Big Question #1: Evolution

This year in Confirmation we are talking about big questions. Each week through the winter and spring the students bring their big questions and we have conversations around the running list of really good thoughts and ideas they are wondering about. I do my best to give my answer. Sometimes I preface what I say by adding this is what I believe, or this is my best guess; other times I preface responses by saying this is what Martin Luther said or this is what the Lutheran confessions teach. These are hard questions for a reason: To presume I have some nicely-packaged answer is foolish, though still to say nothing to these questions is to let the loudest voices win the day. So, we tarry on and do our best to address what we may, understanding that this must be done humbly with an awareness that we are not God and, moreover, we don't get to tell God how things are.

With that said, I am going to be writing a long-form response to ten of the very best questions raised by our Confirmation students and posting it to my blog on a regular basis. Each time I will attempt to address first of all what the question is and secondly how, as a Christian, as a pastor, and as a human being I approach these questions. Hopefully, that sets the stage well enough. So, off we go...

Question #1: Can a Christian believe in evolution?




I phrased the question this way because it is most-often asked in this form, but, from the start, I have to point out that this question is unappetizing for Christians and scientists alike. The word "believe" is wrong. Science doesn't deal in beliefs or opinions, and because of this Christians sometimes look at the various fields of science with some kind of contempt. How conceited of scientists to say they don't deal in opinions! Isn't every "theory" just an opinion? I suppose a person can think that way, but the word, "theory," is to me a humble word that admits that even though many things have been studied many ways by many different people still we will hold that everything is fair game to change. Every theory is the right experiment away from being shed in a different light. It doesn't matter if that theory was crafted by Darwin or Galileo or Einstein--the scientific method simply does not care.

Science can do this because it is asking a very specific question, which, in the case of evolution, is something like, "How did we come to be?" Now, that very specific question has some very complicated answers, but it never varies from being a How? question. It may take various forms, asking What? and Who? and When? by way of getting to the How? but one thing that science doesn't pretend to know is Why? Many scientists are people of faith because they are very capable of differentiating the "how" from the "why." They can study evolution with an open mind and discover that there is overwhelming evidence for this kind of process at work in the world--not just in history but presently and ongoing--and they can do so without feeling like a hypocrite because their question is different from a question of faith. It is answering how.

Many other scientists are agnostics. They realize their field doesn't address the Why? question, so they shrug when it comes to matters of faith. Other scientists are atheists and some of these suggest there is no Why? to the universe at all. Fair enough, but this feels much closer to a confession of faith than a logical deduction from science.

Anyway, this is off-subject. Evolution. It's not enough to come at this question from a scientific perspective. We must also ask what God has to say about human beings and, specifically, about their creation. For this there is no better place for Christians to look than Genesis 1 and 2.

Whenever we read Genesis 1 and 2 in Confirmation (and we typically read it several times a year precisely because of big questions like these), it never ceases to confuse students when I ask, "How many creation stories are there in the Bible?" Heck, this confuses adults more often than not. Obviously there's one story, because there's only ever been one creation. Why would there be more than one story?

In fact, there are two accounts of creation. There's Genesis 1, which is the one most people know. In Genesis 1 the earth is created in seven days: Heavens and earth, then sky and waters, then land and plants, then stars, then fish and animals of the seas, then land creatures and humans, and finally God rests. You'll notice the order is a bit strange logically (stars on day 4?!), but let's not get bogged down yet.

Christians have spent a good deal of time defending the seven-day creation, even to the point of making museums and whatnot. On the surface, it makes sense. After all, the Bible starts with this account! If God says this is how the world was created then it stands to reason we should defend it tooth and nail. But did you catch that? Did you catch the question word there? How... I said "If God says this is how the world was created." We are all products of modernity, whether we like it or not. In the 21st century, we default to how; we obsess over facts; we are overly concerned about how things went down. Because this is our perspective we assume that the creation story in the Bible is an orderly account of the creation of the world. This puts us in an awkward position, and before long we find ourselves in the position of having to defend it against all challengers. So we say things like, "Well, a day doesn't have to really be a day!"

