those “foods” which appeal to us, while wrinkling our noses at what our theological tastes find disagreeable. As long as the menu includes a wide assortment of things we already like, and we share the table with people with similar tastes, we can get along just fine with this strategy. But is this wise in, say, a survival situation? Food is food, and if we’re hungry enough and don’t have a life-threatening allergic reaction to something specific, I would venture to guess that we’d dig right in without a second thought. In regard to the creation-evolution debate, I am convinced that the evangelical church will find itself in dire straights if we intentionally starve ourselves intellectually, especially with a healthy banquet in full sight and within reach. I also think having a too-restricted “diet” limits our ability to sit down with those outside the church and can, as Augustine believed, play a role in actually prohibiting the secular world at large from coming to a saving knowledge of Christ, “to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil.” Several years ago, Bruce Waltke, former Evangelical Theological Society president and former professor of Old Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, updated Augustine’s caution in a brief video production for BioLogos, suggesting that the church risks losing our ability to really interact with the world if we don’t trust God’s providence in this area. Wheaton College’s Professor of Christian Thought, Mark Noll, as the very first sentence of his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind writes, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”³ If not for the fact that I’ve never met Professor Noll, I’d believe he was talking about me a decade ago.

What drives us evangelical Christians to “hold the line” against acknowledging truths in these certain categories of scientific knowledge? After undergoing several theological shifts myself over the last decade, and seeing others do the same, I believe I’ve been able to “reverse engineer” what happened in my own life: It was a subtle slide from a confident faith into a comfortable, unwitting arrogance. When we believe that we are in an intimate spiritual union with the Creator of the universe, it’s quite easy to forget (if we ever understood this in the first place) that God can couch theological truth in a variety of literary genres and, yes, even in the context of ancient, scientifically inaccurate cosmologies.⁴ Caught up in the awesome truth of spiritual union, what makes perfect sense to us at any particular point in our spiritual walk can be easily confused with “the truth.” We also gravitate toward churches that conform to our particular belief systems. We prefer pastors who preach to the choir. We buy books that support our particular theological system. To attend another church, listen to a theologically edgy pastor, or read a book from a completely opposite viewpoint from what we’re accustomed to would be to invite a considerable measure of tension into an otherwise comfortable intellectual and spiritual environment.

How many of us actually have or take the time to study evolutionary biology, theology, the history of biblical interpretation, ANE literature, or modern translations of Babylonian creation myths? I would venture to guess that very few of us have the same opportunities that professional scientists and theologians take for granted in their academic careers. To overcome the fear of losing intellectual face, I recommend exposing oneself to different ways of thinking about these topics, including perspectives that you might deem “outside the box.” Reading multi-view comparisons and critiques, such as those found in Zondervan’s wonderful Counterpoints series, is particularly helpful in this regard. Familiarity with and exposure to these views helps temper that initial fear or shock when we come across those few brothers and sisters in Christ who opt to take another approach to any one topic. (One youth pastor friend of mine, when discovering my views on a particular topic, approached me and excitedly exclaimed that meeting me was like meeting a dragon: “You hear stories about them, but you never see one!”)

A word of warning: Before I adopted evolutionary creationism, my neatly packed theology was virtually stress-free. Ignorance was truly bliss. Then came the paradigm shift, and all sorts of previously suppressed tension, questions, and doubts rose to the surface. Another word of warning: If you’re not confronted with tension, questions, and doubts in your day-to-day spiritual walk, something’s wrong. Wrestling with theological issues is not an activity to be avoided; it is a discipline to be vigorously pursued! If you are comfortable enough in your relationship with the risen Savior, you should not fear admitting your ignorance on various topics and entering into a period of temporary uncertainty. This fear can be remedied by taking advantage of a fully informed palette of theological options provided by genuine Jesus followers, including those that embrace biblical criticism. If one’s faith is truly rooted in the One by, for, and through Whom all things were made, all the theories put forth by the higher biblical critics and esoteric scientists should be no cause for fear—but all should be cause for loving dialogue.

Notes

1. St. Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram), Trans. J. H. Taylor, in Ancient Christian Writers (Long Prairie, MN: Newman Press, 1982), vol. 41.
2. “Ignorant,” Oxford Dictionaries, accessed October 08, 2012, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/ignorant.
3. Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 3.
4. See Denis Lamoureux, Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2008); Brian Godawa, “Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography in the Bible,” accessed October 04, 2012.

Growing up, David believed that Young Earth Creationism was the Christian position on origins and how God created. As he endeavored to learn more, he was intrigued by Francis Collins book The Language of God because Francis did not present evolution as a rival theory to Christian faith, but as something that described God's method of creation. David studied biblical interpretation and found John Walton's scholarship to be tremendously helpful in understanding the original purpose and intent of the Genesis narrative.

Reflecting on his personal journey, David thinks that it is important that we don't oversimplify questions related to science and faith, but that we explore them deeply in order to understand science in a robust, Christian way.

In my previous essay, I discussed “Darwin’s finches” and how surprisingly little Charles Darwin himself had to say about them. In fact, it was actually the British ornithologist David Lack (1910-1973) who conducted the critical research that immortalized the finches in biology textbooks and popular lore. In 1973, the eminent German zoologist Ernst Mayr wrote:

Already well known among professional ornithologists, his work on the Galapagos finches gave David Lack world fame… There is no modern textbook of zoology, evolution or ecology which does not include an account of his work.¹

Ernst W. Mayr

Decades have passed since Mayr wrote these words, and David Lack’s name has largely faded from public discourse. On the other hand, the Galapagos finches have become one of the most recognized symbols of evolution in the world today. Does it really matter whether Lack or Darwin gets credit for describing the evolution of these remarkable birds?

Insofar as evolutionary theory contrasted with religious belief, it makes a big difference. In a culture that is eager to equate evolution with atheism, it should come as no surprise that these birds are only known as “Darwin’s finches”. Darwin’s personal struggles and ultimate rejection of Christianity are well documented, and people are eager to link his loss of faith to his evolutionary theory. David Lack, on the other hand, began his scientific career as an agnostic, but shortly after publishing his famous book on the evolution of Galápagos finches, he converted to Christianity! ²

A Christian at the forefront of evolutionary biology

Lack’s Christian conversion did not mark the end of his scientific achievements, either. In fact, he continued as a prolific researcher until just weeks before he died. Among his many achievements, he was Director of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology (1945-1973), Fellow of the Royal Society, and President of both the International Ornithological Congress (1962-66) and the British Ecological Society (1964-65). His fellow scientists held him in great esteem:

He was described as one of the most outstanding among world ornithologists; he was certainly this, but he was also one of the world’s leading evolutionists. All the time one saw developing his use of birds as material for the study of wider, deeper, biological problems.³

David Lack at the International Ornithological Congress, 1962.

Clearly David Lack was an outstanding scientist, and his commitment to Christianity did not tarnish, hinder, or undermine his research on evolution. But we might also ask, what was Lack like as a Christian? Did he keep his faith hidden from view, afraid that it might compromise his reputation as a scientist? Ernst Mayr, who interacted with David Lack professionally and personally for nearly 40 years, had this to say:

I have known only few people with such deep moral convictions as David Lack. He applied very high standards to his own work and was not inclined to condone shoddiness, superficiality and lack of sincerity in others. This did not always go well with those who preferred to compromise in favour of temporary expediency. David had been raised in an environment in which great stress was layed on moral principles and this attitude was later reinforced by his Christian faith. This explains his extraordinary unselfishness and modesty, and his great devotion to his family, to his students, to his friends, and to all the things that he lived for. The equanimity, indeed serenity, with which he faced death after his terminal cancer had been diagnosed is further evidence of the strength which his faith gave him.⁴

Like Asa Gray⁵ before him, and Francis Collins⁶ after, David Lack was an sincere, devout Christian, as well as a leading scientist who employed evolutionary theory to make brilliant discoveries about the natural world. Though Lack did not see any conflict between his scientific and Christian beliefs, he was sympathetic to the concerns of his fellow Christians. Therefore, ten years after publishing his masterpiece on Darwin’s Finches, Lack wrote another book entitled Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief: The Unresolved Conflict.

Originally published in 1957, this book deals with the very same science and faith questions that Christians struggle with today— topics like randomness and chance, death in nature, miracles, and evolutionary ethics. While it would be unreasonable to expect anyone to completely resolve these matters, Lack offered numerous insights both as a devout Christian and one of the world’s leading biologists.

Let’s take a brief look at how Lack addressed some of these questions.

Blind Chance or Divine Plan?

Evolutionary theory does not invoke supernatural forces in explaining the history of life on Earth; instead, it relies on naturally-occurring processes to account for the vast diversity of life. Additionally, it explains animal behavior largely in terms of survival and reproduction, without appealing to any higher purpose of life. Taken together, does this imply that God is absent, and that our lives are ultimately meaningless?

David Lack responded,

Behind the criticism that Darwinism means that evolution is either random or rigidly determined lies the fear that evolution proceeds blindly, and not in accordance with a divine plan. This is another problem that really lies outside the terms of reference of biology. It is true that biologists have inferred that, because evolution occurs by natural selection, there is no divine plan; but they are being as illogical as those theologians whom they rightly criticize for inferring that, because there is a divine plan, evolution cannot be the result of natural selection.⁷

When rendering judgment on the ultimate meaning of life, biologists are speaking from their person beliefs, not from scientific authority. Moreover, Lack pointed out that many science enthusiasts have employed the concept of “randomness” in ambiguous and misleading ways:

Mutations are random in relation to the needs of the animal, but natural selection is not. Selection, as the word implies, is the reverse of chance.⁸

In support of his view, Lack pointed out that convergent evolution has produced uncanny resemblances between distantly-related species across the world, notably among marsupials in Australia. Different evolutionary trajectories can lead to very similar results.⁹

Death in Nature

After addressing concerns about the seeming “randomness” of evolution, Lack turned to another great concern, the role of death in natural selection:

Various writers–some Christian and others agnostic–have been troubled about natural selection not only because it seems too random, but also because it is so unpleasant.¹⁰

Image courtesy John Marsh Photography via Flikr

Genetic mutations are generally harmful, and for evolution by natural selection to produce new forms of life, an awful lot of organisms must die. For many Christians, it is inconceivable that a loving and merciful God would allow death on such a vast scale.

But Lack also pointed out that rejecting evolutionary theory doesn’t actually get rid of the problem of death. Regardless of what we think about evolution, the brute fact of mass extinction remains. Fossils of innumerable animals, plants, and microorganisms clearly demonstrate that the vast majority of species that have ever lived are now dead. It may be quite troubling for us to observe that our planet is a giant graveyard of natural history, but rejecting evolution will not change this fact.

Some Christians conclude that death could not have been part of the divine plan; instead, it must be the work of the devil, or the result of human sin. But this interpretation contains an implicit assumption that death is always evil. Is this really true? David Lack offered two intriguing insights:

Blue-cheeked Bee-eater (Merops persicus) pair in
courtship, seen in Basai, Gurgaon, India.
Image courtesy Koshy Koshy.

