That said, I genuinely empathize with those who are reluctant to abandon traditional theological concepts for newer, still- developing ones. Given spiritual leaders’ biblical mandate to protect their families and congregations against error, a responsibility for which God will hold them strictly accountable (James 3:1), I respect their refusal to expose their flock to ideologies they regard as conflicting with the Word of God.

I further understand pastors and theologians’ resistance to tethering theology—which is meant to provide a solid epistemological foundation—too closely to that intrinsically dynamic endeavor called science. All humans need ideological stability, perhaps especially so with respect to spiritual matters. Recognizing this, pastors rightly ask why they should abandon or substantially revise an internally-consistent systematic theology that has served the church with relative stability for many hundreds of years. Science, on the other hand, is a realm for adventurers, groundbreakers, and ideological athletes intent on not just polishing or expanding today’s body of knowledge, but shattering it when necessary. Resounding with the jousts and clashes of competing ideas and arguments, and the stunning reversals of ideas once widely held, science often appears to be a messy–even tumultuous–business. Spiritual shepherds are insistent that the epistemological dynamism that necessarily characterizes science never become the mainstay of the Christian experience, which must be fundamentally stable and dependable. They see wisdom in maintaining a safe distance between the Church and the choppy waters of science.

The question, then, is whether the waters of scientific thought, particularly with respect to the age of the earth and evolution, have sufficiently smoothed out to warrant conservative thinkers’ taking a deeper look. Of course, the catch-22 here is that this can’t be answered without actually embarking upon an expedition of exploration and investigation, much as I recently did. Once undertaken, however, the conservative explorer will likely be confronted by a formidable problem:

As I can personally attest, navigating the crowded forum of wildly-differing ideas as to how to resolve the faith-science divide can be terribly daunting. Making this especially disconcerting for the conservative is the sobering reality that amidst the chorus of conflicting theories, one finds very little substantive published input from respected conservative theologians. As a result, the conservative seeker is sure to find herself awash in an ocean of seemingly novel theological “solutions” that are fundamentally antithetical to her evangelical sensibilities. This is likely to result in the impression that there is in fact no way to reconcile the findings of modern science with the key doctrines of orthodox Christianity, and hence the termination of the endeavor. Not only was this dynamic a constant challenge to me, but has proved a stumbling block to many would-be seekers that I personally know.

Whence then change? I believe the breakthrough will begin with a particular subgroup of conservative evangelical pastors, elders, and theologians. I know firsthand that there are many who, truth be told, have not been entirely at peace with their fellow conservatives’ summary rejection of—and apologias against—the findings of mainstream science. They have a gnawing sense that devastation looms for the Church and her children unless detachment yields to engagement, and rhetoric to substance. These have likely admitted to themselves that despite stridently asserting anti-evolution/old-earth views, they actually don’t understand these views in depth (nearly every conservative pastor and elder I’ve spoken with has conceded this). To date, these shepherds and thinkers have remained silent about their misgivings, reluctant to be perceived by their congregations and peers as betraying true Christianity. Given the astonishing fruitfulness of modern science and the comparative barrenness of young-earth creationism, I believe these evangelical leaders may now finally regard themselves as justified in stepping forward and publicly questioning whether the latter is in fact the view that a truth-revealing God would have His people believe.

Indeed, if I may, I would exhort these, my fellow conservative evangelical shepherds and thinkers, to set aside all reticence and fear, emerge from anonymity, and storm the forum of discourse, engaging this most pressing matter with vigor, equanimity, and humility. In doing so, know upfront that there will be few handrails to guide; you will not be building upon an extensive precedence of published conservative thought. Rather, you will be pioneers, with the open prairie of contemplation and consideration before you and the Word of God as a faithful, orienting star. The journey will be at times confounding, often scary, and never without challenge. Yet only through such robust, self-critical analysis will you find yourself in a posture where God can correct and refine all that He would, and only after which will you be able to pass on to your flocks a cogent, truly harmonious portrait of our Lord and His Creation that finds rich consistency between His written and natural revelations. I firmly believe that the fuller, more deeply informed portrait of the Lord and His universe that emerges from this investigation will fill your congregations with an unprecedented new sense of awe at our beloved God as Creator, and profoundly enhance their worship of Him. This has certainly been the result of my own journey.

Genesis is one of my favorite books of the Bible. I read through it probably once every few months and repeatedly grind my Hebrew language skills on its opening chapters. Unlike Leviticus (at least in the opinion of most people I know), the Genesis narrative is exciting and adventurous. Some of our favorite stories come out of the book: Noah and the Ark, The Tower of Babel, Abraham and Isaac, Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors, and so on.

But no story is perhaps as infamous and well known as the creation account (or accounts) as presented in Genesis 1-2. Almost every Christian or Jew, even those less than devout, know the opening words to the tale: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” We know that God created the earth in six days. We know Eve was taken from Adam's rib for a companion. We know that God called the general creation “good”, the special creation of man “very good” and, at the very end of it all, took a day of rest (which I'm sure most of us would call “very good.”)

Of course, we know all of this. Yet we challenge it (and are challenged by it), continually, when we consider the variety of interpretations of how this story intersects the world as described by science. With Genesis, are we dealing with a literal scientific account, where “day” means 24-hours; are we dealing with metaphorical “days” in which epochs or periods of time or even processes are being described; or are we readers of a creation mythology from the Ancient Near East that doesn’t have anything directly to do with material origins? Interpretations go on and on, as anyone who has spent any time at all studying the creation debate knows. By and large, however, we can probably categorize Genesis interpreters into three camps: the Young Earth Creationists, the Old Earth Creationists, and the Theistic Evolutionists.

Now, I have the unique benefit of falling into all of these individual camps at one point or another in my life, sometimes even mixing them up. I have made a strong transition from being a die-hard Young Earth Creationist to being convinced that the evolutionary story is, in fact, the more substantiated and evidenced position. I say this with no pride, since my own transition involved many agonizing questions, a whole lot of reading, and a significant internal spiritual battle: what I believed about when and how the earth was created would not only change the way I read Scripture, it would also change certain aspects of how I viewed the Creator.

While I've certainly learned a lot of information on my journey, it was not an accumulation of facts that has kept me following Christ through all the ups and downs, but Jesus himself, and the knowledge that truth is not something which the Christian should find spiritually threatening. Nevertheless, those same ups and downs—and my internalization of each of these views on creation in turn—has provided me with one simple realization about the debate over scripture and evolution: most of us are not so committed to finding the truth about Genesis and creation as we are to sustaining and maintaining our own interpretive boundaries and the boundaries of the communities which influence us. In other words, the debate is often not so much over Genesis—or even over whether we can all follow the same God when we believe different things about how he created—it's over our own ability to be right. I know this because admitting that I was wrong was the most difficult part of my own transition.

Interpretive communities

While I am pretty convinced of the truth of an evolutionary portrait of reality and an ANE reading of Genesis similar to that espoused by scholars like Peter Enns or Bruce Waltke, I can still make this claim about interpretive communities because my intention is not to dissuade others from debating the issues involved, but to ask that we simply recognize our own limits and check them as often as possible. This is part of following Jesus, is it not? Unfortunately, vigorous debate often deteriorates quickly into screaming matches where proponents of one position or another simply are talking heads, speaking past each other and forgetting our fellowship in Christ. We play into the same interpretive competition that the Pharisee and Sadducee scribes were well known for, each claiming to have a proper interpretation of the Scriptures, but all the while forgetting that interpretive arguments matter exceptionally little if a genuine search for God is not at the forefront. This is certainly not to insist that the discussions cease, but rather, to insist that these discussions can only be propelled forward if individuals—of whatever stripe—step outside of their own interpretive boundaries and communities and humbly present themselves before God, seeking His truth alone. It is to insist that “system maintenance” must die along with the self, because only then can we allow Scripture to interpret itself. Unfortunately (and this is an issue that goes way beyond the Genesis text), too many of us are more committed to a specific model than we are committed to seeking God’s truth, whatever inconvenience to us that truth proves to be.

In 2006, for instance, I heard a popular and well-trained Young Earth paleontologist make the following statement: “If all the evidence turns against young earth creationism, I will still believe it because that's what the Bible says.” I followed up with him in a conversation a year later over lunch and quickly realized that I did not misunderstand his statement. For him, the parameters of his convictions were set in concrete and the truth of the overarching story of Christianity rested on these parameters not being crossed. In his view, the Bible absolutely and fundamentally teaches a universe which came into existence 6,000-10,000 years ago; to deny that is to deny Scripture, and if evidence turned up to the contrary one must not alter those parameters but, instead, search (perhaps in vain) for counter-evidence or be willing to live in blind faith. For this paleontologist, confident Christianity hinged on the stability of those borders of interpretation. Transition wasn't allowed.

But I have heard and read statements coming out of the two other camps of thought that share this kind of certainty over interpretation, too. There is a sense of doing injustice to scripture, thereby doing an injustice to Christianity, and, thereby again, doing an injustice to God if one strays from the preferred reading. One Old Earth Creationist remarked in a popular book that an interpretation of Genesis that allows for evolution is a “contradiction in terms” and it's an unfortunate thing to “blame God for it.” Genesis, in the mind of this thinker, specifically precludes any interpretation which leads to the sort of story evolution tells. To think otherwise is to “blame” God for something which he intentionally tells us is otherwise against his nature.

I have equally heard some theistic evolutionists deride—in a very spiritually shallow and personally offensive way—those who do not accept an evolutionary viewpoint. As one who went through an interpretive evolution on biological evolution, I can say confidently that I believe my own transition would have been much easier both intellectually and spiritually if not for feeling as if certain theistic evolutionists accused me of intentionally lying or being mentally ignorant. It seems that all three camps are at least sometimes plagued by the issue of pride—especially in the cases of a few strong advocates. But pride is nothing less than the cement by which interpretive barriers are built, helping them become unmovable walls that protect the interpretive communities within.¹

On the other hand, one of the great benefits of the fall of positivism (or verificationism) and the rise of postmodernism was the realization that total objectivity among individuals is a false conception. And, since individuals make up communities, neither are camps of thought above error and immune from being wrong. Yet way too many Christians continue to approach Genesis as if we can interpret it on its own terms, completely and totally, without reference to our own location in history and culture. We're still functionally positivists. But it is an illusion that we’re above the interpretive fray, and we must realize time and again that we are subjective individuals, affected by a number of factors and people. We are deeply influenced by those that speak into us, those that we trust, and those that we find credible. As W. Randolph Tate writes,

Interpretations...must be consistent with the established interpretive framework of the interpretive community. The worldview of the interpretive community sets the parameters within which interpretations are accepted or rejected.²

The Bible takes a slightly different angle and puts it this way: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” In other words, we are not objective data-interpreting individuals but fallen men and women, even as followers of Jesus.

So it’s when groups of folks line up on either side of an issue and make their positions part of their identity that the debate over interpreting Genesis reaches a near stalemate. It's communities against communities, PhDs against PhDs, experts against experts, and—perhaps more internally—interpretive parameters against interpretive parameters. The truth is that as long as we are first and foremost committed to maintaining the community in which we are involved, there will be very little chance of us getting at the real issues and the best conclusions, much less giving an adequate witness to our God, both Creator and Redeemer.

New eyes, fresh air

I mentioned earlier that I spent time in all three major camps of thought on this issue. I was a hard-lined Young Earth Creationist, debating on forums and writing creationist papers in college. I argued for the existence of modern-day dinosaurs, major flood geology, and so on. I was convinced I was right, that defending the truth meant digging my heels deeper into the sand. But two questions plagued my thoughts: first, I asked whether Christianity fell to pieces if I was wrong. Second, I asked whether I was committed to Christ or, rather, to myself and my interpretations. With that as my first major paradigm shift, I eventually came to accept an Old Earth view. I sat comfortably within the Old Earth view for several years, but the Lord was still at work in me, and, once again, brought those two questions to my mind. Back to the books I went, back to the Bible I went, and back to prayer I went.

