One of the more outspoken proponents of this view is Sam Harris, a leading figure among the New Atheists, and a fierce antitheist. Harris has written a book and given talks on the idea that morality—broadly, the act of discerning good from bad—can be derived from science.

On the face of it, this seems strange, since the scientific consensus, especially in evolutionary biology, has always been that nature is morally neutral. We know, as scientists, that sharks are not “bad” any more than dolphins are “good.” The true evolutionary view (I always thought) was that fitness is related to success, not goodness.

The problem is that as human beings, we know that goodness exists, so it must be accounted for, and if one is a staunch believer in scientism, it must be accounted for scientifically. In some situations, this accounting seems to be possible. There is a large literature on kin selection as the basis for some kinds of altruism, and Dawkins has made the case that what he calls “misfiring of genes” for kin altruism are responsible for human goodness.

Harris claims that moral values can be based on scientific principles, and that no kind of cultural context, especially faith-based context, is necessary for humans to have a code of morals. He bases this argument on the idea that moral values are based on facts, and that these facts can be tested for their truthfulness. To some extent, this is an old idea. Murder, adultery, theft and lying—some of the best-recognized universal moral prohibitions, all tend to destabilize the coherence of social groups and would therefore be selected against in all societies.

But Harris goes much further, using arguments and examples that are anything but scientific. Since Harris is a leader of the antitheistic movement, and is interested in finding examples of religious practices that he believes can be scientifically proven to be immoral. He cites the abusive treatment of women in Islamic societies as a main example, and he mentions corporal punishment of children as a slap at Christianity.

So how does Harris prove scientifically that forcing women to cover their bodies, and hitting school children with rulers are morally wrong? He doesn’t. Here is what he actually says:

But we can ask the obvious question: Is it a good idea, generally speaking, to subject children to pain and violence and public humiliation as a way of encouraging healthy emotional development and good behavior? Is there any doubt that this question has an answer, and that it matters?

Harris clearly believes the answer to that question is no, and I agree with him. But where is the science here? Has he data to show that children who were subjected to corporal punishment had worse emotional development and behavior than children who did not undergo such punishment? No. He has no such data, and in fact while he considers the wrongness of corporal punishment to be an obvious fact, there are millions of people who consider it to be just the reverse. There is no science here; there is simply a basic underlying moral idea, which Harris shares with others.

Harris touts the evils of Islamic fundamentalism as morally indefensible from a scientific point of view. But what kind of fact is it to say that making women cover their bodies is wrong, other than the “fact” that Harris thinks it is? Is there a science for determining the optimal way to treat women? If there is, it isn’t mentioned by Harris. 

While it may seem obvious that the oppression of women is morally wrong, proving scientifically that its disadvantageous to the thriving of our species is more tricky. In fact, the moral values of Harris, which are typical Western Judeo-Christian values, are largely counter-evolutionary. What we see when we look at history or sociology, is a background of true selection-positive behavior—indiscriminate killing of enemies, sexual aggression, concentration of power in a dominant faction—on which has been superimposed a moral code, followed and enforced despite its anti-evolutionary tendency. The real question to ask is: How is it that humans obey any of these moral codes that do not help them survive as individuals or as members of a culture?

In truth, there is no science at all behind Harris’s grand claim of factual moral values, (beyond such obvious things as it isn’t a good idea to add cholera germs to the water supply). He even admits this by stating:

Now the irony, from my perspective, is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another.

Of course that is correct, because both Harris, and the people whom he calls “religious demagogues,” have formulated moral codes that they hold to in the absence of any “scientific” data. 

The argument that morality is outside the scope of science is not a hard one to make, but it isn’t only morality that must be excluded from the domain of science. The more important argument is that very few of the ideas of evolutionism are based on anything remotely scientific. This is because the evolutionism paradigm includes many distortions of Darwin’s great theory, and too many of these distortions have become accepted by an antitheistic academic culture without proper rigorous analysis. 

Like Steven Jay Gould, I see no evidence that the biological mechanisms of evolution by natural selection can be extrapolated beyond the bounds of biology. Gould devotes several chapters in The Richness of Life to attacking the “adaptationist paradigm,” which is a central part of evolutionism. In responding to Daniel Dennet’s assertion that adaptation and selection explain just about everything, Gould says:

The fallacy of Dennet’s argument undermines his other imperialist hope that the universal acid of natural selection might reduce human cultural change to the Darwinian algorithm as well … The chief strategy proposed by evolutionary psychologists for identifying adaptation is untestable and therefore unscientific.

Cunningham has also explored this issue in Darwin’s Pious Idea. Social Darwinism, eugenics, evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, mimetics and other nonbiological applications of Darwin’s theory are not rationally consistent with the fundamental properties of evolution by natural selection. 

Evolutionism has been used to “explain” all sorts of dynamics in culture, using evolutionary concepts. But, while the evolution of devices that play music (as an example) might bear a resemblance to the evolution of carnivores, it is a superficial resemblance. Devices do not replicate themselves, so they cannot be the target of selection. 

Scientism is a failed philosophical approach to the pursuit of universal truth. Its failure should be evident especially to scientists who, more than most, understand the limits of their fields of study, as well as the enormous effort it takes to wrest nuggets of pure truth from nature. We must, as previous generations of enlightened thinkers have done, admit that issues of morality, beauty, thought, love, art, and culture are not approachable by scientific methodology or tools, or we risk losing a huge part of our human endowment of special (if not divine) genius.

Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive end.

Important scientific theories invite philosophical and theological reflection. Dawkins, Ruse, and Wilson, have described their conclusions. But scientific theories are often compatible with multiple philosophical and religious interpretations. For example, Newton's laws of motion and gravity allow several competing theistic and atheistic interpretations.

To avoid Ruse and Wilson's philosophical conclusion, we need not dispute their scientific hypothesis about how morality evolved. We need only dispute their philosophical extrapolation as to why morality exists. Even if we restrict ourselves to an atheistic worldview, this extrapolation is questionable. Donald MacKay (1965) would call this an example of "the fallacy of nothing but-tery". This is the assertion that a description of something at one level renders other levels of description meaningless. From our everyday experience, we know that a successful description on one level does not invalidate other levels of description. For example. one might assert that a Shakespeare sonnet is "nothing but" ink blots on a page (MacKay 1965). True, one way to describe a sonnet is to precisely specify the page coordinates of every ink blot. This description is valid and complete on its own level; however, one could also analyze the sonnet linguistically, emotionally, socially, historically, and on other levels. If one is programming an inkjet printer, the most important description is in terms of ink blot coordinates. For almost every other purpose in life, however, that is an unimportant level of description. In the same way, a complete evolutionary description of the existence of morality does not necessarily invalidate the truth, utility, or significance of other levels of description of morality.

If we do not restrict ourselves to atheism and instead allow for the existence of a creator, the extrapolation from how morality evolved to why morality exists fails further. Consider an analogy. Suppose an inventor builds a robot which could do a variety of useful things-- mow the lawn, clean the house, grade homework, write book chapters, and so on. One thing this robot can do, given a complete set of spare parts, is build a replica of itself. Whenever the inventor needs another robot, she gives one robot a set of spare parts and has it build a replica of itself. Amongst all the software subroutines within this robot, there is a set of subroutines that govern the robot's self-replication, including the replication of those self-replication subroutines. Would it be correct to say that the purpose of the robot's existence is merely to reproduce those particular self-replication subroutines? Do all of the other software and hardware of the robot--which allow it to mow the lawn, and so on-- merely further the reproductive ends of those self-replication subroutines? At one level, the robot's hardware and software do serve to reproduce those self-replication software routines. At another level of analysis, however, those self-replication software routines serve the robot to produce more copies of itself. At still another level, those self-replication software routines serve the robot's creator. The creator of the robot should get the last world as to which of those levels of description is most important.

In humans, does morality exist to further the reproduction of certain genes, or do those genes exist in order to allow for the production of new human beings who can behave morally? If human beings have a creator, the creator gets the final word on the question of purpose. The mechanism which the creator used to make those genes-- whether de novo or via evolution-- is secondary. The creator's purpose in creating those genes decides the issue.

References

• Dawkins, Richard. 1976. Pp. 1-11 in The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• MacKay, Donald. 1965. Christianity in a Mechanistic Universe. Chicago: InterVarsity.
• Ruse, Michael, and Edward O. Wilson. 1993. The approach of sociobiology: The evolution of ethics. In Religion and the Natural Sciences, ed. James E. Huchingson. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Javonovich.

Today, as I write, I am no longer in the desert of southern California, nor in the beech-maple forest of New Hampshire, but on a glacial drumlin in Waubesa Wetlands—a large marsh four miles south of Madison, Wisconsin. Here Ruth and I have our home, and here I study creatures whose watery habitats my neighbors and I have worked to save from eventual destruction. While my desert study site now is covered by a city where people live alone in the land—absent the desert creatures—my wetland study site remains occupied by all kinds of native plants and animals. Embracing it is the Town of Dunn, whose land stewardship plan helps people understand, serve, and maintain this and the other ecosystems. Our town stewardship plan encourages restoration of the landscape, protects agricultural lands, and strives to transmit an intergenerational heritage of secure and wholesome homes, livelihoods, and habitats for the animals, plants, and people that live here. We live largely in harmony and accord.

House-building on slabs poured onto desert sands first alerted me to the question of praxis, the third point on the napkin. But it was later, in my work as organizer of the Waubesa Wetlands Scientific and Agricultural Preserve, and as supervisor and later as chair of the Town of Dunn, that I came to realize that science and ethics do no earthly good unless put into practice. In serving my town, I came to apply what I had learned in the desert: praxis uninformed by science and ethics usually creates more problems than are solved.

“How do you put it all together?” those students in New Hampshire wanted to know. For me, it was building a framework for stewardship that simultaneously considered the questions “How does the world work?” “What is right?” and “What then must we do?” This science-ethics-praxis triad is a framework for living, for learning, for teaching, and most importantly for acting. It is a framework for stewardship.

In order to live and act rightly in the world, we need to know how the world works. We need to know how the systems that sustain us work, and how we interact with them. Without such knowledge we could drown in a flash flood, have our homes undercut by desert winds, cross the street in the path of an oncoming car, or get sick from consuming foods with toxic ingredients. As human beings develop more and more of the world, and as the reach of human actions extends regionally and globally, our knowledge must increase accordingly. This knowledge is not limited to what we acquire from a formal education; it also includes the knowledge we gain from family and friends, and from experience and experiment. In order to live and act rightly in the world, we need to know how the world works.

In order to live and act rightly in the world, we need to know what we ought to do. A century ago, this question was addressed in many colleges across America in a course for graduating seniors on moral philosophy. The purpose of this course was to convict students that they should apply their knowledge for the pursuit of good instead of pursuing self at others’ expense. At my university, this aspect of college education is expressed in a quotation from Abraham Lincoln carved in stone on a bench behind Lincoln’s statue at the top of Bascom Hill: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, dare to do our duty.” The question “What is right?” is represented by the ethics corner of our triad. Moving directly from the Science corner to the praxis corner, or from the ethics corner to the praxis corner, proves problematic, even disastrous. Consider the result of going from knowledge of nuclear fission (science) directly to producing and dropping an atomic bomb (praxis), or moving from the belief that death is bad (ethics) to removing dead wood from forests (praxis); both are examples of these disastrous shortcuts.

But knowing the science and observing the ethics of this stewardship framework does absolutely no good if it is not put into practice—placed into service. By themselves, the very best science and the most substantial ethics are no substitutes for action. We need to act appropriately and deliberately in the light of scientific and ethical knowledge. Praxis by itself, without being grounded in science and ethics, results in mere activism—activism that is unlikely to do good and that may produce harm. All three corners of the triad are essential—but not by themselves. Taken together and working interactively, they provide a framework for stewardship.

But will these three operate in dynamic interaction? Will they interact in ways that preserve and achieve the integrity of human life and the environment? The answer depends on what we know and understand about ourselves and the world (science), what we believe we should do (ethics), and what we in fact do, and how we respond to our successes and failures (praxis). It depends on our will, our motivation, our determination, and our dedication to strive for a harmonious world of creatures before their Creator. What might make us strive for such a world?

Part 3 explores the challenge of translating ideals into concrete actions.

A careful study of this chapter is important because it gives us a beautiful picture of the proper relationships we should have with God, the natural world, and each other. Numerous posts could be written on each of these relationships, but in this post I’d like to focus on how Genesis 2 describes our relationship to the rest of creation. These relationships are given deeper significance when we recognize that the garden is being described as a temple-like “sacred space,” not just an ordinary garden. There are numerous clues in the passage that this is the case. John Walton writes that the Garden/temple parallels “are givens that are simply assumed by the author and audience” ¹ of Genesis, but we completely miss them if we take fail to read the text the way the ancient author and audience would have.

Temples and Gardens

In the Ancient Near East (ANE), all sacred space was conceived of as something like a temple; it was a place where humans would serve God and experience their closest access to Him. Thus in ANE cultures, a temple complex was seen as being the apex and a microcosm of creation and the earthly abode of the god(s). Descriptions of temples often pictured a river flowing from under the temple and flowing out through an adjacent garden, symbolizing the fertile extravagance of the divine provision. A temple garden would be no mere backyard vegetable patch, but rather an elaborate, beautifully landscaped botanical park.

The same temple/river picture can be seen in the description of the eschatological temple in Ezekiel (ch. 47) and Revelation (chs. 21-22, where the final temple is God Himself). Sound familiar? In Genesis 2 we also have a river flowing “from Eden [‘Abundance’] to water the garden” (v. 10).² Not only is the Garden filled with “every beautiful tree with edible fruit” (v. 9), but the area itself is rich with gold, resins, and gemstones (sometimes translated “bdellium and onyx”), the same materials later used to decorate Israel’s tabernacle, temple, and priestly garments. Furthermore, many scholars are convinced that the design of temple’s Menorah (candlestick) deliberately echoes the Garden’s Tree of Life, and some also think that the Ark of the Covenant in the temple parallels the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.³

Made for Sacred Service

As inhabitants of this temple-garden, it comes as no surprise that Adam and Eve enjoyed a special closeness to God’s presence (Gen. 3:8 pictures God taking an evening walk through the Garden). But as inhabitants of the Garden, they had special responsibilities as well; they were told “to farm it and take care of it” (v. 15). The two Hebrew words used here have a broader range of meaning than their English translations suggest. As John Walton writes, the broader meaning of the word here translated “to farm” (particularly when used in a sacred context) “is often connected to religious service deemed as worship (e.g., Ex. 3:12) or of priestly functionaries serving in the temple precinct (e.g., Num. 3:7-10).” ⁴

The usage in Genesis 2 seems to have two layers of meaning: “farm/cultivate the Garden” (since it is an agricultural space) and “serve/worship God” (since the Garden is also a sacred space). The dual meanings are as intertwined in Hebrew grammar as they are intended to be in practice. The second Hebrew word (translated “take care of”) has a deeper religious meaning as well. The word can refer to protecting farmland from external threats, but in a danger-free sacred space like the Garden, the word more generally refers to “performing duties on the [temple] grounds,” that is, to “sacred service.”⁵

Walton therefore translates these two Hebrew words as “serve and preserve.” These same words appear again together several times in Numbers to describe the priest’s duties in the temple. Because of all this, Gordon Wenham describes Adam as “perhaps…an archetypal Levite” with a “quasi-priestly” role in the garden.⁸ Eve was created as Adam’s companion and “helper” in his work, a word which nowhere in the OT refers to a subordinate assistant, but rather to one who is at least equal to the one being helped.⁹

Genesis 2 should banish from our minds any idea that creation care is somehow “secular” work for a Christian, or that it is not even our responsibility. This was the first task given to humanity, to serve and worship God by cultivating and protecting the natural world. The centrality of our responsibility in this regard is even clearer when we back up to the beginning of the chapter. We know there was a river “flow[ing] from Eden to water the garden” (v. 10), symbolizing that “all fertility emanates from the presence of God.” ¹⁰ Nonetheless there could be no cultivated plants in the garden because “there was still no human being to farm the fertile land” (v. 5). With no gardener and no rain, the ground was watered indiscriminately; a human was needed to irrigate the waters and support a garden.¹¹ Therefore, God “formed the human from the topsoil” (Hebrew wordplay equivalent to “human from the humus”) before planting the garden. God certainly could have watered it another way without needing us, but He chose not to, and the resulting collaborative picture here is a beautiful one. All provision flows from God, but He has chosen to give us an essential part in further channeling his provisions in the natural world. Far from countering God’s creative work by destroying nature, we are intended to work with Him to preserve and further it.

Of course, though created primarily to glorify God, the world was also made to provide us abundantly with the food and resources that we need to live (Gen. 2:16). Yet we don’t need to look far to see that we have often failed in our responsibility to properly care for creation. We live in a fallen world, and sin has fractured the intended harmony of our relationships with God, creation, and each other (as described in Genesis 3:14-24).

I recently heard a striking crystallization of this fallen perspective in Spencer Tracy’s narration in the opening scene of the sprawling 1962 western film “How the West Was Won.” As the camera flies over majestic Western fields and mountains, the narrator tells us that “This land has a name today, and is marked on maps. But the names and the maps all had to be won, won from nature and from primitive man.” This is the fallen perspective – advancing our human purpose on earth is done through defeating nature and other people (derogatively labeled “primitive,” as well) apart from God. This perspective perfectly illustrates the conflict-based relationships that sin brings about, already described for us back in the first chapters of the Bible.

Are we doomed, then, to live helplessly in this way? If this is just the way the world is and the way we are, shouldn’t we just accept that? Apart from Christ the answer would be “yes,” but the New Testament makes it clear that though we are still fallen, the saving work of Christ has brought about a profound change in us. As N.T. Wright makes clear in his book Surprised by Hope, Jesus taught (and the Resurrection vindicated) that the Kingdom of God “was and is breaking in to the present world, to earth.” ¹² Christ’s Resurrection was the first act of the future new creation. If we are truly “born again” into this new reality, this new way of living, we must strive (in the Spirit’s power) to live lives of wholeness and right relationships, putting our sinful nature to death (Colossians 3). In doing so, we would be wise to include Genesis 2 as we seek to follow God’s will and God’s Kingdom, “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10).

In part 2 of this series, David describes how Genesis 1, Genesis 2, and modern scientific accounts offer complementary and mutually enriching perspectives in our understanding of God's creation.

