Creation and Science

Almost all the heat in this argument comes from a failure of sorting. There are three different kinds of question in play, they have three different kinds of evidence, and collapsing them is what turns a disagreement into a war.

The first kind is exegetical. What genre is Genesis 1? What does yom mean in this chapter? Does the numbered sequence assert chronological order or literary order? Does Romans 5 require a historical individual, and if so, what kind of individual? These are settled, so far as they can be settled, by Hebrew and Greek, by the conventions of ancient literature, and by the arguments you learned to run in Hermeneutics. A telescope contributes nothing to any of them.

The second kind is scientific. How old is the earth and how old is the universe? Do the species alive now share common ancestors? What does the distribution of genetic variation in living humans imply about past population sizes? These are settled, so far as they can be settled, by evidence and measurement. A Hebrew lexicon contributes nothing to any of them. It is worth adding that scientific claims come with different strengths, and a careful person distinguishes a measurement repeated by many independent methods from a current best reconstruction that specialists themselves expect to revise.

The third kind is neither, and it is the kind most often smuggled through as though it were one of the other two. Does an event brought about through ordinary secondary causes count as an act of God, or only an event with no such causes? Is divine action the sort of thing that could in principle show up in a laboratory? What counts as an explanation, and when is a question answered? These are theological and philosophical questions. They are not decided by exegesis and they are not decided by experiment, and a person who thinks he has settled them by either has usually just assumed an answer.

Keep the three columns in front of you through the rest of this lesson. When a position is criticised, ask which column the criticism is in. When an argument is made, ask which column the evidence comes from. A remarkable amount of what gets said in this dispute is a claim in one column defended with evidence from another, and once you can see that, you can be useful to people on every side of it.

You already have the tools. Hermeneutics taught you that genre is a contract between writer and reader about how a text is to be taken, that it is not a label attached afterwards, and that the honest teacher states the genre he is working with, states his reasons, and holds the identification with the firmness the evidence actually supports. That last clause is the one that bites here, because Genesis 1 is the most consequential genre judgement in the Bible and it is genuinely contested among people who all believe the chapter is true.

Four proposals are live, and each has a strength and a real difficulty. The sequential reading takes the six days as consecutive ordinary days and the order as the order of events. Its strength is the plain surface of the text: the days are numbered, each has an evening and a morning, and Exodus 20:11 grounds the sabbath command on the six days of making. Its difficulty is internal to the Bible before it is external: the sun is made on day four while light and morning and evening are present from day one, and the sequence of Genesis 2 does not match the sequence of Genesis 1.

The framework view, proposed by the Dutch scholar Arie Noordtzij in 1924 and developed by Meredith Kline in a 1958 article and by Henri Blocher in In the Beginning, holds that the six days are a literary arrangement in two triads: days one to three form the realms of light, sky and sea, and land, and days four to six fill them with lights, with birds and fish, and with animals and humanity. Day four fills day one, day five fills day two, day six fills day three. Its strength is that the correspondence is exact and clearly deliberate, and that verse 2's twin problem, formless and void, is answered by forming and filling in that order. Its difficulty is that a scheme can be a literary arrangement and a sequence at the same time, so the pattern does not by itself show that the sequence is not meant, and Kline's supporting argument from Genesis 2:5 has been contested in detail.

The analogical days view, argued by C. John Collins in his commentary on Genesis 1 to 4, holds that God's workdays are presented as analogous to human workdays rather than identical to them, so that the days are God's days and their length is simply not the point. Its strength is that it takes the numbering and the sabbath pattern seriously without committing the chapter to a scientific claim about duration. Its difficulty is that critics on both sides call it an evasion, and that it leaves the chapter saying less about sequence than the numbering appears to promise. The cosmic temple view, argued by John Walton in The Lost World of Genesis One, holds that the account concerns functional rather than material origins, that the seven days inaugurate the cosmos as God's temple, and that the seventh-day rest is God taking up residence and rule, in the sense you found in Psalm 132:14. Its strength is the density of ancient Near Eastern parallels and the fact that divine rest in the Bible is repeatedly enthronement rather than recuperation. Its difficulty is that many Old Testament scholars, including some sympathetic to his wider project, judge the distinction between functional and material origins too sharp, and argue that ancient accounts of origins do concern material beginnings as well.

