Christians love the medical treatments (such as statins), optical devices, and technological innovations that science produces. But many Christians don't love the questions science asks and the theories and laws scientific evidence overwhelmingly support. Three of these theories are that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, the universe is 13.8 billion years old (check this research hot off the press this week!), and evolution, the process by which the 1-2 billion species that have walked this earth came to be from the first single-celled organisms that appeared on earth 1.5 billion years ago.
Let me take a few paragraphs to expand on evolution before I return to my point (skip if desired). The purpose of the Darwinian theory of evolution is to explain the biological diversity that we see all around us. This diversity includes:
1) On a microscopic scale, the 10^14 (that's 100,000,000,000,000) bacteria and 10^13 cells living in your body.
2) On a terrestrial scale, the estimated 10-20 million living species our planet currently contains, which is 1% of the species that have ever lived on this planet. A species is a population of organisms that interbreed with each other, but not with other organisms.
Microevolution refers to variation within a species (think of the various breeds of dogs, which exhibit great variety, but can still breed with each other).
Macroevolution refers to changes above the species level. For example, DNA evidence indicates that whales are closely related to even-toed ungulates. These include hippopotamuses, cows, sheep, deer, and giraffes. Fossil and DNA evidence suggest that the whale and hippopotamus descended from a common ancestor.
Both forms of biological evolution depend on DNA, the code which makes who we are, and consist of two big-ideas, intimately connected with each other:
1) First, there is the generation of diversity in the genome, for example by mutations of various kinds which occasionally make a difference to the ability of the resulting organism to survive and reproduce.
2) Second, there is the ensuing process of natural selection, whereby genomes generating organisms with slightly better survival and more offspring tend to be the ones passed on to succeeding generations. Conversely, genomes generating organisms with slightly or significantly worse survival and fewer offspring are less likely to be passed on. Examples of beneficial mutations that allowed isolated organisms to flourish in a particular ecological niche and led to macroevolution include:
- Two species of salamanders (E. klauberi, E. exchscholtzii) evolved from a common ancestor, but developed different characteristics due to migration of their common ancestor along two sides of the San Joaquin valley with different environmental conditions.
- 170 species of cichlid fish live in Lake Victoria in Africa, which evolved from two species that 'seeded' the lake 14,700 years ago. These species show differences in body structure and appearance linked to their feeding habits: some cichlids eat insects, others crustaceans, others plants, others molluscs, and others fish scales. Each new species has found its particular niche. About 4,000 years ago, a small new lake (Lake Nabugabo) became isolated from Lake Victoria by a narrow sandbar. Since this time, at least 5 new species of cichlids not found in Lake Victoria have evolved.
- The marsupial mammals of Australia resemble (similar body structures) the placental mammals of North America (numbat vs. anteater, cuscus vs. lemur, flying phalanger vs. flying squirrel, tasmanian tiger cat vs. bobcat, tasmanian wolf vs. wolf, etc.) because they evolved in similar environmental niches (grassland plains, forests, etc.). However, the Australian mammals have pouches because their South American ancestors were marsupials. Geological evidence shows that Australia broke off from Antartica, which was connected to South America, 50 million years ago. A land bridge allowing placental mammals to migrate from North to South America only formed 2.5 million years ago (due to formation of a polar ice cap that caused a dramatic fall in sea level).
I challenge Christians that dislike the idea that genetic mutations, which are central to evolution, are random (while natural selection selects those that are beneficial for survival) to consider their own existence: one, out of millions of sperm, won the race to fertilize the egg that became you. If God is providential over this, could He be providential over evolution?
Evolution is often referred to as a theory, but we must understand what we mean by theory in this instance. Just as the law of gravity best fits with tides, the orbit of planets, and why everything on the surface of earth is drawn to its core, evolution is the theory that best fits the massive amount of evidence (fossil, DNA, geographical distribution of species) regarding the development of life on earth. Evolutionary theory is not a simple hypothesis to be tested in a single laboratory experiment.