Notes

1. John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 125.
2. Biblical quotations are from the Common English Bible unless otherwise noted.
3. Both symbolized divine wisdom that humans had to receive from God obediently, with the proper “fear of God” that the Old Testament wisdom literature stresses as a prerequisite. Disobediently eating the Tree’s fruit would lead to death and disobeying God would lead to expulsion from the Garden. Similarly, disobediently touching the Ark brought death (Num. 4:15, 2 Sam. 6:1-7) and disobeying God’s instruction led to Israel’s exile from their Eden, the land of Canaan.
4. John H. Walton, Genesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), 172.
5. Ibid., 173.
6. Ibid., 192.
7. See Numbers 3:7-8, 8:26, 18:5-6.
8. Gordon J. Wenham, “Sanctuary Symbolism in the Garden of Eden Story,” in “I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11, ed. Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 401.
9. Walton, Genesis, 176.
10. Ibid., 170.
11. This follows Walton’s illuminating exegesis of this passage in Genesis, 164-65.
12. N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 201.

Today's video features pastor Brian McLaren and is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In today's video, Brian McLaren discusses the value of considering Scripture in light of the cultures that surrounded them. The Biblical writers were aware of the myths of the power nations that surrounded them, but flipped their stories on their heads to reveal truth about God. The myths of cultures like Babylon declared that the world was built on a foundation of violence and humans meant to be slaves to the gods and their leaders, but the Bible tells that the world comes from goodness and that humans are made for more than servitude but to truly know God.

The early chapters of Genesis appear to pose scientific problems that challenge our literal, post-Enlightenment lens through which we often read the Word of God. (See this post for a commentary on how this situation came about.) This leads many people to believe that the descriptions in these texts are meant to reveal more than raw scientific fact. Pete Shaw of Crosswalk Community Church highlights the story of Noah and the Ark to explore the possible reasons for adopting a non-literal understanding of this ancient narrative. Shaw first summarizes the story of Upnashatim in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a famous Sumerian flood story that the young and old in Abraham’s day would have known well. Upon comparison, these two accounts—the Genesis flood and the Gilgamesh flood—are incredibly similar. Furthermore, Shaw exposes the various practical problems that arise if one takes every word of the Noah story to be a precise truth. For example, he wonders how Noah could have fed and maintained every living land creature in a small boat for ten months. He also explains how a primitive understanding of the universe is heavily reflected in this text. In light of these points, he concludes that whether or not this story is portraying actual historical events, it is presenting rich truths about God, and that should be the focus of the believer.

Transcript

“The first eleven chapters of Genesis are what scholars call pre-history. In other words, they can’t really date what was going on very well in those first elven chapters. After that, twelfth chapter on, it is a lot easier to date, and the stories have a different feel, a different structure… but those first eleven have caused a lot of debate over the years. In fact, the next slide is going to kind of give you the line of where I am going to take you today. You might not be aware of this, but there is a Noah controversy. You and I, when we hear the story of a great flood, the first thing that comes to our mind—when we think of the whopper of all whoppers—we think of Noah and the Ark, but if we lived in Abraham’s time or especially before, the name Noah probably would not have come up. In fact, if we grew up with Abraham, the story we would have most likely known about was the story—I am going to butcher this name—of Utnapishtim.

You are familiar with Utnapishtim aren’t you? And you are familiar with the god Enlil. I am sure you are familiar with Enlil. And you would have been very aware of a storybook that was read by children and adults alike called the Epic of Gilgamesh. And in the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, we have the story of Utnapishtim and the god Enlil. And just so that you would know about that story a little bit, knowing that that would have been the predominant story that you would have understood anytime you thought about a flood, this is how the story went down. So, this god Enlil was the god of thunder and rain and all that and he was not a happy camper (kind of temperamental) as thunder gods can be. And for no clear reason, except to mess around with some of the other gods in his discontent, he made the decision that he was going to wipe out the earth with a great flood. And one of the other gods, a goddess in fact, did not like that this was going to happen and thought that it was unfair, unjust, and so she sent a message to Utnapishtim that this flood was going to come at the hand and the wrath of Enlil. And so Utnapishtim got to work, and he built a vessel (a strange vessel), a cube, but he used some of the similar materials that we saw in the Ark, and he made this massive structure (if in fact you do the math, it is probably at least twice, if not much larger, than the actual Ark) this massive cube that he made hoping that it would float, and he got it done on time.

The rain didn’t come down for forty days, it came down just for seven, but it flooded everything out, and the only survivor was Utnapishtim. And when Enlil came around and saw that some human beings had survived, he was very upset because he intended to wipe out everybody to show his wrath and his anger to the world and to show that he was upset to all the gods in heaven. Well, Utnapishtim obviously saved his own life, the life of his family, the life of his personal animals because those are the animals that he saved—not the rest of the animals of the world. And he took some carpenters along because he didn’t know how to build stuff and once you are starting over you have got to build stuff, and so he brought some carpenters along. In honor of his faithfulness (in light of this word from the goddess) he was given divinity. And so, he became a god, he became one of the gods, he got to reside in heaven, if you will, because of his faithfulness…interesting story.

If you grew up in Sumer, which is present day Iraq, and you grew up with Abraham in what is present day Baghdad that would have been the story that you would have known very, very well. It is because that story exists and other cultures have their own flood stories as well that some scholars look at the story of Noah and the Ark, and they think, ‘well, gee, how should we really interpret this thing? You know, our Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment perspective says it is in black and white, and if it says that is what happened, then that is exactly what happened. There is no way around it.’ Well, what if the first people who shared this story with each other and what if the early writers of this word, what if when they approached the Bible, they didn’t approach it the way we do? What if they didn’t approach the Bible, the Word of God, as a literal, this is exactly how it happened book that our post- Enlightenment eyes are framed to do? How would that change us? And also, some of the things that some of the challengers of this story are bringing out are some of the issues with the story like ok is this really a big enough boat to handle all of the creatures of creation…can they really, really fit?

