The Lost World of Adam and Eve - John H Walton

I've read a lot of Christian books that were okay – they didn't set the world alight but they might have reminded me of some important truths or put something in a slightly different way. This is not one of those; this could be a real game changer.

John Walton is professor of Old Testament at the bastion of US religious conservatism that is Wheaton College, and he's written this book to see what Genesis 1-3 really claims about creation, specifically the question of human origins. He doesn't bother with the science, because he isn't a scientist; he just sticks to what he is good at, which is Old Testament exegesis and cultural background. He doesn't even deal with Adam and Eve in the New Testament – he gets N.T. Wright to write that chapter. He also (quite rightly) recognises that the scientific arguments don't really matter much for Christians - we believe that God could have created the universe with the appearance of age and human beings with the appearance of being descended from a common ancestor with chimps; the question is whether he did.

Walton confirms what I have long thought; that Genesis 1-3 doesn't necessarily contradict the claims of modern science. Along the way he demolishes some of the things I'd already noticed were bogus (like the assumption that Adam and Eve were immortal in the Garden of Eden – if they were, they wouldn't have needed the Tree of Life) and some I hadn't spotted before (Adam and Eve are Hebrew nouns and Hebrew wasn't invented until Genesis 11, so they can't be the real names of the couple). He remains utterly committed to Biblical authority throughout; even while working on potentially controversial areas he gives clear, common sense, uncontroversial examples which show the validity of his position. Did several Old Testament authors believe in a solid sky? Yes, I suppose they did. Did the wine Jesus made from water in John 2 have the appearance of a potentially misleading history? Of course it did. Does the ancient belief that the heart was where a person did their thinking and feeling commit us to believe the same? No, it doesn't.

I'm not convinced by everything in the book – I think he over-eggs the concept of sacred space, for example, and there are some bits near the start of the book that badly need editing/rewriting. But I think that for the reader who can cope with his language and style, this book utterly demolishes the idea that you need to believe in young earth creationism to take the Bible seriously, and shows us just how much cultural baggage we bring into our readings of Genesis 1-3. Brilliant, eye-opening, thought-provoking.

Seven Days That Divide the World – John Lennox

I know that the whole creation / evolution argument is (or should be) old hat now, but it still rumbles on in some corners, and seems to be very much live in the USA. Maybe it's just that I got fed up of the poor reasoning on both sides of the argument and dropped out of it a while ago.

John Lennox is one of the best writers and speakers in the debate at the moment. His previous books God's Undertaker and Gunning for God are among the best I've read on science/religion and apologetics, so I was expecting good things of this one too. I wasn't disappointed. Well, I was, but not to start with...

The first three chapters are the best thing I've read on the creation / evolution debate in a long time. Lennox frames it by using the heliocentrism debates of the 16th-18th centuries to show that one generation's dogmatic insistence on one interpretation of the text in the face of science is another generation's mad over-literalism.

The next chapter is a bit of a let down. Lennox debunks a lot of the common myths in the creation / evolution debate but ends up committing himself to the odd view that the universe is old, that apes evolved but that Adam and Eve were a direct creation. In doing so, he argues that young earth creationists should accept that their view flies in the face of the scientific evidence but ignores the significant genetic evidence that we share ancestry with apes just as much as they do with each other. It seems to be almost a worst of all possible worlds view – he avoids over-literalism in the understanding of Genesis 1 and affirms the importance of scientific evidence, but then ignores the scientific evidence on the basis of what looks like an over-literalistic reading of a single verse. Alternatively (i.e. from a YEC point of view), he rejects large amounts of what the Bible says in favour of dodgy science, but still tries clinging onto one bit of it.

Chapter 5 is closer to a return to form. Lennox examines what the point of Genesis 1 actually is, if it isn't to teach specific details about how the universe came to exist. There are still weaknesses in this chapter though – Lennox doesn't really get into the culture at the time Genesis 1 was written, so only sees some of how Genesis connects with today's culture. He doesn't point out how it shows God as the consistent and sole creator of the universe, which is so important for understanding of science. Of course Lennox believes that, but it's easy to miss it in Genesis 1 unless you see it as in part a reaction to the polytheistic creation narratives of surrounding cultures. Another example would be Genesis giving people the status that the other nations gave to their kings.

There's some of that in the appendices, when he discusses whether the Genesis account is derived from the Babylonian one, but Lennox never really draws out the significance of the important contrasts. The other appendices are pretty good, but never really get to the height of the first three chapters. The book is well worth the price just for those.