Through months of extremely difficult and heart-rending transition, I found myself considering a particular reading of Genesis that I would have regarded as unacceptable as a YEC. But then I was confronted with this even more important point about Christianity: often God finds what is unacceptable to us very acceptable to Him! That included me, personally, and I felt the warmth of God’s grace flow over me. In the wake of that change of heart, people accused me of rejecting my background, my Christian education, and my interpretive communities. And, yet—whether I was right or wrong—I knew God accepted my path towards this new reading of Creation as a genuine search for Him. My spiritual struggle—contrary to what I thought while it was happening—was not a struggle to reject bad data and exegesis, it was a struggle to reject myself.

While the “facts” were important, that spiritual struggle was even more so for me. What was God showing me in the midst of it all? Was thinking differently about the creation making me appreciate the Creator less, or more? Did reading Genesis differently mean only that I had been wrong, or that it was somehow less true? What did any of this have to do with my sense of calling to love and serve God and my fellow men? In a way, I’m still figuring this out. But I can absolutely testify that the struggle transformed every single one of these questions. Indeed, for the first time, I believe I saw God as much this-worldly as other-worldly. I saw nature as intimately intertwined with itself, still being woven together by God’s hand. I saw Scripture as a beautiful expression of God’s desire that man should participate in creation. I saw that my fellow men and my fellow Christians were all on a journey, much the way I was. And I saw myself as a flawed, stubborn, and prideful man, yet forgiven for the times I’ve pitted myself and my presuppositions about Scripture against God, its author.

As settled as I am now, I have not forgotten that the common ribbon which ties together all of these transitions is my commitment to keep asking questions within my own circle, too—realizing that God still has much to teach all of us. I have learned the continuing importance of stepping outside of my camp and making sure I haven’t become merely a product of or a willing prisoner to thinking a certain way, unwilling to consider that it and I might be incorrect. I came to realize that everyone (including myself, of course) has stories and life experiences that become the framework in which they read Genesis 1-2. And if I stopped pretending that I, myself, could be perfectly objective, then I also had to stop pretending that those in the community that I trusted were necessarily objective, themselves.

Ultimately, I had to be willing to be wrong and to see that my friends might be wrong, too. That’s not something that any of us are “naturally” very good at, but it is possible when we realize that the world does not depend on us being right, but upon Jesus being right. For me, seeking truth rather than presupposition requires that we all be able to approach the communities that have influenced us deeply, and ask not just “what” they say but “why” they say it. We all have to guard our hearts even more than our heads. Frequently reminding myself to walk back to the edge of my own camp—to follow Jesus’ example and withdraw to a solitary place—has shown me that there is room to breathe outside our familiar interpretive parameters. At certain times, I have found it to be the most refreshing air I've ever tasted.

Notes

1. Though, admittedly, the theistic evolutionists tend to have a greater sense of leeway when it comes to how the claims of Genesis 1-2 affect Christianity as a whole. It would be an odd thing to say that to not interpret Genesis 1-2 as an evolutionary metaphor is to reject Christianity. As far as I know, most Christian evolutionists are very much willing to acknowledge that Young and Old Earth Creationists are still within appropriate spiritual bounds, even if not scientific ones. It seems to me that if individual theistic evolutionists choose an issue about which to be rigid, it’s the Fall and the existence of Adam.
2. Tate, W. Randolpy. Biblical Interpretation: An Integrated Approach. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008, p 222.

But it is also important that we engage believers who disagree with us (on human origins, especially) with charity and humility as a witness to our common identity in Christ—that we may be known by our love for each other in tandem with our demonstrated love for the secular world that does not yet claim Christ as Lord and Savior.

While the BioLogos Foundation is committed to both of these aspects, we are especially pleased that our desire to engage in gracious dialogue with fellow believers who reject biological evolution has been receiving increased and very favorable attention in both the Christian and secular press. More importantly, we are being joined in that reconciling project by those who have often been defined primarily as our “opponents,” rather than as brothers and sisters in Christ.

First, A Tale of Two Scientists, the cover story of Christianity Today’s July-August 2012 issue, featured the accounts of BioLogos Foundation President Darrel Falk and Todd Wood, Director of the Center for Creation Research at Bryan University. Though Wood does not accept biological evolution on theological grounds, both men recognize its strength and explanatory power. But more importantly, both reject the warfare model between science and faith (and between Christians who think differently) as being, in Wood’s words, “detrimental to the Church.”

Second, our Southern Baptist Voices series has become a model for how such dialogue can be pursued, even in the sometimes no-holds-barred context of the web. Several installments in our ongoing dialogue with Southern Baptist theologians have been covered by the Erin Roach of the Baptist Press (on May 25th , June 6th, and July 3rd) and on on July 19th by Lillian Kwan of the Christian Post. And just this past week, Associated Press reporter Travis Loller highlighted the series in an article picked up by the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, and many other news outlets across the country.

To make it easier for readers to find the entire Southern Baptist Voices series and join in the conversation themselves, we’ve launched a new landing page here: Southern Baptist Voices. It is our hope and prayer that this initiative will set the stage for future dialogue between evolutionary creationists and those who hold other perspectives, as well.

I am using the term in the same sense. Like Ramm, I don’t regard theistic evolution as a concordist view, even though some TE proponents like to say that evolution can be “harmonized” with Genesis. At the same time, Ramm completely rejected Price’s recent creation and Flood Geology, and he obviously did not consider that view to be a type of concordism either. Why not? On first glance, the YEC view might seem to fall within Ramm’s definition of concordism, and the authors of one of the books recommended in the first column in this series classify it as a type of concordism. However, the harmony sought by YEC proponents comes at the cost of entirely rejecting the standard geologic record, which they replace with Flood Geology. That isn’t what Ramm had in mind by seeking a “harmony.”

Often the concordist view is called “progressive creation,” another term that Ramm used with much approval: “We believe that the fundamental pattern of creation is progressive creation,” he wrote prominently in italics. Indeed, it is sometimes assumed that Ramm invented both terms, “concordism” and “progressive creation,” when in fact he did no such thing. If anything, the latter term is even older than the former, having been used to refer to an OEC interpretation of natural history for about two centuries. The first American author to use it may have been Benjamin Silliman, an evangelical who was appointed the first professor of natural history at Yale by another evangelical, Yale’s president Timothy Dwight. Silliman was the single most influential figure in American science during the nineteenth century. In his Outline of the Course of Geological Lectures Given in Yale College (1829), Silliman spoke of “the progressive creation, life, death and sepulture [fossilization], of animals and plants.” On another occasion he noted how the Bible describes “a successive creation of plants and animals, ending with man,” and that geology “proves this history to be true.”

Clearly, then, the concordist or progressive creationist view has been around for a long time. Let’s examine its main components.

Core Tenets or Assumptions of Concordism

(1) The Bible and science (mainly geology and astronomy) are BOTH reliable sources of knowledge about the origin of the earth and the universe. God has written two “books” for our instruction, the book of nature and the book of scripture. Since God is the author of both “books,” they must agree when properly interpreted.

If this strikes you as worded deliberately to sound like Galileo, you’re right—but only because so many proponents of the concordist view also have Galileo very much in their minds. The basic scheme is neatly depicted in this diagram:

Recall Galileo’s belief that the book of nature, written in the divine and unambiguous language of mathematics, should be used to help interpret the book of scripture, written in the richer but more ambiguous language spoken by the ordinary persons for whom its vital message of salvation was intended. When they accept the evidence for an ancient earth, Silliman and many other evangelical scholars right down to our own day believe they have merely applied Galileo’s logic to a different set of biblical texts.

(2) Scientific evidence, when properly interpreted, is consistent with the Bible, when properly interpreted.

Galileo again: because both “books” are written by the same Author, they must agree. As he said in his Letter to Christina, “the holy Bible can never speak untruth—whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error.”

What about those who interpret the book of nature? Can they ever be mistaken? Should they ever yield to those who interpret the book of scripture? Evolution was not the source of Galileo’s concerns, but concordists today would give the nod to scripture mainly when it comes to evolution—especially human evolution. Regardless of how much evolution they accept for other organisms, concordists hold strongly to the separate creation of Adam and Eve as the first human beings. They believe that Genesis 1 was intended to be at least broadly historical, even though it does not provide detailed scientific information.

Mainstream conclusions in geology and cosmology, however, are almost always accepted; indeed, Hugh Ross and some other OECs not only accept the “big bang” theory of the universe, they actively promote it as central to Christian apologetics, because it presents us with a universe that is not eternal and that appears to be exquisitely designed as a home for living creatures, including ourselves.

(3) The Bible does NOT tell us the age of the earth.

Two main concordist approaches to resolving the tension between Genesis and scientific dating of the earth have been popular since the mid-nineteenth century: the “day-age theory,” which still has numerous advocates (including Ross), and the “gap theory,” which is now nearly extinct. One hundred years ago, however, the gap theory was probably the more popular option among conservative Protestants, and it remained so until the 1960s and 1970s, when the rapid spread of Scientific Creationism all but relegated the gap view to the dust bin.

The Gap Theory

The gap theory posits a “gap” of untold length between “the beginning” of Genesis 1:1 and the first “day” of creation, starting with Genesis 1:3; the formless void of Gen 1:2 corresponds to this “gap.” Verse 1 refers to the original creation of the earth and the universe “in the beginning,” not to world as we now find it. The fossils represent creatures that populated the original creation. Current living creatures come from a second creation, after the “gap,” when God made them in six literal days, culminating in the creation of Adam and Eve just a few thousand years ago.

Although the creation of humanity matches the traditional biblical chronology—a major reason for the popularity of the gap theory in its heyday—the original creation cannot be dated from the Bible. Whether it happened 100 million years ago (as scientists thought around 1900) or billions of years ago (as scientists thought for much of the twentieth century), does not matter one bit to the Bible. Geologists can say whatever they wish about the age of the earth. The Scofield Reference Bible, originally published by Oxford University Press in 1909, taught the gap theory to generations of conservative Protestants in the English speaking world. The headings alone indicate Scofield’s endorsement of the gap theory, and he waited no longer than the second footnote to spell it out: “The first creative act refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic ages.” (NOTE: the date “B.C. 4004" in the middle column refers to the start of the six days, not to “the beginning.” I’ll elaborate on that date in part two of this column.)

As Scofield’s third note shows, the gap theory was usually placed within an elaborate theological structure about the fall of Satan and the angels, based on certain prophetic texts (see below). A full discussion would take us far afield, but something should be said about how gap theorists interpret Genesis 1:2, the crucial verse for their model. Scofield sticks with the King James Version, “the earth was without form, and void,” doing the exegetical work in his notes, but others like to render it as, “the earth became a waste place,”, drawing out the implication (in their view) that God destroyed the original creation, laying waste to it in an act of judgment, leaving us with fossils of the pre-Adamic world.

In some versions of the gap view, the original creation included pre-Adamite people—that is, humans who were not descended from Adam and Eve. This idea that took many forms, some with racist overtones. Perhaps this strikes you as a bit surprising, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was a commonplace conception among Protestants, and not unknown to Catholics either. A prominent example would be The Pre-Adamite Earth: A Contribution to Theological Science (1846), a very popular book by the English Congregational minister John Harris. Historian David Livingstone has written the definitive history of this fascinating idea. For more, see this interview, but there is no substitute for reading the book itself! Let me make an invitation: who wants to borrow a copy and provide their own commentary here?

