One of the most controversial topics in the Christian church is evolution. It’s so controversial, in fact, that it’s even talked about less than abortion, and when it is, just like abortion, it is often spoken of with great hostility.
But this has been strange for me, and hard at times, because…I’m an evolutionist. I’m not a particularly argumentative person (I take out my rage in this blog instead, ha!), so when the issue comes up, I usually just don’t say anything.
Several years ago, I was talking with some friends in a larger group of people after church, and I can’t remember what brought the topic up, but some guy just launched into this rant about how wrong evolution is and how it doesn’t make any sense. It was so random, and nobody really knew how to respond to it. But, sadly enough, that summarizes the general Christian response to it: it’s dumb, it’s not possible, it’s evil, and if you believe it, you’re a big doodoohead.
I’d like to respond to this in three parts.
Part 1: My History
The subject of evolution nearly broke my faith in high school. I had never been particularly opposed to it, although I seem to remember a friend carrying on back in 8th grade about how the answer to one of our science test questions on the age of the earth should actually be whatever that Ussher guy came up with, so like 4004 BC or so. I went with the textbook answer and got some mild praise from our teacher. I just didn’t see what the big deal was.
But that all changed later in high school when I began to ask myself what I truly believed. If God was real, where was he? If God was real, then what about everything the sciences seemed to be saying about the universe?
I was decently skilled with speaking, and had found in my church youth group that if I put the right spin on answers to Sunday school questions, I could get some serious accolades. But I became jaded with this, because smooth speech is not the same thing as truth, so although I felt I could answer things pretty well, what was true and what wasn’t? (I’ve never been interested in debate, because debate doesn’t necessarily reveal the truth)
I read the Case for Christ. I read the Case for the Creator. I read the Case for Faith. I immersed myself in apologetics. I read books by Ravi Zacharias. Hell, in college I even read atheist Richard Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” after being challenged to read it online. While a lot of these books seemed to make good points, the Christians always seemed to be petty in their critiques of other people, and the evolution debate tended to terminate in the so-called “Intelligent Design” movement, dedicated to disproving evolution based on a few inscrutable gotchas of biology. “See, evolutionists can’t answer this!” they would say. I guess that means creationism must absolutely be true, huh?
Over time, I became less and less impressed with Christian arguments for pretty much anything. That piece of shit book, “Evidence that Demands a Verdict”, was like a slap in the face to anybody who wants to think critically about anything. You got a question? It has the answer! Don’t think too hard about it, though; the Bible is 100% true, and you’re an idiot if you aren’t convinced in a page or two on every subject. Christians have absolutely all the answers. It’s so obvious, duh!
One day, when my family went to a church that Susie Shellenberger guest spoke at (randomly), she went on this tirade about how Christian kids were going off to college and not coming back with their Sunday School faith. They no longer believed that Jonah was literally swallowed by a whale, how dare they?! After being shit on the entire service, I went home livid.
It was years of aching pain, searching for answers, and finding nothing by condemning, self-righteous, dismissive books written by Christians. I was no fan of Richard Dawkins, either, who was kind of a dick, but the world of science, for all of its potential flaws, pointed to the stars in wonder, pointed to the fossils in wonder, pointed at things unseen and unknown, inviting me into the search, while pastors stood on stage and bitched about how college students weren’t going to church, especially at my own church, which simply didn’t have any group for college students at all. Gee, I wonder why they don’t go to church.
It wasn’t compelling to me to believe that the earth was created in 4004 BC. That seemed like a massive contradiction of everything so many people had tried to discover about the world. Half my degree involved some detailed analyses of hominid skeletons (which was fascinating). And to think it was all some massive conspiracy to lead everyone astray just seemed incredibly far-fetched. But where was God? He was still silent. I didn’t have any desire to let go of him, but I wasn’t sure I could keep holding on if creation, as explained in the Bible, wasn’t true.