Were Adam and Eve Historical?

This article is a good summary of the current state of a very interesting debate. Lots of the points made in the debate are very good ones, and some of them see difficult to reconcile with other very good points.

For what it's worth, I'm not compleltely sure exactly what I think, but I want to affirm the following two points:

1. Adam and Eve really existed.
2. The scientific evidence is not deceptive.

It isn't obvious how to reconcile those points - here are a few ideas.

Were Adam and Eve the only people alive at the time? That probably depends on what you mean by "people". I think Biblically it is clear that they are the first real humans, because they are the first ones to be given the divine image, which was subsequently spoilt, and being human is fundamentally about the capacity for relationship with God. Were there other members of the genus homo alive at the time? Maybe, but if so Adam was their representative head and so after the Fall they share in his image, which is fallen from the image of God.

Although the scientific evidence is not deceptive, the study on that evidence may have been done badly for various reason. It may be there are factors of which they are unaware. They might have been using faulty models.

Bits and Bobs - Cremation, Autocracy and Creationism

Cremation

Russell Moore has written an interesting article on cremation. I'm still not convinced either way about cremation, even (or perhaps especially) after presiding over a fair few. My worries aren't to do about the question of resurrection - it's to do with the attitude to humanity, the importance of the physical body, and respect for the dead. Moore concludes:

Sometimes the “culture wars” that really matter aren’t the ones you’re screaming about with unbelievers in the public square; they’re the ones in which you’ve already surrendered, and never even noticed.

Church Autocrats

On a not intentionally connected note, Mark Meynell has written about how church autocrats work. Interesting, true to my experience, and a worthwhile checklist for ministry.

As I may have mentioned before, one of the main things I've learnt from coming through some quite traumatic leadership experiences in Christian circles is that godliness is the most essential quality for leaders, especially humility.

Evolution Argument Gets Worse

Once again, possibly connected is this really sad bit of news. Bruce Waltke, who is a seriously good Bible scholar, has left his job at the Reformed Theological Seminary after a video he made about evolution attracted a lot of hostile attention.

In an earlier version of this post, I incorrectly stated that he was sacked (sorry!). RTS's comment on the issue is here, but from my POV the seminary should have stuck by him if they thought he was right to be allowed to say what he said. They try defending their corner by saying they're a confessional seminary. Confessional in the sense of sacking someone who doesn't believe something the Church has always agreed on (like the divinity of Jesus) - fine. Confessional in the sense of not sticking up for a seminary professor who points out the intellectual and apologetic difficulty of taking a popular but contentious line on the interpretation of one Biblical passage - mad and bad. And I thought RTS was meant to be OK...

Sermon on Creation

Here's a sermon I preached recently on the topic of creation.

MP3 downloadable from here.

Denis Alexander - Rebuilding the Matrix

I put off reading this book for years, a) because I knew a fair bit about the subject and b) because I didn't especially get on with Denis Alexander when I'd heard him speak on it. Having said that, it's surprisingly good.

It is aimed to be a fairly academic but accessible book by a Christian who is also a respected scientist about the relationship between Science and Christianity. And it actually does that fairly well. His theology of science seems pretty much right, though he doesn't really make a big thing of it. The book tends to cover the areas that most books and talks on science and religion cover - notably history and creation / evolution.

Alexander spends a lot of time saying not very much, but I guess that's important if this is aimed at a largely non-Christian audience (which it seems to be). I guess this book is best aimed at someone who is university educated without much background in theology, and it does a pretty good job of that. It would probably be the book I'd be most likely to recommend to such people.

If I was being critical, I'd say that he could often be a lot clearer and more concise. But I suppose my biggest criticisms would be that he doesn't allow his theology of science to impact on miracles or the question of general revelation, and that he assumes that science and "faith" tell us complementary truths about reality - an approach which is useful to an extent, but which doesn't actually hold together philosophically especially well.

And for those who are interested in such things, he's very much a theistic evolutionist, to the point where he is really quite critical of Young Earth Creationism, but also of evolutionary naturalism.

History of Science and Religion - Books

Probably the most common question I get asked by Christians is about the whole area of Science and Christianity. I'm still intending to write a book on it, but I'm studying the topic at Oxford first, partly to see where other people are coming from on it.