Back to my point. I grew up in the church, attended private Christian schools from kindergarten to seventh grade, still (and hopefully always will) love Jesus wholeheartedly, and wouldn't trade my upbringing for anything. However, through middle school, I grew up in a church and schools that feared evolution. As a result, I never learned the evolutionary theory and had no science classes in sixth or seventh grade. I was taught that the earth was roughly 6,000 years old and all species were discretely created by God. There is a gaping hole in my education regarding dinosaurs; the reason for which is obvious: dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago due to a huge asteroid (nine miles in diameter) that struck the earth at that time. This left a massive crater (112 miles in diameter, 30 miles deep) in the gulf of Mexico. It also raised an incredible amount of dust and debris, causing a darkening of the sun and severe polar winters. The starvation that ensued led to massive extinctions. Importantly, these extinctions facilitated the rise of mammals as there was significantly less competition in most ecological niches. The church I grew up in, on alternating years, taught its middle schoolers to believe in the rapture and sudden creation. Throughout my high school years, I was too concerned with girls, grades, work, athletics, and youth group to consider my beliefs on evolution (or the rapture, for that matter). However, college significantly challenged my beliefs:
- As a member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, it became clear from attending lectures and experiencing departmental research that the universe was older than 6,000 by several orders of magnitude.
- In taking an Eschatology course, for which our final exam was to outline our beliefs of the end times, I realized the rapture had no Biblical support (aside from misreadings of 1 Thessalonians 4:17) and stemmed from this guy named John Nelson Darby in the 1830s in America.
- While I only took one Biology course, from conversations with peers and reading books such as this, I decided that evolution probably brought all species into existence, except for mankind. Having since seen the fossil evidence for neanderthals and intermediates between ape and man, I now lean towards man evolving from apes.
In the opening chapter, Falk shares his story before addressing the relationship between faith and science. He writes, "Most of the books about creation that evangelicals have on their shelves espouse the position that there are major scientific flaws in the view that life appeared gradually on this earth...[these books] advocate a view [of sudden creation] that, carried to its conclusion, leads to the position that the sciences of astronomy, astrophysics, nuclear physics, geology and biology are fundamentally wrong. These sciences point toward a very old earth and universe and to the gradual appearance of new life forms on earth over billions of years. If they were wrong, it would not mean the demise of a marginal theory at the sidelines of each discipline. So central are the notions of an old earth and the gradual appearance of life to these fields of scientific endeavor that the scientists in research universities hold them with absolute certainty" (emphasis mine). The question this urgently begs is: what if it is the large segment of the American evangelical church that is wrong? This question becomes all the more urgent in considering our call to spread the gospel. In isolating ourselves from scientific research, are we pushing away a more educated demographic that needs Jesus just as desperately as we do?
Before exploring what science has to tell us about God's mechanism of creation, Falk spends a chapter engaging with Genesis 1-3 and the rest of the Bible to understand the purpose of creation. He shows that the heart of the creation message is not to be found in the mechanical details of life and how it arose, but in the person of Jesus Christ (John 1:1,4). Just as the creation story reveals that we were made for life with God, the new creation story--the story of how you and I can become new creations in Christ (2 Cor 5:17)--reveals that God's goal in creating humankind is so that we all might have life "to the full" (John 10:10). The Bible shows Adam and Eve were created by God to live in the presence of God--knowing no guilt or the meaning of evil. Tempted to doubt God's words to them, they chose to disobey the all-good God who wanted the best for them. In a similar fashion, we are repeatedly tempted to doubt God's promises to us and to value prestige, power, and control of our own destiny in the place of the simple call to obedient discipleship. In the midst of our sinful state, God seeks us out--from Adam and Eve, hiding in shame in the garden, to us, hiding behind our idols and in our shame, God has never stopped relentlessly pursuing His children. God was with Adam and Eve, but their sin had consequences: spiritual death and banishment from the garden. However, in Jesus Christ--God incarnate--God shows His rescue plan for all sinners. "If being cast from the garden meant being removed from access to the tree of life...then Jesus' death and resurrection make it accessible to us once again." He explores how the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ--fully God and fully man--provides new life for sinners who fall at His feet; new life in a new heaven and a new earth. He closes the chapter by arguing that all the evidence in the world (apologetics, convergence in evolution, the anthropomorphic principle, etc.) can provide "strong hints that there is something more." However, "it is not our minds that lead us to God; we come to know God because God chooses to reveal Himself and His nature to us." As a result, the real challenge to evangelicals today should not be to change people's minds (for instance, by getting the creation story into the classroom) but to show people God, such that He can melt their hearts.
