Monday Thoughts: Science and Faith

8.3 Creation
Christians throughout the centuries have affirmed that God created the universe. As the Apostle's Creed says, "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth." Since at least the 200's, Christians have also regularly affirmed that God created the world out of nothing. Christians seem to have forged this particular belief in argument with individuals called Gnostics. Gnostics believed matter was evil, perhaps even created by an evil spiritual power. In response, both Jews and Christians asserted that in fact God had created the world out of nothing.<1> If God created everything, including the substance of the universe, then Gnostics could not blame it for the evil in the world.

The conviction that God created the world out of nothing brings into perspective a number of other things that Christians have usually believed. For example, if God created the world out of nothing, God apparently does not need the world to exist. God existed at a point when no world was around. God is thus self-sufficient (God's "aseity").

Similarly, if God created the world out of nothing, then God presumably has as much "power" as God puts into the world. Christians have accordingly considered God to be all powerful (God's "omnipotence"). And since God does not have any materials to begin with, God must know everything made in every way. We thus say that God is all knowing (God's "omniscience"), although this line of argument only necessitates that God know all the possibilities of the creation.<2>

The Gnostics are not the only ones these last two thousand years who have brought challenges to the way Christians have viewed creation. For example, until the time of the Renaissance in the 1500's, Christians assumed that the earth stood at the center of the universe, with the heavenly realm where angels and Christ lived straight up and the dead below the earth. It thus went against the commonly held view of the universe for individuals like Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo to suggest that in fact the earth went around the sun (heliocentric universe) rather than the sun going around the earth (geocentric universe) as everyone had previously assumed.

[textbox--Philippians 2, the three storied universe, quote from Paradise Lost]

It is easy for us to dismiss this challenge to faith today as if it was nothing significant and Christians should not have been disturbed at the time. Indeed, the fact that the greatest opposition at the time came from the Roman Catholic Church makes it all the easier for Bible oriented Christians today to dismiss the issue. Yet is seems almost certain that if modern day fundamentalists had existed in the 1500's, they almost certainly would have joined the Roman Catholics against the heliocentric view of the universe.

[textbox, fundamentalist]

A fundamentalist is a Christian who reads the Bible not with a view to what its books meant when they were written, but as a book whose words apply directly and literally to our world today. A fundamentalist might deny that any distinction between the two exists, that what the Bible meant to the ancients is the same as what it means today. This view is difficult to hold the more one studies the ancient world and reads the Bible in that light.

Those who critique the fundamentalist approach would say that the result is a blurring of the ancient world with the modern world. On the one hand, the fundamentalist reads the Bible in the light of modern science. For example, a fundamentalist might see a globe when Isaiah only speaks of the "circle of the earth." An ancient might merely have pictured a two-dimensional circle. It is possible that fundamentalists inappropriately hear modern scientific categories in the text of the Bible where none were intended.

On the other hand, it is also possible that fundamentalists at times bring aspects of ancient culture inappropriately into the modern world. For example, fundamentalists tend to limit the roles that women can play in the church and society. They do so because they are applying ancient biblical material from extremely "patriarchal" cultures directly to today (and at the same time ignoring very positive teaching on women in the Bible). We can at least ask, however, whether the good news of Christ plays out a little differently in our world than it did two thousand years ago in completely male dominated cultures.

Fundamentalists often seem inconsistent in their application of Scripture because they do not take such differences into account. If they are going to prohibit women from pastoring, for example, why do they not prohibit them from teaching any males in any context, including college classes?<3> They question changes that currently face them in modern culture, but do not realize how much change from biblical times has already taken place. It is for this reason that we suggest they would have opposed the idea that the earth goes around the sun if they had existed as a group in the 1500's.

Another challenge to Christian views of creation has come from voices that have seen the world either as God (pantheism) or the world as a part of God (panentheism). Since neither of these views rest on scientific evidence, neither has really brought about any substantial change to historic Christian views of creation. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), who was Jewish rather than Christian, was perhaps the earliest person to suggest that we should identify God with the world. As a result he was "excommunicated" from the Jewish community in Amsterdam.

Panentheism is a more recent version of this approach to creation in which the world does not completely make up God, as it did for Spinoza. Rather the world is a part of God, perhaps something like God's body. Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) popularized the term when he developed an approach to God called process theology. Unlike historic Christianity, which sees God's nature as unchanging, process theology sees God's nature changing in interaction with an evolving world.<4>

[textbox: pantheism, panentheism, process theology]

Process theology brings up the most recent challenge to traditional Christian views of creation, namely, evolution. On the most basic level, evolution is the idea that complex organisms have developed or evolved from less complicated organisms over time. Charles Darwin (1809-82) suggested, for example, that all the different finches he observed in the Galapagos islands had developed from a common finch-like ancestor over time.

Darwin did not have an explanation for how this variety might have come about in the first place. But he did have a suggestion for how some types ended up on one island and other types on other islands. His suggestion was called natural selection or survival of the fittest. Once the variety existed, some birds were better equipped to survive on some islands than on others, perhaps they had just the right beaks for the particular food on that island. Over time, then, the better equipped birds on that island--the "fittest"--came to dominate there.

