Old-Earth or Evolutionary Creation?: Discussing Origins With Reasons To Believe And BioLogos 0830852921, 9780830852925

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Title Page......Page 2
Copyright......Page 3
Contents......Page 4
Acknowledgments......Page 6
Introduction: How Did We Get Here?......Page 8
1 Boundaries: What Views Define Your Organization?......Page 15
2 Biblical Interpretation: What Is the Nature of Biblical Authority?......Page 34
3 The Original Couple: What Is the Range of Viable Positions Concerning Adam and Eve?......Page 56
4 Death, Predation, and Suffering: Is “Natural Evil” Evil?......Page 75
5 Divine Action: How Does God Interact with the Natural World?......Page 92
6 The Scientific Method: Methodological Naturalism or Natural Theology?......Page 112
7 Biological Evolution: What Is It? Does It Explain Life’s History?......Page 130
8 The Geological Evidence: What Is the Natural History of the Earth and the Origin of Life?......Page 149
9 The Fossil Evidence: Who Were the Hominids?......Page 166
10 The Biological Evidence: Does Genetics Point to Common Descent?......Page 185
11 The Anthropological Evidence: How Are Humans Unique?......Page 206
Conclusion: What Is the Next Step?......Page 227
Bibliography......Page 232
Contributors......Page 240
The BioLogos Foundation......Page 244
Praise for Old-Earth or Evolutionary Creation?......Page 245
About the Editors......Page 248
Academic Textbook Selector......Page 0

Citation preview

Discussing Origins with

Reasons to Believe and BioLogos Edited by

Old-Earth Old Earth oror Evolutionary Creation?

Kenneth Keathley, J. B. Stump, and Joe Aguirre

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 ivpress.com [email protected] ©2017 by Kenneth D. Keathley, BioLogos Foundation, and Reasons to Believe All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press. InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges, and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, visit intervarsity.org. All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®, NIV ® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Cover design: David Fassett Interior design: Jeanna Wiggins Images: Illustration representing evolution of organisms with correlation to geologic eras / De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images Bible: ©eurobanks/iStockphoto Earth: ©leonello/iStockphoto ISBN 978-0-8308-9264-8 (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-5292-5 (print)

Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction: How Did We Get Here?

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1

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8

Hugh Ross, Deborah Haarsma, and Kenneth Keathley 1

Boundaries: What Views Define Your Organization? Robert Stewart, Deborah Haarsma, Hugh Ross, and Kenneth Samples

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Biblical Interpretation: What Is the Nature of Biblical Authority?

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Steve Lemke, John Walton, and Kenneth Samples 3

The Original Couple: What Is the Range of Viable Positions Concerning Adam and Eve?

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Ted Cabal, Loren Haarsma, and Kenneth Samples 4

Death, Predation, and Suffering: Is “Natural Evil” Evil?

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James Dew, J. B. Stump, and Hugh Ross 5

Divine Action: How Does God Interact with the Natural World?

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John Laing, J. B. Stump, and Jeff Zweerink 6

The Scientific Method: Methodological Naturalism or Natural Theology?

| 105

James Dew, J. B. Stump, and Jeff Zweerink 7

Biological Evolution: What Is It? Does It Explain Life’s History? Ted Cabal, Darrel Falk, and Fuz Rana

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The Geological Evidence: What Is the Natural History of the Earth and the Origin of Life?

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Robert Stewart, Ralph Stearley, and Hugh Ross 9

The Fossil Evidence: Who Were the Hominids?

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Robert Stewart, Ralph Stearley, and Fuz Rana 10

The Biological Evidence: Does Genetics Point to Common Descent?

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John Laing, Darrel Falk, and Fuz Rana 11

The Anthropological Evidence: How Are Humans Unique?

| 199

Steve Lemke, Jeff Schloss, and Fuz Rana

Conclusion: What Is the Next Step?

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Kenneth Keathley, Deborah Haarsma, and Hugh Ross

Bibliography

| 225

Contributors

| 233

The BioLogos Foundation

| 237

Praise for Old-Earth or Evolutionary Creation?

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About the Editors

| 241

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

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Academic Textbook Selector

| 245

Acknowledgments

This book came to fruition because of the cooperation and generous support of many people. Whether it was time, financial means, hospitality, or expertise, we could not have put this excellent resource in your hands without their help. We are particularly grateful for a grant from the John Templeton Foundation that funded face-to-face dialogues among BioLogos, Reasons to Believe, and Southern Baptist seminary professors. The Reasons to Believe editorial team of Sandra Dimas, Amanda Warner, and Jocelyn Hsiung provided much-needed copyediting skills as they helped Joe Aguirre stay on schedule with the RTB scholar essays. We are deeply appreciative of the support of the administrators of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, who made available the facilities of their respective campuses for our meetings; each provided lodging, conference rooms, and organizational help. Finally, a special word of thanks must also be given to Emily Harrison. Emily serves as administrative assistant for the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture. She provided Ken Keathley with essential help in coordinating meetings, handling travel logistics, and later in compiling the book. She worked tirelessly to shepherd the Southern Baptist chapter writers, and then collated their respective contributions. Many, many thanks. Soli Deo Gloria. Kenneth Keathley Jim Stump Joe Aguirre

Introduction

How Did We Get Here? Hugh Ross, Deborah Haarsma, and Kenneth Keathley

This book is the result of an unprecedented project. What happens

when you bring together three groups who disagree about key points of science and theology but share a love for Jesus? Is it possible to overcome mistrust? To present one’s own position without attacking others’? To develop an attitude of humble learning instead of winning a debate? In today’s hyperpolarized culture, such dialogue seems nearly impossible. Yet because of our shared love for Christ, who calls the church to unity, and our shared excitement for studying God’s creation, we were able to find the common ground needed for genuine dialogue about our differences. In this book we invite you to listen in as we talk together about what we’ve learned over the last several years of conversation. The dialogue began between leaders of Reasons to Believe (RTB) and future leaders of BioLogos in the years leading up to the founding of Bio­ Logos in 2007. In 2011 a group of Southern Baptist seminary professors (representing the Southern Baptist Convention or SBC) began conversations with BioLogos, and by 2013 the three-way dialogue was in full swing. These groups represent a range of positions on the issues of creation and evolution. National surveys show that most Southern Baptists accept the young-earth creation view. This view is the most well-known: God created the earth and life several thousand years ago, and Genesis 1 refers to six literal twenty-four-hour days. This book will not address young-earth views in detail but will focus on two others: old-earth creation as presented by RTB, and evolutionary creation as presented by BioLogos. Both

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RTB and BioLogos believe that God created the universe several billion years ago and that Genesis 1 can be interpreted in ways that are at least as faithful to the authority and message of the text while not contradicting the evidence for an old universe. The groups differ, however, in their views on biological evolution, their interpretive approach to Genesis 1, and some theological positions. This book will introduce you to the views of each group and present a robust discussion of areas where they agree and disagree. We begin with introductions to the two organizations from their respective leaders.

REASONS TO BELIEVE

Hugh Ross

Reasons to Believe (RTB) began in 1986 when the church where Hugh Ross served as minister of evangelism commissioned him to launch a science evangelism organization. Though it started small—with a dozen volunteers, a three-hundred-name mailing list, and an inventory of Hugh’s booklets on Genesis 1—within a year RTB was able to move from an office in Hugh and Kathy Ross’s apartment to a seven-hundred-square-foot space rented from the church. Today, the paid staff at RTB numbers almost forty and the volunteer teams exceed one thousand people. The goal of RTB is to gather and train volunteers from all walks of life, not just the sciences, to join us in our common mission. That mission is to use the ever-expanding knowledge and understanding of the book of nature to show people not yet committed to Jesus Christ the inspiration and inerrancy of the book of Scripture. We then seek to demonstrate God’s fingerprints inscribed on nature and through those evidences persuade unbelievers to dedicate their lives to Christ as Creator, Lord, and Savior. RTB sees science as the primary tool (see Ps 19; Rom 1) for persuading unbelievers that God “exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (Heb 11:6). As an apologetics organization, RTB focuses on ventures proven most effective in reaching unchurched youth and adults for Christ. Rather than exposing flaws and contradictions in competing worldviews, RTB concentrates on building a positive case for Christianity through a testable biblical creation model. In the spirit of 1 Peter 3:15-16, RTB is committed to

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researching and proclaiming sound reasons for hope in Christ with gentleness, respect, and a clear conscience. In the spirit of 2 Corinthians 5:18-20, RTB engages Christians with differing creation theologies with the goal of pursuing reconciliation through love, truth, and peace so that nonChristians observing these dialogues may be encouraged to trust us in helping them to be reconciled to Christ.

BIOLOGOS

Deborah Haarsma

BioLogos was founded by Francis Collins, one of the world’s leading biologists and the current director of the National Institutes of Health. In 2006, after he led the Human Genome Project, he published The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. This book recounts his own development from atheism to Christian belief. He argues that science is not in conflict with biblical faith and presents an active, caring God who created the diversity of life through evolutionary processes. These views attracted widespread curiosity, both from secular scientists who had never heard a leading scientist speaking positively about Christianity and from evangelical Christians who had never heard an evangelical speaking positively about evolution. As the book rose in popularity, Collins’s inbox was inundated with questions, leading him to start the BioLogos website to address a few of the most common questions. Today, our website has over a thousand articles, videos, testimonies, and sermons discussing questions of science and Christian faith. Over a million people visit the site per year. Our online discussion boards have attracted people from across the spectrum, from young-earth creationists to mainline Christians to agnostics, atheists, and followers of other religions. BioLogos also sponsors workshops for teachers, academic conferences for scientists and theologians, and gatherings for pastors and faith leaders. Too many people have left the church or felt they couldn’t commit their lives to God because they perceived science (particularly biological evolution) to be the enemy of Christianity. Our goal is to call such people back to faith or invite them to consider the gospel for the first time, as we proclaim Christ as the Creator of all things in heaven and on earth (Col 1:16). We strive for humility and gracious dialogue with those who hold other views so that our conversations may be filled with the fragrance of Christ (2 Cor 2:15).

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HOW DID THE DIALOGUE BEGIN?

Hugh Ross and Darrel Falk

The relationship between RTB and BioLogos formally began on October 17, 2006, when biochemist Fazale “Fuz” Rana and physicist Dave Rogstad of RTB interviewed BioLogos founder Francis Collins for RTB’s Creation Update webcast.1 Informally, the relationship began much earlier. Hugh Ross interviewed future BioLogos scholar Jeff Schloss on altruism and human exceptionalism for several television episodes in the early 1990s. In the late 1990s BioLogos geneticist Darrel Falk had meetings with Rana and Ross, and Ross and astrophysicist Jeff Zweerink interacted with Deborah Haarsma in her capacity as executive director of the chr-astro website. The next formal meeting was on June 22, 2009, when Falk, then president of BioLogos, had lunch with RTB’s scholar team. Afterward the RTB scholars and Falk had a phone meeting with Collins, where we discussed getting the leaders of BioLogos and RTB together for a private, day-long dialogue. Before that dialogue, on August 24, 2009, Falk met for several hours with Rana and Ross at RTB’s headquarters and by phone with Lynn Carta, an RTB volunteer who heads up a government biology research lab. The first dialogue between the BioLogos and RTB leadership teams occurred on January 23, 2010, in Collins’s home. The BioLogos participants included Francis Collins, Peter Enns, Darrel Falk, and Jeff Schloss. The RTB participants were Lynn Carta, Fuz Rana, Hugh Ross, and Kenneth Samples. The purpose of the meeting was to clarify areas of agreement and disagreement and to establish goals for future dialogue between the two organizations. Four goals were agreed on: 1. Clarify for each other our beliefs about and positions on various aspects of creation and evolution. 2. Outline the means by which at least some of the more significant differences between us could be resolved. 3. Set up public forums that will allow both Christians and non-Christians to learn about our respective positions on specific creation and evolution issues, observe our dialogue, and then engage in conversation with us. This interview is available at http://c450903.r3.cf2.rackcdn.com/2006/cu339.mp3. See the Creation Update podcast at Reasons to Believe, www.reasons.org/explore/type/creation-update-2.

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4. Consider how our interactions with one another might model for the Christian community how to approach differences in perspective and interpretation. Leaders of the organizations met again to pursue these goals in Laguna Beach, California (September 14, 2010), Newport Beach, California (August 23, 2012), and Stone Mountain, Georgia (October 3–5, 2013). Meanwhile, public forums and debates where BioLogos and RTB presented their areas of agreement and disagreement on biblical creation texts and on the origin and history of life and humanity took place in Vancouver, British Columbia (November 11–14, 2010), Hong Kong (February 18–19, 2011), Amelia Island, Florida (February 26–29, 2012), Wheaton, Illinois (March 29, 2012), KKLA radio in Southern California (July 10, 2012), Anaheim, California (July 14, 2012), Atlanta (October 3, 2013), and Azusa, California (February 11, 2014). The first public forum involving Southern Baptist theologians as moderators occurred at the Evangelical Theological Society conference in San Diego on November 19, 2014. Meetings focused on the development of this book that involved all or nearly all of the authors occurred in New Orleans (May 2014), San Diego (November 2014), and Wake Forest, North Carolina (April–May 2015). For a complete history of the BioLogos-RTB-SBC relationship, see “History of the BioLogos–Reasons to Believe Dialogue” by Hugh Ross.2

SOUTHERN BAPTIST THEOLOGIANS’ ROLE AS DIALOGUE MODERATORS

Kenneth Keathley

In 2011, Darrel Falk and Ken Keathley met during a conference at Pepperdine University. Falk had not yet retired from being president of BioLogos, and Keathley was (and remains) a professor of theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, a Southern Baptist school in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Their conversations led to Falk inviting Keathley and other SBC professors to enter into a dialogue with BioLogos. The dialogue was published as a series of blog posts on the BioLogos website, titled “Southern Baptist Voices.”3 This initial exchange resulted in further SBC involvement in the Reasons to Believe–BioLogos conversation. 2

Hugh Ross, “History of the BioLogos–Reasons to Believe Dialogue,” Reasons to Believe, January 31, 2015, www.reasons.org/articles/history-of-BioLogos-Reasons-To-Believe-relationship. 3 “Southern Baptist Voices Series,” BioLogos, March 2, 2012, http://biologos.org/blogs/archive /southern-baptist-voices-series.

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One can safely say that the Southern Baptist seminary professors involved in the dialogue represent conservative evangelicalism. They subscribe to the Baptist Faith and Message (the SBC’s confessional document) and to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. Both documents affirm the verbalplenary inspiration of Scripture, which ensures that the Bible is the infallible final authority in all matters of faith and practice. Each SBC participant is a committed inerrantist. In many ways, the Southern Baptist participants have served the dialogue as the intended audience. They posed questions, asked follow-up questions, and at times expressed concerns about the answers they received. The conversations were sometimes frank but always affectionate. Our meetings began with worship, and this spirit of worship continued throughout the dialogue.

GOAL AND STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK This book is not a traditional two-views debate. Given the scope of the science-faith issues that both organizations address and the technical nature of much of the science and theology involved in their respective creation models, it is not possible in a single volume for either, let alone both organizations to defend their models. Rather, this book’s purpose is to help lay readers identify science-faith issues, comprehend what the two organizations stand for, understand the nature of their dialogue and what the two organizations hope to achieve through it, and appreciate how they and the church at large can benefit from the conversation. To ensure that this part of the dialogue between RTB and BioLogos does not veer from these purposes and that the two organizations truly engage one another, a team of Southern Baptist theologians agreed to moderate. Through initial and follow-up questions these theologians assisted the respective authors in developing their contributions to each chapter. They also provided theological commentary on the contributions. Jesus declared, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (Jn 13:35). This love has not always been evident among Christians engaging one another on science-faith issues. The hostility and character assaults expressed by many creationists toward fellow believers have become a stumbling block for unbelievers.

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A major purpose of this book is to demonstrate that two creationist organizations can strongly disagree with one another while treating one another with Christian charity, respect, and a willingness to seriously consider the merits of an opposing position. Both organizations and the Southern Baptist moderators intend that this dialogue will serve as a model for how Christians can lovingly pursue reconciliation on this and other controversies threatening to divide the church. This book is the beginning of a written dialogue between the two organizations. It ends with a roadmap for how we hope the dialogue and the pursuit of reconciliation will proceed, not only through future books and articles but also through public speaking venues. BioLogos, Reasons to Believe, and the Southern Baptist moderators desire to enlist the rest of the Christian community in their dialogue and pursuit of reconciliation. We are convinced that the engagement of the larger Christian community will lead to many opportunities for all Christians to present sound reasons and evidences for the Christian faith to unbelievers. We pray too that this book will attract many non-Christians to observe our interaction and thereby be exposed to evidences for Christianity they may never have previously considered.

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Boundaries What Views Define Your Organization? Robert Stewart, Deborah Haarsma, Hugh Ross, and Kenneth Samples

SBC MODERATOR ROBERT STEWART I have very much enjoyed our dialogues. I have especially enjoyed the vibrant faith that is evident among members of both BioLogos and Reasons to Believe (RTB). I have also appreciated the respectful tone and even fellowship that has always been part of our dialogue sessions. At least since the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, Christians have been all over the map in terms of how to understand the relationship— or lack thereof—between science and theology. In recent times, various organizations that specifically focus on the relationship between Christianity and science have flourished among evangelicals. BioLogos and RTB are among the best-known and most-respected groups seeking to show the harmony that exists between Christianity and science. There are two overarching domains that enter into this discussion: science and Christian theology. There are also two primary avenues of knowing who God is and what he has done: general revelation (the book of nature) and special revelation (Scripture). Science interprets nature while theology interprets Scripture. Thankfully, both BioLogos and RTB are composed of scientists who love theology and theologians who love science. There are, however, significant differences between the two groups. I would like Deborah and Hugh to share briefly how their respective groups

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came to be and something of their purpose, core values, presuppositions, and methods, both scientifically and theologically. Please feel free to shape your responses to fit your group’s unique identity and mission.

BioLogos Author Deborah Haarsma Over many hours of conversation and fellowship together, Bob, Hugh, and others often asked about the views and organization of BioLogos. Here I give an overview and address common questions. What is your mission? As described in the introduction, BioLogos was founded by Francis Collins, a world leader in genetics and an evangelical Christian. The mission of BioLogos is to invite the church and the world to see the harmony between science and biblical faith as we present an evolutionary understanding of God’s creation. We hold to these core commitments: • We embrace the historical Christian faith, upholding the authority and inspiration of the Bible. • We affirm evolutionary creation, recognizing God as Creator of all life over billions of years. • We seek truth, ever learning as we study the natural world and the Bible. • We strive for humility and gracious dialogue with those who hold other views. • We aim for excellence in all areas, from science to education to business practices. What do we mean by the Christian faith? We mean the same core beliefs held by Christians over the millennia, from the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds to today. We believe in the Trinity—God the Father, Son, and Spirit. We believe that God created all things, visible and invisible. God transcends his creation and brought it from nothing (creatio ex nihilo); God is immanent in creation, actively participating in a creative and continuing sense (creatio continua); and God will transform the current order of things into his new creation (creatio ex vetere). All people are created in the image of God, yet all have sinned against God and are in need of God’s saving grace. God’s Son became incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth as

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fully God and fully man. His physical death and historical bodily resurrection provide the only path to salvation and eternal life. The Holy Spirit convicts, equips, guides, and empowers God’s people today. The Bible, including all the books of the Old and New Testaments, is inspired by God, trustworthy, and authoritative for our faith and lives. These core Christian beliefs are not unique to Protestantism but are shared across Christendom. While the BioLogos community is centered in the evangelical Protestant world, we have awarded grants to Catholic scholars, discussed theological insights from the Eastern Orthodox world, and written about church fathers from all branches. How does BioLogos get from biblical faith to evolution? John 1 and Colossians 1 teach that all things were made through Christ, and in him all things hold together. Because it is Christ’s creation, we are motivated to investigate the natural world and to take seriously the evidence we find there. That evidence tells a compelling story of evolutionary development of the diversity of life over billions of years. Thus we adhere to core Christian commitments while also accepting the scientific evidence for evolution as the current best description of how God brought about the diversity of life on earth. That includes the scientific evidence that humanity began nearly 200,000 years ago in a population of several thousand individuals. Why use the term “evolutionary creation” rather than “theistic evolution”? It emphasizes God’s creation as the noun, with evolution as the modifier. The parallel with “young-earth creation” and “old-earth creation” highlights how all of these views agree that God created the world while disagreeing about how God acted. How big is your tent? BioLogos is not a membership organization but a community gathered around the commitments described above. Our board, nine staff, and fellows completely affirm our mission statement, core commitments, and belief statement. Moving out from that center, our advisers, hundreds of guest blog authors, and other friends typically affirm most of these statements, but they are not required to sign an agreement. At times we invite guest blog authors with significantly different views because they have ideas worth discussing. Everyone, regardless of their views, is welcome on our online discussion boards, where the only requirements are to maintain a respectful tone and stay on topic.

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One thing we discovered in our dialogue with RTB is that the BioLogos tent of viewpoints is larger than the RTB tent. Even among those who agree with all the BioLogos core commitments and belief statements, there is still a significant range of views that are fully within the organization. Consider the issue of human origins. Within the commitments stated above (e.g., God created humans in his image; they fell into sin; there were more than two individuals at the headwaters of humanity) there are several possible ways to understand Adam and Eve, including as two real historical figures who led a larger group. BioLogos actively fosters research and discussion among the different views on this topic, as discussed in chapter three. In this volume, the BioLogos authors are speaking from within the BioLogos community, and what they write about here is within the bounds of our core commitments and belief statements. Keep in mind, however, that their view may not be the only view at BioLogos—others in the tent may disagree. The most prominent of such disagreements are noted in the respective chapters. How does your view compare to other views? The BioLogos commitment to biblical faith gives us a strong basis for unity with Christians who disagree with us about science. Evolutionary creation clearly differs from young-earth creation (YEC)—the view that the earth and universe were made in six twenty-four-hour days only a few thousand years ago—yet we respect their commitment to Christ and biblical authority. Our Christian commitments are the biggest difference between our views and those of atheistic evolution. In today’s culture, the word evolution has become closely tied to atheistic worldviews, to the point that many Christians find the word itself distasteful or even abhorrent. At BioLogos, however, we completely reject this connection—the science of evolution does not require an atheistic worldview! Instead, like most scientists, we use the word evolution to refer to a scientific process or theory, in the same way scientists refer to the theory of gravity or the process of photosynthesis. Consider the orbits of the planets around the sun. Most Christians are comfortable believing that God governs the motions of the planets and that gravity describes those orbits; the spiritual explanation and the scientific explanation are not mutually exclusive. Similarly, at BioLogos we believe that God governs the development of all life over billions of years and that the science of evolution is an accurate description of that process. Thus BioLogos rejects

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ideologies such as evolutionism that claim evolution has replaced God or renders humans insignificant or purposeless. Similarly, BioLogos rejects worldviews such as materialism and scientism that claim that science is the sole source of knowledge and truth, that science has debunked God and religion, or that the physical world constitutes the whole of reality. Rather, we believe that God typically sustains the world using faithful, consistent processes that humans describe as “natural laws.” We reject ideologies such as deism that claim that the universe is self-sustaining, that God is no longer active in the natural world, or that God is not active in human history. How do your views compare to those of RTB? RTB and BioLogos celebrate our common commitment to biblical Christianity and to science as a means of understanding God’s creation. Moreover, the groups agree on the importance of how we discuss these issues. BioLogos holds that conversations among Christians about controversial issues of science and faith can and must be conducted with humility, grace, honesty, and compassion as a visible sign of the Spirit’s presence in Christ’s body, the church. RTB has not only stated its shared commitment to this goal, but also actively demonstrated it in dialogue with us. Both groups affirm that God reveals himself in two “books”: the book of nature and the book of Scripture (see, e.g., the Belgic Confession, article 2). Since both revelations are from God, they cannot conflict with each other— they might be referring to different things, but they are not saying contrary things. The apparent conflicts come at the level of interpretation, since scientists do not always agree on how to understand the natural world and Christians do not always agree on how to interpret the Bible. We at BioLogos agree with this statement on the RTB website about interpreting the two books: We believe God’s two revelations (Scripture and nature) will agree when properly interpreted. When apparent contradictions arise, we reexamine the data—both biblical and scientific—recognizing that our understanding is incomplete. Sometimes the scientific data seems an unclear or awkward fit with the biblical data. But we see such instances as an opportunity to study both of God’s revelations more deeply.1 1

“Our Creation Model Approach,” Reasons to Believe, www.reasons.org/about/our-creation-model -approach.

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While both groups start from this framework, they come to significantly different conclusions about what the two books are revealing. The biggest areas of difference are scientific—namely, our respective views on the evolution of life and the origins of the human species. BioLogos finds compelling the scientific evidence that all life, including humans, descended from a common ancestor, and that natural evolutionary processes can bring about the development of species. Keep in mind that both groups believe that God created humans, even though we disagree on the methods God used to create. Another key area of difference is our approach to biblical inerrancy. Both groups take the Bible seriously as inspired by God, trustworthy, and authoritative for our lives. The BioLogos tent, however, includes a range of views on inerrancy. Some actively embrace the term, viewing the Bible as inerrant in matters of faith and practice. Others, while taking Scripture seriously as authoritative and inspired, do not find inerrant to be a helpful term in describing their views. Most emphasize that Scripture was revealed in a prescientific context, in which God adapted his message to the understanding of the people of the time. Thus, God did not attempt to teach science to the ancient Hebrews. The Bible is God’s revelation for people of all times, but it was God’s word to the original audience before it came to us. That context is essential. Our organizations have significant differences in how we view the relationship between the Bible and science. At BioLogos, we do not see the Bible as making particular scientific predictions, nor do we develop our own scientific model. Instead, we affirm the process of science taking place in the larger scientific community. We emphasize that the scientific method itself follows naturally from a biblical worldview, as it did for Boyle, Galileo, and Faraday, and that the truths discovered by scientists of any worldview are God’s truth. Thus the scientific conclusions we accept at BioLogos look much the same as those accepted by scientists of all worldviews. We don’t consider this surprising, since all scientists, including atheists, are studying the natural world, God’s general revelation. Where the views of BioLogos differ from most scientists is in the larger religious and philosophical perspective held around those purely scientific conclusions. Because of God’s special revelation in Scripture, we completely reject the claims made by militant atheists in the name of science.

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Sometimes we at BioLogos are asked, “If your science looks just like the science of the secular world, why would you believe in God?” Our answer typically is, “For much the same reasons as other Christians.” We commit our lives to following Jesus for reasons such as a deep conviction of our need for a Savior, a spiritual experience of the Holy Spirit or of answered prayer, or seeing how the Bible rings true in our lives and in the world today. We typically see science as a limited tool, not equipped to answer religious questions about God and meaning. But when we view the natural world through the lens of Christian faith, we discover a vast, ancient, well-crafted, and extravagant creation that resonates, rather than clashes, with our biblical understanding of God. The heavens truly declare his glory.

Reasons to Believe Authors Hugh Ross and Kenneth Samples The mission of Reasons to Believe is to spread the Christian gospel by demonstrating that sound reason and scientific research—including the very latest discoveries—consistently support, rather than erode, confidence in the truth of the Bible and faith in the personal, transcendent God revealed in both Scripture and nature. Reasons to Believe is a three-decades-old organization. Even at its birth, as a desk and a table in Hugh and Kathy Ross’s apartment, the apologetics ministry was founded on the principle of big-tent participation. Volunteers from all walks of life, not just the sciences, gathered around the cofounders with the common mission to use their expanding knowledge and understanding of the book of nature to show people not yet committed to Jesus Christ the handiwork of God imprinted on nature—and, through those fingerprints of God, to persuade nonbelievers to dedicate their lives to the one and only Creator, Lord, and Savior. Today, though many of the hundreds of staff and volunteers possess earned doctorates in scientific and theological disciplines, the majority do not. The diversity of educational, career, and ethnic backgrounds matches or exceeds that of any other existing nonprofit Christian organization. However, though the range of backgrounds is diverse, the theological perspectives and mission principles held by members of the RTB team are quite narrowly focused.

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Every RTB staff member, visiting scholar, and chapter officer must sign a four-page doctrinal statement, a Christian behavior contract, and RTB’s mission statement. The doctrinal statement is explicitly Protestant and evangelical, patterned after Reformation creeds, but allows for a diversity of views on eschatology, spiritual gifts, and the paradox of human free will and divine predestination. Thus our tent includes individuals from virtually every Protestant denomination and even a few Roman Catholics and Coptic Orthodox Christians who wholeheartedly endorse our doctrinal, behavioral, and mission statements. The doctrinal statement includes a strong commitment to biblical inerrancy. However, given the range of definitions evangelicals attach to the term, RTB requires its scholar team members to adhere to inerrancy as it is defined and applied by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI). In particular, RTB subscribes to the following ICBI statements concerning science and faith research: • We affirm that any preunderstandings that the interpreter brings to Scripture should be in harmony with scriptural teaching and subject to correction by it. • We deny that Scripture should be required to fit alien preunderstandings, inconsistent with itself, such as naturalism, evolutionism, scientism, secular humanism, and relativism. • We affirm that since God is the author of all truth, then all truths, biblical and extrabiblical, are consistent and cohere, and that the Bible speaks truth when it touches on matters pertaining to nature, history, or anything else. We further affirm that in some cases extrabiblical data have value for clarifying what Scripture teaches, and for prompting correction of faulty interpretations. • We deny that extrabiblical views ever disprove the teaching of Scripture or hold priority over it. • We affirm the harmony of special and general revelation and therefore of biblical teaching with the facts of nature. • We deny that any genuine scientific facts are inconsistent with the true meaning of any passage of Scripture.

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• We affirm that Genesis 1–11 is factual, as is the rest of the book. • We deny that the teachings of Genesis 1–11 are mythical and that scientific hypotheses about earth history or the origin of humanity may be invoked to overthrow what Scripture teaches about creation.2 In accordance with the ICBI, RTB also denies that the Holy Spirit in his inspiration of Scripture ever tolerates errors by the human authors. RTB is committed to the two books doctrine of revelation (Belgic Confession, article 2) and to the complete harmony of a literal interpretation of the book of Scripture with a literal interpretation of the book of nature. We are all concordist in our theology, but none of us are hard concordists. We acknowledge that while much of Scripture and nature overlap in what they communicate, most of Scripture is silent on scientific matters and, though nearly all of nature’s record testifies of God, most of it does not address specific passages in the Bible. Everyone at RTB views the Bible as a revelation for all generations of humanity. As such, we reject speculations that particular passages refer, for example, to dinosaurs, nonhuman hominids, or fundamental particles, since only postindustrial generations would even be aware of the existence of such components of the natural realm. We also reject the hypothesis that biblical texts are intended only for the contemporaries of the authors. As Peter explains in his first epistle, though all of Scripture has meaning for all generations, certain texts reveal more to future generations (1 Pet 1:10-12). Specifically, at RTB we believe the Bible possesses predictive power—the power to predict future historical events and scientific discoveries. While RTB is an apologetics organization, our priority is evangelism. We restrict our apologetics research to those projects that can be developed into tools that will be effective in bringing unchurched adults to faith in Christ. We are not content to convert people to deism, theism, or belief in an intelligent designer. We note that such “conversions” often result in apathy toward God. Our goal, always, is to bring people into an eternal, personal relationship with Jesus Christ. 2

These statements are taken from articles XIX–XXII of the ICBI Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics, 1982, available at the Dallas Theological Seminary Archives, http://library.dts.edu /Pages/TL/Special/ICBI_2.pdf.

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Another RTB commitment is to the development and dissemination of a biblical creation model to persuade unbelievers to become Christians. Recognizing that most people will cling to their worldview model, in spite of exposed flaws, until they see a better one to take its place, we focus our efforts on providing that better model. Our goal is to develop a biblical creation model that provides (1) the best explanation for all the data scientists have gleaned so far from nature’s record, (2) the most comprehensive explanation for everything observed in the natural realm, and (3) the greatest predictive success in anticipating future scientific discoveries. While the doctrine of common grace would lead us to expect that much of the content of our creation model will perfectly accord with mainstream science, the doctrine of special grace leads us to conclude that significant parts will directly contradict. Scientific disciplines that will more evidently show this conflict are those that touch most closely on the exceptionalism of the nephesh animals (birds, mammals, and a few of the higher reptilian species that God endows with mind, will, and emotions so that they can bond with a higher species—humans—and serve and please them in exceptional ways). Also, the sciences demonstrating the exceptionalism of humans (whom God endows with a spirit so that they can bond with a higher being— God—and serve and please him) and that touch on the sinfulness of humanity, the personality of God, and God’s redemptive works will more strongly evidence this disconnect. Our commonly held strategy at RTB is to use the areas of agreement with mainstream science to reassure educated nonbelievers that we value reason, logic, and a commitment to go wherever truth leads. We then use the areas of disagreement to persuade these same people to repent, to turn from their commitment to unsatisfactory or incomplete explanations of certain things evident in nature’s record and instead adopt a biblical creation model. We invite them to a God who exercises an active, not passive, role in ensuring over the history of the universe that humanity has all the resources it needs to fulfill their divinely assigned destiny. Our mission field is not limited to atheists, agnostics, and nones. We also desire to reach Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, SETI adherents, and others committed to a non-Christian intelligent design theology. Thus we endeavor to develop our biblical creation model in sufficient detail and

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breadth to challenge these intelligent design adherents to receive Jesus Christ as their personal Creator, Lord, and Savior. Everyone at RTB holds to an interpretation of Genesis 1 that views the creation days as much longer in duration than twenty-four hours. We also believe the days are chronological and are primarily, but not exclusively, intended to communicate God’s interventions in shaping natural history. These interpretations lead us to expect a scientific dichotomy between the prehuman eras of natural history (the first six creation days) and to the human era (God’s seventh day of resting from his work of creation). We would expect methodological naturalism to entirely explain natural phenomena during God’s day of resting (the human era), but would expect it to fail to provide an adequate explanation of all natural phenomena during the six days of creation (the prehuman eras). We especially expect it to fail to explain those acts of creation described in the biblical creation texts. To put it a different way, we point out that naturalism predicts no scientifically discoverable discontinuities at the boundary demarked by the first appearance of human beings, whereas the RTB creation model does. We interpret the biblical creation texts as describing a God who delights in transforming chaos into order and functional complexity. As Romans 8:20-21 states, nature left to itself pervasively tends toward decay. Therefore, we interpret the obvious order and functional complexity in the natural realm as evidence for God’s interventions (see chapter nine). We see God’s delight in transforming chaos even in the lives of human beings. What one believes about biblical inerrancy and creation theology influences one’s theology of social issues and creation care. Thus important corollaries of RTB’s biblical creation model are that we are all socially conservative in our theology and we all recognize our responsibility to care for the planet and its life. We believe the Bible upholds the sanctity of life and that life begins at conception—thus we are pro-life. We also believe the Bible teaches that sexual intercourse is to be reserved for a man and a woman in a legally recognized marriage relationship. We see all forms of sexual immorality and lewd behavior as examples of failed intimacy and recognize our responsibility to help people suffering from failed intimacy to gain the love and intimacy with God and others that only a relationship with Christ can provide.

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We interpret Genesis 1–2 and Job 37–39 as texts that hold humans responsible to manage Earth and all its God-endowed resources not only for their own benefit but also for the benefit of all of Earth’s life. In this context we believe God has provided in Earth’s resources the means so that in our caretaking we need not choose between the welfare of humanity and the welfare of the rest of the planet’s life. Thus part of RTB’s creation model is a commitment to seek and implement caretaking solutions that enhance the welfare of all. Finally, RTB requires all its staff and chapter officers to put into practice a lifestyle that reflects the exhortations in 1 Peter 3:14-16 and 2 Corinthians 5:18-20. Such a lifestyle entails welcoming persecution and slander as signs that our ministry is effectively challenging unbelievers who are not yet ready to receive Christ or who are testing the depth of our security in Christ. It demands that we actively develop logical, reasonable, evidential responses to objections unbelievers express toward Christianity. It means developing a demeanor of respect, gentleness, and a clear conscience in all of our witnessing engagements with non-Christians. It also means fully manifesting a ministry of reconciliation, first with fellow believers who disagree with us and second with unbelievers, so that in all circumstances we assist everyone we encounter in a spirit of love and compassion to be reconciled to Christ.

REDIRECT

Robert Stewart

For Deborah: Does “evolutionary creationism” differ in practice from “theistic evolution,” or is it merely a linguistic distinction? Assuming that there is an actual difference, how would the presuppositions or methods of an evolutionary creationist differ from those of a theistic evolutionist? How would each actually do science and see the relationship between science and theology? Theologically speaking BioLogos has a wide tent, accepting all who embrace “historic Christian faith.” Does BioLogos have an equally wide tent concerning evolutionary thought? Would someone who affirmed Lamarckism but rejected Darwinism be included? Would someone who rejected gradualism be included? How “orthodox” does one’s understanding of evolution need to be? For Hugh: I would like to hear more about RTB’s concordist approach. In particular, how do you distinguish between “hard concordism” and RTB’s concordism?

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I would also like to hear more about Scripture’s predictive power. Can you give some examples? Finally, what is the relationship between RTB and intelligent design theory? For both Deborah and Hugh: Your organizations appear to share one overarching value: a commitment to legitimate science. Yet there are also distinct differences between your groups. BioLogos’s audience is both Christians and non-Christians, while RTB’s audience is primarily unbelievers. BioLogos’s purpose is to show that there is no contradiction between science and Christian faith, while RTB’s purpose is to use science, properly done, to evangelize. Do you recognize your groups in these descriptions? Please feel free to state things differently.

BIOLOGOS RESPONSE

Deborah Haarsma

Theistic evolution and evolutionary creation. The difference between the terms “evolutionary creation” (EC) and “theistic evolution” (TE) is both semantic and substantive. The terms share the same core meaning: that God used the process of evolution to create living things. “Theistic evolution” has been around much longer, and some at BioLogos continue to use it for continuity, especially in scholarly contexts. However, the theology associated with the term is not well defined; it has been claimed by people of many religious views, including those who don’t believe in a personal God and deists. The term “evolutionary creation” is newer and is typically claimed by Christians who see the Creator as the God of the Bible and their personal Savior. The use of creation as the noun evokes these core doctrines and affirms the unity we share with young-earth creationists and old-earth creationists around these doctrines. The use of EC is an effort to reclaim the definition of creationist as one who believes in the Creator, rather than the popular usage as shorthand for “young-earth creationist.” “Theistic evolution” can also imply a special version of the science of evolution. No one uses terms like “theistic gravity” or “theistic photosynthesis,” since all of us, Christian or not, are looking at the same scientific processes. The use of TE can imply that if theistic was dropped, then the word evolution would be atheistic by default. We aim to avoid that implication. The size of our scientific tent. Does BioLogos require a commitment to “Darwinism”? That term tends to cloud the debate rather than clarify, since

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it has been used in many ways over the decades, not only by Christians but in scientific circles. Darwin’s original theory has been expanded and modified extensively over time. BioLogos emphasizes the areas where the current scientific evidence and mainstream consensus is strongest and encourages debate and discussion in areas that are debated among experts in evolutionary biology. Thus we strongly affirm evolution as the development of life by descent with modification, including the common ancestry of all life on earth. Someone who disagrees with common ancestry would be outside the BioLogos tent. However, we welcome debate within BioLogos on questions currently debated in the scientific community, such as the relative importance of various natural mechanisms in evolution and whether genes or organisms are most central to the evolutionary story. Note that evolution is not a theory in crisis; scientists are not doubting whether evolution occurred or whether all life on earth shares a tree of common ancestry. Commonalities and differences with RTB. Bob proposes that the commonality of our organizations is our commitment to “legitimate science” and that our differences are in audience and purpose. I would describe it differently and, based on my exchanges with Hugh, I expect he would as well. On the science side, if legitimate science refers to the conclusions of mainstream science, then our organizations definitely do not agree, especially regarding the science of evolution. If legitimate science refers to the value we place on scientific investigation, then RTB and BioLogos are much closer. At a recent public forum, a moderator asked Hugh and me what we saw as our primary disagreement. We discussed it and agreed that our differences regarding biblical interpretation are at least as strong as our scientific differences. RTB believes that the doctrine of special revelation requires a Christian scientific picture to differ from mainstream science, especially in topical areas related to animals and humans. BioLogos disagrees; we believe the Bible provides a strong foundation for pursuing science in all areas of the natural world, and that evidence from general revelation is just as reliable for animal and human evolution as it is for astronomy and geology. We agree that special revelation is essential to understanding topics such as the image of God and the spiritual capacities of humans, but not because we are “nephesh” creatures. Rather, we view science as limited and unable to fully answer spiritual questions. Also, we do not see the Bible as making specific scientific predic-

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tions, although it prophesies truly about the future of God’s work with his people. RTB may describe their concordism as soft or moderate, yet we feel many of their concordist claims are unwarranted by the text, such as claiming the scriptural phrase “God stretched out the heavens like a tent” is a prediction of the expansion of the universe in the Big Bang. Regarding purpose and audience, the two organizations are both committed to presenting a positive interaction between science and faith, and both see themselves as Christian ministries and not mere academic discussion. Our differences in this area are more a matter of emphasis and approach. RTB is more focused on evangelism and bringing non-Christians to Christ, while BioLogos is currently more focused on keeping Christians from leaving the faith over perceived conflicts with science, yet both RTB and BioLogos minister to both groups. Both organizations use agreements with mainstream science as a strategy to build trust with non-Christians. However, at BioLogos we do not have significant differences with mainstream scientific findings, and we feel there are dangers in the RTB approach of making such differences central to their evangelistic work. The Holy Spirit uses many means to bring people to Christ, and we are grateful that people have come to faith this way. However, we see a danger in asking people to accept (what we see as) inaccurate views of evolution as part of their coming to Christ. At BioLogos, we affirm mainstream science and focus on differences in worldview, arguing that the whole picture of the universe—from science to human culture to experience—fits better in a Christian worldview than in an atheistic worldview. We work to address atheistic arguments and remove perceived scientific barriers to coming to faith, but in the end we find that most people come to faith for reasons having little to do with science and everything to do with spiritual experience and an encounter with the teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

REASONS TO BELIEVE RESPONSE

Hugh Ross and Kenneth Samples

Our concordist approach. Concordism has gotten a bad rap from both theologians and scientists because it is often conflated with a fusion or a nearfusion model for integrating science and Scripture. The diagrams in figure 1 are illustrative.

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separate magisteria

complementarity

fusion

constructive integration

Figure 1. Models for integrating science and Scripture

The separate magisteria model views the Bible and the world of nature or science as separate, nonoverlapping domains. The complementarity model espoused by evolutionary creationists sees only a very slight overlap. For example, most evolutionary creationists accept that the Bible explicitly teaches that the universe had a beginning, but they deny that the Bible addresses Earth’s physical history or the history of life on Earth. The fusion model, otherwise known as hard concordism, sees a near-total overlap between the Bible and science. Virtually every Bible verse is seen as possessing scientific implications, and virtually every fact of nature is viewed as having biblical implications. For example, people holding this perspective often claim that the Bible gives scientific details on dinosaurs, several hominid species, extraterrestrial life, and particle physics. Reasons to Believe holds to a constructive integration model, otherwise known as soft or moderate concordism. We see considerable but far from total overlap between the Bible and science. For example, we believe Genesis 1–11 offers a literal, chronologically ordered account of the origin and history of the universe, Earth, Earth’s life, and humanity. We believe Job 37–39, Psalm 104, and Proverbs 8, as well as several other Bible passages, add substantial scientific details to the Genesis 1–11 accounts of natural history. However, we acknowledge that most of the Bible’s teachings are scientifically

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neutral or irrelevant and that most scientific findings have no bearing on the Bible or the Christian faith. Scripture’s predictive power. The degree of Scripture’s perceived predictive power seems to be a major difference between Reasons to Believe and Bio­ Logos. Where the two organizations clearly agree on this issue is the belief that many Old Testament passages accurately predicted in remarkable detail, many centuries in advance, the events concerning Christ’s first coming. It is possible we also agree that the Old and New Testament demonstrate predictive success in foretelling future historical events unrelated to Christ’s incarnation. Reasons to Believe does hold that the Bible demonstrates broad predictive success in foretelling future events in human history. For example, we see the book of Daniel as accurately predicting, far ahead of its time, key events in the history of the Persian, Greek, and Roman empires.3 We view many of the events in the history of the modern nation of Israel as fulfillments of Bible prophecy. Just as the Bible shows predictive success with respect to events in human history, we also see its predictive success in natural history. An obvious example is in Genesis 1, which correctly describes ten miracles of natural creation and places them in the correct chronological sequence.4 Another example is the biblical description of the fundamental features of Big Bang cosmology thousands of years before its discovery by astronomers.5 We see the Bible’s consistent predictive success as one of the most important tools for evangelism. Of those we have led to Christ, almost every unchurched, initially biblically illiterate American adult has cited the demonstration of the Bible’s unique predictive power as the turning point in their accepting the Bible as the inspired, authoritative, inerrant Word of God. Relationship to intelligent design theory. We at Reasons to Believe were researching and proclaiming evidence for intelligent design long before there was an intelligent design movement or before organizations such as the Discovery Institute were founded. However, we differ from most intelligent design movement proponents in that we explicitly identify Jesus Christ as the Hugh Ross and Tim Callahan, Does the Bible Have Predictive Powers?, Reasons to Believe, MP3 audio, http://shop.reasons.org/Does-the-Bible-Have-Predictive-Powers-p/y10m01.htm. 4 Hugh Ross, Navigating Genesis (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2014), 25, 80. 5 Hugh Ross, “Big Bang: The Bible Said It First,” in A Matter of Days, 2nd ed. (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2015), 135-44. 3

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intelligent designer and we explicitly reject young-earth creationism and global flood geology. Most importantly, we make our case for Christ as the intelligent Creator and designer of the entire natural realm in the context of a biblical creation model that is testable, falsifiable, and predictive. We engage the secular scientific community rather than attack it. It is through the testable, falsifiable, and predictive components of our model and our commitment to developing and fine-tuning our model that we gain audiences from the secular scientific community. Through such engagements, we have seen numerous unchurched scientists commit their lives to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. We agree with intelligent design movement proponents that all forms of naturalistic models for the origin and history of life, including both classical and neo-Darwinian, are false. However, we recognize that scientists will cling to their models, no matter how many flaws in them are pointed out, until they see a model with superior explanatory power and greater predictive success to take their place, and because of that we focus our efforts on making a positive case for our biblical creation model. Mission of evangelism. Our audience is both Christians and non-Christians. Our mission is primarily evangelism. We equip and train Christians to use science apologetics as a tool to bring unbelievers to faith in Christ. We also directly appeal to non-Christians to consider the weight of scientific evidence for the Christian faith and for the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. We exhort non-Christians on the basis of the evidence we have presented to repent and submit their lives to Jesus Christ. For our evangelism to be effective, we recognize that it is insufficient to simply show that no contradiction exists between science and the Bible. We must do more. Reasons to Believe’s mission is to develop and proclaim a biblical creation model that is testable, falsifiable, and predictive, one that demonstrates greater explanatory power and breadth than competing nontheistic and theistic models and that shows greater success in predicting future scientific discoveries. We are committed to showing the scientific differences between our biblical creation model and mainstream naturalistic and deistic scientific worldviews. We also look at differences between our biblical creation model and the creation models of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Mormons, and

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other faiths. We believe to do less is to miss opportunities to fulfill the Great Commission (Mt 28:18-20).

CONCLUSION

Robert Stewart

I’m grateful for Deborah’s and Hugh’s responses to my questions. There is much to appreciate from both. Deborah’s discussion of the substantive differences between theistic evolution and evolutionary creationism was very helpful. Heretofore I understood the difference to be more semantic than substantive and primarily a matter of emphasis. Her point that nobody uses terms like “theistic gravity” or “theistic photosynthesis” is also well taken, as is noting that the term “Darwinism” is understood in various ways. My term “legitimate science” was probably a poor choice of words. I did not mean “the conclusions of mainstream science”; I meant something like “mainstream scientific method,” particularly as it relates to predictions, fruitfulness, coherence, and above all testing one’s hypotheses or models. I share her concern as to the Bible making specific scientific predictions, although I note that the denial of such is a conclusion drawn from neither science nor the Bible. I have great appreciation for what BioLogos is doing to remove barriers to Christian faith among non-Christian scientists. I thank Hugh for helping me better understand RTB’s particular type of concordism. I also appreciate his clarifying the degree to which RTB agrees with and differs from intelligent design. Hugh is right that the issue of Scripture’s predictive power is a key point of difference between the two groups. I doubt, however, that the difference is over the degree to which Scripture makes scientific predictions. The issue seems to be not how many scientific predictions the Bible makes but whether the Bible makes any at all. One nagging concern: Given that we all agree that one can mistake one’s interpretation of Scripture for what the Bible actually means, is it not possible that RTB could make a testable scientific prediction based on a mistaken interpretation of Scripture, and then that prediction is falsified and someone rejects either Christianity or the Bible as the result of poor hermeneutics rather than good science? With this sort of ministry comes great responsibility.

