I've come to believe that God used evolution and roughly 14 billion years to create the universe you and I experience today.
There. I feel better. Thanks, Uncle Sig. And sorry again, Aunt Martha. I'll be sure to keep my shoes off of your couch next time.
All kidding aside, I recognize that this topic will make some of my fellow believers uneasy. My encouragement to you is this: let it. I'm not out to make you uncomfortable, I just want you to put aside the comfort of your long-held beliefs in favor of letting your moral imagination wander a bit. If you don't like the trip, I'll return you shortly.
The rest of this post basically traces thematically my journey from young-earth Creationist to my present view. It's decidedly not a journey marked by deep scientific inquiry, though I've tried to understand that stuff as best I could. It has involved a fair amount of theology, but don't expect to see a bunch of Hebrew and Greek words here; I've never studied Hebrew and can only barely remember Greek. Nor will you find a pithy quotes from Tillich and Bultmann. What it really is, is the story of a regular guy trying to make sense of the natural world in a way that preserves his faith in Christ as redeemer. And, it's really not an argument for my position as much as it is a description of how I've come to the views I have.
An Inclination to Trust Science (and Scientists)
I'm kind of a frustrated researcher by nature. Well, not terribly frustrated - I'm interested in finance and economics and my job affords me plenty of opportunities to scratch & dig. Still, there's a part of me that would get a kick out of academic research. I read academic journals and papers in finance when I can, though sometimes the math gets overwhelming and I have to put them down. I have a few theories I'd like to explore; I should probably go back and beef up my math skills, but for now my involvement in that field mainly includes helping the short people living in my house with addition, division, and pre-algebra.
Even if I did have my math an statistics squared away, though, I couldn't just start writing about
my theories. Odds are pretty good that several aspects of what I consider to be my unique thinking have already been developed by people before me. One of the things that sticks out to me when I read a journal article is the way in which the authors first define who they are and where they're headed in the article, in terms of the work that's already been done in the field. Only then do the authors start unpacking the findings of their analysis.
If a paper is judged to be good enough to be included in a prestigious journal, it's done so by an editorial panel of academics, who also are researching in the field. This is what's known as the "peer review" process, and it helps to ensure that new ideas are vetted by the community of experts in that field. What it really does is ensure competition for the best field-advancing theories of the academy.
Intellectual competition doesn't guarantee correct conclusions. I'm sure natural scientists, like financial economists, have rusty paradigms that sometimes shift uneasily. But, for the most part, competition among an informed group of scientists ensures that the best ideas rise to the top. Not, perhaps, in the humanities: historians seem capable of constantly re-writing sagas to suit current fashion. But unlike in historical research, the field of evolutionary biology holds the promise of commercial and public health rewards. My doctor is uber-conservative about prescribing antibiotics because of a greater-than-Steve concern for mutating bacteria, for example.
Yes, I get that mutations within species are different than mutations leading to new species. But, to believe that researchers who are otherwise hemed in by the threat of making a career-ending dumb argument would also be complicit in a grand athiestic-materialist conspiracy seems, well, conspiratorial in itself.
If you've not yet read Francis Collins book,
The Language of God, do so. Collins is now director of the National Institutes of Health, but he won popular and academic acclaim as the leader of the Human Genome Project. A former athiest, Collins earned a Ph.D. from Yale (physical chemistry) and and M.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Collins's intellectual-spiritual experience helped me gain additional comfort in harmonizing well-tested scientific claims with my undeniable experiences of the divine. Also be sure to check out
The Biologos Foundation (started by Collins) for resources to integrate a thoroughly scientific understanding of the natural world with an authentic faith in the living, redeeming God of the Bible.
The Grand Canyon
I've been to the Grand Canyon four times. It's an amazing place - hiking down from North Rim to the Colorado river, you go through 5 different life zones and 3 of the 4 desert ecosystems found in North America. The north kaibab squirrel is a species unique to the north rim. The grand canyon rattlesnake is also unique to the area. I'm not much of a flora guy myself, but cactus flowers and agave plants always stop me in my tracks.
