Category Archives: Creation/evolution

Creation/Evolution 2- poets and butterflies

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The first poem of the Bible concerns the origin of the world- the sweep of creation from formless void to the teeming tangle of animals, vegetables and minerals that make up this wonderful place that we live in. And perhaps most of all, this poem concerns the place of men and women in the order of things – our position in the mind and heart of God, as he unfolds his masterpiece.

This poem of the origin of all life has been one of those battlegrounds that men have argued over for centuries. Modernity, in all its scientific and analytical rigour, pinned the poem to board like a butterfly, and for a while, seemed to destroy its shape by pulling it a part – by measuring its width and depth, and finding no industrial application. From this world view, the poem is an irrelevance – it has no value to our understanding. Like the butterfly, its beauty and simplicity are categorised and filed, at best as a decoration to ornament the progress and rise of mankind.

Some religious people still try to defend the words of the poem. They too have it in a glass case of their own. For them, it has become a sacred artifact. Its words are open for analysis, but only by those who have the looking glass of correct doctrine, and anything that appears to question its absolute truth must be challenged and nullified, lest the power of the words be stolen.

But poems, like butterflies, were never meant to be pinned to boards, or kept in cases – they need to fly. Perhaps the truth of a butterfly can be measured in terms of its constituent parts, but much more than this, we understand the essence of the creature in the light of an early summer day, flickering and dancing in and out of the flowers, seeking nectar and spreading pollen – its flight seeming both impossible and triumphant.

I believe that the poem of life that has been given to us in Genesis is true. I am not a scientist, or a theologian – I am a poet. For poets, truth is given not as a blue print, or a mathematical equation, although these things are wonderful and creative in their own right. Poems bring meaning and beauty in the abstract, in order to make clear the obvious. They are often far more concerned with the why questions than the what, or the how. Poets should have no fear of scientists, who speak a different language.

As for those of us who have faith in the Creator God, I think we should also have no fear as we read the poem of life from the beginning of Genesis. We do not need to defend, or to stand against the scientific community. It makes us look stupid. Think of those folk in an earlier age who found their world view challenged by those who said that the world was not flat, and that rather than the sun turning around the earth, in fact we seemed to orbit the sun. This was the theological dynamite of the medieval age, and as such, was an idea suppressed by the religious powers of the day.

But God is not defined or limited by science – His was the art that birthed the science in the first place!

Creation/evolution 1

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The-Creation-of-Adam-c1510-detail-Poster-C10027868.jpeg (JPEG Image, 400×321 pixels)

I am going to post a few articles around the issue of creation in the next couple of days. This one is by way of an introduction…

You can see the others in the series here and here and here.

I start with a disclaimer. I am no scientist. If you want to engage in a debate about quarks or details of the fossil record- go elsewhere! If you are like me, a Christian who has heard many hard opposing statements, and sometimes felt a little lost in the middle of it all, then you are welcome to join me for what I hope will be a gentle journey around the soft theological edges of the debate.

As far as I can understand things, Christians have taken (very roughly) one of the following positions within this debate.

1. Young-earth Creationists. People who believe that the Earth was created by God, in 6 days, and that the age of the earth can be calculated using the chronology of the Bible, to be about 7 thousand years old. They would cast doubt on any science that contradicts this, for example the fossil record, and claim that the only true interpretation is the biblical one. This position has found ascendancy in American fundamentalist circles.

2. Old earth Creationists. People who would accept the scientific evidence for an old earth, but not for biological evolution. Some would argue for a massive gap between the beginning of the earth, and the creation process, which they would still say took 6 days. Others point to Psalm 90:4, which seems to indicate that Gods reading of time is different to ours. They would suggest that each day might be seen to represent an ‘age’, and that this is consistent with a broad interpretation of the fossil record.

3. Process creationists. Many Christians feel quite satisfied that days=ages is quite consistent with an unfolding creation along evolutionary lines. They point to the way the first three days describe three stages of separation (light from dark, water above from water below, land from sea), leading to various environments, whereas the next three days describe a “filling”-the creation of things to inhabit the environments (lights, birds and fish, land animals and humans). Interestingly enough, this is not necessarily a new position. In AD 391 Augustine wrote a commentary on Genesis in which he said that the days of creation were not literal days but were a way for the writer to talk about the whole of creation. He was insistent that ‘No Christian would dare say that the narrative must not be taken in a figurative sense.’

Christians have struggled throughout church history with the problem of reconciling theology with unfolding scientific discovery. It seems that at times, the church encouraged and embraced science as revealing the awesome and glorious work of a Creator God, and at other times, suppressed information that was seen as heretical or contradictory to the current interpretation of Scripture. Western evangelical Christians have rolled up their sleeves and begun a similar battle in the name of defending the faith against the heretic Darwin, and all his disciples. Sympathetic scientists have been engaged, and the battle is fought in the hearts and minds of Christians and in the media, before a bemused general public.

In Christian circles, discussion about these apparent polar opposites is always going to be controversial. I am not trying to be provocative, but this discussion brought me into conflict with a close friend, in a way that surprised me, and it seemed that, in many ways, our discussion mirrored much of the debate present within evangelical Christian Churches.

But back to my ideological clash with my friend. It began with a group discussion about faith, which included several Christians, but also a couple of highly intelligent teenage lads. One of these lads thought of himself as an atheist. We sat on the shoreline of a small Hebredian island, and watched the stars come out in brilliant splendour. Conversation turned to the origin of all of this. However, the discussion soon became something of a theological battleground, although fortunately, our young atheist had left by then.

I later wrote an article about this, which I am going to reproduce here in parts. It became the basis for some hot e-mails between my friend and I. I reproduce it here for the following reasons;

  1. I believe that we do our faith, and our Creator, a disservice by propagating versions of the Creation story in a way that seeks to suppress and close down alternative understandings.
  2. I think that the Genesis story is wonderful and intended to bring light and life to those of us who read it. I do not think it is a scientific blue-print. I think it was inspired by a living God in his engagement with ancient primitive desert dwelling people.
  3. I think the way we apply the concept of truth in this matter is often flawed. We apply modernist propositional ideas of truth to ancient scriptures which have been understood in totally different ways by people of the Book in the intervening period.
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