Atheism on Trial– Part Eight

Q. I appreciate your stress on the fact that science and Christian faith are not inherently at odds with one another. It often seems to me that Christians get trapped into defending a certain view of say Genesis or the age of the earth or the origin of human beings, and they end up dying by inches. I thought it was judicious of you to say that various devout Christians take various different views on the issue of evolution, and one should not suggest that people lack orthodoxy just because they do not totally agree on this matter. The Bible after all is not a science textbook, the genealogies in the OT are segmented and incomplete, and even Genesis itself suggests there were other human beings on earth that Cain and Abel could marry at the time of the first Biblical parents, Adam and Eve. I’ve come to the view that the Bible is telling the story of God’s people from Adam to Abraham to Moses to us, and not the story of everyone, though God’s salvation is ultimately for everyone. That is, the Bible is written from the perspective of God’s people who strangely believed in only one God in a polytheistic world. Does this make sense to you?

A. It does make sense to me. I find great freedom in how to understand early history as written in the Bible. One might say there is a young earth and a seven day creation, although I think that is not the best reading of Genesis. One might say that God has creatively and intelligently designed creation. One might say God has set up the knobs of physics to produce a universe that would evolve humanity on this little dirt clod rotating around the sun. I tend to think that God doesn’t provide the ultimate answers because God is telling that story you reference. It seems to me quite possible that in a world with all sorts of animals, some (we would recognize as human predecessors whether Cro-Magnon or otherwise) were set before a spiritually endowed Adam for a potential partner. Those unspiritual “people” were not suitable, so God made Eve. Adam and Even could live within their garden and take a measure of responsibility for the world, but with their sin they were banished to live in the world. They took the curse of their sin and spread it around to all their descendants. This is only one way to exercise the freedom we find in reading Genesis.