"One might say that whereas the Stoic and Josephus reason like contemporary advocates of Intelligent Design, inferring a supranatural power from the symmetries (or, in Josephus's case, the asymmetries) in nature, Jubilees and Philo speak of a self-revealing God who controls nature but is not readily or fully inferable from nature alone. If nothing else, this issues a caution about scientific arguments developed for or against the existence of God. For the God therewith affirmed or denied may not be the God of Abraham."
Inheriting Abraham, Jon D. Levenson, pg. 131 (emphasis added)
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A few weeks ago, I got a Facebook message from a conservative Christian friend who wanted to pick my brain on some religious issues we disagree about. As I skimmed the message before preparing to dig in and prepare my arguments, I noticed that there, nestled down in the middle of it, was a word I hadn't seen in a long time, a word my friend was applying to me: "evolutionist." As in, the opposite of a "creationist." And seeing the word gave me pause. Am I an evolutionist? And if so, how did I become one?
As a kid, I was never all that invested in a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. My parents were pastors (and not fundamentalist ones) so I heard too much exegesis and application of the Bible to really think that all of it could be understood from its plain sense alone. In particular, I never learned to think of the six days of creation in Genesis as a literal fact. For one thing, it seemed to conflict with what I knew from my books about dinosaurs and outer space; for another, I was well aware that there were people who thought of it and the rest of Genesis in non-literal terms.
I was, however, very invested in the idea of Creation, that God was the creator of the universe, of life, and especially of humanity. So I was open to persuasion on the matter of just how Genesis was to be interpreted. I remember being around eight years old and picking up a creation science book in my church's nursery/playroom, which was devoted almost entirely to providing evidence that people and dinosaurs co-existed. As a huge dinosaur fan I was, of course, totally blown away. Thanks in no small part to a dearth of critical thinking skills, I remained convinced for years that ancient legends about dragons were describing real encounters with dinosaurs. (Also, that the T. rex had sharp teeth for eating pineapples, not meat, because creation science.)
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| Wouldn't this be great? This would totally be great. |
While this conviction wore off eventually, a new one sprang up in its place. Sometime during my teenage years, I encountered Darwin's Black Box, a book by Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe. In the book, Behe lays out a case against the evolutionary origins of certain biological structures on the grounds of irreducible complexity; in essence, he argues that no one has been able to explain how these things arose by evolution, therefore, they didn't. Today I tend to think of this as the creationist version of Bill O'Reilly claiming that You Can't Explain how tides work,* but at the time I was enormously engaged by the idea that there was a real, live scientist (Behe is a biochemist) who had found physical proof of Creation.
Three things eventually changed my mind. The first was, of all things, Catholicism. As a student at a Catholic high school, I was subjected to various classes under the heading of "religion" (barf, amirite?), including a class on the Bible.** I learned in class that the position of the Catholic church was, surprisingly, that evolution is pretty legit. While I remained unconvinced, I was intrigued that Catholics took a less conservative position on the matter than many American Protestants.
The second thing was college. Not so much listening to professors extoll the virtues of evolutionary theory (though that played a small part), but having a chance to discuss my ideas with a friend who actually studied biology. I brought up irreducible complexity to her, wondering what her perspective would be, and she told me that it was not considered legitimate science! In fact, she had major issues with the way the arguments about it had been advanced, and thought that the whole Intelligent Design movement stood on extremely shaky ground.
I was shocked. I started researching Intelligent Design and Michael Behe in the college library, and I discovered that my friend was correct: irreducible complexity had been rejected and discredited as mainstream scientific theory. I was all set to do what humans normally do when confronted with evidence that contradicts a strongly held belief, namely, do everything I could to strengthen said belief. What stopped me was the third thing: another conversation.
I had started to dig in to defend my position on Intelligent Design, checking out library books and brooding about the issues at stake, when I happened into a conversation on the subject with one of my mentors at church. "What do you think about evolution?" I asked, preparing to hear him affirm my stance on the subject, or something like it. "It doesn't matter," he said. My mentor explained that he was a Christian, he believed in God, in Christ, in salvation and freedom from sin and death. The exact terms of how the world came to be were irrelevant to those beliefs; no theory of biology was going to do anything to confirm or refute his belief in a loving God, because that God stood outside of such things.
Thankfully, this broke my resolve, and I did not spend months, years, or a lifetime trying to use science to prove that God, or Creation, is a thing. What's more, today I can pursue any interest I may have in evolutionary biology or related fields, as I would not have been otherwise. Because of two conversations and a high school class, I can read Stephen Jay Gould or Steven Pinker with delight instead of tension or anger. Because a few people took the time to speak gently to me, I can get excited about new research into genetics or paleontology. Because I became an "evolutionist," I was set free.
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Like most liberal Christians, I love the Bible. I really love it. I spent all of last year reading it, and now I love it even more. But loving the Bible means taking it seriously; and taking it seriously means trying to read it as honestly as I can.
An honest reading of the Bible can reveal the truth of Creation and God's care for it, without insisting that the Bible has all the historical details of Creation. For me, an honest reading of the Bible includes research about the cultures it was written in and the historical events that took place during its composition. It includes hard thinking, praying, and discernment about what needs to be taken in its plain sense, at the literal level, and what has value on other levels. And that discernment should be based not on my instincts about what is right, but on external principles that can guide me and other Christians.
One of these principles is this: when interpreting the Bible, take into account what humans learn about our world through careful study. This includes not only the careful study of the natural world, which has yielded the theory of evolution, but also the study of human history, which has shown that some parts of the Bible record historical details accurately, and that others seem to have been written not to convey exact history, but messages about historical events or instructive stories about certain historical periods.
At the heart of this principle is Genesis 1, in which God creates the land and the sea, the sun and the moon, the plants and the animals—all of which God declares to be "good"—and last of all, God creates human beings, declaring the Creation that has been completed with them to be "very good." Creation is good, and humankind is good, and studying ourselves and Creation should also be good, because such study can tell us more about their origins in the ultimate Good. If we learn new facts from studying ourselves and our world, this principle implies, should they not be read as a complement to, rather than a contradiction of, the truths found in our Bibles?
*Okay, I confess that I actually think it's the creationist version of Insane Clown Posse asking F@#&ing Magnets, How Do They Work?, but I was uncomfortable saying so in the body of this post. Now you know, O footnote reader.
**This was actually a pretty good class, at least in terms of shaping my views of scripture going into adulthood: it was also the first place I encountered the documentary hypothesis and other historical criticism of the Bible.
Photos:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Huxley_-_Mans_Place_in_Nature.jpg
2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Largesttheropods_2.svg
3. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/vinothchandar/7696925948/
4. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/tfjensen/8056427807/
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