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Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? Paperback - November 4, 2008
Unknown Binding
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Denis Alexander
22 books15 followersEmeritus Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St Edmund's College, Cambridge, a molecular biologist and an author on science and religion. PhD in neurochemistry.
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November 18, 2024
A DETAILED DISCUSSION OF BOTH THE SCIENTIFIC AND THE BIBLICAL EVIDENCE
Authors Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight wrote in the Introduction of this 2017 book, “Like many evangelicals, I (Dennis) grew up in an environment that was suspicious of science in general, and openly hostile to evolution in particular. Yet I had a deep longing to be a scientist… Now I’m on the other side of the equation, teaching biology to undergraduates---many of whom, like me, come from an evangelical background. Like me, they’ve heard that evolution is evil and that they have to choose between the Bible and science. I wonder how many of their friends have already made that choice and aren’t in my class. How many of them, I wonder, might have become the next Francis Collins? And how many… upon realizing that the Sunday school flannel-board theology they learned as kids just isn’t up to the tack, will abandon their faith[?]… We as a community need to do better… One way is for us to do better is to learn… what modern evolutionary biology is really all about… then it’s time to have a careful look at Scripture, allow it to speak for itself without our cultural baggage… That is that this book is about, and it is a book I have wanted to write for a long time…as I pondered these things, in attended a BioLogos meeting … where Scot was one of the featured speakers… Scot had also been wrestling with these questions from a theological angle, and he was more than willing to add his voice to the conversation.” (Pg. ix-x)
Scot McKnight continues, “the question eventually comes to this: How do I, Scot, believe in Adam and Ever if I embrace some form of evolution? …When Dennis contacted me to ask if I would participate with him in a BioLogos grant project on the genome and Adam, I knew the time was ripe…. What follows in [this book] is a basic introduction to the science of evolution and genetics and how it impinges on the basic claim of many Christians: that you and I, and the rest of humans for all time, come from two solitary individuals, Adam and Eve. Genetics makes that claim impossible… But instead of leading me to hide behind the Bible or insult scientists, genetics sent me into the stacks of books in the library… and to ask yet again what Genesis 1-3 was all about … and how Jews and the earliest Christians understood ‘Adam’ when they said that name… [Or] did they think the way the ancients thought and offer to their world a brilliant vision of the nature and mission of humans in the world---all captured in that golden expression, the “image of God’?” (Pg. xi)
Venema notes, “Basilosaurids… are fully aquatic with only tiny hind limbs unconnected to the rest of the skeleton that cannot possibly have been used for locomotion… While we can’t tell if any of these species are direct ancestors of moder cetaceans, these extinct forms support the hy8pothesis that moder cetacean lineage passes through something Indohyus-like, to something Pakicetid-like, and so on through Ambulocetid- and Basilosaurid-like forms. In other words, given this fossil evidence, we have FAILED TO REJECT the hypothesis whales, dolphins, and porpoises descend from terrestrial, tetrapod ancestors.” (Pg. 17)
He states, “Let’s return to our example of the insulin gene and extend our comparison … to include three great apes. What we observe for this short segment is that the gorilla sequence is identical to that of the human except for one letter; the chimpanzee is identical except for three; and the orangutan is identical except for five… this level of identity far exceeds what is needed for functional insulin, and strongly supports the hypothesis that humans share a common ancestral population with great apes.” (Pg. 31)
He continues, “we also observe that humans and chimpanzees not only have nearly identical genomes, but that our genomes are organized in the same spatial pattern… there is no biological reason why this needs to be the case…and placing our genes into a different arrangement would be well within God’s creative abilities… what we observe, once again, is consistent with the hypothesis that the present-day human and chimpanzee genomes are slightly modified descendants of what was once the genome of a shared ancestral species.” (Pg. 33)
He suggests, “Similar to… whales, we cannot be certain that any of these [hominin] species is in fact a direct ancestor of present-day humans. What these species can show us, however, is the probable path of our actual lineage, since these species are at least close relatives of our ancestral line… What we see in the fossil record matches up with what we see in our DNA… humans are, biologically speaking, not new---we are the modified descendants of similar species that lived in the past.” (Pg. 59)
He critiques the arguments of Stephen Meyer: “In spite of Meyer’s objections, geneticists have determined numerous mechanisms by which new genes and new functions come into being… gene duplication and mutation can create a new gene with a new function… other mechanisms are known where gene sequences can be duplicated, broken apart, and rejoined into new combinations…” (Pg. 81)
Scot McKnight comments, “over time I encountered Christian scientists who informed me, sometimes off the record, that evolution was more or less how it happened and that they believed God guided that evolutionary process. Their testimony gave me more courage to listen to how science works and to wait on the evidence… I have to admit that the encounter with science made me wonder at times about what I had been taught, about what the Bible said… and… about whether traditional interpretations of Genesis 1-2 were perhaps well intended but misguided and in need of rethinking.” (Pg. 94-95)
