It's Impossible To Love The Truth And Deny Evolution: Part VII - On Interpreting Scripture

 

In recent articles, I've talked about the undeniable evidence for evolution over billions of years, and I did so to encourage Christians to come together and love the truth and elegance of evolution. Here I’d like to pay attention to what is perhaps the main reason that some Christians are creationist - taking the Bible too literally in the places when other interpretations are more accurate and enriching. Some of the most powerful truths the Bible conveys are far beyond the mere literal interpretations of the creationists. The Bible verses are not always literal, but they are always true, and that is the key distinction.

One of the most powerful methods of storytelling is through metaphors and analogies. And what I want to show in this article is that metaphors and analogies are more than just stories conveying simple truths; they are intricately woven into the very fabric of what mind is. It is no wonder that God used the powerful metaphor of marriage to speak of our relationship with Him. The central narrative – that God emptied Himself by coming into nature to incorporate Himself on our journey - is itself both literal and metaphorical; it is literally true because the person of Christ lived as a man, and it is metaphorically true because it infuses an abstract metaphysical power into the entire human history, making the journey and the destination a real tangible goal for every one of us

Let me suggest how we can manage our reading of the Old Testament and conceptually demarcate our history from our non-history - a suggestion that points to a few truths that are bound to seem utterly strange to a post-Enlightenment person steeped in the logic of the Greeks and the empiricism of Bacon, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Part of the understanding required is the understanding that in ancient traditions, particularly oral traditions, the narrative being conveyed is a blend of fact and fiction, where profound truths are disseminated in a way that requires interpretative qualities beyond the headlights of the kind of rigorous historical and scientific analysis we moderns are used to. Given that life itself is so richly analogical, metaphorical and narrative-laden, it is no wonder that we are insistent that a deep understanding of the Bible won't come to anyone who trivialises its dynamic nature and is blind to its analogical, metaphorical and narrative-laden power.

Old Testament figures like Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, Saul, Job, Jonah, David and Solomon are such an agglomeration of history, myth, legend, analogy, metaphor and theological aetiology that we can't hope to pin them down to simple historical/non-historical analyses. That's not to treat them all the same, of course - there are evidently different extents to which the above applies to Adam, Jonah and Job than, say, David and Solomon. What's clear, though, is that while God 'breathed' His influence onto the writing of scripture over the many centuries of its composition, He allowed His word to be subjected to the limitations of creation, and for the narrative to be absorbed into a blend of the literal and non-literal in order to convey the power of the gospel of grace. These Old Testament stories are so psychologically deep and theologically complex that it's not even possible to justifiably approach them through a simple binary literal or non-literal lens of analysis.

The writer of Genesis would have been a significantly different person to any kind of person a contemporary person living in the post-scientific revolution era would have ever encountered. The writer of Genesis would have no apprehension of a global concept, or the size of the world, solar system or universe; he’d have no concept of what a billion is, and no experience of prescribed philosophical investigations or formal empirical procedures associated with the science of the past few hundred years. And it’s highly likely, given what we know of the formal development of human thought over the past two and a half millennia, that he wouldn’t even understand what modern people are probing when they debate whether the Genesis 1 text should be taken literally or not. The concept of demarcating recorded literal history from symbolic theological expressions would be alien to the man who wrote Genesis 1, and to the New Testament figures too, which is why, when Jesus talks about Adam, He is speaking theologically in a way that the audience of the day would understand. When talking about Adam, Noah, Jacob, Jonah, Abraham, etc Jesus is talking about such deep and profound truths, so far transcendent of actual historical events, that those speaking about them in scripture would be quite aghast at how far many modern people had departed from its tenor in applying banal scientific metrics to the literalism text.