1. For a population to maintain a stable size, all births must be balanced by a corresponding number of deaths. A world in which no animals die is a world in which no animals are born. That means no reproduction, no courtship, and by implication, no singing birds—much to the dismay of ornithologists and people in love!

2. Some people, taking cues from Isaiah 11:6-7, suppose that in a perfect world, animals only eat plants. But in fact, plants themselves depend on the bacterial decay of dead organisms. If animals didn't die, then essential nutrients would disappear from the ground, and plants could not continue to grow. Eventually, there would be nothing left for animals to eat, and all life would cease.¹¹

Miracles

Many Christians are uncomfortable with evolutionary theory because it denies a miraculous, supernatural origin of life. They fear that if those miracles are denied, it might lead people to reject the possibility of miracles altogether, including the central feature of the Christian faith—the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

As a devout Christian, David Lack certainly affirmed the fundamental tenets of the gospel. But at the same time, he explained to his readers that invoking miracles to account for unusual features of the natural world is not particularly helpful when trying to deepen our understanding of God’s great multitude of creatures:

[The biologist's] research depends on repeated observations. It need not, as popularly supposed, consist solely, or even mainly of measurements and experiments, but unless events are repeated, they cannot be assessed by science. Hence truly unique events come outside the domain of science, though biologists are not usually convinced when told they must, therefore, leave such problems as miracles to others. For one of the chief ways in which research has advanced is through the discovery of apparent exceptions to the known rules, and if further study shows the exceptions to be replicable, new regularities are revealed from which modified rules can be propounded. This method has been so successful that the biologist tends to doubt whether there are any types of irregularity, or seeming irregularity, that will not yield to it.¹²

But just because a scientist cannot repeat a particular event doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Both natural history and human history contain unique events that only happened once. As we peer into the past, the difficulty of discerning fact from fiction inspires us to further investigate the mysteries that surround us.

Conclusion

David Lack’s book Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief was quite insightful, but his enduring achievements took place in evolutionary biology, a place where many Christians are afraid to tread. While it is significant that he himself found no contradiction between his faith and his science, perhaps the greatest testament to the compatibility between Christian faith and evolution is the life he led as a believer in both. As we saw in Ernst Mayr’s candid praise, Lack reflected the light of Christ through both his personal and his professional relationships.

Today, many voices in our culture still insist that evolution is incompatible with a sincere faith in Jesus, but a careful look at history demonstrates otherwise. In the future, perhaps more people of faith will have confidence to study biology knowing that one of the most iconic symbols of evolution—the Galapagos finches—owe their fame in large part to a devout Christian named David Lack.

Notes

1. Mayr (1973) “David L. Lack.” Ibis: 433.
2. Larson, E. J. Evolution's Workshop: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands. New York, Basic Books, 2001: 218. See also Lack, David. (1973) “My life as an amateur ornithologist.” Ibis: 431.
3. Alister C. Hardy (1973). "David L. Lack." Ibis: 436.
4. Mayr (1973) “David L. Lack.” Ibis: 433.
5. For more about Asa Gray, see the BioLogos FAQ “How have Christians responded to Darwin’s Origin of Species?”
6. See Francis Collins’ autobiography The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for his Belief (New York: Free Press, 2007) (book info)
7. Lack, David. Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief: The Unresolved Conflict. Methuen & Co., 1957: 67.
8. Lack, p65.
9. For more on convergent evolution and the possibility that evolution could be compatible with some form of divine purpose, see the work of Simon Conway Morris, especially The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal? Templeton Press, 2008.
10. Lack, p72.
11. Lack, pp75-76.
12. Lack, p82.

In Part 1 of this essay I pointed out that metaphysical naturalism is not necessary nor inextricably tied to the practice of science, and that essentialism is only one of the historically-Christian ways to think about being human. As a case in point, we can identify the Patristic Fathers and Medieval Christian thinkers who discussed a relational alternative for understanding the nature or being of persons.¹ Roughly, the idea is that the three persons of the Trinity are what they are and who they are in virtue of their relationship with each other, not based on some intrinsic properties that ground their uniqueness as persons in the Godhead. That is to say that Father, Son and Spirit co-constitute each other, or are bound up together with enabling each other to be distinctly the persons that they are. Far from a static form of being and relationship, there is a dynamic interrelatedness in the Trinity. Father, Son and Spirit mutually constitute each other while enabling each other to be particularly who they are and engage creation and salvation in particular ways suited to who they are as persons. Father, Son and Spirit are being in community.

By analogy of relationship, humans are what we distinctly are in our being and personality in virtue of our relationship to God, creation and each other. Our involvements with others necessarily shape who we are as particular persons. The personal realm, then, is characterized by a dynamic relationality, as persons have ongoing mutually constituting influence on each other. This is part of the “dynamic order” of creation “that is summoned into being and directed towards its perfection by the free creativity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That orientation of being is, of course, distorted and delayed by sin and evil, and returns to its directedness only through the incarnation and the redeeming agency of the Spirit. But evil distorts the dynamic of being, does not take it away.”² Like the relationality of the persons of the Trinity, we are being in community.

We can also pursue the doctrine of creation as an alternative to essentialism, to see if it sheds any light on possibilities for what it means to be human in a non-reductionist sense.³ As other writers have been exploring in the Forum over the past few weeks, the biblical claim that humans are created in the image of God is important to the Christian of view of humankind. This may sound like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, for there are both Christians and non-Christians who claim that if humans arose through evolutionary processes, then we cannot be made in God’s image. Nevertheless, it is worth exploring as a way of showing that there are strong alternatives to a strictly essentialist understanding of being human.

The Image of God

Over the centuries, the dominant view of humans as the imago Dei has been grounded in the idea that there is something distinctive about the creation of humans that both sets us apart from the rest of the animals and that marks us as unique kinds of creatures. Though we are clearly both distinctive and unique, does affirming the imago Dei require this kind of essentialism? On the one hand, Genesis 1:27 has often been interpreted as grounding humanity’s being in the divine image of God on Earth. On the other hand, recent discussions in human evolution have focused on several independent lines of evidence supporting the hypothesis of common ancestry among primates and humans: fossil evidence over the last 6 million years; homologies or anatomical similarities between humans and the primates; biogeographical distribution of supposed human ancestors; similarities in developmental biology between humans and primates; and several lines of genetic evidence favoring common ancestry. In addition, our current best understanding of the genetic diversity of humans is inconsistent with models that assume all humans descended from a single original pair of individuals. Instead, the current best data and models indicate the human ancestral population was never smaller than several thousand individuals.⁴

On the surface, then, what contemporary evolutionary science currently says on human origins appears to challenge cherished beliefs and understandings of many Christians. However, to understand what implications, if any, an evolutionary development of humans might have on the image of God, we first need to get clear on what it means to be the imago Dei, and that has to be settled theologically, not scientifically.

Historically, some of the most popular proposals for the imago Dei were rooted in human rationality, human freedom or human creativity because it was thought that humans alone among the animals possessed one or more of these qualities. There are two problems with this traditional line of thought. First, investigations since the early 18th century have progressively led to the conclusion that such qualities of humans mark a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind (e.g., brains of mammals and humans are anatomically homologous, dolphins, primates, and some species of birds exhibit degrees of rationality and creativity). The degree of difference may be significant, but a difference in kind is necessary for the traditional line of essentialist thought.

Second, if we look to the Incarnation for clues to the imago Dei we find that Jesus’s humanity is never depicted as exercising extraordinary powers of rationality, freedom, creativity, and so forth. Primarily, Jesus lived as an embodied person in relationship with the Father, other humans and creation as enabled by the work of the Holy Spirit. In other words, Jesus’ human life in Scripture indicates that the divine image is a special relationship, or form of relationality: to be in relationship with the Father as a created, embodied person; to be sustained or upheld in this relationship with the Father through the perfecting Spirit; and to be in relationship with other persons and all of creation.⁵ Moreover, this special relationship is also a vocation to mirror or reflect the glory, life and worship of God.⁶

If to be the image of God is to be sustained in a special relationship with the Father, each other and creation through the Spirit, then the imago Dei is not grounded in intrinsic qualities that particularly mark humans as distinct from the rest of the animals, as essentialism would have it. Christians can understand Genesis 1: 24-31 and 2: 4-5, as many of the Patristic Fathers did, as an account of our unity and connection with the rest of creation as well as of our special relationship with God and role in God’s kingdom. So if Father, Son and Spirit created human beings through evolutionary processes, we would have continuity and connection with all of creation while still being the imago Dei. Evolution does not threaten human specialness before God unless it is viewed as a replacement for divine creative activity (which, of course, is what Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne and Answers in Genesis all do repeatedly).

If evolution is broadly right as an account of the creation of all living things (an empirical matter), and if some form of essentialism is found to be consistent with such an account (a philosophical and biological matter), Christians would then have two options for how to understand what it means to be human. We can look for some stable, unique intrinsic features in virtue of which we are human; or we can look to the special Spirit-sustained relationship we have with God, creation and each other. Both are biblically consistent, though I judge understanding the imago Dei as special relationship to make better sense of the whole of the Bible, as well as our experience in the world.

Notes

1. See Gunton, The one, the three and the many and Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, T&T Clark (2003).
2. Gunton, The one, the three, and the many, p. 166.
3. Gunton, The Triune Creation; Robert C. Bishop, “Recovering the Doctrine of Creation: A Theological View of Science,” 31 January 2011.
4. For example, see Dennis R. Venema,“Genesis and the Genome: Genomics Evidence for Human-Ape Common Ancestry and Ancestral Hominid Population Sizes,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, vol. 62, No. 3 (2010): 166-178.
5. See Gunton, The three, the one, and the many.
6. As such, the imago Dei has an inextricable missionary focus towards extending the kingdom. See N. T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, HarperOne (2012).

In a Nutshell

The meaning of the “image of God” has been debated for centuries in the church. A common view is that the image of God refers to the human abilities that separate us from the animals. However, scientists have found that abilities like communication and rationality are also present in animals on a basic level. Plus, theologians do not see the image of God as human abilities. Some theologians see the image of God as our capacity for a relationship with God. Other theologians see it as our commission to represent God’s kingdom on earth. Both of these theological positions are consistent with scientific evidence. Whether God created humanity through a miracle or through evolution, God gave us our spiritual capacities and calls us to bear his image.

In Detail

The “image of God” is a key concept in Christian theology, foundational to Christian thinking about human identity, human significance, bioethics, and other topics. Many Christians see evolution as incompatible with the image of God. How could God’s image bearers have evolved from simpler life forms? Doesn’t image-bearing require miraculous creation of humans rather than shared ancestry with chimpanzees? And when in the evolutionary process did humans attain this image? These questions are tied to many other issues concerning human origins, including the soul, the Fall, and the historicity of Adam and Eve (see sidebars), but in this article we will focus specifically on the image of God.

