In this video Conversation, Denis Alexander addresses two prominent barriers for Christians to accept evolutionary creation. The first is Biblical interpretation. When contemporary Christians interpret the early chapters of Genesis literally, they do so out of a desire to take the text seriously. Yet the early church fathers saw these chapters as figurative—and that figurative interpretation did not lesson the important foundational truths taught in these passages. The contemporary literal reading is actually a modern approach to the text in that our scientific mindset inappropriately shapes the interpretation. Since science did not even exist at the time that Genesis was written, an overly literal interpretation can actually cause us to miss the inspired message that the Biblical authors were communicating.

The second barrier is the rhetoric of the New Atheists, who claim that it is impossible to accept evolution while still believing in God. Christians should challenge this. Traditional Christian views are not in conflict with modern science. Instead, they see nature as God's work, with St. Augustine writing that "nature is what God does." As humanity develops a scientific understanding of nature, we will only learn more about the handiwork of God. 

Showing Christian schoolteachers that one can be a believer who embraces the Bible as God’s inspired Word and evolution as His creative process has always been a mission of BioLogy by the Sea, the accomplishment of which is never guaranteed. During the first few days, several participants expressed doubt that their faith could be compatible with evolutionary creation. However, as the week came to a close, some of those who had previously denied compatibility seemed to be much more considerate of the notion—if not fully accepting of the idea altogether. If you’ve ever doubted evolution yourself, then you know that such acceptance is no small feat. There are numerous theological and philosophical barriers that must be dealt with, and to think that this could occur in the span of just one week is pretty amazing. Then again, the program had some pretty amazing guest speakers and activities—the most significant of which occurred throughout the week: prayer and worship to the One we all serve, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

While these times served to glorify God and nurture participants’ souls, the week was also filled with activities designed to nurture participants’ minds through the study of biblical passages and biological content. In addition to graduate level courses and accompanying labs in either biodiversity or developmental biology, participants went on field trips to the intertidal zone, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Gaslamp Quarter. Furthermore, presentations given by Dr. Gregg Davidson, professor of geology and geological engineering from the University of Mississippi, and Dr. Mary Schweitzer, paleontologist and associate professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences from North Carolina State University, offered key insights into their fields and demonstrated how the tenants of both are based on evidence rather than conjecture.

In short, this year’s BioLogy by the Sea offered another comprehensive look at what it means to be a Christian who accepts the conclusions of mainstream science—not at the expense of our faith in God or His Word, but in light of it. We can only hope that these teachers, who spent an entire week of their summer break with us, left with not only a greater sense of oneness as the body of Christ, but also found new ways to engage their students in matters of science and faith—another facet of the program’s mission. After all, the first step in protecting the next generation from the faith crisis that many seem to experience after they learn about evolution from a secular perspective is showing that it need not be an either-or situation. It’s also an important part of ensuring that Christian young people can rise to the forefront of global scientific research.

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

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

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures and features physicist Ard Louis.

In today's video, Oxford physicist Ard Louis discusses the famous debate between renowned evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. Gould believed (and wrote in his book Wonderful Life) that if the "tape" of evolution were rerun, the chance that anything like human intelligence would emerge is essentially zero. In other words, humanity is here through random accident. Gould pointed to the work of Morris and fellow scientists in their research of the Burgess Shale as evidence for this view.

However, Morris himself disagrees, pointing to what is called evolutionary convergence. As Morris notes, there are numerous examples of identical features evolving multiple times throughout the history of life independently. Morris believes that if the tape of life were replayed, we would see something like humans emerge. A Christian might say, it looks like we were planned.

Some Christians might find Simon Conway Morris' viewpoint, with its implicit teleology, more attractive. Others, perhaps motivated by a high view of providence, may find Gould's emphasis on contingency equally congenial to their faith. What do you think?

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In this video, physicist Ard Louis discusses the misconceptions about evolution and what it says about our purpose. A lot of the young earth arguments against evolution, says Louis, can be beneficial to those promoting atheism. According to Louis, both sides are attempting to extract theology from the natural world and wrongly accept the premise that where we come from determines who we are and how we should live. However, that’s not what the Bible tells us; rather, our value comes from God, and God determines who we are and how we should live.

Many understand evolution as a theory underlined by the idea that our existence is purposelessness. But our value and purpose do not come from whether or not we were created by an evolutionary mechanism. Evolution may tell us something about how we were created, but it is not the source of our worth. That worth comes from God.

For more from Ard Louis, be sure to read his white paper for BioLogos.

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In this video, young earth creationist Aaron Daly offers his thoughts on theistic evolution, creation, and how Christians should handle disagreements over issues such as the age of the earth and how God created. Most of all, however, Aaron highlights the need for love in our discussions with one another, especially when we disagree.

Last week we debuted the first clip from the documentary “From the Dust”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith.

To help foster such dialogue, we are including several discussion questions with each clip from the film. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to watch this video with your friends, your church, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward. We have more discussion questions that go with this transcript and we'd be happy to send them to you to foster further conversation within your church or small group setting.