Some have really tried to make a case that there weren’t as many animals back then as there are now because they got together and hooked up, and now, we have all kinds of varieties and that kind of thing. And so that is kind of there, but you are talking ten months of time! How do you feed all the animals of the world? How do you store all the food? Did they eat fish, because the fish didn’t die? The fish lived on just fine. How do you do that? And what about—it is kind of unpleasant—but all the excrement? What are you going to do with all that ‘bleep?’ Are you going to throw it out the eighteen inch window at the top? Did they have a conveyor belt system? How did it work? And so they look at that and think, ‘I am just not sure about that.’ Would you really take that literally? Is that how we should take it? Is that how they took it around their campfires and around their dinner tables? Did they think about it that way?

And there are other issues too that academics look at, and they challenge somewhat. Like they know that forty days and forty nights is a proverbial statement in Jewish culture. It was like saying (and you see it in many accounts in the Bible), forty days and forty nights was saying a long time, but it probably was not meant to be taken literally. It is just a long time. It is how they thought about things. Then, there is the issue of the rain itself, and how it all came down. Now, the New Living Translation and most modern translations, just simply talk about it as--there is the sky and the rain came down from the sky and you are good to go. But there is another word that is used. If you go to the New King James Bible, for instance, and they talk about the firmament—that the rain came down from the firmament. And so, when we think about firmament, we think, ‘well they are talking about sky or they are talking about the starry host and all that stuff,’ but if we go back to the original word, which the New American Standard version got right (it is one of the most academic and precise versions that is out there), both in the creation story and in the Noah account, they use a different word for sky: they use the word dome.

Now, I am going to butcher this a little bit, but broad stroke version is that the way the ancient people saw the world was that we kind of lived in this bubble, you know sort of like a snow globe, and there was water--not all inside, but outside, surrounding us. There was water below and there was water above, and above us was this massive dome called the firmament or called the sky. And then when it rained it was because God was opening up the floodgates of heaven. That is how they thought back then. They didn’t know any better. And so, kind of what these questions are asking us now is how we make sense of this and do we have to believe like they did in order to believe the story. How many of you believe that the sun revolves around the earth? None! Nobody does. Do you get mad at, do any of you hold a grudge against the earliest people in the Bible, actually, all the people in the Bible, do you hold them accountable and are you angry at them that they believed with everything in them that the sun revolved around the earth and not the other way around?... no, of course not. Do you get angry at them because they believed we lived in a dome and that God opened up the gates of heaven and there you go? No, you don’t hold it against them because you understand that it is the best that they could do given their time.

But we live in the age of Doppler radar, right? We know within minutes, you know, when rain is going to hit Napa and when it is going to move on to Valeo, and so on and so forth. I mean it is that precise, and we know when it is coming hundreds of miles off shore and we can look thousands of miles because of satellite stuff and our ability to understand temperatures and all that. We know how the whole thing is brewing. We know that hurricanes are lining up one after the other in hurricane season because we have cameras up there that are seeing them start to form, and we can gauge temperature in the water and so forth—we do not live back then. So, it would be inappropriate for us to become primitive in the sense of looking at the world the same way they did in that kind of a literalness because we know different, you know what I mean? We know different. And so really the bottom line is that the literalness of the story really isn’t the most important thing to begin with anyway.”

A few editorial reflective thoughts by Darrel Falk: The sermon continues, of course, and you can download it at the above link. What is "the most important thing" to which Pastor Shaw refers as the audio clip draws to a close? Regardless of whether you think it is historical or not, what is the message that God wants to communicate to us through this story? Consider reading Genesis 9 right now. What are the parallels in this "recreation"account to the original creation account? What does God want us to see in making those parallels? What about the rainbow? What does it symbolize for you? Can you sense God's love for all of creation (not just humankind) as this story draws to a close? Why does the story of Noah himself, however, not have a happier ending? Have we seen the theme of nakedness and the need to cover up nakedness in an earlier scriptural passage? Why do you think the story of Noah draws us back to this point (nakedness and shame), just like the story Adam and Eve does? What brought on shame for them? What brings on shame for us? Do you see that God is wanting us to think deeply about this story and its meaning? What is another example of the need to cover up? (Hint: think Moses.) What difference does the coming of Jesus make to all of this? (Hint: see II Corinthians 3:12-18.) Do you see the rainbow?]]> Sat, 12 Nov 11 04:00:15 -0800 Pete Shaw http://biologos.org/blog/where-we-come-from-and-who-we-are?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/where-we-come-from-and-who-we-are?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication In this video, physicist Ard Louis describes that 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.

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.

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.”

Throughout history, all civilizations and peoples have operated under the assumption of a cosmography or picture of the universe. Cosmography is a technical term that means a theory that describes and maps the main features of the heavens and the earth. A Cosmography or “cosmic geography” can be a complex picture of the universe that includes elements like astronomy, geology, and geography; and those elements can include theological implications as well. We are most familiar with the historical change that science went through from a Ptolemaic cosmography of the earth at the center of the universe (geocentrism) to a Copernican cosmography of the sun at the center of a galaxy (heliocentrism).

Some mythologies maintained that the earth was a flat disc on the back of a giant turtle; animistic cultures believe that spirits inhabit natural objects and cause them to behave in certain ways; modern westerners believe in a space-time continuum where everything is relative to its frame of reference in relation to the speed of light. Ancients tended to believe that the gods caused the weather; moderns tend to believe that impersonal physical processes cause weather. All these different beliefs are elements of a cosmography or picture of what the universe is really like and how it operates. Even though “pre-scientific” cultures like the Hebrews did not have the same notions of science that we moderns have, they still observed the world around them and made interpretations as to the structure and operations of the universe. The Bible also contains a cosmography or picture of the universe that its stories inhabit.

I have said this before, and I will say it again: I am not a scientist, I am a professional storyteller, and so my interest in Biblical cosmography comes from my study of imagery, metaphor, and story. But a picture of the cosmos certainly has a bearing on scientific notions of the way the universe is and operates. Imagination and science are not completely unconnected. I am also a Christian who believes that the Bible is the Word of God. But does this mean that the Bible will have a cosmography that agrees with modern western science? I used to believe it did. I used to believe that if the Bible was scientifically errant in anyway, then it could not be the Word of God, since God would never communicate false information to us. That would make God a liar, or so I thought.