Two historical facts should slow anyone down. The church has never been unanimous here, and the disagreement is older than science. Basil of Caesarea, in his Hexaemeron sermons in the fourth century, read the days as ordinary days. Augustine, in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, argued that God created everything simultaneously and that the days are a framework for the creature's knowledge rather than a duration, which is about as far from a twenty-four-hour reading as one can get while insisting, as Augustine did, on reading the text literally in his own sense of the word. Origen allegorised. These men were not accommodating Darwin. And the second fact: Augustine, in the same work, warned that when a Christian talks nonsense about the natural world in the name of scripture and is overheard by someone who knows the subject, it is not only the speaker who is discredited but the scripture he claimed to be defending. That warning is quoted by people on every side of this argument, usually against their opponents, and it applies to whoever is wrong.

What follows states four positions in the terms their own defenders use, with the texts and the evidence each leans on, the hardest question each has to answer, and a named weakness. Watch where each weakness comes from, because the source is itself evidence. Two of the four are criticised here out of their own mouths, by their own institutions and their own scholars, which is the strongest sign of good faith a movement can give. The other two are criticised from outside, and that is said plainly rather than dressed up as self-correction. The order is not a ranking. The first three are arranged by how they answer the question of age, and the fourth is placed last because, as you will see, it is not an answer to the same question at all.

Young earth creationism. The claim is that God created in six ordinary days a few thousand years ago, that the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 are intended as chronology, and that a global flood in Noah's day accounts for most of the fossil-bearing rock. The textual case is the one its defenders lead with: the six days are numbered and each is bounded by evening and morning, which everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible marks a calendar day; Exodus 20:11 and 31:17 ground the sabbath on the six days and the seventh, which works as an analogy only if the pattern is a week; and Mark 10:6 has Jesus say that 'from the beginning of creation' God made them male and female, which sits awkwardly with humanity arriving at the last instant of a long history. The theological case is at least as important to its defenders and is often missed by critics: Romans 5:12 says that sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and 1 Corinthians 15:21 that death came through a man; Genesis 1:31 calls the finished world very good; so a history in which predation, disease and extinction ran for hundreds of millions of years before any human sin is held to make the fall cosmetic and the curse in Genesis 3 unintelligible. The modern movement is usually dated from The Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris in 1961, which drew on the earlier flood geology of George McCready Price, and it now has institutions of its own: the Institute for Creation Research, Answers in Genesis, and Creation Ministries International. Its scientific case rests on flood geology, on fossils crossing many strata, on soft tissue recovered from dinosaur bone, and on the Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth project, which argued from helium retained in zircon crystals and from radiohalos that decay rates have not been constant. Its hardest question is light from distant galaxies: if the universe is young, light from objects millions of light years away should not yet have arrived, and the proposals offered are not agreed on within the movement itself. The weaknesses named from inside the movement are two, and both are published by the movement itself. That project's own final report conceded an unresolved heat problem, since accelerated decay on the scale proposed would have released enough heat to melt the earth's crust. And Answers in Genesis maintains a standing list of arguments it asks creationists to stop using. Kurt Wise, who took a doctorate in palaeontology at Harvard under Stephen Jay Gould, has stated in print that he holds the position on the authority of scripture and would hold it if all the evidence in the universe turned against it, which is the clearest statement anyone has given of what actually drives it.

Old earth or progressive creationism. The claim is that the universe and the earth are as old as the standard measurements say, that God created directly and repeatedly across that long history rather than through an unbroken chain of descent, and that Genesis 1 is compatible with this. The textual case runs on several tracks. Yom has a wider range than a calendar day and is used of a period in Genesis 2:4 itself, in the very summary of the chapter just ended; Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 warn against measuring God's working by human clocks; the seventh day alone has no evening and morning, and Hebrews 4:3-11 treats God's rest as still open, which suggests that at least one of the seven is not a calendar day; Genesis 1:11 and 1:24 have God commanding the earth to produce rather than producing directly, which reads naturally as process; and Genesis 2 has the man naming the animals and then finding, in the BSB's words, that 'no suitable helper was found', a sequence that reads oddly if compressed into part of an afternoon. Its most visible advocate is Hugh Ross and the organisation Reasons to Believe, and the position has a long pedigree: Bernard Ramm argued a version of it in The Christian View of Science and Scripture in 1954, and many nineteenth-century evangelicals held day-age or gap readings before the modern movements hardened. Its scientific case accepts radiometric dating, the cosmic microwave background and stellar distances, and leans on discontinuity in the fossil record, particularly the Cambrian explosion, and on the fine-tuning of physical constants, as evidence of repeated creative acts rather than a single unbroken process. Its hardest question is order. If the days map onto epochs, the mapping has to match the record, and it does not: fruit-bearing trees appear on day three, sea creatures and birds together on day five, and land animals on day six, whereas the fossil sequence puts land vertebrates well before birds and flowering plants late. Defenders answer by treating the days as overlapping or as accounts of when each kind was commissioned rather than completed, and critics reply that this rescues the mapping by loosening it until it can no longer be tested. The named weakness is concordism itself, and the criticism comes from neighbours rather than from inside: readers who accept the old earth but reject the mapping, chiefly those holding the framework and analogical views of section 2. The attempt to align the chapter with current science has been made afresh in every generation and redone every time the science moved, which they take as a reason to stop trying. And the position shares with the next one the problem of animal death before the fall, without the recourse to a young earth that would dissolve it.