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Biblical Interpretation What Is the Nature of Biblical Authority? Steve Lemke, John Walton, and Kenneth Samples

SBC MODERATOR STEVE LEMKE Evangelical Christians hold a high view of the inspiration and authority of Scripture. Many evangelicals consider the affirmation of biblical inerrancy as a litmus test for an adequate view of Scripture. Of course, the human authors through whom the Holy Spirit inspired biblical texts did not know the vocabulary of modern science. For God to communicate complex truths about creation to people in the ancient world required a divine accommodation —using language understandable to a prescientific people. Furthermore, the Bible’s divine inspiration does not guarantee the correct interpretation of Holy Writ by modern readers. How historical is Genesis 1–11? Were Adam and Eve literal persons or symbolic representatives of humanity? And were the “days” in the Genesis account literal twenty-four-hour days or symbolic of a longer period? Also, how does the book of Scripture relate to the book of nature? Concordism is the belief that the book of nature properly understood never conflicts with the book of Scripture, while nonconcordism affirms that new scientific discoveries may lead us to revise our understanding of what is affirmed in Scripture. The two contributors to this chapter were asked to address the following specific questions:

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• What is your view of biblical inspiration? • Article 12 of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI) affirms that “Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit” and denies the notion “that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.”1 How do you respond to these statements? • How does the book of Scripture (particularly the biblical accounts about creation) relate to the book of nature (particularly scientific accounts of the origin of the universe)? • What hermeneutical principles should guide the interpretation of the biblical creation accounts, particularly Genesis 1–3? In this chapter John Walton, professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College, represents the BioLogos position. Kenneth R. Samples, senior research scholar for Reasons to Believe (RTB), champions the RTB perspective. Samples earned his baccalaureate in social sciences (history and philosophy) at Concordia University and a master of arts in theological studies from Talbot School of Theology. Both authors have written extensively on this subject.

BioLogos Author John Walton Steve Lemke asks primarily about biblical authority and how doctrines such as inspiration, inerrancy, and concordism might be related. I am writing here not as the official or only voice of BioLogos on these matters, but as one scholar whose views fall within the “tent” of BioLogos faith commitments. Authority. When we claim that the Bible has authority, we do so on the basis of its self-claim that it is inspired by God. Thus the source of the Bible’s message is located outside of ourselves. If the Bible only communicates what we want it to say or what we make it say, it is only a reflection of our own ideas and desires. Of course the Bible is relevant and authoritative for our 1

Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, 1978; available at Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, www.alliancenet.org/the-chicago-statement -on-biblical-inerrancy.

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world and our lives today, but that is because it begins elsewhere; it must or it would have no independent authority. Our perspectives, thoughts, and actions are the final target of God’s Word, but its source and instrumentation are other than us. Its origin is not in us, and its initial audience was not us. The Bible is for us, but not to us. The message of Scripture derives from God—that is why it has authority. That is the basic affirmation of 2 Timothy 3:16. Scripture is breathed out by God—his Word. Given that premise, we have to discern how we are to find that message and thereby learn what God has to say to us. To do that we have to know how God has transmitted his message. Here too Scripture itself seems to point the way. Second Peter 1:20-21 says, “No prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” What was true for prophecy we take to be true for the other genres of Scripture. God chose to communicate his revelation through human communicators. He thereby vested his authority in them. Scripture comes to us through human instrumentation. When we accept that whatever God had to say he conveyed by means of an ancient author’s communication, two immediate questions come to mind: (1) How did God accommodate his message to the human authors and original audience? (2) Is what God desired to communicate limited to what the author understood? Accommodation. There can be no question that as God communicated, accommodation was essential. Every act of communication requires accommodation that will tailor the communication to the needs and circumstances of the audience, including their background beliefs about the world. Some beliefs held by the original audience are ones we would not accept today. But accommodation to culture need not entail affirmation of theological error.2 So we can give two quick principles concerning accommodation: (1) We know that there is accommodation taking place in a particular passage if there is a piece of information that is demonstrably false (e.g., the mustard seed as the smallest, a solid sky, or cognitive processes occurring in the entrails). (2) We know that a text is not only accommodation if theology is 2

For more detailed discussion, see John Walton and D. Brent Sandy, The Lost World of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), 39-48.

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hung on the information (e.g., the exodus or the resurrection). The first can prove complicated when uncertainty exists about whether metaphor is involved or not. The second can prove complicated when the question of whether theology is dependent on the statement is disputed. Original meaning and intent. To answer the second question—whether what God desired to communicate is limited to what the author understood —we should first ask whether the author understood the message from God that he was communicating. Nowhere in Scripture do we ever get the idea that the authors were just babbling what to them was a meaningless flow of words. They understood what they were saying and they expected their audience to comprehend. It was in their own language (so they could comprehend it) and it was offered in the context of their own culture (so it was meaningful to them). Both the author and God expected the original audience to respond to what they heard. The more pertinent question is whether God conveyed more meaning than the author could possibly recognize. In other words, even once we are convinced that the message conveyed by the author to his audience carried the authority of God, is the authoritative message found only in what the author understood, or did God embed more meaning that would eventually unfold or be understood by later audiences? That sounds precisely like what we find happening in the process of events that brought about fulfillment of prophetic oracles. The prophets had a particular meaning that they understood, communicated to their audiences, and expected those audiences to understand and respond to. That message carried authority in its own right and in its own time and context. Yet New Testament authors came along and at times identified meaning that transcends what had been discernible in the prophet’s context. Based on that precedent, could we not expect the same thing to happen on a regular basis as we read Scripture and as new events unfold and new understanding of the world around us becomes available? The difference is that the later New Testament author who interprets the Old Testament also enjoys the benefit of authority vested in him by God. So his message comes with divine endorsement too. The situation for us as interpreters is different. For argument’s sake, let us suppose that God embedded in an author’s words more meaning than what the author knew. How would we get to the

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authoritative meaning? We have accepted the premise that the author was vested with the authority of God. So we must analyze the communication of that author (found in the words, grammar, etc., that were used). If there is authoritative meaning outside the author, we cannot get to it by that same means. That is the problem. Once we move outside of the author’s intentions, we have no confidence that we are actually identifying something that God meant to say. We have no authority and neither do the meanings that we discern that are not represented in the inspired authors’ intentions. We cannot conclude that some extended meaning must be what God intended to say just because we are convinced that it is true. And if it is only our own imposed meaning rather than God’s, it cannot be considered to be God’s Word or have God’s authority. Concordism. We now need to examine this hermeneutical principle of extended authority as it pertains to scientific readings in the Bible. One of the common approaches to Scripture that attempts to extend meaning beyond the biblical author’s original intentions is called concordism. Concordist interpreters claim there is a convergence between God’s Word and God’s world and suggest ways that a more sophisticated scientific understanding of the world can be integrated with statements of Scripture— admittedly applying meaning to the words of Scripture that the author would never have been aware of. Such extended meanings can claim no authority since they do not derive from inspired sources. They cannot justifiably represent claims to perceive meanings that God intended, because they are not meanings that are independent of our own imagination. Both our organizations affirm that the “two books” can and should be read together. Yet we do not undertake such reading in the same way because at BioLogos we recognize a weakness of concordism that is found in the very flexibility that it exploits. No matter what the modern scientific consensus might be, concordists can feasibly find Scripture to support it. When people believed that the earth was the center of the universe, Scripture could be cited in support. When the steady-state universe was the reigning model, Scripture was found to be in conformity. Then when the Big Bang and expanding universe replaced the earlier cosmology, sure enough, Scripture came to be seen as supporting that. This flexibility argues against putting stock in such a methodological approach.

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We ought to focus more narrowly on the authoritative message that is embedded in the author’s intentions. It should be of no consequence to biblical interpreters whether the words of Scripture can accommodate modern scientific perspectives. At BioLogos, we do not believe that evolution or common descent should be read into Scripture or found between the lines. We need to know as precisely as possible what the text claims by the authority vested in the human author’s intentions. Our interest for the interaction with science is in whether the intentions of the author make claims that inherently deny the conclusions of modern science. That would indeed be problematic. But in my own investigations of Genesis 1–3, I have found that the authoritative message of Scripture does not contradict the findings of modern science.3 Inerrancy. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy affirms precisely the parameters I have articulated in the previous sections, though those parameters may also be expressed by some without using the term inerrancy. It recognizes that humans do not give authority to God’s Word but that the authority is inherent in it (article 1). It further confirms that no normative revelation has been given since the completion of the New Testament writings (article 5). This means that none of our interpretations or proffered extensions of meaning (even if we want to claim they represent what God meant all along) can stand as normative revelation. That is, such suggestions cannot claim to be what the Bible’s meaning is. When article 12 speaks of inerrancy, it is linked to what the text affirms. The affirmations of the text come from the author. Scientific hypotheses cannot overthrow Scripture, but neither are we free to read between the lines of the text scientific statements that it did not affirm. In the cases of creation and the flood, interpreters are obliged only to those affirmations being made by the author as expressed in his language and as understood against the backdrop of his culture. The hermeneutical principle that is too often neglected is that we must therefore read the text as an ancient text, not a modern one. If we feel free to impose new meaning on the text that the author did not intend, we are claiming authority equal to the author—that we have an independent pipeline to God. Many people may feel free to make such a claim on the premise that the Spirit leads us to truth, but here we must be careful. See John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), and The Lost World of Adam and Eve (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015).

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Christianity has a lurid history of people embarking on all sorts of endeavors claiming the leading of the Spirit—endeavors that instead were simply reflections of their own selfish desires. What confidence could we possibly have that the Spirit is leading us to a message that carries, by extension, the same authority with which the Spirit vested the authors of Scripture? In the end, by that method anyone could claim anything. The role of the Spirit is not to provide us with extended authoritative meanings of the text. The role of the Spirit is to bring renewal, restoration, and transformation into our lives on the basis of the authoritative message with which he endowed the authors of Scripture (CSBI article 17). We cannot extract new meaning from the text; rather, we recognize ever-fresh applications of the meaning that the author conveyed as God’s chosen instrument. Only in that way can the authority link be preserved as we strive to understand God’s revelation of himself through his chosen human instruments. Those associated with BioLogos are committed to the authority of the Bible regardless of whether they choose to embrace the term inerrancy or not. Most importantly, those who do feel that it is important to use the word inerrancy will find nothing in BioLogos that would pose problems with their belief.

Reasons to Believe Author Kenneth Samples In this section, I will first outline Reasons to Believe’s broad view of Scripture concerning revelation, inspiration, and inerrancy. Then I’ll address the more specific issues raised in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, as well as questions about science and its relationship to the Bible. Scripture and revelation. Reasons to Believe affirms the historic Christian position that the God of the Bible did not leave his creatures to grope in the dark wondering about his existence, character, and commands. Christianity is a faith built on the truths of divine revelation. In Christian theology, revelation refers to God’s personal self-disclosure to his creatures. God took the initiative to actively and decisively reveal himself in two ways: general revelation (the knowledge of God that comes via the created order) and special revelation (the knowledge of God that comes via redemptive history). God’s existence, power, wisdom, majesty, and glory are made known in a general way to all people at all times in all places through the created order.

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That includes nature (see Ps 19:1-4; Rom 1:18-21), history (Dan 2:21; Acts 17:26), and the inner human conscience (Gen 1:26-27; Rom 2:11-16). God’s more specific self-disclosure comes in and through his great redemptive acts, events, and words (see Jn 20:31; 2 Tim 3:15-17; Heb 1:1-4). It comes at special times and in special places. This detailed unveiling occurs in two stages. First, God manifested himself through his covenant people, including the Hebrew patriarchs, prophets, and kings (as recorded and interpreted by the prophets in the Old Testament). Second, God’s revelation culminated in the incarnation of Jesus Christ—the God-man whose life, death, and resurrection were recorded and interpreted by the apostles in the New Testament. Two-books theory. In light of this biblically based view of dual revelation, RTB affirms what Christians have historically referred to as the two-books theory. God is the author of both the figurative book of nature (God’s world) and the literal book of Scripture (God’s written Word). The Belgic Confession (a Protestant Reformed confession of 1561) is perhaps the best historical example setting forth the two-books metaphor: We know him by two means: First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God. . . . Second, he makes himself known to us more openly by his holy and divine Word, as much as we need in this life, for his glory and for the salvation of his own.4

The two forms of revelation from the same infinitely perfect God mutually reinforce and complement one another. RTB therefore considers all truth to be God’s truth. Human interpretations of the two sources of revelation may indeed conflict, but not when properly understood and correctly applied. Ultimately, divine revelation is one unit. It is appropriate to distinguish between its two forms, but they should never be separated. Some critically important truths in general revelation are not explicitly spelled out in special revelation (including many mathematical, logical, and scientific principles). However, in all matters the Bible addresses (the essence of special revelation The Belgic Confession, article 2, in Ecumenical Creeds and Reformed Confessions (Grand Rapids: CRC Publications, 1988), 79.

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having been embodied in Scripture), this verbal revelation should be considered final and supreme. Revelatory priority is granted because of the Bible’s specificity and its unique propositional and self-authenticating nature. RTB explicitly affirms that God’s written Word speaks with a unique specificity and authority. The Bible correlates and unifies the whole revelation of God. Because of this coherence, one can affirm the full weight of the book of nature while also embracing the unique authority and divine inspiration of the book of Scripture. Scripture and inspiration. RTB affirms that the biblical doctrine of Scripture’s inspiration is exemplified by the apostle Paul’s statement that “all Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Tim 3:16). The Greek word, theopneustos, used to describe Scripture implies that it is the product of the creative breath of God, not unlike how God produced the universe and the first human being (Gen 2:7; Job 33:4; Ps 33:6). In addition, the apostle Peter declares that “no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. . . . But prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet 1:20-21). The inspiration of the Bible may therefore be defined as the divine act whereby God superintended human authors to ensure their writings reflected his revelation. God produced the biblical text while using the genuine contributions of human authors. They brought their backgrounds, educations, vocabularies, and styles to the writing task, but God produced the inspired Scripture through them. Written by human beings but endued with the Holy Spirit’s unique power and supervision, the Bible is the inspired Word of God. Scripture and inerrancy. RTB wholeheartedly believes that Scripture’s divine inspiration implies the doctrine of biblical inerrancy (see Ps 18:30; 119:89). The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy sets forth the doctrine this way: Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches. . . . Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.5 5

“A Short Statement,” in Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

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God’s absolutely trustworthy nature and moral integrity (see Jn 17:3; Rom 3:4) and his direct supervision of the original autographs (2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:19-21) resulted in scriptural text that—when correctly understood and properly interpreted—is free of all error (historically, scientifically, morally, and spiritually). Jesus Christ himself taught that Scripture came from the mouth of God and is error free (see Mt 5:17-18; Jn 10:35). As a result, RTB views the doctrine of biblical inerrancy as a necessary implication of the Bible’s inspiration. Therefore, everything Scripture says, including about the fields of history and science, is true and faithful. Scripture and interpretation. RTB believes the Scriptures—as written revelation—must be responsibly and objectively interpreted. This science of interpretation is known as hermeneutics. Desiring to carefully lead out the meaning of the biblical text, RTB seeks to follow sound hermeneutical principles by using the historical-grammatical method. To discover a text’s original meaning and intent requires a credible interpreter to carefully (1) examine the grammar, (2) determine the genre of literature being used, (3) investigate the text’s cultural and historical setting, and (4) study both the immediate and wider contexts affecting the given passage. RTB also believes that accurate biblical interpretation involves allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture. A passage must be analyzed in light of other passages on the same theme. Clearer, later, and more complete texts illumine earlier and more obscure ones. For example, the earlier Old Testament is explained in light of the later New Testament. Thus the biblical creation account of Genesis 1–3, as well as the various other passages in the Bible that address the topic of creation, must be carefully interpreted in light of the above literary principles. Scripture and science. RTB asserts that the discoveries found in the book of nature can never correct the truths revealed in the book of Scripture. This is obviously true because both books come from the same divine source. However, well-established discoveries from the various sciences can serve as a possible indication that Scripture may have been improperly interpreted. This idea is built on the theological principle that God’s revelation in the two books is a unified whole that can be distinguished but should not be separated. Of course scientific interpretation of the book of nature can indeed, and often does, conflict with the theological interpretation of the book of

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Scripture. For that matter, the mere interpretation of both books does not necessarily convey the full inherent truth contained therein. Moreover, interpretation in both cases (nature and Scripture) is also deeply influenced by philosophical worldview considerations. Scripture and creation. RTB has a distinctive approach to integrating the two books. First, we affirm the biblically rooted and historical Christian position known as creation ex nihilo (Gen 1:1; Prov 3:19; Jn 1:3; Rom 4:17; Col 1:16; Heb 1:2; 11:3). This distinctively biblical doctrine teaches that there was originally nothing but God (an infinite, eternal, and tri-personal spirit). By means of his incalculable wisdom and infinite power, God alone brought the universe (in the language of modern physics, all matter, energy, time, and space) into existence from nothing (not from any preexistent physical reality such as matter and its connected realities). Second, RTB affirms that Genesis 1–11 describes real historical events. Thus Adam and Eve were historical persons who disobeyed God and, as the progenitors of the human race, plunged humanity into original sin. New Testament authors, in turn, confirm and rely on the historical nature of the early chapters of Genesis. RTB affirms an old-earth, progressive creationist position that interprets the Genesis creation days as expressing a chronology. The days represent sequential epochs rather than twenty-four-hour periods. According to this view, the Genesis 1 creation week describes events from the point of view of the earth’s surface, which is being prepared as humanity’s habitation. While historically holding a day-age interpretation, RTB sees validity and insight in other approaches to the creation days. The analogical days view and the framework view, while different at various places, nevertheless seem to be sister schools of interpretation alongside the day-age view. Scripture and concordism. RTB now ranks as the world’s leading Christian science-faith organization that promotes concordism and concordist apologetics. RTB’s mission is to spread the Christian gospel by demonstrating that sound reason and scientific research—including the very latest discoveries—consistently support, rather than erode, confidence in the truth of the Bible and faith in the personal, transcendent God revealed in both Scripture and nature. Concordism is the belief that the book of nature and the book of Scripture significantly overlap and can be

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constructively integrated. Concordism emerges from the belief that revelation is a coherent union. Also, since Genesis 1–3 records real space-time history, the book of nature may be used to probe that history. RTB affirms a soft concordist perspective, which seeks agreement between properly interpreted Scripture passages that describe some aspect of the natural realm and indisputable and well-established data in science. RTB’s soft concordism rejects the view that a literalistic hermeneutic applies to all Bible passages. RTB insists that one must always guard against reading more into the biblical text than what the text actually warrants. An overreach here can expose a biblical viewpoint to public ridicule. Certainly scientific or historical research could always prove an overreaching interpretation incorrect. On the other hand, to read less into the biblical text than what the text teaches can also be a problem. Secularists often interpret such responses as a concession that Scripture cannot withstand objective testing. Either way, the Bible’s truth claims are damaged. Furthermore, by reading less into the text, believers lose out on truth that they can apply to Christian living and witness. For RTB, the sheer quantity of the Bible’s science and creation content (which extends beyond Genesis 1–11) demands some kind of concordist theology. Our soft concordism is not limited to Genesis 1–11. It seeks a consistent interpretation of all the Bible’s texts that describe the origin, history, and present state of the natural realm. RTB’s approach looks for agreement between biblical passages addressing nature and the indisputably established facts of nature. However, it sees no need to always agree with mainstream or contemporary science. A concordist model allows Scripture to be a revelation to all generations, not just the generation in which its biblical human author lived. While understanding the biblical author’s intention is a necessary condition in interpreting any passage of Scripture correctly, that factor alone is not sufficient for capturing the entire breadth of biblical inspiration. Concordism allows for additional messages bearing significance only for future generations to be embedded in the inspired words of ancient prophets. In such effort there is no fear that we will be forced to honor one revelation and reject the other. The God who inspired the Bible is the same God

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who created the universe, Earth, and all Earth’s life. Since in him there is no possibility of lie or deceit (Ps 33:4; Jn 17:17), nature’s record will never contradict Scripture. Where conflict does appear, we can be confident we have misunderstood one, the other, or both. Or we may simply need more information from or deeper insight into one or the other. Whatever the case, we will gain greater knowledge and appreciation for the Bible, for nature, and for the God who is responsible for both.

REDIRECT

Steve Lemke

Both contributors to this chapter have affirmed a high view of biblical inspiration and authority, but they differ somewhat in the language they use regarding biblical authority and in their interpretation of the creation narratives in Scripture. My observations about the dialogue are as follows. Both BioLogos and Reasons to Believe affirm biblical inspiration and authority. RTB requires an affirmation of inerrancy for its representatives; Bio­ Logos does not, and appears to have more diversity on their views of inerrancy than RTB. Some people associated with BioLogos have not affirmed inerrancy or have preferred to use different language in affirming biblical authority. John Walton does affirm inerrancy and is a positive representative of BioLogos on this issue. Both BioLogos and RTB affirm that God reveals himself through both the book of nature and the book of Scripture. However, the contrast between RTB’s belief in soft concordism and BioLogos’s rejection of concordism is a significant difference. Both organizations recognize the problem with imposing a woodenly literal reading of Scripture on science. However, when Scripture and science appear to conflict, BioLogos appears to rely more on the book of nature when there is a scientific consensus on the subject, even if it requires reading the book of Scripture in a new light. These apparent conflicts are less of a problem for BioLogos because they utilize a “two realms” theory of interpretation, in which Scripture primarily addresses the spiritual realm while science addresses the material realm. In their view, Scripture was not intended by its authors to address technical scientific matters. On the other hand, while RTB also gives great credence to the book of nature, its soft concordism makes RTB reluctant to revise what appears to be a clear teaching of Scripture, even if science seems to contradict it.

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Now, a couple of questions for the contributors: • Young-earth creationists (YEC) have criticized the views of both of your organizations for not taking the creation accounts as literally as they do (e.g., they see the Hebrew word yom in Genesis 1 as referring to six actual twentyfour-hour periods). Because you interpret these accounts differently, such critics question whether either of you hold to a sufficiently high view of biblical inspiration, authority, and inerrancy. How do you answer this criticism? • Could you be a little more specific in listing some hermeneutical guidelines by which creation accounts such as Genesis 1–2 should be interpreted?

BIOLOGOS RESPONSE

John Walton

As is evident from the previous sections, RTB and BioLogos agree on many aspects of biblical authority. Both adopt the two-books model of God’s revelation and affirm the coherence that exists between the books. Both hold to the traditional doctrine that Scripture was inspired by God through the instrumentation of human writers. Both generally accept the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, though we may have disagreements about which passages are articulating that doctrine (specifically, RTB includes Gen 1:1 in that list, whereas I would not).6 The main differences are in hermeneutics, particularly related to the issue of concordism. Before turning to that, I would like to draw attention briefly to a few other issues that require nuancing. First, it is true that God revealed himself through acts and events, but we have access to those acts and events only through the testimony of the writers of Scripture. We trust them (since they are superintended by the Spirit), but since we are dependent on their reports, the authority on which we rely is again vested in the writers’ words and perspectives. We cannot assess the events independently; we have to go through the writers, and their perspectives are our source for the authority that God has vested in them. The events themselves, categorized as general revelation, are beyond our access. The writers of Scripture report those events and interpret them in the authoritative special revelation of the biblical text. 6

Creation ex nihilo is not a doctrinal assertion of BioLogos, though most connected with the organization would accept it.

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Second, Samples reflects on CSBI with the summary statement that “everything Scripture says, including about the fields of history and science, is true and faithful.” Such a statement is too vague in that it fails to offer nuance for “says.” The traditional view of inerrancy locates the authority in what the text “affirms”—a narrower category. These two topics make for interesting conversation, but now we must turn our attention to the main distinguishing hermeneutical feature between the two organizations. Samples offers a helpful definition of concordism: “Concordism is the belief that the book of nature and the book of Scripture significantly overlap and can be constructively integrated. Concordism emerges from the belief that revelation is a coherent union.” We are in agreement that revelation is a “coherent union.” The question to be asked is whether concordism is the only way to reflect this coherence, and whether coherence by means of concordism can be achieved with hermeneutical consistency. Can revelation from the book of nature be used to determine the message given in the book of Scripture? Is concordism actually a constructive method of integration? RTB says yes; those connected to BioLogos would be inclined to disagree. In the “soft” concordism maintained by RTB, they are seeking “agreement between properly interpreted Scripture passages that describe some aspect of the natural realm and indisputable and well-established data in science.” The burning question is, what are the criteria for “proper” interpretation? Is it “proper” to interpret the text as saying more than what the original writer could possibly have meant? Samples attempts to mitigate this problem by stating that “RTB insists that one must always guard against reading more into the biblical text than what the text actually warrants.” One can’t help but wonder what the basis is for determining what the text warrants. If it is not the writer’s intention, then where does the warrant come from? Samples answers that question by stating, “RTB’s approach looks for agreement between biblical passages addressing nature and the indisputably established facts of nature.” Consequently, they see the warrant as deriving from what we “know” about the natural world by means of “indisputable science.” I would contend that we cannot play so fast and loose with Scripture. This brings us to the crux of the disagreement. Samples says, “While understanding the biblical author’s intention is a necessary condition in interpreting

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any passage of Scripture correctly, that factor alone is not sufficient for capturing the entire breadth of biblical inspiration.” In this he is positing revelation outside of Scripture that carries equal weight as Scripture and can give meaning to biblical passages that has no foundation in the intentions of the ancient writers. For RTB, scientific knowledge is apparently the source of this information. In contrast, although Christian theology has traditionally affirmed general revelation, that revelation has not been considered on an equal par with Scripture such that it can be used to add meaning to biblical statements; it is only indicative as it points to God. That is to say, general revelation supplements our knowledge of God and may give us a greater appreciation of statements in Scripture, but it does not add inspired meaning to the biblical text. Special revelation is needed to fulfill and perfect general revelation. It is never the other way around. Compatibility and continuity are expected, but special revelation is never dependent on general revelation. Adopting a position that the author’s intention is insufficient leads to Samples’s final stunning assertion: “Concordism allows for additional messages bearing significance only for future generations to be embedded in the inspired words of ancient prophets.” This is very thin ice both hermeneutically and theologically. The embedding concept works when applied to prophecy insofar as we possess special revelation (e.g., the New Testament voice) to identify the “embedded” message that would have been unknown to the original writer. It is highly problematic to expand the authority to identify embedded truth unknown to the original writer by means of general revelation. No hermeneutic exists to regulate such interpretation. In conclusion, we turn to the questions posed by Lemke. Regarding the criticism from young-earth creationists, I cannot speak for all of BioLogos, but I would insist that we cannot take a text more literally than by understanding as fully as possible what the original writer intended to communicate. I would suggest that they are not taking the text literally if they are reading it through modern lenses to address current questions. A casual, superficial reading should not be mistaken for a literal one. Authority, inspiration, and inerrancy must be attached to the intended communication of the first human writer (as one vested with authority by God). I personally have no problem with a twenty-four-hour-day interpretation, but in my interpretation the text is not suggesting that material origins are confined to

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those twenty-four-hour days. If that is the case, then to read the text as if it does apply to material creation is not a literal reading. Regarding hermeneutical guidelines, I believe that I have been very clear. Authoritative meaning must be associated with the intentions of the human author as our only avenue to divine meaning. The human author’s intentions must be informed by his own cultural and linguistic context so that we avoid imposing our modern ideas anachronistically on the biblical text. The perspectives found in ancient Near Eastern literature do not determine the meaning of a biblical text, but they can prompt us toward a better understanding of the cognitive context of the ancient world and to recognize differences between ancient ways of thinking and our own.

REASONS TO BELIEVE RESPONSE

Kenneth Samples

The entire scholar team of Reasons to Believe has benefitted from reading John Walton’s essay in this chapter on the nature of biblical authority. We appreciate his overall clarity and thoughtfulness and distinctive focus on explaining how he and BioLogos understand Scripture in general and the Bible’s relationship to science in particular. We also appreciate the significant common ground that our two organizations share when it comes to the Bible’s inspiration and authority. We at RTB appreciate BioLogos’s deep investment in and respect for the two books of divine revelation. Scripture, inspiration, and revelation. Walton is correct to insist that the Bible should be allowed to speak on its own terms as an objective, inspired revelation from God. He is also right to assert that the author’s intention is a critical consideration in interpreting any text of Scripture properly. And we agree with him that human beings living today were not Scripture’s initial, direct audience. But it seems clear from reading the Old Testament in light of the New Testament that sometimes a text contains greater meaning than what the initial biblical author knew or intended to convey. For example, the New Testament authors saw more (and explained it for all) in the Old Testament statements concerning the coming of Jesus the Messiah than the initial prophetic Hebrew authors knew and understood. Thus it seems fair to conclude that the biblical author’s intention is a necessary condition for understanding a given text but it is sometimes not completely sufficient to capture all of biblical inspiration.

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However, when they wrote Scripture the apostles had special divine authority in order to interpret previous biblical writings in a new and deeper way. So we agree that people living today do not have that kind of apostolic authority to find new or greater meaning in a text the way the apostles did. But it does seem biblically sound to conclude that future generations may discover greater application and appreciation of a scriptural text than was initially intended. To use a specific example, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is taught in Scripture. Many biblical scholars think the doctrine is taught at least implicitly in the Old Testament and somewhat more explicitly in the New Testament. This distinctive biblical truth about cosmology was also affirmed very early in church history. So it would seem acceptable for a Christian today to read the book of nature in light of the book of Scripture and conclude that traditional Big Bang cosmology—with its singular beginning— seems more consistent with creation ex nihilo than does a steady state or an oscillating cosmological model. This specific judgment concerning the Big Bang’s compatibility with Christian cosmology (and mounting twenty-firstcentury evidence) seems like a reasonable and respectable use of God’s two books of revelation. The two books are to be read together and interpreted with great care. But it should be noted that in this example, scientific theories must be evaluated in light of Scripture and not the reverse. Scripture and concordism. Walton is also correct to note that some forms of concordism in the past have at times played fast and loose with biblical authority and reasonable rules of textual interpretation. Such poor practices have led some people to question the authenticity of Scripture as a divine revelation. However, abuse does not necessarily rule out proper use. RTB’s approach to understanding the two books reflects a soft concordism that seeks to generally integrate the content of the two books based on sound hermeneutical principles. RTB does not interpret Scripture in light of science but rather grants Scripture its rightful place as the supreme propositional revelation. Science as an example of general revelation cannot correct or override Scripture, but it can suggest that we might need to reevaluate our present way of interpreting certain biblical texts. Scientific and theological theories reflect mere interpretation of divine revelation and, as such, both are subject to possible error. To summarize, God’s revelation never errs but human interpretation of that revelation can be erroneous.

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Scripture and accommodation theory. The idea of divine accommodation theory has to be thought through very carefully. It is certainly true that an infinite, eternal, tri-personal spiritual God must speak in terms that mere human creatures can understand if he is to communicate effectively to them. Also, it is reasonable to conclude that people living in the ancient world would be limited in their understanding of science and in their ability to frame issues scientifically. But the writings of biblical authors were supervised by the Holy Spirit, and so it seems that divine inspiration would keep them from expressing unscientific or provably false ideas. Thus, for example, Jesus and Paul falsely believing in a historic Adam seems patently inconsistent with any evangelical understanding of biblical inspiration and inerrancy. Scripture and worldview truth claims. BioLogos seems vulnerable to apologetics challenges when science-oriented issues are raised that may conflict with a Christian understanding of Scripture. In those instances, it would be easy to default to the position that Scripture doesn’t address scientific issues. While premodern and modern cultures looked at many issues differently, Scripture is intended to speak truthfully to all people at all times. Spiritual and moral truths cannot be separated from truths about the natural world and about critical knowledge claims. Therefore, accommodation theories of Scripture that separate spheres of truth strike many nonbelievers as convenient and ad hoc, thus lacking in any kind of powerful apologetic persuasion. If accommodationism is taken too far, then skeptics may think there is no way to genuinely test Christianity and that it, like so many other religions, is simply unfalsifiable. Thus accommodationism runs the risk of making Christianity at best not critically important and at worst irrelevant. Hence, it is possible for irresponsible concordists to find any and all scientific views in some text or another in Scripture. But it is also possible for nonconcordist accommodationists to avoid any scientific criticism by making Scripture completely off limits to truth claims about the natural world. If concordists sometimes treat Scripture like a wax nose, then it seems that nonconcordist accommodationists have the very same problem. Perhaps there is a need for soft concordism and an equal need for soft accommodationism.

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Response to Steve Lemke. RTB rejects the calendar-day view (the view that the creation days are six consecutive twenty-four-hour days) because of its severe exegetical weaknesses. Here are six brief criticisms of that view: 1. The creation days (e.g., references to “evening and morning”) cannot be normal calendar (or solar) days if the sun and moon were not created until day four, as the calendar-day view insists. Proposing that God supernaturally provided a light that preceded the creation of the sun turns days one through three into abnormal days that are definitely unlike calendar days. 2. Evening and morning references are inconsistent with the strict rendering of a twenty-four-hour day. For example, the biblical sabbath is measured from sundown to sundown or evening to evening. 3. The events of creation day six are too numerous and momentous to have reasonably transpired in a mere twenty-four-hour day. Adam seems to have engaged in activities that involved more of a career-type devotion than a mere few hours of work in the afternoon. Naming or classifying the animal kingdom could have occupied his time for many years. Maintaining the garden and developing a relationship with his wife would also have transpired in a long amount of time. 4. Given the parallel structure of the creation days, if the seventh day is a long period of time (the consummation of history, which obviously has not yet taken place), then so are the previous days. 5. The Hebrew word for “day” (yom) does not mean a twenty-four-hour period in every context in Genesis (see Gen 2:4). 6. Some versions of the calendar-day view actually have three different kinds of days defined: days one through three are earth rotation days; days four through six are regular solar days; day seven is a very long period of time. Without appealing to science, many evangelical scholars who affirm full biblical inerrancy nevertheless reject the calendar-day view on purely exegetical grounds. Regarding hermeneutical guidelines, the biblical creation account of Genesis 1–3, as well as various other passages in the Bible that address the topic, must be carefully interpreted in light of the following literary principles.

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To discover a text’s original meaning, and thus the intent of the biblical author, requires a credible interpreter to carefully (1) examine the grammar of the text, (2) determine the genre of literature being used, (3) investigate the text’s cultural and historical setting, and (4) study both the immediate and wider contexts affecting the passage. Leading out the meaning of the text also involves allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture. A passage must be analyzed in light of other passages on the same theme. Clearer, later, and more complete texts illumine earlier and more obscure ones. For example, the earlier Old Testament is explained in light of the later New Testament.

CONCLUSION

Steve Lemke

Let us summarize and contrast what we have heard from our two authors in this excellent dialogue on biblical authority. Both John Walton and Ken Samples affirm a high view of biblical inspiration and the doctrine of inerrancy. As a whole, however, Reasons to Believe is more uniform in affirming inerrancy since affirmation of that doctrine is required for its representatives. BioLogos has a broader range of views within its organization, with perhaps some more nuanced understandings of inerrancy. While both organizations affirm biblical inspiration and authority, their interpretation of various texts varies significantly. Both BioLogos and Reasons to Believe affirm old-earth creationism—the earth is much older than a few millennia. Some conservative evangelical Christians who hold the young-earth creationism view have called into question the interpretations of both organizations. The young-earth view interprets the biblical accounts with what they understand to be a more literal hermeneutic, claiming that creation took place in six literal twentyfour-hour days less than twenty thousand years ago, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of years ago. Because both BioLogos and RTB affirm an older earth, young-earth advocates sometimes question their commitment to biblical inspiration and inerrancy. BioLogos and RTB assert that this is a question of biblical interpretation, not biblical inspiration. BioLogos and Reasons to Believe affirm both the book of nature and the book of Scripture as proper vehicles for divine revelation. Because of their more nonconcordist reading of Scripture, however, BioLogos believes that

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the two books have different purposes. The book of Scripture reveals theological truths; the book of nature reveals scientific truths. In Walton’s view, the primary meaning of Scripture is what the original ancient writer intended it to mean. Samples’s affirmation of a soft concordist hermeneutic leads him to assert that the divine author of Scripture may have embedded meanings in the text that were not understood by its human authors. Both John Walton and Ken Samples have addressed complex issues in a scholarly and collegial way, and for that we can thank them for this model of Christian discourse.

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The Original Couple What Is the Range of Viable Positions Concerning Adam and Eve? Ted Cabal, Loren Haarsma, and Kenneth Samples

SBC MODERATOR TED CABAL Evangelicals in recent decades have expended considerable energy debating the age of the earth. Much of this energy derives from some who regard that question as central to evolutionary theory. But since the 1859 publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, evangelicals have been principally concerned with the theory of universal common descent—that all living things share common ancestry. At the core of this concern lie questions of whether the theory squares with biblical teaching. Did Adam and Eve descend from lower life forms? Did all humanity descend from the first couple? Or was there even a first couple at all? Debate among evangelicals has recently focused on the historicity of Adam. Specific related theological issues involve the image of God, the fall and original sin, and how the New Testament authors understood the Adam of Genesis. So the questions I pose to Loren and Ken are: What do you consider to be viable options for understanding the biblical Adam and Eve? Let’s understand “viable” to include both faithfulness to biblical orthodoxy and scientific feasibility. How should one’s view of the first biblical couple correlate with mainstream scientific understandings of human origins? Where would you draw the lines regarding nonviable options?

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BioLogos Author Loren Haarsma Throughout church history, most Christians interpreted Scripture as implying that all humans descended from two individuals who lived a few thousand years ago in Mesopotamia. But just as discoveries in astronomy in Galileo’s time prompted to the church to consider other interpretations of scriptural texts that talk about the earth being fixed in place, recent discoveries in archaeology, paleontology, and genetics prompt the church to consider other interpretations of Genesis 2–3. Many Christians understandably worry that new interpretations of Adam and Eve jeopardize core teachings about the inspiration and authority of Scripture, humans as created in God’s image, and the doctrine of original sin. We at BioLogos share these concerns. Yet as history shows, sometimes the church is rightly prompted by the results of science to carefully reconsider how it interprets some passages. BioLogos does not believe that science trumps theology or biblical interpretation, but we do believe that theology and biblical interpretation can draw useful insights from scientific discoveries. At present this work has not resulted in consensus among evangelical scholars about Adam and Eve, and BioLogos believes it is important for discussion to continue about a range of viable proposals. Systematic theology. Genesis 2–3 is tied to key doctrines of systematic theology that are taught throughout Scripture, including the following: • Humans are created “in the image of God,” with a special relationship to God and a role to play in God’s creation (Gen 1:27). • All humans who have ever lived have sinned by rebelling against God’s revealed will. • God has dealt with sin through Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, and promised return. BioLogos is committed to these core doctrines. The views of Adam and Eve that we consider viable must adhere to them. For two millennia the church has explored a range of views within these parameters, and those theological reflections are a valuable resource when considering current proposals for Adam and Eve.1 1

See posts by Oliver Crisp on the BioLogos website, particularly on the developing views of the church about original sin.

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Biblical interpretation. A twenty-first-century person reading only a translation of Genesis 2–3 into a modern European language would understandably read it in a literal-historical way, although the text itself has certain elements, such as the talking snake and the miraculous trees, that also suggest symbolic interpretations. But as John Walton writes in the previous chapter, it is essential to take into account the original context of these ancient passages to avoid reading into them new meanings the author never intended. Today’s understanding of ancient Near East history, cultures, and literature indicates that literal-historical interpretations of Genesis 2–3 might not be the best interpretations. Consider just one aspect of Genesis 1–11: it is compressed history with symbolic imagery. Genesis 1 and 4–11 obviously compress long periods of time and profound, global theological themes into localized and condensed stories, which often include symbolic imagery. These texts teach many important things, but the genre suggests they were not intended to be literalhistorical texts in the modern sense. It seems consistent and appropriate to interpret Genesis 2–3 in a similar way. Turning to the New Testament, consider Paul’s references to “one man” in Acts 17:26 and to Adam in Romans 5. What do Paul’s theological arguments regarding Christ as the savior of all humanity in Romans 5 require regarding the interpretation of Genesis 2–3 and the historicity of Adam? Although Paul says that “sin entered the world through one man” (Rom 5:12), in Genesis 2–3 there are two individuals present, Adam and Eve. So even if Paul thought of “Adam” in Romans 5 as a real historical figure, it could only be as a leader of two individuals. His sin held special theological and historical importance, but it was not the first sin chronologically. So one straightforward re­ interpretation of this passage in light of modern science would be to think of Adam in Romans 5 as a real historical figure, a leader of perhaps more than two individuals, whose sin held special theological and historical importance, although it may not have been the first sin chronologically.2 While Paul probably assumed that there was a particular individual named Adam, it seems likely that Paul also thought of Adam as an archetype of Israel. This was a common belief in Second Temple Judaism. 2

More on this view can be found in blog posts on the BioLogos website by Robin Collins and David Opderbeck.

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Jews of Paul’s era would read the story of Adam and Eve and also see in it the history of Israel—they were in paradise, they disobeyed God, they were expelled.3 So another proposed way to interpret Adam in Romans 5 is to focus on this second aspect of what Paul likely believed: Adam was a literary figure representing both our very first ancestors and many real individuals over a long historical period. All humans are sinners. Sin enters the world through the actions of many real, historical individuals. Adam is an archetypal figure representing both everyone and the very first members of humanity.4 A third proposed interpretation is that Paul assumed—but did not teach— a common belief of his time in order to make a theological point. Christians believe what Scripture teaches, but we are not bound by every assumption the human writers held as common cultural beliefs of their time. Perhaps the most famous biblical examples of this are the Old Testament passages that refer to the common belief of the time that the earth was fixed in place (1 Chron 16:30; Ps 93:1; 96:10) in order to teach theological truths about God’s faithfulness. New Testament writers such as Paul also were sometimes inspired to use (not teach) common prescientific beliefs of their culture in order to make the theological points the Spirit wanted them to make.5 Scientific evidence. Along with Reasons to Believe (RTB), the BioLogos community agrees with the consensus of the scientific community that there is abundant evidence that the earth has a history stretching back billions of years. Unlike Reasons to Believe, BioLogos also agrees with the consensus of the scientific community that evidence from genetics, anatomy, physiology, and developmental biology strongly indicate common ancestry between humans and animals, most closely with other primates. Moreover, genetic diversity in the human population is not consistent with what we would expect if all humans had descended from a single pair of humans. The genetic data is most consistent with models in which humans have an evolutionary history, and the most recent “bottleneck” in human ancestral 3

N. T. Wright, Daniel Kirk, Scot McKnight, and Pete Enns expand on some of these connections in posts on the BioLogos website. 4 See John Walton, “A Historical Adam: Archetypal Creation View,” in Four Views on the Historical Adam, ed. Matthew Barrett and Ardel B. Caneday (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014). More on this view can be found in posts on the BioLogos website by Robin Collins. 5 More on this view can be found in posts on the BioLogos website by Denis Lamoureux.

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population was no less than several thousand individuals, more than one hundred thousand years ago. Later chapters by BioLogos authors (as well as numerous articles on the BioLogos website) provide further details of the scientific evidence for human evolution. Possible scenarios for Adam and Eve. Having looked briefly at three areas of scholarship, we can now describe a few potentially viable scenarios for interpreting Genesis 2–3. Each agrees with the scientific consensus on human evolution that our ancestral population was never as small as two individuals. These scenarios are also consistent with core doctrinal commitments regarding humans being created in the image of God and the reality of sin as disobedience to God’s revealed will. 1. Adam and Eve as a transformed pair of ancient representative-ancestors of all humanity. At some early point when our ancestral population was only a few thousand individuals, perhaps about two hundred thousand years ago in Africa, God specially selected a pair not only to receive special revelation but also to be miraculously transformed—perhaps by a superabundant gift of the Holy Spirit—to make it possible for them to be truly holy, capable of obeying all of God’s spiritual and moral requirements. While they were for a while able not to sin, nevertheless they sinned, and the special grace that allowed them to be sinless was withdrawn. In the centuries following their revelation and disobedience, that group and their descendants mixed culturally and eventually genetically with other groups of humans alive at that time, and in this way the spiritual, psychological, and cultural effects of sin eventually spread to the entire population. 2. Adam and Eve as a small group of ancient representative-ancestors of all humanity. At the point when our ancestral population was only a few thousand individuals, God specially selected a small family group of a few dozen individuals to receive special revelation. Although they potentially could have lived according to God’s expectations for them, they chose to sin. We might picture the fall as a singular event, or we might picture it as a process taking place during a probationary period for this group. That first small group who sinned are among the ancestors of all humans today, but not the sole ancestors. In the centuries following their revelation and disobedience, that group and their descendants mixed culturally and eventually genetically with other groups of humans alive at that time, and in this way

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the spiritual, psychological, and cultural effects of sin eventually spread to the entire population.6 3. Adam and Eve as a pair of recent representatives of all humanity. Somewhere between forty thousand and eight thousand years ago, God specially selected a pair of individuals to receive special revelation and to act as representatives (but not ancestors) of all human beings. They disobeyed God and so fell into sin in a concentrated historical event. Because they sinned as representatives of all humanity, all of humanity fell into sin. The opportunity for the rest of humanity to receive additional spiritual gifts and to enter into a state of sinless grace before God was lost.7 4. Adam and Eve as literary figures in a highly compressed history of all our ancestors. Over their long developmental history, whenever our ancestors became sufficiently advanced, God used both general and special revelation to tell them how they ought to behave and the consequences of disobedience. They chose disobedience again and again. Through their disobedience they damaged their relationship with God, damaged their relationships with one another, and damaged themselves. These consequences were passed from generation to generation. The sciences of genetics and archaeology are not able to show how our ancestors transitioned from animal self-interest to human sinful disobedience, although God does know.8 There are many possible variations on each of these four general types of scenarios.9 We don’t claim that each of these scenarios is equally promising or advocated by an equal number of scholars. Some scenarios face greater challenges than others in how they answer certain theological questions. There are, however, Christian scholars proposing versions of each of these four scenarios that are compatible with everything we have learned so far from the natural sciences, affirm the inspiration and authority of Scripture, 6

Several versions of this scenario and the next are explored in more depth in posts on the BioLogos website by Robin Collins, John Walton, Pete Enns, Daniel Harrell, Tremper Longman, and David Opderbeck. 7 Denis Alexander explores this scenario in more depth in his book Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? (Oxford: Monarch Books, 2014), and in posts on the BioLogos website. 8 This scenario is explored in more depth in posts on the BioLogos website by Alister McGrath, Tremper Longman, Denis Lamoureux, and Denis Alexander, as well as in Alexander’s book Creation or Evolution. 9 See the articles and links under “Human Origins” at BioLogos, http://biologos.org/common-questions /human-origins.

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and hold fast to the core theological principles mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. BioLogos does not endorse any of these views, but supports continued conversation among scholars working out the theological consequences of each. If the problem of sin is so vast that it requires such an astonishing solution as the atonement, perhaps no one simple, neat theory can encompass all we need to understand about original sin. As we continue this work in coming decades, some theories we develop may eventually be discarded. Those theories that remain should deepen our understanding of Scripture and our appreciation of the immensity of the rescue God undertook through Jesus Christ.

Reasons to Believe Author Kenneth Samples I will begin by setting forth what Reasons to Believe adheres to theologically about the identity and role of Adam and Eve. I will then offer a brief assessment of two basic alternative viewpoints and evaluate their theological viability. Finally, I will offer some reasons why RTB thinks the traditional view is the best overall theological and apologetics explanation concerning Adam and Eve’s identity and role in the biblical revelation. RTB’s traditional view. As an old-earth, progressive-creationist apologetics organization, RTB affirms the traditional theological view on Adam and Eve. This view has been held by theologically conservative Jews and Christians for many centuries and can be summarized in five scripturally based points. First, God directly and immediately created Adam as a fully functional being from the dust of the ground without recourse to a long evolutionary process from other animals (Gen 2:7). Textual support for the immediacy of Adam’s creation is found in the description of creation moving from the dust of the ground to a living being (inanimate to animate instead of an evolutionary animate to animate).10 The Hebrew word for “formed” in Genesis 2:7 suggests the meticulous work of a potter who is shaping an intricate piece of art.11 Later, Eve was created directly and immediately from Adam’s body (Gen 2:21-23). Millard Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 506-7. Walter A. Elwell, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), s.v. “Adam.”