This led to the corollary that whatever modern science has proven would have to be in accord with the Bible’s own revelation. This is called “scientific concordism.” So, if we now know that the earth is a sphere and that the universe is expanding, then Scripture would not contradict that truth. What’s more, I might even be able to find a verse that would have that truth hidden it: Behold, I thought I found it: “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth…who stretches out the heavens like a curtain” (Isa. 40:22). In this scientific concordist paradigm, the Bible contains veiled scientific truths before their time in a gnostic hiddenness that is uncovered by initiates into such mysteries.

Unfortunately, this paradigm would lead to much cognitive dissonance for me as I tortured the text to fit whatever scientific theory I was trying to support at the time. First, I accepted Genesis as literally explaining material creation chronology and relegated evolutionary scientists to dishonest manipulators of facts.¹ Then I tried to find dinosaurs in the Bible by interpreting the Leviathan or Behemoth as references to ichthyosaurs and sauropods.² Then I tried to make six literal days and young chronology of Creation in Genesis square symbolically with the seriously old age of the earth.³ Then I tried to creatively reconcile the billions of years of the Big Bang with 24-hour earth-bound solar days though gravity-warped space-time.⁴

I also thought that the best interpretation of the Bible was the “plain reading” of the text. That is, any interpretation that would turn the meaning into unwarranted figurative, symbolic, allegorical or metaphorical language would be disingenuous hermeneutics. I didn’t mean obvious figurative and allegorical language like parables of talking brambles and trees (Jud. 9:7-15) or clearly poetic expressions of singing mountains and clapping trees (Isa. 55:12). I meant that when the Bible talked about the physical order and events in heaven and earth it would mean just what it said since the Creator of the cosmos would know best what was actually happening.

But something started to seriously challenge these assumptions. First, as I studied the ancient Hebrew culture and its surrounding Near Eastern background, I began to see how very different a “plain reading” of a text was to them than a “plain reading” was to me.⁵ The ancient Hebrew mind was steeped in different symbols, ideas, and language than I was. If I read a phrase like “sun, moon and stars,” my western cultural understanding, which is deeply affected by a post-Galileo, post-Enlightened, materialist science would tend to read such references in terms of the physical bodies of matter, gas, and gravity spread out over vast light years of space-time. When ancient Israelites used that phrase, they would have pictures in their minds of markers and signs (Gen. 1:14), and more personal objects like pagan gods (Deut. 4:19), heavenly beings (1 Kg. 22:19), symbolic influential leaders (Gen. 37:9), or the fall of governing powers (Isa. 13:10).⁶

An ancient Jew hearing the words leviathan and sea conjured up notions of a disordered world without Yahweh’s rule, and Yahweh’s covenant creation out of chaos.⁷ Whereas for me, hearing those words makes me think of a monster fish swimming in the ocean – or maybe Moby Dick, a symbol of man’s hubris – but primarily the physical material being of those objects. It is easier to see now that my plain reading of the text through my modern western worldview could completely miss the plain meaning that the Scripture would have to an ancient Israelite. My so-called act of “plain reading” was ironically an imposition of my own cultural bias onto the text removed by thousands of years, thousands of miles, and thousands of cultural motifs.⁸ We must seek the “plain reading” of the ancient authors and their audience, and in this way we can be “diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15).

Something else had always haunted me like a nagging pebble in the shoe of my mind, and that was the Galileo affair. We’ll look more at this in my next post.

Notes

1. I never believed they were all lying, but many were certainly blinded by their worldview bias. I still believe that some scientists do in fact lie, cheat, and manipulate facts and studies just as in every other discipline because they are human like everyone else and can be just as driven by political and personal agenda as everyone else. A good book that documents this is Betrayers Of The Truth: Fraud And Deceit In The Halls Of Science By Nicholas Wade William Broad (Ebury Press, 1983); Michael Fumento is a science journalist who reports on current scientific fraud and its widespread economic and political effects at www.fumento.com.
2. Scientific Creationism by Henry M. Morris (Master Books, 1974, 1985) is an example of this viewpoint.
3. Creation and Time: A Biblical and Scientific Perspective on the Creation-Date Controversy by Hugh Ross (NavPress, 1994) is an example of this viewpoint.
4. Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery Of Harmony Between Modern Science And The Bible by Gerald Schroeder (Bantam, 1990) is an example of this viewpoint.
5. The seminal book that opened the door for me to a better understanding of this ANE cultural context of the Bible was John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006).
6. “The worship of the host of heaven [was] often set in parallelism to the worship of foreign gods (Deut 17:3; 2 Kgs 17:16; 21:3; 23:4–5; Jer 19:13; Zeph 1:4–5).” K. van der Toorn, Bob Becking and Pieter Willem van der Horst, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible DDD, 2nd extensively rev. ed., 429 (Leiden; Boston; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brill; Eerdmans, 1999), 429.
7. Brian Godawa, “Biblical Creation and Storytelling: Cosmogony, Combat and Covenant,” The BioLogos Foundation.
8. Othmar Keel’s The Symbolism of the Biblical World (Eisenbrauns) is an encyclopedia of imagery and motifs that Israel shared with her ANE neighbors that are quite alien to our thinking.

The men, women and children we met were using teachings of faith as directives to care for the environment, and they were courageously confronting the central questions of what it means to be human in the midst of a culture of profligacy and consumption: What is our relationship and responsibility to all life on this planet, and to our Creator? How can we become better stewards of the environment and build a sustainable future?

RENEWAL presents eight grassroots stories about people who have been spiritually called to environmental action. Each story is set in a different faith tradition, addressing a different environmental concern. The film includes several Christian stories with one focusing on Evangelicals bearing witness to the sin of mountaintop removal coal mining that is decimating Appalachia and has been denounced in formal resolutions by the Lutheran, United Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches. While the entire film runs 90-minutes, each story on the RENEWAL DVD is easily accessible as a short stand-alone film.

The emerging religious-environmental movement has been thrilling to document for its potential to bring about deep and lasting changes that can impact the earth. Addressing issues of consumption, pollution and stewardship, the religious movement promises to make a difference and motivate action in ways that the secular environmental movement has not yet been able to do.

One of RENEWAL’s stories, about the Reformed Church of Highland Park, NJ, portrays church members motivated by their faith to make changes at every level, to reduce their waste and become more low-impact stewards of the earth. This is typical of what is happening now in many houses of worship across America as people are becoming part of the religious-environmental movement.

