A Christian's Guide to Evolution

A blog like “A Christian’s Guide to Evolution” has to begin with the Bible. The Bible teaches that the earth was created in 6 days, the first man was created from dust, and the first woman was created from his rib. It implies that at that time, no animal ate meat. All animal life was vegetarian. Plants were the food for all life.

Or does it?

As you might imagine, interpreting a 3,500 or 2,500-year-old document (age depends on who you listen to) is not as simple as “I read it, so that’s all there is to it.”

Some Ancient Near East scholars (Christian ones) like Dr. John Walton tell us that Genesis chapters 1 to 3 are about God and man, not science. Genesis 1 is trying to teach us that there is only one God, unlike the surrounding nations that had many gods.

It is trying to teach us that God is good, and he created the earth for the benefit of humans. Babylonian mythology taught that Marduk created the heavens and earth by splitting the goddess Tiaman in half, then created humans as slaves to provide the gods’ needs. Genesis tells us that God created everything and has need of nothing.

When we try to turn the Bible, and its ancient authors, into a modern science book, we run into problems we should have learned from 500 years ago. When Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric theory in 1543, that the earth went around the sun, rather than vice versa, churches cried out against him. Luther and Calvin both pointed out that Joshua commanded the sun to be still, not the earth (Josh. 10:12-14). Churches pointed out that Psalm 104:5 says, “[God] set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.”

Some 90 years later, in 1633, the Roman Catholic Church declared Galileo a heretic for supporting Copernicus’ theory, forced him to recant, then kept him on house arrest for the rest of his life. Today, despite Psalm 104:5, it would be very hard to find even one Christian who believes the earth goes around the sun.

Science triumphed, and the churches had egg on their faces for turning the Bible into a science book. Those events are long forgotten by those who are trying to make it a science book today.

A literal reading of Genesis 1 does not provide a description of the cosmos that Christians would accept anyway. The sky has the sun, moon, and stars in it, yet it is holding up “the waters above.” As pointed out earlier, the earth is on foundations and does not move (Ps. 104:5), and the sky is called the firmament because it is “firm” or solid (cf. Job 37:8).

SIL Global, a company devoted to translating the Bible for all cultures, has an article explaining that the cosmology in Genesis 1 is the same cosmology held to by the surrounding nations of the Ancient Near East. Again, Moses was not arguing for a particular scientific view of the universe, but there was one God who loves humans and created the earth for our benefit.

So I want to begin this blog, and its posts, by telling you that I believe the Bible is inspired and true. Its truths, however, are not always scientific. Instead, the truth you should gather from Genesis 1 is that there is one God who loves us and created the earth for us to not only dwell on, but to oversee.

I will also cover the science of evolution in future posts, and accept your questions and challenges in the comments. In the next post, however, I will cover Genesis 2-3 and the creation of Man and Life (which is what Adam and Eve mean in Hebrew).

I know this blog will be controversial, so I will be deleting off-topic comments. For example, if you discuss Charles Darwin in a comment on today’s post, I will delete it. If, however, you have an argument that the Bible does not teach that the sky is solid, you comment will be on-topic and remain. If you make more than 2 comments on one of my posts without waiting for a response, I will delete all your comments. I have had some experience with “shotgun” posters who post 10 comments at a time.

Please try to stay on topic when you comment. Thank you.