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Second, Adam and Eve were created in the express image and likeness of God as the crown of creation and as male and female (Gen 1:26-27). Genesis 2 reveals that both humans and animals were made from the dust of the ground (Gen 2:7, 19), but humans alone possess the divine image that carries with it a special dignity and grandeur. Thus, biblically speaking one would reasonably expect to discover that animals and humans share many physical similarities (anatomical, physiological, biochemical, and genetic) in mere matters of degree, reflecting the same source of the dust of the ground. But one should also note a profound difference in kind for humans (perhaps reflected by spirituality, rationality, and morality) due to the image of God.12 An objective scientific and philosophical comparison of animals and humans seems to comport well with this biblically expected outcome. Namely, when we compare humans with animals, some differences are reflected in the category of degree but others in the category of kind. Third, all human beings descended from their original parents and ancestors—Adam and Eve as the progenitors of humanity (Gen 5:1). Passages from both the Old and New Testament place the origin and unity of the human race with and in Adam. Genesis 5 contains a list of the family line from Adam to Noah. And in his Areopagus sermon the apostle Paul states, “From one man he made all the nations” (Acts 17:26). This clear allusion to Adam by Paul supports both Adam’s historicity and his role as the father of all humanity. Fourth, Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience against God brought sin into the world (Gen 3:11-19). The consequences of that sin caused spiritual and ultimately physical death for the original couple. Further, because they were representatives of the race, Adam and Eve’s sin was passed on to all their descendants (Ps 51:5; 58:3; Rom 5:12, 18-19). The Hebrew Scripture’s view that human beings are distinctive sinners sets it apart from other anthropologies reflected in the writings of the ancient Near East.13 Fifth, immediately following the fall of human beings into sin, there is a veiled Old Testament promise of redemption. After announcing a curse on Kenneth Richard Samples, A World of Difference: Putting Christian Truth-Claims to the Worldview Test (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 181-85. 13 Elwell, Evangelical Dictionary, s.v. “Adam.” 12

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the serpent, God proclaims that there will be a conflict between the serpent and the woman’s offspring in which the serpent suffers a head wound and the offspring a wound to the heel (Gen 3:15). Historic Christian theology interprets this conflict as representing the battle between Satan and Jesus Christ, in which Jesus is wounded but Satan suffers a mortal wound of destruction (Rom 16:20). This passage has been called the protoevangelium— the first announcement of the gospel. Thus, the traditional biblical portrait of Adam is that he was an actual historical person, the first man, who fathered the entire human race. This is the biblical position that RTB affirms to be true. Problems with the mythical Adam view. Some biblical scholars view the early chapters of Genesis as mythical, allegorical, or figurative and therefore reject the idea of a historical Adam. In this view, Adam is a mere literary figure. However, this position does not reflect the broad consensus of evangelical Protestant biblical scholarship. There are no exegetical or literary factors that require the early chapters of Genesis to be interpreted as myth.14 In fact, on literary grounds, though it contains figurative language, one can argue that Genesis 1–11 is no less historical than the later patriarchal narratives of the book of Genesis. It served as a polemic to pagan ancient Near Eastern cultures that were consumed with mythology, so it seems unlikely that Genesis would feature a similar mythical genre. The genealogies of the Old Testament (Gen 5; 1 Chron 1) find in Adam a historical person and the first parent of humanity. In the New Testament, Luke’s genealogy places Adam at the front of the list of ancestors of the historical Jesus (Lk 3). Many biblical scholars consider that the genealogies contain gaps and therefore omit some historical figures. But the biblical genealogies are not known to add fictional or mythical figures; hence, scholars treat them as historical.15 Jesus’ clear allusion to Adam and Eve in his teaching on marriage (Mt 19:4-6) seems to make sense only if the two biblical figures were actual historical R. B. Gaffin Jr., “Adam,” in New Dictionary of Theology, ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and J. I. Packer (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 5. 15 Mike Reeves, “Adam and Eve,” in Should Christians Embrace Evolution? Biblical and Scientific Responses, ed. Norman C. Nevin (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2011), 43-56. 14

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persons. Jesus describes Adam and Eve as the first literal male and female and makes their physical union the basis on which marriage rests.16 The apostle Paul’s theological reasoning in comparing Adam and Christ (Rom 5:12-19; 1 Cor 15:21-22, 45-49) seems to indicate an essential and indivisible link between the historical reality of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the historical reality of the life, fall, and death of Adam. The logic of Paul’s central theological argument in Romans 5 and in 1 Corinthians 15 appears to collapse if Paul were comparing a historical Christ to a mythical Adam.17 Paul presents an extremely tight parallel between the first Adam and the last Adam (Christ). In other words, there’s no last Adam needed to give life without a first Adam whose actions led to death. If the foregoing correctly presents Paul’s theological reasoning, then it appears that a historical Adam is necessary to explain the broader Christian story of sin and death. Such an Adam provides a rationale for Christ’s incarnation, atonement, and resurrection. Jesus and the apostle Paul consider Adam a real historical person. Also, Paul’s theology seems to require a historical Adam as an integral part of the gospel’s storyline. The mythical Adam view distorts the gospel to such an extent that historic Christianity is fundamentally changed. This upheaval places the mythical Adam view outside the boundaries of biblical orthodox Christianity. Therefore, RTB does not see this position as being biblically sound and theologically viable. Problems with the nonancestor Adam view. Some biblical scholars propose that Adam could be a historical person without being the progenitor of the human race. Thus, Adam serves as humankind’s representative but is not humanity’s literal ancestor. In contrast, the apostle Paul anchors the origin and unity of humanity in Adam as humankind’s paternal ancestor (Acts 17:26). Thus, with a historical Adam who is also humankind’s physical progenitor there is indeed a common humanity in terms of origin, unity, and sinfulness. This tight solidarity of Adam with his descendants is taught in Genesis 1–3 and makes Norman L. Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), s.v. “Adam, Historicity of.” 17 Reeves, “Adam and Eve,” 44-55. 16

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sense of the biblical storyline.18 Humans are a genuine, commonly connected family who are noble because they are divine image bearers. Yet they are also deeply flawed because they share a collective relationship to their fallen ancestor and representative, Adam. To propose that Adam was a representative of humanity but not the physical progenitor damages the solidarity of the human race as reflected in Scripture. Furthermore, the historical person of Adam in Scripture cannot easily be separated from his role as the father of all humanity. Thus, an Adam who is merely a historical representative but not a physical ancestor of human beings may also compromise the logic of Paul’s comparison between Adam and Christ in the book of Romans. The nonancestor Adam view is not as doctrinally egregious as the mythical Adam view. But removing Adam’s role as progenitor is extremely difficult to align with a biblical perspective generally and with biblical inerrancy specifically. Adam and Eve’s historicity and their role as the first parents of humanity are not peripheral theological matters. Any view that eliminates the traditional identity and purpose of the first human beings cannot do so without severe theological repercussions. Why the traditional view is the best explanation. The traditional theological view that sees Adam as both a historical person and the physical progenitor of all humanity is a powerful biblical explanatory view.19 It takes into account the critical solidarity between Adam and his descendants in origin, unity, and uniqueness. As such, this position makes sense of the human condition and of life overall. All human beings are simultaneously noble as divine image bearers and morally flawed as fallen sinners who face suffering and an inevitable death. This is true in each human being’s case through their connection to their representative father, Adam, who with his wife, Eve, brought sin into the world through willful disobedience. Thus, the traditional view makes sense of what the great Christian thinker Blaise Pascal called the enigma of man’s greatness and wretchedness.20 Elwell, Evangelical Dictionary, s.v. “Adam.” C. John Collins, Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? Who They Were and Why You Should Care (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), 133-35. 20 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1995), 13, 434. 18 19

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The traditional view also easily aligns with the biblical teaching concerning the gospel. Jesus Christ—the last Adam, according to the apostle Paul—has taken a human nature at his incarnation to provide redemption through his life, death, and resurrection. So through our physical solidarity to Adam, we all die. But through our spiritual solidarity to Christ through faith, we all will be made alive. The traditional view also coheres with scriptural authority and biblical inerrancy. Holding to the traditional view of Adam and Eve could mean that one’s biblical convictions are at odds with the consensus position within the scientific community (the view that human evolution does not allow for a distinctive original pair). However, this isn’t the first time that orthodox Christians have faced such challenges. Scientific thinking in the area of human origins is complex, fraught with unknowns and uncertainties, and in some areas is quite fluid. RTB does not think it is wise or prudent to set aside an essential biblical truth of Adam’s historicity and fatherhood of the human race based on current scientific consensus that is open to change and interpretation. On science-faith issues, Christians, as in all areas of life, are called to exercise intelligent and reasonable faith—even in areas of intellectual uncertainty.

REDIRECT

Ted Cabal

For Loren: Loren affirms that all humans today are prone to sin and are incapable of not sinning. He also seeks to assure evangelicals that the openness of BioLogos to nonhistorical, evolutionary views of Adam are compatible with original sin. In one view Loren presents as viable, Adam is figurative for all people. But when Loren writes that “our ancestors transitioned from animal self-interest to human sinful disobedience,” doesn’t the transitional aspect seem to imply that the first humans were created as sinners? That is, that original sin consists of early humans developing a conscience that made them aware of their inherited animal/sinful nature? If I have understood Loren correctly, why should evangelicals consider this a viable theory of original sin? For Kenneth: So much of the ministry of Reasons to Believe has emphasized the correlation of biblical and scientific data when both are rightly interpreted. Yet Kenneth writes:

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Holding to the traditional view of Adam and Eve will likely mean that one’s biblical convictions are at odds with the consensus position within the scientific community. . . . Scientific thinking in the area of human origins is complex, fraught with unknowns and uncertainties, and in some areas is quite fluid. RTB does not think it is wise or prudent to set aside an essential biblical truth of Adam’s historicity and fatherhood of the human race based on current scientific consensus that is open to change and interpretation.

How does this view square with the traditional RTB position? How can this not be accused of cherry-picking the science?

BIOLOGOS RESPONSE

Loren Haarsma

God did not create the first humans as sinners; however, God did create the first humans with the ability to choose to sin. All the scenarios that I sketched earlier, as well as Augustine’s traditional view and the RTB scenario, agree about that. They differ somewhat in regard to how God gave the first humans that ability. God created animals and humans with desires to take care of themselves; this is part of God’s good provision for creation. But as humans we know that love for ourselves can compete with love for God and love for others. Sin enters the picture when we fail to love God above all and fail to love our neighbors as ourselves. Augustine’s theories about how and why God created humans with competing loves and with the ability to sin by disordering those loves drew not only from Scripture but also from the best Greek natural philosophy and metaphysics of his day. Modern science does not contradict Scripture, but it does contradict some ancient Greek natural philosophy. Modern scientific studies of animals, especially the most intelligent and social primates, show that they have dispositions toward actions that for humans would be selfish, and have competing dispositions toward actions that for humans would be altruistic. Neurobiology, genetics, and developmental biology show that some of the same genes and similar brain structures are involved in these competing behavioral dispositions in humans and animals alike. Those similarities in genes and brains appear to be there because of the evolutionary methods that God used to create us. Science can tell us some things about how God gave us our abilities, including our abilities to choose. Science cannot, however, pinpoint exactly

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when or how divine revelation first entered into human history. Science cannot tell us when the first actions occurred that God would have regarded as sinful rebellion against divine will. Whether humanity’s sinful rebellion occurred early or late in the history of our species and whether it should be thought of as a concentrated historical event or spread out over a long time are questions not addressed by science, and we rely on theologians and biblical scholars to work through the theological implications of competing answers. Some of the challenging theological questions raised by evolutionary scenarios for Adam and Eve can be avoided by maintaining a traditional Augustinian view or the RTB view. But these choices carry other theological consequences. Science by itself never dictates how we interpret Scripture. Science only alerts us to new theological problems that we had not considered before. Here is a historical illustration. Prior to Galileo’s work, there were very few theological problems with interpreting Psalm 93:1 and other passages as actually teaching that the earth is fixed in place. Galileo and others made scientific discoveries that strongly indicate that the earth moves. However, these scientific discoveries do not require us to change our interpretation of Scripture. It is still possible today to believe that Scripture truthfully teaches that the earth is fixed in place. One possibility is that God is tricking (or permitting the devil to trick) all of our scientific measurements into giving false data about a moving earth. A second possibility is that we humans, because we are finite and sinful, simply should not trust our senses and our reasoning ability on this matter despite the vast evidence that the earth is moving. A third possibility is that there is a huge conspiracy among thousands of scientists to create a false belief that the earth is moving. Christians overwhelmingly reject those three possibilities because each of them carries enormous theological problems. The first is inconsistent with what we believe about God, the second is inconsistent with what we believe about ourselves as God’s image bearers, and asserting the third amounts to bearing false witness against scientists. The scientific evidence for a moving earth, by itself, does not require us to give up a fixed-earth interpretation of Scripture. The scientific evidence only points out theological problems with a fixed-earth interpretation of Scripture of which the church was not previously aware. The situation today regarding evolution is not precisely the same as Galileo’s situation, but there are some similarities. We are convinced that multiple

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mutually reinforcing lines of evidence indicate that humans share common ancestry with animals and that we are not all descended from a single pair. The scientific data and the strength of the scientific consensus does not require anyone to change their interpretation of Scripture, but it does create significant new theological challenges for the traditional Augustinian scenario or the RTB scenario. Scholars in the BioLogos community have concluded that there are fewer theological problems, and greater opportunity for progress, with one or more of the evolutionary scenarios on Adam and Eve.

REASONS TO BELIEVE RESPONSE

Kenneth Samples

Each member of Reasons to Believe’s scholar team has profited from reading Loren Haarsma’s helpful essay on the range of viable positions concerning Adam and Eve. We are impressed with Loren’s ability to summarize and organize a great deal of diverse and technical information from both the scientific and theological disciplines. This response will focus on six areas. I will outline the traditional view on Adam and Eve held by RTB, summarize how that position makes the best sense of the Christian world-and-life view, identify and briefly respond to reasons offered for rethinking the traditional viewpoint, consider what the theological restrictions would be for an alternative view of Adam and Eve, respond to Ted Cabal’s specific question, and offer an organizational concern about the overall position taken by BioLogos on science-faith issues. RTB’s traditional view. Since Loren Haarsma and BioLogos as an organization reject RTB’s traditional view, let’s again enumerate RTB’s position in five points: 1. God supernaturally created Adam directly, immediately, and in a fully functional form from the dust of the ground (Gen 2:7), and Eve was created later from the body of Adam (Gen 2:21-23). 2. God uniquely created Adam and Eve in the divine image (Gen 1:26-27). 3. Adam and Eve were the first human beings created and the progenitors of the entire human race (Gen 5:1; Acts 17:26). 4. Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience brought sin into the world (Gen 3:1119), and that original sin was passed on to all their descendants (Ps 51:5; 58:3; Rom 5:12, 18-19).

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5. Following the fall of human beings into sin, a divine promise of future redemption was given (Gen 3:15). Best explanation of the historic Christian worldview. The strength of RTB’s position over that of BioLogos lies in its view of Adam as both a historical person and the physical progenitor of all humanity. This view best fits the broad historical Christian worldview of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. A traditional perspective best takes into account the critical solidarity between Adam and his descendants in terms of origin, unity, uniqueness, and sinfulness. As such, this position makes better sense of the biblical and theological considerations of Scripture, and it explains life overall (a good creation scarred by sin) and the human condition (humans as noble but flawed). Three reasons for doubting the traditional view. Nevertheless, three basic factors have caused some scholars to doubt the traditional view of Adam and Eve.21 I’ll summarize each and offer a brief response. Factor 1: Themes in the early chapters of Genesis seem to parallel mythical stories from other ancient Near Eastern cultures. So Genesis may be mythical as well. Response: This position does not reflect the broad consensus of evangelical biblical scholarship. For example, there are no exegetical or literary factors that require the early chapters of Genesis to be interpreted as myth.22 Also, the fact that the book of Genesis represents a polemic to pagan ancient Near Eastern cultures may be reason to think that it would reflect a very different approach. Factor 2: Recent advances in biology and genetics do not support the idea that human beings came from an original couple; rather, they come from a large population group. Response: Scientific thinking in the area of human origins remains complicated and fluid (see Fazale Rana’s chapter addressing challenges to human evolution). RTB does not consider it wise to set aside the crucial biblical truth of Adam’s historicity and fatherhood of the human race C. John Collins, “The Case for Adam and Eve: Our Conversation with C. John Collins,” In the Church (blog), byFaith, April 24, 2012, http://byfaithonline.com/the-case-for-adam-and-eve-our -conversation-with-c-john-collins. 22 Gaffin, “Adam,” 5. 21

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based on current scientific thinking that appears open to challenge, change, and reinterpretation. Factor 3: Various people, including scholars and laypeople, now reject the idea that Adam and Eve’s sin long ago could so profoundly and negatively affect another person’s life and nature today. Response: Probably the theological position that this criticism is aimed at is the broad Augustinian view of original sin. However, Augustinians hold that this view has both biblical and explanatory power. Nevertheless, within Christendom (especially reflected in Eastern Orthodoxy) there are different positions about how sin is passed on to Adam’s descendants. RTB considers these three factors insufficient to justify a fundamental change to the traditional view of Adam and Eve. Alternative views of Adam and Eve. Reasons to Believe insists that the traditional view of Adam and Eve is the best understanding of the identity and role of the original couple for the following two biblical reasons: 1. Jesus and the apostle Paul clearly viewed Adam as a real, historical person (Mt 19:4-6; Acts 17:26). 2. The theology of the apostle Paul seems to require a historical Adam as an integral part of the gospel’s storyline (Rom 5:12-19; 1 Cor 15:21-22, 45-49). The mythical Adam view seems to alter the gospel to such an extent that historical Christianity is essentially changed. Therefore, the mythical Adam view falls outside the limits of biblical orthodox Christianity. As was stated earlier, RTB does not consider this position biblically sound and theologically viable. Now we must address the alternative view that affirms a historical Adam but does not necessarily see him as the first or only original human being (though there is a representative relationship, similar to tribal leadership). At RTB we believe such a position, especially a nonancestor view, is extremely difficult to align with biblical inerrancy as expressed in the Chicago Statement and thus is biblically and theologically unacceptable. Nevertheless, since a number of evangelical Christians hold something like this view, we think it can be strengthened if it affirms the following three points:23 23

Collins, “Case for Adam and Eve.”

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1. The basic creation of Adam involves the supernatural, especially in relation to humans possessing the image of God. 2. The human race reflects a unified origin. 3. There was a genuine historical and moral fall into sin that took place at the beginning of the human race. Answering Ted Cabal’s question. First, while RTB reads the two books of Scripture and nature together, the books are not equal. Scripture is the supreme authority because of its explicit propositional nature. Hermeneutically, RTB interprets the book of nature in light of the book of Scripture and not the reverse. Thus, when the two books seem to conflict, deference should be given to Scripture. Second, the historicity of Adam and his role as the progenitor of the human race seem to be the clear teaching of Scripture. Third, to depart from this traditional position is to depart from the clear teaching of Scripture and to destructively reinterpret the nature of historic Christianity itself. Fourth, the science on human origins is fluid and open to interpretation. RTB does not view the evidence against an original pair to be as airtight as BioLogos apparently does. Finally, in light of these points, it seems biblically prudent and necessary to continue to affirm the teaching of historic Christianity and to live with the present interpretive tension between the two books. A theological caution. In closing, RTB thinks that because the BioLogos community allows for a broad range of perspectives on Adam and Eve, someone interacting with the organization will never quite know whether the BioLogos person leans in a more liberal or conservative theological direction on the matter. Surely a community of scholars (BioLogos) is different from an organization with a small scholar team (RTB). But in RTB’s mind this breadth of perspectives may lead to an uncomfortable uncertainty.

CONCLUSION

Ted Cabal

I want to commend Loren for seriously engaging the science of human origins. And I am grateful that we share so much in Christ! But, little surprise, like most Southern Baptists I reject human evolution. Instead of reiterating

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Kenneth’s concerns, which I share, I’d like to revisit my redirect to Loren. I asked how his view didn’t “imply that the first humans were created as sinners.” He responded, “God did not simply create the first humans as sinners.” My question could have been more direct: “In your scenarios, weren’t the first humans already disposed toward and likely committing murder, rape, theft, and so on before God revealed his will against these things?” Loren never stated original innocence as a theological necessity, and analogous animal behaviors are not deemed sinful. But his view that humans “rose” before they “fell” (my words!) raises a number of concerns. I also differ with Loren’s application of the Copernican controversy. Galileo demonstrated Ptolemaic astronomy false, but heliocentrism’s proof awaited Newton’s work. So before marrying the science, the church in the interim courted it with hybrid models (e.g., geo-heliocentrism). Darwinism has been courted and hybridized by even young-earth creationists (e.g., widespread speciation), but conservative evangelicals have remained opposed to an evolutionary first couple, believing it entails serious theological problems. Loren is convinced scientific evidence indicates human descent from animals. But should that entail the standard Darwinian view that morality itself descended from animal emotions? Some BioLogos brethren believe so, but what would constitute convincing evidence? In the end, Loren’s scenarios seem to me like exploratory hybrids that I’m biblically unauthorized to accept.

4

Death, Predation, and Suffering Is “Natural Evil” Evil? James Dew, J. B. Stump, and Hugh Ross

SBC MODERATOR JAMES DEW I’d like to thank Hugh Ross and Jim Stump for their work in this chapter. The problem of evil is certainly a matter that any Christian view must address. Moreover, I am grateful for the willingness of these men to handle the discussion at hand in such a Christlike manner. I am strengthened by their work. Here are the issues as I see them. Death, suffering, and evil pose a particular problem for Christian theism. If God is all-powerful and all-good, why do we experience such horrible evils in life and in nature? For many Christians, this question is answered by passages such as Genesis 2:16-17: “And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”’ Or, as Romans 5:12 says: “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” From passages like these, many believers argue that death, suffering, and evil are the result of the fall. But according to both of your perspectives, death must have been a reality long before the existence of Adam. So then, how do your positions answer the question of natural evil? More specifically, how do your perspectives address the presence of evil prior to

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the fall, including death and suffering of animals before the fall? For the BioLogos position, does the natural evolutionary process create a very special and unique problem of evil for Christian theism? If, as BioLogos argues, God created through the process of evolution and this process took place over billions of years, is there an overwhelming amount of gratuitous evil during this time that is difficult to reconcile with our basic concepts of Christian theism? Some philosophers, such as Paul Draper, argue that the evolutionary process might just create an insurmountable problem of evil for Christian theism.

BioLogos Author J. B. Stump Dew asks us to reflect on the problem of evil. Thankfully he doesn’t ask us to solve the problem, since humans have wrestled with it since our earliest records. We’ll focus particularly on natural evils (as opposed to moral evils that result from human decisions), and I will have areas of substantial agreement with Reasons to Believe (RTB). I’ll consider specifically the aspects of the problem that are related to evolution. Not every­­­one at BioLogos would discuss these issues the same way, but I think what I say is consistent with at least the broad strokes of a response from the BioLogos community. Natural disasters. BioLogos and RTB have a similar approach to some kinds of natural evil. One category of these is natural disasters—things such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and similar events that cause significant pain, suffering, and death. There is a traditional response to these tragedies that also blames them on human sin. That narrative posits that all of creation was perfect and nothing bad ever happened until Adam and Eve first sinned. Then all of creation was affected by the fall, and now these natural disasters are part of nature groaning, waiting to be redeemed. Both BioLogos and RTB affirm that such a response is no longer tenable. There is ample evidence that the laws of nature did not change with the arrival of human sin and that natural disasters occurred long before there were human beings, causing pain, suffering, and death to creatures. For example, the asteroid that struck the earth some 65 million years ago would have generated massive wildfires in which millions of animals were burned alive, and the ensuing climate change caused by the dust cloud over the earth led to the

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slow, painful starvation of countless animals. We don’t think that can be the result of human sin. Some old-earth creationists disagree. William Dembski has a clever way of dealing with natural evil before human sin. He claims that the sin of Adam of Eve is retroactively responsible for the evils that predated them. Just like Christ’s work on the cross retroactively applied for the salvation of some people before his death, so too Adam and Eve’s sin is responsible for putting the world in the condition it was in before their fall.1 Dembski’s position is driven by the reasonable concern to keep God from being responsible for natural evils, maintaining that insofar as it was God’s work, the original creation was perfect. God’s foreknowledge of human sin caused him to allow the evils that we find in nature today and in the historical record of the past. Against this position, I would argue (and RTB agrees) that nowhere in Scripture do we find the claim of a perfect creation. God pronounced his creation good, not perfect. Furthermore, in the Genesis 1 account, where there is no indication of a fall, God’s first instruction to humanity was to multiply themselves and subdue the earth. If creation was perfect, why did it need subduing? It seems that God did not create things exactly how he intended them to be. He could have snapped his fingers and created a world filled and subdued from the start. But evidently God delights in the process of bringing created things to maturity, and he delights in partnering with created things (including us) to help bring this about. RTB will largely agree with this so far, but there is an important point about God’s partnership with the created order that may apply to their version of old-earth creationism. At BioLogos we don’t doubt that God has worked miraculously outside the system of natural causes, but the overwhelming pattern we observe is that God brings about his intentions through natural means: from the creation of the Hawaiian Islands to the creation of human beings, we can observe and understand these processes quite well, and they do not take away from God’s majesty and glory. But a model in which God consistently works outside that natural order creates an additional difficulty for the problem of evil: Why not continue to work in a way that protects 1

William Dembski, “Tracing the World’s Evil to Human Sin,” chap. 3 in The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (Nashville: B&H, 2009).

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creatures from the pain and suffering caused by natural disasters? We think there may be very good reasons for setting up the world in such a way that there are natural disasters (for example, they are an important part of the dynamic systems needed to support life). But if God constantly works miraculously (from the perspective of science) to achieve his aims for the created world, why not do more to protect creatures from needless suffering? Answering that question is more difficult from the RTB perspective. Evolutionary evils. To be fair, some people think our evolutionary creation perspective has its own unique difficulties with respect to natural evil. There is another kind of natural evil we must admit raises further questions: Would God really have designed a process that works according to survival of the fittest? Richard Dawkins paints the picture of “nature red in tooth and claw”: During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.2

It is difficult to square this picture of nature with a good, all-powerful God who is worthy of worship. It is little comfort to say that God knows when a sparrow falls, or a gazelle is torn apart by a cheetah, or a species of hominin goes extinct if God set up the system that virtually guarantees such events will happen—often attended by gruesome pain and suffering. But as I’ll describe below, this is an incomplete picture of creation and the evolutionary process. Ultimately I admit that we are in the position of Job, and in attempting to solve this problem we run the risk of speaking of things we do not understand, things too wonderful for us to know (Job 42:3). God himself claims in Job 38 that he is directly involved in providing prey for the lion and the raven (see also Ps 104), suggesting that our capacity for determining good and evil is not infallible. Yet it is important for us to try. God does not need defending, but we must do our best—though we now see only dimly— to articulate systems of beliefs that are coherent and responsible to the light we’ve been given. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 132.

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Greater goods and the only way. Strategies for responding to evil typically appeal to “greater goods” such as free will (even though it can be used for evil purposes), or to “the only way” as a means to greater goods (e.g., natural disasters are a means to the greater good of a dynamic planet). Can it similarly be argued that evolution (with its attendant “evils”) is the only way to bring about greater goods that God desired for his creation? One of those greater goods might be what has already been suggested: that God delights in the process of transformation itself. But few people would think that is enough to justify the eons of animal pain and suffering. To this, though, we might add an “only way” theodicy. Perhaps the evolutionary struggle is the only way to develop moral beings like us. I’d suggest that moral maturity is a quality that can be developed only by making moral decisions. God can no more create morally mature creatures than he could create free persons who are incapable of sin. So to achieve moral maturity, agents must be involved in their own moral formation by making decisions with moral implications. But in order to have genuine moral decisions, there must be a challenging environment in which beings are subjected to the kinds of natural evils that force difficult decisions. When faced with such situations, will creatures opt for their own selfish preservation over doing what is right and good? Until recently, no one studying evolutionary history would have even considered such a question. But now there is increasing interest in the role of cooperation and even altruism in the story of the development of more complex animal forms.3 In this sense, suffering is a catalyst for greater goods, but not as a mere means to an end. The suffering and pain is in some sense constitutive of the greater good of moral formation. We need not try to force ourselves to think that suffering is good, but it seems that God has structured the world to bring good out of suffering. We at BioLogos clearly affirm that humans bear the image of God, but also that we are linked with the other animals. Our capacities and behaviors —both good and bad—were developed through the long process of evolution. Just as “the cougar’s fang has carved the limbs of the fleet-footed See Celia Dean-Drummond, The Wisdom of the Liminal: Evolution and Other Animals in Human Becoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), and Sarah Coakley, Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation and God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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deer,”4 so too we might say that our capacity for moral responsibility was forged from processes that included pain. If this connection between morality and biology has merit, we must question whether we would want a world history devoid of the natural “evils” associated with evolution. What else would such a world be missing? It seems that evolution may be the only way to create beings with the capacity to know good and evil. Eschatology. The foregoing suggestions might help us respond to some kinds of natural evil at the level of entire populations of evolving organisms. But we’re still left with the instances of countless individuals (both human and not) who suffered and died without living the fulfilled lives they were intended to. It is difficult for me to believe that God—who delights in all his creatures—would treat nonhuman animals merely as a means to an end. Humans are the only creatures that bear the image of God, but that does not mean the rest of creation is there to serve us. All of creation is for Christ (Col 1:16), and all of it waits with eager longing for the culmination of God’s plan (Rom 8:18-22). What might the redemption of nonhuman creatures look like? Scripture itself includes animals in images of the eschaton (see Is 11:6-7), and some Christian thinkers believe there must be some sort of existence after death for animals as part of their redemption. Keith Ward says, “Immortality, for animals as well as humans, is a necessary condition of any acceptable theodicy.”5 This is not just a post-Darwinian innovation in Christian theology. The eighteenth-century founder of Methodism, John Wesley, considered the problem of animal suffering and said, “The objection vanishes away if we consider that something better remains after death for these creatures also; that these likewise shall one day be delivered from this bondage of corruption, and shall then receive an ample amends for all their present sufferings.”6 When we understand that the groaning of all creation was addressed in Christ’s act of redemption, it is plausible to think that all creatures have the possibility of achieving the ends for which they were intended. Holmes Rolston III, Science and Religion: A Critical Survey (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2011), 134. 5 Keith Ward, Rational Theology and the Creativity of God (New York: Pilgrim, 1982), 201. 6 John Wesley, “The General Deliverance,” in The Works of John Wesley, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 6:251. 4

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These responses to the pain and suffering we find in the evolutionary picture of the world are speculative. But they are responsible to the data of the natural world and seem consistent with the character of God as revealed through Scripture.

Reasons to Believe Author Hugh Ross We infer from Scripture the following purposes for God creating the universe: 1. God chose to express his glory through creating the universe, life in general, and humanity in particular. 2. The entire universe and all Earth’s life were created for humanity’s benefit. 3. God chose to initiate an eternal love relationship with humans. 4. God’s work of creation is a subset of his greater work of redemption. As a corollary to these four purposes, God gives humans every incentive to turn away from evil’s empty enticement (autonomy) and toward his love. This corollary helps explain why Genesis 1–3 identifies this world and Eden not as God’s “perfect” creation but rather as his “very good” creation. However, in one context this world is perfect. It is the perfect creation for the purpose of permanently eradicating evil while enhancing the free will of humans who choose to be redeemed by their Creator. Two-creation model. Some insist that a world created by an all-loving, all-powerful God would not contain evil. The argument from evil for God’s nonexistence presumes God has no good purpose for presently allowing evil and suffering to exist. All the major religions share the Christian tenet that humanity began in an evil-free, paradisiacal state that was soon lost. Where they differ is in how they believe that God, gods, or cosmic forces are working to restore humanity to that paradise. In non-Christian belief systems, the evil that humans presently suffer is gratuitous. In contrast, Christianity proclaims a two-creation model where the two creations are radically different. The first creation is the best possible realm to encourage as many humans as possible to choose something far better— an eternally secure, loving relationship with God. This creation also equips and trains individuals to receive the careers, roles, rewards, and relational fulfillments of the new creation. Part of that equipping and training is a brief exposure to evil and suffering. The present creation is the best one possible

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to bring about a rapid conquest and permanent removal of anything less than perfect goodness. God allows humanity to be briefly exposed to evil because of the greater good such exposure yields. The second creation is perfect. Evil will never exist there. Yet, unlike the present creation, no physical limitations will restrict anyone’s free will. Consequently, love without limits can and will be expressed. Some may respond, “Why didn’t God place Adam and Eve in the new creation to start with?” It can be inferred from Scripture that unless humans are first tested by the greatest possible temptation—the most compelling attraction of evil—the careers, rewards, and relationships of the new creation cannot be both perfect and permanently secure. Either human free will and the capacity for love would be greatly diminished rather than enhanced, or the return of rebellion against God’s authority and the consequent evil would remain an ever-present danger. Since redeemed humans have passed the most difficult test, there is no threat that they will fail a less challenging test. To put it a different way, just as the brief suffering students experience in passing a set of difficult university courses prepares and trains them for lifelong rewarding careers, so also a few decades of suffering followed by physical death prepares and trains redeemed humans for an unimaginably enriching and eternal reward in the new creation that otherwise would be impossible. Why suffering? Adam and Eve’s fall into sin, which brought them both estrangement from God, others, and self, occurred after Satan’s rebellion and affected the entire human race, and thus the world. Genesis 3 explains that sin led to more work and more pain, implying that Adam and Eve experienced both work and pain before their rebellion. Genesis 2 explicitly states that Adam worked and ate in Eden before he sinned. Such work—including the digestion process—implies that the physical laws of gravity, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics were in effect before Adam’s fall. Jeremiah 33:19-26 and Romans 8:20-22 imply that the physical laws have remained fixed throughout all cosmic history. God’s design of the physical laws yields this result: the more a person sins, the more work he must perform, the more pain he must experience, and consequently the more time he wastes. For example, the second thermo­ ­dynamic law guarantees that whatever humans organize and design and

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whatever information they accumulate becomes increasingly disordered. However, sin speeds up the breakdown. God designed the physical laws to gently but firmly encourage humankind to depart from sin. The more sin humans commit, the more pain and work they experience. This “physics discipline” is neither too much nor too little. God promised his worshipers a reward far beyond what anyone can imagine or comprehend. This second creation will one day (on an eighth creation day) replace the first creation. That day will not begin until evil and suffering have been permanently eliminated. With no possibility for sin and evil, there will no longer be any need for the universe’s current dimensions and physical laws. God will endow the new creation with new laws and dimensions that will enable humans to experience unimaginably enriching relationships, careers, and rewards without any possibility of death, suffering, or evil. Natural evil? People commonly conclude that natural disasters (such as earthquakes and hurricanes) and carnivorous and parasitic creatures are fundamental evils. If these “evils” must presently exist, these people wonder, why would a good God not intervene to rescue his creatures from the hurtful consequences? The role of the law of decay (Rom 8) in restraining evil and motivating virtue explains why God so seldom rescues people, good or bad, from its natural consequences. God could and has miraculously delivered people from natural disasters and disease. However, he does so only when the rescue brings about a greater restraint of evil and a stronger motivation to receive his offer of salvation from sin. Less frequently, God miraculously intervenes to bring natural cataclysms on certain evil individuals, but again only when the intervention results in a stronger restraint of evil than would otherwise arise from the natural operation of the law of decay. God’s sovereignty over all natural disasters provides no excuse to impute to God any evil intent. As with Job’s situation, we sometimes must suffer without knowing all the reasons why. Like Job, we must trust in God’s ultimate goodness. As Paul declares, “In all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28). Any diminishing of natural disasters would demand a less efficient operation of the law of decay and, consequently, a less effective restraint of evil.

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Furthermore, all the natural “tragedies” actually serve beneficial purposes for all life—independent of the restraint of evil. Every natural disaster is optimally designed for life’s and humanity’s maximum benefit. For example, earthquakes and volcanic activity ensure that continents permanently remain. They also guarantee nutrient recycling levels essential for long-term sustenance of abundant life. However, the present tectonic activity level is not so high as to make the maintenance of cities and transportation arteries infeasible. Given the laws of physics that the Creator chose to fulfill all his purposes for the universe and its life, Earth manifests the ideal level of tectonic activity. Likewise, wildfires, floods, droughts, lightning strikes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and ice ages are all optimally designed in their intensity, frequency, and duration for the maximum benefit of life and humans in particular.7 Given the physical laws that God chose to efficiently and quickly eradicate evil and suffering while enhancing the free-will capacities of those who choose his redemptive offer, carnivores, parasites, and detritivores play critical roles in optimizing the health, longevity, and well-being of all Earth’s life. Abundant field experiments demonstrate how these creatures actually minimize the death and suffering of the life forms on which they prey. While God has optimized natural phenomena and ecological balances for the maximal benefit of all life—and especially humans—there is much that fallen humans have done to degrade this optimization. For example, because of human abuses mosquitoes now inhabit virtually 100 percent of Earth’s landmasses. They occupied just 10 percent before humans arrived. Because of humanity’s agricultural abuses, certain so-called pests have multiplied far beyond prehuman levels. Humans have further exposed themselves to needless consequences of natural phenomena by ignoring preparation. In Matthew 7:24-29, Jesus contrasted the “wise man who built his house on the rock” with the “foolish man who built his house on sand.” As a current example, native peoples avoided Florida’s east coast because of frequent hurricanes, while today we house the elderly in mobile homes on Florida’s east coast seashores and wonder why our disaster insurance bills are so high. Hugh Ross, More Than a Theory (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 204-7.

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While there is nothing inherently evil in God’s very good creation, either before or after the fall, humans have done much to besmirch it. But God is sovereign. As with the evil experienced by Job, Joseph, and Daniel, God has and will continue to turn the evil intents and deeds of humans into far greater goods (Rom 8:28). God carefully designed the universe, Earth, and all its life to maximize these turnarounds. In this context, he expects and equips his followers to show compassion and provide assistance to those who have suffered evil from humans and consequences from natural events. Did the fall initiate death and predation? Some Christians are convinced that none of Earth’s creatures died before Adam’s rebellion in Eden. The Bible passage they cite to support their conviction is Romans 5:12: “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” This verse addresses death through sin, not death in general. Of all the life God created on Earth, only one kind—human—is capable of sinning. Therefore, Romans 5:12 tells us when human death began, not when the death of plants and animals began. This conclusion is confirmed in the verse’s ending: “death came to all people [not all life], because all [life capable of sin] sinned.” Another biblical passage, 1 Corinthians 15:20-22, also clarifies that the death Adam’s sin introduced was limited to humans. This text speaks of the resurrection of humans (“in Christ”) whose death was sealed “in Adam.” Nowhere does the Bible claim that plants and animals did not die before Adam sinned. Furthermore, Adam was not the first sinner, Satan was. And the Bible is silent on when Satan first rebelled against God. As for predation, this aspect of nature is described in several biblical texts. For example, in Psalm 104:21 God takes credit for providing prey for the lions. In Job 38:39-41 God says he satisfies the hunger of lions and ravens by giving them their prey. Research shows that herbivores actually depend on carnivores. Carnivorous activity maximizes herbivore population levels and quality of life. One set of studies demonstrated, for example, that feeding squid to sperm whales and krill to baleen whales made for larger, healthier populations of squid and krill.8 The whales’ fecal matter fertilizes the oceans’ photic zones, thereby 8

Trish Lavery et al., “Iron Defecation by Sperm Whales Stimulates Carbon Export in the Southern Ocean,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 277 (June 2010): 3527-31, doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.0863.

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raising the population of phytoplankton, which in turn feeds the zooplankton and fish on which krill and squid respectively feed. Game wardens also verify that a lack of carnivorous predatory activity leads to the spread of disease, starvation, death, and genetic decline among herbivore herds. The biblical lesson here is that God’s ways are not our ways. Once we gain a comprehensive biblical perspective, we see that what we might presume to be bad may in fact fulfill good purposes. As Paul explains in 2 Corinthians 4:17, “Our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.”

REDIRECT

James Dew

Thank you, Jim and Hugh, for your time and energy in helping to explain your perspectives on the questions I posed above. Your responses are both interesting and stimulating. I am intrigued by the fact that in both accounts you have argued for a “greater good” or “only way” understanding of God’s plan in creation. On this model, natural disasters and “natural evil” must have been a part of the created order prior to Adam and Eve’s rebellion recorded in Genesis 3. And, if I understand you both correctly, having a world that includes such natural disaster is the only way for God to have a world with the positive features that allow for life as we know it. Simply put, we might articulate the rationale as follows: 1. Life on earth is not possible without certain kinds of natural features of this world. 2. Natural disasters are necessary for gaining such natural features. 3. God is justified in creating a world that includes natural disasters in order to bring about the greater goods of our world. Now, if these points are correct, we should not see natural evil as a result of the fall of Adam and Eve, but rather as part of God’s good plan in creation whereby he brings about life and the good things of our world. As Stump has put it, “the overwhelming pattern we observe is that God brings about his intentions through natural means.” Further, if this is the only way to have such features, then it would be counterintuitive and counterproductive for God to interact with the world in such a way that would prevent natural evils.

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A natural follow-up question at this point is, How might your perspectives avoid a possible inconsistency that stems from the way you see God interacting with the world? For the RTB view, if the natural process, which includes natural disasters, is essential to God’s plan, then how does RTB reconcile this with God’s constant interruption of the natural process throughout the history of the world? On the one hand, the natural process is essential and there is no other way to have a world like ours unless it is allowed to be as it is. But on the other hand, the RTB position is committed to the continual work of God in creation interrupting the natural process and exerting supernatural influence. It looks like the position might be committed to saying both (A) the natural process is the only way to have a world like ours and (B) supernatural intervention is the only way to have a world like ours. Perhaps these two statements are easy to reconcile, but how would this be done in the RTB perspective? A similar question could be asked of the BioLogos perspective, but it stems from the relationship between what Jim Stump has said above about an “only way” understanding of creation and the BioLogos understanding of miracles. On the one hand, BioLogos is committed to an “only way” or “greater good” account of natural evil and creation. In this account the natural process (which includes natural disasters) is essential to the world being as it is. If so, then God is obligated to let nature run its course without intervening. But on the other hand, the BioLogos position is committed to saying that God performs miracles in human history. Now, miracles are those events whereby God supernaturally suspends the regular flow of nature to perform some purpose or objective. In short, miracles are those events where God does not let nature “run its course” but chooses to intervene for some reason. So how does BioLogos affirm both?

BIOLOGOS RESPONSE

J. B. Stump

Jamie Dew’s question is a good one, and it gets right to the heart of a very important issue. It seems that in order to reconcile natural evil we have to affirm that God normally accomplishes his will through natural processes, and that these have some unfortunate side effects. But then what about miracles? If we accept that God at least sometimes acts through miracles, why wouldn’t he more often bypass the natural processes that entail so much suffering and pain and skip right to the end goal?

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BioLogos affirms miracles, but I don’t think they are properly described as violations of natural laws. I’ve been asked a follow-up question about miracles in chapter six as well, and there I’ll unpack and defend a view of miracles that I think is more in keeping with the biblical understanding. For the purposes of this chapter and the particular question Jamie asks in relation to the problem of natural evil, I’ll just assert that scientific “laws” are merely our descriptions of the way God normally accomplishes things in the natural realm. And miracles then are instances when God does something different than normal, for some particular purpose (usually a sign or wonder). So the question here is, if God has another way of acting that doesn’t cause so much pain, why not just do that? God is omnipotent, after all, and not limited in any way, right? Well, maybe. Some people would claim that there are limitations on God’s omnipotence and revise the definition to “God can do all things that are possible.” I’ll only go so far as to claim that we are limited in understanding how God could do certain things. For example, it is inconceivable (in the absolutely literal sense) to us that God could make a square circle. That is a direct contradiction in terms. When we understand what a square is and what a circle is, we see that creating a square circle is not just something that is really hard to do (like memorizing the entire Bible); nor is it creating some entity that doesn’t in fact exist but possibly could (like a unicorn or mermaid). Rather, a square circle is something that could not possibly exist. If God is not limited by logic, I suppose he could make a square circle, but we could never recognize it as such. (By the way, the explanations of the Trinity and the incarnation by the early church were attempts to show that those concepts are not logical contradictions, like “square circle.” Whether or not those explanations were successful takes us away from the topic at hand.) In my section of this chapter I wondered whether perhaps the evolutionary struggle is the only way to develop sentient, moral beings like us. Perhaps it is logically impossible, like creating a square circle (not just really hard, or possible but not actual), to create morally mature people in an instant. The thought behind this is that moral maturity necessarily entails the involvement of the agent who is becoming morally mature. It is not like being rich, which I could attain either through my own efforts or by someone giving me a lot of money. No one—not even God, on this account—can give me moral maturity.

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So if that’s what God ultimately wants from us, he has to create the kinds of conditions in which morally mature agents can develop. Those conditions bring with them the sorts of natural evils that are so troubling to us, but they also provide the raw materials for God’s promise to work all things together for good (Rom 8:28). The evolutionary struggle is consistent with the cruciform pattern in which suffering leads to positive things. Notice that my position here does not rule out other kinds of miracles. Wine is normally made over time as the grape juice ferments. The chemical laws we understand about this are descriptions of the normal way that God works in and through nature. But there is no contradiction to suppose that God could work a different way in some circumstances and turn water directly into wine. That kind of transformation does not entail the cooperation of an agent the way moral transformation does. To think that moral maturity could be granted in one fell swoop demands an answer to why God didn’t just create morally mature people in a final, perfect heaven without going through this first life. It seems there must be a purpose to our past and present that prepares us for our future in heaven. Hugh Ross and I have significant areas of agreement about this. He too acknowledges a purpose for our exposure to evil and suffering in preparation for our eternal future. It seems to me, though, that he misses the opportunity to make the point even stronger by acknowledging the evolution of human beings. The development of morality did not happen all at once. Increasingly we are finding precursors for our morality in other species—not full-blown moral responsibility, but components to our cognitive and social structures that have developed over time and without which we would not have the capability to act morally. The evolutionary process has shaped us into the creatures we are today. I don’t believe God was surprised at all by what we have become. Instead, I think it is entirely appropriate to say God has intentionally created us, but with patience as his creations (both human and nonhuman) have cooperated with the process and responded to the conditions God has provided. We’re increasingly able to give a scientific description of that process, and just like our understanding of the laws of gravity and of the conception, gestation, and birth of a baby, this understanding does not diminish our awe and wonder at God’s good creation.

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Hugh Ross

First, we see the history of the universe, Earth, and Earth’s life as a combination of the natural laws and processes that God established and God’s intermittent miraculous interventions. A good analogy is the Old Testament history of the Israelites. Usually God let historical events in the nation of Israel run their natural course. However, there were several occasions at strategic times when God miraculously intervened to change the course of natural history. Yes, God does perform many outstanding, humanly recognizable miracles. However, he is not continually performing such miracles. Second, we differ from several members of the BioLogos team in that all of us at RTB are day-age creationists. We believe the most literal and consistent interpretation of Genesis 1–2 is that the creation days are consecutive, long periods of time. This interpretation implies that we are presently in God’s seventh day, the day during which God rests from his miraculous works of creation. Consequently, we see a dichotomy between the human era and the prehuman eras. During the prehuman eras God performed many miracles of creation. During the human era he has ceased from performing any miracles of creation. Third, while we believe God has ceased from performing miracles of creation, we hold that he remains very active during the human era in performing a wide range of noncreation miracles. We believe these miracles are for the purpose of bringing people into a redemptive relationship with their Creator. Additionally, the laws of physics, the cosmic space-time dimensions, and the physical characteristics of the universe are all designed to facilitate the redemption of humans.9 Because of this redemptive focus, today God limits his miraculous interventions to those situations where the intervention brings about greater works of redemption than would the natural operation of the physical laws and space-time dimensions within the universe. Thus, while God can and does rescue people from natural disasters, he only does so when the rescue brings about a greater redemptive result than it would if he allowed people to experience nature as it is. Fourth, while so-called natural evil is not the direct result of the fall, in creating the universe God foreknew that moral evil would enter his good 9

For explanations and documentation, see Hugh Ross, Why the Universe Is the Way It Is (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008).

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creation. Consequently, he designed his creation in advance with the features to optimally deal with moral evil once it arose. These creation design features had, as a necessary byproduct, the occasional occurrence of natural disasters and disease. Such events and features, however, are all optimized by God to enhance the well-being and minimize the suffering of his creatures. To summarize, in the context of God’s strategy to completely and permanently eliminate evil and suffering from his creation while enhancing the free-will capacity of redeemed humans, everything that God created is very good.

CONCLUSION

James Dew

Once again, I’d like to thank both Jim and Hugh for their time and attention. They have addressed important questions that are complex and detailed. While RTB and BioLogos hold different positions on a lot of issues, this particular issue is one where they share much in common. Both are committed to the idea that God uses the natural processes and laws of the universe to bring about a world like ours. And while both affirm the possibility and reality of miracles in God’s creation, they both see the natural process as integral to the development of morality for human beings. Their responses to my redirect about the relationship of natural law and miracles certainly help to clear up any misunderstandings about their positions, but I’m sure that not everyone will be satisfied with the details of their accounts. Such is the case in almost any debate about heavy matters like these. Lingering questions will always remain. For now, I find myself encouraged by the fact that both groups take seriously the theological questions we’ve explored in this chapter. I look forward to seeing the debate continue!

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Divine Action How Does God Interact with the Natural World? John Laing, J. B. Stump, and Jeff Zweerink

SBC MODERATOR JOHN LAING The doctrines of creation and providence are intimately connected and often overlap. The doctrine of providence refers to God’s governance, sustainment, and preservation of the created order. It is the doctrine to which we refer when we speak of God being “in control” of all things, and it has served as a source of comfort, consolation, and peace to persons of faith for centuries (see Rom 8:28). To be sure, the Bible makes clear that God is providential over a vast array of things, from naturally occurring events (e.g., rainfall, Ps 135:6-7; growth of grass, Ps 104:14), to the rise and fall of political entities (Job 12:23), to the eternal destinies of individuals (Eph 1:11). Theologians have historically made distinctions in how God exercises his providential control by appeal to categories such as primary and secondary causation, natural law, miracles, and the like in order to speak of God’s direct causation in some instances and of his sustainment of natural processes in other instances.1 Still, the intersection of orthodox conceptions of divine providence and theories of creation can be difficult to navigate. Augustine, On Order 1.1.1-2; On Free Will 2.17.45; The Literal Meaning of Genesis 8.26.48. See also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1.22.2-3, 1.45.3, and John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.17.9.