Editor's Note: The full documentary is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. You can order the film here, and learn more about the project here.

"The Book of Genesis" Transcript

Dr. Alister McGrath: “The Christian church has always wrestled with the interpretation of Scripture, realizing both how important it is and also sometimes how difficult it is to get it right. Certainly, the opening chapters of Genesis have been a topic of much debate throughout Christian history.”

Dr. John Polkinghorne: “The Bible is very important to me, but it is very important to recognize that the Bible is not a book. The Bible is a library. It has all sorts of different kinds of writing in it—It has histories, it has stories, it has poetry, it has prose. When we read Genesis one, we have to figure out, what am I reading? Am I reading a divinely dictated textbook to save me the trouble of doing science, or am I reading something, in fact, more interesting and profound than that?”

Dr. John Walton: “We have to approach Genesis 1 for what it is. It is an ancient document. It is not a document that was written to us—we believe the Bible was written for us like it is for everyone of all times and places because it is God’s Word—but it was not written to us. It was not written in our language. It was not written with our culture in mind or our culture in view.”

Dr. Alister McGrath: “It is not about the authority of Scripture, it is about the interpretation of Scripture. What method of interpretation do I use in the case of each individual passage?”

Dr. Karen Strand Winslow: “Biblical scholars urge people to take a literal, plain reading of the text…but I think in the controversy between theology and science, literal is often used to mean scientific, as if it is scientific, and that is a whole different story.”

Dr. John Walton: “We are inclined by our culture to think of the creation narrative as an account of material origins because we think about the world in material terms. For us, that is kind of what is important about origins. People come to Scripture thinking that they need to integrate it with science and so, they want to either read science out of the Bible or they want to read science into the Bible. That is not the way to do it because inevitably you end up making the text say things that it never meant to the ancient audience.”

Dr. Chris Tilling: “We are importing meaning into the text; we are bringing our own presuppositions and assumptions into a text and reading it in light of that as if it were in the text. Now, there is a sense in which we all inevitably do that, but there is also a sense in which we need to be aware when the times that we do that are damaging to the reading of the text.”

Dr. Nancey Murphy: “When I was a kid and the film industry was still relatively new, it was possible to depict people from two centuries ago as modern Americans dressed up in togas. As the film industry has gotten more sophisticated, they have gotten better and better at creating human figures that actually look and behave and think as they probably would have in the past. So, we Bible readers ought to be equally sophisticated and recognize that someone who was writing three thousand years ago, which is very hard to imagine, that these people must have been very different from us, with very different concerns. They certainly had very different understandings about how material things worked.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “One of the benefits of understanding the historical circumstances of the Bible is that we are reminded of how incredibly old this literature is. Let’s understand it in view of what we could even remotely expect of the Biblical writers to say.”

Dr. Nancey Murphy: “We can understand what our own creation stories are saying better, if we know what the creation myths were that were known at the times that those stories were written—for instance, to realize that a lot of the Genesis stories were written as a counter measure against the other cultures’ creation stories. That throws an immense amount of light on what parts of the story we are supposed to be paying attention to.”

Dr. Chris Tilling: “The Gilgamesh epic, for example, has a flood narrative and so forth, and so it wants to reflect creatively and theologically in light of those creation myths; it is going to be something recognizable.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “Genesis one shares theological vocabulary with the other stories—it just sort of takes things and turns it on its head.”

Dr. Nancey Murphy: “If one creation myth talks about the earth being created as a result of the battle between gods, we know to look in our creation stories to say, ‘wait a minute! Is violence intrinsic to the very creation of the universe?’ We find very clearly written that no, it is not.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “It’s Israel’s declaration that Yahweh is worthy of worship. It is a potent and counter-intuitive theological statement in the ancient world where people say, ‘That is totally different from anything we have ever seen.’”

Dr. John Polkinghorne: “The stories of the ancient world were not so concerned with minute, literal accuracy as we are today. People wrote not to give you sort of a factual, journalistic account of what is going on, but to tell you the significance of what was happening.”

Dr. Ard Louis: “And so what we see is that there are these really interesting structures in the Genesis text, which suggest that it is not describing the creation process as this is the order in which it happened. Rather, it is taking that story and emphasizing theological points. It talks about days; there was morning, there was evening—but the sun and the moon are not created until the fourth day. So why, for example, did the writer of Genesis put the sun and the moon on the fourth day? It is a very strange thing to do, and it is not as if it is only moderns who realize ‘Oh dear! Something is wrong.’ People at any time of history would have realized that that was an unusual way of writing down a journalistic account. And, of course, the reason most likely is that people of that day worshipped the sun and the moon, and the Israelites were always being drawn away that way, and the people around them were doing that. And so, what the writer was saying is, ‘no, I am going to demote these things to the fourth day. They are not the first thing to be created; they are something to be created somewhat later.’”

Bishop N.T. Wright: “This is simply the sort of language that people use to refer to concrete events, but to invest those events with their theological significance.”

