All too often people of faith are fearful of science because it seems to come into conflict with their belief system. God is all powerful, they argue and functions outside the laws of nature. When they read passages in the bible that teaches God is the creator, they conclude that any natural explanations of how our universe came to be must be wrong. (more…)
There are some religious people who teach that, according to Moses, the universe was created in 6 days, and that any evidence from evolutionary biologists can be dismissed because evolution is just a theory. This is, in my view, based on a gross misunderstanding of what the Book of Genesis is actually saying but setting this aside, let’s examine the ‘it is just a theory’ argument.
Wikipedia – A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method and repeatedly tested and confirmed through observation and experimentation.
Dictionary.com – The Scientific Theory of Evolution: coherent group of propositions formulated to explain a group of factor phenomena in the natural world and repeatedly confirmed through experiment or observation. (more…)
The bible begins with the story Adam and Eve. Who were Adam and Eve and when did they live? If you have read my blogs ‘What is Genesis 1 Talking About Part 1 & What is Genesis 1 Talking About Part 2’, you will be familiar with my distinction between figurative and fictional. Often people look at the bible and, since the way the story is told does not match with how a modern historian would record the events, they conclude that the story must be fictional. The story however, can be both figurative and true. Today we have developed both expository and poetic writing styles and we forget that, thousands of years ago, these two styles were merged. For example, we can pick up a book on the history of World War I written in a forthright and objective manner, and we can also pick up a poem such as Flanders Fields. When we read “We are the Dead. Short days ago” we know full well that this is not literally the dead speaking, but rather a poetic way of expressing the trauma of war in ways that a factual exposition cannot.
If we work from the assumption that Adam and Eve were real people, we need to also recognize that the text is both telling history and telling a story. Adam and Eve could have been real people, but the text in Genesis presents them as archetypical people. Einstein, for example, was a real physicist, but he has become an archetype for someone who is really smart. Calling someone an Einstein does not mean Einstein never existed. (more…)
Last week I proposed that Genesis 1 is telling a literal story using figurative language, and that this story is expressing the formation of the cosmic temple and not about the formation of the universe and the emergence of life on earth. It is not talking about the material origin of the earth, but the functional origins. How Gods creations bless our lives. Consider how the different days relate to each other: (more…)
When reading Genesis 1, the Creation story, interpretations of the story can generally be classified into three groups:
