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The Christian Theology of Creation versus Atheist Criticisms and Creationism.
Or,
Why evolution supports the Gospel of Christ,
whereas the YEC position is theologically in error.
Introduction
Richard Dawkins considers that all Christians should be Young Earth Creationists by which he means that we should all take Genesis as literal rather than allegorical truth (the YEC position is that whatever the text says must be literally true). In my view both he and YEC proponents are seriously misreading and misinterpreting the Biblical texts. Strictly speaking an atheist has no grounds from which to argue that the universe somehow came into being for no reason; nor should the atheist be able to refute the basic Christian paradigm that the universe (and time as we understand it) was created for a reason by a non-natural creator Spirit. The atheist does however have good grounds for arguing against a parody (such as presented the YEC) of the Christian theology of creation. Quite apart from an impartial scientific view which in my view is almost totally adverse to this YEC position, I intend to show why I believe that the YEC position is theologically untenable. Why does this matter? I believe it matters because this YEC paradigm is essentially a modern phenomenon that is theologically in error and is currently destroying the ability of Christians to effectively reach their contemporaries with the glorious Gospel that God wants all humanity to enjoy.
YEC Science
It should be unnecessary to consider the apparent YEC scientific arguments seeking to support their young earth paradigm – an argument necessary to their position if we are to take Genesis literally: however since they take the science very seriously, I will briefly start here. First from an unbiased scientific view point, one doesn’t need to think any more deeply than a young child might, to see some of the results that follow from insisting that the Biblical text was always meant to be taken as literal truth (as if it had been directly dictated by God). The YEC position results in the belief (which sadly too many Christians still hold including some 40% of the USA population according to the polls) that the earth is a mere 5000 to 6000 years old.
Taking the Genesis text literally would mean that for example (assuming mountain Everest hasn’t risen significantly in 5000 years) Noah’s flood would have covered the earth to a depth of 5 miles above current sea levels. The earth’s surface area is approx. 510M km2 and the total volume of free water on earth is in the region of 1,500M km3 and to completely cover the earth’s surface would take an additional 4,500M km3 of water. So if we take the text of Genesis and Noah’s flood literally the question has to be faced as to where, three times as much water as exists in all the earth’s oceans, seas and icecaps today suddenly came from 5500 years ago and then disappeared again within 150 days? A YEC defence to this objection is to claim that before the flood the seas were shallower and the mountains not so high and that the balance of water that was required to submerse the pre-flood mountains was somehow stored under the earth’s surface.
However since the Genesis account tells us that the mountains essentially remained as they were (they were just submersed) it doesn’t take a student of physics to realise that however much hidden water there may have been, to raise the levels even by a few meters above their pre-flood equilibrium level so as to cover the pre-flood mountains would mean that either extra water or extra sub-ocean rock than previously existed would have to be created and then disappear again into thin air all within the 150 days that the flood lasted. (Suggesting the existence, instantaneous melting and refreezing within 150 days of mind-boggling massive icecaps can give no credence to such an account). Other YEC ‘evidence’ apparently relates to trying to compare a recent mini-canyon (about 100m depth) carved out of a soft deposit of volcanic ash by a single flood, with the Grand Canyon which is some 2,500m deep and carved out of very hard rock. And to claim that the Grand Canyon was quite easily carved out by the receding waters from Noah’s flood and that in less than two months!
A second example relates to DNA profiling which has proved beyond doubt that the first humans originated from Africa, whereas the Genesis text indicates that Adam and Eve originated in what is today central Iraq (unless one is prepared to claim that the Biblical names Tigris and Euphrates were African names for extinct rivers in the region of the Kalahari desert or Rift valley 5500 years ago). Not many people would consider it rational to attempt to explain these discrepancies other than by accepting that the text of Genesis just can’t be taken as literally true. Hence I believe that the YEC position is scientifically untenable and I suspect that YEC attempts to refute the modern understanding of the age of the earth is bound up with their theology that they believe is vitally dependent on a literal interpretation of the biblical texts.