Dr. John Walton: “We are well aware that people have to translate the language for us. We forget that people have to translate the culture for us, and therefore, if we want to get the best benefit from the communication, we need to try to enter their world, hear it as the audience would have heard it, as the author would have meant it, and to read it in those terms.”

Bishop N.T. Wright: “There is a distinction which is there in Scripture between heaven and earth. But the thing about heaven and earth is that they are supposed to overlap, and have an interesting, interlocking, interplay with one another. They are never supposed to be far apart.”

Dr. John Walton: “In the ancient world, they didn’t have a line between supernatural and natural. God was in everything. You couldn’t talk about God intervening because you can’t intervene in something you are doing—and to them, God was doing it all. That kind of functional aspect was very important to them.”

Bishop N.T. Wright: “In Genesis, God makes heavens and earth, and it appears that humans are in the world, but God is around as well because the heavens and earth have not split apart.”

Dr. John Walton: “The temple and the cosmos were all blended into one. If we used a modern metaphor it would almost be like the temple was the oval office. It is kind of where all the business is done, where all the work is run. It is the hub of activity and control, and when Deity took up his rest in the temple, it wasn’t for leisure or relaxation…it was to settle down to the work now that everything is set up and ready to go.”

Bishop N. T. Wright: “Telling a story about somebody who constructs something in six days, it is a temple story. It is about God making a place for himself to dwell…and this is heaven and earth. What you do with that is, the last thing is you put an image of this God into the temple. Suddenly, instead of Genesis one being about ‘were there six days or were there five or were there seven or were there twenty-four hours…,’ it is actually about when the good Creator God made the world, he made heaven and earth as the space in which he himself was going to dwell and put in humans into that construct as a way of both reflecting his own love into the world and drawing out the praise and glory from the world, back to himself. That is the literal meaning of Genesis. To flatten that out into, ‘this is simply telling us that the world was made in six days’ is almost perversely to avoid the real thrust of the narrative.”

Michael Ramsden: “If this is an inspired book, if this really is, you know, something where God is revealed and can speak through it, it shouldn’t surprise us that we find multiple layers of depth.”

Bishop N.T. Wright: “Genesis is one of those books like a Shakespeare play or like a Beethoven symphony or something where you can describe what it sort of literally says. Here is a Beethoven symphony; here are the notes, ‘Duh, duh, duh, duh.’ Then, you think, ‘well, that doesn’t actually catch what is going on in this’, and you want to use bigger language about the opening of Beethoven’s first symphony. This is an amazing statement about the power of empire and the fate of man…and goodness knows what! You still have got to play the notes. This world was made to be God’s abode, God’s home, God’s dwelling place. He shared it with us, and now he wants to rescue it and redeem it. We have to read Genesis for all it is worth. To say, either history or myth is a way of saying, ‘I am not going to study this text for what it is worth. I am just going to flatten it out so that it conforms to the cultural questions that my culture today is telling me to ask…and I think that is a form of actually being unfaithful to the text itself.”

Dr. John Walton: “The account in Genesis one is not intended to be an account of material origins. If that is so, then the Bible has no narrative of material origins, and if that is so, we don’t have to defend the Bible’s narrative of material origins against a scientific narrative because the Bible does not offer one. We can let the text be what it is and take it for what it is. That is the most literal reading that you could have.”

Narrator—Elements of design are all around us: …our homes, our cars, our art. If you have paid any attention to the science and faith conversation taking place in our churches in the last twenty or so years, you have probably heard about a movement called Intelligent Design, or ID for short. Intelligent Design is the proposition that certain features of creation are best explained by an intelligent cause, and not by an undirected process. It is an idea that has become very popular among Christian lay people. Here is what the main proponents of ID say about their work.

William Dembski—“There are features of biological systems that cannot be understood and explained apart from intelligence or purpose.”

Stephen Meyer—“What critics of intelligent design typically do…in other words they don’t have a better explanation to offer, and say is, ‘Well the design hypothesis for the origin of information, is simply not a scientific hypothesis.’”

Lee Strobel—“The negative evidence against Darwinists and Darwinian evolution, convinced me that purely naturalistic processes cannot reasonably account for the creation and the development and the diversity of life.”

Narrator—All of us who love God and believe in His mastery over the universe, experience those moments when we are in awe of His creation. We believe God creates and that He is intelligent, so in that sense all Christians could be said to agree with the idea of an intelligent designer. But is ID a legitimate scientific alternative to evolutionary biology? We asked a diverse group of leading scientists their perspectives on the work of the ID community.

Ian Hutchinson—“What we tend to mean when we are talking about Intelligent Design movement, capital I, capital D, is a view that says not only did God design and create the universe, but we can scientifically detect the fact that the world is designed—And that is the crucial move. I mean I personally don’t find the arguments that have been put forward to support that position, particularly intellectually convincing. They, in my view, just simply have not come up with compelling evidence.”

Darrel Falk—“And so along come these people, who for wonderful reasons, you know, reasons that I hold as well, and that is the existence of a God who works in creation, and they are just interpreting through that lens: ‘I am going to be able to detect God’s work in here. Using scientific tools, I am going to be able to detect God’s work!’