He suggests, “We are challenged to listen once again to the Bible, to let the Bible be the Bible… in its interactive relationship with and ancient Near East. That is the most respectful, the most honest, and the most ‘prima scriptura’ approach I can think of.” (Pg. 112)
He states, “A contextual approach to reading Genesis 1-3 immediately establishes that the Adam and Eve of the Bible are a LITERARY Adam and Eve… part of a narrative designed to speak into a world that had similar and dissimilar narratives. Making use of this context does not mean that Adam and Eve are ‘fictional,’ and neither does it mean they are ‘historical’… Adam and Eve are literary---are part of a narrative that is designed to reveal how God wants his people to understand who humans are and what humans are called to do in God’s creation.” (Pg. 118)
He proposes, “The writers of Genesis were focused on … imaging God in this world. Adam and Eve were… ‘archetypal’ humans. That is, the primal couple is created to reveal what humans in general are assigned to do in God’s cosmic temple… Hence, they are presented as the imaging Adam and Eve, not… as the historical Adam and Eve.” (Pg. 145)
He argues, “if I were to offer a synthesis of the Adam of the Jewish traditions, it would be this: Adam is the paradigm or prototype or archetype of the choice between the path of obedience and that of disobedience, the path of Torah observance and that of breaking the commandments, the path of Wisdom and Mind and Logos and the path of sensory perceptions and pleasure and bodily desires. The Adam of the Jewish tradition is depicted very much as the MORAL Adam.” (Pg. 169)
He turns to Paul’s view of Adam: “It’s clear that Paul is not thinking biologically or genetically. Like … young-earth creationists---Paul believed in the Bible… he also considered the Bible to be in some ways ‘scientific,’ as he thought of science. Unlike these same conservative types of Christians today, he COULD not have and therefore DID not know better… I suspect Paul himself MAY have believed in [an ‘actual’ Adam], but he never explicitly says anything quite like that. I would contend that Paul, like the Jews of his day, would have thought that the LITERARY Adam and Eve were also the GENEALOGICAL Adam and Eve, and that as such they were persons in the history of Israel... But Paul does not anchor his gospel of redemption in the HISTORICAL Adam… Rather, Paul believed that Genesis set up the category and a trajectory of disobedience leading to sin that leads to death… Paul’s gospel does not require that definition of ‘historical’ Adam…” (Pg. 189)
In the Afterword by Daniel Harrell (a minister), he states, “Science does stretch biblical interpretations sometimes. In such times, we appeal to the ‘living and active’ nature of Scripture (Heb 4:12) for flexibility… As descended from Adam, we humans are natural-born sinners, wired for perversity and prone to do evil. Only a second Adam can rewrite human nature. Born in the likeness of Adam, we must be BORN AGAIN into the likeness of Christ. In Jesus we inherit a new nature.” (Pg, 195)
This book will appeal to Christians not tightly bound to a ‘young earth,’ ‘anti-evolution’ position.
Authors Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight wrote in the Introduction of this 2017 book, “Like many evangelicals, I (Dennis) grew up in an environment that was suspicious of science in general, and openly hostile to evolution in particular. Yet I had a deep longing to be a scientist… Now I’m on the other side of the equation, teaching biology to undergraduates---many of whom, like me, come from an evangelical background. Like me, they’ve heard that evolution is evil and that they have to choose between the Bible and science. I wonder how many of their friends have already made that choice and aren’t in my class. How many of them, I wonder, might have become the next Francis Collins? And how many… upon realizing that the Sunday school flannel-board theology they learned as kids just isn’t up to the tack, will abandon their faith[?]… We as a community need to do better… One way is for us to do better is to learn… what modern evolutionary biology is really all about… then it’s time to have a careful look at Scripture, allow it to speak for itself without our cultural baggage… That is that this book is about, and it is a book I have wanted to write for a long time…as I pondered these things, in attended a BioLogos meeting … where Scot was one of the featured speakers… Scot had also been wrestling with these questions from a theological angle, and he was more than willing to add his voice to the conversation.” (Pg. ix-x)
Scot McKnight continues, “the question eventually comes to this: How do I, Scot, believe in Adam and Ever if I embrace some form of evolution? …When Dennis contacted me to ask if I would participate with him in a BioLogos grant project on the genome and Adam, I knew the time was ripe…. What follows in [this book] is a basic introduction to the science of evolution and genetics and how it impinges on the basic claim of many Christians: that you and I, and the rest of humans for all time, come from two solitary individuals, Adam and Eve. Genetics makes that claim impossible… But instead of leading me to hide behind the Bible or insult scientists, genetics sent me into the stacks of books in the library… and to ask yet again what Genesis 1-3 was all about … and how Jews and the earliest Christians understood ‘Adam’ when they said that name… [Or] did they think the way the ancients thought and offer to their world a brilliant vision of the nature and mission of humans in the world---all captured in that golden expression, the “image of God’?” (Pg. xi)