A good light introduction to the history of science and religion written by a Christian who used to lecture history of science is Unnatural Enemies by Kirsten Birkett. It's short; it's clearly written; it tries to explain why things are the way they are at the moment. Briefly put, part of it is that while many Christians thought Darwin was right about evolution, not all of them did because they still had a potential alternative explanation (God doing it directly, suddenly, recently). That meant that it looked as if Christianity and science were in conflict, which meant that the Christians tended to take up more anti-science positions and some atheists wrote histories of science making it look like they always had.

A better, more detailed, and less explicitly Christian book is Science and Religion - Some Historical Perspectives by John Hedley Brooke (former professor of Science and Religion at Oxford). It's a good academic study exploring the history of the two. It doesn't really require much background in science, religion or history. I wouldn't say it's a gripping read, but it's accessible to the sort of person who reads quite a bit. I'm also shocked I hadn't been told to read this book a long time ago... It might be quite expensive, so it's worth ordering it from a library, or getting a second-hand copy or something.

Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy 5

Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

link to full text of statement

The remaining Articles 14-19 are, as far as I can see, much better.

ARTICLE 15:
WE AFFIRM that the doctrine of inerrancy is grounded in the teaching of the Bible about inspiration.
WE DENY that Jesus' teaching about Scripture may be dismissed by appeals to accommodation or to any natural limitation of His humanity.

Saying that Jesus' teaching about Scripture cannot be dismissed by those appeals solves the problem for much of the Old Testament, because it is clear that Jesus regarded it as historical rather than as collective myth or any of the other rubbish that some scholars claim.

ARTICLE 16:
WE AFFIRM that the doctrine of inerrancy has been integral to the Church's faith throughout its history.
WE DENY that inerrancy is a doctrine invented by scholastic Protestantism, or is a reactionary position postulated in response to negative higher criticism.

Need to be careful here. The doctrine underlying inerrancy - what they are trying to express about the trustworthiness of Scripture has indeed been integral to the Church's faith. Patristic writers in the early church, Reformers, Counter-Reformers all cited the Bible as true and authoritative. On the other hand, the articulation of it as "inerrancy" does seem to be invented by scholastic Protestantism in reaction to negative higher criticism, and there are some consequences of that. One example is that there does not seem to have been a move to treat 144 hour creation as a confessional point until Darwin. Indeed, many of the early Church Fathers (e.g. Augustine) argued that creation did not take place over a 144 hour period, but that the term "day" in Genesis 1 referred to longer periods. 144-hour creation as confessional probably does owe something to the newness of the specific articulation of the doctrine of inerrancy, even though the underlying doctrine goes back right to the beginning of Christianity.

ARTICLE 18:
WE AFFIRM that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices, and that Scripture is to interpret Scripture.
WE DENY the legitimacy of any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its claims to authorship.

This is also a useful clarification. Although there is still room for a liberal view of some bits of Scripture via claiming (for example) that John's gospel is metaphorical midrash rather than history, this rules out the potential genre of pseudographia - some claim that someone who had known Peter writing later as Peter was a well-understood literary convention. This rejects that for Biblical books (and rightly so, given the second century Church's attitude to pseudographia).

Part 6 | Summary

Shifting the Argument

This is one of those arguing techniques that Christians have a very unfortunate habit of getting caught out by. I don't know whether people use it deliberately or not, but it seems to work.

The idea goes something like this:

[Person 1]: I like shepherd's pie
[Person 2]: But it's often got overcooked peas in and they are horrible
[Person 1]: No they aren't - they're the best bit

Because people's pride has got involved or something, they want to defend against what the other person says, even if it slightly misses the target. So in the above example, they went from defending a reasonable contention - that shepherd's pie is nice - to a completely unreasonable one - that the overcooked peas are the best bit. If you think that example is bad, there are some more real-life ones later.

Here's a responses that would have kept the argument on track.

[Person 1]: I like shepherd's pie
[Person 2]: But it's often got overcooked peas in and they are horrible
[Person 1]: But in shepherd's pie they are transformed by their surroundings so that they are actually quite nice and they make their surroundings nicer too. One of the best things about shepherd's pie is the way it takes rubbish things, like overcooked peas, and makes them good.

Here are some examples of how Christians have got sidetracked like that.