It makes an enormous difference once you look at environmental protection in more than political, economic or scientific terms – once you understand it’s essentially a personal moral, ethical and spiritual issue. Today many people are discovering that caring for the environment is not only about endangered fish or imperiled birds or wilderness areas that most of us will never see. It’s about our deepest connection with the entire web of life, and with our Creator. And it’s about the choices that each of us makes, day to day.

In our early days of filming, the most striking thing we discovered was the lack of communication among groups who profoundly understood the deep bond between human beings and the earth – and who were already doing faith-inspired work to protect the environment. Most people assumed they were alone in taking action and that they wouldn’t be able to accomplish much – but they were acting anyway, out of a sense of spiritual calling to create a more mutually enhancing way of living with the planet. When we told them about others like them whom we'd met, they were usually surprised and delighted; the news provided a sense of strength and solidarity. We hoped the film would do that on a larger scale: offering a mirror to others whose faith inspired them to creation care across the country, showing them an image of their own good work and assuring them that they were not alone.

It’s been gratifying to watch the growth of this movement and to see the expanding role that Evangelicals are now playing in it. More and more are stepping forward to say that their faith in God has compelled them to find new ways of living with the planet, God’s gift to us. They’re doing it at home, in their churches and in the arena of public policy. Motivated by faith and by Scripture, Evangelicals are taking an active stand to strive for environmental awareness and build a more sustainable future.

Today, the religious-environmental movement – known as creation care to some – is emerging on the map of American consciousness, thanks in part to the continuing growth of Evangelical organizations and individuals who have discovered a calling in their biblical faith tradition to be stewards of the earth.

These include Allen Johnson and Christians for the Mountains (working to save Appalachia from the devastation of mountaintop removal coal mining); Peter Illyn and Restoring Eden (helping Christians, especially youth, rediscover the biblical call to environmental stewardship); the Evangelical Environmental Network (offering biblically inspired education and advocacy that relates to the moral aspects of public policies on energy and the environment); the Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies (integrating environmental studies with biblical principles to bring the Christian community and the general public a better understanding of the stewardship of God’s creation); Matthew Sleeth, MD (author of Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action, a personal account of how Christian faith inspired significant changes in the way he and his family were living); Susan Emmerich, environmental activist / filmmaker (When Heaven Meets Earth, telling the story about the positive work-practices impact her faith-based stewardship approach has had in several Christian communities) and many others.

These exemplary Christian individuals and organizations have turned their faith into action, heeding the words that The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it (Ps. 24:1), that we have a responsibility to Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves (Prov. 31:8) and that the sanctity of nature comes from God, for There is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. (I Cor. 8:6b)

Today, as our nation faces the most daunting ecological challenges of human history, it is increasingly evident that religious communities have a critical leadership role to play by raising their voices to speak out for peace and better stewardship of the earth. Christians have a brilliant opportunity to lead the way at the personal, community and political level.

As filmmakers, we’re proud that RENEWAL has become a positive and powerful influence in the growth of creation care throughout the nation. As a recent article explained, RENEWAL aims to help people “recognize they’re part of a moral and spiritual movement to save the earth and discover a new relationship with the planet.”

The inspiring stories in RENEWAL (which you can learn more about here) are typical of many stories that are now multiplying in religious communities across the nation. These are not only stories about renewal of the earth; they are stories about renewal of the soul and the experience of reinforced faith for those who become engaged in this great work of our time.

Perhaps, then, it is fitting that Earth Day, a day celebrating environmental renewal, falls so close to Easter, the season of spiritual renewal, this year. It is a perfect time to spread the word and celebrate that creation care, the religious-environmental movement, is truly here!

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.

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).

Atrahasis is the name of the Noah-like figure in this story and it means “exceedingly wise.” The Atrahasis Epic and another ancient story called the Gilgamesh Epic overlap a lot with the biblical flood story. We will get to that issue in a future post. Atrahasis, however, is more than just a flood story. It is a story of the origins of the gods (theogony) and of the cosmos (cosmogony).

Atrahasis is important to biblical scholars because of it similarity to Genesis 2-9. Both stories share a similar storyline: creation, population growth and rebellion, flood. They also share some important details within that storyline.

The degree of overlap between the stories suggests to some scholars that Genesis 2-9 may be an Israelite version of Atrahasis, although it is best not to be dogmatic about that. It is very clear, however, that there is a lot of conceptual overlap between them.

The best way to show the similarities between these stories is in a chart. The one below is from Daniel Harlow, which is adapted from a chart by Bernard F. Batto¹. I have made slight adjustments for clarity.

It goes without saying that there are clear differences between the stories (which we will see in more detail when we get to the flood story). But, just as we saw last week with Genesis 1 and Enuma Elish, (1) the differences only stand out because of the similarities, (2) the differences do not justify minimizing the similarities.

As we saw with Genesis 1 and Enuma Elish, Genesis 2-9 and Atrahasis breathe the same air. They share ancient Mesopotamian ways of talking about origins. This is a clear indication that the second creation story does not speak to contemporary science. Hence, (1) it cannot and should not be harmonized with contemporary science, (2) it should not control what can be concluded from scientific investigation.

Genesis 2-9 is an ancient story asking addressing ancient issues. Understanding that ancient context will keep us from asking this story to deliver more than it is prepared to. And it will also help us mine the theological depths of what this story said to ancient Israelites nearly three millennia ago.

Israel’s two creation stories are clearly distinct, which makes one ask why there are two to begin with and why they are placed side-by-side as they are. Unfortunately, Genesis does not come with an introduction explaining why the author did what he did.

The conventional scholarly explanation is a bit involved, but here is the main outline. The second creation story in Genesis is actually Israel’s older creation story, written perhaps sometime during the early period of the monarchy and fully engaged with common Mesopotamian traditions. The first creation story in Genesis was written second, after the return from Exile (539 B.C.), and was influenced by Israel’s long experience in Babylon captivity.

Genesis 1 highlights God’s complete control over creation, employing and transforming familiar Mesopotamian themes such as the cosmic battle motif. That story was placed at the beginning of Israel’s Scripture. The older creation story was edited to reflect its new position as subordinate to Genesis 1.

As I have suggested in previous posts, one way of looking at it is this: What had been Israel’s original story of creation (the Adam story) was transformed to a story of Israel’s creation.