Read Genesis 2. Here's a link. There's a fairly subtle hint in the title of this chapter that many Bibles use: "Another account of creation." One of the things you are likely to discover about this second creation story in the Bible is that the order is completely different. First God creates humans. FIRST. Well, maybe the heavens and earth are created alongside; it's sort of hard to tell. Only after humans exist on their own does God bring other animals into the picture to try to find us someone to hang out with, settling eventually on a woman (for which we can all be very thankful, by the way).

Now, after having read Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 I usually ask the students what conclusions they draw from the fact that there are two creation stories in the Bible that have different orders of creation. Here is a brief survey of answers I've gotten: "Well, that's stupid." "God's an idiot." (Seriously, heard that one this year!) "Were the people writing the Bible just really dumb." And so on.

Surprisingly, that last question might actually be an important one to ask. Seriously, how dumb were these people who put together the Bible? Did they not notice that there was a nice, historical account of creation in Genesis 1 when they added Genesis 2? Did they not see that these two stories contradict each other? How dumb were they?

Here's the answer to this: Either they were really dumb--like impossibly dumb--or the Bible is not answering the question you think it is. In fact, I'll go as far as to say that the Bible has absolutely no interest in answering the question, "How was the world created?" God gave you a perfectly good head to figure that one out of your own and, frankly, you have a perfectly good discipline in science to help you out with that. The Bible does not care about the mechanisms used in the creation of the universe, or the laws of physics, or the atomic mass of Oxygen. Could. Not. Care. Less.

The Bible does care to answer a different question if only you are ready to ask it. The question is "Why?" Why was the world created? Now THAT is a question we're ready to answer in the first two chapters of Genesis. The world was created because it was good. Every day of creation ends that way: "And God say that it was good" until the last day, when human beings were created, and God saw that it was "very good." We have been so obsessed with the questions that our modern minds brought to scripture that we have risked missing the point of the story altogether. The world was created good. That's super important, because things are about to go off the rails--with Adam and Eve and a serpent--and the rest is history. We need this story because otherwise we would have no assurance of the world's inestimable goodness. This is the ONLY reason we can say that we are good at heart. Simply, this story is essential to the Christian faith not because of any mechanisms of creation but because of the value God puts on that creation.

Genesis 2 then isn't contradictory but explanatory. It is interested in what it means to be created good, as human beings are. It tells us that we have a basic need for partnership. It tells us that we need one another. The authors obviously don't care about the order of creation from a historical perspective. They DO seem to care about the order as it demonstrates the importance of things in creation--that God puts a premium on us and our need to feel at home in the world. That's what Genesis 2 is about.

So, can Christians believe in evolution? Wrong question. Can Christians accept that evolution is true? Absolutely. In fact, it gives definition to how this organic machine we call life works so that we can get down the essential business of asking why we are here at all. Evolution should cause nobody a crisis of faith. That's the great sadness I have around this and similar issues of science and faith. There is absolutely nothing contradictory here. Other stories in the Bible are less clear about whether they are telling us history or telling us something about God and us--Jonah, for example, or even parts of the Moses story. Those are stories to wrestle over and ask whether it really matters whether it's historical or whether the Bible is telling is making a theological point. The creation story should not be nearly so controversial.

The one thing that Genesis 1 and 2 definitely demonstrates is that, given the distance in time, perspective, and genre between us and the authors of the Bible, we have a hard time understanding what they are really up to. The good news is that, as Christians, these are secondary matters. We don't worship* in the Bible; we worship* God. While it's true that the Bible is one of the primary ways that God speaks to us we shouldn't assume that a single reading of the Bible makes anything all that much clearer, or that what is clear to us is straightforward for others. After all, the Talmudic scholars who first commented (and indeed critiqued!) the books that now make up the Bible saw everything as fair game. Everything could be explored; nothing was off-limits!

The mystery of faith is that we are so often answering "Why?" questions in a "How?" world. Don't get discouraged by that. At the end of the day, faith is a language that is different from most of our day-to-day business. That is a good thing! We don't need to make the Bible into a science textbook, just as we don't need the scientific method to do theology. Faith and science are sometimes speaking different languages, but that does not mean they can't enhance one another. When it comes to evolution that feels especially true.

*Correction: An earlier draft of this read "believe" in the Bible or "believe" in God.