In the 1800s, pretty much all the non-Christian scientists, and some Christian scientists, thought that Darwin's ideas were pretty neat, and that they might well explain how complex animals came to exist. Other Christians didn't - they didn't think that Darwin's ideas made too much sense and they believed in a God who could do things differently if he wanted to. For people who didn't believe in God, evolution was the only way to explain how complex animals came to exist, so there wasn't so much choice.

Over time, the conversation went something like this:

[Christian]: Evolution didn't necessarily happen - I know that God could have done it directly if he wants to and the scientific evidence isn't conclusive.
[Atheist]: Evolution happened. There's lots of evidence.
[Christian]: Evolution didn't happen.

It's as if there's a pressure to force people into holding the opposite position to the person they are arguing with, which Christians are particularly vulnerable to. In fact, I might state that an an aphorismy thing.

In any argument, there is a psychological pressure towards holding an intellectual position diametrically opposite to that of one's antagonist.
"Allister's first rule of arguments"

Sadly, I think we can see the same in the McGrath/Dawkins debate. It's as if the following has happened.

[McGrath]: [explains Christian theology]
[Dawkins]: God doesn't exist, [attacks religion in general].
[McGrath]: God does exist [defends religion in general]

But that is silly. We don't believe that religion in general is true. When it comes to Islam, Hinduism, etc, we should largely agree with Richard Dawkins. What we should be arguing for is not the general existence of God and religion in general, but the specific divinity of Jesus Christ.

The result of that debate is that we get steered off into discussing whether God exists in the abstract, when the whole point of Christianity is that God is not abstract. He walked round on the Earth 2000 years ago.

That last bit is kind of a synthesis of my thought and the third hand comments of a tutor here - John Lennox. When he debates Dawkins (and they've got a booking), I hope the debate would go more like this.

[Lennox]: [Christian theology] i.e. Jesus is God
[Dawkins]: God doesn't exist, [attacks religion in general].
[Lennox]: I agree with you on most of that, but Jesus was quite clearly God [insert evidence here], so there must be a God, and the question is how we make sense of that and what we do about it.

Cosmology and the Age of the Universe

Back to creation/evolution posts...

What is Cosmology?

Cosmology - the study of the physical universe, its structure, dynamics, origin and evolution, and fate
Wiktionary

Basically, cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole. It's the bit of physics that gave us the Big Bang theory, for example. It's also one of the least discussed areas in the debate about the age of the universe, probably because it tends to be trickier to visualise than evolution.

My background in cosmology is that I studied it as part of my taught masters' at university first time round. So I've got the foggiest what I'm talking about, but I'm not an expert. The bits here that are unconventional I've checked out with people who are experts. I'm going to try to explain this at the level of an intelligent layperson. Some of that means that I'm going to simplify to the point where the truth might be slightly obscured - I'm trying to do it to keep the main points clear.

Virtual Photons

Oddly enough, one bit of background that turns out to be really useful comes from Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), which is a completely different area of physics.

Atoms are made up of electrons, which are really small and which kind of go round a nucleus made of protons (and usually neutrons too). The electrons are held into the atom because they have a negative charge and the protons have a positive charge. The force works by the electrons and the protons constantly swapping particles called virtual photons, which are just like the particles that light is made up of, except that they last a very very short period of time while they are between the proton and the electron (coz they go very fast and it's only a small distance).

Evidence for the Big Bang

The Big Bang theory, or some variety of it, is held by I'd guess at least 99% of cosmologists. It basically says that the universe is expanding and all the matter and energy in the universe started off in one place about 14 billion years ago. That must have been much hotter than today, and the idea is a bit like an explosion that threw out all the matter, whch gradually condensed into atoms and galaxies and stars and planets and stuff.

There are three main pieces of evidence which are cited as evidence for the Big Bang. I'm going to discuss them and look at how the evidence is interpreted.

• Redshift
• The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
• Abundance of Elements

Hubble Redshift

The idea that originally started the Big Bang theory is called Hubble Redshift. It's not actually quite what is believed today, but it's a good way in to talking about it.

When an ambulance or a racing car is moving away from you and giving out sound waves, the sound waves get stretched out and it sounds lower-pitched than it would do if the ambulance or racing car wasn't moving. (And if it's moving towards us the waves get squashed together and it sounds higher)

There's a great example that shows that here.

The same happens with light, which is made of particles called photons, but they act like waves with this. If an object is moving away from us and giving out photons, the photons get stretched out, and the light appears redder than it normally does - we call this a redshift. We don't usually notice it because light goes very very fast compared to cars and stuff. (And yes, there is a blueshift if it's coming towards us).

When Hubble looked at very distant galaxies, he saw that their light was redder than he was expecting, and the further away the galaxies were, the redderer the light was. This led him to conclude that they were all moving away from us, and the idea of the Big Bang was born.

Cosmological Redshift

The current idea isn't that the galaxies are moving away from us through space, but that space itself is being stretched, kind of like the skin of a balloon when you blow it up. So the galaxies are getting further apart, but it's not because they're moving. And as the photons are going through space, they get stretched too as space stretches, so we get the redshift because light has been travelling through space that is stretching. That's called the cosmological redshift.

So the evidence is that the distant galaxies look more redshifted than nearer ones, which we interpret by using the cosmological redshift idea and saying that that's because when the light set out from the distant galaxies, it was a very long time ago, so the universe has stretched a lot since then and redshifted the light. The further away it is, the longer ago the light set out, the more it's been redshifted.

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

Another thing we observe if we look carefully at the sky is that everywhere we look, there's a load of microwave photons whizzing round the universe. And the cosmological redshift idea helps us to explain this too.

After the Big Bang, the argument goes, everything started off very hot, so there weren't atoms or anything. But as the universe cooled down, it eventually got cold enough for atoms to form. And when they formed, there were a load of photons left behind that didn't quite have enough energy any more to break those atoms up. And as the universe expanded, they got redshifted and ended up as the Microwave Background.

Actually, some scientists had realised that if the Big Bang theory was true, we should see something like this, but they apparently realised it only just before Penzias and Wilson discovered the Microwave Background Radiation, so they didn't get their prediction published in time.

The Problem with the Cosmological Redshift

So far, so good. It all kind of makes sense, that's all on the A-level physics syllabus so far and it's all pretty much what I was taught. The problem is that the cosmological redshift idea doesn't work (and I've checked this out with some experts, who agree that it's a valid criticism).

Redshifted photons have less energy than normal photons (this is because the energy is given by hf, and as they are redshifted, f drops).

That means that in a universe with the cosmological redshift, the universe is actually losing energy. It's not going anywhere; the amount of energy in the universe is decreasing. Some people might think that's a big problem because it contradicts the laws of thermodynamics, but cosmologists get round it by saying that we can say that the mean energy density of the universe is constant rather than the actual total energy of the universe. I'd say that energy itself not being constant really messes up Quantum Mechanics, but there's a much bigger problem that's easier to see, so I'll focus on that one.

Remember those virtual photons? Well, they need to get redshifted as well. Only a little tiny bit each time, but over 13 billion or so years, it'll add up to quite a lot. That means that atoms have to lose energy too as the universe expands. But atoms can't lose energy - we can work out how much energy an atom has and it doesn't have anything to do with the age of the universe in it. So we have a big problem. We understand atoms pretty well, and we know they can't lose energy. But we know that if the cosmological redshift argument is true, then they must. So I'd conclude from that that the cosmological redshift argument might be nice, but it doesn't actually fit what we already know about the universe.

That kind of undermines the first two pieces of evidence for the Big Bang. The problem then is that the cosmological redshift argument is actually the only argument that explains the CMB. What most cosmologists do is they say that there are "problems with the relationship between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics" then carry on using the theory regardless and hope someone very very clever sorts the problems out in the end.

Maybe it's true, and the theory just needs some very clever tweaking. Or maybe it isn't and there's some other explanation for the Cosmic Microwave Background and the Redshift other than the Big Bang with cosmological redshift. I honestly don't know.

Abundance of Elements

Some people much better at maths than me have worked out how much of each element there should be in the universe to start with if the Big Bang happened. It's something like 75% hydrogen, 23% helium, 2% everything else. That's just trying to remember the numbers from 6 years ago, but the exact numbers don't matter for this.

Of course, nuclear reactions in stars and stuff have changed that by now, but they won't have made any more hydrogen. So no star or anything should have more than 75% hydrogen (or whatever number it is).

The problem with this piece of evidence is that all kinds of weird stuff can happen to stars. People find stars which really don't fit with pretty much any pattern quite often, then manage to come up with an explanation for why they are the way they are. Here's an example of the kind of thing they come up with.

There used to be two stars here, one heavy and one less heavy. The heavy one burnt its fuel more quickly, but then it got so large that the gravity of the less heavy one started stealing the outside bits of the heavier one. Eventually, the heavier one exploded into nothingness, leaving this star which looks like it's a mixture of two other stars.