In all versions of the gap theory, however, fossils are vestiges of the pre-Adamic world, produced when it was destroyed; they are not a record of evolutionary history. All modern animals and many plants were created recently, in six literal days. Despite what YECs often say, there is just no way to see the gap theory as an “evolutionist” interpretation of Genesis!

The "Day-Age" Theory

The day-age theory takes the “days” in Genesis 1 as periods of indefinite length, such that neither the age of the earth nor the duration of any particular period in creation history can be determined from the Bible. The basis for this view is that the Hebrew word “yom” (day) can also mean an indefinite period of time. According to Hugh Ross, the leading advocate of progressive creation today, if the Hebrews had wanted to refer to a long period of indefinite length, they would have used the word “yom.” Thus, he claims to be giving a literal interpretation when he upholds the day-age view.

Numerous varieties of the day-age view have been proposed since the eighteenth century, too many to review here. They all teach that the major kinds of plants and animals were created separately, over the eons of earth history; the fossil record shows reliably which came earlier and which came later. Thus, the creation was accomplished “progressively,” as Silliman held in 1829 and Ross holds today. Ross thinks God performed millions of acts of special creation, but concordists differ substantially among themselves on the magnitude of the number for this.

Concordists mostly agree, however, that the first true humans were Adam and Eve, and that they were created ex nihilo—but, how recently were they created? Can the biblical 6,000 years be stretched far enough to encompass fossils of modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens) dating back perhaps to nearly 200,000 years? Can the biblical picture of Adam’s children living amidst cities and agriculture be reconciled with extensive evidence of humans who lived long before either existed? I’m no anthropologist, but anyone can see the relevance of such questions for this position.

(4) The Flood was a real historical event, but it was not responsible for producing the fossils; rather, fossils are relics of organisms that were mainly here before humans.

The last of the four basic assumptions shared by concordists is that they reject Flood Geology and accept the standard geologic column. Hugh Ross and some others believe that the flood was geographically localized, covering part of the ancient Near East but not the whole globe. This is called the “local flood” view. Biblical scholar Paul Seely briefly assesses this view in light of current knowledge here, but a full discussion of the issues goes well beyond of the scope of this online course. Anyone with appropriate expertise is invited to place comments below. The main point is that the flood has no geological significance for concordists, whether or not it was geographically “local.”

Looking Ahead

Our look at concordism concludes on July 3 with some conclusions about the OEC view and further historical comments. I’ll pay attention to your comments in the meantime.

It is reasonably well known among evangelical Christians that all living humans trace their mitochondrial DNA back to a single woman (a so-called “mitochondrial Eve”) and that all living males similarly trace their Y-chromosome DNA back to a single male (a so-called “Y-chromosome Adam”). These individuals are commonly assumed by evangelicals to be the Biblical Adam and Eve, the first humans alive and the progenitors of the entire human race. While most young-earth and old-earth creationist organizations make this claim, perhaps one of the best-known organizations to do so is the old-earth creationist / anti-evolution organization Reasons to Believe, who have produced numerous articles, podcasts, and even entire books on the subject.

In contrast to this common evangelical understanding, the scientific picture is rather different. Mitochondrial Eve, though the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of all humans, was but one of a large population living about 180,000 years ago. So too for Y-chromosome Adam: he was also a member of a large population, and he lived about 50,000 years ago. As has been discussed several times here at BioLogos, there are multiple lines of evidence that indicate the human population has never been below around 10,000 members at any time in its history: we branched off as a large population to form our own species.

When presented with the evidence for human population sizes over our evolutionary history, a common point of confusion for evangelicals is how this evidence fits with Mitochondrial Eve. How can we all come from one woman (and one man) but also come from a large population of 10,000 individuals? Aren’t these two observations in conflict?

The answer is no, these lines of evidence fit together. Humans do come from a large population, and all present-day humans do inherit mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA from specific individuals in the past. The reason for the apparent discrepancy lies in how mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA are inherited, as we shall see below.

Mitochondria are organelles responsible for energy conversion, and they contain their own small, circular chromosome that they replicate apart from regular chromosomes in the cell nucleus. Mitochondria are not passed on to progeny through sperm, but only through the egg: as such, mitochondrial DNA is passed on solely through the maternal line. Consider a small pedigree (family tree) below. Circles represent females, males are represented with squares. In this family, one grandmother (the woman at the top right of the pedigree) has passed on her mitochondrial DNA to her sons and daughter, but only her daughter passes it on to the next generation. All individuals who have this grandmother’s mitochondrial DNA are shown in blue:

Conversely, if we examine Y-chromosome inheritance in this same family, we would see that (obviously) women cannot pass it on to their children. Here, the red lines show all males who have descended from a grandfather of the family (the male at the top left of the pedigree):

Now we are ready to examine how these types of DNA are inherited in a larger group, and compare their modes of inheritance with regular chromosomal DNA. While it is not possible to draw out a pedigree for a population of 10,000 individuals, let’s examine a smaller group to see how a specific mitochondrial sequence can “take over” a population of organisms (note that this effect applies to other organisms besides humans that use an XX – XY system of sex chromosomes).

In the family tree below, three mitochondrial DNA variants are present in the first generation (the top row of the pedigree) and a represented with different colors (green, blue and red). Tracing the inheritance of these mitochondrial DNA versions through the family tree shows that all living members of this population (the bottom two rows) have inherited the red version only. The blue and green versions eventually hit a dead end where they were not passed on (either through females who did not have children, or males). As such, all living individuals can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to this group’s “mitochondrial Eve”, the woman at the top right of the tree with the “Mito 3” variant.

Let’s now examine Y-chromosome inheritance patterns in the exact same family tree. Suppose there are three Y chromosome variants present in the first generations:

Here we can see that the current population has inherited its Y-chromosome DNA from one individual as well (variant 1, the red lines) and that the other Y-chromosome variants (blue and green) hit dead ends through males that did not reproduce or men who only had daughters. All living members of the population trace their Y chromosome DNA back to an individual (filled in with yellow) who lived two generations after their most recent matrilineal common ancestor (the woman at the top right).

Now we are ready to examine regular chromosomal inheritance in this same family tree. Genetic variation on chromosomes other than the Y can be passed through either gender without problem, and individuals can have two variants at a time (one on the chromosome inherited from mom, the other on the chromosome inherited from dad). These key differences (compared to how mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes are inherited) produce a very different effect. In this same family, numerous variants (represented by the different colors) have been transmitted to the present generation without loss:

Notice the middle couple in the first generation in the pedigree. This man’s Y chromosome did not make it to the present day, and similarly his wife’s mitochondrial DNA did not make it either (scroll up to see this if you need to refresh your memory). So, they contributed nothing to the current generation, right? Not at all: both of them have passed on regular chromosomal variation to the present day (traced as blue and black lines).

In other words, it would be incorrect to examine this population, determine (correctly) that they share common mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome ancestors, and then go on to conclude that these two individuals were an ancestral pair that started this entire family. We know that this group descends from a larger population, because genetic variation in the present population is too large to explain as coming from one pair (there are five colors, or genetic variants in this population, and the max any one pair could carry is four, with two each).

While this example examines a small family, the same principles apply to larger groups: mitochondrial and Y-chromosome lineages, though interesting, cannot be used to estimate population sizes over time. For that type of work, regular chromosomal variation should be examined. Present day human genetic variation indicates that though we all share a common mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome source, these individuals came from a population of at least 10,000 individuals, and that they lived over 100,000 years apart. If you are interested in examining the evidence for human population sizes, Darrel Falk and I have discussed it previously.

In summary, anti-evolutionary groups, such as Reasons to Believe, that claim that the evidence for Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam supports an ancestral couple for the entire human race are not interpreting the data correctly. They have failed to account for the unique pattern of inheritance these types of DNA have in populations.

Photo courtesy of Lewis Schofield.

Introduction

Today BioLogos begins a series that we think ought to have significant impact on evangelical churches far beyond the local congregation in Arlington, Massachusetts where it was first delivered. A recent editorial in Christianity Today stated that many Christians likely face another "Galileo moment." In that earlier era, finding that the earth moved around the sun--and not the other way around--caused the Church to reorient its understanding of certain scriptural passages. Today, interconnecting strands of evidence all of which lie at the heart of biology, geology, physics and astronomy require segments of the Church to carefully evaluate its magnificent creation narrative--it needs to be certain it is hearing God's message in the way that God intends for it to be understood. It is healthy for the conservative wing of Christianity to be carefully examining the genre of the creation narrative. It has had to do this once before and, it is appropriate to prayerfully seek clarity once again. Christians are truth-seekers and God's Spirit will guide the process as we sincerely seek that wisdom which is from above.

Oratory, at its best, has long been an important key in opening the door to new and dramatically important insights. Pastor David Swaim of Highrock Church in the Boston suburb of Arlington illustrates this poignantly. In fact his sermon is so significant, we've asked permission to post it in serial form so that each of us can deeply reflect on his words in a protracted fashion. We encourage you to let others who are conflicted over this issue know about the series so that they can follow it. Indeed, we believe It will be a great series for small group discussions--we need to lovingly support each other as we seek God's guidance in coming to understand God's truths.

In this sermon, Swaim discusses our belief in God as creator, or “Maker of heaven and earth”, as the Apostle’s Creeds so poetically states. To begin, he reminds us that some passages in the Bible, like the parable of the prodigal son, convey deep truths even though they are not historical accounts. Asking “the wrong questions”—questions that focus on arbitrary details—about such stories can cause us to miss out on their intended message. In a similar way, he says, it is possible that we might be asking the “wrong questions” about the opening chapters of Genesis. In recent years, conflict has erupted because a literal reading of Genesis seems to contradict the findings of science. Swaim suggests, however, that accepting scientific evidence about things like evolution and the age of the earth need not rule out faith in Scripture.

If you wish to jump ahead and hear the sermon in its entirety, you may do so here.

Introduction written by the BioLogos editorial team.

"Maker of Heaven and Earth" (transcript)

One of my favorite parables is that of the lost son. There’s a lot to it. Basically, it’s a story that Jesus told about a young man who insulted his father by demanding his share of the inheritance early, then ran off to spend that money on wild living, and found himself destitute when the money was gone. In desperation, he returned to his father, asking to work as a servant. But instead of being angry, his father joyfully embraced his lost son and threw a huge feast to celebrate his return. It is a great story that Jesus tells to help us understand God’s amazing grace.

How many of you know this story? Raise your hand, if you would. Okay. Now I want to make sure I’m clear…that’s a lot of you…I don’t mean just like, you know it because I just told it to you. I mean you know it because you’ve heard a sermon on this before, or maybe you’ve read it on your own. Raise your hand high if that’s true of you. Wow, still a lot of you. That’s perfect because I actually have a couple of questions maybe you can help me with. You see, it says that the father saw the son while he was still a long way off. Can anybody tell me how far off was the son at that point? Anybody know that? Because, you know, they didn’t have glasses back then, and the father was really old, so how far could he really see? It just doesn’t really add up for me. Can anybody tell me about that? Nobody? Okay. Well I have another question. Maybe this one’s easier. What town did that family live in? Does anybody know that? No? Nobody? What town they lived in? People, this is one of the greatest stories of all time! This is a story that has changed thousands of lives, including many of yours! How can you say that you know this story, that you understand this story, if you don’t even understand these basic facts? Okay, well maybe this is easier. Speaking of family, the Bible’s into family values, so I want to know—where’s the mother? Can anybody tell me? Is this family not intact? What’s wrong? Did they get a divorce maybe? And how come the father ended up with the custody of the sons? And why did they only have two? Families back then had much bigger families. Maybe they just got divorced too early? But I mean he seems so nice—why do you think she left? Anybody know these things? I mean I just don’t get it. You all tell me you know this story, and yet you don’t understand just these simple things about it.