[Spoiler alert, my life became rather charismatic when crazy spiritual stuff started happening. I’ve told parts of this story before, but God really turned up in ways I didn’t expect, and I needed that]
Part 2: Philosophy
Before you can even begin to answer questions about the truth, you have to understand what you expect from truth in the first place. It is all too easy to accept and reject things as true based on your philosophical assumptions.
For example, the faith of my childhood, the faith of Creationism, is founded on a few key philosophical assumptions: that the Bible is completely, literally true, and that Genesis is a literal account of history.
From this perspective, it makes perfect sense to say that evolution is false. However, you have to argue the assumptions first. While most people immediately jump into arguments about how Creationism is true and evolution is false, they should instead first focus on arguing the assumptions that set the stage for this.
The ideal of literal, perfectly true history, however, is a modern one. We were all raised in the world of peer-reviewed history, and when somebody of academic authority says that something happened in the past, we expect that such a thing literally, definitively happened, and if it didn’t, we believe this would discredit that person as a historian quite seriously. Now, most people understand that a considerable amount of interpretation happens in the fields of history and archaeology, and sometimes rather smart historians and archaeologists make assumptions that may later prove to be inaccurate, but we expect them to not speak too firmly on things they aren’t absolutely certain of.
(Fun fact, many early archaeologists like Frank Albright were a little too convinced the Bible was literally true, and largely saw everything through the eyes of the Bible. I know this doesn’t do me any credit not remembering the specifics, but for as brilliant as some of those guys were, they thought everything they came across was in the Bible, while, naturally, most villages and towns from Hebrew Bible times were never mentioned in the Bible itself. People often find what they want to find, that was my lesson, and it’s a hard lesson, because it can apply to everyone.)
This philosophical perspective on history, for better or worse, ends up being applied to the Bible. The general assumption is that it is all perfectly historically true or it’s not true at all. And devout believers, therefore, often have a rather harsh view of anything that would appear to discredit the Bible in this respect, since this, based on their assumptions, might lead to the Bible not being true.
In short, evolution poses a threat to the Bible, but only based on the assumption that Genesis is literally, historically true. This is why most Christians feel so threatened by evolution and are so hostile toward it.
But is it really fair to apply modern historiography to a collection of writings written between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago? I don’t believe so.
Part 3: A New Perspective
“Okay, smartass”, you might be thinking. “Do you seriously expect the whole Bible to be figurative instead of literal? How could Genesis mean anything then?”
Well, those are important to address.
First of all, I think that God would have laid quite a heavy burden on us giving us the literal truth of creation. Let’s imagine it requires 1,000 volumes of Biology, Chemistry, Geology, Astronomy, Physics, Behavioral Ecology, and Psychology of Consciousness. Damn, quite the task for those early writers! Modern civilization would have been given to us on a platter, and perfectly spelled out, too!
Giving us the literal, absolute, exhaustive truth of creation isn’t actually very practical, looked at from this angle, because it would be so immense and so difficult to digest, and the language to describe all of those things likely didn’t exist in the ancient world, either, so how could you even begin to convey the whole truth? More importantly, it wouldn’t tell us one important thing: how we were meant to relate to God. Now that strikes me as something that would be very important in a book that is, frankly, all about God and his relationship with humanity. So it makes a lot of sense to me that this would be the focal message of creation as described in Genesis, and not the gritty, literal details of creation, which are probably so complex we’ll never know them all anyway. Most Young Earth Creationists just sweep those details aside. “It happened in 6 days, that’s all that matters!”
And yet we still seek these answers out, and this has led to the creation of the sciences. They find out important things about our world and universe, and these can be greatly valuable, but the Bible is still very important because it tells about God’s relationship with humanity. And wasn’t there a verse in Proverbs about it being the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to seek it out? But sure. I guess God clearly wasn’t talking about creation and the natural world. Everything you ever needed to know is in two or three pages, right? What do the sciences know?
And I want to be clear that just because ancient expectations of history are dramatically different than modern expectations of history absolutely does not mean the Bible is “ahistorical” in any sense, by which I mean, it is not devoid of history, even literal history. Kings and Chronicles in particular, as well as the entire New Testament seem to have been written with a great attention to strict history, or stricter history, thanks especially to the Greeks.