Theories like that are fine, but if you've got that kind of potential level of complexity in a star's lifecycle, plus 14 billion years for stuff to happen, I'm sure that current cosmologists and astrophysicists could explain just about any imaginable star in terms of some process or other. So I don't think this piece of evidence is actually falsifiable.

In other words, even if it was false, we wouldn't know because astrophysicists could (and would) always find another explanation for why the star was like that.

Virtual Photons and the Appearance of Age

As I discussed in the comments to this post, virtual photons also undermine the argument from distant starlight.

The basic idea is this - we see things that are a very long way away. That means that the light must have left them a very long time ago to get to us now. So the universe must be at least that old.

It's a nice argument. The problem is that if the universe was created suddenly out of nothing, then for atoms to work for the first tiny bit of a second, virtual photons need to have been created in mid-flight along with the protons and electrons and stuff. Those photons would have look like they'd been emitted by the proton or electron just before, but they actually hadn't - they'd just been created out of nothing suddenly, along with the proton and electron.

If you scale that up, then it makes sense that if the universe was created suddenly then photons are created mid-flight between two objects, even giving the appearance of a history which never actually happened. It's pretty much like the idea of rocks in the garden of Eden, which I discussed here.

Problem - the Fine Structure Constant

One problem which I haven't seen anyone tackle properly, on either side, is the problem with a number called the fine structure constant. It's a number - about 1/137 (if I remember correctly), which is worked out by combining a whole load of important quantities in the universe like the speed of light and the charge of an electron. The problem with it is that in most attempts to unify all the physics theories into one big theory, it needs to have changed as the universe gets older.

Where the problem comes is here - if the fine structure constant is changing, what's that doing to the redshift? What's that doing to the photon energies? What's that doing to the CMB? What's that doing to the stability of atoms?

Maybe one day all the problems with the theory will be solved and cancel each other out. Or maybe they won't and in 1000 years people will be looking back and laughing that people in 2007 believed in the Big Bang. I really don't know.

Conclusion

My personal opinion is that the Big Bang theory, while it has huge holes in, is probably the best current explanation for the evidence, but I think there's plenty of room to think that the universe is young.

The fact is that no-one on either side has yet come up with a comprehesive enough theory to explain all the evidence and fit in with the rest of what we know about how the universe works. Or if they have, they haven't told me...

Death in a Good Creation?

This is continuing my series on questions connected with creation / evolution.

One of the best arguments I've heard for why evolution is not consistent with the Bible is the argument from death. I'm going to explore the argument a bit, show why I don't think it works, then show how an argument might be constructed that might work.

The Argument from Death

Here is a selection of quotes that hopefully illustrate the Biblical background to the argument:

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."
Genesis 2:15-17, ESV

But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.
Genesis 3:4-6, ESV

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned ... death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.
Romans 5:12, 14, ESV

The argument then goes something like this:

• Genesis teaches that death entered the world through Adam and Eve
• Romans shows that a literal understanding of Genesis 3 is required
• Evolution teaches that there must have been death in the world before the time of Adam and Eve
• Therefore evolution before the time of Adam and Eve does not fit with the Bible.

Why the Argument Fails

I'll start by agreeing with a fairly literal understanding of Genesis 3. I'm not convinced that it's necessary for someone who believes the Bible to be authoritative and true to think that, but I do.

One key is what Paul means by "death" in Romans 5:12, as quoted above. The verse says "and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned" - it's clearly talking about human death. So when it says "death entered the world through sin", it seems likely that it's talking about human death too.

It's worth noting that "men" here is ανθρωπους - "people" would probably be a better translation in the context.

Furthermore, when I hear the argument from death used, it usually argues that animals didn't die until after Adam's sin. Why priviledge animals like that? Why shouldn't plant death count? Why not bacterial death? And if bacteria didn't die, what about Adam's gut bacteria, or those in a cow or rabbit or something?

What does Romans 5 require? That the first people did something wrong - they went against what God had told them to do, and that they died eventually as a result. That actually fits fine with evolutionary theory. After all, what is to stop God revealing himself to some hominids and thereby making them into the first people? In fact, it seems to suggest that part of what it is to be human is to be in some kind of relationship with God... I'm not saying that the Bible teaches that people evolved from something else - I'm pretty sure it doesn't. But I think that here it's consistent with it, just as it is with a Young Earth. I don't think this argument makes us say that the Earth is either Young or Old.

