Stewart Weaver

Can we balance Genesis and Darwin?

We continue our series in which the congregation poses questions for the minister and the minister attempts to respond.  The congregation quite clearly enjoy hearing the gears in the minister’s brain grinding.  Not to a halt, I hope.

However, the question posed above is merely the shorthand for the actual question posed by a member of St. Philip’s.  The actual question was this:

Could you marry the first Genesis with Darwin’s theory and second Genesis when God entered the hearts and souls and lives of his people?

‘Genre’ comes to mind immediately.  In what sense does Genesis pretend that it is scientific in the sense that we would define it?  Certainly those who wrote both accounts of creation on Genesis observed the world with great care and intent.  How else would there be such beautiful language and imagery and rhythm that seems to cut to the quick of the human soul?  But then again, Aristotle observed carefully and ‘scientifically’ and got lots of things clearly wrong: do flies really spontaneously generate straight from rotting meat?

Observation and interpretation are not necessarily science.  The authors of Genesis did observe wonderfully well within their worldview, a worldview which assumed an active God who would and could create in this manner.  This point could be put more precisely: maybe they couldn’t imagine a universe or a world where God didn’t interact consistently and decisively.  Given this assumption they came up with a statement of observation in faith: this is how the world was created.  This world was created with intent and purpose and was created good.  Very good.  The rhythm of the universe and the rhythm of  our religious lives are one in the same: rest on the seventh day.

Darwin, I suspect, was working within a different worldview.  I have read that he was a religious man but undoubtedly within his time frame he could engage with a worldview in which events could occur without divine intervention.  Thus in his acute observations he could see the forces of nature and time and survival working slowly to fashion a wonderfully diverse variety of plants and animals.  Observation and interpretation within a different intellectual framework.

Where does that leave us?

Many scholars who know more about these things than I ever will understand have claimed that evolution and Genesis are not incompatible.  Other people, such as Dawkins on one end of the spectrum to more conservative readers of the Bible on the other, see a yawning gap between the two. 

One might draw analogies between Genesis and Darwin, just as the question presupposes.  The first story of creation is, in a sense, a poetic description using poetic and imaginative time to describe what is, in essence, an evolution and development of the world.  The second story, which focusses so beautifully on the craftsman God working with humans, could be that moment when self-consciousness arises within humans.  The sense of mortality or outside transcendence or perhaps even language.

But is this a fair reading of the texts?  Is this their intent?  Allegorical readings were famous within the early church.  Go read some of Augustine’s interpretations.  His ingenuity is breathtaking…and perplexing.  Was the writer of the Song of Songs really describing the relationship between Christ and his bride, the Church?  Or was it a wonderful love poem exuding one of the most marvellous of human emotions?

I hesitate with this kind of analogous thinking.  It is open to so much speculation within which so much could be read into the text or out of the text.  There’s simply too much room for personal or communal eisegesis (reading into the text) and that can lead to shocking abuses of the text.

So, where does that leave us?

The Bible, to quote Karl Barth (the famous 20th century evangelical theologian) is a ‘witness to the revelation of God’.  He emphasised that the revelation of God is in Jesus Christ and through Jesus Christ.  If that’s the case, then perhaps we can re-visit this entire scenario.  Creation is not, in fact, a common theme in the New Testament at all.  Perhaps it was a given that God created in the manner that was described in Genesis.  But surely in the midst of Greek gods that battled at the beginning of all things before the world was created (Cronos and Gaia and the Titans), surely in the midst of the Roman cosmology, so analogous to the Greek thinking, Jesus would have addressed the issue if he felt it was interfering with the essence of his teaching.  For some of the Gospel stories, later than Paul’s writings about Jews and Gentiles, point to the interaction with the Gentiles and the efforts to convert them.  And these interactions and these conversions don’t seem to focus terribly much on God the creator in Genesis but Jesus the one who heals and redeems and brings people back to God.

If we focus on Christ, the revelation of God, and if we accept the basic premise that Christ taught of a God of love and mercy (Prodigal Son; Good Samaritan; Sermon on the Mount; the Great Commandment)  then perhaps we need to look at our creation, right now, as it stands, unfettered by both Genesis and Darwin, and ask what we see.

And what do we see?

I for one see a world of nature that is undoubtedly red in tooth and claw.  I see a world of nature where survival is crucial and animals will strive to survive.  I see too nature full of unimaginable beauty and colour and variety.

Humans are a part of that creation.  We know that without any other mental or intellectual frameworks.  All of the above obtains for humans too: red in tooth and sword and gun.  Survival and competition.  But utter beauty and commitment and generosity and love.

Does love obtain in nature?  There are commitments to other animals (swans) and to the group, but is it love?  Can it approach the distinctions between romantic love, brotherly love, platonic love and agape, the communal, giving love of Christianity?  I wonder.

So, where does that leave us?

The ideal and the real.  Darwin may be correct in the cold-eyed (reptilian?) description of nature.  In fact, he is correct: there is simply too much evidence to suggest that the broad thrust of evolution is incorrect.  But the ideal is Christ.  To see creation as basically ‘very good’; to see humans not as competitors but as brothers and sisters; to see within the very warp and woof of creation its transcendent beauty and within the soil of human society the seed of transforming love.

The world is ours to steward.  Christ once told a possible follower to let the dead bury the dead and come, follow him.  Will we ever know, unequivocally, the intricacies of the big bang or evolution?  Probably not.  Let us leave the mystery of creation, the why of creation (rather than the how), to God.  What we can do, what we are called to do, what we are urged to do, is to see creation and humans through Christ’s love.  If we do this, if we really do put on the spectacles of Christ, then we will see the truth of Genesis alongside the truth of Darwin and know that there is a truth that transcends both because it is grounded in Christ.  A truth that is a leap of faith.

Darwin or Genesis?  Yes.