It's obvious why we don't need the story of Adam and Eve to be literally true to understand its real meaning of ourselves in relation to God. Literalists insists on reading Genesis 1 to be 6 x 24 hour days, but when we get to Genesis 3, they suddenly stop reading that literally, because if read literally then only the serpent, Adam and Eve receive some consequences for their actions, not the rest of humankind. To see the story of the fall as being about human sin, you have to extend beyond the purely literal. The literal story of two humans and a snake sinning in a garden and everyone else becomes cursed because of it is beyond silly unless we give it its full allegorical due, which is what Paul does in Romans with a figurative truth where they represent all of mankind. Similarly, there is no such thing as a literal tree of the knowledge of good and evil - it makes no sense except as a story conveying deep symbolic metaphysics. But when we see the tree of knowledge and the Fall as allegorical stories about the human capacity for moral agency, and the ability to make choices when measured up against their moral consequences, including the ability to choose God over self, or self over God, we then get to understand what those theological symbols mean. The tree of knowledge of good and evil is meaningless without an already evolved moral awareness and conception of free will in acting on that awareness.

It's absolutely absurd to me that anyone could be so misjudged as to think of Genesis as being science - but to compound the point, here are just some of the scriptural errors that emerge when we try to align it with known science. In Genesis 1, the earth is created before the sun, which is the wrong way around scientifically. Light is created on the first day (Genesis 1:3), but the stars that emit light aren't created until the fourth day (Genesis 1:14). These stars on the fourth day are said to be made to let them shine on earth (Genesis 1:15), but yet on day 1, God had already created the light and called the light “day,” and the darkness “night". And if three days had already passed without stars, those days couldn't have been measured if the stars weren't created until the fourth day. This gets even more bizarre when we see that our sun and moon weren't created until day 4 (Genesis 1:16) and yet we'd already had three days of evening and morning before that point in the creation story. Moreover, if we want to be scientifically technical, the moon isn't a lesser light, it merely reflects the sun's light - which means Genesis 1:16 is wrong when it says " God made two great lights" - He actually only made one great light, and one smaller celestial object (the moon) to reflect it.

The writer of Exodus refers to God "showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love Him" (Exodus 20:6), but according to literalists Exodus documents events only a few hundred years after Adam and Eve. For a thousand generations to occur, it would take 25,000 years. Now obviously, we can say this doesn't have to be read literally, but that goes against the creationist wishes, so they can't really have it both ways.

If taken scientifically, the Genesis account actually distorts the truth of the genetic mapping even further; for example, reading Genesis scientifically we would see that fruit trees appear before marine life, which is known to be wrong, and can easily be observed on the genetic map. Reading Genesis scientifically, we have whales and birds created at the same time, but this is also far from accurate, as birds were here millions of years before whales. Reading Genesis scientifically we have insects, spiders, reptiles and amphibians created at the same time as mammals, which is wrong by a factor of several hundred million years. So even if one questions the genetic sequencing I mentioned earlier (and there is absolutely no reason to do so) a scientific Genesis account would actually contradict the genotypic mapping with which creationists say God endowed creatures – it either has God as a master deceiver or as an incompetent Creator who cannot even create a blueprint to match the genotypic order.

Furthermore, the ordering of the appearance of phyla is scientifically incorrect with a literal interpretation - fruit and seed bearing plants came after the water was teeming with life. Even dinosaurs are long before seed bearing fruits, yet Genesis says otherwise, showing it is not a scientific account. Moreover, human evolution has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, and given that any so-called speciation that would make proto-humans distinct from humans would have occurred at the population level not at the individual level, the Genesis account that there were two first humans is not scientifically accurate as a literal interpretation. Forming a man out of the dust and breathing life into him through his nostrils is not a scientific reality for making him 'a living being', but it's a powerful spiritual image, conveying how God imparts spiritual extras into human beings that make them over and above the rest of the animal kingdom. A woman cannot literally come from a man's rib. Biblical figures like Adam, Noah and Methuselah cannot live for over 900 years, and Sarah could not conceive Isaac at 90 years old. No human being has ever lived hundreds of years, and no woman could ever become pregnant at 90 yeas old. There was not one world language at the time of writing (Genesis 11:1) and the whole variety of world languages did not literally suddenly appear in one fait accompli moment by being scattered all over the earth, as conveyed in Genesis 11:8.