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On the one hand, many Christians are skeptical of evolutionary theories because they seem to lack a robust theology of providence, and instead tend toward what is typically known as deism at best or atheism at worst.2 These concerns arise partly out of a regard for biblical fidelity, and partly out of evolutionary theories’ seeming portrayal of God as essentially passive in the creative process.3 On the other hand, many Christians who are skeptical of old-earth models, often referred to as progressive creation, fail to see an appreciable difference between those models and their evolutionary counterparts. While progressive creation typically suggests a more active role of God in the creative process than theistic evolution does, the line between the two is often blurred.4 2

Henry Morris, founder and long-time president of the Institute for Creation Research, has long maintained that evolution is essentially atheistic in nature and that there can be no biblical evolutionary perspective. Henry M. Morris, The Long War Against God: The History and Impact of the Creation/ Evolution Conflict (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), 109. Similarly, Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, has written, “Really, billions of years and evolution are an anti-God religion, and we must recognize them as such.” “Richard Dawkins and Mr. Deity,” Ken Ham’s blog, Answers in Genesis, February 16, 2015, http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2015/02/16/richard-dawkins -and-mr-deity. Many proponents of evolution have also added fuel to the fire, suggesting that Dar�win’s theory is best understood as an alternative and challenge to divine creation and design. Richard Dawkins’s comment that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” is one example; Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 6. See also Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); and E. O. Wilson, who wrote, “If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species”; On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1978), 1. 3 To be fair, Ard Louis has attempted to address the concern over deism from the BioLogos perspective in numerous posts. For example, in his exchange with James Dew as part of the Southern Baptist Voices series, he argued that fear of deism in evolutionary models arises in part because of “an impoverished view of God’s sovereignty” that sees divine action only in the miraculous and effectively discounts it in normal processes. Ard Louis, “A Response to James Dew, Part 2,” BioLogos, May 30, 2012, http://biologos.org/blog/southern-baptist-voices-a-biologos-response-to-james-dew-part-2. Classical deism rejects the very possibility of the miraculous. Still, Harbin states well the problem for any theistic evolutionary model: “This is the quandary of theistic evolution in general. Attempting to maintain the integrity of the scientific model it begins with it is forced to retreat theologically, restricting God to secondary actions or, at best, to primary actions that are transparent to scientific observers. This creates tremendous problems with any historical account of a supernormal event, which by definition is nonreplicable. . . . While we do not conclude that theistic evolution per se is deistic, we do note that when one extrapolates the evolution process back to origins the desire to maintain a gapless economy certainly sets one up for that accusation.” Michael A. Harbin, “Theistic Evolution: Deism Revisited?,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40, no. 4 (1997): 651. 4 For example, Mills argues that God directly inserts new genetic material in order to drive speciation, but this seems to be virtually indistinguishable from Neo-Darwinian evolution interpreted through a punctuated equilibrium lens. See Gordon C. Mills, “A Theory of Theistic Evolution as an Alternative to the Naturalistic Theory,” Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith 47, no. 2 (June 1995): 112-22; Mills, “Theistic Evolution: A Design Theory at the Level of Genetic Information,” Christian Scholar’s Review 24, no. 4 (1995): 444-58.

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BioLogos Author J. B. Stump The problem. The problem of divine action is called a problem for a reason— it can be really tricky to sort out the kinds of issues that Laing brings up. Scholars have thought about this problem since before the Scientific Revolution, but our increased understanding of the natural world has exacerbated the difficulty of knowing how God interacts with the created order. For example, when considering that Laplace famously answered Napoleon’s question, “Where is the Creator in your book?” with “I have no need of that hypothesis,” Christians tend to worry that science is displacing God. Loud voices in the marketplace reinforce that worry by interpreting the latest scientific discoveries as more nails in God’s coffin. Christians who are persuaded by this rhetoric feel that rejecting science is the only way to preserve an active role for God and not slip into a deistic understanding in which God set things up but now only watches them go. Such Christians are often confused by the BioLogos position of evolutionary creation and ask us with alarming regularity, “If your science looks just like secular science, then why do you need God?” We at BioLogos claim there is a grave error in such thinking. It seems to suggest that God’s only actions are miraculous actions. Laing helpfully delineates the doctrine of providence as God’s governance, sustainment, and preservation of the created order. But then he notes that some have suggested that models that accept evolution tend toward deism or atheism because they seem to portray God as passive. And even further, he suggests that progressive creation models, like RTB’s, are seen as giving God a more active role. Such claims give voice to the assumption that God is not involved (or is only passively involved) when he does not directly act in miraculous ways. BioLogos rejects this assumption. In our What We Believe statement we affirm that God can and does act in miraculous ways. All of us associated with BioLogos wholeheartedly affirm that God raised Jesus from the dead, transforming his corpse into the first fruits of the resurrection bodies we all hope to receive. And we readily acknowledge other miraculous acts of God as well. But no matter how many miracles a Christian accepts, if it is assumed that when God isn’t performing miracles he’s not acting at all, the difference from deism is only a matter of degree. Aubrey Moore saw the problem with that approach more than one hundred years ago, saying, “a

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theory of occasional intervention implies as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence.”5 At BioLogos we think that attempting to preserve a role for God by denying scientific explanations of the natural world is going about things the wrong way. We see God’s hand throughout the created order not because science can’t explain nature but because it can. Those who claim that gaps in scientific explanations show the work of God seem to suggest the Designer’s mark is found in systems that don’t quite work correctly. On the contrary, we believe that scientists who uncover the inner workings of nature are the ones who see further into the mind of God. God created the world but did not leave it on its own. At BioLogos we hold that the ordinary functioning of God’s world is describable by science, and that God is continuously involved in sustaining and governing it. But of course asserting these things is the easy part. Going further and explaining how they can be true—that is the problem of divine action. Metaphors. We might start with metaphors. Many people who have considered these issues think there is some value in the model of Thomas Aquinas and the notions of primary and secondary causation. In his Summa Contra Gentiles (3.70) he explains that God can be the ultimate cause of things (the primary cause) while working through natural processes (the secondary cause) to accomplish his goals. Aquinas compares this to a workman using a tool. Is the workman the cause of the nail being driven into a board, or is the hammer the cause? It seems right to say that the workman is the primary cause and the hammer the secondary cause, and that we recognize a difference in these causes. Regarding the hammer we would look at the weight and hardness of the metal and natural laws such as the conservation of momentum; with the workman we might talk about strength and accuracy of his swing, but we’d also want to know about his reasons and intentions. In a similar way we can say that God is the primary cause of the creation of human beings, and the natural processes that make up the theory of evolution are secondary causes. This metaphor breaks down, though, when the “tool” is another agent. Do we have to say that God is the primary cause of sinful actions that humans Aubrey Moore, Science and the Faith: Essays on Apologetic Subjects, 6th ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1905), 184.

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perform? Some have said we can claim that God wills the action, but not its sinfulness. However, that seems hugely problematic to me and indicates that we need to keep looking for an adequate solution. Perhaps a different metaphor gets us closer to understanding God’s providence with respect to human action: we might understand God as an author of a book and ourselves as characters. C. S. Lewis drew this comparison, suggesting that one who looks the whole world over and doesn’t find God is like one who reads the works of Shakespeare and doesn’t find Shakespeare in them—as though he should be a character like Falstaff or Lady Macbeth.6 God has a different kind of relationship to the world than as merely one of the characters in it. There is some scriptural precedent for this. Paul says in Ephesians 2:10, “we are God’s handiwork.” The Greek term he used is poiēma, from which we get the English word poem. Some will object that this is still determinism if God ultimately authors our every act. But authors speak of developing their characters to the point where they take on a life of their own and even express surprise about what their characters have done. These are fruitful and suggestive metaphors, but they are still metaphors and do not accomplish the goal of explaining how God’s governance and sustaining of the world actually works. Explanations. In attempts to explain how God’s general providence works (I’m not addressing miracles here), it is helpful to outline three broad strategies, all of which might find supporters within the BioLogos community. First, we could say it is all a mystery. At some level we have to concede this. It is unreasonable to expect that our finite minds can fully understand the ways of God, just like it is unreasonable to think that chimpanzees could understand rocket science. But it seems deeply unsatisfying to me to leave it at that, and it threatens to undermine the credibility of Christian theism if we have nothing to say in the way of justification for how this God we believe in could interact with the world. In the second strategy, we might try to find a “causal joint” in nature where God could insert himself into the chain of natural causes without overriding them. Robert Russell is one of the most prominent advocates C. S. Lewis, “The Seeing Eye,” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 168.

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of this approach. He looks to nondeterministic interpretations of quantum physics. The equations of quantum mechanics often don’t determine single outcomes, but they give only a range of possible outcomes and their probabilities. God’s action could take the form of realizing which potential outcome actually happens. In this way God might constantly be at work without disrupting the scientific laws by which we describe nature. This is a sophisticated attempt to understand God’s ongoing relationship to the created order, and its goal seems correct to me and others at BioLogos: to give a description of God’s continuous action in the world while acknowledging the lawlike character of the natural order that science has discovered and described. But it seems that God’s action here is treated as just another of the causes within the natural order—a part of the chain of efficient causality that scientists deal with. Perhaps this would work for explaining special acts of God, but as a strategy for explaining God’s ongoing governance and sustaining it doesn’t seem to escape the dilemma: either God ultimately causes everything (if all quantum events are determined by him), or if he only causes some quantum events, then we’re left with an episodic deistic account again because he isn’t doing anything during the other times. It seems to me that any approach that aims to locate God’s providential action within the system of scientifically describable causes will suffer the same difficulties. Such approaches are ultimately committed to a reductionist view of agents (whether human or divine) in which the goal is to describe action within the framework of reality as described by physics. But agents are motivated by reasons, which resist reduction to the concepts acknowledged by physics. This suggests that scientific descriptions of reality cannot be exhaustive. There must be other kinds of descriptions that are not reducible to scientific concepts. The third broad approach to action (whether human or divine) is to locate God’s action at a different level of description outside the scope of scientific explanation. Some argue for this in various versions of ontological dualism—the claim that God and human persons are ultimately made of a nonmaterial substance that is not amenable to scientific explanation. But instead I want to sketch an approach in this third category that is epistemological rather than ontological. It is similar to what British philosopher

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Roger Scruton calls “cognitive dualism.”7 This does not suggest that there are two different kinds of reality, nor that there are two different magisteria or domains—one for science and one for theology. But it suggests that we have developed two different traditions or ways of thinking about reality—the scientific and the personal. In the former we appeal to things like material particles and forces as fundamental realities; in the latter we appeal to persons as fundamental realities. For example, we can treat human beings as subjects, asking why they did something (go to the store) and expecting to be given reasons (I wanted to get a new pair of shoes). Or we can treat them as objects, asking what caused something to happen (getting a bad night of sleep) and expecting to get an answer that appeals to scientific categories (I had too much caffeine last night). The comparison with God’s action is not exactly parallel—God does not have a body to which things happen. But we can look at nature and see it as the product of intentional action (God created birds) or we can see it as the product of natural processes (birds evolved from dinosaurs). These two ways of speaking are not reducible to each other, but both of these traditions are successful, so we have good reason to believe that they are (mostly) accurate representations of reality. We might think of them like two styles of art that could represent the same object in very different ways. Sometimes we can get away with combining these two images or ways of thinking. For example, in a loose sense we can make meaningful statements like “God created human beings through the process of evolution” or perhaps even “God caused certain mutations in the genetic code.” But to go further and claim to give a scientific explanation for how God caused the mutations would be overstepping the bounds of legitimate expression and confusing the two images. It would be like trying to give an account of a homerun in the game of baseball in terms of the rules of football. So on this view the problem of divine action turns out to be an issue of language. It is a category mistake to try explaining the intentional actions of a personal agent using the tools of science. We can speak coherently of God having reasons, of willing, and of acting intentionally. But none of these personal concepts can be reduced to the kinds of entities that are incorporated into scientific descriptions. Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

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This approach will be unsatisfying to some (even at BioLogos). They want a direct correlate in the physical world that is identifiable as what God has done. I’m not sure this is possible. Instead, by paying attention to the different traditions and respecting the boundaries of their legitimate application, we can reframe the issues and train ourselves to speak about them in ways that do not lead to conceptual dead ends. And those who are conversant in both the personal and scientific modes of discourse will have a richer understanding of reality.

Reasons to Believe Author Jeff Zweerink On a beautiful, warm summer day, three men went out to the links for a round of golf. The first player teed up his ball for a shot at the par-three fifteenth hole. When his club sliced through the air and hit the ball, the ball rocketed toward the green. Sailing over the wide water hazard, it dropped on the front edge of the green and then arced toward the cup. The clink of the ball in the bottom of the cup punctuated the hole-in-one. As the second man approached the tee, he remarked, “Way to swing the six-iron, Mr. Nicklaus!” Without even a warm-up, the second man struck the ball with a crack of the club, sending it directly toward the middle of the water hazard. Upon contacting the water’s surface, the ball bounced a couple times before rolling to the shore, up the bank, across the green, and straight into the cup. Jack turned and said, “Well played, Jesus! Well played.” After placing his ball on the tee, the third player paused for some time, admiring the beautiful course. A quick swing sent his ball flying toward the deepest part of the water hazard. Just before it struck the surface, a colorful rainbow trout leaped from the water, and the ball ricocheted off its tail into a large hole in the tree. A second later, a squirrel emerged from the hole, spitting the golf ball out of its mouth. The ball fell through the air, struck four different branches, dropped onto the green, and rolled into the pin before landing in the bottom of the cup. Jesus turned around and proclaimed, “Excellent shot, Dad!” Lest this merely appear as a bad joke, it also illustrates three different ways that Reasons to Believe sees God interacting with the universe. God’s work through ordinary providence. Jack Nicklaus’s hole-in-one relies intimately on the laws of physics. Solving a few equations of motion

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provides the speed and angle necessary to transfer the ball from the tee to the cup with one swing. Actually, solving the equations can be difficult when accounting for variable winds, changing humidity, softness of the grass, and so on. However, everything happening during this shot follows from an application of the laws of physics. Just because scientists can explain this activity using the laws of physics does not eliminate God’s activity in nature— the ability to provide such explanations actually require his work. Here’s how. The doctrine of providence, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, describes God’s governance, sustainment, and preservation of the created order. Without God’s providential work in the created order, none of the predictability that the scientific enterprise requires would exist. Consider how Jeremiah 33:25-26 proclaims God’s trustworthiness: “This is what the Lord says: ‘If I have not made my covenant with day and night and established the laws of heaven and earth, then I will reject the descendants of Jacob and David my servant and will not choose one of his sons to rule over the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’” The regularity of Earth’s day/ night cycle and the entire heavenly order serve as an appropriate metaphor for God keeping his promise to the nation of Israel. Today we recognize the remarkable regularity, orderliness, and dependability of creation. We describe, predict, and use these features of the laws of physics, and scientists assume (and every measurement validates) that these laws are unchanging regardless of one’s location, motion, or time in the universe.8 Scientists often talk about the laws of physics as though they had an existence independent of God (or any material substance). In his book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking states, “Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”9 Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss echoes that sentiment in an interview with Sam Harris, where he says, “I then go on to explain how other versions of ‘nothing’—beyond merely empty space—including the absence of space itself, and even the absence of physical laws, can morph into ‘something.’ Indeed, in modern parlance, ‘nothing’ is most often unstable. Not only can something arise from nothing, 8

The phrase “laws of physics” is not meant to convey any snobbery, as though physics is better than chemistry, biology, neurology, and so on. It reflects the position that the laws of physics deal with fundamental rather than higher-order interactions. 9 Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam, 2010), 180.

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but most often the laws of physics require that to occur.”10 In contrast, RTB denies that the laws of physics have a reality independent of God. If God were to withdraw his hand from creation, it would tumble into nonexistence. This position does not negate the existence of abstract, lawlike entities. Rather, it denies a deistic view where some independent set of natural laws (the kind posited by Hawking and Krauss) creates and maintains the universe apart from God’s sustaining care. Instead, God so reliably sustains creation, whether directly or through some abstract entity, that scientists can discover these laws of physics. In this view, God is actively involved in everything that happens, from the ball that falls due to gravity to the swing of Jack’s club. God’s work through transcendent miracles. We see the laws of physics at work in Jesus’ hole-in-one, but his shot also introduces a new category of divine interaction. Nothing in ordinary providence, described by the laws of physics, allows a golf ball to roll across the water’s surface.11 However, God transcends the universe and therefore has the freedom to intervene by redirecting or suspending the laws of physics for his specific purposes. Theologians refer to instances in which God operates beyond the laws of physics as miracles or extraordinary providence. Often Christians and non-Christians adopt this usage of miracle and further infer that the only times God intervenes in creation are when we cannot find a natural explanation for some phenomenon—that is, an explanation from the laws of physics. Such an extrapolation leads to two problems. First, if God only works via miracles (by the definition above), then as humanity continues to understand more of the universe, God’s activity gets squeezed into a smaller box. Second, this extrapolation fails to account for God’s work through ordinary providence—the kind of activity that leads to such an orderly creation that scientists can describe it by the laws of physics. The concept of extraordinary providence includes another possibility, which brings us to the third hole-in-one. 10

“Everything and Nothing: An Interview with Laurence M. Krauss,” Sam Harris’s blog, January 3, 2012, www.samharris.org/blog/item/everything-and-nothing. Both Krauss and Hawking use the terms “laws of physics” or “law like gravity” in reference to a theory of everything—the theoretical umbrella that would describe all the fundamental interactions in a unified way. 11 Of course, one might imagine a frozen lake or some special, hydrophobic coating on the ball, but those don’t apply here and you cannot put such qualifications in a joke without losing the impact.

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God’s work through hypernatural miracles. A detailed analysis of the Father’s shot reveals that each and every aspect finds a suitable description within the laws of physics. Yet the trajectory appears so contrived or bizarre that it stretches credulity. Since God sustains creation through his ordinary providence and transcends creation with the ability to work miracles, we should expect that he would also use natural processes in extraordinary ways to accomplish his purposes. We adopt the term hypernatural miracle to describe such a scenario. Looking at creation, we expect to see three different ways that God interacts. In his ordinary providence, God sustains the universe so reliably that it operates with lawlike consistency. This means that humanity can study creation via the scientific enterprise and discover a great deal about how it functions. Yet because God exists beyond the universe and brought it into existence, he also operates through extraordinary providence or the miraculous. Hypernatural miracles have a natural accounting, but their explanations require such unusual or contrived circumstances that they appear intentional. Of course, God also performs transcendent miracles that defy an explanation within the laws of physics. This view of God’s interaction with creation has at least three strengths. First, it fits within orthodox Christian thought about God’s relationship to creation. It is consistent with views expressed by Baptists, Reformed theologians, and others.12 Second, it counters the accusation of deism because God’s providence means that he is actively involved in every aspect of creation. His fingerprints mark everything from the ordinary action that we describe with the laws of physics to the more direct, extraordinary, intentional action within and beyond the laws of physics. Third, God’s extraordinary providence separates this view from more naturalistic models where God only operates within the bounds of ordinary providence. Instead, God also intervenes in ways detectable via exceptions to or contrivances of the laws of physics. While it may be easy to delineate three categories of divine action, the challenge in this position arises as we explore what Scripture says about Regarding Baptist thought, see Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998). As an example of Reformed thought, see Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994).

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where we would expect to see signs of extraordinary providence. We address that question in more detail in the next chapter, but I offer a few comments here. A majority of the time, God interacts with creation through ordinary providence. Consequently, we expect to see things abiding by the laws of physics. This regularity of action provides the backdrop for detecting extraordinary action. If fish regularly jumped out of the water to knock golf balls out of the hazard, such activity would be deemed a part of ordinary providence rather than the miraculous. Given these three categories of God’s activity, we would expect the biblical text to provide some indication of whether an action is ordinary providence or a transcendent or hypernatural miracle. Here are a few examples. In Psalm 139, David describes how God formed his inward parts and knitted him together in his mother’s womb. The context of this passage seems to be illustrating how God knows everything because of his immanence in creation. Consequently, we would expect the formation of David’s physical body to flow from God’s ordinary providence and find adequate description within the laws of physics. Yet Genesis 1 describes how God created humankind in his own image, using the same terminology as God’s creation of the universe. Thus, humanity’s origin would be a transcendent miracle where God creates spiritual beings. Even acts of extraordinary providence occur by means understandable within the laws of physics. For example, when the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, “Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided” (Ex 14:21). The timing and magnitude of this event clearly place it in the category of extraordinary providence. After all, bodies of water don’t usually part, and this occurred at the precise time that the Israelites were crying out for deliverance. Yet the passage also gives a physical mechanism by which God accomplished the miracle (a strong east wind), and scientific studies demonstrate the possibility of such an occurrence given the right conditions.13 As a final note, these three categories are not meant to be hard-and-fast rules for describing God’s activity. Instead they provide a helpful framework 13

For details, see Jeff Zweerink, “Maybe the Bible Was Right About the Exodus,” Reasons to Believe, September 29, 2010, www.reasons.org/articles/maybe-the-bible-was-right-about-the-exodus.

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for seeking how God’s work portrayed in Scripture may lend itself to scientific investigation. In summary, Reasons to Believe takes the position that nothing happens in creation apart from God’s activity. We concur with the traditional position that his work takes the form of ordinary providence (described by the laws of physics) as well as the less frequent extraordinary providence (typically associated with miracles). We would further distinguish that some miracles transcend the laws of physics, while hypernatural ones occur by mechanisms describable by those laws. This position provides for a robust scientific enterprise to investigate all things about creation and also actively recognizes God’s ongoing and special activity.

REDIRECT

John Laing

Both Jim and Jeff have offered some helpful distinctions for understanding divine providence that clarify their positions and distinguish them from deism. Both seem to agree that God’s work through predictable natural processes enhances rather than diminishes his greatness, and that this stands as a corrective to the view that divine action is only seen in the miraculous. Still, both agree that God can and does intervene in ways that contravene natural laws so that we refer to them as “miraculous.”14 Jeff has set forth three categories for understanding divine providence— ordinary providence, extraordinary providence (transcendent miracles), and hypernatural miracles—and suggested that while ordinary providence is the norm, we should expect to see all three in God’s interactions with the creation. What is still unclear, however, is which of the three is most descriptive of God’s work in creating. If it is claimed that ordinary providence is the way God creates, then it is hard to see how RTB’s position is any different from that of BioLogos. God creating by ordinary providence just would be evolutionary creationism. If God’s creative work is not via ordinary providence but through one of the other methods, two basic questions arise, along with related issues. First, on what basis is it claimed that God uses 14

Both authors would probably agree that the language of “miracle” is somewhat vague, since in a sense all acts of the transcendent God are miraculous. Thus, God’s making the sun rise through ordinary providence is no less miraculous than his parting the Red Sea; both acts require equal effort and the same type of work from God.

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miracles to create? Is it a pure faith statement, based on a particular reading of the creation narrative(s)? Is the claim based on the supposed untenable nature of evolution as a creative force? Second, how can such miracles be discerned? That is, what scientific means does one have for identifying that a miracle has taken place in creation? If there is a scientific means, can it be used to determine at which level of the evolutionary tree the miraculous intervention is needed? Jim appears to agree in principle with Jeff ’s basic categories, but has raised an additional problem for the doctrine of providence, especially with regard to creation. He fears that the attempt to delineate exactly how God is active in any event (micro- or macroscopic) is too reductionistic and results in a false dichotomy of either occasional deism or absolute determinism. His solution seems to be that language used to describe physical events (language of science and physics) is not the same type of language that can be used to speak of God’s actions, but it is unclear how this works for miracles. Jim helpfully gives an example for “ordinary providence,” the creation of birds via evolution. There is a scientific explanation (evolution) and a spiritual explanation (God’s presumed reasons), and the two refer to different categories or ways of talking about the observed phenomena. How would this work for the example Jim gives at the beginning: the resurrection? Would he just deny there is a scientific explanation? If so, would this not make Jim’s position sound a lot like a God of the gaps? Perhaps it would include a scientific explanation with appeal to God as cause. If so, would this not sound a lot like the absolute determinism Jim hopes to avoid?

BIOLOGOS RESPONSE

J. B. Stump

Thanks to John for the follow-up question about miracles, and to Jeff and RTB for the interaction we’ve had with them on a host of issues. It has helped to sort out our own thoughts and positions, and these times have been edifying as we’ve gotten to know our fellow believers. Not surprisingly, I don’t think miracles pose a problem for the BioLogos position on creation in general, nor for the particular view I’ve sketched here. It seems to me that when people think there are scientific problems with accepting the reality of miracles, they assume views of science, natural laws, and miracles that don’t stand up to careful scrutiny.

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I’ve claimed that science is one way we have for talking about reality. Scientific “laws” then are a kind of summary statement of a host of observations. They show there is a simple and regular pattern (preferably one that is quantifiable) to which the individual instances all conform. For example, Newton discovered that clumps of matter, whether on earth or in the heavens, are attracted to each other in proportion to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. It is not a scientific claim to say matter must obey this law of gravitation. That would be a philosophical claim, and one that is in fact incorrect, since the law is only an abstraction that pertains to an ideal system that is never actually observed. The eighteenth-century skeptical philosopher David Hume has dominated most people’s view of miracles up to today. He claimed, “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.”15 Talk of “violation,” or the currently more fashionable term “intervention,” suggests a picture according to which nature is an autonomous system that runs on its own. Miracles occur when God steps into the system from the outside and tinkers with what nature would have done by itself. But I have rejected this picture in this chapter because it implies deism and nature operating on its own (along with what Aubrey Moore called a theory of God’s ordinary absence). So we need a better way to think about miracles that is more in keeping with an orthodox and biblical view of God. Miracles in Scripture are not presented as violations of the laws of nature, but rather as signs and wonders for a specific purpose. We today might ask whether a certain event is in keeping with our scientific understanding of things, but for the biblical authors the question was whether an event marked some spiritual or salvation significance. For something to qualify as a miracle in Scripture, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for it to violate the laws of nature. It is not necessary: when Isaiah walked around naked for three years (Is 20:3), it was called a “sign and portent” with spiritual significance, even though it didn’t violate natural laws. And neither is a violation of nature sufficient: Scripture warns against false prophets and false messiahs who will “perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect” (Mt 24:24). These signs and wonders might qualify as miraculous David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg, 2nd ed. (Indian­ apolis: Hackett, 1993), 76.

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on Hume’s definition, but they would be false miracles according to Scripture since their spiritual significance is detrimental to the purposes of God. A better understanding of a miracle is “an event brought about by God or God’s agent which serves as a sign of God’s reign and realm, independent of any question of the laws of nature.”16 In this sense, consider two miracles recorded in Scripture: the miraculous catch of fish and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In John 21, several disciples went fishing and caught nothing. Then Jesus appeared to them and told them to cast their nets on the right side of the boat; they did so and hauled in 153 fish. Now, perhaps from the perspective of science this is an extraordinary event, but it doesn’t seem impossible or a violation of any natural law. It is miraculous, though, because it serves as a sign of God’s reign and realm. Scientists observing this miracle would not be forced to abandon their understanding of how nature works. They might be perplexed or marvel that Jesus somehow knew there was a school of fish approaching from the other side of the boat, but unless they observed this to happen again and again, they could write it off as coincidence from a scientific perspective. For a miracle like the resurrection, though, I’d suggest things are different. Scientists could not say, “the resurrection of Jesus was a remarkable coincidence.” It was something they believe not to be just rare or extraordinary, but physically impossible. Does this cause a problem for science-minded believers? Again, I say no. It might be claimed that scientific observation has shown that every time a body is dead for at least twenty-four hours it does not resurrect. But as I claimed earlier, I don’t think science tells us the whole story. In this case, theology tells us that a time is coming when dead bodies will resurrect, and that it has already happened once to the “first fruits” of the resurrection. So we Christians should not accept the claim that dead bodies must always stay dead. We could say that in all the cases of controlled observation by modern scientists, bodies that were dead for more than twenty-four hours stayed dead. But since laws are descriptive—not prescriptive—it is not inconsistent to believe that one time in the past God resurrected a dead body Alan G. Padgett, “God and Miracle in an Age of Science,” in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, ed. J. B. Stump and Alan Padgett (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 540.

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to new life, and to believe that in the future God will act to bring many more dead bodies into new life. For the more general case of miracles, I’m claiming that science is a description of the processes by which God normally does things, and that there is no problem (either theologically or scientifically) with saying that God might sometimes do things differently.

REASONS TO BELIEVE RESPONSE

Jeff Zweerink

Reasons to Believe’s position on the nature of God’s activity in creation is anchored in the two-books theory that was the clear consensus of Christian history and has served to illuminate Christian scholarship for centuries. God took the initiative to reveal himself in two ways: through general revelation (the knowledge of God that comes via the created order) and special revelation (the knowledge of God that comes via redemptive history). God is the author of both the figurative book of nature (God’s world) and the literal book of Scripture (God’s written Word). These two forms of revelation mutually reinforce and complement one another. The biblical worldview considers all truth to be God’s truth. Human interpretations of the two sources may conflict, but not when properly understood and correctly applied. God’s truth by its very nature always coheres. To address the nature of God’s work regarding any specific aspect of creation requires an ongoing dialogue between those scholars who interpret general revelation (scientists) and those who interpret special revelation (theologians). Probably the main difference between RTB and BioLogos relates to the way we view how frequently God intervenes beyond ordinary providence. RTB would argue that the bulk of God’s creative activity in Genesis 1 and 2 consists of extraordinary providence, whereas BioLogos contends that this activity is largely a part of ordinary providence. Clearly the main purpose of these two chapters in Genesis centers on revealing the nature of God and how he interacts with his creation. However, the biblical author uses language to communicate God’s direct activity as opposed to a more passive historical description. Throughout the passage we see phrases like “God created,” “the Spirit of God was hovering,” “God said, ‘Let there be,’” and “God made.” The implication of these terms seems better suited to God’s

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direct involvement through extraordinary providence rather than his simply letting things play out via ordinary providence. In addition, careful study of creation also provides insight into the nature of God’s activity. The Bible says that God created the universe in the beginning. Our best scientific understanding points to the universe having a beginning. Studies indicate that the moon resulted from a remarkable and unusual collision—one that looks like a hypernatural miracle. This event also cleared Earth’s atmosphere so that light could penetrate to the surface, allowing the sun to provide demarcation between day and night. The stable water cycle experienced by Earth over the last four billion years requires an immense degree of fine-tuning between tectonic activity, changes in the atmosphere, the brightness of the sun, and the types of life on Earth. The advent of humanity, with a consciousness unparalleled in any other life form, also seems to require something beyond the laws of physics. This matches the biblical description, where God created (the same Hebrew word used for the origin of the universe) humanity in his image. Our scientific understanding of all these events is consistent with the notion of God working through transcendent or hypernatural miracles. In these instances, the scientific indicators of God’s extraordinary providence do not flow from gaps in our scientific knowledge. Rather, our best scientific models point to conclusions with miraculous implications. For the creation of the universe, the scientific models point to a breakdown of the laws of physics in the earliest moments. For the formation of the moon and Earth’s longstanding stable water cycle, the scientific models do not require any explanation beyond the laws of physics. However, the best explanations are solutions that appear unnatural or unexpected. In other words, the best explanation is improbable or unlikely. So scientific pointers to activities of extraordinary providence either require a breakdown of the laws of physics or fine-tuning. One point worth noting is that neither the theological nor the scientific descriptions are complete. Consider the origin of the universe. Scientifically speaking, the data over the last hundred years seems to repeatedly push scientists back to models with a beginning. However, to truly answer the question as to how the universe began requires a quantum theory of gravity, and it will likely be many years before the scientific community develops such a theory. Similarly, many theologians have argued that Genesis 1

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teaches the doctrine of creation ex nihilo—that God created the universe out of nothing. Other theologians, such as John Walton, contend that the ancient Near Eastern context of Genesis 1 means that the chapter does not address the material world in any way. Much work remains to determine the final details of the correct interpretation of both books of God’s revelation. Throughout the last few hundred years, the dialogue between theologians and scientists has tended to break down. Earlier in that period, the pendulum swung far toward religious explanations. Theologians would often declare some part of creation as God’s intervention in such a way that it was off limits to investigate scientifically. Or, a miraculous explanation resulted in scientific laziness that simply abandoned any further investigation. In more recent times, the pendulum had swung toward material explanations. Today, scientists have declared any theological explanation out of bounds. Furthermore, many scientists claim that religion has no place in science because scientific advances show that no supernatural explanation exists. Both extremes of the pendulum represent a lack of balance. A better scenario involves cooperation between the two sides. A commitment to thorough scientific investigation of every aspect of creation prevents laziness. Good theological input helps scientists know where to look for unusually fine-tuned or unnatural explanations. Healthy dialogue between theologians and scientists, especially those who are Christians, would lead to greater understanding of the two books of God’s revelation and, consequently, help us to know God better.

CONCLUSION

John Laing

There is much the two authors agree on regarding divine providence. Both deny deistic notions of a God who is uninvolved, either because of his perfection (classical deism) or because he set up a universe with lawlike character that needs no intervention. Both allow for valid natural explanations that do not conflict with theological claims to divine activity. Jeff uses the categories of ordinary providence and sustainment, while Jim is more comfortable with the distinction of two types of explanation, natural and theological. Both allow for situations in which appeal to natural laws is insufficient to explain the phenomena. And although he did not address this issue specifically, I suspect Jeff would agree with Jim’s point that the category of sign more accurately

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represents a range of events, of which miracle is a subset. As Jim rightly notes, progress has been made. Still, some disagreement persists. One key area of disagreement between the two models—though not necessarily reflective of the two organizations—is related to how God’s work in the world is conceived. Jeff seems committed to the belief that in some cases (e.g., miracles) God works within the physical realm; he thinks the biblical text indicates this is how God works. Conversely, Jim sees this conception of divine activity as leading to theological error; God is conceived as either the cause of all, including evil and sin, or as intervening only periodically and randomly. In the one case, God’s goodness is called into question, and in the other, his loving involvement and rationality are called into question. The degree to which this disagreement is problematic, especially given the substantial amount of agreement, is worthy of further exploration.

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The Scientific Method Methodological Naturalism or Natural Theology? James Dew, J. B. Stump, and Jeff Zweerink

SBC MODERATOR JAMES DEW I would like to thank Jim Stump and Jeff Zweerink for their time and attention to such important questions that sit at the intersection of theology and science. I would also like to thank them for their kindness to me and to each other as we strive for understanding as brothers in Christ. The issues of methodological naturalism (MN) and natural theology (NT) are significant for Christian theology and apologetics. Here are the main questions as I see them. First, how does God factor into our explanations of the physical world today? That is, according to your perspectives, what role, if any, do divine explanations play in our scientific theories? Is it appropriate to look for theological explanations of the natural events of the world? Or does such an approach undermine the scientific enterprise? Moreover, if natural as opposed to theological explanations are preferred, does this commit us to methodological naturalism, which many evangelicals feel prejudices science against theology? How do your perspectives answer these questions? Should we reject MN, embrace it, or try to renegotiate the way we think about it?

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Finally, what are the implications of your answers for the possibility and practice of natural theology? If we are not to find God in nature at the level of scientific explanation, how can we make arguments from nature for his existence or that support Christian theism? How can we do NT while also refraining from theological explanations of the physical events of the world?

BioLogos Author J. B. Stump Dew asks a series of questions that get at the heart of an important debate among those who reflect on the nature of science: What role does God have to play in our scientific discourse? This is not a debate between atheists and Christians about the nature of reality itself and whether God exists, but primarily between one group of Christians who claim that the practice of science should be cordoned off from beliefs about the supernatural, and another group of Christians who think appeals to the divine are perfectly legitimate within scientific theories. The former group claims to operate according to methodological naturalism (MN). They are not ontological naturalists; that is, they are not claiming the natural world is all that exists. Rather, they think there is a sense in which scientists—when doing science— should confine themselves to natural explanations. Within the BioLogos community, there is a range of positions on methodological naturalism. My reflections here are consistent with the BioLogos belief statement, but should not be seen as the definitive BioLogos answer. I’ll defend the claim that there is a kind of naive and dogmatic MN that is often trumpeted as the correct way to do science, but has obvious problems just below the surface. But then I’ll also claim that there is something correct about MN when held more loosely. These positions have implications for how we understand natural theology as well. Problems with methodological naturalism. The 2004 Dover trial about intelligent design (ID) is a relevant place to begin. The essential argument in the case was whether ID could legitimately be called science. Judge John E. Jones III was convinced by the testimony that ID does not qualify as science, and so ruled that the Dover school board’s mandate requiring its science teachers to read a statement to their classes that ID is an alternative scientific theory was unconstitutional. In his 139-page memorandum opinion Judge Jones claimed, “ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of

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science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation,” and concluded, “It is therefore readily apparent to the Court that ID fails to meet the essential ground rules that limit science to testable, natural explanations.”1 Are there some “essential ground rules” to science? Does reference to supernatural causation violate them? Who gets to determine the answers to such questions? There are no straightforward answers to these questions. The actual practice of science is not so amenable to being characterized and codified by essential ground rules. There are problems with both the adjective and the noun of the phrase “methodological naturalism.” Just what does it mean to be a methodological naturalist? It seems that philosopher Paul de Vries coined the phrase, saying that scientists working according to MN “establish explanations of contingent natural phenomena strictly in terms of other contingent natural things—laws, fields, probabilities.”2 That is to say, a scientific theory is confined to explaining natural things, and in doing so should not appeal to nonnatural things. So a Christian, who almost by definition believes in the existence of nonnatural things, would have to bracket those beliefs when doing science. Some have characterized this by saying that scientists are supposed to check their Christianity at the laboratory door. Others have gone so far as to call this “methodological atheism,” as though Christians are supposed to pretend that they are atheists while seeking out scientific explanations. The thought of such a requirement is repulsive to many Christians in the sciences today, and would have sounded ludicrous to Christian scientists in the past who saw their scientific work as a thoroughly Christian vocation. It falls prey to the simplified (and dichotomized) thinking that either God does something or nature does it on its own. Characterizing methodological as “acting as if you are a . . .” has consequences. Treating phenomena as if they are wholly natural implicitly commits one to the view that they have no relevant nonnatural characteristics. That seems to go beyond looking at only one aspect of reality (the natural aspect) toward developing theories based on the working assumption that all of reality is natural. It becomes more reasonable to see, then, why critics of MN 1

John E. Jones III, “Kitzmiller v. Dover, Memorandum Opinion,” Middle District of Pennsylvania case no. 04cv2688, December 20, 2005, http://web.archive.org/web/20051221144316/http://www .pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf, 64, 70. 2 Paul de Vries, “Naturalism in the Natural Sciences,” Christian Scholar’s Review 15 (1986): 388.

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accuse it of easily sliding into ontological naturalism. We just can’t separate reality into discrete areas of inquiry that don’t affect each other at all. That leads to more difficult questions about the noun in MN. Most of the definitions of MN don’t even attempt to define naturalism (like de Vries’s given above), and those that try don’t really clarify things. For example, MN is “an approach to scientific investigation that seeks to take phenomena on their own terms to understand them as they actually are.”3 Probing further into this definition, though, forces us to ask how we know what the phenomena actually are. Aren’t the methods of inquiry going to set the parameters for the kinds of things we find? Then we’re begging the question about what kinds of methods are most appropriate. Paul Draper tries to help by saying that natural entities are “physical” entities or causally reducible to physical entities; then he says that physical entities are “the entities currently studied by physicists and chemists.”4 So, at least in the case of physicists and chemists, if they want to follow the dictates of MN, they should appeal only to the same kind of objects that they are studying. The problem here is that there is no set and abiding list of the things that scientists study. That has changed over time. For example, astrology was once considered within the domain of science, but the study of the mind was not. Most scientists today think that situation is reversed. The “occult forces” invoked for explaining gravity were not natural according to many in Newton’s day; they are now. Our ontological commitments change according to what we find, but this often takes some time. Einstein couldn’t accept the ontological picture foisted on us by quantum mechanics; he thought it wasn’t properly scientific. Many interpreters of quantum mechanics today disagree. Science changes—not just the conclusions of science, but its methods and aims as well. What identifies the best theories about the world? Predictive success or explanatory power? The simplest theory or the one that unites the most disparate phenomena? The answers to such questions do not come from the results of scientific investigation, but are value commitments. It seems, then, that we can’t identify “essential ground rules” that apply across 3

Robert Bishop, “God and Methodological Naturalism in the Scientific Revolution and Beyond,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 65 (2013): 10. 4 Paul Draper, “God, Science, and Naturalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, ed. William J. Wainwright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 277.

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time and infallibly regulate the proper practice of science. The actual practice is much more flexible and will be guided by extrascientific considerations. So the sort of dogmatic MN that claims to define some enduring, essential nature of science and judges everyone against its standards seems to me hopelessly naive. The most we can say is that MN is a contingent value of most practicing scientists today. It is not a necessary part of science. So back to the question of who gets to decide what counts as properly scientific. I’m claiming that this is similar to the problem with dictionary definitions: Do they describe usage or prescribe usage? The answer is both/ and. In a given generation we might be able to point to a dictionary to show that someone is not using a word correctly, but over time that definition might change to reflect the way people actually use the word. In the same way, history attests to the changing norms and values of science, and it would be naive to think that these won’t continue to change. It is a fact that the mainstream of science operates right now according to MN. Opponents of this are free to adopt local values that are different than the mainstream regarding what counts as a legitimate scientific explanation, and it is possible that they could ultimately win the day and persuade the mainstream that their view of science is better. Even W. V. O. Quine, one of the leading naturalist philosophers of the twentieth century, seems to accept this point, saying, “If I saw indirect explanatory benefit in positing sensibilia, possibilia, spirits, a Creator, I would joyfully accord them scientific status too, on a par with such avowedly scientific posits as quarks and black holes.”5 Usefulness of methodological naturalism. But now, even though there don’t seem to be any necessary or compelling reasons for acknowledging MN as the essence of scientific inquiry, perhaps there are some pragmatic reasons for holding loosely to the tradition of MN that has developed in the natural sciences. Science has proved remarkably successful at figuring out the causes of phenomena that once were explained only by supernatural agents—from thunder and solar eclipses to disease and epilepsy. Of course that doesn’t mean that science will be able to figure out everything in the future. But it should give us pause before thinking we’ve found some phenomenon for which there will never be any natural explanation. To think W. V. O. Quine, “Naturalism; Or, Living Within One’s Means,” Dialectica 49 (1995): 252.

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this way would be to inhibit scientific investigation. Take the example of the how the first living cell came about. Scientists don’t have very promising models right now for how that could have happened through natural means. Christian philosopher and opponent of MN Alvin Plantinga thinks this should allow us to conclude that God must have intervened in a special way. He says, If, after considerable study, we can’t see how it could possibly have happened by way of those regularities—if, as is in fact the case, after many decades of study the enormous complexity and functional connectedness and integrity of even the simplest forms of life make it look increasingly unlikely that they could have originated in that way—the natural thing to think, from the perspective of Christian theism, is that probably God did something different and special here. . . . And why couldn’t one draw this conclusion precisely as a scientist? Where is it written that such a conclusion can’t be part of science?6

Of course the difficulty is knowing how much “considerable study” is enough. Plantinga’s approach seems to give license to giving up the search. He claims not to mean that inquiry should halt, just that our conclusions should always be provisional. Yes, but should we call it the best provisional scientific explanation if we say, “and then a miracle happened and there was life”? It seems more in keeping with our present usage to say, “we currently have no scientific explanation for that phenomenon.” Furthermore, if we give scientific status to claims that invoke the supernatural, we run the risk of sliding into a de facto scientism. That is to say, that approach seems to agree with scientism on the scope of science: science can explain everything. I think the wiser course of action is to agree with scientism that science should be limited to natural explanations, but to disagree that science can explain everything. In this regard, MN for the Christian shows the limits of science. Finally, there are some implications for natural theology, which is generally taken to be the attempt to derive theological conclusions from natural premises. In practice, natural theology usually proceeds by taking the results of science and trying to develop these as evidences for the existence of God. If science does not follow the dictates of MN and allows Alvin Plantinga, “Science: Augustinian or Duhemian?,” Faith and Philosophy 13 (1996): 380.

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supernatural agency as part of scientific theories, then of course it will be possible to derive theological conclusions from science, for they have been packed into science from the beginning. But critics would note that such conclusions should not be compelling or even persuasive since the arguments have assumed what they hope to prove. It seems that the traditional understanding of natural theology needs MN. It is another question, though, whether theological conclusions can be derived from purely scientific premises.

Reasons to Believe Author Jeff Zweerink The answer to the opening questions about theological explanations requires an understanding of the ethos surrounding Reasons to Believe. Our scholar team, as currently constituted, consists of four scientists and one philosophertheologian. RTB exists to spread the gospel. Everything we do flows from this purpose, by either interacting directly with nonbelievers or equipping Christians to do the same. This purpose implies that we are not out to change the scientific process. Rather, we seek to marshal sound scientific thought toward evangelism. The foundation for such an endeavor relies on a solid understanding of Scripture, and the first step in building that foundation is a proper exegesis of the biblical text to understand what it says. Then scholars develop a biblical theology, where we seek to determine what the biblical authors taught in the context of their time. After good exegesis and sound biblical theology comes the process of building a coherent, systematic theology. This approach also integrates studies of general revelation as well as findings from philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines. The final step is contextualizing the systematic theology into the culture of the people group being reached. For RTB, the people group primarily includes anyone interested in science and how it accounts for the world in which we live. In this context, RTB does not advocate developing a natural theology in the usual sense of the term. Natural theology seeks to understand the existence and attributes of God without appealing to divine revelation. As RTB seeks to understand how science and Christianity relate, we rely heavily on a proper interpretation of Scripture to find those areas where the Bible and science make statements about the same phenomena.

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This perspective requires a robust way of determining when, if ever, the proper interpretation of Scripture makes statements that science can address. One prominent example where Scripture makes such a statement is the origin of the universe. Based on passages such as John 1:1-18, Colossians 1:15-20, Hebrews 1, and Genesis 1, theologians developed the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, that God created the universe “out of nothing.” A reasonable inference from this doctrine is that the universe began to exist—a proposition that science can address. The cosmological model currently enjoying the most support among the scientific community is Big Bang cosmology. The main features of Big Bang models include a universe governed by constant laws of physics, a pervasive law of decay, a universe that expands, and a universe that has a beginning. This last feature fits well with the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, even though recent scientific investigations searching for a quantum theory of gravity demonstrate some uncertainty about the necessity of a beginning. Still, we can argue that the Bible describes something consistent with Big Bang cosmology. However, in order to advance this case, one must anchor the other traits in sound biblical interpretation. The difficulty of this task arises when trying to establish that the proper interpretation of the biblical text includes ideas that were probably foreign to the biblical author and the original audience. Consider the expansion of the universe. Numerous biblical authors declare that God “stretches out the heavens.”7 In the twentieth century and beyond, it is easy to see how this might describe the expansion of the universe. Yet studies of ancient Near Eastern cultures do not seem to support the idea that anyone thought this way. So if the biblical author did not understand the expansion of the universe, nor did his original audience, on what basis do we conclude today that these passages describe an expanding universe? RTB contends that the validity of drawing such conclusions rests in the doctrine of inspiration. Clearly, the author’s and the original audience’s understanding play an important role in a passage’s meaning, but the Holy Spirit also superintends the author’s writing. It is similar to an expert in mathematics communicating a concept to an elementary student. The expert must use language that the younger student will comprehend 7

Job 9:8; Psalm 104:2; Isaiah 40:22; 42:5; 44:24; 45:12; 48:13; 51:13; Jeremiah 10:12; 51:15; and Zechariah 12:1.

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(achieved through human authors). But a good teacher will also use language that does not conflict with what the student will learn later (accomplished by the Holy Spirit). So how does all this impact scientific studies? For practical purposes, scientists must operate largely from a standpoint of methodological naturalism in the sense that explanations for the vast majority of phenomena will flow from God’s ordinary providence described by the laws of physics. However, that does not completely exclude theological considerations. The Bible contains many descriptions of events that result from God’s extraordinary providence. The creation of the universe clearly transcends the laws of physics since there is nothing to describe via those laws until something exists. Genesis 1:1 reflects this perspective by noting that God created the heavens and the earth. The Hebrew word for “create” here implies God bringing into existence something that did not exist before. However, Genesis 1 also uses this terminology for the origin of the great sea creatures and every winged bird, and also for the origin of humanity. Specifically, RTB contends that these “creation events” signify the introduction of highly relational creatures and, with humanity, the advent of spiritual creatures. Just as the creation of the universe transcends the laws of physics, so these creation events transcend the laws of physics. Consequently, scientific investigations of these events would point to some action surpassing the laws of physics. This does not mean that physical explanations will fail, but that they will be incomplete and point to something beyond the laws of physics. The closest RTB comes to advocating a natural theology—that is, seeing God’s hand in nature apart from Scripture—is when we study the evidence of design in the universe. Numerous features of the universe seem to have finely tuned values that play a critical role in its support of life. Small changes to the strengths of the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear interactions) lead to a universe devoid of the structures (such as atoms, planets, and stars) or elements (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, etc.) that life requires. Even the fabric of space-time (with three large spatial and one time dimension) seems the only option for physical life, given the laws of physics. Similarly, the amount of ordinary matter, dark matter, and dark energy occupies values in a relatively narrow range that permits the building blocks of life. Astronomical and geophysical studies

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indicate that a planet capable of supporting life for long periods of time requires a large set of characteristics that fall within a relatively small window. Even life itself is built on a genetic code showing great error correction and redundancy—hallmarks of design. Based on these and other fine-tuned quantities, it is reasonable to conclude that an intelligent designer fabricated the universe to support life. There is much evidence for design in nature, but RTB also recognizes that most of the biblical passages that appear to have scientifically measurable consequences focus on the transformation of Earth from a “formless and void,” hostile planet to a world suited for and teeming with a great diversity of life. The primary emphases of these passages reveal the nature of God, but they also provide accounts of events in history. RTB affirms that just as the descriptions of the exodus and the battle of Jericho (Josh 6) give details that archaeologists and historians can validate, the creation accounts in Genesis 1–2, Job 38–41, Psalm 8, and elsewhere describe physical events that scientists can validate. These accounts can sometimes provide predictions regarding what scientists may find, and this predictive power can aid in taking the gospel to science-minded people. This position does not mean that the Bible contains the seeds of quantum theory or general relativity. It simply recognizes that in some instances the Bible describes processes in ways that may inform scientific investigation. Even the RTB scholars have different positions on how often the Bible provides these predictions, but we uniformly agree that discerning and articulating these predictions plays an important role in engaging scientifically minded people. This approach of using the Bible to make scientific predictions often encounters two objections. First, the skeptic claims that religious ideas have no place in science. However, it shouldn’t matter where an idea originated— from the Bible or elsewhere—as scientific ideas are not evaluated based on their origin. Rather, scientists evaluate ideas by how well they stand up under testing. Likewise, RTB seeks ways that biblical claims can be tested. Second, Christians claim that this approach elevates human reason (the scientific process) above God’s revelation in Scripture. This claim, while understandable, reflects a misconception of how the process works. Rather than pitting the Bible against the facts of nature, RTB’s position recognizes that

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God revealed himself in two books: the literal book of Scripture and the figurative book of nature. By definition, proper understandings of these two books must agree. In order to derive biblically based predictions that science can test, one must start with a good hermeneutic system. Stated another way, this process assumes that Scripture is the supreme authority, but it includes the testing science brings as an aid in determining the proper interpretation of God’s two revelations. God most commonly interacts with creation by his ordinary providence. Not only is ordinary providence critical for the development of the scientific enterprise, but it also means that the vast majority of physical phenomena we observe will find an adequate explanation in the laws of physics. In this context, a soft methodological naturalism provides the most efficacious approach to understanding the world. RTB affirms the validity of a soft MN approach to science and recognizes the limits any natural theology has in truly grasping the knowledge of God. RTB also recognizes the need to contextualize the message of the gospel to a people group largely dismissive of Scripture. We seek to accomplish this in two ways. First, we highlight how the Judeo-Christian worldview anchors the necessary conditions for a thriving scientific enterprise. Second, we try to determine what the Bible has to say that might provide a testable claim that science can address. RTB’s testable creation model represents the latest development in this effort to negate the claim that science is an enemy of the Christian faith and to buttress the credibility of the Bible in the unbeliever’s eyes.