Evolutionary creation, also called theistic evolution. The claim is that God is the creator of everything and that evolutionary common descent is the means he used, so that the scientific account describes the mechanism of an act that remains fully his. The textual case begins by denying that the dispute is textual at all in the way the others assume: Genesis 1 is held to be a true theological account of origins in the idiom of its own world rather than a description of mechanism, so that asking it for a process is a category error of the sort Hermeneutics taught you to avoid. Positively, it leans on Genesis 1:11 and 1:24, where the earth is commanded to bring forth, as a biblical pattern of God working through what he has made; on Psalm 139:13, where God knits a person together in the womb through a process nobody thinks is unmediated; and on the doctrine of providence generally, in which ordinary causes are God's causes, which is the subject of the next lesson. The position is not new and not fringe: Asa Gray, Darwin's American correspondent, was a devout Presbyterian who argued for it in the 1860s; B. B. Warfield, the Princeton theologian who did as much as anyone to formulate biblical inerrancy, wrote that evolution could be the method of divine providence; Pope Pius XII permitted the discussion of the body's origin from pre-existing living matter in Humani Generis in 1950, provided that souls are immediately created by God; and John Paul II told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996 that evolution is more than a hypothesis. Its present institutional centre in the English-speaking world is BioLogos, founded by the geneticist Francis Collins, and its advocates include Denis Alexander, Deborah Haarsma and Dennis Venema. Its scientific case is the mainstream one: the nested pattern of similarities across living things, the fossil sequence, biogeography, and the genetic evidence, including shared broken genes such as the inactivated vitamin C gene that humans share with other primates, endogenous retroviral insertions at matching positions, and the fusion signature in human chromosome 2. Its hardest question is the historical Adam, which the next section takes up: if humanity arises from a population, Paul's one man in Romans 5 has to be accounted for, and no proposal has satisfied everybody. The weakness named from inside is natural evil. Predation, parasitism, extinction and animal suffering on this account precede human sin by hundreds of millions of years, so the fall cannot be the explanation of them, and evolutionary creationists themselves, including Christopher Southgate in The Groaning of Creation, treat this as the position's outstanding unpaid debt rather than a solved problem.

The intelligent design movement. The claim is that certain features of the natural world are better explained by an intelligent cause than by undirected processes, and that this inference is a scientific one rather than a religious one. Its founding text is Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial in 1991; its principal arguments are Michael Behe's irreducible complexity, set out in Darwin's Black Box in 1996, that some biological systems require several parts simultaneously and so could not be built by successive small improvements; William Dembski's specified complexity, set out in The Design Inference in 1998, that patterns which are both highly improbable and independently specified reliably indicate design; and Stephen Meyer's argument in Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt that the information content of DNA and the suddenness of the Cambrian appearance of body plans exceed what undirected processes can supply. Its institutional centre is the Discovery Institute. The structural point to grasp first is that this is not a reading of Genesis and does not claim to be. Behe accepts common descent and an old earth. Others in the movement are young earth creationists. Advocates generally decline to identify the designer within the argument itself, holding that identification is a further step beyond what the evidence shows, and they appeal, when they turn to scripture at all, to Romans 1:20 and Psalm 19:1 rather than to Genesis 1. That means the movement can be combined with two of the three positions above and does not settle the exegetical question at all. Its hardest question is whether design is a testable claim: critics ask what observation would count against it, and note that irreducible complexity has been contested case by case, with the bacterial flagellum answered by pointing to the type three secretion system as a functional subset, and the blood clotting cascade narrowed after criticism. In 2005, in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science and could not be taught as such in public school biology; its advocates dispute the judgement, and the Discovery Institute had itself opposed the school board's policy before the case was brought. The named weakness here comes from outside the movement, which is said plainly rather than dressed up as self-correction. It is theological rather than biological, and it is pressed by parties to this very argument: evolutionary creationists, whose position is stated above, and Thomist philosophers, among them Edward Feser and the physicist Stephen Barr. They argue that treating God as a cause that shows up where natural causes run out concedes the naturalist's map, makes God one item in the causal furniture, and leaves him vulnerable to every gap that later closes. Design advocates answer that they are identifying positive evidence rather than gaps, and that the objection assumes what it needs to prove.