Is this narrative of creation, and Genesis 1, in particular, compatible with gradual creation? In the third chapter, Falk argues that, for a long time, the time frame of God's creative work in Genesis 1 could be 6,000 years or an unknown amount of time. Since Genesis 1 is a literary genre seen nowhere else in the Bible it is tricky to interpret. Issues that add interpretation intrigue are that the sun is not created until day 4, the creation order is reversed in Genesis 2, 'day' is used to represent an indefinite amount of time elsewhere in the Bible (2 Peter 3:8, the 'day of the Lord' throughout the NT), there are poetic parallels between days 1-3 and days 4-6, there is authorial intent to combat Babylonian creation stories (the number 7 and its multiples were unlucky in Babylonian literature, the Sabbath is a deliberate replacement of the Babylonian lunar cycle), and the phrase "and there was evening and there was morning" is not repeated for day 7 (indicating that day 7 is not a day so much as it is the period since creation in which God dwells in the 'temple' He made for Himself; see this book). As a result, multiple views of God's creative time frame were compatible with Genesis 1 and were held by various theologians since the time of Christ.
Falk shows in great detail that overwhelming evidence from the decay of multiple radioactive elements in rocks, monitoring changes in earth's magnetic poles, tree rings, lake sediments, and ice cores have shown that the earth is much, much, much older than 6,000 years (namely, about 4.5 billion years). Falk shows how the doppler effect and light intensity measurements of several galaxies have allowed astrophysicists to calculate a time period of 12-16 billion years for the age of our universe (i.e. the time since the big bang). In the subsequent chapters, Falk turns his attention to earth, showing, again in painstaking detail, how fossil, geographical, and DNA evidence strongly support evolution. He shows that evolution is consistent with gradual creation, but challenges an interpretation of Genesis 1 that holds to the sudden creation of all species 6,000 years ago (or a stepwise creation of species at discrete intervals in time).
So what does this all mean for Christianity?
- The Bible does not provide explicit detail about the mechanisms of creation, because that is not its purpose. "The Bible, above all else, is a story of God's plan of salvation and as such it is a story of God's desire to enter into relationship...in a sense, then, how God created our bodies is incidental, and God chose not to go into it in detail because it is a side issue that would detract from the central purpose of the story. Readers down through the ages would have become lost in the technical details and missed the real point of the story if it had been told in any other way. Hence God simply told us that we, like animals, are created from the dust of the ground. And that, as you know, is the heart of the gradual creation story--no biologist could put it more succinctly than that."
- Evidence for a very old earth and evolution does not lead to atheism. Rather, the fact that the universe had a beginning, the anthropic principle, and many examples of the convergence of evolution provide great challenges to atheism. As such, believing in evolution does not undermine the core belief of Christianity that God created us in His image for relationship with Him. Exploring the mechanisms by which He did so is one of the many joys we have in "thinking God's thoughts after Him."
- Christians are all members of Christ's body and need to strive for unity. Christians that hold a 'sudden creation' perspective must not view those with a 'gradual creation' perspective as sinners doomed to hell. They must allow space for evolutionary creationism, so as to build bridges with the spiritually thirsty whose rational disbelief in 'sudden creation' keeps them from exploring Christianity. They should also stop insisting that 'sudden creation' be taught in schools as if it was science, as evidence from all scientific fields clearly show this is not the case. Conversely, Christians who believe in 'gradual creation' must lovingly embrace Christians who believe in 'sudden creation.' "Although you may be absolutely certain that God created gradually, this does not mean that you are somehow less obligated to love and care for someone who is equally certain that God created suddenly. We are one body and we must nurture and care for each other, all the more so when we think differently on some points."