Venema notes, “Basilosaurids… are fully aquatic with only tiny hind limbs unconnected to the rest of the skeleton that cannot possibly have been used for locomotion… While we can’t tell if any of these species are direct ancestors of moder cetaceans, these extinct forms support the hy8pothesis that moder cetacean lineage passes through something Indohyus-like, to something Pakicetid-like, and so on through Ambulocetid- and Basilosaurid-like forms. In other words, given this fossil evidence, we have FAILED TO REJECT the hypothesis whales, dolphins, and porpoises descend from terrestrial, tetrapod ancestors.” (Pg. 17)
He states, “Let’s return to our example of the insulin gene and extend our comparison … to include three great apes. What we observe for this short segment is that the gorilla sequence is identical to that of the human except for one letter; the chimpanzee is identical except for three; and the orangutan is identical except for five… this level of identity far exceeds what is needed for functional insulin, and strongly supports the hypothesis that humans share a common ancestral population with great apes.” (Pg. 31)
He continues, “we also observe that humans and chimpanzees not only have nearly identical genomes, but that our genomes are organized in the same spatial pattern… there is no biological reason why this needs to be the case…and placing our genes into a different arrangement would be well within God’s creative abilities… what we observe, once again, is consistent with the hypothesis that the present-day human and chimpanzee genomes are slightly modified descendants of what was once the genome of a shared ancestral species.” (Pg. 33)
He suggests, “Similar to… whales, we cannot be certain that any of these [hominin] species is in fact a direct ancestor of present-day humans. What these species can show us, however, is the probable path of our actual lineage, since these species are at least close relatives of our ancestral line… What we see in the fossil record matches up with what we see in our DNA… humans are, biologically speaking, not new---we are the modified descendants of similar species that lived in the past.” (Pg. 59)
He critiques the arguments of Stephen Meyer: “In spite of Meyer’s objections, geneticists have determined numerous mechanisms by which new genes and new functions come into being… gene duplication and mutation can create a new gene with a new function… other mechanisms are known where gene sequences can be duplicated, broken apart, and rejoined into new combinations…” (Pg. 81)
Scot McKnight comments, “over time I encountered Christian scientists who informed me, sometimes off the record, that evolution was more or less how it happened and that they believed God guided that evolutionary process. Their testimony gave me more courage to listen to how science works and to wait on the evidence… I have to admit that the encounter with science made me wonder at times about what I had been taught, about what the Bible said… and… about whether traditional interpretations of Genesis 1-2 were perhaps well intended but misguided and in need of rethinking.” (Pg. 94-95)
He suggests, “We are challenged to listen once again to the Bible, to let the Bible be the Bible… in its interactive relationship with and ancient Near East. That is the most respectful, the most honest, and the most ‘prima scriptura’ approach I can think of.” (Pg. 112)
He states, “A contextual approach to reading Genesis 1-3 immediately establishes that the Adam and Eve of the Bible are a LITERARY Adam and Eve… part of a narrative designed to speak into a world that had similar and dissimilar narratives. Making use of this context does not mean that Adam and Eve are ‘fictional,’ and neither does it mean they are ‘historical’… Adam and Eve are literary---are part of a narrative that is designed to reveal how God wants his people to understand who humans are and what humans are called to do in God’s creation.” (Pg. 118)
He proposes, “The writers of Genesis were focused on … imaging God in this world. Adam and Eve were… ‘archetypal’ humans. That is, the primal couple is created to reveal what humans in general are assigned to do in God’s cosmic temple… Hence, they are presented as the imaging Adam and Eve, not… as the historical Adam and Eve.” (Pg. 145)
He argues, “if I were to offer a synthesis of the Adam of the Jewish traditions, it would be this: Adam is the paradigm or prototype or archetype of the choice between the path of obedience and that of disobedience, the path of Torah observance and that of breaking the commandments, the path of Wisdom and Mind and Logos and the path of sensory perceptions and pleasure and bodily desires. The Adam of the Jewish tradition is depicted very much as the MORAL Adam.” (Pg. 169)
He turns to Paul’s view of Adam: “It’s clear that Paul is not thinking biologically or genetically. Like … young-earth creationists---Paul believed in the Bible… he also considered the Bible to be in some ways ‘scientific,’ as he thought of science. Unlike these same conservative types of Christians today, he COULD not have and therefore DID not know better… I suspect Paul himself MAY have believed in [an ‘actual’ Adam], but he never explicitly says anything quite like that. I would contend that Paul, like the Jews of his day, would have thought that the LITERARY Adam and Eve were also the GENEALOGICAL Adam and Eve, and that as such they were persons in the history of Israel... But Paul does not anchor his gospel of redemption in the HISTORICAL Adam… Rather, Paul believed that Genesis set up the category and a trajectory of disobedience leading to sin that leads to death… Paul’s gospel does not require that definition of ‘historical’ Adam…” (Pg. 189)
In the Afterword by Daniel Harrell (a minister), he states, “Science does stretch biblical interpretations sometimes. In such times, we appeal to the ‘living and active’ nature of Scripture (Heb 4:12) for flexibility… As descended from Adam, we humans are natural-born sinners, wired for perversity and prone to do evil. Only a second Adam can rewrite human nature. Born in the likeness of Adam, we must be BORN AGAIN into the likeness of Christ. In Jesus we inherit a new nature.” (Pg, 195)
This book will appeal to Christians not tightly bound to a ‘young earth,’ ‘anti-evolution’ position.
Displaying 1 of 1 review