See “How does the Fall fit with evolutionary history?” and “Were Adam and Eve historical figures?”

The phrase “image of God” does not appear many times in the Bible, but the importance of the concept is emphasized by its repetition in the creation account:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. -- Genesis 1:26-27

From this text, it is clear that part of bearing God’s image is ruling over the animals. Genesis 9:5-6 reveals another aspect of image bearing: all human lifeblood is sacred because all humans are made in the image of God. The emphasis on Judeo-Christian thought on the sanctity of human life is derived in part from this passage. In the New Testament, the idea is expanded further as Christ is revealed as the true image of the invisible God (2 Corinthians 4:4, Colossians 1:15).

For centuries, theologians have discussed these and other passages, debating the meaning of the image of God (“imago Dei” in Latin). Being made in God’s likeness is not a matter of our physical appearance, because humans don’t all look the same. But to what does the image of God actually refer? Many ideas have been suggested over the centuries, producing a huge body of theological writing. While hard to summarize, we give a brief overview below of three common themes for the image of God. After developing this theological context, we’ll consider how these ideas intersect with evolution.

Image of God as our abilities

A common view is that the image of God refers to human abilities. When people talk of the things “that make us human,” they refer to abilities like reason and rationality, mathematics and language, laughter and emotions, caring and empathy, and cultural products like music and art. Often the motive is to distinguish humans from animals by showing that humans have unique abilities that make us special and superior to animals. Saint Augustine (354-430 A.D.) wrote something like this when he said “Man's excellence consists in the fact that God made him to His own image by giving him an intellectual soul, which raises him above the beasts of the field.”¹ Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) also emphasized intellect and rationality in his discussion of image bearing.² But Augustine and Aquinas were not speaking of intellect as an aptitude for math or music; Aquinas instead writes of an “aptitude for understanding and loving God.” In fact, the modern emphasis on reason comes more from secular Enlightenment ideas than from Christian theology. During the Enlightenment, the image of God was connected to ideas like the natural dignity and majesty of humankind that separates us from the brute beasts of the animal world.

Scientific evidence is piling up that humans have more in common with animals than was once thought. Genetic evidence shows that humans and chimpanzees share much of their DNA. Studies of animal behavior (particularly of chimps and other apes) show that animals not only laugh and cry and care for each other, but can learn sign language and even have basic reasoning ability. In fact, Christian neuroscientist Malcolm Jeeves writes that “any attempt to set down a clear demarcation between the reasoning abilities of nonhuman primates and humans is found to have become blurred.”³ Obviously, humans have a much larger capacity to reason than animals, but reasoning is not a uniquely human ability. As neuroscientists and animal behaviorists learn more about animals, they see how traits appear in a rudimentary form at a level similar to human children.⁴ Whether or not one accepts evolution, evidence from living humans and animals does not show a distinct difference in kinds of abilities (only degree).

See “Made in the Image of God: The Theological Implications of Genomics” a 2-part blog by Denis Alexander.

Another challenge for this picture of the image of God is the place of people with mental disabilities. If a person is impaired in reasoning or language, are they bearing less of God’s image? Are they not showing his true likeness? The Christian answer to these questions is No! The Bible repeatedly teaches that God values all people, particularly those who are rejected by society or unable to care for themselves.⁵ In fact, Genesis 9:5-6 points to image bearing as the reason that all human life is valuable. This is a major motivator for Christians who seek to protect the unborn, the poor, and the aged. Surely bearing God’s image must mean something other than using our abilities.

PLEASE READ THE REST OF THE ANSWER HERE.

Notes

1. Saint Augustine The literal meaning of Genesis, Book 6, Chapter 12 (Google books, p. 193)
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 93 (html)
3. Malcolm Jeeves, “Neuroscience, Evolutionary Psychology, and the Image of God” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (2005) 57.3, p. 178 (PDF)
4. Similarly, many human traits have been replicated in artificial intelligence, particularly logic and math but also conversational language and computer-generated art.
5. For more see, Kathy McReynolds “More Than Skin Deep” BioLogos Forum June 2010

As we’ve seen in recent essays (and comments) touching on Biblical scholarship, philosophy, theology, and anthropology, the imago Dei is a complicated idea, linked to the question of whether what makes humans unique among the creatures on earth is physical, cultural, spiritual, or some combination of all three. As Christians who seek to frame what the natural sciences tell us about our physical humanity with what the Bible suggests are our defining human qualities, we tend to focus on what Genesis means when it says Adam was “made in the likeness of God”; but it is helpful to remember that the first mention of God’s image in human form looked forward to the full revelation that would come in Christ. Thus, we ought also seek to understand Jesus as the model towards which Adam always pointed, and by which we should understand both Adam and ourselves.

Going one step further, we should also look forward from Jesus to the life of the Church. For if Jesus was the true image of God, then at Pentecost, the new community of believers took on the role of imaging the continuing presence of God in and for the world. The Church was constituted as the very Body of Christ, charged with making him known in their lives as well as their words. Thus in the structure and life of the Church we also see something important about the imago Dei.

Perhaps one way to hold in tension the various interpretations of the image—that is, to affirm the incomplete truths available through the relational, functional, substantial, and elective models—is to look at a literal image of the way the social aspect of imaging God via the Church interacts with the intensely individual and personal aspect of imaging God in individuals. Picking up on Kathy McReyolds’ sketch of personal transformation through encounters with those with disabilities (More than Skin Deep), I’d like to turn our attention towards the work of Chicago artist Tim Lowly, whose monumental portrait of his disabled daughter (Temma on Earth, 1999), is pictured above. Lowly’s work compels us to recognize the image of God even in one who lacks markers of those other roles, capacities, and relationships, and highlights two linked characteristics common to Jesus and Church: brokenness that does not merely equate with imperfection, and a social picture of our essential identity in Christ. By allowing Lowly to place Temma’s identity and humanity at the center of our attention, we can reframe our sense of what it means to bear the image of God and reflect the crucified Christ as his Body.

Profoundly Other

Born in North Carolina but spending his youth in South Korea (where his parents were Presbyterian missionaries), Tim Lowly attended Calvin College and began work as an artist in Michigan. But his life and work took an unexpected turn in 1985, when Tim and his wife Sherrie’s daughter was born and suffered a medical emergency during her first two days home from the hospital. In 2002, journalist Fred Camper’s incredibly sensitive article treated the Lowlys’ physical, emotional and spiritual journey with Temma at length, and I encourage readers to turn to that essay for the full narrative background to Tim’s approach to his daughter and his art. But the central facts are that for all of her now 27 years, Temma’s host of physical and mental disabilities have made her completely dependent on others, and have meant that the relationship she has with her parents (and they with her) is a radical departure from ‘normal.’ Temma’s “profound otherness” challenges most of our expectations about the human capacity to image God. Speaking to Camper, Lowly describes Temma:

It's unlikely that she thinks in a way that we would call thinking," he says, "because our ways of thinking are based so much on learning, experience, sight, socialization, and history, and I doubt any of those things have any bearing on Temma. I don't even think comparing her to animals makes sense. There's a certain wholeness to the way animals think that I don't think Temma is capable of. I'm pretty sure she does have an inner life, but I don't think she has the mental mechanisms that would make it correspond in an understandable way to the way we think.

And yet Lowly has produced hundreds of paintings and other works that feature Temma, some of them monumental in scale, none of them shying away from questions of the purpose, value, and meaning of her life for their family, and for ever-widening circles of community. Certainly there is a political component to Lowly’s work that addresses inequity in culture and church. Generally, he says, the church has been compassionate, but “nearly always from perspective of the able-bodied and the ‘whole’ vs. the disabled, never mind that none of us measure up to complete wholeness.” Yet his work also reflects the way Temma, in her “otherness,” creates community. Artist-in-residence and gallery director at Northpark University since the mid-1990s, Lowly has often made Temma a physical presence in the studio and classroom. Carry Me, 2002 (drawing on panel, 108" x 48," at left) depicts students from an advanced class holding Temma, but they were also involved completing the project. Another large work, Culture of Adoration, 2008, shows Temma as the model in a drawing class, with Lowly drawing the parallel between that scene and the adoration of the Magi at Jesus’ birth. That comparison pictures the way a community forms around loving attention and worship, but subverts artistic and cultural expectations that only what is beautiful should be valued. Lowly notes that while Temma is often alone, in some ways she’s never alone: “She’s cared for by her parents, but that relationship extends out to a much broader church outside her family.” Both paintings, then, are images of Christ’s corporate body as much as they are of Temma or the painting students who carry and draw her.

What bearing, then, does Lowly’s particular way of seeing and depicting his daughter have on us, on our sense of the imago Dei? Part of his ongoing artistic project is to understand and interrogate the way the traditions of perspective in Western art and culture presuppose and privilege the individual, solitary and unified point of view as the most important, the most true. In the wake of modernist emphases on self-expression in art, Lowly also sees value in pursuing ways of working that bring out the meditative (and even prayerful) craft aspect of painting, and that at least partially de-emphasize his and other artists’ subjective positions. He increasingly works from photographs (and collages of many individual pictures), and has more and more sought to bring collaboration into the making of his work. When Lowly takes Temma as his subject, these features of his practice emphasize the way that, in the Church, our individual identity is experienced as a tension between brokenness and wholeness in the Body.

Broken Together

There is a sense in which we look at Temma and we want to affirm that she is made in the image of God by denying that the image of God has anything to do with her physical, material body. Indeed, one way to approach the problem made visible through Lowly’s painting is to imagine the soul as imparted to (or trapped in) the physical frame. This certainly fits with saying that the image-bearing role of humanity in general is an act of the grace of God, not something dependent on our abilities. But in the election model, we are reminded that God didn’t call Abraham just to a “spiritual” identity, but also to physically constitute a people sent into the very concrete physical world.

Likewise, if we recognize Jesus as our model for the image of God, we will not deny the physicality of the human experience, nor the incarnation, nor even Christ's suffering on our account. Indeed, we must affirm the goodness of creation and our physicality, even—especially—in its brokenness because Jesus, himself, was broken. Even after the resurrection, his wounds were not abolished or erased, but remained tangible marks by which the Lord revealed himself every bit as much as he did in his creative and healing power. And in the Revelation image of the victorious Christ, we have another picture of that essential and persistent sacrificial brokenness in the Lamb who appeared “as if slain.”

What of the Church? Similarly, the Church remains a fragmented whole when it is at its best—broken open to be dispersed into the world. And though it is also all-too-often broken by own individual and corporate sin, even that finds its meaning and redemption in the image of bread broken in the Lord’s Supper—the way that sharing brokenness together unites the individuals in a congregation with each other and with Christ. As a reminder of Jesus’ own individual body, communion addresses both of those senses; it is the means of both healing and sending.

