Or, The Evolution of Our Discontent
Scripture: Genesis 1:1-31
Date: March 22, 2015
Speaker: Sean Higgins
Or, How Genesis One Shoots Holes in the Story of Theistic Evolution
The subtitle for this message is “the evolution of our discontent” which is a riff on John Steinbeck (his novel, The Winter of Our Discontent) riffing on William Shakespeare (his play, Richard III). This is the headache of evolution: it leaves us no one to thank! When there is no God of creation that means that there is no gift in creation and no gratitude for it. If evolution is the way, then of course we’re not content with what we have, with where we are, with who we are. We’ve got to get better. Whatever we know today is not enough; it can’t possibly be full-grown. Who knows what stage of development we’re stuck in for this phase of millions of years? The more evolved we get, the more sophisticated awareness we have of where we’ve come from, the more discontent we must be about how far there could be to do. And there is no hope that we will get there. We’ll be dead.
There is another possible story. According to Genesis, the universe was launched in an instant, due to the initiating, intelligent, omnipotent, creative work of Elohim. In the first verse of the Bible our beliefs are framed about God, the one God, the only eternal God, the God who is distinct from, yet involved with His creation. He created time, space, and substance out of nothing. As quickly as the second verse in the Bible, amidst this new and vast universe, God elected the earth to show His favor. Genesis 1:2 describes the earth’s early condition, setting the scene for a week’s worth of forming and filling so that man could live on His planet.
I emphasize the word week because it seems that a very small minority believe there was only one, 24-7 week in Genesis chapter one, and few believe that God created tout de suite. The majority I’m concerned about most are not those who reject the Bible altogether. A person who doesn’t believe in God and who has no commitment to Scripture certainly won’t hitch their wagon to the creation account. Naturalistic evolution, that is, the belief that life developed apart from God, presumably the result of a big bang, using the formula “nothing times no one equals everything,” is not the problem (besides the fact that it is clearly ruled out by Genesis 1:1). Most scientists no longer want to admit that they depend on that theory anyway.
I am concerned with those who desire to reconcile Scripture with science, specifically those who want to squeeze the millions of years required by the evolutionary theory into the Genesis one story. The drag is with professing Christians, those who believe in God, those who affirm allegiance to the Bible, who still struggle to cram a version of evolution into creation.
There are different definitions of evolution. Someone might use “evolved” simply as a synonym for progress. “The building plans really evolved since the first meeting.” That use of the word is benign, even if it sounds scary. When it comes to the origins of life, evolution could refer to macro evolution, often called universal common descent, or to micro evolution, also called limited common descent.
Limited common descent discerns variation and development within species. In the Garden of Eden—as well as on the ark—were not every type of dog (dobermans, bulldogs, poodles, etc.) but a number of dogs (however many there may have been) within whose genetic patterns included a range of forms that appeared over time.
Universal common descent argues that everything came from one thing. All of the complex organisms gradually developed from simple ones. This is usually the meaning of evolution in science classes. It’s what I was taught. It has the best pictures and heroic glory.
There are professing Christians who want God to get the credit for evolution. They believe that He created using the universal common descent model and controlled each step of incremental mutations. Most who desire to reconcile science (granting for the sake of argument that evolution can even be considered “science”) with Scripture call themselves theistic evolutionists or progressive creationists, but both of those approaches make a similar scrambled mess of exegesis. Those persons want to keep both science and the Bible, so they look for ways to fit evolution into God’s design.
I don’t remember this being a popular position when I went to public high school. Back in the day, you were on one side or the other. You either believed God and the Bible and creation, or there was no god at all and the Bible was stupid and evolution was scientific fact.
Yet theistic evolution appears to be the common, Christian way of thinking today. By far, the majority of Genesis commentaries I’ve read presume theistic evolution to be the proper interpretation of the chapter. Even in the comment thread on my blog a loyal reader wanted to “leave the door open” for God’s work through evolution, even suggesting that theistic evolution gives God more glory.
As I said before, I’m most interested in addressing Christians. Pure materialistic, atheistic, macro-evolutionists are addressed by some of these observations but their contentions barricade the street at a previous junction. But for Christians who recognize the authority of the Bible and who desire to recognize the observations of science, we want them to see that the form and content of Genesis one do not fit with the evolutionary puzzle.
What can you say to those who want God as the evolution mover? There are at least six or seven bullets from Genesis chapter one alone that shoot holes in the story of macro evolution, over six days or over millions of years, and prove it unbiblical. There are other biblical and scientific evidences available to the Christian apologist. But mathematical formulas about DNA strands or cracks in the fossil record are not as convenient or authoritative as a well-reading of the story itself. I want believers to be able to take anyone to Genesis one and show that God Himself says He didn’t create via evolution.
The bulk of the book of Genesis is in the narrative genre. “Narratives are stories, purposeful stores retelling the historical events of the past, that are intended for a given people in the present” (Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 90). Moses is telling a story, but it is a non-fiction story, an historical record of actual events at specific times in particular places with real characters.