It is just pretty (hesitates)… sloppy… What happens is that all that they’re finding—for the most part—they’re just finding gaps in the scientific process. Then when those gaps get filled in, everybody is embarrassed because they have invested so much money, they have invested so much personal ideology, reputation, even (hesitates)… ego. And along comes somebody who says, ‘Well, we filled that gap in.’ …It is pretty hard to say, ‘I guess I was wrong.’”

Sean Carroll—“Intelligent Design when it has been examined by the scientific community, when Intelligent Design has put forward scientific arguments... in the realm of this peer review… this intense critical process I am telling you about---then their arguments have been found to be completely empty. Intelligent Design hasn’t been able to get out of the batter’s box because its first swings have been completely empty, they are complete whiffs. So for…you know…PR reasons, or… political reasons, or whatever it might be, they keep talking….But they have no traction in this scientific game.”

David Ussery—“The Intelligent Design movement is still doing it—they deny it—but essentially if you look, their arguments are… ‘We can’t explain this, therefore, God did it!’ Many people think if we can explain it with the laws of chemistry and physics, God is not involved. And we only need to invoke God when we cannot explain things. …. Just because we can explain it, doesn’t mean God is not there.”

So while there are serious problems with Intelligent Design as science, many Christian scholars are just as concerned with the theological implications raised by these ideas.

Thomas Jay Oord—“For me, I take God’s love as the central signpost, central attribute of who God is, and I worry that a God who has the capacity to force agents and organisms to do certain things, then is acting in unloving ways, if love doesn’t force, if love is persuasive, if love calls, if love works in cooperation, then in any instance in which God would be forcing, even non-humans, I worry that is not a very loving thing to do. And so there are theological reasons why I am a little bit suspicious of particular claims by the Intelligent Design community.”

Denis Alexander—“And I think it is a misunderstanding of the understanding of what creation actually means in the Bible, on one side, that creation in a traditional Christian understanding means simply a God who is creator and who brings into being everything else that exists. So everything that exists, whatever it might be, is existing by the will and through the purpose and plan of God.

So we as scientists, what we can do, is to actually describe what God has brought into being. That is very much the old Augustinian view of creation-theology that he mapped out in his great commentary on Genesis, which was published the early part of this century. This goes way back; it is not some new understanding of creation, this is traditional theology. So I think we need to restore a traditional creation-theology to this discussion. Once you accept a traditional Christian understanding of creation, then all we discover as scientists…all we describe is part of that whole narrative of God’s created order. Augustine said that nature is what God does, and so if we are investigating nature, we can only investigate what God does.”

Narrator—Intelligent Design has been embraced by many in the church because they have been led to believe that serious science leaves no room for God, and so serious Christians must turn their backs on the discoveries of modern science. ….But that’s simply not the case.

The God of the Bible upholds His natural laws and His Spirit pervades the entire universe in ways that are beyond our comprehension. There is room for science and faith in the lives of committed believers as we fearlessly pursue truth together.

Epilogue (by Darrel Falk)

As indicated in this film clip, many scientists feel that the ID movement is an attempt to locate gaps in our scientific knowledge and then to presume those gaps can only be filled by intervention of an external intelligence. It is important to note that ID leaders do not view their work this way. For example, William Dembski recently wrote:

But in fact, ID is not an interventionist theory. ID is, in the first instance, concerned with the detectability of design. But detecting the activity of a designing intelligence says nothing, without further investigation and evidence, about how the designing intelligence acted, whether by discrete interventions or by continuous infusions of information or by front-loading of all the necessary information….In detecting design we can say where design is.

Our task is to help the Church understand that we are unaware of any single instance where the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement have scientifically demonstrated supernatural activity. Nor are we aware of a single instance of where they have done “further investigation and [provided] evidence about how the designing intelligence acted, whether by discrete interventions or by continuous infusion of information, or by front-loading of all the necessary information.” It still seems to us that what they do is to go into that realm just beyond the horizon of what we know about God’s natural world and assert that they have demonstrated that God’s supernatural activity is required there.

Have I been too frank by calling this sort of science “sloppy?” Should I try to find a gentler word when speaking about the quality of the work of my Christian brothers? Should not Christians always be known for their spirit of grace? True, we Christians must always be known by our love. Without that we are just a resounding gong and a clanging cymbal. Still, what about these words from Paul:

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. (Colossians 3:16)

I have been a professor for many years and perhaps the hardest thing I ever have done is to sit down with a student as I review a term paper that I know is not up to the standards of what I am convinced that person is capable of producing. If their work is sloppy, and I know they can do better, then the loving thing to do is to tell them as kindly and gently as I can.

As Christians, we can do better science than this. Let’s stop claiming we have detected design, when all that we’ve really done is to point out interesting research questions that exist at the horizon where our knowledge is incomplete.

God spoke life into existence. It is all his. “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” How can one detect design when it has all been designed? What is our negative control? What I do know is that as I look out on creation I see the majesty of God, and as I explore the inner working of a cell, I am in awe as I observe a marvelous symphony. It is all God’s.