Obviously, my questions miss the whole point of the story. There was no mother, or for that matter, no father or son either. This never actually happened. It’s just a parable. It’s one of the many marvelous stories that Jesus told in order to help us understand something that was hard to see. Now does that make it so that this story isn’t true? No, it is true. This story communicates some of the most important truths in the universe—about God’s nature, and the way that we relate to him. There are many passages in scripture that promise God’s love, or praise God’s love, or even try to explain God’s love. But this passage helps us grasp that truth in a way that’s much more effectively communicated than just through direct reporting. This way helps us feel it. This event never happened, but it’s one of the truest stories in the world. And what a shame for someone to dismiss it as irrelevant because it’s not literal history, or miss the point by asking the wrong kinds of questions.

Now I bring this up because just like my questions miss the point of the lost son parable, so, I fear, many of us ask the wrong questions about the beginning of the book of Genesis, which we read from just a few minutes ago. Not only does this generate needless confusion and division, it also makes us miss the point, miss the life-changing truths that we could see if we asked the right questions. Right now we’re in a sermon series studying the Apostle’s Creed, an ancient declaration of faith in the God of the Bible. And today, we’re considering the word “creator.” So, Genesis seemed like the right place to go.

Like the story of the lost son, most of you know the basic outline: God created the universe in six days and then napped on the seventh (so those of you who nap through my sermons every Sunday, you’re in good company!). But by adding up all the names of the people mentioned in Genesis, and throughout the rest of the Bible, seventeenth century Bishop Ussher determined that the creation of Adam and Eve, and everything else, happened in 4,004 BC—about 6,000 years ago. And that’s great. But you’re probably also aware that this creates some tension with contemporary scientists who suggest a different timeline. Considering the evidence offered by the size and expansion rate of the universe, plate tectonics, fossil evidence, and genetics, their best guess is that the universe was created by a big bang about 13 billion years ago, the earth appeared about 4.5 billion years ago, and the earliest humans existed about 200,000 years ago. In the past 300 years, this has become a very heated debate. Apparently, we need to choose whether we believe in science or in scripture. At least that’s the claim made by the most strident voices on each side, so the general population seems to have accepted that if you believe in God you can’t believe in evolution, and if you believe in evolution then you can’t believe in God.

This topic arouses passions and anxieties in many people, including some in this room. No matter what your perspective is, I’m probably going to say something today that you’ll disagree with, and might even make you angry. There’ll be plenty of time for you to set me straight in the coming weeks. But for the next half hour, in order to allow the possibility that we might hear something new, or even learn from the Holy Spirit, let’s lay aside our defensiveness so that we can at least consider why we are so attached to whatever ideas we have, and evaluate whether our devotion to one truth may be blinding us to others. As scientists have discovered more and more evidence supporting the basic evolutionary theory outlined in Darwin’s Origin of Species, Christians have responded in a variety of ways.

Science has been right about so many things, so some Christians have embraced evolution and felt forced to abandon their trust, not only in the truth of Scripture, but also in the God it describes. Other Christians, including many renowned scientists, have fought back by pointing out the many flaws in evolutionary theory and proposing alternative theories of their own. These include Young Earth Creation, which asserts that the earth was created in six days six thousand years ago, and offers thoughtful explanations to reconcile the findings of science with the words of Genesis 1. Old Earth Creationists do the same thing, but contend that each of the days in Genesis could represent an epoch, or a million years, or whatever amount of time, instead of just a 24-hour day. This is linguistically legitimate—it’s a fine interpretation of the Hebrew word “day” in Genesis—and it recognizes that it’s hard to measure a day before the invention of the sun in day four, anyway. So, Old Earth Creationism opens up many possibilities to reconcile scientific claims about the age of the earth with a literal interpretation of Genesis. Theistic Evolution takes further steps to accommodate evolution while still honoring God as the one who created heaven and earth and everything in them through the evolutionary process. This is attractive because it eliminates the conflict between science and scripture, but it requires a very different way of reading Genesis. They suggest that, like I did with the parable of the prodigal son earlier, perhaps we’re asking the wrong questions about Genesis so that we’re inventing an unnecessary argument, and even worse, we’re also missing what the first chapters of Genesis really are all about.

In the next installment, to be posted tomorrow, Pastor Swaim goes on to discuss the Genesis passage in detail.

]]> Mon, 17 Oct 11 08:00:03 -0700 David Swaim http://biologos.org/blog/series/from-id-to-biologos?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/series/from-id-to-biologos?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication In this series, Dennis Venema describes his personal journey that took him away from the Intelligent Design arguments toward the evolutionary creation worldview. Through careful and honest research, he discovered ID scientific reasoning to be analogy-based, in sharp contrast to evolutionary science, which was supported by concrete data. After accepting this view, God’s presence ever strengthened him as he explored the compatibility between the Bible and God’s creative mechanism. For those familiar with my work here at BioLogos, it might come as a surprise to know that until relatively recently I was a supporter of the Intelligent Design Movement (IDM). In this series of posts, I tell the story of my transition to the view that God uses evolution as a creative mechanism.

Early years

I grew up in northern British Columbia, Canada, in a small town called Terrace, where I spent a lot of time in the woods with my father and brother hunting and fishing. Little did I know how spoiled we were –Terrace and its environs are a world-class destination for outdoor pursuits, especially fishing. As a hunter, my father was always interested in patterns in nature: what animals fed on, where they moved at certain times, and so on. Even as a child I can remember being similarly interested in how nature worked. Often, while dad fished, I was the one brandishing a net, bucket at the ready, to see what critters I could scoop up and examine. While my peers at school wanted to be astronauts and firemen, I dreamed of being a scientist some day.

My local church setting was pretty much a wash when it came to science. Science was not held up as a potential vocation, but neither was it denigrated as suspect. Creation science did not seem to be a priority, but rather global missions. As such, science–faith issues were seldom, if ever, discussed in the church I grew up in. I can vaguely recall one dust-up over eschatology, which was perhaps the first time I realized that not all Christians agree on everything when it comes to interpreting the Bible. I cannot, however, recall any similar discussion about the means by which God created.

High school

Despite evolution being almost a complete non-issue in my local church, I seemed to acquire a generic, evangelical, anti-evolutionary position by default. Certainly I knew of no Christians who accepted it, and I can still recall the feeling of dread I would get even at hearing the word evolution spoken aloud. That word, in my mind, was effectively synonymous with atheism. Fortunately, even in high school biology class evolution seemed to be a complete non-issue too, for as far as I can recall evolution was not a subject I was exposed to in high school. In fact, in high school I found biology to be intensely boring – it seemed to me to be mere regurgitation of information. Chemistry and physics seemed much more interesting, and I suspect now the reason for the appeal they held for me then was that they were taught from their underlying principles: atomic theory, Newtonian mechanics and Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. What was missing was the theoretical underpinnings of biology: a way to organize the laundry list of information into a context. It would be a long time before I realized that evolution was the theoretical underpinning that was missing from my biology experience. Given my dread of the topic, had this been pressed on me in high school I may have never pursued a career in biology.

As a high school student I had left behind my childhood desire to be a scientist. After all, I knew no scientists, and had no notion of how one might become one. In my small-town, northern Canadian setting, a medical doctor was about as close as one came to a scientific career that I was aware of. Accordingly, I set my sights on medicine, and off I went to the University of British Columbia in the fall of 1992. Biology seemed a natural choice for an aspiring doctor, so that was what I chose.

One church incident that I do recall with great clarity happened just before I left for university. There were several recent grads in the congregation: some were headed to Bible College, and others, such as myself, were off to “secular” universities. Our congregation had a time of prayer for all of us, but the contrast was stark: prayers of thanksgiving and blessing for those bible-school bound, but for those of us heading into the lion’s den, prayers of supplication that we not lose our faith in the process. I can remember steeling myself for the upcoming battle, where professors tried to snare me with their atheistic teachings and peers likewise pressured me to give up my faith. One battle I knew was coming was the evolution one: certainly, as a biology student, this would be one of the challenges I would have to face.

University 101

To my delight, I found that university was not going to require me to hold my breath spiritually for four years. Soon I was involved with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and enjoying the friendship of many other Christian students. Biology, however, remained boring and laundry-list like. My grades in chemistry and physics were still higher than those within my declared major of biology. The one bright spot was that evolution barely seemed to rate a mention except in passing. Certainly no compelling evidence for evolution was ever mentioned – professors seemed too intent on teaching the details of their fields to provide a wider evolutionary context. Even the introductory survey courses seemed more intent on a mere description of biodiversity rather than any detailed understanding of how that diversity arose. I did note that there was a 400-level evolution course, but thankfully it was an optional elective. Avoiding the evolution issue was easier than I had thought: I simply skipped taking that elective.

At the start of my third year, with my grades still marginal for medical school, I somehow decided to upgrade into a biology “honors” student. This meant two things: working on an undergraduate research thesis with a faculty member, and attending an “honors seminar” class with other students in the same program.

Experiencing my first taste of research was electrifying: here at last was genuine science! Not long after, my upper-level classes seemed a lot more interesting and relevant, and also much easier. My grades improved dramatically, and medical school looked to be a live option once more – except for the fact that my childhood interest in science had blossomed again.

Standing against evolution

The undergraduate thesis seminar class included an assignment that required students to familiarize themselves with the research of one of the professors in the department. As the list of potential faculty and their research interests was read, one caught my attention: the work of Dolph Schluter on experimental evolution. I decided to take the opportunity to score a few hits on the so-called “theory” by signing up for this topic. What followed can only be described now as a painful memory: full of ignorance and confidence, I trotted out every long-refuted, anti-evolutionary argument in the book (in fact, if memory serves, my “research” was nothing beyond skimming one anti-evolutionary book for its arguments). I remember that the class was quite engaged by the presentation, and there was some vigorous back-and-forth with some of the students who knew the science better than I because of their research work. I can only imagine what the thesis class faculty supervisor was thinking at the time. The worst part was that Dolph himself arrived early for his own presentation to the class, which was to follow my own. As such, he was able to hear a good portion of my nonsense.

Fortunately for me, Dolph had no interest in what would have been a very easy dressing-down. Rather, he restrained himself to a few words to the rest of the class on their lack of knowledge. Personally, I thought I had scored a victory for the faith, against the evils of evolution.

In the next post in this series, I’ll describe my introduction to, and enthusiastic embrace of, the Intelligent Design Movement.

Media-hungry atheist, creationist and religious fundamentalist provocateurs have successfully dominated the science and religion narrative for the past decade or so. In doing so, they have created the false impression of an ongoing unavoidable war between the two camps. A recently published large-scale survey of college students, however, finds that the call to arms has fallen on deaf ears. For the vast majority of American university students, there simply is no conflict between science and religion.

Christopher Scheitle, a Penn State sociologist, analyzed survey data from more than 10,000 students at over 200 colleges and universities across America (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 50, p. 175). The students were surveyed both as freshman and juniors so that attitudinal change over the course of their university years could be assessed. Among the many items on the survey was one that asked the following: "For me, the relationship between science and religion is one of..." Four possible responses were provided: (1) Conflict -- I consider myself to be on the side of science, (2) Conflict -- I consider myself to be on the side of religion, (3) Independence - science and religion refer to different aspects of reality and (4) Collaboration -- each can be used to support the other. Students were also asked about their religious beliefs and affiliations and their course of study (i.e. major).

Results showed that nearly 70 percent of college freshman saw the science/religion relationship as one of either independence or collaboration. The minority who saw science and religion in conflict were roughly evenly split between those who sided with religion (17 percent) and those who sided with science (14 percent). Even more interesting was the fact that when students changed their opinion over time, the most likely change was moving from a conflict position to one of non-conflict (either independence or collaboration). For example, 70 percent of those who as freshmen said they were on "religion's side" had changed to a non-conflict position by the time they were juniors. Similarly, 46 percent of freshmen who said they were on "science's side" had adopted a non-conflict position by the time they were juniors. By contrast, only 13 percent of freshman who took a non-conflict position changed to one of conflict by their junior year (5 percent to religion's side, 8 percent to the side of science). For most students, more education means less science/religion conflict, not more.