REDIRECT

James Dew

Thank you, Jim Stump and Jeff Zweerink, for your time and effort to answer tough questions and clarify your positions. To follow up and seek further clarification, allow me to redirect the conversation and ask some additional questions. For Jim: Your balanced view of methodological naturalism is intriguing and helpful, especially as to the way traditional approaches to natural theology might actually require MN. At the end of your section, you mention that there is an important question as to “whether theological conclusions can be derived from purely scientific premises.” What would you think about this? Throughout the history of Christian theology, believers have thought

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that it was possible to draw such conclusions and have built their natural theologies with that assumption in mind. Granted, in many cases they followed a God-of-the-gaps approach to scientific explanation, which proved problematic as later generations of science discovered new things about nature and eliminated the explanatory gaps. Yet it is not clear that this must be the case. So long as we can avoid a God-of-the-gaps approach to natural explanations, is it possible to derive theological conclusions from what we learn about the natural world? In other words, can we do natural theology? For Jeff: Your care for Scripture and concern for evangelism are encouraging and important. My questions focus on the concordist perspective present throughout your section. In your and RTB’s approach, it is important to show that the Bible makes scientific predictions that have been confirmed by mainstream science today. You describe, for example, the numerous passages in the Bible that refer to God “stretching out the heavens” as a scientific prediction that has now been confirmed by Big Bang cosmology. I see two important questions worth considering. First, aren’t these, and many of the predictions referenced by RTB, a bit vague? Couldn’t the biblical passages cited be used to support a very large range of scientific theories, such that we have reason to question whether or not science and the Bible are really teaching the same things? Second, isn’t the concordist strategy a risky strategy? It seems that the concordist approach to science and theology seeks to find fixed (static) teaching points of agreement between science and theology. But since scientific theories are not static but constantly changing, is it really possible to show that they teach the same things? Wouldn’t it be better to take a less aggressive strategy of showing that science and the Bible are consistent with each other?

BIOLOGOS RESPONSE

J. B. Stump

Can we derive theological conclusions from scientific premises? Again, not everyone at BioLogos would answer this the same way. I’m going to say no and suggest that this traditional conception of natural theology is problematic and needs to be reconceived. Two passages of Scripture are often appealed to in support of the traditional conception of natural theology: Psalm 19 and Romans 1:18-20. The psalmist says the heavens declare God’s glory and proclaim his work. The apostle Paul

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says God has made plain what can be known about him from what has been made. These seem to suggest the standard formulation of natural theology, which is that we can start with premises accessible to anyone’s reason and experience and derive conclusions about the existence and nature of God. Some of the standard arguments of natural theology attempt to do just this. One version of the cosmological argument begins with the fact that the universe began to exist and claims that it couldn’t have come from nothing— so there must be at least some transcendent cause that could start things off. The teleological argument begins with our observance of design or purpose in nature and claims that these couldn’t have arisen without a designer. Both arguments rely on scientific discoveries to supply their first premise. These and many other arguments of natural theology are quite sophisticated, and cannot just be dismissed out of hand. But my question is: If they are so obviously correct, why doesn’t everyone accept their conclusions? It seems the arguments of natural theology are most persuasive to those who already accept the theological conclusions to begin with. Most of us probably know of a few people who have converted to theism generally (and even to Christianity specifically) because of the arguments of natural theology, but I think it is safe to say that among those who are atheists or skeptics, the vast majority who have considered the arguments have not found them persuasive. Why is that, and what does it tell us about natural theology? I think the problem is that these kinds of arguments don’t really appeal to premises that are accessible to everyone’s reason and experience. The premises delivered by the natural sciences from cosmology or biology are usually highly technical. How many of us could actually figure out from our own observations and reasoning that the universe started in a Big Bang or that the physical constants necessary for life are fine-tuned? Most people have to accept these premises on the authority of others who have the relevant expertise. That means we must trust these authorities. I don’t think it is controversial to say that we are inclined to trust people who tell us things that fit comfortably with what we already believe, and we’re not inclined to trust them when they tell us things that are not consistent with our beliefs. So the situation is more complex than the linear model of traditional natural theology, which reasons straight from supposedly objective and neutral data to its conclusions. I think our reasoning is more complex than that.

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Consider the distinction between “seeing that” and “seeing as.” According to the latter we don’t just take in raw data and then draw conclusions about what we see. Instead, our theoretical presuppositions condition us to conceptualize what we see. I don’t mean to suggest that our presuppositions are randomly chosen or free from revision—just the opposite. They undergo continual revision in response to our experience and thus can result in our seeing things as something different than what we once saw them as. So we don’t observe a neutral, natural order. We interpret it, and our interpretations are influenced by the other things we believe. That doesn’t mean that in some postmodern sense every interpretation is just as good as the others. Seeing nature as God’s creation may be an interpretation, but if Christians are right, it is the correct interpretation of what nature is. Christians who consider the natural order will see it as imbued with purpose, and the more scientists reveal the ordered and lawful behavior of the natural world, the more theologians will revel in God’s provision for creation. Some discoveries may be surprising from certain perspectives. For instance, there are finely tuned physical constants that allow life, and there are evolutionary convergences that seem to render it inevitable that life forms like us develop. These are very hard to square with a perspective that sees nature as purposeless and random. But for Christians, these are not at all inconsistent with what we would expect. Instead of “natural theology,” this approach is now often referred to as “theology of nature.” Its conclusions are not proved by scientific premises, but we give credence to the Christian way of seeing the world when we show that our beliefs are consistent with what we find there. Because the data are capable of being interpreted in different ways, there is plenty of room for disagreement. Recognizing this allows us to make sense of the fact that arguments for the existence of God drawn from scientific premises are not persuasive to everyone, and yet they can be powerful indicators and interpretive tools for Christians in understanding how God has purposively ordered his created realm. RTB agrees that the linear model of natural theology from scientific premises to theological conclusions is not helpful. Jeff Zweerink states they do not advocate natural theology in that traditional sense, but instead look first to Scripture. I wonder, though, whether their approach results in a

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different linear model. Can we reason from the words of Scripture to scientific claims? I understand that their evangelistic approach of showing Scripture to be scientifically accurate has been successful with some people. But again, I’d want to ask why it isn’t persuasive to everyone. I’d suggest it is because the “data” of Scripture on these issues are not so clear and objective. Instead, RTB sees Scripture as predictive of science because of the presuppositions they bring to it. That said, there are many areas of overlap between RTB and BioLogos, and it has been helpful and encouraging to work out our positions in their company.

REASONS TO BELIEVE RESPONSE

Jeff Zweerink

I would reemphasize that RTB answers these important questions in the context of evangelism, not with a desire to change the way the scientific community operates. So the guiding question RTB asks when evaluating the interaction between Christianity and the scientific community is: How can we interpret the Bible with theological integrity while developing resources to spread the gospel? A couple of decades ago, there was broad consensus even among nonChristians that what the Bible said was worth listening to. Evangelism in the United States often employed tools like the Four Spiritual Laws and the Romans Road (both based on Bible verses) to communicate the need for a Savior. Today, many non-Christians no longer accept the validity of the Bible, so tools that aid in buttressing its authority with nonbelievers are important. One popular narrative in our culture is that scientific advances continually show the naiveté and unsophisticated knowledge of the biblical authors. However, an articulate message that the biblical description actually accords with the best scientific knowledge and that theologically derived ideas encourage rather than impede scientific progress provides a useful means to counter that narrative and engage a skeptical culture. RTB scholars have interacted with nonbelieving audiences repeatedly over the last three decades by showing how the basic features of creation described in the Bible align with scientific understanding. Those interactions demonstrate the utility of a concordist perspective in challenging nonbelievers to consider the claims of the Bible regarding the redemptive work of Christ on the cross. (They also strengthen the faith of believers and equip

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them to share the gospel.) Often, one of the key points that engages the science-minded nonbeliever is that biblical ideas can inform scientific advance, not by decree but by making an assertion of what scientists can investigate. The notion that theological statements can be tested genuinely surprises many nonbelievers. The question about the “vagueness” regarding some of RTB’s biblical predictions prompts two comments. First, RTB scholars recognize that not all theologians agree on the proper interpretation of biblical passages, and this disagreement results in ambiguity about what a particular set of passages may say about creation. Some statements, such as the stretching of the heavens, do not appear to be directly predicting an expanding universe. Rather, the language used seems remarkably consistent with well-established scientific discoveries, but largely in retrospect. Other passages make bolder statements, such as the universe having a beginning. The importance of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo in historic Christian thought makes the evidence pointing to a beginning of the universe more remarkable, especially since many scientists resisted the conclusion (and continue to do so) so strongly over the past century. Second, theologians have tested biblical interpretations over the centuries by seeing whether they cohere throughout the Bible. Drawing inferences from the text that might have measurable consequences in creation and then making the appropriate scientific measurements can help narrow the allowed interpretations for some passages. Even the RTB scholars approach this process with varying degrees of aggressiveness. Some make more frequent, stronger statements but feel comfortable revising a position when the data doesn’t support it. Others make more cautious statements that hopefully need little revision. This difference is also reflected in the audiences we reach. Some nonbelievers and Christians engage better with bolder statements, while others respond to a more cautious approach. This last point partially addresses the second part of the question. Isn’t looking for consistency a more prudent approach than seeking concordism? This question highlights one main difference between BioLogos and RTB. RTB takes a more concordist approach, although we would characterize it as a soft concordist stance. We don’t believe the Bible teaches much, if anything, about quantum mechanics, bacterial life, plate tectonics, or many

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other scientific disciplines. However, we do think the Bible makes statements that science can affirm or falsify. Within this soft concordist position, some RTB scholars take a more aggressive approach while others take a more measured stance. BioLogos seems to adopt a more complementary view on the Bible and science, where little, if anything, in the Bible informs what scientists may discover. This difference between RTB and BioLogos figures prominently when discussing human origins. BioLogos adopts a position that God used the evolutionary process to fashion humanity. RTB asserts that the language of Genesis 1 and 2 means that God intervened beyond ordinary providence to create humanity and that humanity started from a single pair. The scientific data currently available is consistent with some aspects of RTB’s view on human origins, but it also poses some significant challenges. While this data causes some tension for many Christians and nonbelievers, we also think it represents a great opportunity to affirm the predictive nature of the Bible in future research as this discipline unfolds. The same discussion could have occurred regarding the origin of the universe back at the start of the 1900s, but the major scientific discoveries continue to push scientists toward models in which the universe began to exist (although scientists still don’t have the final answer). RTB expects a similar scenario to play out regarding human origins as scientists continue to grow in their understanding of the genetic code. One final point warrants mention. RTB contends that the more strongly a biblical doctrine forms part of the redemption narrative, the more confidently we can make scientific predictions. Nonbelieving scientists will express more resistance to those discoveries that affirm essential aspects of the redemption narrative. This is consistent with what theologians describe as the noetic effects of the fall. The fact that God created the universe out of nothing (which skeptics don’t believe) seems far more important for redemption than the stretching of the heavens (which many skeptics do believe, although in nontheistic form). Similarly, the existence of a historical Adam and Eve seems as important as God creating the heavens. RTB’s experience in pre-evangelism indicates that nonbelievers often think a historical Adam is the position the Bible espouses. Thus, in this context it seems that tying predictions to redemption is a worthwhile goal.

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CONCLUSION

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James Dew

Once again, I want to thank both Jim and Jeff for their work in this chapter. Natural theology has played an important role in the life of the church for centuries, and it continues to be a major topic of debate in both science and theology. I’m excited to see these two distinct accounts come into dialogue in this chapter. Jim Stump raises an important point about “natural” theology by questioning the supposed neutrality of the concept of nature. As Alister McGrath has argued in his trilogy A Scientific Theology, the term nature does not refer to a fixed concept that is universally understood by all people everywhere. The failure to recognize this can be very problematic for natural theology. Even still, however, one cannot help but wonder whether we are going too far in saying that we cannot derive any theological conclusions from purely scientific premises. Jeff Zweerink’s responses to my redirect are certainly helpful to clear up what seem to be troubling questions about RTB’s commitment to concordism. Yet, I do wonder whether the issues of “vagueness” and “risk” will continue to linger. In the end, this has been a fascinating discussion and I am grateful to have been able to be a part of it!

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Biological Evolution What Is It? Does It Explain Life’s History? Ted Cabal, Darrel Falk, and Fuz Rana

SBC MODERATOR TED CABAL The word evolution has a wide range of meaning these days, yet often is undefined in the context of important discussions. The term can apply to Darwin’s now largely uncontroversial notion of natural selection and to the moredebated, at least among evangelicals, theory of common descent. Moreover, the term currently is also used regarding theories of the origin of life or even the beginning of the universe. Indeed, many view evolution as the universal concept that explains everything, including those things most interesting about human beings, such as psychology, sociology, and ethics. Evolution has even come to serve in the minds of many as a kind of shorthand for metaphysical naturalism, the philosophical dogma that nature is all that exists. Obviously, for evangelicals such as Darrel and Fuz, metaphysical naturalism is out of the question. So the questions I pose to them are the following. How would you define evolution in its most important uses today? How convincing do you find the evidence for universal common descent? Does acceptance of biological evolution necessarily entail rejection of design?

BioLogos Author Darrel Falk What is evolution? The meaning of the term evolution, as it is generally used by biologists, is summarized at the Understanding Evolution website at the

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University of California, Berkeley. To provide a concise summary of how the term is used throughout the discipline of biology, I quote their definition here verbatim: Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification. This definition encompasses small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next) and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations). Evolution helps us to understand the history of life. . . . Biological evolution is not simply a matter of change over time. Lots of things change over time: trees lose their leaves, mountain ranges rise and erode, but they aren’t examples of biological evolution because they don’t involve descent through genetic inheritance. The central idea of biological evolution is that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor, just as you and your cousins share a common grandmother. Through the process of descent with modification, the common ancestor of life on Earth gave rise to the fantastic diversity that we see documented in the fossil record and around us today. Evolution means that we’re all distant cousins: humans and oak trees, hummingbirds and whales.1

This summary says nothing about whether there is or is not a Creator in whom the process is based and whose ongoing presence is required for it to proceed. It says nothing about purpose, nor does it encroach on the issue of whether a Creator has influenced (or may still be influencing) the process in ways that are undetectable through the tools of scientific investigation. Evolutionary theory is silent about all of these issues. The two poles of misrepresentation. Despite what most would agree is a good consensus statement of the meaning that biologists attach to the term evolution, a number of spokespersons drastically overinterpret its meaning. Besides the stridency of books by “new atheists,” the literature is full of statements by scientists whose writings may not be characterized by militant atheism, but who write nonetheless as though the theory of evolution has disproven theism. For example, in his book The Accidental Species, Henry Gee states, “It is clear that evolution has no plan. It has neither memory nor 1

University of California Museum of Paleontology and National Center for Science Education, “An Introduction to Evolution,” Understanding Evolution, accessed March 24, 2016, http://evolution .berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_02.

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foresight. No vestige of cosmic strivings from some remote beginning; no prospect of revelatory culmination in some transcendent end. Rather than being at the pinnacle of creation, human beings are just one species on the tangled bank of Darwin’s imagination.”2 If pressed, such authors would need to admit they are overextending the reach of science. It simply doesn’t address matters of purpose, human or otherwise, nor does it address the question of the existence of a reality beyond the universe itself. It simply does not have the tools to do so, and to take the position that it does is misleading and perhaps even in some cases disingenuous. The science of biology addresses questions such as what, when, and how life forms came into being. However, it says nothing about the possibility of the existence of a who through whom all things exist, or the why of their existence. We find a parallel set of errors on the other side of the fence as well. John MacArthur writes on the Grace to You website, “The evolutionary lie is so pointedly antithetical to Christian truth that it would seem unthinkable for evangelical Christians to compromise with evolutionary science in any degree.”3 If God chose to create through the process evolution describes, this does not negate any central Christian doctrines. It does rule out some interpretations of Genesis 1–3, but Genesis is still authoritative. It does mean that God created the first humans in evolutionary continuity with other life, but Adam and Eve could still be real, historical people. It means God created through natural processes, but God is no less active in creation. It does require the death of plants and animals before human sin, but it does not negate the truth that all humans sin and need a savior. It certainly is not “pointedly antithetical to Christian truth.” Both of these two extremes are common examples of where many people are misunderstanding (or misrepresenting) the ramifications of the science in a manner that is not justified by the conclusions of biology or dictums stemming from historical theology. Henry Gee, The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 12. 3 John MacArthur, “Is Evolution Compatible with Christianity?,” Grace to You, August 28, 2009, www .gty.org/resources/articles/A188/is-evolution-compatible-with-christianity?. 2

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The mechanics of the evolutionary process. Natural selection. At the heart of evolutionary theory is the process of natural selection. There are four pillars on which the concept is based. First, not all organisms have the same properties. Second, at least some of the variation in properties is brought about by inheritable traits. Third, some variations of these traits may result in increased viability or reproductive capacity (i.e., fitness). And fourth, with time traits that result in increased fitness will become more common relative to less-fit alternatives. In human populations a good example of natural selection at work is the inheritable trait of tolerance to lactose. In earlier millennia, our species, like mammals in general, did not produce an enzyme to break down the milk sugar lactose in adults. We only drank milk as babies, and there was no need for the enzyme to metabolize it as adults. This changed with the arrival of dairy farming when there was a distinct survival value in being able to metabolize lactose. Dairy farming was initiated in several world areas and was accompanied by the spread of a specific genetic change that enabled adults to break down milk sugar. Over long periods of time species change through the accumulation of various alterations that result in better adaptations to particular environments and lifestyles. So the main principle on which micro- and macro­ evolutionary change is based is the adaptive value of each new variant. Species acquire characteristics that ideally suit them to the lifestyle of particular environmental niches. Genetic drift. Although natural selection has clearly been an important factor in bringing about species change over time, scientists today recognize that it is not the sole component that has been important in driving evolution. For example, in small populations, particular traits can come to predominate not because they lead to greater adaptation but because other traits (even highly beneficial ones) may get lost by chance. Perhaps a particular ancestral individual (or a small group of individuals) had a neutral or even nonadaptive trait but happened to have lots of offspring. Or an individual that had a highly beneficial trait may nonetheless have died before reproductive age, purely by a chance event such as crossing paths with a predator. In large populations, where things average out, natural selection has an important influence on species changes. However, in small populations,

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chance events have a significant influence on the properties of a species. It is important to point this out because of a misunderstanding about evolutionary theory. Traits may become common not because they maximize reproductive capacity or survival, but just because of the random forces at play in small populations. Cooperation. It is increasingly clear that in certain of life’s lineages, the capability of cooperating with others becomes a significant driving force in evolution—even in cases where cooperation benefits others in the group at a net cost to the individual who has the trait. This quality—the adaptability of cooperation—has reached its zenith in human evolution. Not only are genes that lead to cooperation more common, but cooperative traits grounded in culture and not genes spread and become embedded into populations as well. Although there is much discussion today about how cooperation and altruism can arise through the evolutionary process, there are a growing number of investigators who believe it has come about through the relative success of those groups that can cooperate effectively compared to the lack of success of groups characterized by less cooperation. What is the evidence for evolution? Much of the history of life on earth can be determined through the study of fossils buried in the earth itself. The rocks are like a grand file cabinet with the organisms that have existed in the past preserved for our perusal by opening drawers and looking inside. The “drawers” can be dated, often quite precisely, and frequently through the use of several independent measures. The age of rocks is correlated with specific arrays of life forms. Rocks dated at 800 million years, for example, contain a vastly different array of species than rocks dated at 500 million years. They in turn are vastly different from rocks dated at 400 million, 300 million, and so on. There has been an ongoing and regular succession of life forms with a strong trend toward increasing complexity. Thus as we study the file cabinet, from single cells to all of life in all of its complexity, along with many recently discovered examples of transitional species, it appears likely that all species arose and diversified through a process of descent from a common ancestor. The strongest evidence, however, comes from genetics, which is discussed in more detail in chapter ten. Suffice it to say, there are highly specific “scars” (the result of DNA damage) in the genome that can be followed though the lineages from one species to another. These scars are clearly a reflection of

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events that occurred in ancestral species and can be followed down through the generations in a manner that is fully consistent with common descent. Some might argue that scars shared by multiple species have a function. However, it is very clear that even in cases where the scars end up taking on particular functions, they don’t need to be in exactly the position they are in or have the exact characteristics they have in order for function to be manifest. The fossil data, the genetic data, and much other data not discussed here (see the BioLogos website) are overwhelmingly consistent with common descent. Evolutionary theory in light of God’s Word. All that exists in creation is a reflection of the ongoing presence and activity of God in the universe (see Col 1:16-17; Jn 1:1-3). Natural laws are a reflection of—indeed a description of—the ongoing regular or customary activity of God’s Spirit in the universe. So when a distinction is made between natural laws and supernatural activity, we would be in error to say that God is more intricately involved or more highly active in supernatural activity than he is in natural. The prefix super can be misleading because it implies something over and above, when in fact it is best thought of as that which is noncustomary and different from God’s ongoing regular way of working. Different people at BioLogos would nuance these points differently, but I don’t think there is any scientific reason to conclude that God’s supernatural activity (what we would call miracles) has not occurred in the ongoing process of life’s creation. Indeed, if there is sound theological or biblical reason to expect it, then it can readily be incorporated into an evolutionary understanding of life’s history. The important consideration is that the directions creation has taken have not been outside of the will of God (except so far as it has been disturbed by human sinfulness), and all that has happened and will happen has been permitted by God’s providence. There is nothing in evolutionary theory that is inconsistent with that. The processes of life have been called into existence in a manner that is fully in accord with God’s will and God’s design.

Reasons to Believe Author Fuz Rana Is biological evolution compatible with the Christian faith? Many evangelicals, including me, are troubled by biological evolution—or perhaps more broadly by the evolutionary paradigm. Adherents to this paradigm

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claim that unguided, historically contingent processes are sufficient to account for life’s origin, history, and the design of biological systems. Philosophical concerns. If evolutionary mechanisms possess such capabilities, then, believers and nonbelievers alike wonder, what role is a Creator to play? For example, evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins quipped, “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”4 I debated developmental biologist Paul Zachary “PZ” Myers, a well-known atheist and author of the award-winning blog Pharyngula, at North Dakota State University on Darwin Day, February 12, 2015, on the question of God’s existence. One of the key points Myers made was, in effect, evolution can explain everything in biology, so why do I need to believe in God? Even though atheists often co-opt Darwin’s theory in support of their worldview, it is, of course, conceivable that God could have used evolutionary processes to create. The problem I have with adopting this approach, however, is that it isn’t clear how to distinguish between an evolutionary origin and history of life that is under God’s auspices and one that is merely an outworking of natural processes. This is not a trivial point. During our debate, Myers repeatedly asked for evidence for God’s intervention in nature. The key lesson from my interaction with Myers (and other atheists) is that to make a case for a Creator and the Christian faith, it is incumbent on us to (1) distinguish our models from those that are materialistic and (2) identify places where God has intervened in life’s history. If we cannot, it is hard to convince skeptics that a Creator exists. Theological concerns. Biological evolution (and evolutionary creationism) seems to have an apparent incompatibility with the creation accounts found in Scripture. For example, the Hebrew verbs used in Genesis 1 and 2 to describe God’s work of creating life (bara’, “to create”; ‘asah, “to make”; yatsar, “to form”; banah, “to build”) imply that God took a direct and personal role and did not just oversee a process. If God used evolution as a means to create life, including human beings, it also raises questions about the historicity of Adam and Eve. Evolution is a population-level phenomenon, which means, from an evolutionary Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 6.

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perspective, that the first humans must have arisen as a population, not a primordial pair. Giving up the historicity of Adam and Eve as humanity’s sole progenitors has wide-ranging implications for key theological doctrines. However, the problems that I perceive with the evolutionary paradigm are not just theological. They are also scientific. I don’t think evolutionary mechanisms can fully account for life’s origin and life’s history. It is important to note that, having staked out this position, I don’t reject all aspects of biological evolution, just certain facets. What do I mean by evolution? The term evolution can take on a variety of meanings. Each one reflects a different type of biological transformation (or presumed transformation). I find it useful to distinguish between evolutionary change (driven by genetic variation, iteratively filtered by selection) and the evolutionary paradigm, which argues that this mechanism is sufficient to explain life’s origin, history, and diversity. Just because evolutionary change is observed or inferred for one type of transformation, it does not mean that the evolutionary paradigm has been established. I like to think of evolutionary changes as falling into one of five categories. 1. Microevolution refers to change within a species. Microevolution, or adaptation, involves altered gene frequencies within a population in response to environmental, predatory, and competitive pressures. A textbook example of microevolution would be peppered moths changing wing color in response to rising pollution levels in the United Kingdom. 2. Speciation describes the scenario in which one species gives rise to a closely related sister species. A classic example is the evolution of the finches on the Galapagos Islands from an ancestral finch species that arrived on this archipelago from South America. After arriving, the ancestral finch evolved into a variety of species that vary primarily in body size, beak size, and shape. Speciation can be considered an extension of microevolution, but it includes genetic isolation of portions of the population, caused typically by geographical barriers. Once isolated, the populations can evolve along different trajectories, eventually becoming reproductively isolated. These two types of evolutionary changes have been observed repeatedly and, in my opinion, are noncontroversial. In fact, I see these features as part of God’s providence. Such evolutionary mechanisms make species robust, allowing them to respond and adapt to ever-changing circumstances.

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3. Microbial evolution is another noncontroversial type of evolution that describes the transformation of viruses, bacteria, archaea, and single-celled eukaryotes. Examples include the acquisition of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, the ability of viruses to hop from one host to another (e.g., SARS and HIV), and the emergence of drug-resistant strains of the malaria parasites. Microbial evolution would also include horizontal gene transfer between microbes. This leads to the evolution of pathogenic bacteria from nonpathogenic strains (e.g., E. coli O157:H7). Microbial evolution is not surprising given the large microbial population sizes. While microevolution, speciation, and microbial evolution are noncontroversial and are a positive feature of our creation model, the two other categories of evolutionary change—namely, chemical evolution and macroevolution—are contentious, because they supplant the work of the Creator. Microevolution, speciation, and microbial evolution involve limited modifications of already existing designs. On the other hand, scientists ascribe creative potential to evolutionary mechanisms when it comes to chemical evolution and macroevolution. For the evolutionary paradigm to be true, macroevolution and chemical evolution must be unequivocally established. And they simply have not been. 4. Chemical evolution (also called abiogenesis and the origin of life) refers to the processes that presumably generated the initial life forms. According to this model, chemical selection transformed a complex chemical mixture of simple compounds into protocellular entities that evolved to yield the first true cells. The scientific problems associated with chemical evolution are legion.5 Almost no one would dispute the assertion that currently there is no real explanation for the origin of life based on chemical evolution, though researchers in this area may claim that we have some clues as to how life may have gotten started. Some of these clues include the discovery of various chemical and physical processes that could conceivably contribute to an evolutionary origin of life. For example, scientists have demonstrated in laboratory settings that chemical routes exist that can yield most of life’s building blocks, starting with simple chemical materials that would have been present on early Earth. 5

For detailed discussions of the problems associated with evolutionary models for the origin of life, I recommend Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolutionary Models Face Off (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004).

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Yet, it is questionable whether these chemical and physical processes would ever be productive under the complex chemical and physical settings of early Earth. These reactions work well in the laboratory because organic chemists carefully control the conditions. They perform chemical reactions under highly pristine conditions—carefully adjusting the concentrations of the reactants, controlling the order of addition, excluding any possible chemical interference, adjusting the pH and temperature of the reaction, and so on. This type of control would never exist on early Earth. In other words, the involvement of intelligent agents in the design of these so-called prebiotic simulation experiments plays a necessary role. Ironically, in trying to understand chemical evolution, this research provides empirical evidence that life must originate via the work of a Mind. This provocative conclusion is affirmed by work in synthetic biology. One of the goals of this exciting new area is to create artificial cells. It is immediately evident that creating biochemical systems and assembling them into protocells requires significant effort by highly trained and highly skilled researchers. More importantly, it requires ingenuity on the part of the investigators, who base their research strategy on decades of accrued knowledge and understanding of biochemistry.6 5. Macroevolution refers to the origin of life’s major groups. Most evolutionary biologists argue that macroevolutionary transformations use the same mechanisms that drive speciation. It’s just that these mechanisms operate over vast periods of time. Examples of macroevolution would include whales evolving from a terrestrial wolf-like mammal and birds evolving from theropods. How strong is the scientific case for macroevolution? Two chief lines of evidence are cited in favor of macroevolution: the fossil record and homologies. The fossil record demonstrates an ever-changing history of life on earth, and homologies show shared biological features possessed by related organisms that are taken as evidence of a shared evolutionary history. Yet both lines of evidence can be readily accommodated within a creation model. For example, one could easily view the fossil record and the 6

For a detailed discussion of how work in prebiotic chemistry and synthetic biology make a case for a Creator, I recommend my book Creating Life in the Lab: How New Discoveries in Synthetic Biology Make a Case for the Creator (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011).

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history of life on Earth as reflecting the work of a Creator who brought into being different life forms at different times. This pattern is consistent with the Genesis 1 and Psalm 104 creation accounts, which describe God as transforming the planet and bringing life into existence in a purposefully progressive fashion. Homologies. Homologies too can be understood from a creation model perspective. These shared features could easily reflect the Creator’s handiwork. For example, Sir Richard Owen, a preeminent biologist who preceded Darwin, argued that these mutual features were manifestations of a common blueprint—an archetype. He defined the archetype as “that ideal original or fundamental pattern on which a natural group of animals or system of organs has been constructed, and to modifications of which the various forms of such animals or organs may be referred.”7 According to Owen, the archetype points to a “deep and pregnant principle . . . some archetypal exemplar on which it has pleased the Creator to frame certain of his living creatures.”8 So even though the human hand, the bat’s wing, the horse’s hoof, and the whale’s flipper all perform distinct functions, Owen recognized that these structures all had the same basic design (or form). Interestingly, Owen (and other likeminded biologists) found an explanation for vestigial structures like the pelvis and hind limb bones (found in whales and snakes) in the concept of the archetype. They regarded these structures as necessary to the architectural design of the organism. Scientific challenges from the fossil record. Not only do we understand the fossil record and shared biological designs from a creation model perspective, but we also see these features as a basis for skepticism about macroevolution. For example, the fossil record does not describe a gradual, continuous transformation of life. Instead, stasis is often the dominant pattern throughout life’s history. And when biological innovation occurs it often happens explosively, in what paleontologists describe as radiation events. The quintessential example would be the Cambrian explosion—biology’s Big Bang. This was a dramatic event in life’s history when 50 to 80 percent of the Nicolaas A. Rupke, Richard Owen: Biology Without Darwin, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 120. 8 Ibid., 112. 7

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known animal phyla appeared over a relatively short window of geological time. Currently there is no real explanation for the Cambrian explosion. In fact, biologists Douglas Erwin and James Valentine have argued that the Cambrian explosion exposes deficiencies in current evolutionary theory. They write, One important concern has been whether the microevolutionary patterns commonly studied in modern organisms by evolutionary biologists are sufficient to understand and explain the events of the Cambrian or whether evolutionary theory needs to be expanded to include a more diverse set of macroevolutionary processes. We strongly hold to the latter position. . . . The move from micro to macro forms a discontinuity.9

Convergence. Another problem for macroevolution is the phenomenon known as convergence. While homologies refer to shared features possessed by related organisms, convergence describes shared features possessed by unrelated organisms. From an evolutionary vantage point, convergence arises when evolutionary processes funnel biological systems toward the same end. Yet if biological systems are the product of evolution, then identical or nearly identical biological systems should not recur throughout nature. Chance governs biological and biochemical evolution at its most fundamental level. Evolutionary pathways consist of a historical sequence of chance genetic changes operated on by natural selection, which also consists of chance components. The consequences are profound. If evolutionary events could be repeated, the outcome would be dramatically different every time. The inability of evolutionary processes to retrace the same path makes it highly unlikely that the same biological and biochemical designs should appear repeatedly throughout nature. The concept of historical contingency embodies this idea and is the theme of Stephen Jay Gould’s book Wonderful Life. To help clarify the concept, Gould uses the metaphor of replaying life’s tape. If one were to push the rewind button, erase life’s history, and then let the tape run again, the results would be completely different each time.10 Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine, The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity (Greenwood Village, CO: Roberts and Company, 2013), 10-11. 10 Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 9

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The very essence of the evolutionary process renders evolutionary outcomes nonrepeatable. And yet convergence is widespread throughout the biological realm.11 Warranted skepticism. Though biological evolution is taken as a fact by most biologists, there are good scientific reasons to be skeptical about aspects of the evolutionary paradigm. And most certainly there are good reasons to question the sufficiency of evolutionary mechanisms to completely account for the origin and history of life.

REDIRECT Ted Cabal For Darrel: Darrel affirms that evolutionary processes “have been called into existence in a manner that is fully in accord with God’s will and God’s design.” But he also writes that the Creator’s influence on evolution may be “in ways that are undetectable through the tools of scientific investigation.” Darrel points out that atheists are not entitled to claim that evolutionary science has disproved theism: “they are overextending the reach of science. It simply doesn’t address matters of purpose, human or otherwise, nor does it address the question the existence of a reality beyond the universe itself.” Does this mean Darrel understands the scientific evidence such that on biological grounds neither theism nor atheism has the advantage? If no biological evidence suggests divine activity in evolutionary processes, what about the origin of life (abiogenesis) or the “end game” (e.g., human consciousness)? For Fuz: One who accepts a thoroughgoing evolutionary explanation of life may grant that evidence and understanding for some aspects of that history remain weak. But they might also note that evidence has mounted over time in support of evolution, and there is little reason to doubt this will continue. How do you respond to this claim? One might also ask, can you imagine any kind of evidence that would change your mind in regard to, say, universal common descent? Or are your convictions such that you would always interpret the evidence in line with your biblical understanding? BIOLOGOS RESPONSE Darrel Falk Thanks to Ted Cabal for the follow-up questions. I’ll respond directly to them after clarifying a few issues in my dialogue with Fazale Rana. For a discussion of convergence in biochemical systems, I recommend Fazale Rana, The Cell’s Design: How Chemistry Reveals the Creator’s Artistry (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008).

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First, I would like to emphasize that although Rana indicates that the evolutionary creation paradigm creates theological problems for the biblical notion of Adam and Eve, he seems to have overlooked the fact that many of us who subscribe to evolutionary creation do believe in a historical Adam and Eve. It is important to emphasize that mainstream science does not imply that Adam and Eve did not exist, just that they could not have been the only two progenitors of the human race. There are other ways of understanding the biblical Adam and Eve that are fully compatible with genetics and paleontology. Indeed, the evolutionary creation views on this matter are laid out in previous chapters by Loren Haarsma and John Walton. Second, I would like to emphasize that Rana and I are working with different definitions of evolution. I have thought it important to work with a standard definition of evolution from a leading university evolutionary biology department (University of California, Berkeley). Rana preferred to write about evolution as he defines it. I know of no biology textbook that would define it as he has done, but I would like to respond to his particular definition. In short, he agrees (as virtually all Christians do) with what most would call microevolution (he defines three subcategories of this). However, Rana does not accept macroevolution, which means that he does not accept that organisms that differ in a structurally significant fashion are related to each other through common ancestry. This is not a small matter at the periphery of the biological sciences. It means that Reasons to Believe is at odds with one of the most fundamental tenets in the science of biology. Reasons to Believe accepts the correctness of the physical sciences—geology, astronomy, nuclear physics (through isotope dating)—but considers the biological sciences to be incorrect at their very core. In Rana’s definition of evolution he includes the origin of life. The scientific study of life’s origin is not part of evolutionary theory; it is a dynamic aspect of biochemistry research about which little is known so far. Since the science is still at a somewhat primitive (albeit highly active) stage, we think that too little is known scientifically to enter into a meaningful discussion of the nature of divine action at life’s origin. That may change soon, and the interested reader is referred to the book The Vital Question by Nick Lane.12 Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015).

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If work of the sort described by Lane and by Andreas Wagner in Arrival of the Fittest13 continues to mature, then we will be able to enter into meaningful dialog about what chemistry at life’s beginning tells us about divine action. However, we’re simply not there yet. Third, Rana states that there are two pieces of evidence that lead mainstream scientists to accept the notion of common descent. He misses the main one, which is the tracking of “scars” in DNA (see chapter 10). Genetics has solidified the evidence for common descent in ways that have totally altered the nature of the conversation. Fourth, Rana critiques common descent because with evolution “identical or nearly identical biological systems should not recur throughout nature,” and yet they do. Rana offers no justification for this statement except a paragraph from Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould. In this quote Gould is writing about something entirely different than the matter of “biological systems.” He is referring to whole species. Indeed, Gould is famous for making the very reverse point to that which Rana attributes to him. “The Panda’s Thumb,” likely his most famous essay, shows how a system does repeat itself.14 For more detail, however, I recommend Wagner’s book Arrival of the Fittest, which describes computer simulations that have demonstrated exactly what Rana claims is not possible. Also, Simon Conway Morris’s Life’s Solution demonstrates clearly that the evolutionary mechanism does result in similarities reappearing in evolutionary history and shows why this is consistent with evolutionary theory.15 Rana does not explain the scientific basis for why he thinks the situation ought to be different. Finally, I would like to address the interesting and important question of whether there are aspects of the study of biology that point clearly to the hand of a Creator. The answer, as I see it, is that the whole process of life’s history from the origin of life to the achieving of full consciousness is wonderfully consistent with theism. I see no scriptural reason, however, to expect that we should be able to take any particular structure or process and put it to a scientific experiment in which theism is a hypothesis to be tested. Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution’s Greatest Puzzle (New York: Current, 2014). Stephen Jay Gould, “The Panda’s Thumb,” in The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 15 Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 13

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God reminds us in the book of Job, for example, that we know far too little about how to expect God would act to be able to assign him to some sort of predictability test. Noted Christian author Marilynne Robinson puts it this way: “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or of Luther, Calvin, and Ignatius of Loyola, or of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, and Martin Luther King, is no Watchmaker. To find him at the end of even the longest chain of being or causality would be to discover that he was a thing (however majestic) among things. Not God, in other words.”16

REASONS TO BELIEVE RESPONSE

Fuz Rana

It is true: since Darwin proposed his theory of biological evolution, paleontologists have developed a remarkable understanding of the history of life based on the discovery and characterization of fossilized organisms. Evolutionary biologists have performed countless anatomical, physiological, and genetic comparisons of organisms and have used the similarities and differences to construct evolutionary trees. As biology enters into the age of genomics, these comparisons now involve entire genomes. But has all of this activity strengthened the case for biological evolution? I would answer no. It is important to note that the data from the fossil record and biological comparisons, rather than being used to evaluate the validity of the evolutionary paradigm, is simply interpreted within an evolutionary framework. In fact, I would argue that the growing databases actually provide us with reasons to be skeptical about the sufficiency of biological evolution to account for the origin, history, and design of life. As I describe further in chapter eight, features in the fossil record, such as the Cambrian explosion, appear to defy an evolutionary explanation. Most of our understanding of this dramatic Cambrian event has come in the last few decades, and new discoveries from the fossil record are being made all the time that deepen the Cambrian mystery. Darwin was aware of the Cambrian explosion in his day and recognized it as a “difficulty” for his theory. He writes, There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks. . . . Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: Picador, 2005), 37.

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To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.17

Instead of resolving Darwin’s dilemma, advances in paleontology exacerbate his original concerns. Darwin was also skeptical about convergence. He writes in a later edition of The Origin of Species, It is incredible that the descendants of two organisms, which had originally differed in a marked manner, should ever afterwards converge so closely as to lead to a near approach to identity throughout their whole organisation. If this had occurred, we should meet with the same form, independently of genetic connection, recurring in widely separated geological formations; and the balance of evidence is opposed to any such an admission.18

As noted earlier in this chapter, convergence is a widespread phenomenon, and yet given the nature of evolution’s mechanism it should be a rare occurrence in the biological realm. Evolutionary biologists have discovered most of the examples of convergence within the last decade or so. Recent work has also uncovered another disturbing problem for the evolutionary paradigm: incongruities among evolutionary trees built with different data sets. Traditionally, evolutionary biologists built these trees using anatomical features. As the technology emerged to rapidly sequence DNA, evolutionary biologists have increasingly relied on DNA sequence data to construct evolutionary trees. Prior to these efforts, scientists predicted that molecular trees should agree with trees built from anatomical data. They also predicted that molecular phylogenies (evolutionary trees) constructed with DNA sequences from one region of the genome should agree with evolutionary trees built from other genomic regions.19 Neither prediction holds true. It is commonplace for molecular phylogenies to contradict morphological 17

Charles Darwin, “On the Imperfection of the Geological Record: On the Sudden Appearance of Groups of Allied Species in the Lowest Known Fossiliferous Strata,” chap. 10 in The Origin of Species, vol. 11 (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909); www.bartleby.com/11/1006.html. 18 Darwin, “Natural Selection; or the Survival of the Fittest: Convergence of Character,” chap. 4 in Origin of Species, www.bartleby.com/11/4010.html. 19 Morris Goodman, “Reconstructing Human Evolution from Proteins,” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, ed. Steve Jones, Robert Martin, and David Pilbeam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 307-13.

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phylogenies and for one molecular phylogeny to disagree with another. In my view, this incongruence represents a significant problem that has come to light thanks to mounting data. As I point out in chapter eleven, in principle the most compelling evidence for common descent is the shared nonfunctional DNA sequences found in the genomes of humans and the great apes. I would be compelled to accept the case for common descent if geneticists could unequivocally demonstrate that the so-called shared junk DNA sequences are truly nonfunctional and resulted from rare, random events. Yet the latest advances in genomics continue to provide evidence for the functional utility of every class of junk DNA. So at this point I see no reason to abandon the case for common design. In fact, the research in genomics reveals that the structure and function of genomes are much more sophisticated and complex than imagined, adding to the case for intelligent design.

CONCLUSION

Ted Cabal

The contrast is striking. Darrel believes scientific evidence is “overwhelmingly consistent” with universal common descent, with genetics having “solidified the evidence.” So, believing evolution to be consistent with the Bible, he is an evolutionary creationist. But Fuz believes evolution is not compatible with the Bible and contends that evolution cannot “fully account” for all the scientific evidence. Darrel has mainstream biology on his side, emphasizing that Fuz “accepts the correctness of the physical sciences” while considering “the biological sciences to be incorrect at their very core.” But though Darrel views evolution as philosophically neutral—providing neither theism nor atheism an advantage—he admits that “the literature is full of statements by scientists” writing “as though the theory of evolution has disproven theism.” I am grateful that Darrel squarely faces the fact that the scientific community often weaponizes evolutionary theory against Christianity. Aside from theological concerns, evolutionists’ anti-Christian fusillades alone explain why conservative evangelicals have long resisted evolution’s complete program. Fuz may be swimming against the evolutionary mainstream, but Darrel appears to be doing the same. If the biggest names in evolutionary science pronounce against theism in the name of that science, whom should evangelicals trust? No wonder we face the unhappy

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situation of Bible-believing layfolk having to choose their favorite youngearth, old-earth, or evolutionary creationist authority who seems best able to hold together biblical, scientific, and cultural tensions. Again, it is no surprise that in addition to universal common descent, issues discussed in other chapters such as biblical authority, general revelation, and methodological naturalism lead me and most Southern Baptists to feel much more at home with the position Fuz stakes out. But I’m grateful for honest dialogue with brothers like Darrel. One great day we’ll no longer need proficiency in intramural apologetics!

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The Geological Evidence What Is the Natural History of the Earth and the Origin of Life? Robert Stewart, Ralph Stearley, and Hugh Ross

SBC MODERATOR ROBERT STEWART Without a doubt the most controversial scientific issue among evangelical Christians is that of biological evolution. BioLogos and Reasons to Believe differ on this point; BioLogos affirms biological evolution while RTB rejects it. Yet both groups agree on what to my mind is the next most frequently fought-over question: the age of the earth. If our planet is old (billions, not thousands of years old), then evolution is possible, though not certain. But if our planet is young (thousands, not billions of years old), then evolution is not possible. An old earth is thus a necessary but not sufficient condition for evolution to be a fact. It is thus clear that what science, particularly geology, can tell us about the age of our planet is important. Interestingly enough, when the age of the earth is debated the two sides frequently talk past each other. One side appeals to what it takes to be the biblical position while the other stresses what it takes to be the scientific position. To use a sporting metaphor, each team is comfortable playing on its home court. Yet both sides agree that the book of nature and the book of Scripture cannot contradict each other. Young-earth advocate Kurt Wise

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plainly states it: “A face-value reading of the Bible indicates that the creation is thousands of years old. A face-value examination of the creation suggests it is millions or billions of years old. The reconciliation of these two observations is one of the most significant challenges to creation research.”1 Both BioLogos and RTB think that this reconciliation is possible, although they may seek it by different paths. Harmonizing the two books of revelation as to the age of the earth is indeed a crucial task, but it is not enough. Geology involves more than assigning an age to our planet; it also attempts to trace the processes by which the earth came to be as it is. For evolution to be confirmed not only must the earth be old, but the findings of geology as to earth’s processes must also be consistent with evolutionary theory. So are they? It is to this question that we now turn.

BioLogos Author Ralph Stearley This chapter will discuss how fossils have helped us uncover a history to life, spanning more than three billion years during Earth’s yet longer history. It will also address the role that life forms have played in making Earth habitable for more advanced life forms like us. My essay is personal and is founded on four decades of investigating fossils and the history of life. RTB will find little to disagree with in the dates assigned to fossils and in the overall progression of life forms as reflected in the fossil record. But Bio­ Logos finds this evidence highly indicative of evolution and the interconnectedness of all life on Earth. To orient ourselves to the almost unfathomably long natural history of Earth, it will help to take a moment to define the terms that geologists use in subdividing Earth history. We now assess Earth’s age as a bit more than 4.5 billion years. That overall history is sliced into four long eons, and our own eon—the Phanerozoic—is split into three eras, as seen in table 1. How has the paleontological record informed us of life’s history? The data continue to mount and give greater clarity, but after a few centuries of well-executed and thoughtful fossil extraction and curation, we can reconstruct a good overview of life’s history plus many detailed local histories. In Kurt Wise, Faith, Form, and Time: What the Bible Teaches and Science Confirms About Creation and the Age of the Universe (Nashville, TN: B&H, 2002), 58.

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several dozen instances, a nearly complete ancient ecological system is (providentially) well preserved. The remains of particular organisms usually take the form of preserved hard parts, such as shells, skeletons, or teeth; but in some environments where oxygen has been excluded, decay is halted and soft parts may also be preserved (e.g., an insect preserved in amber). Collectively these preserved materials present at least a 3.4-billion-year pattern to the history of life. By means of radiometric dating, they also establish a timetable for significant occurrences within this pattern. Finally, they provide information about processes that acted on organisms in the past. For example, tooth marks on bones evidence predation or scavenging. Table 1. Geological divisions of Earth’s history Eon

Era

Millions of Years Ago

Cenozoic

65–present

Phanerozoic

Mesozoic

251–65

Paleozoic

542–251

Proterozoic

2500–542

Archean

3850–2500

Hadean

4500–2850

Some history of paleontology. Between 1790 and 1830 the reality of an order with respect to rock layering (a stratigraphic pattern) became broadly appreciated. The same fossils were found over and over again in distinct layers of rock throughout the world. Soon hundreds of scientists in Europe and eastern North America were able to identify a sequence of many thousands of fossils, which gave rise to the realization that life developed in stages over long stretches of time. Throughout the nineteenth century, fossils continued to provide dramatic revelations of undreamt-of past biotas (the animal and plant life of a particular region). By 1850, Mesozoic-era skeletons of swimming marine reptiles, flying reptiles (pterosaurs), and large terrestrial reptiles—dinosaurs— brought on the world’s first dinosaur craze. Since that day, thousands of inspired amateur rockhounds have verified the reality of the stratigraphic order to the fossil record. This regular order, testable by anyone reading this article, witnesses to a protracted history to life on Earth.