Notice what all four affirm, because it is easy to lose in the noise. God made everything that is not himself. The world is not an accident and not self-explanatory. Human beings bear God's image and are morally accountable. Humanity is fallen and needs redemption. Scripture is true. Every one of the four positions above holds all five of those claims, and every one has been held by people of obvious learning and obvious devotion. That does not make the disagreements unimportant. It does mean that an argument conducted as though the other side had abandoned the faith is an argument being conducted dishonestly.

The age of the earth touches no article of any creed. The historical Adam does touch something, and this is the place to be precise instead of loud. Paul builds two arguments on Adam, and he builds them at the load-bearing points of his theology. Romans 5:12: 'Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, so also death was passed on to all men, because all sinned.' And then, through verses 15 to 19, a sustained comparison in which one man's trespass and one man's act of righteousness are set against each other. 1 Corinthians 15:21-22: 'For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.' The structure is one-to-one. If the first term evaporates, the question is what happens to the second, since Paul's argument runs from the reality of the first to the reality of the second and not the other way round. That is the whole of why this question is serious, and it is worth saying that everyone in the discussion below is trying to keep Paul's argument standing. They disagree about who succeeds.

Four positions are live among Christians who affirm Paul's authority. The first is the traditional one: Adam and Eve were historical individuals, specially created, and every human being descends biologically from them and from no one else. It has the weight of the tradition, it reads Genesis 2 most directly, and it takes Acts 17:26, 'From one man He made every nation of men', at face value. The second holds that Adam was a real individual who stood as head of a group, chosen and covenanted with, so that his act had representative force for a population that may have been larger than his own family. Derek Kidner floated a version of this in his Genesis commentary in 1967, and C. John Collins argued a careful form of it in Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?, setting out criteria that he thinks any acceptable proposal must meet. The third is the genealogical proposal of S. Joshua Swamidass in The Genealogical Adam and Eve in 2019, which turns on a distinction most of the argument had missed: genealogical ancestry is not genetic ancestry, and because genealogies branch so fast, a couple living only thousands of years ago could be genealogical ancestors of everyone alive today while contributing detectable DNA to almost nobody. On that account a recent, specially created Adam and Eve, with other people outside the garden, is compatible with the genetic evidence as it stands. The fourth reads Adam as an archetype or representative figure rather than an individual: Denis Lamoureux and Peter Enns argue versions of this, and John Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve treats Adam as archetypal while leaving room for a real person in a priestly role. On this reading Paul is arguing within the framework his readers had, and what he asserts about sin and death is true whether or not the figure he names existed as one man.

The confessional stakes are not the same in every communion, and this is where a course that only spoke for one wing of the church would mislead you badly. For Roman Catholics the question has an explicit magisterial answer of long standing: Pius XII, in Humani Generis in 1950, wrote that the faithful cannot embrace the opinion 'that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents', on the ground that it cannot be seen how this is reconcilable with original sin proceeding from a sin truly committed by one Adam. The Catechism at paragraph 390 says that the account of the fall uses figurative language but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Catholic theologians have proposed ways of holding both that and the genetic evidence, and the magisterium has not revisited the question formally, so a Catholic reader should know that the constraint is real and that the discussion inside Catholicism is live. For the Eastern Orthodox the stakes are differently placed, because the East never received Augustine's account of inherited guilt. The Orthodox speak of ancestral sin: what is inherited is mortality and corruption and a disordered will rather than the guilt of Adam's act. Part of the reason is a translation. The Greek of Romans 5:12 ends with a phrase (eph' ho) the East read as 'because all sinned'; the Latin Vulgate rendered it, in the lesson's literal rendering of the Latin, 'in whom all have sinned', and Augustine, who read Latin, built on that. A note on the BSB: it prints 'because all sinned', which is the Eastern reading, and it carries no footnote offering the other. That is the BSB taking a side in an old argument, not the settling of it. The Greek phrase is disputed, the Latin 'in whom' reading has its defenders in the Augustinian tradition, and 'because' on its own does not yet say whether all sinned in Adam, after Adam, or both, so check the phrase in the Greek on Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible, both free. The Hermeneutics track warned you what a preposition can do to a doctrine, and this is the largest example in the Bible. Among Protestants the confessions do not all frame it the same way, and the difference matters here. The federal or covenantal account, in which Adam acts as the appointed representative of those he stands for, is a Reformed development, worked out by Cocceius, Turretin and Hodge and stated at Westminster Confession 6.3. Because it makes representation rather than descent do the decisive work, some Reformed readers judge that the second and third positions above cost them nothing. The Lutheran Formula of Concord is doing something else: its account of transmission is by propagation, a nature corrupted in Adam and inherited through ordinary generation, with no covenant head and no imputation, and the Anglican Article IX is likewise about the corruption of nature rather than representation. On those accounts the tie to physical descent is tighter, so the proposals are not equally cheap for everyone. Wesleyans hold original sin firmly and pair it with prevenient grace. Baptists and Pentecostals divide internally and have no single confessional answer to give.