The above results also reflect the fact that the pro-science point of view appears to be more entrenched than the pro-religion point of view. In other words, once someone has adopted "science's side" in a perceived science and religion conflict, it is harder to move them from this position compared to when someone has adopted "religion's side." Exactly how to interpret this is unclear. Are religious people actually less dogmatic on the issue? Maybe. Maybe the evidence more clearly confirms the rightness of the "science" side and this is why fewer people switch. Then again, if the evidence so clearly supports the "science side" then why don't the majority of people see a conflict to begin with, and why do nearly half of the pro-science folks defect over time?

The apparent greater willingness of "religion side" students to re-examine their stance can also be seen in another interesting finding. Students at religious schools were actually less likely to claim to be on "religion's side" than students at secular schools. This pattern held true even after the results were adjusted for the students' degree of religious commitment and religious conservatism. The author suggests that students at religious schools may feel less threatened than equally religious students at a secular school and that the conflict narrative may be more salient at secular schools.

The breakdown of findings by major also showed some interesting trends. Business and education students were most likely to adopt a conflict approach, with nearly 40 percent doing so, most of whom claimed a pro-religion stance. The conflict approach was endorsed by just under 30 percent of natural science, math and engineering, social science, and arts and humanities students. However, while the majority of "conflict" students in natural science, math and engineering sided with science, the majority of arts, humanitie, and social science students sided with religion. While it is important to keep in mind that most students of all majors saw no conflict, this pattern across majors was somewhat troubling to the author:

"The finding that scientists and engineers are among the most likely to have a pro-science conflict perspective could mean that some of the most influential voices in these public debates might be more likely to fuel the debates than attenuate them. Similarly, future educators are among the most likely to hold a pro-religion conflict perspective. Given that classrooms and school boards have been one of the central forums for the struggle over religion and science, this does not bode well for a reduction of those struggles" (p. 185).

A shrill alarm cry naturally attracts attention and the few extreme voices promoting a science and religion conflict have taken full advantage of this. Seeking common ground or respecting distinct domains are not sexy, but this is where the majority of educated people are when it comes to science and religion. As the author of this survey points out, the non-conflict position firmly established among college students is only a reflection of what has already been found for most working scientists.

The majority position is not always the right one. It is not always the wrong one either. But one is justified in being wary of those who promote conflict (whether in science and religion or in politics, society, etc.) when: (a) it not obvious to most people why the conflict is necessary and (b) those promoting it have something to gain by doing so. Crass opportunism could be afoot just as easily as sincere disagreement.

In teaching at an evangelical liberal arts college that holds firmly to the inspiration and authority of Scripture, I find most of my students think the biblical doctrine of creation (DoC) is limited to two points: (1) God created out of nothing (ex nihilo) and (2) God created the world in six days (whatever they think “days” is supposed to mean!). My students are fairly representative of contemporary evangelicals’ understanding of the DoC. This contemporary understanding is problematic, however, because it is much narrower than the full doctrine as it was developed by the Patristic fathers. Given that the DoC is perhaps one of the most helpful pieces of theology for thinking about science, it’s worthwhile recovering it in all its glory. What follows over the next few parts of this blog is a brief tour through the elements of this amazing doctrine.

Two preliminary comments to get started. First, we have a tendency to cut up doctrines into chunks like the DoC, the doctrine of providence, the doctrine of salvation, the doctrine of eschatology, etc. Nevertheless, we need to realize that this is somewhat artificial on our part as we strive to understand one grand doctrine of God and His activity. All of these doctrines interpenetrate and inform each other as can be seen in what follows (e.g. much of God’s ongoing work of creation is continuous with His providence in creation; likewise, if God hadn’t created, there would be no providence, salvation or sanctification).

Second, all of the elements composing the DoC have been hard fought, won and then lost over and over in the history of Christian thought. If many of the following elements seem surprising or new to you, that’s largely because since the eighteenth century the DoC has suffered significant decline such that contemporary Christians usually only have a very atrophied version of the doctrine in mind when they think about creation, God’s work in creation, and science.¹

Creator/Creature Distinction

Let’s start with the creator/creature distinction, something that is familiar to us and that we recognize as part of the DoC when we think about it. This distinction actually has some important yet often missed implications. For example, the distinction implies that God intends for creation to be something different from rather than similar to Him. God didn’t make creation with the same infinite being or nature as Himself. Creation’s being distinct from God implies it is to be distinctly itself, literally to become uniquely what God calls it to be in Christ.

Moreover, the creator/creature distinction implies that all of creation is valued—it has the kind of nature and functionality God intended it to have. After all, “God saw all that he had made and it was very good” (Gen. 1:31), is a proclamation of His valuing all of creation. The Hebrew term in Genesis 1 and 2, tob, often translated as “good,” has a variety of meanings in different contexts including moral goodness and craftsmanship. However, it is commonly used in the OT in the sense of functioning properly. For example, “It is not good [tob] for the human [adam] to be alone, I shall make him a sustainer beside him” (Gen. 2:18). The man isn’t fully functioning without a sustainer appropriate to his created nature. So the repeating refrains of “good” in Genesis 1 and 2 primarily mean value, as in properly functioning or working as intended, fulfilling assigned purposes. From the beginning, God is telling us that creation does—and will do—what He intends.

Moreover, we see God’s valuation of creation especially in Jesus’ incarnation: what higher affirmation could there be of the value of the material order than the second person of the Trinity taking on the material nature of creation and inhabiting its order, an order that Jesus Himself established and blessed in the beginning?

A final implication of the creator/creature distinction is that creation has what theologians call contingent rationality. Creation is contingent in two senses: (1) it is utterly dependent on God such that if Christ ceased sustaining creation it would disappear instantly and (2) God could have made any kind of creation He wanted but chose to make this particular creation. God didn’t need or have to create anything. He was under no compulsion or necessity. Rather, being a loving communion of three persons, out of the overflow of that love God brought into existence a particular kind of creation for His glory and for its own sake. Furthermore, creation has its own rationality, its own particular order, structure and functionality, which is at least partially intelligible to us.

The creator/creature distinction has implications for science as well. First, since creation is so valuable to God, its study is a worthwhile human activity. Second, the contingent rationality of the created order is what science seeks to uncover and understand (whether or not scientists realize that both this order and its intelligibility are good gifts from God).

Ex Nihilo Creation

That creation was made ex nihilo—literally out of absolute nothing—is implied by the creator/creature distinction. The Patristic fathers inferred the ex nihilo nature of creation from this distinction and various passages like John 1:1-3, 1 Cor. 8:6, Col. 1:16, Heb. 11:3, Rev. 4:11 in their struggle with ancient Greek natural philosophy (the latter maintained that matter was eternal). This element of the DoC was not easy to achieve and required the Patristics to “think away” what was false from the Greek philosophical ideas that so permeated their world and their education.

The theological significance of ex nihilo creation is hard to overestimate. For one thing it protects God’s sovereignty showing us that all things in creation are subject to Him. Moreover, it distinguishes God’s creative activity from all other religious creation stories. There is no pre-existent matter giving rise to divinities as in the other ancient Near East creation accounts. Creation is pictured as originating in covenantal love (Jer. 33:25) rather than conflicts among deities. God is never once seen to be struggling to shape recalcitrant matter (a constant theme in other ancient Near East creation accounts).

Another important implication of ex nihilo creation is that there can be no creation out of nothing without purpose. Creation was no accident on God’s part. He has reasons for what He’s doing, one of which is for creation to become what God destines it to be in Christ (more in part 3).

Finally, a creation made out of nothing is particularly fragile! Its tendency is to always fall back into nothing meaning that creation requires God’s constant preserving care. Here, there is a clear connection between God’s creating out of nothing and His general providence sustaining the being and order of creation.

Sovereignty in Creation

God’s sovereignty in creation contrasts with all the ancient creation myths and cosmologies, where divinities are always struggling with each other and with recalcitrant matter. Instead, the Bible pictures God as in control of all things: “See, the Sovereign LORD comes with power and his arm rules for Him” (Is. 40:10a), “He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in” (Is. 40:22b), and

Blessed are you, O LORD, the God of Israel our father, forever and ever. Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O LORD, and you are exalted as head above all. Both riches and honor come from you, and you rule over all (I Chron. 29: 11-12a).

From Genesis 1 to Revelations 22, God is king and ruler over all! One of the most relevant implications of this for thinking about science: God rules over all natural processes! Therefore, anything a scientist says about processes in creation can only be describing something that is sustained by God and subject to His sovereignty.

Notes

1. Although not his main theme, James Turner’s masterful history, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, Johns Hopkins University Press (1986), reveals much of the DoC’s decline during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Since his pivotal 2006 paper, Todd has continued to evaluate and respond to arguments against human common ancestry brought forth by other creationists. One group that is frequently the target of Todd’s criticism is the Old-Earth Creationist group Reasons to Believe, (RTB) a group that I have recently critiqued as well (see here and here). The striking genetic similarities between humans and chimpanzees presents a difficulty for the RTB view that humans were directly created by God apart from common ancestry with other species. One RTB rationalization for the evidence is that since humans and other life are formed from the dust of the ground in the Genesis narratives, such similarities are to be expected:

Genesis 2:7 describes the creation of Adam and states that God “formed the man from the dust of the ground.” The verb “formed” is translated from the original Hebrew verb yasar, which means “to form,” “to fashion,” or “to produce.” Genesis 2:19 uses yasar to describe God’s work to form “out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air.” Together, these verses indicate that both man and animals were fashioned by the Creator from the same substance. It follows, then, that anatomical, physiological, biochemical, and genetic similarities should exist between humans and other animals, including the “99% genetic similarity” between humans and chimpanzees.

While RTB views this as a reasonable line of argument, Todd does not. The fatal flaw, as both Todd and I see it, is that this rationalization does not explain the pattern of biological similarity we see in nature:

Being created by one God would be a good reason for some degree of similarity to exist. Likewise, being created to occupy the same world or to participate in the same ecosystem would also necessitate some biological similarity. These types of considerations could explain why all living things use the same basic biochemical building blocks (amino acids, nucleotides, etc.), for example.

What these considerations do not explain is the pattern of similarity. This is quite a different problem that is easy to confuse with the fact of similarity. What we're dealing with in creation is not just bare similarity or random similarity. There is a definite pattern, and it's a pattern that Darwin says is uniquely explained by the inference of common ancestry …

When are building materials sufficient to justify a conclusion that things built will be strongly similar in form? If I get two homework assignments that are identical word-for-word, I do not conclude that the similarity is inevitable given that they're both written in English.

In other words, RTB is content to present a weak argument they feel is theologically satisfying even if it fails to grapple with the compelling pattern that scientists observe throughout nature. Todd, however, isn’t having any of it. He would rather understand the pattern than find ways to explain it away.

Given my appreciation for Todd and his approach, I was pleased to discover Todd’s blog series examining my recent critiques (see here and here) of Reasons to Believe’s “Testable Creation Model”. I found several aspects of RTB’s response to be inadequate, as I will explain below. Still, when one is personally invested in a discussion it can be difficult to evaluate a rebuttal objectively. Far better to have another, more impartial individual look it over and offer their thoughts. Todd is an ideal candidate for this. He is eminently qualified to evaluate the science, he is familiar with the RTB literature, and, since he is a Young-Earth Creationist, he certainly cannot be accused of a pro-evolutionary bias.