Let's turn to Noah’s flood as another example; creationists believe that the world really was flooded in its entirety and they believe the Bible says that when the ark rested on a mountain in the Middle East it contained every human and land animal in the world, and that they were the only survivors on the plant. Even if we put aside the mass of evidence of human evolution throughout the world and the copious amounts of art and artefacts that give evidence of their uninterrupted evolution, the land animals issue, if taken literally, amounts to one of the oddest stories the world has ever seen. For example, a literal interpretation means we have to believe that the voluminous amounts of species indigenous to one part of the world all made their way from the Ark’s resting place, residing in their place of provenance, travelling through conditions under which their phenotype wasn’t built to survive, and avoiding all predation along the way (never mind that many would require other animals for food in a world in which all other life had been destroyed). We are supposed to believe that the kangaroos, koalas, and wombats made their way across Asia through the Indonesian islands and over the east side of the Indian ocean to Australia. We are supposed to believe that the Arctic walruses, polar bears and caribous survived the warmer climate of Europe as they all found their way northwards. We are supposed to believe that anacondas and capybara found their way to South America and the giant tortoise found its way to the Galapagos islands, all from the Middle East. It's beyond silly to attempt to take this as a literal event in history - and the author of the flood story in the Bible would think it preposterous if he could fast forward in time and see that some Christians had become so detached from the symbolic and metaphysical theology of the story and its concomitant archetype that they were actually considering it as a literal global event.

Sticking with South America, take (for example) sloths, armadillos, spider monkeys, poison arrow frogs, jaguars, opossums, electric eels, chinchillas, guanacos, caimans, and hoatzins (to name but a few) - it is now possible to draw up maps based on chromosome painting where, with observing genomic sequencing, we can establish the relationship between DNA sequence variations among all these animals, and all other animals linked to them in one big family tree. We can locate the syntenic segment associations as well as the molecular markers within the major clades which delineate families, orders, who evolved from who, where this evolution took place, and the length of time animals have been indigenous to a particular place. Not surprisingly, in our studies of genomes across the world with thousands of species in virtually every location, we found that the genomic studies, DNA sequence variations, and markers within the major clades give exhibition to evolution over billions of years. All the data fits, and we have not one case where a particular genomic sequence has been discordantly out of place on the family tree - everything fits together, and when we conduct new tests on unsequenced genomes we find that they match our predictions without fail, giving us a consistent map of evolution. If the animals had been only a few thousand years old, or had all converged upon their destination from one Middle Eastern centrepoint (which in many cases geography prohibits due to oceans) the genomic sequences would be very different – not matching the evolutionary history that they do.

The upshot of all this is, with regard to the Bible, the intention of meaning shouldn’t be confused with science, and it is for the same reason that the intention of meaning of the works of Keats or Tennyson or Blake should not be confused with the works of Newton or Kepler or Maxwell - different expressions are being conveyed through different types of language. On hearing that a wife's love for her husband "Lifts her high above the clouds", only a very foolish man would say 'No it doesn't, because that contradicts Newtonian laws'. Yet some Christians too often fall into the mistake of doing something similar with their Biblical interpretations.

The Bible contains everything one needs for having a relationship with God. It won't tell you about the age of the earth or evolution or gravity or electromagnetism because those subjects weren't studied in depth by the men of the day who wrote scripture. It’s not as though one needs to put God aside to study science; people just need to stop looking for scientific answers in scripture, because by doing so they skew God's intention, and miss the power of meaning contained in books like Genesis. Don't put God aside when studying science; rather, look at science as the tool with which we assess the finer details of the beauty of God's 'physical' creation.