Every society, every tribe, has some conception of the past in literal terms, but this doesn’t mean it is codified in the same way over long periods of time. In modern ethnographies, for example, it is often described that tribes people have a strict understanding of events in their parents’ lives and their grandparents’ lives, and some people specialize in knowledge further into the past, but as time goes on much of the past becomes codified in legends and stories, which are not “true” or “false” but cultural manifestations of important events, something folklorists study. This looks very different in societies with writing, where the past can be codified more literally, but that doesn’t mean the written presentation of the past isn’t presented from a culturally-relevant way, which naturally incorporates meaningful events that were important. It’s this cultural background that imbues text with greater meaning and value, and it’s one reason we have to study the culture of the Bible to get the most out of it, as our own culture is far removed from many of those cultural idioms.
I’m on the fence about whether the Exodus was literal or not (it’s just a very complicated subject), but I have no doubt Moses was a real man who was a critical part of Israelite history, and I don’t believe the Bible is false in claiming he was God’s prophet who led his people right up to the promised land. I don’t believe that everything has to be literally true in Exodus for the Bible to still be true, but I’m also not convinced it’s figurative, I simply am not familiar enough with how the literature of the time was truly intended. It’s also important to note that the “literal” and “figurative” dichotomy is itself somewhat recently constructed. It’s not clear to me what all of the implications of that might be, but I’m sure it’s a subject that goes deep.
And this goes for Genesis, too. It would make sense to me that, whether via evolution or ad hoc creation, a true account of the origins of the universe would be immense, and would put our various academic and scientific disciplines in their place appropriately, but instead we just have a few pages of story which, while they don’t address this, address something even more important: that God is responsible for creation, responsible for the existence of humans, and that humans and nature are somehow fallen and imperfect. It almost begs for restoration, for salvation, otherwise it must be thought the most depressing and senseless of explanations of the universe and our role within in.
And there are some deep, compelling aspects to Genesis, too, what with there really being two incompatible creation stories (something churches rarely address), people existing when they really shouldn’t, bad angels doing stuff with women, rather interesting stories of human language, the tension between pastoralism and horticulture, the social evolution of the Middle East, and that there was a time at which humans began to call upon the name of the Lord, suggesting that there was a time before when they didn’t.
There’s no way I would dismiss all of that. There are some powerful messages in there that resonate to this day. I simply don’t believe these must necessarily be literally or historically true, but it all begs further investigation. Most Christians just dispense with deeper analysis, and when they don’t, they’re trying to play apocalypse games and tell you why the government is the anti-Christ and why bitcoin is Jesus’ favorite cryptocurrency, or whatever. ‘Murica. Some people put a tremendous amount of effort into “disproving” evolution, when it wasn’t ever clear this was necessary in the first place. But it is consistent with someone whose worldview is deeply threatened.
Conclusion
Naturally, this subject is HUGE. And I’m honestly a bit rusty on it, too, it’s just that several months ago this came up in my life group at church and really tore the old wounds back open. I tried to address this recently with my group, while being clear it was okay to disagree, but that I’ve been hurt over the years by the hostility. It’s very odd to be a Christian who believes in evolution and to feel deeply condemned at church just because I believe something that people don’t like but which isn’t incompatible with faith. I’m just amazed at how hostile people are toward the subject. Speaking out in defense of it feels like raising your hand quietly at the back of the class to say, “Hi, uh…I disagree” when almost everyone around you has been preaching vehemently.
It doesn’t mean that I’m right, and I sure as hell don’t have all the answers. I don’t suspect I can debate very eloquently, either. But I would suggest to the broader church that evolution is not the enemy, only the Enemy is the enemy. People like me get stomped out much of the time, but I think so many more people would come to faith if they could get past this evolution vs. creation “debate”, but they can’t because the gatekeepers have decided that 6 day creationism is the only possible option, and everybody else is evil or stupid. I would actually suspect this could be one of the larger causes for why so many people leave the church. Many years ago, I was almost one of them!