But it's the geology that gets me. The upper canyon wall is comprised mainly of alternating layers of sandstone, limestone, and shale. Each of those are sedimentary rocks, varying in density and the type of sediment: sandstone is self-explanatory, shale comes from mud, and limestone is mainly the calcium-carbonate shells of gajillions of little marine critters. If you ever get a chance to look at limestone up close, do it. My first childhood home was made of Bedford limestone. I remember looking at the rough sides of the stone as a kid and being fascinated with all of the tiny fossilized shells. It didn't hit me then that what I was looking at was actually the sediment of an ancient inland seabed. I just thought the fossils were really cool.
Sand, silt or mud, and limestone will each form in very different conditions. You might find sand at the edge of a sea, mud at the bottom of a different, murkier body of water, and calcium carbonate shells at the bottom of a sea. When I see those types of rock alternating in the Grand Canyon, I'm impressed first with how dramatically the conditions in that location would have had to change over the years to produce those types of strata.
Now it's possible that seeing many long cycles in the earth's upper crust is the wrong way to look at it. But as a friend of mine said of God's creative activity in the earth: "Well, it's either really old or he made it look that way." Why would God make something look like it took billions of years to form when it didn't? Sure, it's possible that we're wrong to see those processes in the rock strata, but on what basis should we conclude that?
Biblical Interpretation
I grew up in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS). That tradition is more theologically conservative than the larger Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), including in the area of Biblical interpretation. Christians vary widely in their views of Biblical authority. Some groups hold that the Bible is the collected stories of many ancient and wise people, who each experienced the Divine in their own ways. LCMS Lutherans (and many other Evangelical groups) hold a different view: they believe that the words of the Bible were communicated spiritually to the authors and are therefore not simply religiously similar accounts but are actually the words of God.
Let me just interject at this point to clarify where I stand: I believe the Bible to be God's word, not merely a collection of stories or fables. I do not support the doctrine of
Biblical inerrancy, though my objection to that position is on exegetical grounds; it's not because I see a lot of mistakes in the text. Through inerrancy, the Church has painted itself in a corner that's neither asked of us in, nor supported by, the text. Exegesis is a fancy word for methods of textual interpretation - more on that in a minute.
What I began to learn as I aged was that in my religious tradition, frequently a belief in inspiration was confused with a "plain sense" method of interpreting the Bible. But, really, they're quite different. I can say, for instance, that I believe God inspired the writing of Genesis without also believing that God created the world in six 24 hour days, and many conservative Christians would agree with me. But the larger interpretive question, the place where the exegetical rubber meets the road, is this: how do we know that we aren't brining 21st century western views to an ancient near eastern text throughout the whole of Genesis? At some point when you have time, read the first 11 Chapters of Genesis and then read some of the stories about Abraham in the chapters that follow immediately thereafter. Yes, the accounts of Abraham's life involve a lot of miracles, which may seem inaccessible to your modern experience, but they're also more precise with respect to relationships, geographic locations, chronology, and so forth. It strikes me that the emigration of Abram marked a change in the literary genre. In Genesis 12 we move from something like theologically-oriented pre-history to ancient history. When this first started to occur to me, I din't have that kind of clean distinction. Frankly, Genesis 1 - 11 just felt different to me than what followed.
In John Walton's
Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, I learned one reason why it felt different. The central purpose of the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 was not to communicate principals of the natural sciences nor to layout specific historical timelines, but to distinguish the Hebrew God from the numerous gods in other ancient near eastern cultures. The Hebrew God was above the creation, not a petty territorial deity obsessed with humans' actions. God was personal in a transcendent sort of way, not an anthropomorphism. God created order; he did not arise out of disorder. By the way, I should warn bookworms: this one is chocked with good stuff, but its almost a text on comparative religions and can be pretty dry.
When we read the story where God forms Adam in the dust and breathes life into his nostrils, why should we think that the plain sense of the text is the correct way to understand it? I've come to believe that this story, too, is a way of distinguishing God's interaction with his human creation from other near eastern views and it's central to a Christian interpretation of the created order: God's not made us to be his muses, his marionettes. He's called us out of the purely physical order by giving us his image, his spirit. Significantly, we hold moral accountability because of this image in a way that other primates do not, and certainly for purposes totally unlike the ones Sumerian, Egyptian, or Canaanite deities were thought to have created people.