In the wisdom that comes from God, let’s join together—all of us—in celebration and worship, as we sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in our hearts and with the assurance that this is our Father’s World.

Today we debut the second video in our “Distinctions” series, a collection of short videos that look to clarify some of the important scientific questions at the heart of the science and faith dialogue. Today’s video looks at the idea of genetic information, and whether it can offer us “proof” of an intelligent designer.

Over the past two decades, the intelligent design movement has been working diligently to offer a parallel version of modern science, one that can scientifically show God at work in creation. In a way, it is similar to Christian music and Christian art, creating an evangelical version of science. But is their goal an admirable one?

So far, the efforts of the Intelligent Design movement have not been well received by the general scientific community. In this video, biologist Sean Carroll, currently Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics and an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Wisconsin, focuses on one of the reasons for this rejection: the misdirected emphasis of the ID movement. Says Carroll:

To put it sort of in the simplest terms, it’s not the genes you have; it’s how you use them. And so these genes, which are involved in building bodies, you can sort of think of them like a carpenter’s toolkit. That while everyone may have a hammer and a nailgun and a whole set of wrenches… how you use them over time determines what structure you build, whether you build a hope chest or a whole house. So the genetic switches determine the use of those tools. And it’s the genetic switches that are evolving that are giving us the great diversity of, for example, the animal kingdom.

However not all objections to Intelligent Design are scientific. There are also philosophical obstacles. As Ian Hutchinson, professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, notes:

I think if you strive too hard for scientific proofs of God, you’re in danger of accidentally endorsing the scientistic position, of elevating science to be the supreme arbiter of what is intellectually convincing, because you are essentially giving them the deciding control over what is and is not to be believed.

He continues by saying, “I think ultimately you can’t know God in an abstract way. You have to get to know him.”

As believers, we might prefer Christian music or art, but that does not mean there needs to be an alternative set of scientific Christian facts. We agree with the Intelligent Design movement that there is a Mind who has created, established, and sustains the universe, despite the inability of the ID movement to “catch God” under a microscope or in a laboratory. God is at work in his creation, and science is not a challenge to that sovereignty.

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 this video Conversation, senior biblical fellow Peter Enns asks Rev. N.T. Wright to respond to a reader question about science and faith. Specifically, the reader asks, “If you take Genesis in a non-literal fashion, especially the creation stories, why take anything in the Bible literally—such as the Gospels? Do you take the Gospels literally?”

Wright responds by first unpacking the meaning of the word “literal” as it relates to the act of reading and interpretation.

The word literal, like the word metaphorical is a word that refers to the way that words refer to things, he notes. But we often confuse the word literal with the terms concrete and abstract—that is, the first meaning something that is actual, physical and the latter, referring to something transient, like an idea. One can refer metaphorically to something concrete (e.g. “my car is an old tin can”), or one can refer literally to something abstract (e.g. Plato’s Theory of Forms).

So when we ask if Genesis can be taken literally, that doesn’t settle the question of what it refers to. This should be an open question, Wright says, when we read any text: what does it refer to and how does it intend to refer to it? When it says in the Gospels, “Jesus was crucified,” the literal reading refers to a concrete event. But when Jesus tells a parable, the literal reading points to an abstraction or a metaphor—though it may have a concrete application.

Wright then considers what the writers of Genesis intended to do by the creation story and points out that in context, telling a story about someone who constructs something in six days is a temple story. It is about God making heavens and the Earth as the place he wants to dwell and placing humans into that construct as a way of reflecting his own love into the world and drawing out the praise and glory from the world back to himself. “That is the literal meaning of Genesis,” says Wright, “and the question of the formal structure has to sit around that as best it can.”

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To understand and apply Genesis 1 correctly, we have to consider issues of genre and intention. Too often these chapters are read as if they present a purely straightforward (read literal) historical and even scientific account of cosmic and human origins. They are thus then read as a polemic against modern scientific ideas, particularly Darwinism.

In my opinion, if one reads Genesis 1-2 closely and with knowledge of contemporary ancient Near Eastern texts, it is impossible to believe that the original author wanted his audience to read the text literally. Let me explain by giving a couple examples.

First think of the days of Genesis. “Day” typically means a twenty-four hour period. When it means something like “period of time,” it occurs in a formula like “day of the Lord.” In addition, each of the six creation days are described as having an “evening and a morning.” Those who want to read the creation days as literally 24 hour days will often point to these facts as indicating that we are dealing with a real day, not a period of time. That seems very reasonable until we note that the sun, moon, and stars aren’t created until the fourth day. But to have a literal “day” there has to be a sun, moon, and stars! These heavenly bodies define what a literal day is. Attempts to argue that God manipulated the light and the darkness of day one in a 24 hour period are a far-fetched and strange. These are not literal days, but a figurative way to present the fact that God ordered creation. The first three days are realms that are filled by the second three days, so the light/darkness realm of day one are inhabited by the sun, moon, and stars of day four. The sky/sea realm of day two are filled by the birds and fish of day five, and the land of day three is filled by the animals and humans of day six.