Todd starts the series by explaining his motivations:

In my last post before Christmas, I indicated that I would be discussing Reasons to Believe in my next posts. Unfortunately, what started as a single response to some of Fuz Rana's recent assertions about the chimpanzee genome has turned into a long series of posts. Having written almost the entire series of posts already, I've become discouraged by the length and detail of my criticisms. I have even debated whether or not I should bother posting what I've written, since I'm sure it will be either ignored by RTB or misconstrued as personal attack or insult. Despite that, though, I do think I have a duty to the public and to the truth to set the record straight on a topic that I'm familiar with: comparative primate genomics.

In his first post, Todd addressed the accusation that my critique was merely an ad hominem attack on RTB. In my critique, I was careful not to accuse RTB of wrongdoing. That is certainly one possible explanation for the data I laid out in the original critique, but it is not the only explanation. My intent was to make the data accessible to non-specialists and allow them to see what a biologist sees when they look at the RTB model. So, I found this response from RTB to be somewhat puzzling. Todd’s evaluation was similar to mine:

In his first response to Venema's post, Rana wrote,

...instead of discussing the scientific weaknesses of our approach, Venema chose to launch an ad hominem attack against me and Hugh Ross, impugning our integrity as scientists and scholars.

I think that interpretation is pretty debatable. Venema raised some very important questions … about the way RTB has represented published research. He never accused anyone at RTB of any specific wrongdoing or incompetence. By dismissing these issues as just a personal "attack," I would say that Rana is far more guilty of argumentum ad hominem than Venema ever was.

An additional point is that critiquing a model for failing to adequately address the scientific literature is very much a scientific critique. If I submit a scientific paper for publication that makes claims clearly against the published literature, while simultaneously omitting any discussion of the relevant research, the reviewers would, without a doubt, reject my work. That’s not an ad hominem attack on their part, it’s pointing out a scientific weakness in my scholarship. The RTB model, as published in their major books, makes no mention of the key paper comparing the human and chimpanzee genomes. The most recent RTB book, More Than a Theory, even claims that a full-genome comparison has never been done. Moreover, no explanation or evidence is given to back up these assertions. Regardless of the reasons for these omissions, the fact remains that they are a serious scientific shortcoming for the RTB model.

Todd’s thorough analysis eventually spanned eight posts on his blog, and links to each post are provided below for those interested in the details. Having gone over RTB’s response with a fine-toothed comb, Todd offers some conclusions for RTB to consider:

Venema and I have documented a sad but consistent and ongoing pattern of erroneous summaries of published works on the part of RTB (Rana and Ross, but mostly Rana). There's really no way to deny these mistakes have been made or to explain them away, so what are you going to do about them? I recommend apologizing for the mistakes, correcting them if you can, and instituting some kind of serious fact-checking filter on everything you publish.

Todd goes on to challenge RTB to live up to their stated invitation for serious critique of their model:

Rana claimed that "We do invite serious critique of our model (both theological and scientific). We believe that critical evaluation of our ideas will only improve our case for biblical creation." Fine. Venema did that in his critique. You ignored a number of important points he raised and instead mischaracterized his critique as a personal attack, which it was not. I've also offered a serious critique in the fourth post of this series, where I tested Rana's hypothesis that the unaligned portions of the chimp genome are too different to align. Will you ignore that as well? If so, please stop saying that you "invite serious critique" of the RTB model.

I’m hopeful that RTB won’t ignore what Todd has to say. Todd’s blog might not get a huge amount of traffic, but he is an important voice in this discussion. Hopefully posting this here on Biologos will raise Todd’s visibility with those who need to hear what he has to say most: RTB supporters. Folks, when two Christian geneticists who hold radically different views of creation agree that the RTB model has serious scientific flaws, it’s time to ask hard questions.

One serious critique of young-earth creationist attempts to explain the natural realm is that their explanations, typically rooted in religious dogma, have no flexibility to adapt and self-correct as knowledge increases.

-Hugh Ross
More Than a Theory, p. 20

Introduction

Reasons to Believe (RTB) is the most influential Old-Earth Creationist organization in North America. While RTB supports a mainstream scientific position on cosmology and the age of the earth, RTB rejects evolutionary biology. Specifically, RTB denies that humans share ancestry with other forms of life, such as Neandertals or chimpanzees. RTB also claims that all human are the descendents of a single, specially created couple who lived about 50,000 years ago. RTB has expounded a framework called the “Testable Creation Model” in three major books published in the last five years: Who Was Adam? was published in 2005; Creation as Science was published in 2006, and More Than a Theory was published in 2009. Furthermore, RTB claims that this model is scientifically robust.¹ This same period however, has also seen the publication of much genetic data relevant to assessing human common ancestry. This paper will examine the interaction between RTB literature and several lines of genetics-based evidence for common ancestry. In so doing, I will address the scientific robustness and reliability of the RTB model. RTB welcomes such critique from qualified scholars in their works as a means of improving their model.² This critique, while forthright, is offered without animosity and in good faith. It is my hope that RTB will find it useful for correcting several serious flaws in their approach to human origins.

A recent history of primate comparative genomics

When the human genome project (the endeavor to determine the complete DNA sequence of every human chromosome) was completed in 2003, the equivalent chimpanzee genome project was already underway. Just prior to the completion of the human project (from about 2002 on), detailed comparisons of large stretches of DNA between humans and chimpanzees became possible as both genome projects progressed. As the data came in, a range of estimates for the precise amount of identity between the two genomes was published in the mainstream scientific literature (Table 1).

Such estimates took two forms: measuring single-nucleotide differences in sequences found in both genomes while omitting inserted or deleted sequences (so-called “indel” mutations, because it may be difficult to determine if a difference is due to an insertion or deletion), or estimates combining both sources of variation. In the years preceding the completion of the chimpanzee genome in 2005, partial-genome comparisons repeatedly estimated the two genomes to be over 98% identical when omitting differences due to indels. Two pre-2005 studies took indels into consideration as well: Britten (2002) estimated the two genomes to be 95% identical, whereas Anzai et al. (2003) found only 87% identity. This paper examined a chromosomal region that contains immune system genes, and was not thought to be representative of the genome as a whole. This prediction was borne out in 2005 when the completed human and chimpanzee genomes were compared (2.9x10⁹ DNA base pairs). The final tally was 98.77% identical when indels were omitted and 95% identical when indels were included. A second paper published in 2005 examined 1.85x10⁷ DNA base pairs found in the portions of the chromosome that specify proteins, and found even higher identity (99.4%) in these sequences.

The RTB model and comparative primate homology: overview

A key tenet of the RTB model is that humans do not share ancestry with other forms of life. As such, RTB has invested considerable effort in reinterpreting human / chimpanzee genomic homology comparisons for their constituents. A notable feature of the RTB model is the claim that the whole-genome, human / chimpanzee homology value is in fact 85-90%, not 95-99%.³ As we have seen, comparisons between the human and chimpanzee genomes progressively improved in the early 2000s, culminating in the landmark whole-genome comparison of 2005. The fact that these data emerged over time allows us to investigate how RTB responded over the same time period, and as such examine the reliability of the RTB model as new data became available that were at odds with one of its non-negotiable claims.

The RTB model and primate genomics (2005): Who Was Adam?

Like comparative primate genomics, the RTB creation model also hit a milestone in 2005 with the publication of Who Was Adam? (WWA) by RTB scholars Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross. This book narrowly predates the pivotal 2005 whole-genome comparison paper. Unlike two later RTB books (see below) this book discusses research-to-date on human-chimpanzee comparative genetics in extensive detail. (p. 212-215) WWA carefully distinguishes between estimates based on including or excluding indels, as well as chromosomal or mitochondrial DNA. However, WWA made a questionable claim when it states:

“The most comprehensive genetic comparisons indicate that humans and chimpanzees share genetic similarity closer to about 85 percent than to 99 percent. From an evolutionary perspective, if a 99 percent genetic similarity reflects a close evolutionary connection, then an 85% genetic similarity distances humans from chimpanzees.”(p. 223)

This assertion, however, was already at odds with the conclusions of the 2004 Chromosome 22 Consortium paper (Table 1), a paper that is cited in WWA as support for differences in human-chimpanzee gene expression. (p. 222) At the time WWA was published, RTB expected future genomic comparisons to widen the gap between humans and chimpanzees. (p. 223)

The RTB model and primate genomics (2006): Creation as Science

In early September 2005, a full comparison between the completed chimpanzee genome and the human genome was published in the prestigious journal Nature. This landmark paper used a sample size of 2.9x10⁹ base pairs: it covered virtually the entire genomes of both species, dwarfing previous comparisons (Table 1). This comparison returned results consistent with previous studies: homology excluding indels was over 98%; including indels brought it down to 95%. As expected, the 2003 Anzai et al., paper (that found 87% homology including indels in one chromosomal region) was shown to be an inappropriate estimate for the genome as a whole. Beyond its wide impact in the biological sciences, this paper also received much attention from the mainstream media. This work, however, did not make any discernable difference to the RTB model. In 2006, another major RTB book, Creation as Science (CAS), appeared. In contrast to the lengthy, detailed discussion of human / chimpanzee comparative genomics in WWA, CAS has only a brief section as follows:

New research, however, indicates that the widely advertised 98 to 99 percent similarity between human and chimpanzee DNA is greatly exaggerated. Such claims are based on small segments of the human and chimpanzee genomes where common sense dictates that the similarities would be the greatest. While comparisons between the complete human genome and the complete chimpanzee genome have only recently begun, the most complete comparisons performed thus far indicate that the degree of similarity is more like 85 to 90 percent. (p. 156)

The above paragraph from CAS cites four research publications, each of which was previously cited in WWA: Anzai et al., 2003; Thomas et al, 2003; Arnason et al., 1996; and the Chromosome 22 Consortium paper of 2004 (Table 1). Surprisingly, CAS makes no mention of the actual whole-genome study published between WWA and CAS. On encountering this, I initially assumed that Ross and Rana were simply unaware at the time CAS went to press that the chimpanzee genome had been completed, or that perhaps they had mistaken the Anzai paper as a whole-genome analysis. Further investigation, however, failed to support these hypotheses. First, in an article published in 2004 in the RTB periodical Connections, Rana emphasizes that the Anzai paper is not a whole genome comparison and discusses its actual data set in detail:

Though these whole-genome comparisons are not yet possible, scientists are close, and preliminary results indicate that humans and chimpanzees are really not so genetically similar… another study found only 86.7% genetic similarity when segments of human and chimpanzee DNA (totaling 1,870,955 base pairs) were laid side by side.

Thus Rana correctly understands that the Anzai paper is not a whole-genome comparison. Secondly (and more significantly), Rana does mention the key 2005 whole-genome paper in the very first 2006 edition of Connections, and notes correctly that it is a whole-genome study:

Where were you on September 1, 2005? Perhaps you missed the announcement of a scientific breakthrough: the influential journal Nature published the completed sequence of the chimpanzee genome. This remarkable achievement received abundant publicity because it paved the way for biologists to conduct detailed genetic comparisons between humans and chimpanzees.

Rana uses this as an introduction to discuss another article from the same journal issue and does not discuss this key paper or its results, beyond a footnote referring readers to WWA. While this Connections article does not have a precise publication date, Rana cites accession of online material for this article as occurring on November 30, 2005. Other articles in this edition of Connections also cite access dates in late November 2005, suggesting that this volume was drafted in late 2005 for publication early in 2006. The chapter in CAS discussing human / chimpanzee genomics has references to online material cited as accessed in April 2006, indicating that this chapter was still in revision at this time. Taken together, these lines of evidence strongly suggest that RTB was aware of the key 2005 paper at the time the CAS chapter was in preparation, and that they correctly understood its significance as the first whole-genome comparison. The choice of language in CAS also supports this conclusion, since the chapter claims that “… comparisons between the complete human genome and the complete chimpanzee genome have only recently begun…” which makes sense only if both genomes were sequenced at the time of its writing. Despite this concession, CAS makes no mention of the key 2005 paper or its findings, and claims rather that “the most complete comparisons performed thus far” support homology values in the 85-90% range. In reality, only the Anzai paper, which covered a small chromosomal region expected to be disproportionately different between the two species, supports this value (Table 1).

