WHAT SHOULD WE BELIEVE ABOUT CREATION? PART 3 Andrew Sampson

PART 3: TWO STORIES OF ORIGINS

We’ve now reached the point where we can compare the biblical story of origins with its modern, scientific counterpart.

The task is complicated a little by the fact that the Bible doesn’t include one story of origins, but two. The first, in Genesis 1:1-2:3, adopts a sort of wide-angle lens: its concern is with the formation of the cosmos and with the whole of humanity. The second, in Genesis 2:4-25, focuses on what happens in a particular place with a particular man and woman.

As I said in my first post, my interest in these articles is with the first of these two creation accounts. For simplicity, I’ll refer simply to this account as “Genesis 1”. There are two reasons for focusing on the first creation story. Firstly, when I teach in Theology Matters, there simply isn’t time to look in depth at all the biblical material on creation. Secondly, over the years, most of the controversy about creation and evolution has centred on Genesis 1, so it’s especially important to take the time to make sure that we’ve understood this text correctly. 

Most people understand that modern science tells a very different story of origins to the one that’s found in Genesis 1. It’s important for Christians to be familiar with that story and to be able to represent it accurately (this is especially important if we intend to argue against it. It does our faith no favours if the target of our attack is a “straw man”). Part of the scientific story of origins is beautifully told in a documentary produced several years ago by the BBC called Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life. While this telling of the scientific account of origins doesn’t literally start “in the beginning” like Genesis 1, it’s well worth a look.

What are the main points of contention between our two origin stories – the ancient Genesis 1 account and the modern evolutionary account? Here are a few (you may think of more):

The first and most obvious difference between the stories is the fact that, in Genesis 1, everything that exists is attributed to God whereas God is entirely absent from the evolutionary account of origins. One of the key features of Darwin’s theory of evolution was the discovery of what he called the “law of natural selection”, a way of explaining life in all its complexity and diversity that doesn’t make any reference to God.

Secondly, where Genesis 1 teaches that humans are a unique and special creation – made “in God’s image” (1:26-27) – the evolutionary account of origins says that humans are an evolved species and simply one branch on the tree of life.

A third issue concerns the age of the earth. A literal reading of Genesis 1 says that God created everything in six twenty-four hour days. Applying that same interpretive framework to the Book of Genesis more broadly suggests that the earth is no more than about 10,000 years old (or perhaps a bit older, depending on how you do the maths). An evolutionary account of origins, by contrast, requires tens of millions of years.

The fourth issue concerns the repeated message in Genesis 1, “God saw that it was good”. Putting the first creation account next to the second story in Genesis 2 and 3, many have taken this statement to mean that, in the beginning, there was no physical death in God’s creation. Yet, the evolutionary account requires death to have been present from the beginning. Indeed, Darwin argued that the (selective) death of countless individuals is the very means by which species evolve over time.

These are the main points of disagreement between our two stories of origins, but how deep does the disagreement go? Without going into detail at this stage, it should be clear that any suggestion of conflict between the two accounts rests on some assumptions, and like all assumptions, they’re open to question:

i)               I’ve previously introduced the idea that it’s logically suspect to assume that belief in divine creation necessarily precludes belief in a natural process like evolution.

ii)             The idea that human uniqueness in Genesis 1 has to do with our separate material origins vis-à-vis the rest of nature is not spelled out in the text.

iii)            The age of the earth is a clear point of contention between our two accounts if we take a literal reading of the Book of Genesis. But is this how Genesis is meant to be understood?

iv)            The idea that the “goodness” of creation is to be equated with “perfection” is also open to question.

Of course, there’s a lot more that could be said about each of these points but, putting them together, it does at least leave open the possibility that talk of “conflict” between our two stories of origins is overblown.