Second, we must remember that a fundamental principle of biblical interpretation is to read a text in the light of its original context. The first audience simply was not interested in how the creation came into existence, but who brought it into existence and why. Again, Genesis 1-2 was not written against Darwin, but against rival ancient Near Eastern claims. The Enuma Elish of Babylon attributed creation to Marduk and the Canaanite version pointed to Baal. Both of these ancient creation myths saw creation as a result of divine conflict between creator gods and deities that represented the chaotic waters which they defeated and controlled. In contrast, the Bible identifies Yahweh as the creator and since there are no rival gods there is no conflict either. God created the “earth as a formless void,” a watery mass and created the habitable world from it. The watery mass was not there from the beginning.

In a word, Genesis 1 proclaims that God ordered creation. It is not concerned with how God did it. To use Genesis 1 to reconstruct the process of creation is a misuse of the text.

For more videos with Joel Hunter, visit our "Conversations" collection.

In this video Conversation, Joel Hunter acknowledges the risk that pastors take when preaching on Genesis—and in particular, when they approach it with an attitude of humility, allowing the possibility that the text was not meant to be understood in literal terms.

Hunter notes that a large number of congregants in our churches today are uncomfortable with the literal narrative of creation in six twenty-four hour days. In fact, many believers are open to the notion that God used alternative means of creation. Those with this viewpoint are not convinced of the all-or-nothing mentality that pervades contemporary evangelicalism, but rather, they see the possibility of evolutionary creation as a testament to God’s abilities.

Hunter emphasizes, however, that one must avoid being dismissive or derisive of those who do hold to a literalist view of Genesis because for some, reconsidering the traditional creation narrative introduces questions to which they are unsure of how to respond. Many with this viewpoint feel that if Genesis can’t be understood in straightforward terms, then we cannot know how to read the story of the Resurrection—as a historical account, or simply as a metaphor? Questions like this have the potential to cause them to wonder if they must now question the whole truth of Scripture.

Without “bullying” literalists into a new scriptural interpretation, we should still provide Christians with the space—and permission—to more completely consider the “fullness” and the “great mystery” of God.

We all love survival stories, which is perhaps why I like to compare my own faith journey to one--though with considerably less blood and suspense.

You see, my faith shouldn’t be alive. By all accounts, it should have perished the moment I started asking questions about faith and science. All my life I’d been taught that I had to choose—between believing the Bible and believing my science book, between honoring God and embracing evolution. To accept one was to effectively kill the other, I learned. They couldn’t both survive. They were incompatible.

And yet here I am—a girl who loves Jesus and accepts evolution, alive to tell the tale.

Survival stories usually begin in a dramatic setting, and mine is no different. For most of my life I’ve lived in Dayton, Tennessee, home of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. Located in the buckle of the Bible Belt, Dayton is not the most convenient place to question a literal interpretation of Genesis. Most people here believe that evolution is part of an anti-Christian worldview, and the wounds from getting called “yokels” and “ignorants” by the press during the trial are still being nursed today.

I attended a small Christian college in town named after William Jennings Bryan, where one of the most popular professors at the time was a leading young earth creationist. This professor often told the story of how, as a sophomore in high school, he had dreams of becoming a scientist, but could not reconcile the theory of evolution with the creation account found in the Bible. So one night, he took a pair of scissors and a newly-purchased Bible and began cutting out every verse he believed would have to be removed to believe in evolution. By the time he was finished, he said he couldn’t even lift the Bible without it falling apart. That was when he decided, “Either Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible.”

Having operated within this paradigm for so much of my life, I experienced a major crisis of faith when I encountered the overwhelming scientific evidence in support of evolutionary theory soon after graduating from college.

On the one hand, I felt betrayed. Pastors and teachers had assured me that science supported a 6,000-year-old earth and that only atheists with an agenda against Christianity believed it was older. And yet everything from the fossil record to biodiversity to starlight to DNA seemed to confirm evolutionary theory as sound, with the overwhelming majority scientists affirming it.

On the other hand, I was afraid to accept undeniable truth I’d encountered. I didn’t want to walk away from my faith. I didn’t want to throw out the Bible. I didn’t want to reject God. But everything I’d been told up to that point led me to believe I had to choose. Doubt is difficult to describe to those who have never experienced it. What’s most frightening about it is how one question leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to another, creating a sort of domino effect out of your skepticism and fear. I lay awake for hours at night, struggling with this conflict between my intellectual integrity and my faith. I begged God to “help me in my unbelief,” but His presence seemed to drift farther and farther away with every seemingly irreconcilable conflict between reason and faith.

I thought for sure my faith was a goner.

The first rescue helicopter came in the form of Francis Collins’ “The Language of God.” A friend recommended it, and it was the first time I’d ever read the work of a scientist so passionately committed to both his Christian faith and accepted science. The fact that it was even possible to be a Christian and believe in evolution gave me hope.