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These early paleontologists realized that many ancient biotas had become extinct. Initially, the best explanations for this included catastrophes that wiped out entire biotas at once. The brilliant French paleontologist Georges Cuvier, for example, talked of “revolutions” in the history of life. From 1650 to 1860 most scientists who involved themselves with fossils were practicing Christians (though some were deists). They saw the history of life as consistent with a God who is free to act dramatically or mundanely as he chooses. In the middle of these dramatic discoveries, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace proposed that life’s historical pattern could be explained on the basis of repeatedly branching genealogies. Darwin’s sole diagram in his book On the Origin of Species (1859) was of a branching pattern somewhat akin to a branching bush. Darwin inferred that all of life was genealogically connected. He argued that changes from one generation to the next were subtle, like those we see in domestic breeds today, and that major changes were accomplished little by little over many generations. He also proposed that the mechanisms driving these subtle changes were the pressures brought to bear on organisms by their environment, and not necessarily some inborn drive or final cause. He described his mechanism as “natural selection.” Darwin believed that this process played out in a competitive manner. During the latter nineteenth century, paleontologists and systematic biologists realized that there was explanatory power to the Darwin-Wallace proposal of common descent. For example, the potential relationship of dinosaurs to birds was debated as long ago as 1860 when Archaeopteryx fossils were first discovered. They possessed modern-looking feathers as well as other birdlike features, but also exhibited a host of anatomical structures more typical of some dinosaurs. By about 1985, the anatomical evidences that birds are simply a subgroup of feathered dinosaurs became too dense to ignore; now all ornithologists accept this. By the 1930s and 1940s, many if not most paleontologists tended to look at the branching pattern of life’s genealogy as gradual and as the product of competitive interactions between individuals and species. They didn’t appeal to catastrophes and rejected the general perspective of nineteenth-century biologists who saw life’s history as an orderly progression. But during the past fifty years, the geologic evidences for small to planetaryscale catastrophes during Earth’s history have become overwhelming. It is

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now appreciated that the early paleontologists really were seeing dramatic events in the history of life. However, while past catastrophes have resulted in reductions in Earth’s biota, sometimes severe, in the long run these have opened new ecological space for other species to develop. The contingent nature of life’s history now is taken as a datum. The mechanisms for changes within lineages are now realized to be multifold, but remain constrained by our increasingly detailed record. Geochemical transformation. The effect of life forms on Earth’s chemical organization over this long history has been profound. For example, consider the effect of life on carbon and carbon dioxide over the past four billion years. Earth presently has a large reservoir of carbon dioxide in the form of limestone, which is composed of the mineral calcite (CaCO3). Most, though not all, of this rocky storage of carbon dioxide was accomplished by organisms that secrete calcite tests or shells. These include many algae, as well as numerous marine animals such as clams and corals. It is estimated that if all of Earth’s limestone were cooked, releasing CO2, our atmosphere would be very similar to that of Venus, with a pressure eighty or ninety times the present pressure and mostly composed of CO2. Earth’s surface would be very hot, with a grossly enhanced greenhouse effect. On Venus the effect of the high CO2 concentration has caused all water to evaporate and much of the hydrogen to be lost to space, rendering the planet waterless and surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead! The action of bacteria and algae over the first couple of billion years of Earth’s existence has drawn down the concentration of CO2, sequestering it in limestone. Simultaneously, the appearance of oxygenic photosynthesis (the earliest forms of photosynthesis employed by bacteria are thought to be nonoxygenic) began the process of increasing the concentration of free oxygen (O2) in our atmosphere, which permitted high-order, respiration-based metabolisms. The increase in oxygen levels, especially during the early Proterozoic Eon, can be discerned through many geochemical indicators such as oxide and sulfide minerals in ancient sediments. Free oxygen, which is highly reactive, was toxic to the earliest life forms and remains so for some survivors today (e.g., some bacteria). After this reactive waste product built up in the atmosphere for a couple billion years, creatures like snails, butterflies, frogs, and hummingbirds—all with oxygen-based metabolisms—could flourish.

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A further boost to the sequestration of carbon emerged during the middle Paleozoic, when the compound lignin became used by plants to form woody tissues. Lignin does not oxidize quickly and can be buried, removing more carbon from atmospheric geochemical pathways and further increasing ambient oxygen levels. The history of life includes more than two billion years of successive waves of microbes, which built the carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus cycles that most ecologists naively take as some sort of given. Increasing complexity and completeness in the fossil record. Starting in the Late Proterozoic Eon, the fossil record documents a progression from singlecelled organisms to colonial ones, to filmy frond-like organisms that absorbed all nutrients directly through their surfaces, to marine organisms that could move along the surface, to organisms that could crawl and burrow, and to organisms that could briefly emerge on land to scavenge dead remains washed up on shore. Beginning by at least the Silurian Period, 440 million years before the present, land plants with vascular tissues colonized more and more inhospitable environments. They were accompanied by arthropods that suck plant juices and then more arthropods such as spiders and scorpions. During the late Mesozoic, insects such as flies, wasps, and butterflies that carry pollen for flowering plants appeared. Flying pterosaurs, birds, and bats colonized the air, eating flying insects as well as other larger prey items. There is no doubt that the overall trend for life has been the appearance of creatures with increasing complexity. The pattern to fossils first discovered by the paleontologists of the early nineteenth century continues to be filled in today. It continues to provide much corroboration for the theory of common descent, and at different scales. For an example of small-scale changes in organisms over time within a constrained ecosystem, we can turn to small stickleback fish (Gasteroseus doryssus) fossils from the remains of a ten-million-year-old lake near Reno, Nevada. Michael Bell of Stony Brook University and his colleagues have studied these deposits and their fishes for over thirty years. They have counted annual layers of sediments with many thousands of sticklebacks. These provide a one-hundredthousand-year record with which scientists can document skeletal changes, chiefly the elaboration or loss of protective (armor) plates. For an example of a group of vertebrate fossils that demonstrate major shifts over time within a lineage, we can look at the series of air-breathing

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lobe-finned fishes. They progressively developed more leg-like appendages while remaining aquatic. They eventually became aquatic tetrapods resembling salamanders and bearing gills when young, and finally became fully terrestrial animals. Of course we don’t have fossils for every step in this line of development. But during the past thirty years the major anatomical and behavior gaps that existed prior to 1985 have been filled with the discovery or reanalyzing of forms such as Panderichthys, Tiktaalik, Acanthostega, Elginerpeton, and Greererpeton. Other forms are being documented now that will demonstrate even greater continuity in this lineage. Conclusion. The record of sedimentary rocks with their contained fossils testifies to a planet that has undergone profound changes in environmental conditions over time, including major changes in atmospheric and ocean chemistry. Surface temperature has moderated and the oxygen produced by photosynthetic creatures has provided the planet an ozone shield against ultraviolet radiation. These changes have been facilitated by life forms, with the result that Earth has become a very habitable planet compared to its Hadean Eon self. It hosts highly diverse (and aesthetic) biotas that have colonized a wide range of habitats, from sea-floor hot vents, to Antarctic ice, to high arid plateaus. As Christians, we view this huge diversity and marvel, and we rightly see it as providentially governed. This governance, however, encompasses subtle as well as dramatic environmental shifts that select for lineage changes over time. Although I resemble my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, I am thankful that I am not a pure copy of these. I am also happy that my children are individuals and not carbon copies of my wife and me. Similarly, we can be grateful that God has instituted mechanisms for lineage divergence, speciation, and ultimately life’s historical pattern and rich diversity.

Reasons to Believe Author Hugh Ross Reasons to Believe’s interpretation of the origin and history of the universe, Earth, and life is that God occasionally intervenes through transcendent miracles. These events are where God operates from beyond the laws of physics and cosmic space-time dimensions. More frequently God intervenes through hypernatural miracles. Hypernatural interventions do not compel the suspension of either the laws of physics and chemistry or the cosmic

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space-time dimensions, but they do require the agency of Someone of great intellect, knowledge, and power to direct and manage the event. RTB takes the position that through scientific investigation it is possible to identify each event in nature’s record as either a transcendent miracle, a hypernatural intervention, or the normal operation of the laws of physics and chemistry. Three examples of transcendent miracles that are core components of RTB’s biblical creation model are the origin of the universe, the origin of the soulish characteristics of the nephesh animals described in Genesis 1:21-25 and Job 38–41, and the origin of the spirit characteristics of human beings. We consider the first example to be a physical outcome from a nonphysical causal Source and the latter two examples to be nonphysical outcomes from a nonphysical causal Source. We view and use all three as powerful scientific tools for persuading atheists, agnostics, nones, and deists that the God of the Bible has created and personally intervened on our behalf. Hypernatural interventions. Four examples of hypernatural interventions that are core components of RTB’s biblical creation model are (1) the origin of purely physical life, (2) Earth’s plate tectonics history, (3) the faint sun paradox, and (4) the Avalon and Cambrian explosions of animal life. For each, I will briefly outline the case for hypernaturalism. Origin of life. Origin-of-life research shows that the laws of physics and chemistry can explain all the known operations of the simplest cells. In theory, there is nothing about the laws of nature that would prevent a cell assembling from nonliving components. In that narrow context, one could say that a natural pathway for life’s origin exists. However, in spite of all our knowledge, intellect, technology, and funding, humans have yet to assemble a life form from molecules that did not arise from biological sources. Furthermore, certain critical building-block molecules such as ribose and most of the bioactive amino acids do not exist anywhere in the universe or anywhere on Earth outside of biological sources and sophisticated biochemistry laboratories. Nor is there any means outside of biological sources and biochemistry labs for solving the homochirality problem—the requirement that all the amino acids being readied for assembly into proteins exclusively possess the left-handed configuration, and all the sugars needed to manufacture DNA and RNA exclusively possess the right-handed configuration. While it is feasible that humans one day might marshal the technology and funding to assemble a life form

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from nonbiological source materials, Christians certainly are justified in concluding that nothing less than a being that is far more intelligent, knowledgeable, and powerful than all of humanity put together is responsible for life’s origin. On the other hand, scientists are justified in saying that life’s origin does not necessarily require a miracle that transcends the space-time dimensions of the universe or the physical laws governing the universe. The origin of life is a hypernatural event, one that points directly to God’s creative hand. Plate tectonics. Thanks to plate tectonics, Earth was transformed from a water world into a planet with surface continents and surface oceans that established nutrient recycling and habitats enabling Earth to sustain advanced life. Without 3.8 billion years of plate tectonic activity, human civilization would have been impossible. Preparation for Earth’s plate tectonics history began with the sun’s birth in the one known galaxy conducive to advanced life nine billion years after the cosmic creation event, when the uranium and thorium abundance in the interstellar medium reached its maximum abundance. The sun’s birth, in a cluster of more than ten thousand stars located near the center of our galaxy, exposed the sun to several nearby supernovae that further enriched its protoplanetary disk with uranium and thorium. The powerful ejection of the sun and its protoplanetary disk from its birth cluster into a stable orbit with little z-axis movement just inside the Milky Way Galaxy’s corotation radius placed the solar system in the only location in our galaxy where advanced life could safely thrive. Then the moon-forming event and the late veneer boosted Earth’s uranium and thorium abundances to 340 and 610 times the concentration levels expected in other rocky planets. Earth’s extreme abundance levels of uranium and thorium established a long-lasting dynamo in its core, giving Earth a strong, steady magnetic field that preserved its atmosphere and protected its surface life from deadly cosmic and solar radiation. Earth’s uranium and thorium abundance also made possible long-lasting plate tectonics. However, for the plate subduction essential for advanced life to start and be maintained, it was crucial that justright life forms be present at just-right abundance levels in just-right locations on Earth at the just-right time in Earth’s history to produce and deliver uranium precipitates to the zones where subduction could possibly occur. For plate subduction to be maintained strong enough and long enough

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to produce conditions to permit the eventual existence of advanced life, justright life forms at just-right population levels at just-right times had to be progressively introduced, removed, and replaced. The wrong life at the right time or the right life at the wrong time would cause a stagnant lid—the permanent shutdown of plate tectonics. For life to be maintained with abundance, diversity, and longevity to produce the conditions and resources advanced life requires, just-right levels, locations, and timings of plate tectonic activity are needed. If Earth’s plate tectonics had departed from these fine-tuned requirements at any time in Earth’s history, Earth would have become permanently sterile. All these fine-tuning requirements argue for a hypernatural cause. It takes the active involvement of a mind that understands the future life requirements of plate tectonics to ensure that just-right life forms are removed at just-right times and replaced with different life forms. Faint sun paradox. Earth’s surface temperature must be fine-tuned for life to survive, which implies that the sun’s luminosity cannot vary by more than 2 percent. A greater variation would bring on either a runaway freezing or a runaway evaporation of all Earth’s water. The problem for life’s history, however, is that the nuclear burning history of the sun establishes that at the time of life’s origin the sun was at least 18 percent dimmer than it is today. The resolution of this faint sun paradox requires continual fine-tuning of several independent factors. Earth’s surface temperature can still be kept at an optimal level for life in spite of a fainter sun if • the heat-trapping capacity of Earth’s atmosphere is sufficiently increased; • the reflectivity of Earth’s surface is reduced; • the reflectivity of Earth’s clouds is reduced; • the reflectivity of Earth’s life is reduced; • the quantity of interstellar and interplanetary dust in Earth’s vicinity is reduced; • the quantity of cosmic rays in Earth’s vicinity is reduced; or • some combination of the above factors takes place. The right kinds of life existing at the right times, at the right abundance and di-

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versity levels, and at the right locations can sufficiently impact the first four listed factors if at the same time (1) plate tectonic activity is continually fine-tuned throughout Earth’s history and (2) the continental landmasses are fine-tuned throughout Earth’s history with respect to their sizes, shapes, and orientations, and the distributions and heights of their mountain ranges and volcanoes. Attempts to resolve the faint sun paradox by invoking just one or two of the four ways that life can compensate for a fainter sun and just one of the two geophysical fine-tunings have failed. However, invoking all six does provide an adequate solution—with one more critical proviso. That proviso is that specific life forms must be replaced at relatively frequent intervals by different life forms that are progressively more efficient in removing greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases from Earth’s atmosphere and in deflecting more of the sun’s heat and light. That is, the mass extinction and mass speciation events throughout Earth’s history must be fine-tuned. The resolution of the faint sun paradox requires hypernatural causes. Without a mind that knows and understands the future physics of the sun and the different ways various life forms and geophysical processes can compensate for a progressively brightening sun, it is simply a matter of time before Earth has the wrong life at the right time or the right life at the wrong time, and Earth becomes permanently sterile. A sterile Earth becomes inevitable if that mind is not directly involved in determining which life, tectonics, and geological configurations are present on Earth in each geological era and period throughout Earth’s history since life’s origin 3.8 billion years ago.2 Avalon and Cambrian explosions. Animals have existed for only the last 12.6 percent of Earth’s history. One reason for the delay is the lack of sufficient oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere to sustain the respiration levels animals require. The most primitive animals—those without a mouth, a digestive tract, and an anus—can get by if oxygen makes up just 8 percent of Earth’s atmosphere. More advanced animals—those with digestive tracts, eyes, and limbs—need a minimum of 10 percent oxygen in the atmosphere. It is now established that oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere suddenly jumped from 1 percent to 8 percent about 580 million years ago (just before the Avalon explosion) and suddenly jumped again to 10 percent about 543 For more information, see Hugh Ross, Improbable Planet: How Earth Became Humanity’s Home (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2016).

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million years ago (just before the Cambrian explosion). Paleontologists cannot measure any time delay between these two oxygenation events and the appearance of the Avalon animals and later the Cambrian animals, respectively. Furthermore, at least for the Cambrian animals, nearly all the different phyla, including the most advanced that have ever existed (vertebrate chordates), appeared suddenly and simultaneously at the very beginning of the Cambrian event. The lack of any evolutionary history and the suddenness of the quantum jumps in which Earth went from microscopic to macroscopic life, from no animals to animals, in response to the oxygenation events argues for a hypernatural cause. That at least 80 percent of all mathematically conceivable skeletal designs appear in the animals of the Cambrian explosion strengthens the case for a hypernatural cause. That human civilization would be impossible unless the Avalon and Cambrian appearances of animals were both as early as physically possible and as aggressive as physically possible, in our judgment, seals the case for a hypernatural cause. Model applications. Even a cursory examination of Earth’s astronomical, physical, and geological history reveals God actively intervening to ensure that the pinnacle of his works of creation in the universe, human beings, would have all the resources they need to complete the mission God assigned to them. If God supernaturally intervened and cared so much in preparing Earth and its life for humans, then how much more must he care and supernaturally intervene in the life of every human being? All of us who are Christians active in evangelism, missions, and ministry have witnessed God repeatedly intervening in miraculous ways. This experience is consistent with a God who is actively engaged in every part of his natural realm through transcendent miracles, hypernatural interventions, and exquisite designs by which he established the space-time dimensions, the laws of physics, and the physical features of the universe and all its physical components.

REDIRECT

Robert Stewart

Given that both BioLogos and RTB affirm old-earth positions, there is no disagreement as to the general age of the universe. This chapter seems to feature two different sorts of answers. Ralph offers a descriptive essay on what science reveals about the fossil record as it currently stands. Hugh, on

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the other hand, first offers a schema for categorizing divine action in creation that features three categories: (1) miraculous interventions, (2) hypernatural interventions, and (3) physical laws. He then gives examples of the sorts of data that fall into each category. For Ralph: I would like to hear more about the BioLogos position with respect to divine agency. Is the position (to the degree that you speak for BioLogos) that BioLogos understands the fossil record to have come about entirely as a result of natural laws, whereas RTB sees the mechanism that produced the fossil record as a combination of hypernatural interventions coupled with natural laws? For Hugh: Would it be safe to say that you agree with Ralph and BioLogos concerning the facts of the fossil record but have a different interpretation of how the fossil record came to be what it is? If you disagree on the facts of the fossil record, where exactly does your disagreement lie?

BIOLOGOS RESPONSE

Ralph Stearley

BioLogos Foundation affiliated scholars affirm a Christian theistic approach to the relationship of God to his creation. We believe, as do the Reasons to Believe team, that God initiated and directs the history of the cosmos. We also share the belief that this providential supervision has extended over many billions of years of cosmic history, including the past 4.5 billion years in which Earth and life came into being. This long period of oversight yields no problem for the God of the Bible (see Ps 90). Thoughtful Christians and other theists have long pondered the nature of God’s governance over his good creation. The creation is not God, but God is immanently present in all places and times. And it is God’s faithfulness that undergirds the routine, law-like operations of the world. On the other hand, God is ultimately free. His freedom includes the ability to do “new” things—things that are not anticipated. Some of these free acts supervene on the normal order of the universe, such that very subtle yet contingent events occur. At other times unusual and unexpected events occur, such as the impact of an extraterrestrial object with Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, causing the loss of many types of creatures and opening wide new ecological niches. And sometimes these free acts are simply outside our experience—for example, the incarnation, transfigu-

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ration, and resurrection of Jesus. For a larger explication of divine action by someone from BioLogos, I refer the reader to the section by Jim Stump in chapter five of this volume. Narrowing our focus to interpretations of the history of life on Earth, paleontologists find it useful to distinguish between the patterns that we see in the fossil record and the inferences of processes that account for them. Typical processes for which we have ample experience in everyday life include those involving genetics, ecological relationships such as predation, the physical principles undergirding the mechanics of organisms, and physiological principles such as the relationship between temperature and enzyme function, among many others. Paleontologists apply these principles to past organisms based on our confidence in the uniformity of natural laws. Christian scientists are justified in holding to this principle of uniformity because it is in reality based on God’s faithfulness to his creation. An uncontroversial example of the application of the uniformity of processes principle would be the inference, based on bone and muscle properties, that a Tyrannosaurus rex could not run eighty miles per hour or jump over a one-hundred-foot-tall tree. Another example would be that on discovering a large deposit of fossil coniferous trees, ferns, and winged insects we would not infer that these creatures lived at the bottom of an ocean. The accumulated evidence provided by the genetic molecules in cells, anatomical similarities, biogeographic patterns, and the fossil record has convinced almost all scientists that a genetic continuity exists among all forms of life past and present. This conviction of genetic continuity is affirmed by BioLogos scientists, theologians, and other scholars. King David in Psalm 139 declared that God had knit him in his mother’s womb. God was working through genetic processes. Mainstream paleontologists and evolutionary biologists agree on genetic continuity over the history of life, but there is some disagreement as to the significance of different processes of lineage evolution and processes leading to the divergence of different species. We understand that natural selection occurs but also that, due to the redundancy of the genetic code, some genetic mutations are completely neutral. We also understand that small changes to the DNA of regulatory genes can yield huge impacts on developing embryos and infants. Thus, subtle nudges to genetic information can yield a spectrum

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of potential evolutionary change, from zero to large shifts in organismal design. There remain major outstanding issues in organismal history, such as the origination of multicellularity. An example of a poorly understood evolutionary innovation is the origin of the insect larval stage and particularly the profound transformations that happen in the pupa stage of butter­ flies and moths. BioLogos authors, with a conviction of the uniformity of nature based on God’s faithfulness, are generally in step with their non­ believing scientific colleagues: united regarding the genetic continuity of all of life but not in complete agreement with one another on the implications for God’s supervenience over the course of life’s history. Both BioLogos scholars and RTB scholars take history and historical processes seriously. For that reason, I expect there to be many points of agreement in our mutual assessment of theological implications. For example, we agree that the universe—the cosmos—is a creation out of nothing, whether one terms this an “intervention” or not. We also agree that Earth (together with its sun) has functioned remarkably as an abode for life. With regard to the origin of life from prebiotic chemistry, I think a spectrum of legitimate beliefs is to be found among the BioLogos supporters. Some, like myself, remain skeptical that geochemical processes could produce protocells and find ourselves in complete agreement with an RTB approach, while perhaps not employing the RTB phrase “hypernatural intervention.” Other BioLogos authors are comfortable with the notion that cellular functions originated out of normal geochemical processes. Some phenomena described as hypernatural interventions by Hugh in this chapter are, I think, more likely due to God’s patient governance. For example, the emergence of the Ediacaran biota (“Avalon explosion”) and so-called Cambrian explosion biota are decomposable into small-scale, ordinary, ecologically driven diversification periods in Earth’s history. I am in agreement with Hugh, though, that some components of these diversifications (e.g., the origin of triploblastic embryonic development and the origin of eyes) are certainly a cause for wonder. Psalm 104 is a commentary on the regularity of creation and God’s faithfulness in maintaining a natural order. It speaks, for example, of lions getting their prey from God; of the sea teeming with creatures beyond number; and of volcanoes: he “touches the mountains, and they smoke.” Such things continue to testify to God’s faithfulness, even though we find

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comprehendible causes for them. In like manner, Earth’s history and the history of life, while subject to our investigation as God’s agents, reveal simultaneously God’s faithfulness and his freedom and beauty.

REASONS TO BELIEVE RESPONSE

Hugh Ross

I think we agree with Ralph on the facts of the fossil record. However, at least one other member of the BioLogos team has disputed our claim that the Avalon and Cambrian explosions of animal life were relatively sudden events. We believe the secular scientific literature sustains our claim. This dispute illustrates both organizations’ commitment to stand by the well-established facts of nature. Where there is disagreement about what is well-established and what is open to different interpretations, Reasons to Believe would call for a more extensive survey and evaluation of the scientific literature and especially for additional research studies designed to settle the disagreement. While recognizing that the fossil record is incomplete, we believe an adequate record exists to test competing philosophical interpretations of what or who is responsible for why the fossil record looks the way it does. As we clearly stated in our opening statement on the geological evidence, we see an overwhelming scientific case against a naturalistic interpretation of the history of Earth—one that is in favor of the supernatural handiwork of the God of the Bible. Where RTB and BioLogos probably disagree is on how much credence we give to molecular clocks. Molecular clocks, based on the assumption that life forms diverged from common ancestors, use biomolecular differences between two or more species and a presumed mutation rate in those biomolecules to determine when the species diverged from a presumed common ancestor. If molecular clocks were indeed reliable, they would yield dates consistent with the fossil record and consistent with one another. They do not, and that fact, in our opinion, calls into question the evolutionary assumptions undergirding molecular clocks.3 Nevertheless, while we view molecular clocks as a virtually useless tool for determining the history of Earth’s life, we would I document some dramatic examples in Improbable Planet, 177-79.

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agree with BioLogos on the reliability of the fossil record for determining the history of life on Earth.

CONCLUSION

Robert Stewart

I’m grateful for the succinct answers that we have from Ralph on the part of BioLogos and from Hugh for RTB. I appreciate the theological balance between God’s faithfulness and his freedom, between his immanence and his transcendence that Ralph provides in his answers. He helpfully points out the relationships between the patterns that scientists observe and the processes that they infer from these patterns to account for their observations. This makes perfect sense. This is similar in some ways to what theologians do when they make inferences from patterns in Scripture to theological principles concerning God’s nature or his action in history. Few, if any, will object to such inferences. This is not to say that there will be no objection when a particular process is inferred from a particular pattern and spelled out in detail. I am pleased to see that our authors are in agreement as to the facts of the fossil record, and I note the fact that Hugh never appeals to the Bible in his answers. It seems then that whatever disagreements they have will be over how best to interpret scientific data. I’m not certain whether Hugh’s comment concerning “an overwhelming scientific case against a naturalistic interpretation of the history of Earth” is directed toward an atheistic interpretation or toward interpretations that rely entirely on natural processes—that is, interpretations that are instrumentally composed entirely of causes that fit well within known natural laws. I’m ignorant of the relevant facts concerning molecular clocks, but Hugh’s point is well argued (modus tollens). Therefore, if he is right on the facts, then the implications concerning evolutionary assumptions must be taken very seriously.

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The Fossil Evidence Who Were the Hominids? Robert Stewart, Ralph Stearley, and Fuz Rana

SBC MODERATOR ROBERT STEWART Fossils are cool! They have the power to transport us into another world, where we find dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex and raptor, stegosaurus and brontosaurus, and many other gentle giants or fearsome predators that lived in the distant past. But of course fossils do more than this. Fossils are significant for at least two reasons. First, at least some of them seem to be quite old, much older than one can easily reconcile with a youngearth view. Second, because dinosaur fossils are not the only kind of fossils that we have, fossils can potentially show us at least the broader contours of how life evolved from one species to another, if evolutionary theory is correct. Therefore, when we consider evolution, the crucial question is this: Does the fossil evidence show the sort of development that one would expect to find according to evolution? Of special importance is the question: What, if anything, can fossils tell us about human development? If fossil evidence is consistent with what we think evolution should look like, then we have support for the theory, although in and of itself this evidence would not prove the theory. If, on the other hand, the data is contrary to what we would expect on evolution, then this would be evidence that could undermine or perhaps even refute the theory altogether.

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So what do the fossils that we have tell us? It is to that question that we now turn.

BioLogos Author Ralph Stearley The fossil record of the apes, family Hominidae in the mammalian order Primates, is rich in species scattered across the Old World and extends twenty-five million years into the past. (The Hominidae are informally termed “hominids,” and this chapter will often employ that informal term.) To date, no fossil apes have been located in the New World. There are presently many paleontologists who focus on the fossil record of apes, and the number of excellent specimens, well-excavated with good contextual information, is increasing rapidly. A subfamily of hominids are the Homininae (informally termed “hominins”); they include several fossil species, the modern African great apes, and humans (see discussion below). The fossil record of the hominins is rooted in European forms that date back to twelve million years ago. But beginning about six or seven million years ago, apes appeared in Africa that are regarded as significant for detecting human ancestry. This narrative will address these remains, but some preparatory pondering is first in order. Implications of classifying humans as apes. Fossils provide various kinds of evidence that address the question of whether humans descend biologically from ancient apes. But even to begin to evaluate this evidence instantly raises fears in the minds of many that an argument is being developed to the effect that humans are nothing but apes, somehow to be equated with modern chimpanzees or gorillas. So it will be worthwhile to consider what it might mean for humans to be classified as some kind of ape. What exactly are humans, biologically speaking? Are humans insects, perhaps? Or mollusks? Where do they fall into the overall biological order? It turns out that biologists and anatomists have been intrigued by natural comparisons between apes and humans since the 1600s. Famously, in 1699 Edward Tyson described the anatomy of a chimpanzee. Long prior to Darwin or other evolutionary theorists, he identified forty-eight features by which the chimpanzee closely resembled humans but only thirty-four features by which it more closely resembled monkeys. In other words, Tyson identified specific anatomic characteristics that justify including extant apes and humans in

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some sort of common biological category. By the middle 1700s Carolus Linnaeus, in his foundational work on biological taxonomy, included humans along with apes and monkeys in his mammalian order Primates. Later, in 1863, Thomas Henry Huxley in Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature proposed that humans descended from ancient apes. Huxley’s proposal was not based on fossil evidences, which were sparse in his day, but almost completely on anatomical features. Thus, whether one agrees with Huxley’s conclusion regarding human descent, according to fundamental anatomical pattern the human species is noncontroversially a member of the larger group of apes, family Hominidae—just as humans are noncontroversially vertebrates because they possess an ossified backbone, and noncontroversially placental mammals because they employ a placenta to bear their young alive. And what is more, humans share unique anatomical characteristics with the more restrictive group of modern African apes (subfamily Homininae), such as the fusion of two of the standard mammalian wrist bones. So humans, along with living African apes and several fossil ape species, are technically considered members of the subfamily Homininae. This classification is regarded by biologists as redundantly certain—redundantly because so many lines of biological characteristics cluster humans together with living great apes. Behaviorally, however, humans differ greatly from other extant apes and are endowed with properties that enable them to fulfill their role as God’s image bearers. This evaluation is regarded as certain in this present context. With these considerations in mind, we can consider two questions of interest: (1) Did God employ “standard” genealogical processes to create humans, or did he create humans, with their mammalian, primate, and hominid anatomical features, out of nothing? (2) If God employed typical genealogical processes to create humans, can such processes explicate the inauguration of humanity’s role as image bearers, or would such an office be conferred at a particular point in time and space, as the early chapters of Genesis describe? I believe that (1) fossils provide strong evidence that human anatomical similarities to living apes are not coincidental but result from historical processes, and (2) the early chapters of Genesis describe the election of humans to the office of God’s image bearers. Fossil evidence for human ancestry. During the nineteenth century, fossils of archaic hominins began to come to light. Some of the earliest to be

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discovered became known as Neanderthals, after a principal site in the Neander Valley, Germany. Over succeeding years the stature, appearance, technological abilities, and mental capacities of Neanderthals would be analyzed and debated. In the late nineteenth century, remains of modern-aspect humans (“Cro-Magnons”) were also discovered in European caves that chronologically overlapped the occupancies of the Neanderthals, suggesting perhaps that modern-looking humans had replaced Neanderthal populations. Then, beginning around 1900, other hominin remains assigned to several species and genera were discovered in Pliocene (5 million years ago to 1.8 million years ago) and Pleistocene (1.8 million years ago to ten thousand years ago) sites across southern and eastern Africa, the Middle East, southern Europe, Russia, China, and Java. We will briefly consider the major categories of fossil hominins that have been discovered and are believed to shed light on the biological ancestry of humanity. Fossils of the subgroup Homininae, which include that lineage that leads to humans, have been located in African sites dating to seven million years ago, but the earliest of these forms are represented by incomplete skulls and skeletons and thus their exact biological affinities are yet under discussion. This narrative will begin with apes from approximately six million years before the present. These ancient apes, the australopithecines (the name means “southern ape”), are the earliest group of potential human ancestors, and thus far their remains have been found only in Africa. The australopithecines, comprising several species placed in the genera Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Ardipithecus, possessed apelike skulls with small (400 cubic centimeter) brains. (Modern humans have brain capacities between 1,200 and 1,600 cubic centimeters.) While the foramen magnum (the opening through which the spinal cord passes out of the skull) is oriented at the base of the australopithecine skull, indicating an upright posture, their limbs and pelvic bones were not adapted for fluid bipedality. In fact, the chronologically earliest and anatomically more primitive Ardipithecus retained an abducted big toe (i.e., extended laterally as in most fossil and extant apes). On the other hand, the famous preserved trackway at the Tanzanian site of Laetoli, assigned to Australopithecus africanus and dated to circa 3.7 million years ago, includes many footprints from three individuals, all planting their feet and striding as

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modern humans do. And australopithecine anterior teeth—incisors and canines—were reduced in size and look relatively humanlike. These early hominins manufactured a consistent toolkit, based on smashing baseball-sized cobbles together to obtain simple handheld chopping instruments. Perhaps some of the fragments split off the choppers were then utilized as blades for slicing food items or other materials. This earliest tool kit is named the Oldowan technology, after the significant fossil location of Olduvai Gorge, Kenya. These choppers, though crude by our standards, are much more sophisticated than the stones utilized by modern chimpanzees for smashing food items. The Oldowan technology remained essentially unchanged for over a million years. In summary, the australopithecines are a diverse group of upright apes, definitely nonhuman but on the other hand more technologically adept than are modern chimpanzees. Beginning around two million years ago, other hominids with much greater brain capacities (800 to 1,000 cubic centimeters) appear in the fossil record; they migrated out from eastern Africa into the Middle East, southern Asia, and southern Europe. These larger-brained hominins include several species placed within the genus Homo, such as Homo ergaster and Homo erectus. They possess a pelvis that looks remarkably human and leg proportions appropriate to human-style striding and running. The famous H. erectus “Nariokotome boy,” from the site of Nariokotome, Kenya, for example, was slender and stood six feet one. H. erectus and H. ergaster employed a much more elaborate toolkit than did the australopithecines, and there is evidence that they controlled fire. Some anthropologists speculate that these creatures possessed speech to some degree, because some sort of cultural transmission for their technology is likely. Several notable fossil discoveries appear to bridge the anatomical gap between Australopithecus and the early Pleistocene representatives of the genus Homo such as H. ergaster. Two of the more promising candidates are Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis. These forms are represented by wellpreserved skulls, with braincases 600 to 700 cubic centimeters in volume, midway between capacities typical of Australopithecus and those of H. erectus or H. ergaster, and their jaws are more reduced with consequent less facial projection. But postcranial remains of H. habilis and H. rudolfensis are sparse, complicating interpretations. The hand of H. habilis, however,

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exhibits muscle attachment sites that imply great manual dexterity, leading to the nickname “handy man.” Fossils from many localities in southern Europe and England, dated to between 500,000 and 200,000 years before today, have higher cranial capacities than H. erectus or H. ergaster and facially resemble Neanderthals. These have been assigned to the species Homo heidelbergensis. One site, Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, northern Spain, has yielded two thousand specimens, dated to 350,000 years ago. The remains include three complete skulls and six partial skulls as well as abundant postcranial skeletal remains. The mean height for these individuals was about five feet six and the mean braincase volume in H. heidelbergensis approaches 1,300 cubic centimeters. By this time, tools were complicated. Stone tools were based on a prepared core technology, in which an initial blank is prepped, blades are struck successively from this blank, and then the blades are modified. Wooden throwing spears are also known from this time period. By approximately 180,000 years ago, modern-looking human skeletal remains with brain capacities much greater than 1,200 cubic centimeters appear in the record. These are frequently termed “anatomically modern” humans. They appear in Africa and then in successive waves in the Middle East and outward. They are accompanied by carved shell ornaments and complicated multicomponent tools. Several Christian theologians, psychologists, and paleoanthropologists have suggested that these represent the first hominins to bear God’s image. Neanderthals have now been located in many sites in Europe. They are barrel-chested, and the muscle attachments on their limbs reveal that they were very robust. Many exhibit broken bones. Some of the later Neanderthal sites demonstrate the use of pigments, deliberate burial of the dead, and perhaps art. They gradually disappeared from the record as modern-aspect humans migrated westward across southern Europe, ultimately dying out in Spain and Gibraltar. Genetic studies now demonstrate that modern Europeans have some surviving Neanderthal genes. Did Neanderthals share the image of God with “modern” humans? Human ancestry and the image of God. In summary: clear trends can be seen over the past five million years in posture, stature, locomotion, brain size, teeth, technology, and aesthetics, with conditions resembling more and

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more those of modern humans through time. Christians are left to ponder (just as secular paleoanthropologists do) what the cultural, ethical, and spiritual correlates to these transitions just might be. Does brain size provide a clear signal? What about particular tools, or the use of fire, or other aspects? I understand that all humans are created by God. But I am not sure that it is counter to God’s purposes to produce the human lineage as another of the ramifying branches on a diversifying “tree of life.” The human position on this historical branch says nothing about God’s ability to select humanity to bear his image—any more than Abraham’s ancestry precluded God from selecting him to initiate a special lineage within his redemptive economy, or the humble origins of Mary prevented God from choosing her to bear the Savior of the world. The hominin fossil record is strongly suggestive of lineage continuity with apes. We will continue to see more fossils discovered; my prediction is that lineage continuity of humans with other hominins will tighten. But our human biological backdrop is overlain with a profound cultural and spiritual dimension, enabling humans to fulfill the cultural mandate, converse with God, and enjoy his fellowship and redeeming love forever.

Reasons to Believe Author Fuz Rana One of the most remarkable scientific accomplishments over the course of the last century has been the discovery and characterization of fossils such as the Toumai Man (Sahelanthropus tchadensis), Ardi (Ardipithecus ramidus), Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), the Handy Man (Homo habilis), the Turkana Boy (Homo ergaster), the Java Man (Homo erectus), and Neanderthals. The last decade or so is of particular note, witnessing the recovery of various new hominid fossils, including those that have been identified as a new species, such as Australopithecus sediba, Homo gautengensis, Homo georgicus, and Homo antecessor. These extraordinary discoveries reveal a rich and elaborate natural history over the last six million years for creatures that paleoanthropologists refer to as hominins. The fossil record—along with the accompanying archaeological and geological records—provides insight into hominin biology, behavior, culture, and life history. The scientific record also supplies information about the timing of the hominins’ existence and the ecology of their environments.

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Most biologists, including the scholars at BioLogos, interpret the hominin fossil record from within the confines of the evolutionary paradigm. They regard the hominins as transitional intermediates, documenting an evolutionary origin for modern humans. A creation-model interpretation of the hominins. In some respects, we regard hominins in much the same way as the majority of the scientific community: as real animals that existed in Earth’s past. (I will use the words hominid and hominin interchangeably, despite some taxonomic differences.) We also consider the dates assigned to hominin fossils as generally reliable, within the limitations of the methods used to obtain them. But instead of viewing the hominids as transitional forms documenting the evolution of humanity, the RTB model interprets the hominins as creatures—animals— created by God. These extraordinary creatures walked erect and possessed enough intelligence to assemble crude tools and even adopt some level of “culture.” The RTB model maintains that the hominids were not spiritual beings. They were not made in God’s image. RTB’s model reserves this status exclusively for Adam and Eve and their descendants—modern humans. Our model predicts many biological similarities between the hominids and modern humans, but also significant differences. The greatest distinctions should be related to their cognitive capacity, behavior patterns, technological development, and culture, especially artistic and religious expression. (The cognitive differences between modern humans and the hominins are discussed in some detail in chapter eleven.) Why not an evolutionary interpretation? Some might wonder how we justify our skepticism of human evolution from a scientific perspective. A thorough response to this question is beyond the scope of this chapter.1 From our perspective, for human evolution to be valid, the transitional forms connecting australopithecines to primitive Homo specimens and in turn connecting these hominids to modern humans should be discernible in the fossil record. At this juncture, paleoanthropologists cannot reasonably map out the naturalistic route that produced modern humans. In fact, we question 1

For an extensive critique of human evolution and for references to the original scientific literature cited in this essay, I refer the interested reader to the expanded second edition of Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Who Was Adam? A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Humanity (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2015).

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whether this will ever be possible. Paleoanthropologists disagree on the evolutionary relationships among the hominids, specifically on the pathway that led to modern humans. Examination of any textbook or treatise on human evolution attests to this conflict. In light of this significant failure, we believe it is unwarranted to consider human evolution any more than a hypothesis. That human evolution occurred is as much a hypothesis as how it occurred. The nature of the hominin fossil record. When most people think of hominid fossils, they picture nearly complete skeletal remains. Popular presentations almost always feature the greater-than-90-percent-complete Turkana Boy specimen, or Lucy, which consists of a nearly 40-percentcomplete postcranial skeleton. Yet these specimens are unusual. Most hominid fossil discoveries consist of partial crania, partial jaws, isolated teeth, and occasionally isolated limb fragments. Paleoanthropologists rarely find a complete cranium, let alone an entire skeleton. Very few hominid species have extensive representation in the fossil record. In most cases, researchers define a species based on a limited number of fragmentary fossil finds and a handful of specimens. Without a large number of specimens, paleoanthropologists cannot accurately decipher the range of morphological variation that occurs within a population or across geography and time. And without this knowledge, it is uncertain whether hominids with morphological differences from two time periods in the geological column represent two distinct species with an evolutionary connection or the range of variation within a particular species. Often the hominid remains are crushed or shattered prior to fossilization and further deformed by geological processes. These limitations make proper analysis of the hominid fossil record very difficult. Distortions and deformations of hominid fossils obscure paleoanthropologists’ ability to construct accurate evolutionary trees. The implications are enormous for human evolutionary scenarios, as illustrated by recent fossil finds for Australopithecus afarensis, or Lucy. Case study: The status of Lucy in human evolution. The standard evolutionary view places Lucy in the direct pathway from an apelike ancestor to modern humans. Presumably, Ardipithecus ramidus (approximately 4.5 million years ago) gave rise to Australopithecus anamensis (about 4 million years ago). This hominid evolved into A. afarensis, which later yielded Homo

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habilis, the first member of the genus Homo. Anthropologists believe that A. afarensis also produced a second evolutionary branch that included Australopithecus africanus and terminated with three species grouped into the genus Paranthropus: P. boisei, P. aethiopicus, and P. robustus. Analysis of a jawbone from an A. afarensis discovered in 2002 about a mile from where paleontologists unearthed Lucy indicates—from an evolutionary vantage point—that Lucy was exclusively part of the branch leading to A. africanus and Paranthropus. Based on jawbone anatomy, Lucy could not have been directly in the line that led to modern humans. If this is the case, then Lucy’s new status leaves a two-million-year gap in the fossil record between A. anamensis and H. habilis (2.5 million years ago). In the summer of 2010, a team of paleoanthropologists discovered fossils that composed a remarkably complete collection of postcranial remains for A. afarensis, dating to around 3.6 million years ago. Unlike the remains of the Lucy specimen (dating to around 3.2 million years ago)— which indicated that A. afarensis was a diminutive creature with apelike body proportions—the newly uncovered fossils clearly demonstrate that A. afarensis stood about five feet in height with body proportions very much like Homo erectus. This specimen also showed that A. afarensis employed obligate (i.e., it had no reasonable alternative) bipedalism, not a facultative (functional or optional) form, as was long thought to be the case for Lucy. In other words, the Lucy specimen—which is not only the poster girl for A. afarensis but also the key hominid used to interpret the biology of other hominids in the fossil record—is anomalous and has misled paleoanthropologists for more than three decades. Support for this new understanding of A. afarensis’ biology and the evolutionary status of Lucy comes from another team of researchers who examined a fossil of the fourth metatarsal assigned to A. afarensis dating around 3.2 million years in age. The structure of this foot bone, recovered in the Hadar region of Ethiopia, is diagnostic of the overall structure of the foot. The architectural features of this bone indicate that A. afarensis had an arched foot just like the members of the genus Homo. This new insight implies that A. afarensis engaged in a form of bipedalism that was like that of H. erectus. That is, this species was an obligate biped, not a facultative one.

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Particularly important to understanding A. afarensis’ gait are the Laetoli footprints. These trace fossils, dating to about 3.7 million years ago, were made by three individuals walking through volcanic ash. Paleoanthropologists believe an A. afarensis family made these tracks. The Laetoli footprints have been a source of controversy. Analysis of the footprints indicates that A. afarensis must have walked like members of the genus Homo, employing obligate bipedalism. Yet the skeletal anatomy of Lucy shows that A. afarensis must have relied on a crude, facultative form of bipedalism. A modeling study published in the summer of 2012 provides additional evidence that the hominids that made the Laetoli footprints were not facultative bipeds, but instead walked like H. erectus. It is sobering to think that the Lucy specimen, the gold standard when it comes to hominid fossils, could turn out to be an aberrant A. afarensis. (Although it should be noted that some paleoanthropologists have argued that Lucy has been improperly classified as a member of A. afarensis. In fact, they argue that she is actually a male that belongs to another hominid species. Other researchers have disputed this claim.) Lucy’s unusual anatomy has caused paleoanthropologists to formulate wrong views on the biology and behavior of A. afarensis, highlighting the extreme incompleteness of the hominid fossil record. This incompleteness makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to develop a clear understanding of hominid natural history and establish evolutionary relationships among these creatures and modern humans, assuming it exists. The confusion surrounding Lucy’s biology and place in human evolution is not atypical. It is remarkable how frequently new hominin fossil finds force a rewrite of human evolution—over and over again. Will it ever be possible to build hominin evolutionary trees? In the midst of these difficulties, work published by Mark Collard and Bernard Wood raises serious and fundamental questions about the capability of paleoanthropologists to ever establish evolutionary relationships among hominids.2 In their view, any evolutionary tree paleoanthropologists construct for hominids will always be hopelessly uncertain. Paleoanthropologists typically use comparisons of hominid cranial and dental anatomical features to build evolutionary trees, since these fossils Mark Collard and Bernard Wood, “How Reliable Are Human Phylogenetic Hypotheses?,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 97 (April 2000): 5003-6; doi:10.1073/pnas.97.9.5003.

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supply the chief data available. However, as Collard and Wood point out, the use of hominid craniodental features to discern evolutionary relationships has never been validated. To make their point, these two paleoanthropologists compared evolutionary trees constructed from craniodental data with those built from DNA and protein sequences for two currently existing groups of primates. One group included humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. The other consisted of baboons, macaques, and mangabeys. For both sets of primates, the evolutionary trees built from DNA and protein sequences differed significantly from those constructed from craniodental data. Evolutionary biologists now consider evolutionary trees produced with molecular data inherently more robust than those derived from anatomical features. This development has forced Collard and Wood to conclude that “little confidence can be placed in phylogenies [evolutionary trees] generated solely from higher primate craniodental evidence. The corollary of this is that existing phylogenetic hypotheses about human evolution are unlikely to be reliable.”3 In light of these results, “that human evolution occurred” becomes a scientifically untenable statement. In order to demonstrate that humanity originated through biological evolution, robust evolutionary trees must be established. Collard and Wood have shown that such determinations may never be possible for hominids as long as craniodental data is mostly all scientists have to work with. In fact, more recent work indicates that this problem extends beyond the hominid fossil record. Evolutionary biologists from the University of Helsinki, Finland, have questioned the reliability of any evolutionary tree generated from dental data. Of course, it is perfectly reasonable to think that the hominin fossil record supports the notion of human evolution. But paleoanthropologists have not identified the evolutionary pathway that produced modern humans. And that being the case, it is equally reasonable to be skeptical about the fact of human evolution, on scientific grounds alone.

REDIRECT

Robert Stewart

Ralph has presented us with a cumulative case for humans being descended from apes without precluding their also bearing the image of God. He stops 3

Ibid., 5003.

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short, however, of saying that the case is proven but rather concludes that the “fossil record is strongly suggestive of lineage continuity with apes.” He predicts that as more fossils are discovered the case will be strengthened. Fuz, on the other hand, argues that Ralph’s case is overstated given the evidence presently available. It appears that our two writers assume different positions with respect to the burden of proof. Ralph sees the evidence suggesting the evolution of humans from apes and thus believes that those who deny this evolution need counterevidence of their own to do so, while Fuz sees Ralph’s position as undersupported because of crucial gaps in the chain of evidence. For Ralph: The case for evolution is not based on one single line of evidence. How important is the fossil record in your thinking? Is it a necessary condition for accepting evolution or something that merely strengthens the case? If future finds do not, as you predict, tighten your position, will that decrease your confidence that humans descended from apes? Should it? I’m also interested in hearing more on your view about the sort of image of God that humans would bear. Would it be substantive or relational or functional in nature? For Fuz: Why couldn’t Ralph agree with most of your observations and simply insist that you’re setting the bar too high or that you’re applying the wrong standard of assessment? Could he not agree that the evidence is not conclusive, but hold that it is consistent with and suggestive of evolution, and as a result strengthens the overall case for evolution?

BIOLOGOS RESPONSE

Ralph Stearley

BioLogos-affiliated scholars and RTB researchers agree that fossil primates, including ancient apes, came and went during a protracted historical period spanning millions of years. We also agree that humans are different in many respects from other primates. We agree that humans differ from other primates in that we are established as bearing God’s image. We agree that humans are created for a special role within God’s design. BioLogos partners and the RTB team differ with respect to whether God utilized normal creational genealogical processes to derive human structure. Many people are interested in determining their family genealogy. Sources of data are many: birth and death records, passenger lists for ships, land sale records, church membership records, names plus birth and death

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dates on tombstones in family plots, and others. Recently, genetic tests have become available that help adjudicate paternity disputes. More recently, organizations such as 23andMe claim to provide ethnic ancestry percentages to the 0.1%. These tests, while not proving direct lineal relationships, can deliver broader information concerning ethnic components of ancestry. Historians, including genealogists, argue with one another; we resolve these arguments with more data. For example, there is a longstanding controversy over the authorship of the play Edward III, attributed to William Shakespeare; presumably this argument will ultimately be resolved. We understand that this process, which is based on greater sleuthing and incorporation of more data, leads to a more precise genealogical and historical interpretation over time. Based on anatomy, shared physiological traits, and genes, all human beings are related to one another. Today it seems preposterous to suppose that all humans are not related to one another, but historically this has been a matter of contention. For example, in 1550 a papal junta was convened at Valladolid, Spain, to debate whether Native Americans really shared ancestry with the rest of humanity. The Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas defended the hu� manity of Native Americans, but the junta gave no definitive pronouncement. Similarly, based on anatomical and physiological similarities, biologists include human beings within the order Primates and believe that these shared features reflect derivation from a common ancestor. An example of a shared feature that Tyson, Linnaeus, and Huxley could never have imagined is the presence of three cone pigments in the primate retina, which is unique among all placental mammals. Within the larger group of primates, humans share many specific features with living Old World monkeys and apes—for example, the same number and position of teeth. Humans share further specializations of anatomy and physiology with Old World apes but not Old World monkeys. Shared genetic traits now provide another data set to test a hypothesis of relatedness. For example, humans, other apes, and Old World monkeys all possess a duplicated X-chromosome opsin gene—a gene responsible for some of the quality of our color vision, and one unique to this group. The increasing density of the fossil record of humans and apes, especially since the 1920s, provides another category of data from which to test a hypothesis of relatedness.