Christ’s commission to the Church, then, presents a profoundly social model of being the continuing revelation of God for the world. We bear the image of God together, and the image of God is only fully realized when we are members of a community, in relation to other human beings (even if that relationship is one of complete dependence), as opposed to seeking independence. This does not and ought not compromise the absolute worth of each individual, but should remind us that part of our worth is tied up in our integration with the whole body of Christ.

One last example of Lowly’s work gives iconic form to this inter-relation between image-bearing, self, identity, and the community of the Church. Made to commemorate Temma’s 25th birthday in 2010, At 25(right, and below), is a collaborative piece constructed of 25 individual, two-sided panel blocks that fit together something like a puzzle. On one side is a black and white portrait of Temma, while on the reverse, the individual blocks have been painted and gilded in different patterns and techniques. Lowly constructed the piece, but sent each block out to be completed by 30 different artists, either working alone or in pairs. In requesting them to do their sections of the composite portrait in an “artistically neutral” style, he was asking them to subjugate their artistic personae and self-expression to the depiction of Temma. Not every artist was able to do that to the same extent, so the final object is an image of the imperfection of our self-giving—or our inability to see others without looking through our own particular lenses of self—even while being a testament to the compassion and care of Lowly’s dispersed community.

Most importantly for this discussion, At 25 suggests that our image-bearing of God does not rest on our individual “fitness,” much less how well we “fit in.” Rather, it is carried by the whole human community, most fully in the broken Body of Christ. In this respect, brokenness is not something to be corrected; it is something that makes the particular community of the Church possible. Individuals may not be able to fulfill or even recognize the functional aspects of the imago Dei, they may not even be capable of the relational aspects—or of returning expressions of love or kindness or thanks, or even awareness. But the whole body, the beloved community, the nation God set apart for himself and the world, is called to be the image of God for each of us—precisely when we can’t.

Tim Lowly is Assistant Professor of Art at Northpark University. An inter-disciplinary artist, he works with painting, drawing, installation, digital media, photography and music: both individually and collaboratively. His work has a lyrical realism and quiet spirituality that have contributed over the last thirty years to the development of a international reputation. While Tim’s art and music address a variety of subjects, the central pillar of his work has been his daughter Temma who is, in his words, “profoundly other”. The clinical diagnoses of “multiple impairment” or “spastic quadriplegia” do little to address the compelling presence of this young woman and the way her being and essence have shaped her father’s work.

Lowly was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina in 1958. The son of medical missionaries, he spent most of his youth in South Korea. He attended Calvin College and received a BFA degree in 1981. His wife Sherrie Lowly is a United Methodist Pastor. They reside in Chicago, Illinois. Since 1994 Tim has been affiliated with North Park University in Chicago as professor, gallery director, and artist-in-residence. Tim is represented by Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles.

For additional information (including exhibitions and collections) see Tim’s personal website.

All images © Tim Lowly.

For the past twelve years, I have had the privilege to teach in the Bible Department at a prestigious Christian university. Most of my students have been raised in Christian homes and have attended conservative, Bible-believing churches all of their lives. These students believe that they have a pretty solid understanding of what the image of God entails; at least they think they do until they encounter the world of disability. Disability creates a dissonance in their worldview that they are not expecting. All of a sudden, what they thought they understood about the image of God comes crashing down like a house of cards. The image of God and disability just do not seem to go together.

The following quotes from some of my student’s papers are representative of many and their experience with the disabled “strange other.” What is communicated loud and clear is the challenges disabilities raise for their conception of the image of God:¹

I believe that those with disabilities are equal to us … but I discovered a hidden evil in my heart. Deep in my heart, hidden from the world, I believed that children born with disabilities that would normally not survive its first few days should be allowed to die.

I think I could have intellectually acknowledged that all men and women are created in the image of God … In this class I was challenged to see the realities of disability and ask if I really did believe that God created these individuals in his image and salvation was for them too.

Though I have always known that these individuals are created in His own image, I often found myself secretly thinking that they were miserable and often a burden on others.

Sometimes I feel pity for disabled individuals because they are not “normal”. I feel that their disability is hindering them from experiencing the best life possible. I think disabled people experience a lesser quality of life because they cannot physically and/or mentally do as many things as a “normal” person could.

Now, these young people are not more spiritually or morally bankrupt than others in contemporary society. In fact, to the contrary, these Christian students are considerably more spiritually and morally sensitive in general because of their commitment as Christ- followers. Still, these views have been nurtured and influenced by two factors, one that is cultural and one that is religious: 1) the pervasiveness of a reductionist view of human being fostered by scientism; 2) a wooden, literal interpretation of Genesis 2:7 which says that “the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being.”

Taken together, these two factors present a skewed view of human being, one that focuses on the physical and material rather than on the spiritual and essential. This is one of the reasons why my students twinge and recoil a bit at the thought that persons with disabilities can be made in God’s image. “They just don’t look like it,” they say, zeroing in on what is physically seen. This view has had enormous consequences for people with disabilities. In fact, Adolf Hitler, as part of developing his approach to the weaker members of society in his book Mein Kampf, identifies the stronger (better looking and functioning) members of society as “images of the Lord” in contrast to the weaker members who are mere “deformities” of that image, and who ought to be cleansed from society. Many have argued that Hitler’s ideas concerning those with disabilities were inspired solely by Darwinian evolution. However, these quotes from Mein Kampf reveal a horrific misuse of Scripture, not evolutionary ideas.

Furthermore, with regard to evolution, a face value exegesis of Genesis 1 & 2 does not dictate that the physical stuff God used to create human beings was special or unique or that the image itself resides in it. It shows, rather, that all matter was formless and void until God, who acted and willed out of his good pleasure and sovereign choice, brought order and harmony to it. This applies as well to the creation of human beings who are uniquely created in God’s image. If this image is not merely physical stuff, what is it? What does the literary and historical context of Genesis 1 & 2 reveal?

There are three views on the image of God: 1) Substantial; 2) Relational; and 3) Functional. The functional view sees the imago Dei as a function or role that humans fulfill--such as being priests or having dominion. The relational view has to do with humans imaging God in their ability to have spiritual relationships—primarily with God, but also expressed in terms of our male and femaleness and other nuances. The substantial view essentially says that God’s image is imprinted on the person’s soul as an image is impressed on a coin, and has much to do with human capacities like our free will and ability to reason. It has been predominant in Christian theology in the West since about 600 AD.

But though we do have specific capacities that bear on our responses to God, as the substantial view says, the human being is an embodied soul who has both relational and functional capacities, as well. The relational implications include the biblical truth that among all God’s creatures, only human beings can know Him and be consciously aware of Him. Most importantly, he knows us and can be in relationship with us even when we do not acknowledge him out of rebellion, or cannot respond to him because of disability. If we consider the Substantial view’s emphasis on conscious awareness, ability to exercise freedom, and decision-making capacities alone, however, some human beings may not qualify as persons, whereas some non-human animals might.

Against this, a more holistic view affirms that all human beings bear God’s image, regardless of capacities. The image of God cannot be lost or compromised in anyway. Even the poorest functioning human being profoundly reflects God’s image.

In an unexpected and peculiar way, my students discovered this truth about the image of God when they began to interact with people with disabilities in my classroom. This truth about the image utterly transformed and they began to see people with disabilities quite differently. The following quotes come from the same students quoted at the beginning:

What I came to realize is that since the disabled are people, they deserve life. As humans made in the image of God, we are to try to preserve our fellow disabled brothers and sisters who are also made in the image of God.

When I went to the day group home, it was an amazing experience. I really enjoyed interacting with everyone there. I was able to paint with them, and one of them sang to me and taught me to dance; it was so much fun. It was great to see how each and every one of them was so unique and made in the image of God.

In this class I was challenged to see the realities of disability and ask if I really did believe that God created these individuals in his image and salvation was for them, too. As a result of what I have learned from this class my answer to these two questions is a resounding yes! God loves individuals with disabilities and knows the depths of their hearts and minds on a level I could never comprehend. Who am I to doubt who God knows, who He loves, and to whom He offers the gift of His Son.

At the beginning of the semester, disability was a foreign world for me. That world was new and uncomfortable. I had no idea how to interact with anyone with a profound disability and had little desire to learn how. Throughout this course, the walls of misconceptions, fears, and insecurities that I have built up to distance myself from disability have slowly been chipped away. As I learned more about disability, my fears and discomfort were replaced with compassion and joy. Exposure to individuals and families with disabilities was the most effective way to break down those walls. Having the opportunity to observe and interact with individuals with disabilities was invaluable. Participating in disability ministry is not burdensome, as I had initially worried, but freeing. I left the night feeling uplifted, loved, and so aware of God’s mysterious presence within broken humanity.

During Jesus’ ministry on earth, often the best way to find him was to seek out those society considered strange, unclean, or undesirable; Jesus often sought them out, himself, in order to show that God’s love for us does not depend on our merits or abilities, much less our outward appearance. Similarly, my students today meet the Lord anew—and discover that same message of God’s unmerited grace and love—when they seek out relationships with those our society finds strange and broken, with those who they could easily avoid seeing at all. Rather than judging with the eyes alone, my students learn to recognize their cultural and theological blind-spots, and see both the disabled and themselves in the light of Christ’s love. Relationships are transforming; and relationships with people with disabilities can transform not only our image of them, but of the God who made in His image, and dwells with us in places deeper than the skin.

Notes

1. All student quotes used by permission. Names are left out to protect student privacy.

Left: "Abrahamic Covenant" by Christoph Weigel, 1695.
Courtesy Pitts Theological Seminary, Emory University.

The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. - Ishmael ¹

For the destiny of humans and the destiny of animals is the same: As one dies, so dies the other; Both have the same breath of life. And humans have no preeminence over the animals…All go to the same place; All come from dust, And to dust all shall return. - Ecclesiastes 3:19-20

What is humankind’s place among the animals? Should we even count human beings among the animals at all? Perhaps we—as men and women—are something else entirely? Such questions are not new. Indeed, they are as old as writing itself and similar ponderings about human identity occupy the most ancient of texts. While many of these primeval writings have crumbled in the winds of time and have come to us only in fragments, the Genesis account of human and animal origins remains a living document that occupies a vital place in the life of Christian practice and thought. In the first chapter of the Genesis narrative we read that humans—male and female—were created in the image (tselem) and likeness (demuth) of God. But what does this mean? There is certainly no shortage of proposed answers, and over two thousand years of theological tradition bears witness to this fact. Here, however, we are not primarily interested in tradition—as valuable and insightful as it may be—but we are concerned with what the Bible itself has to say.

Taking the authority of Scripture seriously demands that we engage with Scripture in light of both its original languages and its original cultural context. If we are to avoid—as much as it is possible—projecting our own personal, modern and post-modern cultural presuppositions onto Scripture, then we must be willing to do some of the hermeneutical (or interpretive) hard work. In other words, if we want to allow Scripture to speak for itself, we must be hyper-aware of the cultural lenses we are wearing when we read it. Interpreting the Bible through five hundred years of Protestant tradition, fifteen hundred years of Roman Catholic tradition, or one hundred years of Seventh-Day Adventist tradition won’t do.² Rather we must venture to take off the thick hermeneutical lenses of tradition and boldly attempt to go into the world of the sacred text itself so that we can allow the ancient inspired words to shape the lenses or our reading.