As I stressed earlier, such a suggestion is not meant to cut off discussion but promote it. The meaning of Israel’s creation accounts has been pondered since before the time of Christ, and no one should think that conversation has come to an end in an internet post or two.

Whatever one concludes about Israel’s creation stories, the extra-biblical stories should not be kept at arm’s length from Genesis. They are clearly very important for understanding the nature of Genesis and what it means to understand it properly today.

Notes

1. Harlow, professor at Calvin College, gave a lecture at the ASA meeting at Baylor University in August 2009, “After Adam: Reading Genesis in an Age of Evolutionary Science.” That lecture will appear in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith in an upcoming issue. Batto’s chart can be found in his classic Slaying the Dragon: Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition (Westminster John Knox, 1992), pp. 51-52.

In this video, John Walton talks about ancient myth and how we might better understand it if we think about its intended functionality—that is, myths were a way to explain a culture’s origin and universal significance though they lacked the advances of scientific discovery.

For example, the concept of mythology is often a “trigger word” , Walton says, for contemporary readers because we don’t define even the term myth properly. The term myth refers less to the narrative’s content and more to its genre, that is, the framework used as the vehicle to convey meaning.

Walton explains that the people of the ancient world believed their mythology. Myths weren’t false stories, fairy tales, or fables to them—they were real. Those myths were vital to the way that they understood themselves and their world.

But the idea that Genesis answers the kind of questions we would expect a 21st century human to ask is misguided. Similarly, the notion that Hebraic scriptures were derived from other ancient myths is also flawed—it was simply their “cognitive environment”—just the way that they thought and approached the bigger questions.

These tablets contained things like laws, administrative matters, and literature. It was like unearthing a time capsule to see what life was like in the ancient Near East 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.

But it was the religious texts found there that got the most attention. One of those texts bore striking similarities to Genesis 1.

How people viewed Genesis would never be the same again.

Found among the ruins was a Babylonian creation story referred to today as Enuma Elish. It is a story about a highly dysfunctional divine family engaged in a major power struggle at the dawn of time. The heart of the story is where the god Marduk kills his nemesis Tiamat and then fillets her body in two, making the sky out of one half and the earth out of the other. Thus, Marduk claims the throne as the high god in the pantheon.

Scholars have termed Enuma Elish the “Babylonian Genesis.” The reason is that both stories share some concepts that were immediately apparent.

• In both stories, matter exists when creation begins. Similar to Enuma Elish, Genesis 1 describes God ordering chaos, not creating something out of nothing.

• Darkness precedes the creative acts.

• In Enuma Elish the symbol of chaos is the goddess Tiamat who personifies the sea. Genesis refers to the “deep.” The Hebrew word is tehom, which is linguistically related to Tiamat.

• In both stories, light exists before the creation of the sun, moon, and stars.

• In both stories, there is a division of the waters above and below, with a barrier holding back the upper waters.

• The sequence of creation is similar, including the division of waters, dry land, luminaries, and humanity, all followed by rest.

Scholars knew they were on to something and it led to some predictable questions in both academic and popular circles. Maybe Genesis isn’t history at all, they thought, but just another story like Enuma Elish. In fact, maybe Genesis is just a later Hebrew version of this older Babylonian story.

One can’t really blame people for asking these questions, given the bombshell that just fell on them. Up to this point, Genesis 1 was unique. Now, we have a previously unknown Babylonian myth that is strikingly similar to Scripture.

At the time, many scholars thought that the author of Genesis 1 borrowed material from Enuma Elish. This led to the “Bible and Babel” controversy (“Babel” is Hebrew for Babylon). In fact, scholars commonly thought that Babylonian culture was the source for all ancient religions, including Christianity (i.e., “pan-Babylonianism”).

But with subsequent discoveries from other cultures (Sumerian, Egyptian, Canaanite) and other time periods, scholars came to a more sober conclusion: Babylonian culture did not have such a widespread influence, and Genesis 1 was not directly dependent on Enuma Elish.

Instead, these texts are two examples of the kinds of theological themes that pervaded numerous cultures over many centuries. The stories are not directly connected, but they share common ways of thinking about beginnings. They “breathe the same air.”

Scholars also came to appreciate the differences between Genesis 1 and Enuma Elish. A central difference is that Israel’s God creates on his own, with no divine melodrama or lengthy plot. Israel’s God works solo and in the space of a mere 31 verses (not 900 lines as in Enuma Elish). Genesis 1 is not just a lightly touched-up version of older creation stories. It is a unique piece of Israelite theology.

But this does not mean that the similarities can be minimized. Some scholars have gone to the other extreme saying there is no real value in comparing Genesis 1 to Enuma Elish.

Only a very small number of scholars think this way, however. It is very clear that these stories share a common, ancient, way of speaking about the beginning of the cosmos. They participate in a similar “conceptual world” where solid barriers keep the waters away, pre-existent chaotic material exists before order, and light before the sun, moon, and stars.

Those similarities should not be exaggerated or minimized. But they are telling us something: even though Genesis is unique, and even though Genesis is Scripture, it is an ancient story that reflects ancient ways of thinking.

Genesis 1 cries out to be understood in its ancient context, not separated from it. Stories like Enuma Elish give us a brief but important glimpse at how ancient Near Eastern people thought of beginnings. As I discussed in an earlier post, ancient texts like Enuma Elish help us calibrate the genre of Genesis. That way we can learn to ask the questions Genesis 1 was written to address rather than intruding with our own questions.

One of the main questions Israelites asked was how their God ranked among the dozens of gods in the ancient world—namely, what made him worthy of devotion rather than the gods of the superpowers like Babylon and Egypt. Reading Genesis as ancient literature highlights this polemical dimension.

Genesis 1 is a bold declaration that the God of a tiny nation with a troubled past is the one responsible for what you see. The gods of the superpowers didn’t do it, Yahweh did. In the ancient world, those are fighting words.

Genesis 1 is certainly not just a Hebrew version of Enuma Elish. But we cannot fully appreciate the distinct theology of Genesis 1 without first seeing what it shares with Enuma Elish and other ancient narratives.

Understanding the connections between Genesis 1 and other ancient texts like Enuma Elish is a reminder that we do a disservice to Genesis 1 when we view it only through a modern lens.