The RTB model and primate genomics (2009): More Than a Theory

The next major RTB publication dealing with human - chimpanzee genomic comparisons was More Than a Theory (MTT) published in 2009. The relevant passage in MTT is a lightly reworked version of what appears in CAS, with only one notable change: whereas CAS acknowledges that comparisons between the completed genomes are underway, MTT claims they have not yet been done (Figure 1).

Like CAS, MTT claims “the most complete analyses performed so far” indicate homology values in the 85-90% range, makes no mention of the key 2005 whole-genome comparison paper, and again cites exactly the same references as CAS, the most recent being the 2004 consortium paper (Table 1). Thus, four years after they were aware of the key 2005 paper, there is still no mention of it to be found in the RTB framework; moreover, MTT claims such an analysis has never been performed.

The RTB model and primate genomics – present day

The pattern we have seen in the major RTB books continues into the present. Rana, for example, continues to argue that the best estimate of whole-genome human chimpanzee homology is at best 90%. For example, during a recent podcast discussion of the completed western clawed frog genome (Xenopus tropicalis) Rana claims: “It’s common parlance that humans and chimps have a 99% genetic similarity. The actual data indicates probably it’s closer to 90% similarity as opposed to 99% similarity” before going on to imply that the higher value can only be supported through comparisons of specific genes. He then goes on to claim that sequenced frog genome shows 80% similarity to the human genome based on “the same reasoning.” The argument he makes is an attempt to cast doubt on the relevance of the human / chimpanzee comparison: if humans and chimps are 90% similar and humans and frogs are 80% similar, Rana claims these “are not meaningful comparisons in a biological sense.” Rana’s argument, however, is deeply flawed in that he is comparing two very different measures of similarity and claiming they are equivalent. The human / chimpanzee value, as we have seen, is 95% genome-wide identity (including indels) for the completed genomes of both species compared across approximately three billion DNA base pairs (Table 1). The 80% value Rana touts for the human / frog comparison, however, is merely a measure of the percentage of genes in the frog genome that have a similar gene in humans implicated in a human disease. It is not even a measure of the genetic similarity of those genes, but merely a fraction of the genes identified in frog that might be useful for studying human diseases. Rana, however, presents these two values as equivalent measures in an attempt to disparage human / chimpanzee genomic similarity. In reality, the genome-wide homology between Xenopus tropicalis and humans is slightly over 30%.

Taken together, these findings demonstrate the following: (a) RTB carefully followed the primary literature on human / chimpanzee comparative genomics up until and including a major paper published in 2004, even if it represented such studies selectively to their constituents; (b) RTB was aware of the key 2005 whole-genome study and correctly understood its implications at the time the first 2006 edition of Connections was drafted in late 2005; (c) RTB has made no mention of this paper (nor any paper in this field published since 2004) in two major works published after this paper was available; (d) RTB continues to claim, five years after this paper was published, that the most recent and most extensive evidence supports their preferred value of 85-90% homology (and that higher values can only be supported with small, biased samples), despite the fact that this conclusion is starkly at odds with the best and most extensive study available, and is itself derived from a comparatively small, biased sample; and (e) RTB has shifted from acknowledging (in 2006) that whole-genome comparisons have been done to denying (in 2009) that they ever have.

In the second part of this series, Dr. Venema will continue his evaluation of the RTB model by examining how it approaches a second powerful line of evidence for human evolution: pseudogenes.

A Response from Dr. Rana: “Creation as Science (2006) was initially published by NavPress and More Than a Theory (2009) was published by Baker as a reworking of Creation as Science. There was an urgency to get More than a Theory to the publisher so that it would be released to coincide with the Darwin Day Celebration. Hugh Ross intended both books to be an overview and summarized material from Who Was Adam? (2005) which was published before the whole genome work on the chimpanzee was published. This explains why the work on the whole chimpanzee genome was not mentioned in More than a Theory. There was nothing done to be deliberately deceptive regarding the failure to mention the work on the whole genome of the chimpanzee.”

Notes

1. For a review of these lines of evidence, see Venema, D.R. (2010). Genesis and the genome: genomics evidence for human – ape common ancestry and ancestral hominid population sizes. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 62 (3), 166-178.
2. Ross, Hugh. More Than a Theory: Revealing a Testable Model for Creation. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2009, p. 21.
3. Rana, Fazale and Ross, Hugh. Who Was Adam? A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Man. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2005, p. 223; Ross, Hugh. Creation as Science: A Testable Model Approach to End the Creation / Evolution Wars. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2006, p. 156; and More Than a Theory, p. 187-188.

In this video Conversation, senior biblical fellow Peter Enns asks Rev. N.T. Wright to respond to a common question of readers regarding the disconnect between science and religion. Specifically, he asks Wright why he thinks there is such controversy in evangelicalism about evolution. Is this a “culture war” issue?

Wright responds by noting that this is a very America-specific issue. In England, very few people have these same hang-ups about evolution, except where education and movements have come over from America and have gotten into British subculture —much to the dismay of many who think otherwise.

As a possible explanation for this issue, Wright points to the American conservative/liberal split which happened a century ago with the modernist/fundamentalist controversy. The divide was expanded with the Scopes trials and, he points out, has echoes of some of the old civil war mindset—that is, that people in the south are ill-informed and fundamentalist while people in the north are too liberal and doctrinally soft. Though these are only stereotypes, Wright notes, there are still enough examples of them that the caricatures stick.

People then project those divisions onto issues of science and faith and cast those that believe in science as secularists and those that believe in God as being anti-science. These characterizations are flawed, however, since modern science emerged from people of deep faith that wanted to explain the natural world.

Peter Enns wonders if one way past a combat mentality would be for Americans to have a better cultural awareness as to how we have come to this place and Wright agrees that this would be a good thing. “We all see the world distorted,” he says, “and that’s why we need one another, to be honest.”

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In the first clip, Walton discusses the problem of trying to integrate ancient scripture with our modern worldview. He notes that while people come to scripture thinking that they need to integrate it with the way we view the world now, it is not appropriate to read science out of the Bible or into the Bible. This makes the text say things that it never meant to an ancient audience.

In the second clip, Walton continues on the topic and points out that while modern people are inclined to think of creation in terms of material origins—as that is the way we view the rest of the world—ancient people did not think this way. Instead of being concerned about the precise methodology God used for the creation of matter, ancients were more interested in God’s role as the figure in charge of all matter.

In order to arrive at a better understanding of the text, we need to more fully consider its audience (ancient peoples who lacked scientific knowledge) and its purpose (to explain the role and significance of humans in the universe, not to provide scientific information).

One of the most important questions concerning the origins of life is about Adam and Eve, suggests theologian Alister McGrath.

Are Adam and Eve real historical figures that lived 6000 years ago, or are they metaphorical representations? It is an interesting question, says McGrath, because based on one’s response, the whole theory of evolution would shift the time frames back a very long way from what many evangelicals hold as true.

There are those who would say that Adam and Eve designate specific historical figures. That makes some sense, acknowledges McGrath, but it makes even more sense to say that Adam and Eve are stereotypical figures that encapsulate the human race as a whole. They represent the vast human potential as created by God, but also the capacity for going wrong.

The story of Adam and Eve is the story of all of us—people created with the greatest of intentions and great gifts—but still with the ability to fail. The Adam and Eve story tells us that this is not accidental—this is part of what it is to be human.

The real question is: is there anything to be done about this human quandary? Science doesn’t have a huge amount to say about how we understand Adam and Eve. Yet in Romans, Paul writes that Christ is the second Adam, who offers a second chance for humanity. This is our story, we have gone wrong but there is something to be done about it. And that something is the transformation that is brought about by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In this video conversation, N.T. Wright talks about the story presented in Genesis 2 and 3 and offers some important insights on the functionality of the text that in many ways transcends its literal narrative.

Wright begins by noting that while there are divergent views on the date of authorship of Genesis—with some scholars attributing its authorship to Moses, thus dating it c. 1500 B.C., and others dating it around the third century B.C.. Regardless of its actual date of composition, however, Wright is most interested in the way in which Jesus’ antecedents would have read the text in the period right before the New Testament.

He asserts that any Jew from the period of the Babylonian exile to the life of Jesus reading the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden—and their ultimate expulsion after violating the terms of their covenant with God—would have identified with the story on a deep level. These readers would have thought “this is our story” because Israel had repeated this experience.

In the Adam and Eve narrative, humankind was given a gift—a wonderful identity and a wonderful place in which to exist. Their failure to uphold the terms of their agreement with God results in their exile from the Garden. In kind, through Israel, God offers an opportunity to remake that human project. He gives them their land and identity—and in return, they are to follow his commandments. When they fail, like Adam and Eve, they are exiled from the land.

Readers of Genesis who focus simply on the smaller, literal picture—that is, the number of days of creation and whether there is evidence in the text pointing to an old or new earth—are in effect not reading the complete text. To fully appreciate the richness of the text, we should think about the functionality and reception of the text as opposed to solely the words on the page.

As you watch this, listen especially closely to the section beginning at 2:25. Here, Genesis 2 and 3 are placed in the context of not just the exile ("we blew it again"), but in the context of the answer to this problem as described in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the Acts, and by Paul. Has the unity of the Scriptural message ever been put more succinctly? This, perhaps, is N.T. Wright at his very best.

For a related discussion, see our recent entry by Pete Enns: "Adam is Israel".

The BioLogos Foundation exists to help bring harmony between the Christian faith and science. Since BioLogos is an organization of Christians, this means that those who support it are members of a single Body, and by definition this includes people who do not all think about issues in exactly the same way. Jesus prayer for unity in John 17 is our prayer too. Hence, Paul’s I Corinthians 12 and 13 description of how things are to work in the Body of Christ is our calling. Indeed, it is our mandate. With that in mind BioLogos sponsored the In Search of a Theology of Celebration conference between pastors, theologians, scientists, and other scholars in November, 2009. The statement that emerged from that meeting and its signatories has been posted.

We have also been privileged to engage in several discussions with leaders of the Reasons to Believe organization, including an all day meeting in January, 2010. The following joint statement is the product of that meeting.

Report on BioLogos-Reasons To Believe Dialogue

BioLogos and Reasons To Believe are Christian non-profit organizations. Both may be described as science-faith think tanks. Both affirm that the revelations of Scripture and nature testify to the glory of God. BioLogos promotes theistic evolution as the best understanding of life’s origin and history. Reasons To Believe advocates day-age creation that accepts micro-evolutionary but not macro-evolutionary change.

On January 23, 2010, three scientists and a theologian who support BioLogos met in Washington, DC, with three scientists and a theologian from Reasons To Believe to discuss areas of agreement and disagreement. On the broad subject of creation and evolution, our particular focus for this discussion was the biological record of the past 700 million years.

We agreed on four goals for this session of an ongoing dialogue that began more than a year ago:

1. Clarify for each other our beliefs about and positions on various aspects of creation and evolution. We wanted to establish areas of agreement on science, theology, and philosophy of ministry as well as major differences—with the understanding that secondary differences would require additional discussion at a later date.

   Significant progress was made in clarifying similarities and differences and more will be reported on this at a later date

   
   

2. Outline the means by which at least some of the more significant differences between us could potentially be resolved.

   We agreed to undertake back-and-forth exchanges—video, written, or a combination—on specific topics.

   
   

3. Set up public forums that will allow both Christians and non-Christians to learn about our respective positions on specific creation and evolution issues, observe our dialogue, and then engage in conversation with us.

