The BioLogos Forum. It has a very cool name, and I can just see its shiny Starfleet-style insignia on a letterhead or uniform. Its mission: to “promote and celebrate the integration of science and Christian faith.” But according to Phil Johnson yesterday, so far it’s pretty lame.
[A]bout two weeks ago, Darrel Falk (president of The BioLogos Foundation) Fedexed me a copy of a letter he wrote to John MacArthur. It seems the staff at BioLogos had been reading a series of posts about Genesis and the biblical account of creation on the Grace to You blog and they were convinced MacArthur’s critique of uniformitarianism missed the mark.
[…]
Mr. Falk’s letter to John MacArthur informed him that BioLogos was about to do a three-part response on the subject, defending uniformitarianism. So I figured I would wait and read what they have to say.
What a disappointment. It seems to me the whole BioLogos response is merely a drawn-out way of saying “Nuh-uh!” You can read their responses for yourself: here, here, and here.
In the first article, Stephen O. Moshier essentially argues that uniformitarianism itself has never really been uniform. He says the term “as it is used by geologists today [is different from] the 19th century definition.” Supposedly, Dr. MacArthur did his readers a disservice by not chronicling the evolution of uniformitarian definitions.
That’s fine, but utterly beside the point. Don’t the curse and the flood still refute the uniformitarian presupposition? Biblical arguments are missing from Moshier’s article (oddly titled “The Biblical Premise of Uniformitarianism”).
Well, OK, biblical references are not entirely missing. I should mention Moshier’s one lame appeal to the words of the sage in Ecclesiastes 1:9: “That which has been is that which will be, and that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun.”
As if that disproved the Genesis account and settled the dispute on the side of the skeptics in 2 Peter 3:4.
I’m still wondering: why are some Christians so determined to let evolutionary ideas, based upon only allowing non-God assumptions about history, dictate how we understand the Bible?
This isn’t the same as disagreements over end-times beliefs or baptism. Proponents of those views can find Biblical support for their side, and that is the basis of whatever arguments they use. But in this case, it’s Christians (some of whom just don’t know) accepting inherently anti-God biases and then trying to interpret them as if they were made by objective observers.
And by the way, few people claim a Christian who believes evolution is a heretic. But if you follow the logical conclusions of believing Genesis is only metaphor, you run into so many core-doctrine problems: death before sin, God saying disease was “good,” the flood account being twisted into a “local” flood instead of the clearly described global cataclysm that it was — and ultimately the very reason why Jesus needs to redeem this world.
As I recently wrote to a family member:
Why accept the secular scientists’ “rules of the game” anyway? They’ve already presupposed that God has little or nothing to do with origins worldviews and interpret evidence accordingly. Moreover, origins worldviews have nothing to do with finding or presenting different sets of evidence that speak one way or the other. For unobservable events in the past, such as creation or evolution, all we have are present-day evidence in the present. Which presuppositions best explain it? Let’s admit we have them. More here.
[In the God-used-evolution notions,] creatures on Earth would be living, dying, killing each other, getting bone disease and cancer (as fossils show). Was this before God created the first humans? If so, how could He pronounce this world “very good”? Yes, one can be saved without believing in a literal Genesis, but despite that disbelief, not because of it. We reading Scripture naturally everywhere else; why avoid that in Genesis? The creation account is irrevocably intertwined with all other Scriptural truths: Who owns us, His goodness, what caused sin, why we need to be saved, why marriage is what it is, why public nakedness isn’t cool, and many more.
BioLogos is apparently sticking true to the idea of uniformitarianism. Maybe after millions of years of changes, they will be using the actual Bible to defend evolution-based beliefs.
So far all they have is a nice series of hypotheses about how God somehow used evolution and worked His way up to the first humans. It’s a fun story, with intelligently designed ideas about another world, but it isn’t about the world God actually gave us, the world He created — after which He was kind enough to share with us in Genesis about the process He used.
Also I do wish Tim Keller, even if he isn’t sure how to understand or explain anti-God assumptions about man’s origins compared with the Bible, would get out of this shindig.