With this approach to Scripture in mind, I believe it is useful to address the matter of the image and likeness of God (or imago Dei) by first asking what the imago Dei is not. Throughout the centuries, theologians, philosophers, and others have posed a number of answers to the question of what the imago Dei is. The vast majority of these answers have focused on one or a few characteristics that humans alone have and that non-human animals lack. For example, Evangelical Christian author Kay Warren explains: “Animals and people are two different classes of created beings and they will never be equal in their worth. As precious as animals are to our daily existence, they operate from instinct, not volition. Only people have a spiritual dimension. We are the ones created in the image of the Creator, the only ones with a soul.”³ In a similar manner, political commentator Ann Coulter, citing “the story of Genesis”, maintains: “It’s not merely opposable thumbs and a bipedal gait that make us distinct from the other beasts. It is consciousness of our mortality, a moral sense, language, mathematics, art, beauty, music, love, longings for immortality, a sense of symmetry, the soul’s ascent, the ability to accessorize, and our fascination with Branson, Missouri…We are in God’s image, and we’re the only ones in God’s image, which is why we eat escargot rather than worship them.”⁴ While these are two popular contemporary voices, similar views are espoused by numerous academics as well. In this way the imago Dei has, for many, become synonymous with one central characteristic or several key traits that make humans unique among and/or superior to animals.⁵

As intriguing as such perceived indicators of human uniqueness are, and regardless of the scientific status of claims for such distinguishing human traits, the idea that there are particular physical features and/or behavioral characteristics that make men—and not beasts—in the image and likeness of God is not one that is found anywhere in the pages of Holy Scripture. With regard to humans as “the image and likeness of God,” a literal and consistent reading of the Genesis narratives discloses that the imago Dei designation does not refer to unique characteristics or capacities which humans posses in a way that excludes other non-human animals.

Hebrew scholar Phyllis Bird informs us that the scriptural context of the phrase “image and likeness of God” makes it plain that “its theological significance is in the place it gives to humans within the created order, not in any physical or moral attribute of the species, in either its present or ‘original’ state.”⁶ In the Bible the imago Dei is not about exceptional human capacities or characteristics that automatically qualify humans as being included in the imago Dei category. There is no reason, explains Bible scholar James Barr, to believe that the author of Genesis chapter one “had in his mind any definite idea about the content or location of the image of God.”⁷ The terms “‘image’ and ‘likeness’…make no statements about the nature of human beings.”⁸ When we read of “the creation of human beings in God’s image (Gen 1:26)…the biblical narrative remains silent…about any qualities of human nature that might account for their special standing.”⁹

If we are to properly understand the meaning of the texts, then, says Old Testament scholar Claus Westermann, we must confidently resist “the tendency to see the image and likeness of God as a something, a quality.”¹⁰ Consequently, a literal reading of the early Genesis accounts demands that no specific anthropological content or characteristics may be directly equated with the imago Dei. If one is to take the findings of biblical exegesis seriously, then—apart from theological tradition—the image of God cannot be defined on the basis of particular physical traits or behavioral characteristics. This means that—according to a straightforward reading of Genesis and the rest of Scripture—humans are not said to be biologically or behaviorally unique in a way that is related to their being named the “image of God.”

In addition to the broad consensus among biblical scholars that the image of God in humans, when understood within its original Hebrew linguistic and Ancient Near Eastern context, has nothing whatsoever to do with an appeal to the human possession of particular characteristics which non-human animals lack, research in biblical exegesis has similarly revealed that there is no essential or substantial super-natural divide between humans and other animals. Scripture, when read in the original languages, clearly describes both “man and beast” as possessing “the breath of life” and refers to both equally as “souls.” In this way Scripture makes no ontological or metaphysical distinctions between humans and non-human animals. Instead, the scriptural “emphasis lies on the commonality that exists between the humans and the rest of the animal creation.”¹¹

While the use of the Hebrew word nephesh, often translated as “soul”, to describe humans has been taken by some as an indication that humans are substantially set apart from the animals, the nephesh is not an exclusive possession of humans. Indeed, the Hebrew text describes both humans (Gen 2:7) and animals (Gen 1:21, 24) equally as nephesh hayyah or “living souls.”¹² Thus, Bible Scholar Gordon Wenham explains that in Genesis 2:7, which describes the human being as a nephesh, “it is not man’s possession of the ‘breath of life’ or his status as a ‘living creature’ that differentiates him from the animals—animals are described in exactly the same terms.”¹³ In Genesis, “human beings…are only one subset of God’s ‘living beings,’ into whom God has breathed the breath of life” and established as “living souls.”¹⁴

According to the biblical understanding, then, “what is distinctive about human beings is not that they have a ‘soul’ which animals do not possess, nor that they have a ‘spirit’ which other creatures do not possess.”¹⁵ It is clear, then, that “the possession of nepheš is not a unique characteristic of the human person.” Indeed, “unless one is ready to grant that animals have ‘souls’ in the same way that humans are alleged to have, then we might better conclude that the Genesis account is referring to the divine gift of life: ‘the human being became a living person.’”¹⁶ Consequently, “claims for a ‘special creation’ of humanity in comparison with animals and the material world conflict with the strong assertion in Genesis 2 that, physically (organically), Adam does not differ from the ‘beasts of the field.’”¹⁷ The theological language of anthropology in Genesis 1 and 2 “underscores Adam’s linkage with the animal creation, not his difference from it.”¹⁸

Whatever else the imago Dei might be, then, a clear and consistent reading of Scripture does not permit us to equate it with either a non-material soul which animals lack or some unique physical characteristic or behavior which animals lack. These conclusions regarding what the image and likeness of God in humans IS NOT lead us directly to our discussion of what the imago Dei IS.

In Part 2 of this series, Dr. Moritz examines how the phrase "image and likeness of God" is used within Scripture itself.

Notes

1. Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (New York: Bantam, 1992), 146.
2. I mention SDA because the prophecies of Ellen White and her interpretations of Genesis have played a significant role in shaping contemporary Evangelical understandings of the text. See Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 74. For an online lecture on this topic see http://vimeo.com/38687776
3. Kay Warren, “Puppies Aren’t People: When compassion for animals goes too far,” (Accessed May 22, 2012) http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/2009/04/kay_warren_puppies_arent_peopl.html. In this essay Kay Warren cites the theological views of her husband Rick Warren.
4. Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (New York: Crown Forum, 2006), 266.
5. For example a recent group of Genesis interpreters concludes, “Evidence points to the fact that man is a unique creation, made in the image of God.” David N. Menton, “Did humans really evolve from ape-like creatures?” in War of the Worldviews: Powerful Answers for an Evolutionized Culture, ed. Ken Ham, Bodie Hodge, Carl Kerby, et al. (Green Forest, Arkansas: New Leaf Press, 2006), 43-59.
6. Phyllis A. Bird, “Theological Anthropology in the Hebrew Bible,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Leo G. Perdue (Malden, MA: Blackwell 2001), 262.
7. James Barr, “The Image of God in the Book of Genesis: A Study of Terminology, ” Bulletin of the John. Rylands Library 51 (1968-69), 13.
8. Horst Dietrich Preuss, Old Testament Theology, vol 2, trans. Leo G. Perdue (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 115
9. Kathryn Tanner, “The Difference Theological Anthropology Makes,” Theology Today 50:4 (Jan 1994), 573.
10. Claus Westermann, Creation, trans. John H. Scullion, S.J. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 57-58.
11. Iain Provan, “The Land Is Mine and You Are Only Tenants (Leviticus 25:23): Earth-keeping and People-keeping in the Old Testament,” CRUX 42:2 (Summer 2006): 5.
12. Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary, 1st ed. trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 136.
13. Gordon Wenham, Word Biblical Commentary: Genesis 1-15 (Waco: Word, 1987), 61.
14. Provan, “The Land Is Mine and You Are Only Tenants,” 5.
15. Ray Anderson, “Theological Anthropology” in The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology, ed. Gareth Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 85 (emphasis added).
16. Joel B. Green, “Restoring The Human Person: New Testament Voices For A Holistic and Social Anthropology,” in Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, Theo C. Meyering, and Michael Arbib (Vatican City State and Berkeley, CA: Vatican Observatory and CTNS, 1999), 5.
17. Lawson G. Stone, “The Soul: Possession, Part, or Person? The Genesis of Human Nature in Genesis 2:7” in What About the Soul?: Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology, ed. Joel B. Green (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004), 50.
18. Ibid., 57.

I want to express my gratitude to those associated with BioLogos for the chance to dialogue with them. I have found their material to be challenging and thought provoking, and look forward to continuing the conversation. In the area of science, to call me a novice would be a kindness, and so to question their evaluation of the scientific evidence for the evolutionary process would be inappropriate for me. However, I do want to raise some questions about their evaluation of theological issues, especially concerning the image of God in humanity. I refer especially to their response to the question, “At what point in the evolutionary process did humans attain the ‘Image of God?’”¹

The BioLogos response begins by correctly noting that the precise meaning of the image of God has been the subject of debate throughout Christian history, but they believe the majority view sees the image of God as “characteristics of the mind and soul,” such as “the ability to love selflessly; engage in meaningful relationships; exercise rationality; maintain dominion over the Earth; and embrace moral responsibility.” They see these characteristics as being acquired through the evolutionary process, though they also state, “We do not know if humanity received the image of God by the immediate onset of a relationship with God or by a slower evolutionary process.” Further, since they identify the image with characteristics of the soul, they add in a discussion of the soul, “We also cannot know whether God directly intervened in the evolutionary process at this point [referencing Gen. 2:7], or whether the unfolding evolutionary process produced the human soul.” It is at this point I wish to question whether or not it is possible for the image of God to be produced through the evolutionary process apart from the special intervention of God. BioLogos seems to lean toward the image being produced through evolution, but is ultimately non-committal on the possibility of divine intervention. I want to argue that there is good reason to argue for the necessity of divine intervention in giving to humans the image of God.

I have no strong objection to the list of characteristics given in the BioLogos response, though I would see most of them as underlying the capacity for relationship with God, which I see as central to the image. Nor do I have any necessary objection to the idea that God used the evolutionary process in developing the brain and other physical abilities of human beings necessary for exercising some of the characteristics involved in the image. Nor do I think that Gen. 2:7 requires the direct intervention of God in implanting the soul (though it certainly allows it). The problem, rather, is in not recognizing that the image of God in Scripture seems rather clearly linked with something immaterial in the human constitution (whether it is called soul or spirit) that could not have come into being by evolutionary processes. My argument for affirming the necessity of direct intervention of God in the creation of humanity in the image of God rests on three assertions. Let me try to state and defend them.