True and False Theology
But enough of the science, I will now look at the Biblical theology and where I believe the YEC paradigm has gone wrong. Jesus tells us in Matthew to strive to ‘be perfect just as God is perfect.’ St Peter tells us, ‘In view of all this (God’s grace) make every effort to respond to God’s promises. Supplement your faith with generous moral excellence and moral excellence with knowledge; and knowledge with self-control and self-control with patient endurance and patient endurance with godliness, etc. (2 Pet.1 v5). I put it to you that this small sample of the NT teaching only makes rational sense if we understand that Christian theology calls for struggle and that struggle always was part of God’s purpose for us as human beings. And this I believe has always been the historical orthodox Christian position.
The Hebrews author tells us to ‘hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm…let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works.(Heb.10 v23)’. St Paul tells us to ‘Put to death our sinful nature and to put on Christ’ and he tells us in Eph.6 to ‘Be strong in the Lord … to put on all of God’s armour so that you will be able to stand firm against all strategies of the devil : for we are not fighting against flesh and blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, etc.’
A modern theology that suggests that the NT Biblical call for the human spirit to struggle spiritually is, or was, not part of God’s original purpose for us can’t be right: but such a theology is what the YEC position requires. The so called ‘fall of Adam’ which describes the incomplete, broken (and in Christian terms, sinful) human condition has been equated by a YEC proponent with the concept of ‘marred goodness’ of the human spirit. In other words the concept implies that the glass of the human spirit is half empty because at some mythical point in the past it lost its fullness, i.e., it lost its Christ-likeness. This concept of ‘marred goodness’ also gives the air that somehow it never was God’s purpose that we would need to strive for goodness and perfection, that striving to become Christ-like is somehow less than what God originally intended.
This notion is in my view quite misleading. I firmly believe the traditional Gospel that God is in Christ reaching out to rescue humanity from our humanly irredeemable situation of sin and helplessness: what I am trying to expose is the error of insisting (as YEC do) that this Gospel is dependent on the ‘fall of Adam’ being literally true. What I hope to show is that the glorious Gospel of God’s grace coming in Christ to rescue all creation and humanity into an eternal relationship of harmony and peace, is dependent not on the idea that the human glass needs to be re-filled, so much as that it needs to be completed.
I do not believe that the NT teaches that the ‘divine’ wine has been lost by a literal Adam (even if such a notion corresponds to how we may feel: e.g., when we lose our innocence as we grow up and make bad choices); nor that such a loss is met by God in Christ refilling what we originally lost in Adam. I believe the NT actually teaches that as part of God’s good creation, we are the way we are with all our faults, strengths and weaknesses, but endowed with a thirst for the divine wine that we can’t have except by receiving God’s grace poured out through Christ in love for us.
This NT notion derives from the OT, so let’s start with Genesis ch. 3 which is a picture given by God to help us understand the way we are. It was given to a people who were admittedly limited in their understanding of God and the universe, but nevertheless we can learn from it. In the story there is a ‘tree of life’ and a ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’. Adam and Eve were not forbidden to eat of the tree of life, they were only told not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The story teller indicates that though they could have eaten from the tree of life they didn’t actually do so - they went straight for the tree that was forbidden.
So the NT (Revelation 22) develops this picture (in another vision) telling us there is a ‘river of life’ flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb and on each side of the river is a ‘tree of life’ bearing twelve fruits and whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.
Now in Genesis Adam and Eve had been warned that if the ate from the forbidden tree they were sure to die: they did eat, but they hadn’t actually died (physically) as a result. Next we are told in Genesis that because Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree they would be banned from the ‘tree of life lest the live forever.’ The logic of this is that Adam and Eve were not created to automatically live for ever in the first place. Genesis never tells us that humans were created with immortal souls, that was Plato’s teaching which the Christian church later adopted!
Genesis 2 v.7 states that God ‘breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils and he became a living being (Nephesh in Hebrew) and according to Dr. J Collins, the same Hebrew word (Nephesh) is used in verse 19 for when God gave life to the animals, so clearly Genesis doesn’t give a life to humanity that is eternally different to that of the animals. What the story tells us is that God gave us a human personality that is made in the ‘image of God,’ i.e. although it is mortal, we nevertheless reflect the moral sense and ability for relationship that is inherent to our divine eternal creator God (nor does Genesis teach that humankind is necessarily unique in that).