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Humans possess striking anatomical similarities to the great apes—a fact appreciated since the time of Tyson—and for that reason are lumped in with apes in the family Hominidae. Humans are thus hominids. Why does the RTB team use the term hominids to refer only to nonhuman members of the Hominidae? BioLogos-associated scientists, like the RTB team, understand that God created diverse hominid species, including the extant apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans. But it is disingenuous to employ the term hominid only for nonhuman hominids (similarly for the term hominin). Paleoanthropologists, like historians and genealogists, search for new data. High-quality discoveries, like that of Australopithecus afarensis postcranial remains in 2010, cause revision of our reconstructions of lineages and of the accompanying historical scenarios. For example, these new postcranial remains resolve the argument surrounding the agent responsible for the Laetoli hominid trackway. These fossils provide greater clarity to our understanding of a prehistorical episode; they do not invalidate the process. And these data have not dramatically altered our perception of human lineage phylogeny. Some hominid fossils have suffered distortion, and many of course are abraded. Paleontologists are taught to exert care when making interpretations of these. Other fossils are much more pristine. If I examine a gravestone from 1850 to determine a date for an ancestor, I can tell the difference between a hard stone that resists weathering and reveals a crisp date and a stone that is weathered and has a poorly preserved date. This process of discriminating does not invalidate the discipline of using headstones as evidence for genealogical reconstruction. Similarly, genetic tests on body fluids at a crime scene must account for their own margin of error, but the method remains sound. Australopithecus afarensis, or something very similar, may well have been in the lineage leading to Australopithecus africanus, as Fuz seems to accept. But I am not sure why Fuz’s contribution to this chapter treats A. africanus as an irrelevant side-lineage. Most phylogenies include A. africanus somewhere close to the lineal ancestry of Homo. Thus in my read of the fossils, A. afarensis, or something very similar, was ancestral to A. africanus. A. africanus, in turn, probably is representative of the group of hominids that gave rise to both the large-jawed, “robust” australopithecines, like Paranthropus robustus, and also Homo habilis. Perhaps I will later realize that I am in error here.

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Multicellular animals today can be clustered by anatomy into sets of increasingly nested organisms; thus the group primates includes apes, which include hominids, which include humans. The fossil record provides many more organisms in history that reveal the structural connections between today’s nested organisms. Over the past two hundred years, as more and more hominid fossils have been brought to light, the genealogical linkage between humans and other hominids has become progressively more clear. New data and argument help push this process; they do not invalidate it, as many Christians seem to think. Thus the coalescence of data from gross anatomy, tissue organization, genes, and fossils, I believe, will continue to focus our picture of a genealogical pattern to human bodily origins. Humans share many traits with other organisms, such as the facts that we must eat and breathe to stay alive, we bleed when cut, and we must defecate. These commonalities do not seem to bother Christians who are concerned with human uniqueness. Humans possess behaviors, language, and mental and ethical capabilities that differ from other organisms and are correlated to our position in God’s creation. A theory of common ancestry is now being tested; I suspect that common ancestry will one day cause no more anxiety than the commonalities mentioned above. The first paragraph of this reply emphasized the many points of agreement between the RTB team and BioLogos partners. I have enjoyed our dialog and appreciate the effort that the RTB team has exerted to harmonize Christian faith and the historical sciences. I look forward to a long friendship with Fuz, Hugh, and the other RTB team members and trust that our conversation will continue into the future.

REASONS TO BELIEVE RESPONSE

Fuz Rana

Both Ralph Stearley and I agree: hominid fossils are real and reliably dated— and they provide us with information about the natural history of these creatures and, potentially, about their evolutionary relationships. I would also agree that the hominid fossil record can be counted as evidence for human evolution. In fact, evolutionary biologists argue that the hominid fossil record fulfills a prediction made by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man. Darwin maintained that transitional forms documenting the evolutionary emergence

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of modern humans from an apelike ancestor would be discovered in either Asia or Africa. But I question whether a single satisfied prediction is enough to establish the validity of human evolution. As I pointed out previously, the hominid fossil record is readily accommodated by our human origins creation model, as are the genetic similarities among humans and the great apes. Bob Stewart asks if I am “setting the bar too high” for evolutionary biologists by demanding that their theory satisfies additional predictions. The short answer is no. The bar can never be too high when it comes to establishing the validity of a scientific theory. If science is practiced in its purest form, a theory must continually be forced to run the gauntlet—it must constantly be put to the test. A remarkable example of the scientific community upholding this standard came in the spring of 2004 when NASA launched the Gravity Probe B, designed to measure the geodetic effect—the space-time curvature caused by Earth. The experiment cost $750 million! NASA undertook all of this expense and effort to provide one more confirmatory piece of evidence for the theory of general relativity—a theory that many believe to be one of the best-established principles in physics. These types of experiments are important because they might expose anomalies—cracks in the theory—that may well lead to a deeper understanding of nature and usher in a new and better theory to replace the existing theoretical framework. If general relativity had failed the test leveled against it by the Gravity Probe B, it would have signaled a need to revisit the validity of the theory, regardless of how many other predictions of this theory had been satisfied. So why shouldn’t human evolution be held to this standard? This is why I argue that paleontologists must continually evaluate the theory of human evolution by applying more detailed and sensitive tests, including (1) establishing clear evolutionary relationships among the hominids and (2) identifying a clear evolutionary pathway through the hominid fossil record to modern humans. And when these reasonable demands are placed on the theory of human evolution, the cracks in the theory become apparent, as I described earlier in this chapter. Perhaps one could argue that this failure isn’t sufficient reason to abandon the theory. But this failure does make it reasonable to express skepticism about human evolution—for purely scientific reasons.

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Ralph Stearley and Bob Stewart raise the point that as more hominid fossils are found, the case for human evolution will be strengthened. But, as I detail in Who Was Adam?, the last two decades of work in paleoanthropology doesn’t support this claim. During this time frame there have been some remarkable finds of new hominid specimens and the identification of new species. Yet these finds have repeatedly and invariably produced chaos in our understanding of hominid natural history and human evolution—not clarity. It has become old hat to read headlines announcing “New Hominid Discovery Shakes Human Evolutionary Tree” or “New Find Rewrites Human Evolution.” The human evolutionary tree has been shaken so much over the past two decades, it is left with little fruit on its branches. In my experience working as a scientist, if a theory is robust, then new discoveries bring greater clarity and insight. They solidify confidence in the theory. If, however, a theory lacks validity, new discoveries lead to chaos and confusion—signaling that it is time to abandon or significantly revise the idea, even if the theory has satisfied a few initial predictions. The measure of a theory’s validity is how well it withstands ongoing testing and how readily it accommodates new and unexpected findings. The theory of human evolution has come up short in this regard. The pre-commitment on the part of many in the scientific community to the evolutionary paradigm—arising out of the philosophical framework of methodological naturalism—explains why these types of failings are not seen as counting against evolutionary explanations for human origins.

CONCLUSION

Robert Stewart

I learn something new whenever I hear from Ralph and Fuz. I am impressed with Ralph’s command of the relevant data on the topic. His examples are also very helpful for nonpaleontologists. I do have two concerns, however. First, he writes that it is “disingenuous” of RTB “to employ the term hominid only for nonhuman hominids (similarly for the term hominin).” I don’t think it is disingenuous of RTB to use these terms in the way they do. I have not found the RTB team to be duplicitous, deceitful, insincere, or any of the other common synonyms of disingenuous. They may be esoteric or unusual in how they understand and use these terms, but they are not disingenuous.

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They should be careful in explaining how and why they use them as they do. Second, I can’t see that Ralph addressed my questions, although I thoroughly enjoyed reading what he wrote. I think Fuz has misread me. He writes that Ralph and I “raise the point that as more hominid fossils are found, the case for human evolution will be strengthened.” But in fact, I asked Ralph: “If future finds do not, as you predict, tighten your position, will that decrease your confidence that humans descended from apes?” I wholeheartedly agree with Fuz that “if a theory is robust, then new discoveries bring greater clarity and insight,” and also that new discoveries undermine flawed theories. My question for him about raising the bar too high had to do with whether he was demanding too much too soon, not whether we should continue to test additional fossil evidence as it becomes available. In conclusion, I think I find myself in between our authors and in partial agreement and disagreement with each. We await more evidence, which must then be assessed—on that we agree. Fossils alone, in my view, do not tell the whole story. They cannot fully establish the theory of human evolution because the case for evolution is a cumulative case, nor do I expect fossils fully to undermine human evolution—although that is logically possible. But of course, fossils are cool!

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The Biological Evidence Does Genetics Point to Common Descent? John Laing, Darrel Falk, and Fuz Rana

SBC MODERATOR JOHN LAING Quite possibly, the most exciting scientific work of the late twentieth century has been the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and the subsequent mapping of the human genome. Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project and founder and first president of BioLogos, saw the hand of God at work in the promise of such research for the development of treatments and cures for innumerable devastating illnesses.1 Some of the work’s most startling applications have generated widespread media attention. Two areas in the study of human genetics have been of particular interest and concern to Christians. The first involves the relative lack of complexity of human DNA and its similarity to that of other creatures, which seems to call into question the unique status of humans.2 For example, the similarity of human and chimpanzee DNA has been widely used as evidence of common descent and on occasion to substantiate claims of personhood for nonhuman creatures.3 In response, many Christians have challenged these implications, Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006), 118, 124. 2 Collins nicely addresses some of the concerns about human uniqueness that emerged from his findings (ibid., 125). Of course, this has implications for the theological concept of humans being made in the imago Dei, which is addressed in the following chapter. 3 Animal rights activists Peter Singer and Paolo Cavalieri hope their work in this field will lead to lobbying activity for legal rights for great apes, rights typically accorded to humans. Singer and 1

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and some have even begun to doubt the statistics themselves.4 For example, Vern Poythress has argued that the reporting of a correspondence rate of 96 to 99 percent may be misleading due to presuppositions and hidden assumptions.5 While the details of the science are surely too technical for the average reader, some clarification would be helpful. The second area has to do with popular reports that, through the study of genetic codes and population genetics, scientists can trace human lineage back to Adam and Eve.6 Some have argued that the discovery of “Mitochondrial Eve” and “Y-Chromosomal Adam” means that humans do in fact have a common ancestry (primordial parents), while others claim that the studies suggest no such link.7 Cavalieri, eds., The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 1-3. Jared Diamond specifically charges that our ethical codes regarding treatment of animals must be rethought. Diamond, “The Third Chimpanzee,” in ibid., 99-100. 4 Another question worthy of discussion is whether or not DNA sequencing and similarity can serve as a reliable indicator of evolutionary ancestral relationship. For example, it is not surprising that human DNA is closest to that of great apes, but the same approach seems to lead to the claim that humans are evolutionarily closer to mice and rats than moles and shrews are (see Collins, Language of God, fig. 5.1, 128). Collins is careful to note that many other factors besides genetic similarity must be taken into account in order to properly assess evolutionary relationships (e.g., fossil data and anatomic observation). 5 Vern Poythress, “Adam Versus Claims from Genetics,” Westminster Theological Journal 75 (2013): 65-82. Poythress points out that the high percentages only account for those DNA regions where some alignment or matching sequence already exists, and that 28 percent of the total DNA had to be excluded from the evaluations due to “alignment problems” (67). Poythress cites as evidence the scientific study by Ingo Ebersberger et al., “Genomewide Comparison of DNA Sequences Between Humans and Chimpanzees,” American Journal of Human Genetics 70, no. 6 (June 2002): 1490-97. 6 For example, Josh Ulick, “The Path Back to ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve,’” Newsweek 147, no. 6 (February 6, 2006): 49; Elizabeth Barber, “Genetic Adam and Eve Could Have Been Contemporaries, Scientists Say,” Christian Science Monitor, August 2, 2013. 7 Rebecca L. Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allen C. Wilson, “Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution,” Nature 325 (1987): 31-36; Peter A. Underhill et al., “Y Chromosome Sequence Variation and the History of Human Populations,” Nature Genetics 26 (2000): 358-61. James Marcum points out several limitations of the study conducted by Wilson et al. at the University of California at Berkeley on mitochondrial DNA and its implications for human origins. For example, Mitochondrial Eve only represents an individual who has an ancestral relationship with the women studied (an exceptionally small sample), not an original mother to all humans on Earth. This is just symptomatic of the greater difficulty of backward projections for scientific study; a number of assumptions must be made regarding sample sizes, predictability, constancy, and the like. Similar problems exist for Y-Chromosomal Adam, although the study conducted by Underhill et al. at Stanford University was more extensive with a larger sample (just over 1,000 individuals rather than a little less than 150). James A. Marcum, “Human Origins and Human Nature: Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam,” Faith & Philosophy 26, no. 5 (2009): 566-70. See also Marcum, “Metaphysical Foundations and the Complementation of Science and Theology,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 17 (2005): 45-64.

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In this chapter, Darrel Falk and Fuz Rana will discuss the complex issues surrounding current research in human genetics, the relationship of human DNA to other creaturely DNA, and the question of human origins as reflected in the current understanding of genetic research, and will explain how theses issues are reflected in the work of their respective organizations.

BioLogos Author Darrel Falk For many people, the evidence for evolution—and particularly human evolution—is hard to talk about. I myself had to struggle with understanding how evolution could fit with my Christian faith.8 But the more I studied biology and genetics, the more I saw evolution as an elegant process that describes how God created the life on Earth. The coding information on how to build our bodies is found in the DNA molecule, and the entire set of DNA molecules is called the genome. For the human and the chimpanzee, the arrangement of the 3.2 billion bits of code (nucleotides) has been determined through a process known as sequencing. Most of the sequence of chimpanzees and humans can be lined up side by side, and when that is done the two sequences show a disparity of only 1.4 percent. In addition, there are sections where small segments of sequence are present in one species but not the other. These inserted or deleted segments constitute another 1.4 percent of difference between the two species. There are some other differences as well, but with regard to the vast majority of the genome, the coding information in humans and chimpanzees is greater than 97 percent identical. It is important to point out, however, that even this seemingly high degree of similarity can make it appear that we are more alike genetically than we really are. After all, given the large size of the genome, a 1.4 percent coding difference between the two species represents thirty-five million single-unit code changes. When insertions, deletions, and other genome differences are taken into account as well, the two species have vast potential for genetic difference. Humans are indeed genetically, culturally, psychologically, and spiritually unique beings. However, although we are unique, the question of how God brought about that uniqueness remains. Did human creation occur in an instant or See Darrel R. Falk, Coming to Peace with Science (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004).

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was it a more gradual process? A detailed analysis of genetic evidence answers this question quite succinctly, and this chapter summarizes the results. Mutation rate. Evolutionary theory predicts that if humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor, the current differences that exist between the two species would have come about through mutation—a molecularly wellcharacterized set of processes that bring about change in the DNA sequence. It is possible to determine the frequency of mutations directly by analyzing the DNA sequence in children relative to their parents. When this is done, about 70 of the 3.2 billion coding units have changed (i.e., mutated). If there are about 70 changes in one generation, then there would be about 140 differences between grandparents and grandchild, and 210 compared to great-grandparents. If chimpanzees and humans really do share a common ancestor, then to account for the 35 million differences in their DNA they would have a common set of grandparents going back about 300,000 generations. Based on fossil evidence this is roughly how many generations have transpired since the common ancestor. The approximate number of expected differences and the number of observed differences agree within twofold of one another. This is a remarkable finding, fully consistent with expectations if both species were created by a process of common descent from a single ancestral species—each branch has been accumulating mutations through time at the experimentally determined rate. This assumes that the mutation rate has remained fairly constant though time (a reasonable approximation based on experimental data), but includes a few other estimates as well. Thus there is a slight chance that the agreement between the expected and observed number of differences is a coincidence. However, there is a way of testing this possibility. There are certain types of mutations that are tenfold more frequent among the approximately seventy mutational changes that are detected when parents and children are compared in today’s familial studies. We know the reason for this difference at the molecular level; it is related to a certain type of chemical reaction that changes one part of the code more frequently than other parts. These are “hotspots” for mutation. If the code differences between chimpanzees and humans are the result of mutations—just as we observe in one generation today—we would expect to see this particular code difference at a tenfold higher rate. Indeed, when we compare the DNA in chimpanzees to that of

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humans, the difference between the two species is about ten times greater at known hotspots, indicating that they have arisen through mutations in each branch of the lineage. Those two facts together—quantitative (the number of changes) and qualitative (the types of changes)—are considered to be near certain evidence that humans and chimpanzees have descended from a single ancestral species. Genetic scars. Another type of change, although much rarer, has been well studied by geneticists over the past sixty years. With this type of change, small blocks of DNA units are deleted or, in other cases, inserted. Insertions and deletions are created by cuts in the DNA followed by reattachment at the cut sites. To illustrate the principle, imagine for a moment that you have a scar at a particular location on your body. Perhaps it is the result of a bad cut that occurred to your right little finger when you were seven years old. It’s at the tip and not the base of the finger. It’s on the inside of the finger near the middle, not on the left or the right side. It is a vertical cut, not horizontal, and it is one half inch long—not shorter and not longer. It is there because of a very specific event—an accident with a knife that happened when you were seven. The scar is not serving a purpose in your body. Its presence is solely the result of a particular event in history. In a manner that is completely analogous to this the genome gets damaged, and insertions and deletions are like the scars on a damaged finger. They can be positioned exactly. Indeed they can be resolved to .00000034 millimeters (a single DNA unit) out of the five thousand millimeters of DNA in a typical human chromosome. Sometimes when the cut is healed ten DNA units are deleted, other times one hundred, and other times just one. Sometimes the healing is associated with a small insertion of defined length. But unlike the scar on your finger, DNA scars are passed on to subsequent generations and so can be tracked through an ancestral lineage. Some of the scars in our DNA occurred fairly recently (evolutionarily speaking) in the human lineage. Some of us may share a particular scar because it happened in a shared ancestor deep in the past centuries. Others whose lineage does not include that same ancient ancestor don’t have the scar. There are other cases where all human beings share exactly the same scar. We can tell it’s been damaged and resealed because of certain trademark

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features that we observe in the laboratory when cuts are generated and resealed. We all share the exact same scar because it occurred in a single ancestor long ago. Although many of the scars are unique to human beings, if our lineage can indeed be traced back to the same ancestral population of hominids to which the chimpanzee lineage can be traced, then there ought to be a set of scars that we share with chimpanzees. They would be a reflection of healing events that occurred in ancient populations of hominids that both humans and chimpanzees share. So do they exist? Yes, thousands of them. At a resolution of .000000034 millimeters the two species share many of the exact same scars. Furthermore, even if one imagines that sometimes a scar takes on a particular function in the body (which it can on occasion), usually the exact position of the scar would make no difference to its functionality. Most of the functions are not position sensitive—not at this resolution—and they work just as well if they are moved a little to the left or right. So the position of each scar is a function of a unique historical event that has been propagated through the ages and not a function of some essential design feature. The fact that there are thousands of these shared scars is the reason that virtually all geneticists are certain that we share them with chimpanzees because of single events that left behind scars still present in all descendants. Population size: Was there ever a time when it was two? Chapter four of this book addresses important theological questions about Adam and Eve that science is not equipped to answer. But science can address these questions: Were Adam and Eve the only persons on earth? Were they the sole genetic progenitors of the entire human race? On this matter, science provides an unambiguous answer. It is a well-established fact that all males today have a Y chromosome that is derived from one male, and current data indicate that person lived in Africa about 240,000 years ago. Furthermore, similar studies address the origin of mitochondria, the part of our cell dedicated to generating the energy needed to run our bodies. All human mitochondria are derived from one female who lived in Africa about 165,000 years ago. This does not mean that there was only one male or only one female present at the time of “Y-chromosome Adam” or “mitochondrial Eve.” Indeed, the calculations (done in several independent ways) show that there was likely never a time

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when there were fewer than ten thousand individuals among the human population. How could this be, if all males have a Y chromosome derived from one male and all persons have mitochondria derived from one female? Let’s think about that. If a male has no sons, the lineage of his Y chromosome stops with him. In 240,000 years there are about eight thousand generations. Over thousands of generations in a world with only ten thousand or so persons, many of the Y chromosome lineages are terminated because a male has no male child. The same holds for females passing down mitochondrial DNA, and the mathematics virtually guarantees that over that much time all descendants of an original population will share a grandparent.9 Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to go through the mathematic and genetic formulations that demonstrate a minimum population size of about ten thousand individuals in the evolutionary development of the human species, it is important to emphasize that science, like detective work, involves corroborating evidence through multiple independent approaches. If fingerprints are found at the scene of a crime, this alone may not always be sufficient to convincingly solve the case. However, if there is independent evidence (such as a witness) that places the person at the scene of a crime, and if the person has just sold a piece of jewelry from the crime scene to a pawnbroker, then those three pieces of evidence from multiple sources are strong evidence that the person under arrest is the perpetrator. They are independent ways of knowing. So it is with the evidence that the minimum population size in human history is in the thousands. I will name the four lines of evidence, so that the interested reader with the appropriate background in mathematics and genetics can explore this further: (1) calculations based on gene coalescent times, (2) calculations based on genetic diversity, (3) calculations based on linkage disequilibrium, and (4) calculations based on the diversity of transposable element insertion points. Each of these calculations leads to the same conclusion: God has created humankind through a gradual process of common descent through the primate lineage.10 9

For a more detailed but still accessible description of these scenarios, see Dennis Venema, “Mitochondrial Eve, Y-Chromosome Adam, and Reasons to Believe,” BioLogos blog, October 28, 2011, http://biologos.org/blogs/dennis-venema-letters-to-the-duchess/mitochondrial-eve-y-chromosome -adam-and-reasons-to-believe. 10 A good next step would be Dennis Venema’s blog series “Adam, Eve, and Human Population

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This does not in any way make us less God’s creation, nor does it take away from the special God-given qualities with which humankind is endowed. What science is discovering is the mechanism by which God has created us. There is nothing in that knowledge that conflicts with the biblical message—including the possibility of a historical Adam and Eve who served as representatives for the rest of humanity.

Reasons to Believe Author Fuz Rana Did Adam and Eve actually exist? Were they the first human beings? Did all humanity emanate from a primordial couple? Or did human beings evolve, sharing an evolutionary history with the great apes and all life on Earth? Taking a look at genetic similarity. Based on shared genetic features in the genomes of humans and great apes, most in the scientific community argue that humans have an evolutionary origin. These genetic features are considered to be “molecular fossils” that arose in the shared ancestors of humans and the great apes and were retained after evolutionary lineages diverged. In fact, many people argue that the only way to make sense of these shared features is from an evolutionary standpoint. At this juncture, it is important to acknowledge the powerful yet often unrecognized influence of methodological naturalism. This idea—which undergirds contemporary science—maintains that only mechanistic processes can be used to explain the universe and phenomena within it. This means that any appeal to divine action (and hence, intelligent agency) is prohibited a priori. As an old-earth creationist, I maintain that methodological naturalism stands in the way of discovering truth about the natural world, placing an unhelpful restriction on the scientific enterprise. But if this requirement is relaxed, it is conceivable that the shared features could be viewed as reflecting similar designs employed by a Creator. To put it another way, the shared genetic features could reflect common design, not common descent. There is a historical precedent for viewing shared genetic features as evidence for common design. Prior to Darwin, distinguished biologist Sir Genetics,” http://biologos.org/blogs/dennis-venema-letters-to-the-duchess/series/adam-eve-and -human-population-genetics. See also Eugene E. Harris, Ancestors in Our Genome: The New Science of Human Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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Richard Owen interpreted shared (homologous) biological structures and, consequently, related organisms as manifestations of an archetype that originated in the mind of the first cause, not as the products of descent with modification. Darwin later replaced Owen’s archetype with a common ancestor. Again, the key point is that it is possible to conceive of an alternative interpretation of shared biological features, if one is willing to allow for the operation of a Creator within the history of life. If the action of an intelligent agent becomes part of the construct of science, then the shared molecular fossils in the genomes of humans and the great apes point to common descent only if certain assumptions are true: 1. The genomes’ shared structures and sequences are nonfunctional. 2. The events that created these features are rare, random, and non­ repeatable. 3. No mechanisms other than common descent (vertical gene transfer) can generate shared features in genomes. However, recent studies raise questions about the validity of these assumptions. For example, in the last decade or so, molecular biologists and molecular geneticists have discovered that most classes of “junk DNA” have function.11 Also, researchers are now learning that many of the events that alter genomes’ structures and DNA sequences are not necessarily rare and random. For example, biochemists now know that mutations occur in hot spots in genomes. Recent work also indicates that transposon insertions and intron insertions occur at hot spots, and gene loss is repeatable. New studies also reveal that horizontal gene transfer can mimic common descent. This phenomenon is not confined to bacteria and archaea but has been observed in higher plants and animals as well, via a vector-mediated pathway or organelle capture. These advances serve to undermine key assumptions needed for a common descent argument. In light of these discoveries, is it possible to make sense of the shared genomic architecture and DNA sequences within the framework of a creation model? 11

Interested readers can find references to the original scientific papers in Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Who Was Adam? A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Humanity, 2nd ed. (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2015); and Fazale Rana, The Cell’s Design: How Chemistry Reveals the Creator’s Artistry (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008).

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A scientific creation model for common design. What follows is an abstract of our genomics model.12 As discussed in chapter eight, we do not think that evolutionary mechanisms can create new biological designs. As such, we view humans and the great apes—and consequently, their genomes—as the products of God’s direct creative activity. But once created, genomes are subject to microevolutionary processes. In brief, our model explains the similarities among organisms’ genomes in one of two ways: • As reflecting the work of a Creator who deliberately designed similar features in genomes according to (1) a common function or (2) a common blueprint. • As reflecting the outworking of physical, chemical, or biochemical processes that (1) occur frequently, (2) are nonrandom, and (3) are reproducible. These processes cause the independent origin of the same features in the genomes of different organisms. (It is also interesting to note that researchers have discovered that horizontal gene transfer mimics the genomics signature for common ancestry.) These features can be either functional or nonfunctional. Our model also explains genomes’ differences in one of two ways: • As reflecting the work of a Creator who deliberately designed differences in genomes with distinct functions. • As reflecting the outworking of physical, chemical, or biochemical processes that reflect microevolutionary changes. In principle, our model can account for similarities and differences in the genomes of organisms as either the deliberate work of a Creator or resulting from natural-process mechanisms that alter the genomes after creation. Did Adam and Eve exist? The central feature of our human origins model (and the traditional biblical view of humanity’s genesis) is the historicity of Adam and Eve. We take the view that God directly and personally created Adam and Eve as the first human beings, made in his image. Accordingly, all humanity emanates from this primordial pair. A more detailed description and defense of our model can be found in the second edition of Who Was Adam?

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Scientific support for the traditional biblical view comes from work in molecular anthropology (for references, see Who Was Adam?). In particular, one of the most important advances in human origins research has been the use of DNA sequence data to gain insight into the origin and early history of humanity. Many genetic markers have been employed toward this end, including genetic heterogeneity, mitochondrial (mt) DNA, Y-chromosomal DNA, pseudogenes, human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), short interspersed nuclear elements (SINE) DNA, microsatellite DNA, and mini­ satellite DNA. Linkage disequilibrium has also been used to develop an understanding of human origins. Another inventive approach is the use of the genetic variability of human parasites (such as the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, the JC and herpes simplex 1 viruses, and the bacterium Helicobacter pylori) as a proxy for human genetic diversity. Each parasite studied represents an opportunity to corroborate results independently based on human genetic markers. Collectively, these studies indicate that humanity originated recently— around 100,000 to 150,000 years ago, though significant uncertainty about the date remains—somewhere in Africa. Intriguingly, results of mtDNA and Y-chromosomal studies that trace humanity’s origin (through the maternal and paternal lineages, respectively) to single ancestral sequences are referred to as “mitochondrial Eve” and “Y-chromosomal Adam.” Evolutionary biologists interpret these results to indicate that a relatively large population of humans suffered a catastrophic collapse. When this occurred, genetic diversity was lost and the first humans went through a genetic bottleneck. The surviving humans are thought to have experienced rapid population growth and expansion as they migrated around the world. Accordingly, the genetic markers of the population collapse remain imprinted on today’s human population groups in the form of limited genetic variation. Evolutionary biologists theorize that humanity’s genetic bottleneck, occurring perhaps as recently as 100,000 years ago, creates the appearance that humanity originated from a small population. Similarly, evolutionary biologists assert that mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam were not the first humans; rather, a number of “Eves” and “Adams” existed who shared a common haplotype (a set of inherited DNA sequence signatures). These two haplotypes were the lucky ones who

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just happened to survive. The genetic lines of the other first humans were lost over time. Still, as an old-earth creationist, I find the concept of mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam intriguing. The recent origin of humanity and the pattern of human genetic diversity fit with what would be expected if humanity’s origin occurred as Scripture describes. Yet there are also several points of concern from both biblical and scientific perspectives. In light of these concerns, is it possible to reconcile the data from molecular anthropology with historical Christianity’s view of humanity’s origin? Some might conclude that reconciliation is not possible. But when the scientific and biblical data are carefully considered, a close congruence between the biblical and scientific accounts of human origins emerges. The timing of humanity’s origin. Until recently, a large discrepancy existed between the dates for mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam. Anthropologists estimated that mitochondrial Eve appeared around 150,000 to 250,000 years ago and Y-chromosomal Adam about 50,000 years ago. Evolutionary biologists would frequently point to this incongruity as support for their interpretation of genetic lineages. Clearly the pair could not have lived at the same time; therefore, they must have belonged to distinct populations. Several recent studies, however, eliminate this discrepancy. The best dates for mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam now converge around 130,000 years ago, making it possible for the two to have existed at the same time—a requirement of the biblical model. The location of humanity’s origin. The scientific data clearly indicates that humanity’s origin is in Africa. African populations are the most genetically diverse, and the human gene trees all root in Africa, with African populations composing the earliest branches. Additionally, all of the genetic haplotypes outside of Africa are subsumed by African haplotypes. When anthropologists use genetic data to locate humanity’s origin and spread, they assume that the contemporary location of population groups represents their location throughout human history. This assumption remains open to question, however, particularly because many human population groups have migrated as much as thousands of miles throughout their history. Consequently, the results from molecular anthropology provide a crude (at best) guess as to the location of humanity’s origin.

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Humanity’s original population size. Did humanity originate from a primordial pair? From my perspective, the data from molecular anthropology squares with the traditional Christian view of human origins on this point. As discussed, from an evolutionary perspective it looks as if humanity passed through a genetic bottleneck—a concept embedded within the evolutionary paradigm. From a creation model standpoint, humanity’s limited genetic diversity does not reflect population collapse, but a signature for a creation event. The fact that all humans can trace their ancestry to a single mitochondrial DNA sequence indicates that humanity originated from a single woman. That is, mitochondrial Eve was the biblical Eve. The corresponding reasoning would also apply to Y-chromosomal Adam. Others have challenged this interpretation, however, arguing that the genetic data indicates that humanity arose from thousands of individuals, not two. The chief basis for this claim comes from estimates of the ancestral population size of humans based on genetic diversity. It is possible to estimate the effective population size of any ancestral group from genetic diversity of present-day populations, if the mutation rate is known. It is important to recognize that the population sizes generated by these methods are merely estimates, not hard and fast values. This is because the mathematical models are highly idealized, generating differing estimates based on several factors. More significantly, recent studies focusing on birds and mammals raise questions as to whether these models predict population size. As the author of one study states, “Analyses of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) have challenged the concept that genetic diversity within populations is governed by effective population size and mutation rate. . . . Variation in the rate of mutation rather than in population size is the main explanation for variations in mtDNA diversity observed among bird species.”13 In fact, in three instances —involving mouflon sheep, Przewalski’s horses, and gray whales—when the original population size was known, the genetic diversity measured generations later was much greater than expected based on the models. Did humanity originate from a single pair? Even though population estimates indicate humanity arose from several hundred to several thousand Hans Ellegren, “Is Genetic Diversity Really Higher in Large Populations?,” Journal of Biology 8 (April 21, 2009): 41; doi:10.1186/jbiol135.

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individuals based on mathematical models, it could well be that these numbers overestimate the original numbers for the first humans. Given how poorly these population size models perform, and noting that humanity can trace its origin to a single ancestral mitochondrial DNA sequence (which, again, I interpret as a single individual), it is difficult to argue that science has falsified the notion that humanity descended from a primordial pair. Many people argue that the genetic data unequivocally points to an evolutionary origin and history for humanity. But we maintain that if the restrictions of methodological naturalism are relaxed, it is possible to interpret shared genetic features as evidence for common design, not common descent. Additionally, the data from molecular anthropology can be used as scientific justification for the traditional biblical view of humanity’s origin.

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Both authors have offered helpful insights into their views regarding the biological evidence for human origins. Much of Fuz Rana’s section is devoted to challenging the presupposition of metaphysical naturalism and claiming that if theism is allowed, then genetic similarity among creatures can be explained by common design rather than common descent.14 I assume Darrel Falk would agree, but counter that an appeal to design cannot serve as a biological explanation, even if true. Clarification is in order. Darrell needs to explain why scarring in human and chimpanzee genes is best understood as common ancestry rather than design, and Fuz needs to explain why common design with evolution is preferable (scientifically) to common ancestry.15 More importantly, though, there seems to be a fundamental disagreement about what the genetic evidence shows. Darrel notes that the scientific consensus is that Y-chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve 14

In some ways, Fuz’s concerns regarding the conditions that must be met for common descent are really meant to undermine a Darwinist apologetic that claims common descent is the only explanation, but it seems to me that most evolutionists—in particular BioLogos partners—make the more modest claim that evolution is the best explanation of the available data. Fuz’s conditions do not seem to be required for this claim. 15 Fuz’s own example of genomes—directly created by God prior to something like an evolutionary process taking over—suggests that there is fluidity in the different positions. On what basis are genomes the demarcator between common descent/evolution and common design/progressive creation? Why could God not have directly created life and let evolution take over from there (as in the BioLogos position), or why could God not have directly created each creaturely type without appeal to evolutionary processes?

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are representatives of groups of male and female progenitors to whom modern humans trace their genetic makeup. Fuz agrees that this is the consensus view, but argues that it has been skewed by naturalistic presuppositions and that new studies on bird and mammal population sizes and genetic diversity suggest that such large original populations are not required for the genetic diversity we see in humans today.16 I would invite both authors to explain their mathematical models more clearly. For example, Darrel’s contention that there was never a time when there were fewer than ten thousand humans on earth is perplexing for several reasons.17 Similarly, Fuz’s invitation for the reader to imagine an original couple and lower population sizes suggests that the data does not support evolutionary creationism, but he does not provide concrete examples.18

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Methodological naturalism. Fazale Rana begins his section expressing a concern about the bias that he feels exists within science. Methodological naturalism, he maintains, prevents scientists from considering the possibility of design arguments. I agree with Rana that most leading evolutionary biologists are biased against the existence of a Creator; this does indeed color the tone of their scientific writing. However, Rana specifically invokes this bias to explain why Richard Owen’s mid-nineteenth-century archetype 16

His concerns have to do with the blurring of the lines between methodological naturalism (an approach to science grounded in naturalistic explanations) and metaphysical naturalism (a philosophical belief that only physical entities or relationships exist). Many philosophers of science have expressed concern that methodological naturalism, when combined with verificationist ideology, can effectively deny many avenues of productive explanation. See, for example, Roger Trigg, Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2015). 17 First, there was obviously a time when there were fewer than ten thousand persons on earth because, according to evolutionary theory, there was a time when there were zero persons on earth. In fact, there was a great amount of time when there were zero humans (from the beginnings of life to the time humans emerged). Second, most readers may assume that, under evolutionary principles, at some point in human development there was a shift from “nonhuman” to “human,” however those terms are defined biologically. If chimps and humans evolved from a common ancestor that is neither chimp nor human, then there was a time in the evolution of isolated populations when they ceased to be that common ancestor, biologically defined, and transitioned to a new species. At some point, the population we now call chimps became chimps and the population we now call humans became human, and perhaps the common ancestor died out. How populations evolve together needs some clarification. 18 Fuz says that the population models perform “poorly,” but leaves the reader to take his word for it. Some specific examples—for example, the problematic bottleneck theory to which he refers— would help us see the concerns he has with the scientific consensus interpretation of the data.

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(common design) model for creation has not gained wide acceptance. So the question before us is whether there is solid scientific evidence for Owen’s model that scientists, because of their bias, have missed. As fellow Christian scientists who accept the Bible as the Word of God, our purpose has been to think together about the scientific validity of this model in light of the alternative. I think it fails and—as I try to show below—the basis of the failure is deeply embedded in logic itself, not in the predispositions that we do agree exist within the academy. Common descent. One of the strongest arguments for common descent is the existence of the same genetic “scars” that are found in different species today (for example, humans and chimpanzees). Rana raises three possible problems with the common descent explanation for these scars. First, he says that according to common descent, these shared scars should have no functional importance, but functions have been found for some of them. But it is not their function that is important here; rather it is their position in the genome. There are few things more clear in molecular biology than that most genetic elements don’t have to be at a precise position in the DNA in order to function. But all of the scar pairs are—hundreds of thousands of them and at a resolution of .00000034 millimeters. They have the exact same position in related organisms because of ancestry, not function. Rana has missed the key point in the argument. Next he seems to admit that if the scars occur randomly, it would be significant evidence for common ancestry that the same scars appear at the same places in different species. But he claims the appearance of scars is nonrandom because they occur more frequently in some places in our DNA. True enough, but this nonrandomness is analogous to scars on the skin for humans: they occur more frequently on knees than in armpits, for example. But the degree of nonrandomness to which he refers cannot scientifically account for hundreds of thousands of shared pairs of scars, not just in the same general area but with exactly the same endpoints at exactly the same position. Rana does not address this nonrandomness, and that is what is at issue here. Finally, Rana claims the pattern of genetic scars in humans and chimpanzees might be explained by the horizontal transfer of DNA through a microbial mediator. Although it is true that on very rare occasions DNA enters the lineage via an extraneous microbial agent, it is also clear that the

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probability of two such events independently causing two identical genetic scars at exactly the same place in the human and chimp genomes is vanishingly miniscule and certainly irrelevant to the existence of hundreds of thousands of shared genetic scar pairs. Only two human ancestors for all humankind? First, I note again that other chapters in this book show that taking Genesis literally does not require the view that all humankind descended from just two individuals. Second, the basis of the estimates that there have never been less than about ten thousand individuals on the human lineage at any given time is corroborated by multiple, independently verifiable lines of evidence. It is not based solely on the amount of genetic diversity in humanity, although that is the only one Rana discusses. My section above mentions four independent ways of estimating the smallest population size in human history, and each of the four suggests at least several thousand individuals. Rana has only critiqued one of the four ways and does so with an example he has never formally submitted for scientific review by peers.19 The fact is that there is no controversy within the field of population genetics about this. The scientific basis is described in book-length form for a nonspecialized audience in the outstanding work Ancestors in Our Genome by Eugene E. Harris. Unfortunately, space here does not permit the development of the genetic and statistical expertise necessary to follow the basis for the arguments; suffice it to say that at present, Rana’s alternative understanding is grounded purely in a particular interpretation of Scripture; he has given no scientific support for his view. Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam. Mitochondria are the compartments within cells in which usable energy is generated. Approximately 16,500 bits of DNA information are found in mitochondria—only a tiny percentage (0.0005%) of the DNA of a cell. Rana correctly states that the scientific consensus is that this 0.0005 percent came from a single woman. Scientists refer to this woman as mitochondrial Eve, and she lived about 200,000 years ago. However, the other 99.9995 percent of DNA is 19

See the critique of this view by BioLogos fellow Dennis Venema in “William Lane Craig, The Historical Adam, and the Kerguelen Sheep,” BioLogos blog, August 20, 2015, http://biologos.org /blogs/dennis-venema-letters-to-the-duchess/william-lane-craig-the-historical-adam-and-the -kerguelen-sheep.

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also inherited from ancestors. This DNA has in essence been partitioned into small segments through a process known as recombination. The same data to which Rana refers shows that all of these tens of thousands of DNA segments, like the mitochondrial one, are also derived from single individuals, but not the same one—they are derived from thousands of different individuals. Each one of those thousands lived at vastly different times. Some lived as recently as one or two hundred thousand years ago. Others lived several million years ago, but most lived in between these two time periods. There is strong scientific consensus on this matter. So when Rana traces one tiny fraction of the DNA and follows it back to a single woman, it is important for him to point out that if he used that scientific technique to trace any of the thousands of other segments, they would each map to a different individual alive at a different time. It is not appropriate to use the technique and state that it leads him to conclude that that piece was present in just one person, when the very same technique also leads to the conclusion that the other thousands of segments are derived from different individuals—tens of thousands of them. What about Y-chromosome Adam? Like mitochondrial DNA, the DNA on the Y chromosome is inherited as a segment that doesn’t get broken down into smaller segments as it gets passed through the generations. It is a larger segment (2% of the total) than the mitochondrial DNA, but the principle is the same. Like each of the thousands of segments, it was found in one individual who lived at a particular time. We can call that person Y-chromosome Adam if we wish, but if we do that we need to acknowledge that there are thousands of other Adams, each of whom—hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago—carried the ancestral form of some other segment of the genome. Conclusion. I have been privileged to meet with my colleagues at RTB at least nineteen times over the past seven years. We differ in very significant ways. We at BioLogos do not believe that accepting the Bible as the divinely inspired Word of God requires the dismantling of that which lies at the heart of the biological sciences—common descent through an evolutionary process. They do. The discussions have not always been easy; I have come away very frustrated at times, and I am sure they have as well. Still, I continually have sensed Christ’s presence when I’ve been with them, and that

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alone—experiencing the Spirit of Christ living through them—has made our times together enlightening, joyful, and (often) fulfilling.

REASONS TO BELIEVE RESPONSE

Fuz Rana

Why common design is scientifically preferable to common ancestry. I would like to return to the story Darrel Falk told about the fingertip cut. Suppose that a cut on the tip of your finger is not due to an accident. Suppose it was done intentionally—maybe as part of an initiation rite into a club. You and the other members all have a cut that is the same length and location on your pinky finger. To a casual observer, the cut may seem like an accident. But for those in the know, it serves a purpose—it connotes your membership in the club. The fact that the cut is in the same location for all the club members is intentional and has meaning. The cut serves a function. But suppose some authority issues a decree that it is forbidden to intentionally cut your fingers. If you were asked how the cut on your finger came about, you might lie. You might claim that it was an accident, because to say otherwise would get you in trouble. In light of the authoritarian decree, the only acceptable explanation for the cut on your finger is that it was an accident. Because of the influence of methodological naturalism, most people have become conditioned to reflexively view common descent as the only scientific explanation for shared genetic features. And because of this conditioning, if the common design hypothesis is entertained, it bears a much greater burden of proof than the common descent hypothesis. In spite of this unreasonable burden, recent advances in genomics provide insight that withstands that additional burden. At the time that the human genome draft sequence was published, most scientists thought that the human genome was littered with junk DNA, the vestiges of evolutionary history. Thanks to the ENCODE Project, that view has changed. A sound, scientific argument can be made that nearly all of the human genome serves some type of functional role. In fact, the so-called junk DNA regions in the human genome (and genomes of other organisms) play a role in regulating gene expression, revealing a system that appears to be more elegant and sophisticated than anyone could have imagined. When the phase two results of the ENCODE Project were published, Eric Green, the director of the National Human

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Genome Research Institute, remarked, “ENCODE has revealed that most of the human genome is involved in the complex molecular choreography required for converting genetic information into living cells and organisms.”20 An example in which population size estimates proved unreliable. In 2007 a research team reported on the genetic diversity of wild mouflon sheep on one of the islands that are part of the Kerguelen sub-Antarctic archipelago.21 This group of sheep provided researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to study the effects of population dynamics on genetic diversity in small populations. In 1957 a male and female yearling were placed on Haute Island. These two sheep were taken from a captive population in France. By the beginning of the 1970s the number had grown to one hundred sheep, and it peaked at seven hundred in 1977. Since that time the population has fluctuated in a cyclical manner between 250 and seven hundred members. Given that the population began with only two individuals (the founder effect), that it has experienced cyclical changes in the population size, and that it was isolated on an island, the researchers expected very low genetic diversity (measured as heterozygosity). Using mathematical models, the heterozygosity of a population can be computed at any point in time from the heterozygosity of the ancestral population (which was known for the original mouflon pair) and the original population size. What the researchers discovered, however, when they measured this quantity directly for the sheep on Haute Island was that it exceeded the predictions made by the models by up to a factor of four. In other words, the models underestimated the genetic diversity of the actual population. The researchers explained this discrepancy by speculating that natural selection drives the increase in genetic diversity, since an increase in genetic variability increases the survivability of the population. Consequently, if these same models were used to estimate the effective sizes of the ancestral population from the measured genetic diversity at any point in time, they would overestimate the original population size as much larger than two individuals. 20

NIH/National Human Genome Research Institute, “First Holistic View of How Human Genome Actually Works: ENCODE Study Produces Massive Data Set,” ScienceDaily, September 5, 2012, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120905140913.htm. 21 Renaud Kaeuffer et al., “Unexpected Heterozygosity in an Island Mouflon Population Founded by a Single Pair of Individuals,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 274 (February 2007): 527-33.

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John Laing

It should be clear that substantial disagreement exists between the two authors, not only about how the data is to be interpreted but also about how the discussion should proceed. On the one hand, Darrel has sought to explain why evolutionary creationists are convinced that common descent is the most reasonable explanation of human population genetics and the similarities of human and chimpanzee DNA. Several mathematical models for population genetics confirm human base populations in the thousands, not single digits (i.e., two persons), and the large number of common scars in human and chimp DNA is problematic for direct creation models.22 On the other hand, Fuz has sought to explore the possibilities that God’s existence may open for explanation of the data. He concludes that it need not be a purely natural explanation. Most notably, he has referenced the dual notions of common design and human ignorance to suggest that identical scarring in human and chimp DNA may be purposeful. The heart of the disagreement here may be in biblical interpretation, not in how science proceeds. Both authors must deal with the raw data and determine how to make sense of it, and both approach the data as Christians committed to the truth of Scripture. I suspect they disagree over how much latitude God’s creative work as described in the book of Genesis allows for naturalistic processes. If I am correct, this disagreement cannot be resolved in the content of this chapter.

Scarring implies a random process because it is hard to see why God would cause it or would create creatures with scars already extant. The immense number of identical scars in humans and chimps implies a relationship of some sort because it is almost impossible that they would have arisen independently of one another. Thus, Falk argues, shared ancestry is the best explanation.

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The Anthropological Evidence How Are Humans Unique? Steve Lemke, Jeff Schloss, and Fuz Rana

SBC MODERATOR STEVE LEMKE Anthropology is the question of who people really are. The Bible describes persons as being created in the image of God (Gen 1:27) and as being “a little lower than the angels” (Ps 8:5). This chapter addresses a number of key anthropological issues. What is the imago Dei, the image of God spoken of in Genesis 1:27? Just what does it mean to be human? Do you believe in human exceptionalism—the claim that humans have capacities and skills that are unique from anything else in creation? What capacities reflect human uniqueness from other creatures? How are human beings to be distinguished from primates and hominids? Is there a behavioral gap or a “sociocultural big bang” during which humans evidenced separation from other creatures? How do the findings of archaeology and paleoanthropology square with Scripture? Were the Neanderthals fully human? In an “old-earth” view of creation, when did the first fully human beings come into being? In addressing these anthropological issues, the contributors to this chapter were asked to answer the following questions: • What is the imago Dei and how is it evidenced in persons? • How would you define person and human being?

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• Do you affirm human exceptionalism? If so, what is unique about humans that distinguishes them other living creatures? In your view, is this difference merely quantitative or is it qualitative? • How does the model of origins that you advocate account for the similarities and differences between humans and other species? When did the first human beings come into being?

