WHAT SHOULD WE BELIEVE ABOUT CREATION? PART 1 Andrew Sampson

PART 1: THREE MISSTEPS

 Is there any question that has generated more confusion and controversy in the Christian community than what the Bible says about creation? When I first started teaching on this subject I used to make a point of avoiding talking much about science, but then I found that this is what most people really wanted to talk about. In consequence, when I teach on the question “what should we believe about creation?” for Theology Matters, I now focus on these two questions:

(1) What kind of origins account do we find in Genesis 1?

(2) Can Genesis 1 be harmonised with a modern scientific account of origins?

These are the questions that I’m going to be addressing in this series of articles.

I’ll begin by setting out my stall and presenting what I consider to be three missteps that are commonly taken by fellow members of the Christian community. For now, I’ll set out these missteps in outline. A full rationale for why I consider these steps to be misguided will be forthcoming as we go along.

Firstly, why oh why are there still so many Christians who think that the best way to share a positive gospel message with unbelievers is to lead with a negative message about modern science?

Some years ago I was visiting a town in the south of England. As I was leaving the train station, I saw a sign on an attractive old building promising real fossils that I could come and look at free of charge. It turned out that the building was a museum set up by Christians dedicated to promulgating an anti-evolutionary message for the benefit of the public. I looked around and was immediately transported back to the creationist literature that I remembered from the 90s, full of long debunked theories and scientific misconceptions. It was a depressing experience.

It’s still commonplace to find literature, intended for people outside the church, where the hook is a particular claim about what the Bible is thought to teach about creation. The message generally goes something like this: “How can anyone really believe that we’re here as the result of CHANCE when the evidence all around us screams INTELLIGENT DESIGN?”

Never mind the fact that no scientist really believes that life in all its complexity and diversity can be explained in terms of chance. The main problem I have with putting these kinds of claims front and centre in an evangelistic strategy is that they risk reinforcing a stereotype that’s entrenched in the public consciousness and which (in my experience) seems especially resistant to correction, namely, the idea that the Christian faith is inherently anti-science. This is deeply unhelpful to the reputation of the Church and the cause of the gospel.

The second misstep is closely related to the first and taken whenever a particular view of creation is presented as the biblical view and hence what all right-minded Christians should believe. The fact is that there’s a spectrum of views on creation in the Christian community. That’s why the Evangelical Alliance, perhaps the largest multi-denominational group of “Bible-believing Christians” in the UK, simply affirms God as creator in its Basis of Faith and leaves it at that.

A third misstep is taken whenever a leadership team decides to adopt a particular church position on the details of creation. This happens, of course, whenever there’s a failure to acknowledge that there’s a range of acceptable views within the Christian community. Note that I’m not talking about the doctrine of creation per se. In the next post I’ll explain why it would be extremely suspect if a church leadership team was unable to affirm clearly the doctrine of creation. I’m talking about the inappropriateness of coming down hard on what we might call a particular “model of creation”. Again, more on that in a later post.

So, there we are: three missteps to give you a sense on where I’m coming from in these articles. While those points may be contentious, the approach that I’ll be taking in these articles won’t be especially polemical. That will come as a disappointment to some. I realise that my chosen medium of sharing my thoughts in a public, online forum lends itself to stirring things up a bit. In my experience, courting controversy nearly always generates more heat than light. So, although I have some convictions of my own, my purpose here isn’t to tell you, in the words of this blog series, exactly “what you should believe about creation.”

That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to persuade. What I hope to convince you of is that there are strong biblical grounds for holding to a nuanced and multi-faceted view of creation. You can hold, if you want, to the view that God did everything in six literal twenty-four hour days and that’s all there is to it. I happen to disagree, but that doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t be welcome to be a member of my church. My own view is that the biblical doctrine of creation is far richer than six-day creationism typically recognises.

I should add that, although I have degrees in Biology and Theology, I’m not writing for an academic audience. I’m writing as a church pastor whose primary interest is in opening up the Christian scriptures for everyone, regardless of their background, and to help them delight in the One to whom all the scriptures give witness (Luke 24:27). As I write, I have in my mind’s eye the faces of the people that I get to minister God’s Word to week in and week out. So, although I’ll be spending a lot of time looking at how we should understand the biblical account of creation in Genesis 1, my interest isn’t in merely helping us understand Genesis; I want us to live it.

Before becoming a church pastor, I was a secondary school teacher for thirteen years. Teaching (mainly secular) young people was a stimulating experience, and none more so during the years that I worked as a teacher of both sciences and religious studies. In so doing, I embodied the conviction that’s rooted in my faith as Christian. Christ is Lord of all. He is the integrative centre.[1]Consequently, there is no fundamental conflict between faith and science.

This was, in fact, the view held for centuries by most thinking people in the western world. They were guided by the assumption that the study of God’s words in Scripture and the study of God’s works in nature go together. Many years ago, I came across the following quote and it has become something of a “life statement” for me:

“To conclude, therefore, let no man … think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works …; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both.”

The quote is from Francis Bacon, one of the early architects of what we now call “the scientific method”, in his book Advancement of Learning. I stumbled on it in the preface of another, much more famous book where it’s quoted with approval, a book published in 1859 by a certain Mr Charles Darwin.

[1] A lovely idea expounded by the scientist-theologian Alister McGrath in his memoir Through a Glass Daily: Journeys through Science, Faith and Doubt (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2020). Oh, and also by Paul in the Bible, in places like Eph 1:10 and Col 1:15-20.