Of course, understanding Genesis as primarily having a distinguishing theological purpose doesn't itself suggest that modern humans descended from earlier primates. It does, I think, open the door to potentialities of nature like evolution.
A More Thoroughly Worshipful Experience
Most of what you and I experience as physical reality isn't actually matter, but energy and laws. This is mind-blowing stuff and for the price of a few bucks, you should hire Gerald Schroder to guide you. In
The Hidden Face of God, Schroder digs way down to the cellular and sub-atomic levels of reality to describe the universe in truly awesome ways.
One example Schroder offers is of the electron and nulceus of the average atom. If you could blow the scale up to a point where the nucleus was roughly a sphere 4 inches in diameter, how far out would you imagine the electrons would be orbiting? 4 feet? 40 feet? 400 feet? Nope: 4 miles. Which means that most all of the physical reality you and I experience daily isn't really matter, but laws keeping that matter toghether. It gets worse: those electrons aren't tied to the nucleus, but some how they stay in orbit despite the fact that they're zipping around and around at roughly 25% of the speed of light. What keeps them from shooting off toward the moon or collapsing into the nucleus? Well, we don't know for sure, other than probably their charge. Weirder still: electrons aren't actually like little revolving planets, but are "probability waves" instead. In other words, they may only exist as energy which we're able to observe after they've been in a particular location.
If this makes your brain hurt, you're in good company - or at least you have me for company. I don't pretend to have anything other than the most basic concept of quantum physics, but this much I know: the universe functions - stays the same and changes - according to laws. Schroder refers to these laws as "wisdom." I tend to see them as also God's immancence. "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands?" Um, yeah, and he's way closer than you thought when you first sang that song.
As you move back out from subatomic particles to atoms, to molecules, to cells, to organisms, to ecosystems, to planets, to solar systems, galaxies, and the universe, and you start to picture what it must mean that the universe has - maybe - 100 million galaxies each comprised of 100 million stars, give or take, what reaction does that stir in you? That I would have a mind and awareness in this one little corner of a vast and old universe, comprised of energy and as yet unfathomable laws, brings me to worship. The vastness of space, the depth of time each force me to my knees. Just being moved to worship doesn't mean that what I believe is true, but it is a curious response.
The Problem of Evil
I think the theory of evolution takes a strong step toward settling the religious problem of evil. If you want help distinguishing between the philosophical problem of evil and the religious problem of evil, you should read John Feinberg's
The Many Faces of Evil. I'd just briefly point out that as I've begun to see my suffering and pain as parts the story of being called out from the purely material world and into a spiritual world where I bear God's image, I've taken great comfort in the depth of God's love and purposes. Pain still hurts, but I see it now in a very different context.
The Stakes
I'm concerned for the Church and our still pervasive denial of an old universe and evolution. I guess there are many reasons why someone might be concerned by these views. Let me conclude by offering a few that matter most to me.
First is the fact that disengaging with the real science that's being practiced doesn't do any of us any good. We'll become even more marginalized in society but worse yet, we'll become cut off from the wonders of God's creation. God continues to unfold the most amazing story ever in front of our eyes. I believe God is sharing with us this understanding of how he creates for our enjoyment. Let's not miss this opportunity.
Secondly, I'm concerned as a parent. As the story of evolution and the ancient universe grow clearer, I fear that if I nurture in my kids a simplistic faith, based on what knowledge I received, not on what I think God is actually doing, I'll set them up for disaffection and unbelief. Fundamentally, science (in my view) explains how God is doing those things he's doing. I don't want my kids to have a faith which is closed to God's possibilities.
Finally, if part of what it means to be human is that we reflect God's character through our minds, let's not put artificial, culturally conditioned boundaries on that opportunity. You may conclude that my reasons for believing in evolution and a very old universe are wrong, but make sure that you're doing it based on understanding - gained through wrestling in your mind with the data as best you can process it - not because it's part of a system that was handed to you.