First is the assertion that central to the image of God is the capacity for relationship with God. I do not think this would be rejected by those in the BioLogos community. Within the BioLogos response the phrase “relationship with God” is found numerous times in association with the image of God. They may not like the part about such a capacity being central to the image of God, but the fact that the image of God is what distinguishes humans from other animals in Genesis 1, coupled with the fact that it is humans, and not other animals, who engage in personal relationship with God throughout Scripture, makes a fairly strong case for linking “image of God” to “capacity for relationship with God.”

The second assertion is that this capacity for relationship with God is something that continues after the death of the body, and is associated with something in human beings that continues to exist after the death of the body. Here I recognize that there has been a growing chorus of voices advocating monistic views of the human constitution,² but they all seem to fail to account for the strong biblical evidence for human existence in the intermediate state.³ That which survives death is called the soul in some places (Gen. 35:18; Rev. 6:9-10) and the spirit in others (Eccles. 12:7; Heb. 12:23), but it is identified with the person himself in II Cor. 5:8 and Phil. 1:23. Jesus says to the thief on the cross, “Today, you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). Both of their bodies would soon be in graves, but the words “you” and “me” seem to affirm an existence apart from their bodies.

The third assertion is that whatever it is in human nature that survives the death of the body (soul or spirit) must be non-material, and could not be produced by the evolutionary process.⁴ Alvin Plantinga, in an argument against materialism, asks, “How could an immaterial soul have come to be by way of evolutionary processes?”⁵ He quotes Richard Dawkins,

Catholic morality demands the presence of a great gulf between Homo Sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom. Such a gulf is fundamentally anti-evolutionary [and hence wholly heretical?]. The sudden injection of an immortal soul in the timeline is an anti-evolutionary intrusion into the domain of science.⁶

I would change Dawkins’ wording from “Catholic morality” to “The image of God in humans” but the conclusion is the same. I cannot imagine how an immaterial reality, which survives the death of the body, could be produced by natural processes, such as evolution, even God-guided evolution. I do not think this is a God-of-the-gaps argument that could eventually fall to advances in science, but a logical argument, based on the intrinsic difficulty of seeing how the natural and mortal could produce something immaterial and capable of surviving the death of the body. Even if someone were to question my association of the image of God with the spirit or soul (assertion 1), I would argue that the mere existence of an immaterial spirit/soul that survives death (assertion 2) yields the same necessity of divine involvement in the creation of the immaterial aspect of human nature (assertion 3), which is my chief contention.

Notes

1. Subsequent references are taken from the response given at http://biologos.org/questions/image-of-god, accessed 10/14/2011.
2. Joel Green has been perhaps the most prominent voice advocating monism (see Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008] and Joel Green, ed., What About the Soul? Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology [Nashville: Abingdon, 2004]), though a similar view has been affirmed by a number of his Fuller Seminary colleagues who advocate a “non-reductive physicalism” (see Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, eds., Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998). For a more complete presentation of views, see Joel Green, In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005).
3. John W. Cooper, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989) gives a strong defense for dualism primarily from the evidence in Scripture for the intermediate state.
4. I recognize the objection here of William Hasker and the idea of emergentism, or emergent dualism, in which a distinct soul or self emerges from the complex configurations of the biological organism, similar to magnetic fields generated by physical objects but distinct from them. See Hasker, The Emergent Self (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), for the fullest presentation of his view. The difficulty of his view lies in attributing to material stuff the power to generate a non-material reality. This difficulty is raised by Alvin Plantinga (see n. 5 below) and others and emergent dualism is as of today still a minority view in philosophical circles.
5. Alvin Plantinga, “A New Argument Against Materialism” (plenary address for the Evangelical Philosophical Society, Atlanta, GA, 18 November 2010).
6. Ibid. No source for Dawkins is given.

It didn’t seem right to deposit such a gift unreflectively into our bank account, allowing it to be swallowed up anonymously into our daily expense fund. My wife Sarah and I talked about a symbolic way we might use the money to honor John’s mark of grace on both of our lives. We very quickly settled on our decision: an SLR camera with a fine telephoto lens.

Many people remember John Stott for his books and preaching, but fewer remember him for his love of creation, his ornithological passion, and his knack for bird photography. On the very first day of my job working as his study assistant, I found on my desk a brand new set of binoculars and a copy of “Birds of Europe,” by Lars Johnson (the definitive guide). No study assistant was to work for John unless we shared in his love for birds, or at least could ably feign it. I soon discovered how seriously he took this avocation. In London he would stop whatever meeting we might be rushing off to in order to catch a look at a passing Kestrel. At his writing cottage in Southwest Wales we would begin every Sunday morning at Pickleridge Pools to see the Loons and Cormorants. Wherever we traveled, whether Uganda, India or Hungary, we would always schedule an extra few days to visit the local bird life with the accompaniment of a local expert.

But I also discovered that his love for birds was an extension of his love for creation and for its Creator. Uncle John took seriously the Psalmist’s words, “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them” (Ps 111:2). Taking “the works of the Lord” to include both God’s work of creation and redemption, he would often say that nature study and Bible study must go hand in hand. He was ahead of his time in calling Christians to have a more robust doctrine of and appreciation for Creation, and he viewed having at least one pursuit in the realm of natural history as an outflow of Christian discipleship. Indeed, it is striking that in his very last book, The Radical Disciple, in which he reflects on “some neglected aspects of our calling,” he includes “Creation Care” among Christian responsibilities like Christlikeness and Dependence.¹ And as remarkable as his accomplishments were in authoring such influential books as Basic Christianity and The Cross of Christ, it was his much less well known book The Birds Our Teachers,² which includes over 150 of his own photographs, that he would most often pull out to show visiting guests.

Some criticized John for his theistic evolutionary position and even his appreciation for Darwin, who John viewed as a man genuinely conflicted with how his discoveries could be integrated with his personal Christian faith. But Stott saw no contradiction between his own commitment to the authority of Scripture and his openness to God’s use of evolution in His creative process. He was of course unequivocal in his assertion that “One cannot be a Christian and not believe in creation.”³ Yet believing that Genesis 1 speaks more to the “why” rather than the “how” of creation, John also affirmed, “Those Christians who believe in evolution…mean that the huge variety of animal and vegetable forms can best be accounted for not by the independent creation of each, but by a gradual process of ‘descent with modification’, whether or not Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ is the best explanation of its mechanisms.”⁴ If anything, for John the possibility of God’s implementation of the evolutionary process was a striking example of the way God does not simply create but is also actively involved in sustaining and ordering His world.

So on the date of John’s birthday, April 27, we used his gift and bought our new camera. Laying it out on the table, I realized I needed a spacious and protective carrying case to hold the various lenses and equipment. I climbed up into the attic and retrieved John’s old camera bag, which he passed on to me after he had his second embolism and could no longer see well enough to take photographs. As I opened it up and examined the various lenses and mounts inside, now too old to adapt to any of the modern equipment, I realized I was holding in my hands the tools of one man’s passion and an expression of his love for his triune creator God. Deeply moved, I picked up my own camera, a new tool for my own stewardship of created life, and headed outside.

Notes

1. John Stott, The Radical Disciple (IVP, 2010).
2. John Stott, The Birds Our Teachers: Biblical Lessons from a lifelong bird-watcher (Angus Hudson, 1999).
3. Ibid.
4. John Stott, People Our Teachers (Angus Hudson, 2002), 110.

Realizing such a beautiful thing made me desire God even more, and I began regularly attending the church a friend had introduced me to early on in my relocation to San Diego. The pastor’s messages were funny, relevant, convicting, and oftentimes full of scientific facts used to illustrate God’s majestic creation. As a college student pursuing a degree in biology, it seemed to be the perfect church. One Sunday the topic of evolution came up and I listened as he proceeded to explain how the “theory” was not only utterly ridiculous (it should really be called a “hypothesis”), but that it was incompatible with the Bible. Because the last biology class I took was in high school, I couldn’t quite recall what I learned about evolution; in my new-found zeal for righteousness, I figured doubting the theory was somehow pleasing God more.

Around this time I also began listening to a lot of Christian talk radio, and one of my favorite programs was a call-in show where listeners could join the discussion on that day’s topic. Every now and again evolution happened to be the topic, and whenever people would call in to defend it, the host always seemed to win the debate by countering every point they tried to make with a logical and persuasive argument that was also consistent with Scripture. Just as with my pastor, the radio host appeared to have done a thorough investigation of the matter. Because they were both Christians in leadership positions (and because they exuded absolute surety on the matter), I believed them when they claimed that, not only was there zero evidence for evolution, but that believing it was not consistent with the Christian faith. But the talk-show host didn’t stop there. According to him, evolution was not only a fraud, but a belief system that leads to suicide, Nazism and atheism. Furthermore, because it was being taught in public schools, evolution was responsible for the moral decline in our country. To be fair, this talk show host wasn’t alone. Nearly every program (on all three radio stations I listened to) mentioned similar sentiments about evolution at one time or another. I quickly got the sense that all Christians were in agreement on this issue, and since I wanted to be a good Christian, I determined that I was, too.

During this period I found myself in a very awkward situation. On the one hand I was a follower of Jesus Christ who loved the Bible, knew that it was God’s Word, and, therefore, knew that it was not full of lies. However, I also was someone who had loved science for many years and was planning on pursuing a career in research. Given all that I had learned about the incompatibility of the two worldviews, it seemed that I would have to choose. Or did I? One day on my commute home I turned on my usual AM radio station and heard something quite unexpected – the voice of Ben Stein. Intrigued as to why the teacher from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was on Christian radio, I continued listening as the host and Mr. Stein discussed Intelligent Design and the new documentary that highlighted it, Expelled! No Intelligence Allowed. Loving movies and having never heard of ID, I saw it as soon as it came out. The film did not disappoint: I left excited and relieved that an alternative to evolution had arrived—one that also seemed to be compatible with my faith.

By this time I had graduated from college and decided to pursue a career in education rather than research. I struggled immensely as I pondered what I would do when it came time to teach evolution, but considering that I had been offered a job amidst rumors of hiring freezes, I didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize my position. During the week before the official start of the school year, there were several faculty meetings and department planning sessions. I was pleased to find out that I was going to be sharing a classroom with another Christian teacher. However, when it came time for the evolution unit, I was confused at the enthusiasm this same teacher had for the topic. I listened in as she taught her students that evolution makes the most sense of homologous structures, the phylogenetics of cytochrome c, and the apparent fusion of two chromosomes to make our chromosome 2 (accounting for the fact that we have one fewer pair than chimpanzees)—and that these features pointed to a common origin of all species, including our own. I couldn’t help but wonder, “What was going on here?! I thought she was a Christian, how could she stand up there and twist the truth?”

I figured that she must be one of those people who call themselves Christians, but really aren’t.

But something else concerned me more than my fellow teacher’s apparent divergence from the faith. Although I remember learning about homologous structures and the phylogenetics of cytochrome c, I never realized their significance like I did at that moment. Furthermore, the fusion of chromosomes our ancestors shared with those of chimpanzees was previously unknown to me. Taken together, these three bits of information were admittedly breathtaking; but even so, I wasn’t ready to accept them as anything more than peculiarities.

