It is now time to address the theological implications of evolution. Unfortunately, the whole controversy about evolution has been misframed into “evolution vs creation” or “evolution vs Christianity.” There are Christian fish symbols matched against Darwin fish (which have legs) on car bumper stickers. One fish is devouring the other. Some folks believe that evolution disproves God’s existence and discredits the Bible. Darwin himself was not an atheist and made no such implications. In Darwin’s own words,
I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.” (The Origin of Species)
I rather think that taunting Christians is a favorite pastime of evolutionists. But I must say that, in the attempt to shore up the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith, fundamentalism has painted us into a corner by the introduction of its version of Biblical inerrancy. For background purposes, here is a quote from Wikpedia:
Fundamentalism is a movement that arose in the United States, starting among conservative Presbyterian academics and theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. It soon spread to conservatives among the Baptists and other denominations during and immediately following the First World War. The movement’s purpose was to reaffirm orthodox Protestant Christianity and zealously defend it against the challenges of liberal theology, German higher criticism, Darwinism, and other “-isms” which it regarded as harmful to Christianity.
One of the five fundamentals were: The inspiration of the Bible by the Holy Spirit and the inerrancy of Scripture as a result of this.
Biblical inerrancy is the doctrinal position that in its original form, the Bible is totally without error, and free from all contradiction; “referring to the complete accuracy of Scripture, including the historical and scientific parts.”
This gave rise to the belief that Scripture was not simply inspired by God but was spoken by God word for word. The “complete accuracy” of its “scientific parts” forces the Bible, however well-meaningly, into a losing position because the Bible has no “scientific parts.” The Bible was written in a pre-scientific age, as I will demonstrate later. But first it is time to say a few words about divine inspiration and revelation.
It has been said that “everything is inspired, but not everything is revealed.” (Benoit) The sacred authors of Scripture were writing under divine inspiration about a revelation they received from God, but textual criticism reveals a process that was not dictated word for word as from an oracle.
It is incontrovertible that God allowed the sacred writers the freedom to form ideas according to their own understanding. The quality of writing, grammar, and style varied from one author to another. It should not be surprising that, like all humans, they committed errors. Some evangelical theologians propose the existence of original manuscripts that were “without error as originally written,” though none have ever been found.
But this is where the fundamentalist concept of inerrancy misses the point entirely. The Bible is not the revelation as the Koran claims to be. The Bible is a testimony to the revelation–i.e. Old Testament and New Testament. What, then, or who, is the revelation? The revelation is God in Jesus Christ.
I propose that it is misguided to expect the Bible to be scientifically accurate. We have no sound basis for expecting it to be. As we shall see, the sacred author of the Genesis creation account wrote in terms of an entirely different prescientific world view. But isn’t this reasonable? The Bible does not teach us scientific facts–although there is a lot of historical information in it that is increasingly verifiable by archeology–the Bible teaches us about eternal truths. We ought not to lose sight of the forest for the trees or mistake the map for the treasure.
Part 3 of this series will propose how to absorb evolution into an evangelical Christian theology.
God bless.