Were Adam and Eve Ever Immortal?

I guess the standard understanding is that these first people were made immortal in their interaction with God, and then lost it again by their disobedience. But is that actually what the passage says?

Once again, I think the passage isn't clear. God says that they will die "in the day that they eat" of the fruit (Genesis 2:17, above). But Adam survives another 930 years (whether to take the ages in Genesis literally is a completely different question, which I might come back to some day). So, even allowing for the Hebrew "day" to mean more than just 24 hours (as it clearly does in Genesis 2:4) what is going on?

What happens after they eat the fruit is that God confronts them and changes their working conditions. In particular:

Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever--" therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
Genesis 3:22-24, ESV

It's interesting that God tells Adam that he's going to return to dust (v19), but then his action is excluding him from the tree of life so that he will not live forever. What would have been the effect of eating from the "Tree of Life"? Maybe it would have reversed the effects of Adam being made mortal - in which case, why have it in the garden in the first place? Or maybe (and this seems to me much more plausible), maybe it was there because it was only in eating from the tree that Adam could live forever in the first place. We certainly see the tree again in Revelation 22 (in the New Creation), and it bears fruit continually rather than just as a one off.

So it seeems likely that Adam's promised death comes about as a consequence of him being excluded from the Tree of Life rather than by God changing his nature so that he becomes mortal. That further undermines the argument from death.

(this topic is discussed in more detail here)

Is Death Good?

Another strand of the argument is that God says that creation is good in Genesis 1, and therefore that it does not include death until Adam's fall. But that doesn't quite work either - it assumes that animal death is bad rather than that the complexities of life cycles and life coming from death in the natural order is in itself part of a good creation.

Towards a Better Argument

I've heard (and read) the argument from death trotted out quite a lot. And because I know it doesn't work, it makes me doubt that the Young Earth Creationists actually have anything better.

Here are some thoughts as to how a better argument might work - they aren't a coherent whole yet, because I'm not sure I understand all the passages involved properly. I haven't heard people argue this one, so maybe it can't be made to work...

The Bible is pretty clear that Jesus' is not just significant for his relationship to people, but to the natural world as well. A simple example would be his ability to command the natural world and it obey him, for example his ability to stop storms by telling them to stop.

But a stronger and more relevant example is the future relation of creation to Christ.

And God made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.
Ephesians 1:9-10, NIV

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
Romans 8:18-25, ESV

There certainly seems to be a cosmic aspect to what Christ will do in the future in "liberating creation from its bondage to decay" and in "bringing all things under Christ". The problem is that I'm not sure what that means. Is it simply speaking about the New Heavens and the New Earth of Revelation 21? Will there be different laws of physics?

The potential better argument uses this, and somehow ties the creation's "futility" to Adam's sin. Christ's action certainly has cosmic consequences - if it could be shown that Adam's action also had cosmic consquences, but that the "bondage to decay" (whatever that means) was required for evolution, then that would be a much better argument.

Having just checked John Stott's commentary on Romans, he points out that the word translated "futility" is the same word used in translating Ecclesiastes into Greek, which makes sense of the passage to me - I'll blog about it some other time, but I don't see that it requires this to be the consequences of Adam's sin.

Summary

The argument from death does not show that the Bible requires a Young Earth, nor does its failure show that it teaches an Old Earth.

What Would the Bible Look Like with an Old Earth?

I'm continuing my series on creation / evolution questions, where I explain why I'm genuinely unsure about how old the Earth and the universe are.

Having asked what the Earth would look like if it had been suddenly created from nothing, I'm now going to ask what the Bible would look like if the Old Earth Creationists were right. Old Earth Creationism, roughly, is the belief that God created the universe over a very long period of time a very long time ago, quite possibly using stuff like a Big Bang and evolution to do it. What would the Bible say about it?

The first thing to note is that Genesis was written to a group of Iron Age subsistence farmers. We should not therefore expect it to contain stuff that they wouldn't understand. Not that they were stupid, but they hadn't exactly had much of a modern scientific education. They didn't know what genes, quark-gluon plasmas or quantum vacuum fluctuations were; they didn't have any use for numbers bigger than those in a census, and even then they seem quite capable of confusing thousands with leaders (the two are the same word in Hebrew - see e.g. Wenham on the census in Numbers). So what would a true description of creation written for those people be like? Certainly not like a modern scientific description would be. What use could they possibly have for that?