The example of the peppered moth in England is often given as an example of this process of natural selection. Before the Industrial Revolution, before high amounts of soot were introduced into England's atmosphere, light moths tended to prosper. The darker or peppered moths tended to be a much smaller population if for no other reason than they stood out and birds could see them better. But after the Industrial Revolution, trees darkened from the soot and the peppered moth population flourished, while the lighter type moth dropped off sharply in population.

[textbox: micro-evolution, macro-evolution, natural selection]

On the one hand, this level of "evolution" does not seem problematic, especially since it is common sense. It is sometimes called micro-evolution, and Christian scientists of all stripes have no problem with it. However, Darwin suggested that this process had taken place from the first life all the way to humanity, macro-evolution, and it is here that the potential challenge to Christianity has ensued.

While Darwin could explain survival of the fittest, he had no good explanation for how the fittest came into existence in the first place. This piece of the puzzle was added later by neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism suggests that mutation occasionally produces a "fitter" form of an organism that eventually wins out over the earlier form of that organism. The vast majority of mutations, small changes to our genetic structure, are harmful.

But Christian scientists of all stripes would agree that mutations do occasionally benefit an organism, particularly when we are talking about micro-organisms. One of the reasons that certain medicines stop working over time is because some mutated form of a virus or bacteria proves itself resistant. Over time, the old medicine kills off all the earlier forms, leaving the drug-resistant form to flourish.

[neo-Darwinism, mutation]

It is beyond the scope of this book to engage in Christian debates over the science of macro-evolution. Over the last few decades, a significant literature has emerged against it by scientific creationists and more recently, those who hold to intelligent design theory. The former group marshalled biologists, geologists, and other scientists to argue for a young earth whose complexion is best explained on the basis of catastrophes like the biblical Flood. Their model of the earth's geology is called catastrophism, as opposed to the uniformitarianism of Darwinism. Uniformitarianism assumes that the earth's geology has resulted from the same slow processes we observe today, just over billions of years.

[textbox: scientific creationism, intelligent design theory, catastrophism, uniformitaritanism]

Intelligent design theory takes a slightly different tactic. It suggests that certain aspects of life reflect an "irreducible complexity" that could not have evolved. They attempt to demonstrate that the evolution of certain things like proteins is a mathematical impossibility by chance because they are so complex. Unless they were designed, we cannot account for their existence.

At the same time, the evolutionary community has not stood still either. Many evolutionists no longer hold to the uniformitarinism of Darwinism and suggest now that the most radical phases of evolution may take place quickly in various spurts. This process is sometimes called spontaneous equilibrium.

Again, our purpose is not to examine the science involved. We can refer to a body of Christian scientific literature that makes scientific arguments against macro-evolution.<4> At the same time, some Christian scientists argue for theistic evolution, the idea that God directed the evolutionary process.<5>

We might briefly mention the biblical texts that most come into play in such debates. The first is obviously Genesis 1, which presents creation in terms of seven "days." Theistic evolutionists take such language as poetry rather than a straightforward description. Perhaps the days represent ages of history, they might say. At the same time, fundamentalist interpreters put a high premium on taking the days as literal 24 hour days, since they presume the Bible speaks in the language of modern science. Similarly, when Genesis says God made everything "after its kind," this description is taken to preclude evolution between species.

The greatest difficulty with evolution from an orthodox Christian perspective is not, however, Genesis 1. A close reading of Genesis 1 shows that the fundamentalist has not actually read the text literally him or herself. For example, Genesis 1 never explicitly mentions the creation of the primordial waters--they are there before God begins creating on Day 1 in verse 3. Also, God divides the primordial waters on Day 2 in verse 6. On Day 4, God appears to place the sun, moon, and stars in this space between the waters (verse 14).

In short, God unsurprisingly seems to have revealed Genesis 1 in terms that communicated well to those for whom it was first written. By the same token, it is quite possible that the fundamentalist does violence to the text when he or she tries to force it to speak in the categories of modern science.

The place where evolution is difficult from a Christian point of view is not with Genesis 1 but with Romans 5. In Romans 5, Paul tells the Romans that death entered the world through sin, through the sin of Adam in particular. Yet evolution requires lots and lots of death to take place before Adam. If Romans is referring to physical death, then evolution could not have functioned before him.

What is non-negotiable for the historic Christian is that God created the universe and has all power and knowledge of it. Further God is involved in the world and through Christ will eventually set right everything that is wrong in it. Within these boundaries, we find some variety of perspective among faithful Christians.

<1> Christians ever since have generally heard the idea of creation out of nothing in biblical texts like Genesis 1:1-2 and Hebrews 11:3.

<2> As we will briefly discuss in chapter 10, the idea that God knows every possible outcome in addition to every actual outcome is called "middle knowledge" or Molinism.

<3> The operative passage in question is 1 Timothy 2:12-15--"I do not allow a woman to teach or have authority over a man."

<4> Process theology is not the same as Open Theism. In process theology, God's nature changes. In Open Theism, God intentionally limits His knowledge so that humans can have free will.

<5>Scientific Creationism, Behe...

<6>Kenneth B.