In the third chapter, Collins includes a quote from St. Augustine, who—centuries before Darwin made his landmark observations—warned Christians against interpreting the first two chapters of Genesis too strictly. Said Augustine, “In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”¹

That was when I realized that my hyper-literalist interpretation of Genesis 1-2 was going down, and it was taking my faith with it.

I couldn’t let that happen.

So like a survivor cutting off his arm to escape from beneath a boulder, I severed my fundamentalist approach to Scripture. (Okay, so it wasn’t really that dramatic. Let’s just say I spent some time on the BioLogos site, ordered “The Lost World of Genesis One” by John Walton, and managed to survive the faith crisis with my love for God and for the Bible intact.)

So why tell my story?

Because I wasn’t alone out there in the wilderness of doubt, and not everyone’s faith survived. I have friends who walked away from their Christian faith right when their gifts and talents could have served it best. They walked away because they thought being a Christian demanded willful ignorance and fear of truth. They walked away because they felt betrayed by their pastors, parents, and professors. They walked away because they believed the lie that they had to choose.

And that makes me angry sometimes.

It seems like for every survival story, there is a story of loss…which is why I believe the BioLogos Foundation is so important. We’ve got to work together to reverse this trend. We’ve got to send out more rescue helicopters to young people around the country who are desperately holding on to what remains of their faith. These are unnecessary casualties of an unnecessary war, and the simple knowledge that faith and science can coexist can be enough to bring a lost soul back from the brink.

My faith shouldn’t be alive.

But it is, and not a day goes by that I am not grateful for the gift of a second chance.

Rachel's book Evolving in Monkey Town is available on Amazon. To hear about Rachel's journey, see our video conversation with her (below).

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).

Intro: This video is the final entry in a six-part series from Focus.org, entitled "God: new evidence." We strongly encourage our readers to explore the entire series.

A Deeper Story?

The claim that our universe is “fine-tuned” comes from the fact that certain physical constants in our universe are found to have precisely the right values to allow for the existence of life. If any one of these constants were changed to the slightest degree, life would not be possible.

Many believing scientists have taken hold of the fine-tuning argument as a “pointer” to the existence of a creator, while others argue that this phenomenon can be explained by the multiverse theory, in which there exist innumerable other universes. Such a high number of universes would increase the chances that one universe would happen to take on the values needed to develop life.

In this video, five notable scientists (John Polkinghorne, David Wilkinson, Rodney Holder, Peter Williams and Graham Swinerd) offer their perspective on the strengths and limitations of the fine-tuning argument as a pointer to God.

Each speaker emphasizes the importance of recognizing the limitations of the fine-tuning argument, and also the importance of seeing it in context. John Polkinghorne notes that fine-tuning is a useful tool—in particular, because “[it] puts the question of God on the agenda”. However, he also notes that it gives us limited insight into the nature of God. Rodney Holder agrees that fine-tuning is limited in what it tells us. Holder finds the argument persuasive, but not foolproof. “God doesn’t force us to believe in him”, says Holder, and the fine-tuning argument “doesn’t get you to the personal God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ.”

Along similar lines, Wilkinson shares that while the fine-tuning and intelligibility of the universe serve as pointers to a “deeper story” about the universe, the details of that story come from his faith as a Christian. “At the heart of my Christian faith is the conviction and the experience that God has revealed himself, supremely, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. And I know what the deeper story is about, because I’ve seen it in Jesus.”

For more videos like this, visit Focus.org.

In his post on Monday, Karl Giberson writes that, “My primary concern about ID is that it promotes the idea that nature has gaps in it that God must intervene to fill.” Similarly, in this short video, physicist Ard Louis echoes these same doubts about Intelligent Design, noting that his primary resistance to the movement is based on theological grounds as opposed to scientific. That is, he suggests that accepting Intelligent Design is a bit like acknowledging that God “[couldn’t] get the world right the first time around”.

To illustrate this point, Louis recounts a famous exchange between Newton and his rival Leibniz that occurred when Newton was working out his theory of gravity. Newton found that in the solar system, planets are unstable. He tried to explain this aspect in his theory by suggesting that God occasionally reforms the planets to stabilize them. Leibniz dismissed this claim as nonsense and that in fact argued that this line of thinking was demeaning to God because it discounted God’s power. Moreover, Leibniz said, God doesn’t do miracles for wants of nature—he does miracles for wants of grace. This means that God doesn’t make miracles just to “fix” things in the past. Further, as Louis points out, these “correctives” are not mentioned in the scriptures, thus it makes many of ID’s claims seem theologically unlikely.

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".

John Walton offers some important reminders in this video with regard to how we should approach a reading of the book of Genesis. Walton says that first and foremost, we have to approach Genesis for what it is, which is an ancient text. While it is a text that is written for us—in the sense that it was written for all people in all times and places—it was not written to us. That is, it was not written in our language or with our culture in mind.

It was written to an ancient audience, therefore if we want to get the best benefit of the text, we need to try to get into that context and think about what the author meant and what he might have been trying to communicate.