As my first year of teaching came to a close, I accepted an invitation to attend an info night for Point Loma Nazarene’s Master’s in biology program, designed for working teachers. I was certainly excited at the prospect of getting a graduate degree in biology rather than in education, but I was most excited to have my first taste of Christian education. During the Q & A period, however, that excitement was quickly turned to disappointment: I discovered that the faculty’s position on evolution and natural selection was one of acceptance. I thought to myself, “This must be one of those colleges that say they’re Christian, but really aren’t.” Despite this somewhat bitter conclusion, I went ahead with the application process anyway, and within a few weeks was sitting in my first graduate class. SEASAND was a summer workshop for teachers which we could use as an elective and that year’s topic just happened to be evolutionary developmental biology. Suffice it to say that I was a little worried at what I was getting myself into.

For the first week and a half I experienced serious internal conflicts trying to come up with rational alternative explanations to the apparent common descent of organisms such as fruit flies, mice, and humans as outlined in our textbook, Endless Forms Most Beautiful. I also took one of the professors up on his offer to answer our questions if we were having trouble with the course content as it pertained to our faith—an offer that caused me even more cognitive dissonance: here was a person who claimed to be a Christian and yet he was completely comfortable with saying that Genesis was not a literal creation account. Combining the terms “Christian” and “a non-literal interpretation of the Bible” was just not compatible with my understanding of things. I felt so lost that I did the one thing I should have been doing a lot more of from the start of the class – I prayed.

Through my times in prayer and reflection I discovered many things. For one, I learned that I had been putting God in a box: I was making him fit into my ideas of how he should create life, as if I knew the correct way it should have been done. I also learned that I had been awfully judgmental in mentally accusing the teacher I shared my classroom with, the people at Point Loma’s info night, and my SEASAND professors of only pretending to be “real Christians.” I even judged God himself by thinking that (if I were to admit that evolution were true) he had chosen a hideous way to bring about life as we know it. Finally, I discovered that a major barrier to my accepting evolution was that I didn’t want to say “I was wrong” to the many people I’d argued with about it; I would rather suppress the truth than swallow my pride. Having realized all of this, it was only a matter of days before I decided to stop ignoring the mountain of evidence being laid out in favor of evolution. As ridiculous as it may sound, I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders and a peace settle into my soul.

It’s now been nearly three years since that transitional summer, and to all those who claim a belief in evolution leads to atheism or any of those other unfortunate fates, I am here to say that you are greatly mistaken. I still love Jesus, I still love the Bible, I still attend a conservative evangelical church, and I even still listen to Christian talk radio. But the best part is that I am not an anomaly: there is an incredible group of Christians out there who accept God as creator and evolution as his process, and I have the privilege of working and collaborating with some of them every single day.

Transcript

My name is David Wilkinson, I teach at Durham University in the department of theology, I used to be a physicist and I still am fascinated by science and theology. I became a Christian at the age of seventeen, and at that point Christian faith was very new and exciting to me. I’d also decided to do a physics degree at university; now I’m not that type of person who built a telescope at the age of four or anything of that sort. I did physics at university, I have to admit, because I was quite good at mathematics and therefore I knew I wouldn’t have to work very hard doing physics. I could spend time doing real things at university, such as cricket and other things-- typically British of course.

However what happened for me as I began to study physics at Durham University was that my new-found faith and this new area of science began to enrich each other, and Kepler of course once said that science is thinking God’s thoughts after him. And I think what was happening in hindsight was that as I was encountering the God of creation in and through Jesus, so what God had created became more and more valuable, more and more interesting to me, just as when our children brought back drawings and paintings from their school class. They weren’t great pieces of art but they were put on our kitchen walls because we knew the person who had created them, and because I was being introduced to the God of creation, so the science itself began to live for me.

Another thing was that the science at university level, particularly as one starts to explore relativity and quantum theory, cosmology, is that as John Polkinghorne would say, “It breaks the tyranny of common sense.” This isn’t a mechanistic world of Isaac Newton and those theologians who think that every question is wrapped up. This is an exciting open world of exploration and questions, of freedom both for God to work and the universe to explore. And this became more and more fascinating to me as time went on. My faith enriched my science, and my science enriched my faith. Now that wasn’t always a process where there were easy questions to answer; there were often difficult questions. But I have to say that continually, the science and the faith have gone together and have enriched each other.

My own particular interest then over the years has been how one takes the issues of science and faith and communicates them to folk who aren’t Christians. As I go around the world these days, I find many people who are fascinated by some of the questions that modern science raises, questions such as the intelligibility of the universe. How can our minds understand the universe back to such an early stage? The fact that the universe is very carefully balanced, fine-tuned for the existence of life. The question of human significance in such a vast universe. The sense of awe and wonder as you look not just at the vastness of the sky but also the fact that underneath the complexity of the universe are rather simple, elegant, beautiful laws. And I find that many folk, whether they are people of religious faith or not, find themselves drawn in by these questions that say “Is there a deeper story to the universe? Are these pointers to something that goes beyond science?” I don’t believe that they can prove God in any way, but I do think that they are pointers towards a God who in Christ is the best explanation for all of these different areas.

Off camera: “Let me ask you one question here: you mentioned John Polkinghorne. You studied with him, I believe. Would you tell something about your relationship to John Polkinghorne, and you might begin by saying, ‘John Polkinghorne was my mentor or whatever’. Just a few things about your relationship with him.”

Wilkinson: One of the most important things for me in the science/faith relationship has been those mentors, those great men and women of faith and science who have helped me along the way. Those have been many for me. One of the key people for me in this area has been Sir John Polkinghorne. John was teaching theology in Cambridge, having retired as head of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, trained as an Anglican priest, and then started to teach theology just as I arrived in Cambridge also to study theology. And what I found in his thinking was a commitment to the rigor of science, and someone who not only philosophized about science but had a feel for science as a working scientist, but someone who’s prepared to take that science and contemporary science and use it in theology today.

If I have one criticism of my fellow theologians from time to time it’s that they’re often stuck in the physics of the 19th century rather than the 20th and 21st centuries. They’re still dominated by this clockwork universe, whereas Polkinghorne and others have taken seriously that the universe is very different. And Polkinghorne with many others have spent time with me answering my questions, being gracious to the type of questions I’ve wanted to push, but they’ve impressed me by showing integrity both towards Christian faith and to science by holding the two together and not compromising on either.

I came to history relatively late. When I started college, I wanted to be an astrophysicist, and things went very well in that direction when internships were arranged for me at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. They were exciting experiences—quasars and pulsars had only recently been discovered, and NRAO was in the process of designing and building the Very Large Array telescope. I ended up working for several different astronomers, including the late Donald Backer (who discovered the first millisecond pulsar), NAS member Morton Roberts, and Seth Shostak, who later became a leading participant in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (in those days, he focused on galactic astronomy). On one particularly memorable weekend, I got to decide which galaxies needed a second look with the old 300-foot radio telescope. Ironically, seeing cutting edge science up close showed me that I probably didn’t want to do it for a living. I decided to try my hand at teaching high school science and mathematics, partly because I thought I might like teaching (I did), and partly as a way of keeping my hand in science while I sorted out my career plans.

Three things happened in the next few years that still influence my life profoundly. First, I got married to a wonderful woman who has always encouraged me to be true to myself. Second, I became interested in the relationship between Christianity and science and joined the American Scientific Affiliation, an organization of Christians in the sciences that owns the oldest journal of science and faith published in the United States. Through the ASA, I met some fascinating people and discovered some wonderful books. Any Christian with scientific training—or even any Christian who wants to think hard about science—should consider joining the ASA.¹ My involvement with the ASA soon led to my third decision: to do graduate work in the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University. There I had the great privilege of studying with the late Richard S. Westfall, author of the definitive biography of Isaac Newton and a leading expert on the Scientific Revolution—the period from Copernicus to Newton, when modern science was born.

Westfall’s lectures are legendary, even many years after his death. They were mainly read from a prepared text, his slightly scratchy voice rising and falling dramatically, such that (as a fellow student quite fittingly said) it was like hearing a fine sermon in church. Several other scholars at Indiana also influenced me, especially Edward Grant, a specialist on medieval science and the universities where it flourished. Grant’s excellent course on the history of science and religion was my first formal introduction to the topic, although I had been reading about it extensively for several years at that point.

Westfall and Grant both provided timely and very helpful comments on my dissertation, which examined the influence of theological ideas about God, nature, and the human mind on conceptions of scientific knowledge during the Scientific Revolution. Focusing on four of the most important figures from that period—Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Newton—I argued that an emphasis on divine freedom (in which God’s acts do not always conform to “rational” expectations) was closely linked with the development of modern science. Those thinkers who emphasized God’s freedom (sometimes scholars call these folks “voluntarists”) saw nature as a “contingent order” (to borrow a term from Thomas Torrance) that could be studied only through a combination of reason and experience—a method that Reijer Hooykaas called “rational empiricism.” In short, if God created nature freely, not from rational necessity, then we need to discover how it works by actually studying it, not by dictating what it must be like from pure reason.

Some of my earlier publications developed these ideas more fully. Others focused more narrowly on Boyle, a great chemist who contributed fundamentally to the development of laboratory science and the philosophy of science. For many years I worked with an English historian, Michael Hunter, on a complete edition of Boyle’s works. That is undoubtedly the project with which I am most often associated. More recently I’ve been studying aspects of science and religion in modern America, especially the religious lives and ideas of several scientists who were prominent in the period between the two world wars. The two most famous scientists in this project were both Nobel laureates for physics: Robert Millikan, the person who was mainly responsible for making Caltech such a great university, and Arthur Holly Compton, whose famous experiment with x-rays and electrons is crucial to wave-particle duality, an idea at the core of modern quantum theory.

The people I’m now studying were all almost all Protestants who identified with the “modernist” side during the famous “fundamentalist-modernist” controversy of the 1920s (the only exception, Columbia physicist Michael Idvorsky Pupin, was Serbian Orthodox). We know a great deal about fundamentalist views of science and religion, but very little about modernist views. The more I’ve learned about the modernists, the more I’ve been struck by the magnitude of the gap between these two camps in the decade surrounding the famous Scopes trial of 1925. The fundamentalists rejected evolution and upheld orthodox Christian beliefs, while the modernists embraced evolution but rejected the deity of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection. There was virtually no middle ground; the historian looks in vain for leading Protestant scientists who accepted both evolution and the Resurrection—someone like Francis Collins, William Phillips, or Joan Centrella. Nothing like BioLogos existed in the 1920s, a fact that (in my opinion) had a deleterious effect on American conversations about science and religion for several decades and still has a sizeable impact today.