Stephen, for once I have to disagree with you—theistic evolution and old-earth creationism have a long history in the Christian church, including such defenders of Biblical doctrine as Charles Hodge, B. B. Warfield, St. Augustine, and Charles Spurgeon. The fact is, that the interpretation of Genesis 1 is not a clear-cut issue.
The whole creation-evolution debate should center around biblical interpretation and how to make it fit with the empirical evidence—how do we fit general revelation with special revelation? If they are in conflict, our interpretation of one or the other is wrong.
So was the earth created in a literal six days starting on October 23, 4004 BC? I don’t think the Bible clearly says one way or the other. I happen to think that the genealogies of Genesis are quite stylized, not meant to be added up. Is Genesis 1 poetry? I happen to think so, given that some of the details don’t quite fit with Genesis 2 (where there is a major stylistic shift). Am I accepting evolutionary assumptions in saying this? Not necessarily: I’m just trying to make sure I don’t say anything that the text doesn’t actually say—I want the text to dictate my hermaneutic, not my hermaneutic to dictate what I think the text does and doesn’t say. If there is even a slight chance that a literal hermaneutic is not the right one, I need to back off of being dogmatic about it.
I think what is clear is that man was a special creation, regardless of how other species diversified—Adam and Eve were real people in the same way that Christ was a real person. The Bible is clear on that in a way that it isn’t clear about when Adam existed or even how long God took to create.
I short, I think Tim Keller and others are right to be agnostic on this point because the Bible isn’t clear. I am not denying the historicity or reliability of the Bible if I happen to think that one part is more literal than another—the primary purpose of Genesis 1 is not historical, but apologetic. Think of it: the people of Israel are coming out of Egypt and still they worship false gods, so Moses writes Genesis 1 to show that everything that these gods are supposed to be lords of were, in fact, created by Jahveh, as if the ten plagues hadn’t been proof enough. Again, let’s not go beyond the text and its original intent. My reasons for this position are not scientific, but Biblical—I want to be faithful to what the Bible actually teaches, as you do.
Phillip, you likely know I’ll have some thoughts to share about this — yet at the moment I’m out of town and thus far only have time to refer you here:
http://bit.ly/bpgLHa
The issue is not necessarily the Age of the Earth (though this is an important subtopic). Instead, was Adam a real, historical person? If he was, then we maintain vital theological constructs such as all of us being descended from him and thus having an inherited sin nature and needing a Savior. If not, then so much of our theology is called into question — and the supposed “objective” scientists (who’ve assumed Godless or God-minimizing origins theories from the get-go) are no more impressed anyway.
Another superb resource is the book Old-Earth Creationism on Trial. A chapter I read just this morning dealt with the common “the church fathers were open to different interpretations” objection. In short, some church fathers (such as Augustine) erred on the side of reducing the days’ length, not expanding their lengths, and many (such as Luther took the account as it was meant to be taken: history, not just poetry/framework/polemic/metaphor/whatever.
I’ll likely review that book when I finish reading it, and of course offer some thoughts for you here as well. Another related fact worth looking into is the “conversion” of R.C. Sproul to take the Genesis account for its natural reading. Perhaps many theologians (including those you mentioned) are merely intimidated by supposed “objective” scientists who claim otherwise — as if determining human origins is their exclusive domain and the Bible doesn’t relate. Unfortunately this is how a lot of this got started, when theologians began to accept old-Earth geology ideas and add them to the Bible, even before Darwin originated his evolution notions.
I don’t think that many of those quoted would dispute that Adam was a real historical person. I don’t think that is in question for most. Warfield, Hodge, and Augustine all agreed that Adam was a real person, just as many of the biologos fellows would (Keller, for example). The issue is one of how we interpret Genesis 1 and how we interpret genealogies.
I do think there are evolutionary assumptions that ought to be questioned, but we also don’t want a repeat of the Copernicus incident where a faulty interpretation of the Bible led to a conflict between faith and science. Even Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in critiquing Darwin, did so on a scientific basis rather than a theological one.