evolution – In So Many Words

The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins by Peter Enns

Summary

Can Christianity and evolution coexist? Traditional Christian teaching presents Jesus as reversing the effects of the fall of Adam. But an evolutionary view of human origins doesn’t allow for a literal Adam, making evolution seemingly incompatible with what Genesis and the apostle Paul say about him.

For Christians who both accept evolution and want to take the Bible seriously, this can present a faith-shaking tension. Popular Old Testament scholar Peter Enns offers a way forward by explaining how this tension is caused not by the discoveries of science but by false expectations about the biblical texts.

My Thoughts

I really appreciated this book. The reading I have done so far on Christianity and evolution focused on the various beliefs about the origins of life as well as the stories of a worldwide flood, and I hadn’t really thought about the implications of this as it relates to the existence of Adam.

Enns spends time discussing the appearance of Adam in the Old Testament as well as the mentions made of Adam by Paul in the New Testament. He explains a lot about the cultural and theological environments of both times and how those environments affected the way the Scriptures were written, as well as how the time we live in affects the way we interpret it.

As he states in Chapter 6: Paul as an Ancient Interpreter of the Old Testament:

The authors of Scripture did not speak at a safe distance from their culture but wrote as people living in a particular time and place in human history….The Old Testament already does in principle what Paul is doing here: reworking the past to speak to the present….It is the very act of altering the past to address present circumstances that ensures Scripture’s continuation as the active and abiding Word of God, not a relic of a bygone era.

The Evolution of Adam gave me a lot to think about, and I am glad I got the chance to read it. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the topic.

Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark? The Bible and Modern Science and the Trouble of Making it All Fit by Janet Kellogg Ray

Summary

Janet Kellogg Ray, a science educator who grew up a creationist, doesn’t want other Christians to have to do the exhausting mental gymnastics she did earlier in her life. Working through the findings of a range of fields including geology, paleontology, and biology, she shows how a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis simply doesn’t mesh with what we know to be reality. But as someone who remains a committed Christian, Ray also shows how an acceptance of the theory of evolution is not necessarily an acceptance of atheism, and how God can still be responsible for having created the world, even if it wasn’t in a single, momentary, miraculous event.

Topics Covered

The Nature of Science
Young Earth Creationism
Old Earth Creationism
Intelligent Design
Theistic Evolution/Evolutionary Creationism
Naturalism and Scientism
The Age of the Universe and the Earth
The Flood and the Fossil Record
The Missing Link
Human Evolution
Leaving Creationism without Leaving God

My Thoughts

I grew up in a conservative pentecostal church and was taught to believe in a young earth and a literal six day creation period along with a worldwide catastrophic flood. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I was exposed to the Institute for Creation Research and became obsessed with their materials. I even challenged a student teacher in one of my high school science classes once. I am embarrassed now to remember how superior I felt knowing “the truth” that most scientists didn’t understand.

Over the last several years, I have come to the realization that this belief was rooted in fear. I was afraid that if I listened to mainstream science, I would lose my faith. It has taken quite a while to overcome these fears, but I no longer believe in a literal reading of the Bible as it relates to science.