   We agreed that the emphasis in these events must be on education and discussion, but this does not rule out sincere debate

   
   

4. Consider how our interactions with one another might model for the Christian community at large how to approach differences of perspective and interpretation.

   We agreed on the primary importance of showing civility, grace, and unity in the common goal of understanding and submitting to God’s truth.

   
   

We’re pleased with the progress already achieved. As far as we’re aware, this is the first time in the recent history of the church when two ministries that share protestant evangelical commitments, but with divergent views on creation, have engaged in dialogue showing respect for each other’s Christian character, professional qualifications, and scholarly integrity. Each participant has embraced the exhortation in 1 Peter 3:15-16a:

But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect…

Thus, we remain hopeful that at least some of our differences can and will be resolved and that, even with an admixture of agreement and disagreement, our unity in Christ will be upheld and strengthened.

As my faith matured, I hungered to better understand God’s ways, especially those pertaining to Creation. This meant looking more deeply into science and exploring the faith-science conflict. Although the young-earth, anti-evolution position I held at that time seemed consistent with Scripture, I was unsettled by the fact that it so fundamentally conflicted with the global scientific consensus.

My convictions then, as now, were fourfold: 1) God is truthful and not deceptive in character; 2) He has revealed profound truths to us in His Word, the Bible; 3) Within the Bible, He actually invites us to explore Creation to learn about Him (Psalm 19:1-4); and 4) science is the very means of that exploration. From these convictions, I concluded that Scripture and science must together form a cohesive portrait of Creator and Creation. Thus my journey to reconcile the apparent discrepancies began.

I decided that to get to the truth, I had to be willing to have my presuppositions challenged (Proverbs 18:17). I would study both the evolutionary/old-earth and anti-evolutionary/young-earth materials (books, formal debates, etc.) with as much objectivity as possible, allowing each side to make its best case and refute the other. I would then contact the authors for any needed clarification. Of course, I would always keep the Bible close at hand. Finally, I would thoughtfully and prayerfully seek a conclusion.

As I studied the evolutionary perspective in depth, I was surprised to discern a remarkably logical, eminently credible line of reasoning that made what I would call elegant sense of the scientific data. Further, as I looked into the perspectives of both theologians and scientists on how the findings of modern science actually harmonized with Scripture, my long-held belief that evolution was at its core an atheistic concept was firmly dispelled, and as a result the theory gained great credibility with me.

From there I moved on to the young-earth materials. While I was impressed by their high regard for Scripture, I found myself deeply disappointed by many scientific assertions that seemed patently unrealistic. The young-earth science just didn’t appear to add up. When I contacted a high-level representative at a prominent young earth creationist ministry, he candidly shared with me that he had long before learned to deal with apparent Scripture/science conflicts by not paying too much attention to the science; instead, he let his interpretation of Genesis—which he said was not open to reconsideration—determine everything else. (In the many discussions I would later have with pastors, elders, and friends, I found this line of thinking to be common.) Such a stance would not have disturbed me if young-earth science could be shown to be truly viable and successful in application. But it became increasingly clear that in practice, the young-earth claims were typically not only unworkable, but scientifically impossible. Meanwhile, mainstream science was spectacularly fruitful, with an ongoing record of astonishing advancements in everything from genetics to space exploration.

This brought me to a crisis: If the evolutionary/old-earth views are truly fallacious, as conservative evangelicals are so frequently taught, why do they lead to such powerful breakthroughs while “accurate” young-earth science remains strikingly barren? Either God is deceiving mankind by intentionally prospering a “heretical” view of Creation (as one of my pastors called the old-earth view), or, if in fact He does not want modern scientific views to appear accurate, He was simply failing to prevent it. Obviously, neither conclusion was tenable.

Even after accepting an ancient universe, one of the issues that bothered me most about evolution was the randomness that it required. The concepts of divine sovereignty and chance seemed irreconcilable. But through continued theological and scientific studies, I came to clearly see that “random” occurrences at the micro level are in fact the constituents of order at the macro level, and through my theistic prism came to see that God actually uses events that we observers experience as “chance” to bring about His purposeful end. In fact, it seemed that all Christians should be able to relate to this: Despite experiencing circumstances in life that appear completely random, we believers steadfastly affirm God’s sovereignty and absolute control over all. Thus, another point of resistance to modern science dissipated.

Poised to accept evolution on scientific terms but still uncomfortable with the apparent contradiction with Scripture, I then returned to the Genesis Creation accounts. Whereas I had been taught that a literal interpretation was absolutely necessary lest the Bible be discredited, I was now surprised to find its figurative imagery jumping out at me. It became apparent that in these texts, God was masterfully using evocative imagery to convey eternal truths. I began to see a beauty and elegance in Genesis that I had never before known. For example, I found particularly instructive the account of God making man from the dust of the earth, a picture consistent with evolution. Despite having previously read Genesis numerous times, its early chapters now made more sense to me than ever before, and greatly enhanced my already profound appreciation for God’s Word.

Finally, I came to peace with science. The war ended. Since then, my sense of awe and wonder at God’s creative ways—and my worship of Christ, the Agent and Sustainer of all Creation (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16, 17; Hebrews 1:2)—have been greatly magnified. Further, I now strongly support the endeavor of modern science, as I view its practitioners, whether believers or nonbelievers, as laboring (wittingly or unwittingly) to reveal our Creator’s wondrous methods and techniques to mankind.

Having made this challenging but consummately rewarding journey, my concern today is for the evangelical church. I am deeply troubled by the church’s skepticism – often outright hostility – towards science, and see a devastating crisis looming for our children and grandchildren unless we begin to engage the faith-science issue with honesty, humility, and constructive self-criticism. I’ll share more on this in my next post…

The BioLogos view holds that both Scripture and modern science reveal God’s truth, and that these truths are not in competition with one another. While there are varying views within the BioLogos community of how to reconcile the truths of science and Scripture on particular issues (for example with regards to a historical Adam¹), we believe that the Bible is the divinely inspired and authoritative Word of God. BioLogos accepts the modern scientific consensus on the age of the earth and common ancestry, including the common ancestry of humans.

See more on Scientific Evidence

Evolutionism

While BioLogos accepts evolution, it emphatically rejects evolutionism, the atheistic worldview that so often accompanies the acceptance of biological evolution in public discourse. Proponents of evolutionism believe every aspect of life will one day be explained with evolutionary theory. In this way it is a subset of scientism, the broader view that the only real truth is that which can be discovered by science. These positions are commonly held by materialists (also called philosophical naturalists) who deny the existence of the supernatural.

The BioLogos view celebrates God as creator. It is sometimes called Theistic Evolution or Evolutionary Creation. Theism is the belief in a God who cares for and interacts with creation. Theism is different than deism, which is the belief in a distant, uninvolved creator who is often little more than the sum total of the laws of physics. Theistic Evolution, therefore, is the belief that evolution is how God created life.

Because the term evolution is sometimes associated with atheism, a better term for the belief in a God who chose to create the world by way of evolution is BioLogos. BioLogos comes from the Greek words bios (life) and logos (word), referring to John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

See "What role could God have in evolution?"

Intelligent Design

Contrary to some interpretations, Intelligent Design, or ID, makes no specific theological claims. Instead, proponents of ID argue that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection,"² and that the existence of this intelligent cause is a testable scientific hypothesis. Furthermore, ID theorists attempt to show that intelligent causation is the best explanation for certain phenomena such as irreducibly complex systems (e.g. bacterial flagella) and the complex specified information in DNA.

Those who hold the BioLogos view also believe in intelligent causation. The universe and all that is in it has been created and is being sustained by God:

…in [Christ] all things in heaven and earth were created, things visible and invisible…all things were created through him and by him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Col 1:16,17 NRSV).

BioLogos differs from the ID movement in that we have no discomfort with mainstream science. Natural selection as described by Charles Darwin is not contrary to theism. Similarly, we are content to let modern evolutionary biology inform us about the mechanisms of creation with the full realization that all that has happened occurs through God’s activity. We celebrate creation as fully God’s. We marvel at its beauty and are in awe that we have the privilege of experiencing it.

BioLogos celebrates the reality of miracles, including the miracles of Scripture, but also those we experience in today’s world through answered prayer and the work of the Holy Spirit in our own lives. However, the demonstration of such supernatural activity in the history of the natural world is, we think, unlikely to be scientifically testable.

See "Is there room in BioLogos to believe in miracles?"

To summarize, BioLogos differs from the ID movement in three respects:

1. We are skeptical about the ability of biological science to prove the existence of an Intelligent Designer (whom we take to be the God of the Bible), while ID advocates are confident.
2. We find unconvincing those attempts by ID theorists to scientifically confirm God’s activity in natural history, while ID theorists believe they have sufficiently demonstrated it.
3. We see no biblical reason to view natural processes (including natural selection) as having removed God from the process of creation. It is all God’s and it is all intelligently designed. Those in the ID movement for the most part reject some or all of the major conclusions of evolutionary theory.

Creationism

BioLogos affirms that the earth and the universe were created. Creationism, however, generally refers to the belief that life on earth is a result of a direct flurry of supernatural intervention in a manner that is concordant with a highly literal view of Genesis 1-3. There are two main varieties of Creationists, those who believe the earth is young and those who believe it is old.

Young Earth Creationists (YECs) hold that the earth is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old, a figure derived from the genealogies presented in the Bible. YECs believe the most faithful way to read Scripture is through the lens of a literal six-day creation as presented in the first chapter of Genesis, and they further believe that a literal worldwide flood as depicted in Genesis 6-9 is responsible for geological features of the earth and the fossil record. YECs also reject the common ancestry of all species, believing that life was created as it presently appears by supernatural action. They view “macro-evolution” (as distinct from within-kind or within-species “micro-evolution”) as incompatible with Scripture and some even argue that it is a direct threat to Christianity.

BioLogos disagrees with the YEC viewpoint. This view rejects the discoveries of almost every modern scientific discipline to arrive at its conclusions and overlooks the revelation of God’s work in creation as uncovered by science. We also maintain that the YEC viewpoint stems from a particular interpretation of Genesis that ignores the rich cultural and theological context in which it was written.

See more on Scripture Interpretation

Old Earth Creationists (OECs) accept that the earth and universe are billions of years old, but maintain that these findings are in concordance with a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis (often by interpreting the days of creation as long periods of time, or by understanding large gaps between the days of creation). OECs hold that modern science tightly corresponds with biblical accounts and assume that God included modern scientific ideas in the Bible, sometimes through secret language that would have been lost on the original audiences. OECs do not accept macro-evolution and the common ancestry of all life forms.

BioLogos disagrees with the OEC viewpoint. While accepting the scientific consensus for an old earth, this view rejects the findings of modern genetics, paleontology, developmental biology, evolutionary biology and many other biological sub-disciplines that make little sense apart from macro-evolution and common ancestry. Furthermore, we believe that God chose to reveal himself within the worldview, culture, and language of the biblical authors.

Where Christians Agree

Despite these differences, all Christians agree that the God of the Bible is the creator of the heavens and the earth. We agree on the authority of the Bible, even though we disagree on the best interpretation of particular passages. We agree that God is continually active in his sovereign governance of the universe, even though we disagree on how much God acts through natural law versus miracles. We are unified in our rejection of evolutionism, even though we use different strategies to counteract it (some reject the science of evolution, while BioLogos rejects the atheistic spin put on the science). We agree on the fundamentals of our faith: that all people have sinned and that salvation comes only through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We agree that the God of our salvation is the same God we see in the wonders of his creation. Whether we ponder the intricacy of DNA, the beauty of a dolphin, or the vastness of the Milky Way, we can lift our hearts together in praise to the divine Artist who made it all.