According to Walton, Genesis 1 is really the first place to begin such a reading. He asserts that in order get the idea of what the 6 or 7 days is all about, we have to try and understand what this would have meant to anyone (Israelite or non-Israelite) in ancient world. We need to understand that the part of the narrative when God rests on the seventh day is a very important element of it.

One thing that we probably don’t pick up on, Walton observes, is that when God is said to “rest”, the writer is making a reference to the temple—one that the original readers would have immediately understood. In ancient times, the temple and the cosmos were blended into one. Thus the temple isn’t simply a place of respite or worship, rather, it is the place from which the cosmos is run. As such, on the seventh day, after the cosmos is organized, God takes up his “rest” in this cosmic temple and starts running it. So the first chapter of the Bible is about the temple—the cosmos.

John Walton, in his book , The Lost World of Genesis One, has done the evangelical community a great service. He has shown that the first chapter of the Bible is not a story about how the material came into existence. Rather it is about how the material came to take on its function within God’s temple (the cosmos). If we look to it for scientific statement, Walton says, we are asking it to say something it was never intended to say. We had two earlier posts on this book. Consider referring back to them and then commenting below. Do you think that Walton’s approach will prove helpful to the evangelical church?

I am asked all the time to explain, in a nutshell, why irreducible complexity is not a valid argument in favor of intelligent design. Indeed I have addressed this issue in Part I and Part II of this series. However, I have never heard anyone put it in a more cogent form than Oxford biophysicist Ard Louis in this video. If you are like me though, you’re going to have to listen extremely closely and probably play it two or three times in order to fully grasp the depth of the point he is making. Here is what I think he’s saying. Tell me if I’m right.

Dr. Louis begins by pointing out the complexity of the bacterial flagellum—it consists of many different protein components that must assemble in a specific configuration, a process which takes about twenty minutes. As the components assemble, they might try out many different arrangements until at long last the correct one is identified, producing a fully mature bacterial flagellum.

The problem is that there are a “zillion” different possible combinations and configurations of the components and only one works. Trying them all out and arriving at the single correct one in just twenty minutes would be impossible. Yet, the flagellum assembles. It works. And it works in twenty minutes.

Dr. Louis goes on: If you were to come across a fully assembled flagellum with all of its protein components attached in the one and only way which works, what might you conclude? Remember there are zillions of ways in which those proteins could assemble, but in the search process, only one works. Given the state of our knowledge until recently, you might well conclude that there was a “guiding hand” or a “vital force” that had facilitated the assembly process enabling it to find the correct combination in only minutes. Yet none of us, I assume, believe that there is a guiding hand acting on the cell, causing the proteins inside it to follow the correct search process to make the flagellum. The basic elements of the process are understood, Louis says. They can be explained both mathematically and biologically. We do not need to invoke a guiding hand inside each of the trillions of bacterial cells that are in our body. Their parts, including their flagella, are assembled by processes that we have come to understand over the past half century. No vital force. No guiding hand.

Louis then goes on to explore another aspect of the assembly of the bacterial flagellum: the evolutionary history by which it arose to become the complex structure it is today. That search process took place not in twenty minutes, but over millions of years—probably hundreds of millions. We don’t have the intermediates for this evolutionary history. All we have is the final product. Today, there are people who look at that structure in all of its complexity and say, “There must have been a guiding hand, a vital force to design and build something so complex. Even with hundreds of millions of years of searching in design-space, no natural process could build something this complex.” So, just as some were incredulous that a flagellum could self-assemble in a cell before our current state of knowledge developed, leaders of the Intelligent Design movement are now incredulous in a new way. For what they consider to be scientific reasons, they believe it is nearly certain that the structure must have come fully formed through an intelligence and not have become increasingly more complex through gradual, natural processes.

Louis, a deeply committed Christian, says in essence, “Given our incomplete knowledge about these processes, how do they know that?” True, showing how the flagellum could have been produced by natural processes is a hard problem—we don’t, after all, have the intermediates. However, is it not too early to say that scientists are never going to discover a natural way in which this could come about? Surely we cannot calculate probabilities of this, when we know so little about the process. Is it not premature to come across a finished product and say there must have been a guiding hand when we know so little about the history of its development over hundreds of millions of years?

Again, I emphasize that Dr. Ard Louis is a deeply committed Christian, a person who sees the Bible as the Word of God. He is not arguing against the existence of a Creator. It is science he is discussing, not theology. There are no scientific reasons to say that a guiding hand was needed in evolutionary history to assemble what we now see as a marvelously complex structure. There are also no sound theological reasons to assert that God could not have used natural processes to carry out God’s creation command. God could have used natural processes! We believe that God is Creator of life, that God “spoke” life into existence, and that God’s Presence sustains the created world in its current state.

Think back to Louis’s initial premise about what happens in twenty minutes. There are no scientific or theological reasons to insist on the presence of a guiding hand which manipulates the process so that the proteins attach in all the right ways to build the flagellum of a bacterial cell. By the same token, there are no scientific or theological reasons for assuming that a manipulating hand is needed step by step to build better and better flagella in evolutionary time. Instead, we are simply left with this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.(John 1:1-3)

That is enough for me.