Nothing in Genesis smacks of myth or fable with fanciful, fictional events. There are no potions, no princesses, and no magical golden coins (even though things get weird in chapter six). Instead, this is a matter of fact account. Even if Genesis one were considered poetry, as a few current scholars suggest, that wouldn’t change its truthfulness. I think Genesis one is prose but would poetry make it fantasy? The Psalms are poetic and they aren’t make-believe.
If Genesis one does not describe real events and real days, when does the pretend story stop? If chapter one is figurative or analogous, then reality can’t start until at least after chapter three, after the story of the fall, of Adam’s sin, and the coming of death. Evolution demands death, the “survival of the fittest,” creatures evolving in order to survive harsh environments and predators. For evolution to take place, death must have also been occurring during those millions of years in the first chatper. So at least the first three chapters of Genesis are untrustworthy.
When can we start depending on the straight stuff? Is the flood an analogy? The Tower of Babel? God’s blessing to Abram? The Exodus? If Moses isn’t (always) reporting actuality, and since he gives no indication of switching back and forth between what’s figurative and what’s fact, then he is a great deceiver, and by implication, none of Scripture can be trusted. The truth is, theistic evolution doesn’t stand in light of the narrative genre.
Every verse in Genesis one (except for verse 1) begins with the conjunction “and.” This is one example where the ESV sacrifices for the sake of readability, translating some of the verses in chapter one with “and” or “then” or “so,” but not all of them. The NASB uses it a few times, though the NKJV uses “then” many times and the KJV includes “and” every time. For the curious, the Hebrew conjunction is the same vav (or waw) that begins each verse.
Moses doesn’t skip through the story, he moves step-by-step, directly from one work to the next and from one day to the next. Not only are his readers intended to feel the immediacy of the progression, Moses leaves no empty space for long, indefinite periods of time. We go to bed, so to speak, and there’s more creative work by God the very next morning.
The immediacy of movement in the form of the story is one piece of evidence, but perhaps even more conclusive is that the sequence of evolution is contrary to the order of creation in Genesis one. The form and the content of Genesis one contradict evolution. For example, Moses describes the creation of vegetation on the third day (the third “age” according to most progressive creationists), the creation of birds and fish on the fifth day, and the creation of animals and insects on the sixth day.
Evolution, however, supposes that the sequence started with simple cells (prokaryotes, 3 billion or so years ago), that gradually developed into to complex cells (eukaryotes, 2 billion years ago), then into multicellular life (1 billion years ago), to simple animals (600 million years ago), to fish (500 million years ago), to land plants (475 million years ago), then to insects and seeds (400 million years ago), to reptiles (300 million years ago), to mammals (200 million years ago), to birds (150 million years ago), to flowers (130 million years ago), then to primates (60 million years ago), finally to modern humans (200,000 years ago). This rough timeline is according to the Wikipedia entry which may or may not be every evolutionists’ preferred arrangement.
That means that even if God did use evolution to form and fill the earth, the sequence of development is off. Genesis one describes plants and trees and seed before anything with the breath of life. Fish and birds came before all animals and insects.
Maybe Moses jumped around, but that seems unlikely in light of the genre and the flow of thought. The crux of the matter is that the creation account, as it’s told in Genesis, can’t be made to correspond with the evolutionary chronology.
Seven of the eight creative acts in Genesis one include a follow up phrase of immediate fulfillment.
God said it and it was done. No time passes. No development or struggle or evolution is discussed. God commanded by His word and the creation was completed without extended interval. The repetition of and it was so is a rhetoric device that demonstrates God’s power to create instantaneously, and rules out small, gradual adaptations over indefinite ages.
All three bullets I’ve mentioned so far come from observation of the biblical story itself. In order to earn tempered mockery, or only postponed mockery, of the world, we lose the soul of our story. We have seen three observations that challenge theistic evolution with three or four more to come.
Henry Morris asks:
If the reader asks himself this question: “Suppose the writer of Genesis wished to teach his readers that all things were created and made in six literal days, then what words would he use to best convey this thought?” he would have to answer that the writer would have used the actual words in Genesis 1. If he wished to convey the idea of long geological ages, however, he surely could have done it far more clearly and effectively in other words than those in which he selected. (The Genesis Record, 54)
In other words, could Moses have written the story in any other way that would have been more beyond doubt that he was referring to six 24 hour days? If the assignment had been to leave open the possibility of evolution in chapter one, Moses failed.
No matter how a person might attempt to fit evolution into Genesis by saying that God is responsible for it, he still must deny the Bible on some level. Either Scripture or “science” is wrong. We cannot eat evolution cake with Genesis one icing.
Our belief in a literal six-day creation is built and framed by revelation. But belief in God’s Word is not the same thing as belief based on never seen, never proven guesswork. Those are blind beliefs, nothing better than stabs in the dark. God’s Word, on the other hand, is light in the darkness. The biblical account of creation is night and day from theistic evolution.