BioLogos Author Jeff Schloss The nature and origin of humanity may be the most significant faith-related issue raised by evolution. Christians typically focus on two questions: Who are we? And how did we come to be? The first involves theological issues of human uniqueness and imago Dei; the second entails exegetical questions about the history and means of creation. In this chapter I’ll explore how data from primatology and paleoanthropology bear on these concerns. I’ll also affirm areas of firm agreement and identify differences with Reasons to Believe’s perspective.1 Who are we? “Darwinism undermines both the idea that man is made in the image of God and the idea that man is a uniquely rational being. . . . The idea of human dignity turns out, therefore, to be the moral effluvium of a discredited metaphysics.”2 The preceding quote is not from some paranoid Christian exaggerating the implications of evolution, but is from one of many leading philosophers debunking human exceptionalism. Claims that evolution shows we’re “just another animal” without distinctive moral merit or responsibility generate understandable concern. I’ll argue here that although the data are consistent with evolutionary common descent, this does not warrant a rejection of human uniqueness or the notion of imago Dei. To start, it’s important to identify three foundational issues. First, the Bible clearly affirms that humans are made in the image of God. But as my RTB colleagues point out, Scripture does not explicitly say what this means. Is it a particular relationship we have with God? A role that God The RTB views cited are from Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Who Was Adam? A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Humanity, 2nd ed. (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2015). 2 James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 5. 1

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assigns to us? A distinctive set of capacities, and if so, which ones? Christians have historically had a range of views on this issue. The perspective I’ll advocate here—in agreement with RTB—is that image bearing entails not just our role and relationship, but also exceptional capacities. Second, there is always some ambiguity in ascribing uniqueness. While it is often referred to as “difference in degree versus difference in kind,” this is an oversimplification. Something may be unique in virtue of being an extreme along a gradient of variation (e.g., the size of human cooperative groups). Or a unique trait may admit to no intermediate forms but nevertheless require other capacities that scale up to provide the necessary but not sufficient foundation (e.g., human language). Third, some evolutionary biologists assert (and many Christians accept) that having shared origins with other animals necessarily precludes there being anything radically unique about humans. Not so. There is no more warrant for this than for claiming there to be no fundamental difference between inanimate matter and living creatures since both are made of atoms that were originally formed in stars. It is crucial to note that common nature is not a necessary consequence of common ancestry. Indeed, many evolutionary biologists emphatically affirm human exceptionalism. So there is shared agreement between not only RTB and BioLogos, but also many secular colleagues on human uniqueness and even what seems to make us distinct. I’ll emphasize two features. First is intellectual capacities— symbolic thought and language. While other living species have fascinating capacities for problem solving and communication, there is scant evidence that they solve problems by manipulating symbols or that they communicate with a hierarchical and combinatorial system of symbols. Moreover, we not only use symbols but encode them in writing, art, tools, and ornaments that can be transmitted across generations as material culture. The second feature is relational capacities—morality and altruism. Scripture teaches that we will be held uniquely accountable for our moral choices, and many colleagues acknowledge that we appear to have extraordinary capacities underlying moral cognition. Developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan maintains, “The continual desire to regard the self as good is a unique feature of Homo sapiens. . . . [Our] biologically prepared biases render the human

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experience incommensurable with that of any other species.”3 And it is not just morality but the behaviors affirmed by morality that make us special. Humans are capable of cooperating with and sacrificing for others at a breadth and depth not observed in any other species. Evolutionist E. O. Wilson describes our exceptional cooperation as “the culminating mystery of all biology,” and world-famous atheist Richard Dawkins asserts that “we alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of selfish replicators.”4 How did we come to be? These exceptional capacities reflect a significant gap between humans and other animals. But there is also an impressively ascending sequence of traits that underlie them. Two areas of research illuminate this. Primatology and comparative animal behavior. A little more than a generation ago, many of the most emphatic claims of human uniqueness asserted the complete absence in animals of key behaviors we associate with humans: tools, transmitted culture, relational awareness. These claims have had to be abandoned in light of fascinating new discoveries. Regarding intellectual capacities, the animal world displays a continuum of increasingly complex capacities for technology, problem solving, and communication. • It was once asserted that only humans use tools. Then that only humans modify tools. Then that only humans make tools by imitative learning. Animals do all these things.5 • Primates have impressive problem-solving capacities that involve the conceptual representation and mental manipulation of the world. They can build novel, multipart structures and preplan solutions to multistep problems. Now, conceptual representation is not the same as symbolic encoding. But it is an advanced cognitive building block newly recognized in animals. (And the earliest human artifacts reflect conceptual representation but not clearly symbolic encoding.) • Great apes can learn and communicate with combinatorial signals. Again, this is definitely not the same as symbolic, recursive language. But it is a significant capacity underlying human communication. Jerome Kagan, Three Seductive Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 190-91. E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 182; Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 215. 5 Who Was Adam? provides an engaging overview. 3 4

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Relationally, animals evidence a continuum of capacities to sense distress, form enduring relationships, help and comfort others, and even reconcile conflict between group members. Moreover: • Primates have (at least limited) capacity to ascribe beliefs to others. • Recent work has demonstrated that primates even have a notion of fairness. In surprising contrast to immediate self-interest, they will irately refuse a reward they have previously accepted if they observe their partner getting a better reward. (Not unlike my kids—and many adults!) These traits surely do not constitute full-blown morality or “love your enemy” altruism. But they represent a continuum of social capacities that are entirely absent in “lower” animals and are legitimately viewed as intermediate building blocks to human relationality. Historical anthropology. While the animal capacities mentioned above are requisite to fully human abilities and increase over evolutionary time, they are undeniably not human. Is there anything in the fossil record that is meaningfully in between the capacities of humans and other living primates? My RTB colleagues maintain that extinct hominins had limited intelligence and used crude tools “much as baboons, gorillas, and chimpanzees do.”6 “Majority rules” is no firm maxim for adjudicating truth, but virtually all paleoanthropologists view the escalating hominin sequence as intermediate to humans and living primates. Why? First, over the two million years prior to modern humans, there is an ascending series of step increases in relative brain size, technological sophistication, and cultural transmission.7 This includes amplified variety and sophistication of tools, increasing evidence of fire use from 700,000 years ago on, and recently found (2016) cave engravings and structures vastly predating Homo sapiens. Importantly, none of this clearly betokens symbolic capacity as possessed by modern humans. But nothing remotely like this exists in nonhominin animals. Another important factor is the mysterious Neanderthals. Many anthropologists consider Neanderthal capacities very close to if not indistinguishable Rana and Ross, Who Was Adam?, 50 It is crucial to acknowledge that a series of anatomical or behavioral intermediates is not the same as a sequence of evolutionary transitions.

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from humans. But not all agree: there is serious controversy about whether Neanderthals possessed language or symbolic cognition. My RTB colleagues are entirely correct to point out debate over claims of behaviors such as art or ritualistic burial that appear to be symbolic and “fully” human. But other utterly unique findings are widely recognized: • Fire. Fire use really caught fire in Neanderthal culture. And recent (2016) evidence even suggests the use of manganese to facilitate fires. There remains debate about its role in cooking food, making tools, or convening the group around warmth. But no creatures on earth besides humans systematically employ fire in their social groups. • Clothing. Models of energy dissipation and thermal regulation indicate that both humans and Neanderthals covered their bodies, especially feet and heads, in northern latitudes. Recent (2016) work has found physical evidence for animal coverings in each species, though humans appear to have utilized more sophisticated (stitched) clothing. • Ornamentation. There have been numerous, recent finds of decorative feathers, shells, and cave etching more than forty thousand years old. But some anthropologists debate their Neanderthal origins. Other finds of red ochre, cave structures, and marked eagle talons clearly predate humans. Their utilitarian versus decorative use is debated, though even utilitarian use would represent highly advanced cognition. The most recent (2016) work has illuminated a set of eight eagle talons modified and assembled for use as a necklace.8 • Burial. Although there are numerous proposed burial sites for Neanderthals, there has been debate about some prominent studies. However, the most extensive study yet done—a twelve-year reexamination of the famous La Chapelle site—reveals intentional burial. Although significant, burials do not equal “funerals”: other animals commemorate their dead, 8

RTB argues that personal adornment is uniquely human, “offers no immediate advantage for survival,” and “marks the use of symbolic language” (Rana and Ross, Who Was Adam?, 87). However, ornamentation can have distinct adaptive value (think of a peacock’s tail). And we now know that other species augment their innate ornamentation: besides Neanderthals, chimps are observed to adorn themselves. Ornamentation need not demonstrate symbolism; there are important differences between decorative and representational ornaments or “art.” The latter seems distinctively human, but it is unseen in earliest H. sapiens.

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and aside from one recent (2016) study, there is no unrebutted evidence of symbolic, ritualized burial as seen in modern humans. Then again, the earliest human burials also lack such evidence. • Sophisticated tool use. Neanderthals planned, assembled, and transported multipart tools—including spears with tips. Moreover, they used not only stone and wood, but the first bone tools in Europe. No other animal on earth besides humans has attained this level of technology. And implements associated with earliest H. sapiens were actually less sophisticated. • Radical social care. There have been manifold discoveries of Neanderthal amputee, deformed, toothless, and severely disabled individuals with scarring patterns that indicate many years of being cared for in ways unseen outside of humans. • Encephalization. Encephalization quotient (or EQ) is a measure of cranial volume relative to body mass, and it is regarded by many biologists— including our RTB colleagues—as a “better measure of intelligence than the raw cranial capacity.”9 Importantly, Neanderthal EQ is virtually indistinguishable from humans’ and is greater than that of any other primate or fossil hominin. RTB’s Who Was Adam? graphically represents an impressively large gap between EQs of H. sapiens and three extinct hominins. But Neanderthals are not included in the graph. To their credit, in the book’s second edition the authors acknowledge “we should have included EQ data for other hominids such as Neanderthals.”10 Figure 2 illustrates average EQ values as presented by RTB, but adds Neanderthals. Still, the consistent theme in interpreting Neanderthal finds is admittedly the debate over whether they had symbolic capacity. But intermediacy does not require symbolism. Imagine you came upon an upright walking biped wearing clothing and maybe necklaces, constructing spears with tips, using fire, caring for their disabled, burying their dead—even having babies with humans. Whether or not they had symbolic language, would you think of them as only having “some capacity for emotional expression and a level of intelligence similar to that of great apes today”?11 Rana and Ross, Who Was Adam?, 356. Ibid. 11 Ibid., 195. 9

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Figure 2. Encephalization quotient versus time for selected hominin species Redrawn from data in Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Who Was Adam? A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Humanity, 2nd ed. (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2015), 169, 357. **Homo neanderthalensis added. Value from same source cited by Rana and Ross for other species: Roger Lewin and Robert A. Foley, Principles of Human Evolution, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 452.

The fascinating thing is that many Christians who reject evolution not only agree that Neanderthals are humanlike but go even further. The prominent antievolutionist organizations Answers in Genesis and Institute for Creation Research claim that Neanderthals were one hundred percent fully human. So while there is some debate among paleoanthropologists about just how humanlike Neanderthals were, this disagreement can be seen to reflect the (at the very least) intermediate status of the species. But the world’s leading antievolutionist organizations, while utterly rejecting Neanderthal intermediate status, radically disagree with each other on why. Two say they were completely human; the other argues they were similar to an ape. How does all this relate to our two questions, who and how? The existence of intermediates actually has no bearing on the fundamental issue of imago Dei or human uniqueness: we are unique whether or not there is a precursive sequence leading to us. Nor would a series of intermediates rule out special creation: God could have supernaturally created both humans and intermediate species (as RTB suggests). So the presence of intermediates does not challenge imago Dei, and a lack of intermediates is not a

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strict prediction of special creation. But their presence is a specific prediction of the evolutionary model of origins. And that is just what we have. In rejecting evolution, those who also reject a sequence of behavioral intermediates end up doing so for reasons that diametrically oppose one another. In their contradictory interpretations of the data, the conflicting antievolutionary claims actually end up supporting the very intermediate status of what is empirically observed. Conclusion. There is profound agreement between BioLogos and RTB about who we are: humans are unique. Moreover, our distinctive features— including symbolic thought and moral altruism—are consonant with being made in God’s image and are not just mildly amplified versions of animal capacities. However, we disagree on how we came to be. While posing no threat to imago Dei, the primatological and anthropological evidence— including the genetic, anatomical, and behavioral features of Neanderthals— represents a clearly escalating sequence of foundational intermediates.

Reasons to Believe Author Fuz Rana Who are humans? One of the key ideas of the historic Christian faith—and a key aspect of RTB’s creation model—is the notion that human beings are made in God’s image. Scripture doesn’t explicitly define the image of God, and theologians over the centuries have discussed and debated this concept. Some take the image of God to describe humanity’s spiritual—but finite and limited—resemblance to God. Others think it refers to humanity’s relational capacity, while some think it allows humans to function as God’s representatives or viceroys on Earth.12 Acknowledging that these three views are not mutually exclusive, we hold primarily to the resemblance view at Reasons to Believe, specifically the following points: 1. Human beings possess a moral component. They inherently understand right and wrong and have a strong innate sense of justice. 2. Humans are spiritual beings who recognize a reality beyond this universe and physical life. Humankind intuitively acknowledges the existence of God and has a propensity toward worship and prayer. An accessible discussion of the differing views can be found in C. John Collins, Science and Faith: Friends or Foes? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003).

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3. Human beings relate to God, to themselves, to other people, and to other creatures. There is a relational aspect to God’s image. 4. Humanity’s mental capacity reflects God’s image. Human beings possess the ability to reason and think logically. They can engage in symbolic thought. People express themselves with complex, abstract language. They are aware of the past, present, and future. Human beings display intense creativity through art, music, literature, science, and technical inventions. Who were the hominids? We view the hominids as animals created for God’s purposes and by his direct intervention. They existed for a time and then went extinct. These were remarkable creatures that walked erect and possessed some level of limited intelligence and emotional capacity, as do many animals. Such characteristics allowed hominids to employ crude tools and even adopt a low level of “culture,” much like baboons, gorillas, and chimpanzees. While our creation model asserts that the hominids were created by God’s divine command, they were not spiritual beings made in his image. This status was reserved exclusively for human beings. Our model treats hominids as analogous to, yet distinct from, the great apes. For this reason the model predicts that anatomical, physiological, biochemical, and genetic similarities exist among hominids and human beings to varying degrees. But since the hominids were not made in God’s image, we expect them to be noticeably different from humans, as reflected by their cognitive and communicative capacities, behavior, “technology,” and “culture.” Further, our model maintains that while human beings reflect God’s image in their activities, hominids did not. The RTB model asserts that humans are uniquely spiritual and hominids were not. According to our creation model, much of human behavior ultimately stems from the image of God. Because the archaeological record is the product of behavior and activity, it supplies the means to probe for the image of God. Artifacts that result from reason, symbolic thought, technical inventiveness, and artistic, musical, and religious expression will reflect the image of God. Since our model views the hominids as animals, we predict that such image-of-God artifacts will make their first and only appearance in the archaeological record alongside modern human remains.

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Our model maintains that any artifacts found with hominids that precede human beings in the fossil record should differ fundamentally from those associated with the first true humans. The archaeological remains that coincide with hominids should indicate the absence of image-of-God behavior. The archaeological record. Without question, hominids living as long as two million years ago employed stone tools and possessed a culture of sorts. Still, their crude technology and simple lifestyle remained static for hundreds of thousands of years at a time. When new modes of technology and culture appear in the archaeological record, the advances generally represent relatively small steps upward, followed by long periods of stasis.13 But tool use alone doesn’t reflect God’s image. Chimpanzees make stone tools and have been observed fabricating spears to hunt with. The artifacts linked with modern humans are qualitatively different from those displayed by the hominids. Artifacts produced by modern humans reflect the capacity for symbolism, a quality we associate with the image of God. Until recently, a number of anthropologists maintained that modern human behavior appeared suddenly—an event described as the sociocultural big bang—but well after anatomically modern humans appeared on the scene. (The fossil record and the genetic dates place the origin of humanity around 150,000 years ago.) If this pattern holds, it aligns with an evolutionary explanation for humanity’s origin. Evidence for the sociocultural big bang came exclusively from the archaeological record in Europe. Concurrent with the arrival of modern humans in Europe was the explosive appearance of a sophisticated toolkit, body ornamentation, and artistic expression in the form of cave paintings, figurative art, and musical instruments. Presumably, modern humans already possessed the capacity for symbolism when they migrated into Europe. Support for this idea comes from the recent discovery of art in cave sites in southeast Asia. Archaeologists discovered hand stencils and animal depictions on cave walls, dating to around forty thousand years ago. The quality of the artwork compares to the artwork on the cave walls found in Europe. This discovery implies that 13

For a detailed list of references to the scientific literature describing the archaeological record, please see the expanded second edition of the book I coauthored with Hugh Ross, Who Was Adam?

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humans possessed the capacity for symbolism prior to the time they began to migrate around the world (sixty thousand years ago). Over the last decade, archaeologists have uncovered a number of artifacts from several cave sites (Blombos, Sibudu, Pinnacle Point, and Diepkloof Rock Shelter) along the South African coast that reflect the activities of humans with the capacity for symbolism. The finds at these sites include red ocher with engravings, engraved ostrich eggs, jewelry beads, heat- and pressure-treated stones (which allow for easier flaking), use of adhesives, and bedding made from evergreens with insect-repellent properties. The finds from South Africa push the origin of symbolism to at least eighty thousand years ago. Given the patchiness of the archaeological record, it is reasonable to think that the appearance of sophisticated human behavior may have occurred even earlier. While not conclusive, a number of studies suggest that modern human behavior emerged even earlier than seventy to eighty thousand years ago. For example, researchers have uncovered beads made from marine shells at locations in Israel (Skhul) and Algeria—locations that are remote from the ocean. This means that the shells were transported long distances before being made into jewelry. Using thermal luminescence techniques, these beads were dated to between 100,000 and 135,000 years in age. Archaeologists have also unearthed evidence of the use of red ochre and pierced marine shells in the Qafzeh Cave of Israel that date to about ninetytwo thousand years ago. Investigators have recovered evidence that occupants of the Pinnacle Point Cave in South Africa were making use of pigment as far back as 165,000 years ago. All of the artifacts potentially reflect the capacity for symbolism. These observations place the origin of modern human behavior fully in line with the fossil record and genetic dates for humanity’s origin at about 150,000 years ago. Did Neanderthals possess the capacity for symbolism? Did Neanderthals possess advanced cognitive ability? Perhaps there is no question that leads to more disagreement among paleoanthropologists. Some argue that Neanderthals were cognitively inferior to humans; others maintain that Neanderthals displayed sophisticated behavior on par with humans. If Neanderthals did possess the capacity for symbolism, that ability would be a blow to our creation model.

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To make the case that Neanderthals possessed advanced cognitive ability and symbolism, some anthropologists claim that these hominids (1) buried their dead, (2) made cave art, (3) produced musical instruments, (4) fashioned body ornaments, and (5) possessed language. Yet when the archaeological evidence used to justify these claims is critically examined, the case for Neanderthal symbolism unravels. As a case in point, some paleoanthropologists have argued that about forty thousand years ago—the time of humanity’s arrival in Europe and right before Neanderthals’ disappearance—Neanderthals evolved the capacity for modern behavior and, with it, symbolic thought. Archaeological finds in the Grotte du Renne (a French cave) provide the chief evidence for this claim. Both Neanderthals and humans occupied this cave at various times between twenty-eight and forty-five thousand years ago. The site consists of fifteen archaeological layers. Of greatest interest to paleoanthropologists is a layer containing Neanderthal teeth and artifacts such as personal ornaments, rings, pierced animal teeth, and ivory pendants—remains viewed as evidence for symbolic thought and typically connected to humans. Yet when researchers carefully applied radiocarbon dating to the cave layers, they discovered that the cave layers were mixed, perhaps by the last occupants, raising questions as to whether Neanderthals indeed possessed the capacity for symbolic thought. Neanderthal burials? Many anthropologists hold the idea that Neanderthals buried their dead as unassailable. In 1961 archaeologists unearthed a three-year-old child in Roc de Marsal (a cave in France) and interpreted the discovery as a deliberate Neanderthal burial. The gravesite became widely considered as an unequivocal example of an intentional entombment. Careful reexamination of the site indicates the “gravesite” was actually a natural depression in the cave floor and the child’s remains appear to have slid into this natural cavity. Over a century ago, archaeologists working in La Ferrassie Cave (France), one of the most important Neanderthal burial sites, recovered several specimens that looked as though they were buried deliberately, but appearances did not hold up under scientific scrutiny. Reanalysis of the site in 2012 suggested these findings were natural, not purposeful, burials. Neanderthal art? Recently, researchers have claimed to find cave paintings (red disks) and etchings in the bedrock of a cave (both in Spain) that date to

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forty-one and thirty-eight thousand years old, respectively. Because of their early dates, anthropologists have attributed this art to Neanderthals. Yet other studies indicate that Neanderthals had disappeared from Spain (and Europe) by about forty-five thousand years ago. It also appears as if modern humans made their way into Europe earlier than previously thought, making the most reasonable candidate for the artwork modern humans, not Neanderthals. Musical instruments? One of the most widely known examples of a Neanderthal musical instrument is the so-called bone flute recovered from a cave in Slovenia. The paleoanthropologists who made this find interpreted an eleven-centimeter bone fragment from a cave bear’s femur as a flute. This bone shaft had four evenly spaced circular openings on one side. Subsequent analysis revealed that these openings were perforations to the bone caused by hyenas that were scavenging cave bear remains. Body ornaments? One of the most impressive examples of putative Neanderthal jewelry is the pigmented marine shells found at a site in Iberia. Marine shells were recovered next to red and yellow colorants (pigments inside a marine shell), and one shell was painted orange. Using carbon-14 dating methods, researchers dated the artifacts to be about fifty thousand years old. Researchers have also found negligible remains of a marine shell with red pigment in micropits on its surface in a cave in northern Italy. Carbon-14 dating placed the shell between forty-five and forty-seven thousand years old. As impressive as these finds are, it is premature to count them as evidence for Neanderthal symbolism. It is more reasonable to attribute these artifacts to humans. In both cases, the remains date close to the time when humans entered Europe. Again, there is a growing consensus that Neanderthals went extinct earlier than previously thought, and the dates for these two finds are close to the time that some anthropologists think Neanderthals disappeared. Neanderthal language? Toward the end of 2007, scientists announced the isolation of FOXP2, the so-called language gene, from a Neanderthal specimen recently recovered in Spain. Some people took this discovery as evidence that Neanderthals had language ability like that of humans. Does the presence of FOXP2 in the Neanderthal genome imply that these hominids possessed language? Not necessarily. This gene cannot be the only one responsible for human language. It is most likely that language derives from

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the activity of a complex network of gene interactions that dynamically vary through the course of human development. FOXP2 represents only one of these genes. Researchers have yet to catalog all the genes involved in human language ability, let alone how the genes interact to generate language capacity. What the Neanderthals possessed was a necessary condition for language, not a sufficient one. A uniquely distinguishing image. All claims of Neanderthal symbolism are readily disputed. There is no conclusive evidence that Neanderthals had advanced cognitive ability on par with modern human cognition. Based on the archaeological record, it is possible to make a case that modern humans uniquely possess advanced cognitive capabilities and symbolism, hallmarks of the image of God. The archaeological record also indicates that hominids possessed limited intelligence and perhaps emotional capacity, but their behavior was relatively unsophisticated compared to that of modern humans. It appears that humans alone resemble their Creator.

REDIRECT

Steve Lemke

We owe a great debt to these two excellent scholars for addressing the topics in this chapter from the field of behavioral anthropology, providing detailed explanations that are new information to most readers who are not specialists in this field. These well-informed explanations will be a helpful resource to college students and laypersons who wrestle with this data in their scholarly reading, and will be informative for the church. My observations are as follows. Both BioLogos and Reasons to Believe take the evidence from behavioral anthropology seriously. However, they differ about how this evidence is to be interpreted. As Jeff Schloss notes in his article, both organizations agree that humans are unique and have unique features such as morality, love, and the capacity for symbolic thought that reflect the image of God. The two organizations disagree about how close nonhuman animals (primates) come to exhibiting human capacities, how close the capacities of nonhuman hominins (particularly Neanderthals) approach those of humans, and how distinct the Neanderthals are from human persons. BioLogos is more inclined to see upper-level primates and Neanderthals as intermediate

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forms between animals and humans; Reasons to Believe sees a clearer distinction between any animals or hominins and human beings. Now, some requests for both contributors: • Please address more clearly whether you affirm human exceptionalism. • What distinction, if any, may be made between “human beings” and “human persons”? • Identify more clearly when in anthropological history you date the emergence of fully human persons created in the image of God.

BIOLOGOS RESPONSE

Jeff Schloss

Human exceptionalism. With a sense of both gratitude and sobriety I view humans as exceptional among earthly creatures—in two ways. One is theological, known by biblical revelation and not scientific inquiry. Humans have a unique relationship with our Creator, being distinctively able to cultivate (or reject) commerce with him. We also have a special role in creation, charged with honoring God by caring for his world and one another. And we have a unique destiny: every human will be raised to encounter Christ. These revealed elements of relationship, role, and destiny are central to what virtually all Christians have attributed to being made in God’s image. But second, human beings can occupy these offices because God has endowed us with other traits—traits that we can empirically interrogate. These capacities include symbolic thought, communication through recursive language, moral awareness, and the capacity to intentionally care for others— even those who oppose us—at significant cost to self. We alone can, but too rarely do, love our enemies. Importantly, Fuz Rana and I agree on the uniqueness of these capacities.14 Moreover, we also agree that they are not merely scaled-up manifestations of less developed but fundamentally comparable capacities in nonhumans. Moral idealism and love of enemy have no counterparts outside humanity. But they do require other capacities—individual recognition, social memory and In this chapter and in Who Was Adam?, RTB, like many in the post-Enlightenment Christian tradition, emphasize “cognitive capabilities and symbolism” as “hallmarks of the image of God.” We do differ somewhat on this point, as I would include and indeed elevate the capacity for agapic love.

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cooperation, empathy, counterfactual awareness, affective care—that are completely lacking in earliest life forms and that undeniably scale up in an impressive series of intermediate capacities across evolutionary history. The same is true of symbolic thought and language. These entail a discrete jump in mental abilities, but also require other traits—imitative learning, conceptual representation, temporal planning, and neurological and even anatomical structures enabling speech—that serially escalate over time. Thus there is a sequential increase of traits that, to use words from Fuz Rana’s section, are “necessary but not sufficient” for genuinely unique human capacities. This progressive dimension of evolution is itself a wondrous aspect of the created order. Human beings and human persons. Three distinctions are important here. First is the taxonomic one: “human” is Homo sapiens. We can identify bones dug up in a graveyard as a human skeleton or a cheek swab sent off for genomic analysis as human DNA. But as we go back in the paleo-archeological record, demarcating human from prehuman is debated. And so too with going forward: How much can we edit the human genome before it becomes “post-human”? Setting aside the taxonomic edges of H. sapiens, a human being is a living organism fully endowed with the developmental telos centrally characteristic of our species. A skeleton or cheek cell may be human but is not a human being. The same holds for a sperm or an egg. However, an embryo is a human being. But is an embryo a “person”? What indeed is a human person? This question cuts across so many disciplines and is so profoundly weighty that even asking, much less responding to it in this brief context seems cavalier. One widely posited response holds that a person is a living being with desires, beliefs, and intentions, who is aware of these in herself and in others. Human persons have desires, beliefs, and intentions that are subject to moral appraisal. And an unseen other they can have awareness of is God. The emergence of humans. Setting aside for a moment the question of imago Dei, the anthropological record does not make it clear when “fully human persons” emerged even in the above nontheological sense. For one thing, we can’t clearly identify the emergence of moral awareness.15 And regarding the 15

This is true of both archaeological and individual development. Courts debate the attribution of moral competency to young or compromised individuals. Religious traditions differ on whether and when there is an age of accountability.

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symbolic, linguistic, and cultural capacities we ascribe to humans, physical artifacts are unclear. Some maintain that these capacities emerged gradually before and well into the human lineage. Others posit a significant jump with earliest H. sapiens, who were fully cognitively endowed but awaited later demographic or technological breakthroughs for explosive cultural development. Still others conclude there was a more recent biological jump with special adaptations for symbolic thought and spoken language that set off a cultural “big bang.” So while many paleoanthropologists affirm human exceptionalism, there is no agreement about when, or whether, there was a single transitional threshold. However, there is unanimous agreement on one issue: no scholars in the field recognize evidence of agriculture, animal husbandry, or representational art as far back as 130,000 years ago, when the RTB model of an agrarian Adam proposes. Returning to the question of imago Dei: I agree with RTB that the Scriptures do not identify what specific capacities it entails. But they do affirm a special relationship and destiny. They also depict God as initiating commerce with individuals at points in history. Moreover, there is no conceivable intermediate destiny: beings either are or are not resurrected. Thus for theological reasons I view imago Dei as discretely conferred. I do not know when this distinctive human status emerged; it is not definitively illuminated either by Scripture or by science. Crucially, resolving this is not necessary to embracing the relationship with God that imago Dei disposes us to, that sin subverts, and that the gospel marvelously renews. Moreover, making the gospel credible and attractive hinges not on winning arguments over the nature or timing of imago Dei, but on sharing the love that testifies to its reality and to the grace of him who shapes us.

REASONS TO BELIEVE RESPONSE

Fuz Rana

Human exceptionalism. Reasons to Believe scholars fully affirm the idea of human exceptionalism. Interestingly, a growing number of anthropologists now recognize that humans differ in kind—not just degree—from other animals. The basis for this difference stems largely from our capacity for symbolism: humans uniquely possess the ability to represent the world with discrete symbols that we mentally manipulate to create alternate possibilities. Symbolism manifests through human language (both spoken and

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written), art, and music. We hold to a resemblance view regarding the image of God; thus we consider symbolism to be a component of God’s image. In contrast to the view espoused by Jeff Schloss (and BioLogos)—who sees the capacities that make humans exceptional as “continuously ascending” through the hominins—we maintain that a behavioral discontinuity exists between modern humans and the hominins preceding us in the fossil record. In fact, our view is shared by some anthropologists, though they are a minority. For example, secular anthropologists Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz write, “Symbolic and nonsymbolic cognitive states are clearly separated by a qualitative gulf: the former is not simply an extension of the latter, a little bit more of the same.”16 Human persons and their emergence. We see no difference between human beings and human persons. Based on our human origins model, we predict that when anatomically modern human beings first appeared on Earth, they would have been behaviorally modern human persons. To put it another way: when humans were created, they were fully human persons bearing God’s image. Recent advances indicate that the anatomically modern human form appears in the fossil record less than 200,000 years ago. As noted in chapter ten, the genetic dates for humanity’s origin based on mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal DNA converge around 130,000 years ago. The archaeological record—which gives insight into when the modern human mind emerges—increasingly places the first appearance of behaviorally modern humans in line with the fossil and genetic data. That is, the fossil, genetic, and archaeological data indicate that anatomically and behaviorally modern humans emerged coincidentally. In light of the scientific data, we estimate humanity’s origin to be roughly 130,000 years ago. We maintain that this date for humanity’s origin comports with the biblical account of humanity’s genesis.17 At first glance the scientific dates seem to conflict with the biblical date. This apparent discrepancy arises when some Bible interpreters treat the genealogies in Genesis 5 (Adam to Noah) and Genesis 11 (Noah to Abraham) as exhaustive chronologies and attempt Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz, “Evolution of the Genus Homo,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 37 (May 2009): 81. 17 See a detailed discussion of this point in Rana and Ross, Who Was Adam? 16

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to determine the date for Adam and Eve’s creation from them. We assert that this approach is questionable. The Genesis 5 and Genesis 11 genealogies were not intended to be chronometers but, like all genealogies found in Scripture, were meant to communicate theological truths.18 The range of meaning for the Hebrew words translated as “father” (’ab) and “son” (ben) can include “ancestor” and “descendant,” respectively.19 Similarly, the Hebrew word translated as “begot” or “become the father of ” can mean to father an individual or to bring forth a lineage.20 In Hebrew thought, a father is not only the parent of his child but also the parent of his children’s descendants. According to Kenneth Kitchen, the Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies could be read as “A fathered [P, who fathered Q, who fathered R, who fathered S, who fathered T, who fathered . . .] B.” Genesis 5 and 11 could then be read as “A fathered the lineage culminating in B, and after fathering the line, lived X years.”21 The bottom line: there is no reason to regard the scientific dates for the origin of humanity to be in conflict with the biblical account.

CONCLUSION

Steve Lemke

Let us summarize the points of agreement and disagreement between these two perspectives on behavioral anthropology. BioLogos and Reasons to Believe both affirm human uniqueness, particularly because of the imago Dei. But BioLogos sees a higher degree of continuity between the animal kingdom and humans than does Reasons to Believe. Both BioLogos and Reasons to Believe take the research of paleoanthropology seriously. However, BioLogos understands human development within an evolutionary framework, and Reasons to Believe does not. Although Schloss and Rana examine the same paleoanthropological evidence, they reach different conclusions from the evidence. BioLogos sees a higher correlation between Neanderthals and humans than does William Henry Green, “Primeval Chronology,” appendix 2 in Genesis One and the Origin of the Earth, by Robert Newman and Herman Eckelmann Jr. (Hatfield, PA: Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute, 1977). 19 R. Laird Harris, Gleason Archer Jr., and Bruce Waltke, eds., Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980), 1:5-6. 20 Ibid., 378-79. 21 Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 440-41.

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Reasons to Believe. Both BioLogos and Reasons to Believe assert that the evidence supports the existence of fully human persons 130,000 to 150,000 years ago. Both organizations believe that this “old-earth” view is not inconsistent with Scripture. Our contributors have provided us with a high level of archaeological and anthropological physical evidence to support their affirmations—the sort of evidence that is more technical than most clergy and laypersons have been made aware. They have given us much information that we can share with well-educated persons in our churches who are wrestling with the issues of creation and evolution. They have provided us two different but well-articulated visions of how to interpret the biblical materials about human origins. We are thankful for their contribution.

Conclusion

What Is the Next Step? Kenneth Keathley, Deborah Haarsma, and Hugh Ross

SBC MODERATOR KENNETH KEATHLEY After participating in all of our conversations with Reasons to Believe and BioLogos and now after working though this book, which is the product of those conversations, I am struck by a number of things. To state the obvious, this issue is huge. The creation/evolution conversation is big in the sense of how broad and interdisciplinary the topics are. The discussions involved scientists from so many disciplines—biologists, astronomers, geologists, and more; plus theologians, historians, philosophers, and biblical scholars. But the issues are big also in the sense that the discussions have theological and scientific significance. People feel strongly about these matters because they do matter. These are truly exciting days. The Human Genome Project has been a game changer. Now it seems that further discoveries that impact the discussion on origins are being made almost daily. Sometimes mistakes have been made along the way; certain pronouncements have turned out to be premature or inaccurate. But such are the traits of revolutionary times. We are involved in a conversation that is receiving new information regularly. I am encouraged by the fruitfulness of the present efforts. Recent scientific discoveries have caused theologians and biblical scholars to revisit the biblical creation account, with surprisingly productive results. Many Old Testament scholars are looking again at Genesis 1–2 in the light of the ancient Near Eastern culture in which it was originally written. They recognize that we must interpret the biblical text in a way that takes this ancient context into account.

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This is a pivotal time. The conversation has changed; the center of gravity has moved. If a dialogue like this one had been held forty years ago, it would have looked and sounded very different. And that’s a very big if. It is probably more accurate to say that a generation ago a dialogue like this one simply was not possible. Much work still needs to be done. RTB is an evangelistic ministry with a focused mission and doctrinal stance. BioLogos directs its ministry primarily to Christian audiences and has a broader doctrinal stance. These different emphases and approaches account for some of the differences between the two groups. However, this book demonstrates that other differences between RTB and BioLogos run deeper. A complete resolution to all these disagreements may not be possible. But the members of each organization have a real affection and appreciation for those belonging to the other. Both sides have consistently manifested the love of Christ, a confidence in the Word of God, and a sense of mission. I am honored to have had the opportunity to work with the people of both organizations.

BioLogos Author Deborah Haarsma I want to start by thanking Hugh, Ken, and all the participants in these dialogues. As we wrote in the introduction, we all agree that the Bible (e.g., Jn 17) calls the church to be one body even while we disagree on some matters. How do we talk about those differences in a Christlike way? In today’s polarized culture, such conversations are sadly rare. Thus it has been a blessing to share times of worship and fellowship with Christians who hold other views and a privilege to see grace-filled dialogue in practice. We celebrated our areas of agreement, including our dedication to Christ, our commitment to the authority of Scripture, and our love of science and studying God’s creation. But we went beyond cheerleading about our broad agreement to talk openly about our differences. Participants asked questions out of a genuine desire to learn the views of others, not to trip them up. People stated their disagreements clearly, but without animosity and grandstanding. I remember distinctly a time when Fuz Rana of RTB suggested phrasing to help someone articulate the BioLogos view more clearly, and a time when Jim Stump of BioLogos suggested language for the RTB approach that resonated with people from both organizations. This is gracious dialogue in action.

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That doesn’t mean the conversation was easy. Christian unity does not mean uniformity! We had all the logistical and communication challenges you might expect when herding many scholars or working with groups that have different organizational cultures. But beyond that, our organizations have real and serious differences in our viewpoints, and we found that those views are unlikely to change. The two biggest areas of disagreement are on the science of evolution and on how to interpret Scripture. We probably all felt frustrated at times, wondering, Why can’t you see the strength of my argument? or Why can’t you see the danger in your position? If the group had not established strong personal relationships and been committed to humility and Christian unity, we would not have been able to sustain true engagement and would have descended to talking past each other or rancorous debate. Going public with this dialogue—speaking side by side at events and writing this book—has brought the conversation to another level. It has challenged us to be clearer in our communication and to face up to particular differences that didn’t come out in early conversations. Going public also has risks, as the stakeholders and critics of our organizations begin listening in. In today’s public square and—sadly—in our churches, people are assigned guilt by association, so that even talking with someone of a different view can be seen as an endorsement or agreement with that view. I admire the courage of everyone involved to continue our conversations despite the risks. Our primary goal was not to change each other’s core positions, but to remove misconceptions, discover areas of consensus, and learn to articulate each other’s positions with accuracy and generosity. I feel these goals were achieved. As a bonus, we learned to define and articulate our own positions more clearly in the face of concerns and questions; truly, “iron sharpens iron” (Prov 27:17). With this book, we want to share the benefits of our dialogue with others. Readers can learn about two positions on origins from the leading organizations in order to understand the rich landscape of positions between the extreme views of young-earth creationism and atheistic evolution. Pastors and teachers will be equipped to present multiple views on origins to parishioners and students. But this dialogue is about far more than views and arguments. We hope and pray that it is a model for how Christians can disagree while still loving one another, for how to follow Christ’s call for unity in the

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church. When we do that, we become a powerful witness to a world filled with polarized, rancorous disagreement. As Jesus said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (Jn 13:35).

Reasons to Believe Author Hugh Ross The issues addressed in this book are very big and controversial and, even for people with doctoral degrees in science or theology, can be confusing. Our goal in this book was twofold: to help remove some of the confusion and to demonstrate that important controversial disagreements can be addressed in a spirit of gentleness, respect, and love. Ultimately, both BioLogos and Reasons to Believe seek to bring a measure of resolution and peace to the creation/evolution issues that divide us and the rest of the Christian community. For this to happen there must first be a clear understanding of the positions, goals, priorities, strategies, and core values held by the two organizations. Achieving this understanding was the primary purpose of this book. For this reason, BioLogos and Reasons to Believe asked Southern Baptist theologians to ply us with probative questions designed to eliminate remaining doubts about the positions, goals, priorities, strategies, and core values held by the two organizations. This book, therefore, is a two-views book but not a debate book. We purposely avoided long rebuttals and responses, recognizing that there is not enough room within a single volume to engage in sufficient depth to map out pathways for the resolution of our differences. Our goal is to do that in future books. Differences as great as those described in this book are rarely resolved through rebuttals and responses alone. Typically, it takes the expansion of both the quantity and the quality of the relevant databases. Thus it is the goal of both organizations in their ongoing engagement to propose and undertake research endeavors that will expand such databases. Already both organizations are pursuing more exhaustive compilations, syntheses, and analyses of the published research literature. We recognize, given the scope of creation/evolution issues, that these endeavors must be broadly interdisciplinary. However, more so than probably any other Christian organizations, BioLogos and Reasons to Believe are staffed with

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scholars who are well trained and equipped to engage in the relevant interdisciplinary studies. We are committed to proposing tests. The field of creation/evolution issues is rich in achievable tests, experiments, and observations that hold great promise for bringing resolution to the issues. We acknowledge that especially in the life sciences inadequate attention is given to understanding and reducing systematic errors in research findings, and likewise in understanding and eliminating, or at least reducing, model dependencies and assumptions. Both BioLogos and Reasons to Believe recognize that the way forward will not be achieved just through more research and book writing. We need the input of public audiences to help guide our engagement with one another and our research and writing. Such input will also help us maintain a charitable, respectful attitude toward one another and others who disagree with us. Consequently, we hope to increase the frequency of public events where the scholars at BioLogos and Reasons to Believe engage one another. As part of that public engagement we welcome your suggestions as to how we can move forward for the glory and honor of our Creator, Savior, and Lord.

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Contributors

Joe Aguirre is editor in chief at Reasons to Believe. His recent publications include The (Creation) Show Must Go On and Here’s a Switch: 80 Percent of Junk DNA Has Function. Ted Cabal is professor of Christian philosophy and applied apologetics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He coauthored (with Peter Rasor) Controversy of the Ages: Why Christians Should Not Divide Over the Age of the Earth. James Dew is dean of the College at Southeastern and associate professor of history of ideas and philosophy at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. His publications include Science and Theology, How Do We Know? An Introduction to Epistemology (with Mark Foreman), and God and Evil (with Chad Meister). Darrel Falk is senior advisor for dialogue at the BioLogos Foundation. He is also professor of biology emeritus at Point Loma Nazarene University and senior fellow at The Colossian Forum. He is the author of Coming to Peace with Science: Bridging the Worlds Between Faith and Biology. Deborah Haarsma is president of the BioLogos Foundation. She is the author (with her husband, Loren Haarsma) of Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design. She coedited (with Scott Hoezee) Delight in Creation: Scientists Share Their Work with the Church. Loren Haarsma is associate professor of physics at Calvin College. He authored (with his wife, Deborah Haarsma) Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design and Why Believe in a Creator?

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Contributors

Kenneth Keathley is senior professor of theology, occupying the Jesse Hendley Chair of Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he also directs the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture. He coauthored (with Mark Rooker) 40 Questions About Creation and Evolution. John Laing is associate professor of systematic theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. His recent publications include “Introduction to the New Atheism: Apologetics and the Legacy of Alvin Plantinga” and “The New Atheists: Lessons for Evangelicals.” Steve Lemke is provost and professor of philosophy and ethics at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. His more recent publications include Whosoever Will: A Biblical Theological Critique of Five Point Calvinism (coedited with David Allen) and Biblical Hermeneutics: A Comprehensive Introduction to Interpreting Scripture (coedited with Bruce Corley and Grant Lovejoy). Fazale Rana is a biochemist and vice president of research and apologetics at Reasons to Believe. He has written many articles and books; his most recent publications include Creating Life in the Lab, The Cell’s Design, Who Was Adam?, and Origins of Life (the last two coauthored with Hugh Ross). Hugh Ross is an astronomer, pastor, and the president and founder of Reasons to Believe. A bestselling author, Ross has published many books, such as The Fingerprint of God, A Matter of Days, The Creator and the Cosmos, Navigating Genesis, Improbable Planet, and Why the Universe Is the Way It Is. Ken Samples is a philosopher and theologian who serves as senior research scholar at Reasons to Believe. He has written many books, including 7 Truths That Changed the World, Christian Endgame, A World of Difference, Without a Doubt, and God Among the Sages: Why Jesus Is Not Just Another Religious Leader. Jeff Schloss is senior scholar at the BioLogos Foundation and distinguished professor of biology, occupying the T. B. Walker Chair of Natural and Behavioral Sciences at Westmont College. There he also directs the Center for Faith, Ethics & Life Sciences. He has contributed to works such as Biological Science, Biblical Faith, and an Evolving Creation, and Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Dialogue.

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Ralph Stearley is professor of geology at Calvin College. He also teaches oceanography, paleontology, sedimentation, and stratigraphy as well as climate change and the biosphere. He coauthored (with Davis A. Young) The Bible, Rocks, and Time. Robert Stewart is professor of philosophy and theology, occupying the Greer-Heard Chair of Faith and Culture at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. His publications include God and Cosmology: William Lane Craig and Sean Carroll in Dialogue, and Can We Trust the Bible Concerning the Historical Jesus? J. B. (Jim) Stump is the senior editor at BioLogos. He was formerly a philosophy professor and academic administrator. He has written several books, including Science and Religion: An Introduction to the Issues and How I Changed My Mind About Evolution (coedited with Kathryn Applegate).  John Walton is professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College. His most recent publications include The Lost World of Adam and Eve, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology, and The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. Jeff Zweerink is executive director of online learning and a research scholar at Reasons to Believe and is an assistant research physicist at UCLA. He has authored several works, including Who’s Afraid of the Multiverse?

BioLogos invites the church and the world to see the harmony between science and biblical faith. Founded by Francis Collins in 2007, it provides resources and online forums that explore evolutionary creation for pastors, teachers, students, and scholars. Visit biologos.org. Reasons to Believe’s mission is to spread the Christian gospel by demonstrating that sound reason and scientific research—including the very latest discoveries—consistently support, rather than erode, confidence in the truth of the Bible and faith in the personal, transcendent God revealed in both Scripture and nature. Visit reasons.org.

BioLogos Books on Science and Christianity BioLogos invites the church and the world to see the harmony between science and biblical faith as they present an evolutionary understanding of God’s creation. BioLogos Books on Science and Christianity, a partnership between BioLogos and IVP Academic, aims to advance this mission by publishing a range of titles from scholarly monographs to textbooks to personal stories. The books in this series will have wide appeal among Christian audiences, from nonspecialists to scholars in the field. While the authors address a range of topics on science and faith, they support the view of evolutionary creation, which sees evolution as our current best scientific description of how God brought about the diversity of life on earth. The series authors are faithful Christians and leading scholars in their fields. Editorial Board: • Denis Alexander, emeritus director, The Faraday Institute • Kathryn Applegate, program director, BioLogos • Deborah Haarsma, president, BioLogos • Ross Hastings, associate professor of pastoral theology, Regent College • Tremper Longman III, Distinguished Scholar of Biblical Studies, Westmont College • Roseanne Sension, professor of chemistry, University of Michigan • J. B. Stump (chair), senior editor, BioLogos

www.ivpress.com/academic biologos.org

Praise for Old-Earth or Evolutionary Creation?

“This Reasons to Believe and BioLogos conversation is highly commendable, and it’s important for a number of reasons. First, its tone is irenic, gracious, and humble. Second, its participants trust the Christian integrity of the other conversation partners. Third, it takes the authority of Scripture seriously as participants grapple with the implications of biblical interpretation in light of scientific discovery. Fourth, the Southern Baptist theologians serving as moderators are effective in guiding and focusing the conversation as they call for clarification and further elaboration from both sides. Finally, this conversation takes for granted the strong evidence for an ancient earth, allowing the discussion to push past the young-earth versus old-earth debate to far more pressing issues needing attention within the Christian community.” Paul Copan, professor and Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics, Palm Beach Atlantic University, coeditor of The Dictionary of Christianity and Science “This book has cultural significance that extends far beyond the origins debate. Here, Christians with deep disagreements chose to worship together, laboring for several years to understand and love each other. In a society marked by angry divisions, the hard work of reconciliation chronicled in this book is rare, beautiful, and an example for us all to follow.” S. Joshua Swamidass, MD, assistant professor of laboratory and genomic medicine, Washington University in St. Louis “Origins, particularly human origins, continues to be a controversial issue among evangelical Protestants. In Old-Earth or Evolutionary Creation? the organizations BioLogos and Reasons to Believe model a respectful interchange of ideas in spite of their significant differences. The result is an intelligent and illuminating discussion of this crucial and timely topic.” Tremper Longman III, Robert H. Gundry Professor of Biblical Studies, Westmont College

“This book provides a model of civil discourse in which two groups with opposing views engage in well-informed dialogue. All those interested in the creation and evolution discussion will benefit from both the charity and the clarity that mark the various positions presented.” Denis Alexander, emeritus director, The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion “This conversation is definitely worth listening to! The book is deeply satisfying, with knowledgeable and articulate advocates of differing positions expounding on areas of disagreement clearly as well as respectfully. At the same time, it is deeply un­satisfying, but in a good way: I found my own assumptions challenged, my horizons stretched. I think differently after reading it. An excellent job by all participants, moderators included.” C. John “Jack” Collins, professor of Old Testament, Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis “Old-Earth or Evolutionary Creation?, edited by Kenneth Keathley, J. B. Stump, and Joe Aguirre, is the result of an ‘unprecedented project’ that brings together ‘three groups who disagree about key points of science and theology but share a love for Jesus.’ The book is particularly successful because of the world-class minds who deliver a refreshingly objective and scholarly overview of science and faith issues that have been so divisive in the church and the academy. The essays and interviews clearly communicate theological and scientific points of divergence and coherence while providing a relevant and carefully researched resource for anyone interested in the study of origins. As a university president and a person of orthodox Christian belief, I see this publication as a significant step forward for both the faith community and the academy.” Carlos Campo, president, Ashland University

“Given the vastness of the literature and the breadth of scientific and theological background necessary to understand the arguments, it is perhaps inevitable that Christians sometimes misconstrue how other believers reconcile science and faith. In her conclusion to this book, Debora Haarsma effectively summarizes its uniqueness: ‘Participants asked questions out of a genuine desire to learn the views of others, not to trip them up. People stated their disagreements clearly, but without animosity and grandstanding.’ With Southern Baptist seminary professors (young-earth creation) acting as moderators and audience, representatives of Reasons to Believe (old-earth creation) and BioLogos (evolutionary creation) cordially discuss why they think their models are both scientifically valid and compatible with conservative Christian theology. The book addresses many important issues, including inerrancy, the image of God, Adam and Eve, the question of evil, the age of the earth, and common descent, with a number of well-known authors, both scientists and theologians, each addressing their specialties. This book is valuable, not for its contribution to knowledge, as all the ideas have been published elsewhere, but for its contribution to understanding, providing an example of constructive dialogue on the vital issue of how we relate to the rest of creation and God.” Gerald Rau, author of Mapping the Origins Debate

About the Editors

Kenneth Keathley (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) serves as director of the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture and as a professor of theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He has published several books, including 40 Questions on Creation (with Mark Rooker) and Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach. For over thirty years, Keathley has served in a variety of roles in churches throughout Missouri, Louisiana, the Carolinas, and Virginia, including youth pastor, interim pastor, or senior pastor. Before teaching at Southeastern, he served two years at Midwestern Baptist Seminary and almost six years at New Orleans Baptist Seminary as both an administrator and professor. He and his wife Penny live in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and have a son and daughter and three grandchildren.

J. B. (Jim) Stump (PhD, Boston University) is senior editor at BioLogos, where he oversees the development of new content and curates existing content for the BioLogos website and print materials. He has also been a philosophy professor and academic administrator, and he frequently speaks to churches and other groups on the intersection of science and Christianity. He is the author of Science and Christianity: An Introduction to the Issues, coauthor of Christian Thought: A Historical Introduction and coeditor of How I Changed My Mind About Evolution and The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity.

Joe Aguirre is editor in chief at Reasons to Believe, an organization in the Los Angeles area that spreads the gospel by demonstrating that sound reason and scientific research—including the very latest discoveries—consistently support, rather than erode, confidence in the truth of the Bible and faith in the personal, transcendent God revealed in both Scripture and nature.