Overall, my scholarly work aims to debunk the now-common view that the history of science and Christianity is one of ongoing, inevitable conflict—with science winning a bitter war against religion. Although this view is still widely held by scientists and science journalists, historians of science (the relevant group of experts in this case) have given up this myth in the past two generations. However, the message has been slow to get across to the general public. Not only do I try to dismantle that myth, I do what I can to help replace it with more accurate historical work. Many others in my field are doing similar things, though each of us has something unique to contribute.

Anyone who wants to hear more about the warfare view and its problems, or more of my views on evolution and Christian faith, is invited to listen to an interview that was kindly and expertly done by Michael Dowd. Dowd is not a theist (at least not a theist of any traditional sort), and his idea of “Evolutionary Christianity” is in my view nothing like Christianity, but he let me speak for myself. The result is the best summary of my ideas that you can get in one sitting. I hope that many readers will listen to it—and make comments or pose questions for me in the comments section here. I’ll respond to as many as I can.

Finally, let me tell you where this column will go in the next few months. Does anyone remember the Monty Python film, “And Now for Something Completely Different”? In that spirit, I’ll offer an online course on “Science and the Bible” for several weeks, interspersing informational columns with “assignments” to read a few things by other authors (among them Galileo) that we can discuss here. I leave it to each reader to decide whether or not the “assignments” are worth the time of doing them (some are short, others are longer), but those who do them will probably get more out of the course than those who don’t. And, if this experiment turns out well, I’d like to do more online courses on other aspects of science and religion. Let us know what you think: we’ll be listening.

Next week, Ted gives an overview of and ground-rules for the course: Science and the Bible: Five Attitudes & Approaches.

Notes

1. The American Scientific Affiliation is not connected with BioLogos and, unlike BioLogos, it does not endorse a specific view of evolution and Christian faith.

In my own life, the question “What is Truth?” led me on a path of discovery. I cannot say that I knew I was searching for Truth early in my life, but I was certainly searching for explanations and meaning. The drive to learn how to do things, what made things work, and how things were made so that I might create them myself fueled my first vocational dream to be an engineer like my father. Later I was taken by the visual as well as functional beauty of buildings and structural environments, so modified my dream toward becoming an architect. But while in college, I fell in love. My new mistress was the cell and the incredible choreography of the organelles and intra-cellular structures that danced an intricate ballet of function and reproduction. My love led me on a path that took me into medical research and towards the Truth behind the beauty and wonder of the human body.

In my approach to biomedical research, I always saw myself as participating in a piecemeal revelation of the mysteries of this world. My search was given a new focus while I was in graduate school. I can remember being in the middle of Gross Anatomy my first year, going from cadaver to cadaver for an exam, and suddenly realizing that we could do this, and we could successfully perform surgery, because 99+% of the time whatever we were looking for was in the same location and had the same appearance regardless of the particular body. The beauty and efficiency of the packing of the organs, nerves and blood vessels within the body cavities, as well as their predictability even among vertebrates of different species was a work of art in my eyes. At the level of logic it became increasingly difficult for me to interpret such an observation as supporting the argument for chance and serendipity. The only other alternative to chance would be design or meta-narrative, and that would dictate a narrator. If it were to be a true over-arching narrative, then the speaker must be outside what was being spoken. For me that One is God, the Creator.

It followed that if I were going to seek the Truth about the physical universe, I would need to come to know its Creator. Ultimately this focus on knowing God resulted in a growing understanding of who he had been preparing me to be. And while the change from science to theology seems dramatic, it was really only a shift from one form of healing to another, more holistic form. Still, my call into the ordained ministry was a twelve-year process of experimentation and discernment, rather than a particular transformative event. I purposely use the term “experimentation” because I approached the question of my being ordained as a scientist would—by designing various experiments to test the call. I was seeking the Truth for my life.

This thumb-nail sketch of my faith journey does not describe the full spectrum of influences that drew me to find the Truth in a Person. Relationships tend to lose their enlivening nature when studied under the microscope of science. For example, you may “Google” the name of a person-of-interest in order to learn more about her, but until you commit to the adventure of personal give-and-take, the richness and beauty of that person cannot be fully known. To do otherwise is to learn about an object – the pigments and techniques used by the artist to produce the work, without ever learning the nature of the artist himself. As physicists and mathematicians see beauty in an equation that renders an elegant explanation rather than just a correct answer, Truth is beautiful and becomes known when it is experienced and not just as it is studied.

In his Commentary on the Divine Names (IV, 5-6), Thomas Aquinas taught that beauty in the created order reflects the beauty of the Creator God. The One who in the beginning brought order out of the chaos (Genesis 1) is reflected in the music of Bach and Handel, the painting of Monet and Raphael, the fine tuning of the physical universe and the exquisite detail of the genetic code. When we experience beauty we are touched by the Spirit of Truth and drawn toward a relationship with the One who is Truth. Beauty of itself is not the Truth, but rather a window into the Truth. Just as the Incarnate Lord stood before Pilate and Pilate for a moment uncharacteristically declared him innocent (Luke 23:4), beauty stands before us as we ask the question, “What is Truth?” Pilate walked away without finding the answer (John 18:38). Beauty beckons us into a relationship that will answer our question. If we want to find the Holy Grail of our Quest we must enter into beauty and be guided to the prize. As we engage beauty in this world we find that Truth is not an object or a concept, but a Person – the Beautiful Person, Jesus Christ.

“Come and listen, all you who fear God; let me tell you what he has done for me.”(Psalm 66:16 NIV)

I’ve loved science for as long as I can remember, and from an early age I imagined my future career as a scientist. I also grew up immersed within Christian Fundamenatalism; I attended a Fundamentalist church, went to a Fundamentalist school through 3rd grade, and from then on was home-schooled using the Fundamentalist Christian school curriculum from Bob Jones University (BJU). My views on creation were very simple: God created everything fully-formed during the literal creation week around 6,000 years ago, just like Genesis clearly says. Of course, I knew that most scientists didn’t believe this, but how could they be expected to get it right when they wouldn’t listen to God’s own account of the events? To reject God’s existence, they naturally had to make up their own story of how we got here, and evolution was the fable they came up with to banish God from the world. I also knew that some Christians liked to have it both ways by believing in evolution while still calling themselves Christians. But these theistic evolutionists were clearly compromisers – barely Christians, if that, who didn’t really believe the Bible. Either that or they were just plain confused. And if they knew more about science, it would be clear that evolution wasn’t even scientifically defensible anyway.

Besides, you surely didn’t have to accept evolution to really do science, as organizations like the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) and the credentialed scientists on faculty at BJU made clear. As a matter of fact, by being young-earth creationists, they were surely able do science better, since they after all knew the real story of how it all got here! I remember reading articles by leading creationists declaring that the theory of evolution was on its last legs and would collapse completely within another decade or two. Now that was exciting! Not only was science on the verge of a massive revolution that would vindicate the Bible, but that revolution would nicely coincide with my career as a scientist; I would be on the cutting edge!

However, in 2006 I read an article on Francis Collins’ then upcoming book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. It was the subtitle that got me; I hadn’t heard of Collins before that, but the idea of an apparently well-known, Bible-believing scientist defending Christianity appealed to me. But I was surprised to learn that he was also using the book to defend theistic evolution! I bought the book when it came out, and it really surprised me. Collins didn’t seem like a confused man, nor did he seem like a barely-Christian compromiser; he had reasons for what he believed, and they actually seemed like good reasons. All of a sudden, I started wondering whether it was possible that my preconceptions about theistic evolutionists (or evolutionary creationsists, as many prefer) were actually misconceptions.

Soon after that, I discovered the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), a group of evangelical Christians who were involved (or at the very least, interested) in the sciences. I soon became a student member and enjoyed reading as much as I could from their excellent journal Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. Although the ASA has no official statement on evolution, it became clear that practically no one there thought the earth was young, and most of them accepted evolution as well. First Francis Collins, then the ASA…this all really caught my attention, and I just had to learn more.

I started reading books on the relevant subjects – as many as 30 books in one year. Books on history (by writers like George Marsden and Ronald Numbers) helped me understand how and why modern creationism and Fundamentalism developed. Rather than being the one faithful continuation of true Christianity, as I had always been told, it became abundantly clear that Fundamentalism was a thoroughly modern invention – a modernist conservatism to combat modernist liberalism. True historic Christianity had numerous biblically-faithful ways of dealing with the sorts of challenges I was learning about, but these helpful approaches were unfortunately not “conserved” by the ultraconservatism of Fundamentalism. Even the cautious openness towards mainstream science of many early architects of Fundamentalism (such as James Orr) was completely left behind by the time that Fundamentalism exclusively embraced young-earth creationism in the 1960s.

However, certainly the most important studying I did was on how to properly interpret the Bible. I quickly came across views like the day-age theory, but something didn’t seem right. Surely stretching the “days” of Genesis to match the eons of science didn’t get us any closer to what the Bible itself actually meant to say, no matter how convenient the results may have been! But when I read more, I learned that scholars, including many evangelicals, were learning more than ever before about the original context of Genesis through studies of Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) writings. If there’s one thing that Fundamentalists, evangelicals, and everyone else can agree on, it’s the importance of studying the original context, so I dove right in.

Working to see Genesis through the eyes of its original audience opened my eyes to a wholly new way of seeing things. We in the modern Western world are used to reading nearly everything literalistically; we don’t look for metaphor, allegory, or symbolism when reading owner’s manuals, newspapers, workplace emails, and scientific papers, and so we uncritically expect the opening chapters of Genesis to communicate in exactly the same sort of way. But ancient cultures didn’t work like that. Especially when it came to origins, they told stories full of rich symbolism and metaphor, where even a certain number would mean something special. Now of course Genesis is unique among ANE creation stories in that it is inspired by God, and therefore true and authoritative for us as biblical Christians. But understanding how ANE people communicated helps us understand how Genesis communicates too; just like how we interpret apocalyptic language in Daniel and Revelation, understanding the literary genre of the passage at hand is essential to discerning the truth that God has for us. When we focus on the theological message of Genesis 1-2, and how the symbolic details of the passage work together to convey that message, we can see extraordinary truths about God’s creation that we miss out on when we flatten the text down to a modern, out-of-context literalistic account.

I am reminded of how baroque painters would sometimes paint the Christ-child with a cross and orb in his hand, symbolizing his sovereignty and role as Savior of the world. As a literal depiction of events, it was “incorrect,” to show Jesus holding the orb and cross like this. Yet that depiction was nevertheless true, if interpreted correctly. In this example, we can see how freedom from strict literalism has allowed the artist to convey far more theological truth than mere photorealism would allow. What ever happened to our imagination and eye for symbolic meaning? Or could we really think that God wouldn’t be as adept as His creatures in conveying truth through metaphor? if Genesis was a richly symbolic telling of the theological story of creation, then critically evaluating the scientific story of creation couldn’t be done simply by comparing Genesis with a science textbook as if they should be one and the same. At that point in my journey I turned to the work of theologians to understand what the biblical doctrine of creation actually entails, and that’s where I’ll pick up the story tomorrow in Part 2.