The genetic question deserves stating accurately rather than as a slogan on either side. Dennis Venema argued in Adam and the Genome in 2017 that the amount and pattern of variation in living human populations implies an ancestral population in the thousands rather than two individuals, and that the genetic evidence therefore rules out a recent single couple as sole progenitors. The plant geneticist Richard Buggs challenged the strength of that inference in a public exchange, arguing that the methods used had not been designed to test a short, sharp bottleneck and that a couple could not be excluded as confidently as claimed once one looks far enough back. Swamidass's proposal takes a different route again, conceding the population history and locating Adam genealogically rather than genetically. Where this leaves a non-specialist is roughly here: the evidence against a recent couple as the sole biological source of all human genetic variation is strong and is not seriously disputed by the specialists involved; the further question of how far back a brief bottleneck of two could be hidden is a technical argument that has been conducted with more courtesy than most of this subject; and the genealogical distinction is a real one that changes what the genetic evidence rules out. If you are going to speak about this in public, learn those three sentences rather than a headline.

So what is at stake, stated without inflation and without minimising. At stake: whether Paul's argument in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 retains the structure he gives it, whether sin is a historical catastrophe that entered a good creation or a permanent feature of creaturely existence, and whether the need of redemption is universal in the way the gospel assumes. Those are not small. Not at stake: the age of the earth, which no creed mentions and no council has ruled on; whether God used secondary causes, since the whole doctrine of providence says he ordinarily does; the goodness of God as creator, which every position here affirms; and the authority of scripture, which is not settled by this question but assumed by everyone arguing about it. A person who tells you that the age of the earth is a test of orthodoxy has added to the creeds. A person who tells you the historical Adam does not matter at all has not read Romans 5 carefully.

Go back to the three columns. If someone tells you the fossil record proves the days are long, notice that a claim in the exegetical column has been settled with evidence from the scientific one; the meaning of yom is what it is whatever the rocks say. If someone tells you that because Genesis says six days the radiometric dates must be wrong, the same error has been made in the other direction. If someone tells you that a process with a natural mechanism cannot be an act of God, that is a claim in the third column, it has not been argued, and the entire doctrine of providence stands against it. Most of the bad arguments in this field are that simple once you have the columns.

Three further disciplines. First, do not require of an opponent a consistency you do not practise. Nearly every reader treats some element of Genesis 1 as other than plain sequential report, because the sun arrives on day four and the light on day one, and pressing that is fair from any position. Second, state your own view with the firmness the evidence supports, which is the rule Hermeneutics gave you and the rule most often broken here. There is a difference between saying that you find the young earth reading of the days most natural and saying that the alternative is unbelief, and the difference is not rhetorical. Third, know who you are talking to. Many of this school's students teach in places where the scientific literature is not accessible and where the version of evolution they have met is one nobody in the field would recognise; many others teach in universities where the version of Genesis their students have met is one no serious reader of Hebrew would recognise. Both audiences are being badly served by caricature, and you are in a position to stop it in your own room.

Now the pastoral case, because this argument costs people. Young adults leave the faith over this, and they usually leave for a reason that has nothing to do with the evidence: they were told that one position was the faith, they found the evidence against that position stronger than they had been led to expect, and nobody had ever told them that faithful Christians held anything else. The single most useful thing a teacher can do is to make sure no student of theirs is surprised. Tell them the range. Tell them who holds what and why. Tell them where you stand and on what grounds, and tell them plainly that it is your judgement and that the person in the next pew who disagrees is not less of a Christian for it.

And do not oversell either peace or conflict. The old story in which religion and science have been at war throughout history is bad history, and historians of science abandoned it long ago; the framework that produced modern science in Europe was one in which a rational creator had made an orderly world that could be investigated. But the opposite story, that there was never any real conflict and everyone can relax, is also false, and Christians who say it usually have not felt the force of the questions in section 3. There are genuine tensions here. Some of them are unresolved. Saying so is not weakness, and a student who has been told the truth about what is unresolved is the student least likely to be knocked over by it later.