So getting back to the ‘tree of life’ it seems that Genesis and Revelation are teaching us that God’s purpose is to give eternal life to those he chooses, viz, those who are offered the fruit of the tree to eat forever. It is God who has created us to be in relationship with himself and it is only through that relationship and God’s choosing that we will ever live eternally by God’s grace. This is backed up by the NT (1 Cor.15 v.45) where Paul tells us that Adam became a living person able to pass on his moral life, but Christ is a life giving spirit able to pass on to us his eternal life by God’s grace.
The state of humanity in all recorded history is more simply explained as the glass of the human spirit being only half full and it always being God’s purpose to perfect us, i.e., to make us Christ-like. Such a ‘half full’ explanation fits better with the NT notion of redemption than the ‘half empty’ concept. To argue that the Gospel is intended to correct our ‘marred goodness’ rather than intended to enable us towards our as yet ‘unattained perfection’ (or Christ-likeness) is in my view not right. It is I believe a misunderstanding of the OT concept of the so-called ‘fall of Adam and Eve’ and it turns NT Christian theology on its head. And this is sadly what I perceive Young Earth Creationists are doing, aided in part by Medieval theology that unwittingly draws on Plato!
St Paul’s Teaching
I now aim to demonstrate that Paul’s teaching in particular does not support the NEC arguments.
The Creationists argument goes something like this:
- The ‘doctrine of the Fall’ tells us that the sin of Adam and Eve brought about the fall of humanity from perfection and from God’s grace and so all of the created order was from then on no longer God’s perfect creation.
- Struggle and physical death can’t be part of a perfect creation and so the Genesis storey can’t be merely an allegory and it must be the literal truth.
- Since Genesis must be the literal truth, physical death was the result of Adam’s sin. And all the natural evils that we experience are also the result of Adam’s one sin! Evolution shows us that physical death and struggle existed long before the creation of Adam and Eve, therefore evolution must be wrong.
I disagree with this reasoning on two Biblical counts. First because it perceives that the Bible somehow supports a ‘glass half-emptied’ (marred goodness) understanding of the fall and of God’s grace, therefore YEC proponents feel the need to understand the creation story of the fall as quite literal. And so they surmise that evolutionary theory must be wrong and they are obliged to adopt the concept that their theology must trump all humanly observed evidence to the contrary. However the notion that Biblical theology must trump all evidence to the contrary is itself Biblically unsound since (in Proverbs) the Bible teaches us to study nature and derive spiritual lessons from the results of our studies. We can’t do that if we believe that our theology can never be blind and that it therefore trumps all the evidence to the contrary!
A second error they make is to suppose that the so called ‘Doctrine of the Fall’ (as commonly espoused in the Christian era),’ is a proper understanding Paul’s arguments (viz. in Romans ch.5 and in 1 Cor. ch.15). Although I decidedly hold that humanity is sinful, it is I believe because we are not yet completed by God’s grace: I do not believe that the common Christian doctrine of the fall resulting in so called ‘marred goodness’ necessarily derives from the NT teaching. Admittedly Paul argues from the Genesis story both in Romans and Corinthians, but the different points he is making are clearly not intended to be primarily to do with the fall of humanity. His Romans argument is fundamentally a glorification of the greatness of Christ compared to our first ancestors, and in Corinthians his primary argument is about the reality of the resurrection (both Christ’s and ours and that, in new bodies which clearly will inhabit a different physics to that of the currently created cosmos). In neither passage is Paul making any doctrine about the poison of human sin destroying our previous perfection or of the sin of Adam causing a fundamental shift in the presently created cosmos.
Far from it, Paul argues that the Gospel of Christ saves us from our inherent sinful tendencies. In the Romans passage Paul is primarily exalting in the superiority of Christ’s achievement for humanity in saving millions into eternal life with God, as contrasted with our first ancestors’ achievement of producing millions of unsaved spiritually dead people. In the Corinthians passage, he makes a very similar point, viz. that the natural human race can only reproduce temporal spiritually dead (viz., out of relationship) people, whereas Christ can and does produce through spiritual new birth and final resurrection a new eternal and perfected people by God’s continuing grace.
Paul is definitely not here or anywhere else propounding a so-called doctrine of the fall (as understood by the YEC), nor that physical death was the result of Adam’s sin. If one discounts the YEC paradigm that Adam brought about all physical death, then the resurrection of the new body that Paul talks about in I Corinthians is a glorious bonus that completes God’s eternal purpose of perfecting the saints. The passage does not have to be understood as requiring a merely spiritual resurrection for Paul’s theology to make sense and without the need of thinking that physical death resulted from the ‘fall of Adam’.
But if we were to suppose that I am wrong and that YEC proponents are right, then Paul’s analogy fundamentally fails. Paul would in effect be saying (which he is not saying) that Adam (and all the rest of humanity by inference) was more powerful than Christ because Adam’s sin brought down all of God’s supposed purpose of perfection (for both the natural world and for humanity) which, according to the YEC included procreation without any person or animal ever dying, whereas Christ’s achievement on the cross and in his resurrection has manifestly failed to reverse this globally mortal effect! No, no, no! Paul is not teaching or even implying this, which is why I believe the YEC teaching is not right!
Theology of Creation v. Atheism
Biblical theology should be teaching us that we are born into a temporal incomplete world but that God has a greater purpose namely to redeem us to a new and eternal relationship with God which starts here and now as we struggle with God’s help against the inevitable imperfection of a temporal creation. This understanding of Christianity challenges atheism not because it tries to bury its head in the sand of Young Earth Creationism, but because it tells us how the Gospel of Christ brings us into the final purpose of why the universe exists.
I believe that St. Paul’s teaching is fully compatible with evolutionary theory (which he was obviously unaware of) and quite incompatible with modern Creationist thinking. So I support the atheist who challenges Creationism (it is un-Biblical in my view), but I challenge the Atheist view of creation that is also un-Biblical! However I agree that Christians must not see the world as inherently bad, nor as totally good. It is God’s creation and therefore it is by definition good even if it is not perfect in our eyes; and it is far from perfect because it is deliberately created temporal and God intends us to struggle spiritually for perfection. He has given us Jesus Christ and His Spirit, first so that we can be in relationship with God and second so that we can successfully work to perfection with God’s enabling, and finally so that we have a guarantee of eternal life in new bodies of a kind that far exceeds our imaginings based on this physical universe. Christianity teaches that this process will be completed in a non-temporal but eternal universe.
What is meant by a ‘Good’ creation?
Another mistake that I believe YEC proponents make is to assume that God necessarily had to create a perfect universe for it to be good in God’s eyes. This again goes I believe the core of where they are in error. Who says that God has to create what we might conceive of as a perfect universe for it to be good? Can’t we say that a universe that God sees as good will be one that God sees as good for the purpose of saving to himself a people redeemed by Christ? Such a universe will allow for sin and will involve struggle and hardship and physical death, with the promise of help both now and of new life with God to come. I believe that such a universe is what we have and I believe to be the universe that God purposed and created! And I believe that such a view of the human glass being half full as against half emptied is supported by Scripture.
Conclusion
In my next essay I intend to show how God’s redemptive purposes for humanity are revealed in both the very nature of creation and in the revelation of God through Abraham and Israel and then ultimately in Jesus Christ. I will be employing the idiom of the science of evolution as we generally understand it today. God willing I hope to bring out the very same revelation of God’s utter love for all humanity in its ‘lost’ and broken state that emerges from the somewhat tortuous (though traditional) Christian theology that employs the idiom of the ‘doctrine of the fall’ derived from the Genesis account. And I hope to show how God’s redemptive purposes and redemptive actions have been and are being worked out by God’s Spirit through Jesus Christ.
However I trust in the subject essay that I have shown that a modern understanding of the ‘theory of evolution’ as applied to Christian theology can be supportive of the Christian Gospel of God’s grace redeeming lost humanity, whereas the modern YEC paradigm is theologically in error and as such undermines the very Gospel its proponents claim to protect.