They were also in the context of the ancient Near East, with lots of various creation myths about other gods doing the rounds. So an account of creation written for people in that situation should include references to those myths - maybe showing important points where they were wrong (like having gods as part of creation and the universe as always having existed). And where these myths said that other gods did things that the True God really did (like imposing order and so on), the account should say that he did those things. And it's important to know that God was always in control and that he did things at his own pace rather than being forced by events.

In fact, I think a creation account written for the ancient Israelites, telling them what they needed to know about creation, even if it was written by someone who understood about quark-gluon plasmas and stuff, would probably look quite like the one in Genesis.

What a Young Earth Would Look Like

I'm continuing my series on creation / evolution questions, where I explain why I'm genuinely unsure about how old the Earth and the universe are.

Let's just explore the idea of an Earth that was created suddenly, without a Big Bang or accretion disks or anything, and think about what it would be like. We need to do this so that we can test it as an idea against what we observe the Earth to be like, and see if they fit.

Suppose that Adam decided to dig down underneath the Garden of Eden. What would he see? Well, eventually I guess he'd see rock. And rocks on Earth are classified as igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic. But we observe all three of those being formed today, and all three therefore have inferred histories - we look at them and say "this rock used to be part of a volcano" or "this rock used to be a bit of sand at the bottom of an ocean" or something. In other words, if a geologist had been there looking at the rocks, he wouldn't have been able to tell that the Earth was new (well, not just by looking at the rocks).

What about trees in the Garden of Eden? If Adam had cut a tree down, would he have seen rings? I guess so. But again, when we see tree rings, we infer a history from that. What about horses' teeth? Did horses in the Garden of Eden have rings in their teeth? (I don't know much about horses, but apparently they have rings in their teeth - like trees rather than bulls' noses).

What about limestone? Limestone today is formed by lots of dead sea creatures (or their shells) getting squashed by huge pressure. Would there have been limestone on Earth when it was created? I don't see why not, but if there was, then a geologist there would infer that there had been lots of sea creatures millions of years before, which had died.

I don't think there's any way to escape the fact that if Earth was created suddenly in the last 20 000 years, then it probably in some sense had to have the appearance of age, even down to having the appearance of previous organisms having died.

That's really annoying in a way for trying to work out how old the earth is, of course, because it means that we need to be very careful with dating techniques.

Some people might well point out that this could be said to lead to (the unscientific and unfalsifiable) "Last Thursdayism" - the belief that the whole universe was created last Thursday, with the appearance of age and everyone having memories. But the difference is that there's no good reason to believe Last Thursdayism but some people say there is good reason to believe in a sudden creation of the universe during the last 20 000 years. I think they're probably exaggerating the evidence, but that's a different story...

Creation / Evolution

I'm going to try to be honest (and therefore controversial) on this; I tended to get asked about it a lot when I was a science teacher.

There are a few things it's important to say to start with before I focus on individual areas and why I think what I think in later posts.

Firstly, I think it's very important to say that I think that God knew what he was doing when he got people to write the Bible. So if the Bible teaches that the world was created 6000 years ago over a period of 144 hours, then that's what I believe happened. But I'm not at all convinced that that's what the Bible teaches (and I'll discuss why later). I don't think that the Bible tells us whether the world was created 6000 years ago or 14 billion years ago.

Secondly, I think it's important to say that science is a valid method, and comes up with valid answers to valid questions when done properly. Lots of religions don't teach that, but Christianity does. The traditional way of thinking about it is saying that we can know things via the book of revelation (the Bible) or the book of nature, and both of them come from God. So if the scientific evidence pointed unambiguously to the world starting 14 billion years ago (or 4.5 billion years ago, depending on whether “world” means the universe or the Earth), then that's what I believe happened. But I'm not at all convinced that the evidence for an old earth is as unambiguous as it's often presented (and I'll discuss why later). I don't think that science tells us clearly whether the universe came into existence 14 billion years ago or in the last 20 000 years.

What do I do when what I'm sure science says and what I'm sure the Bible says disagree? I'll deal with that if it ever happens, and it hasn't done so yet.

When I discuss the issue, I usually try to argue people into the middle.

For my part, I've read lots of the arguments on all four sides (old and young universe from the Bible and from science) and I think all of them display cognitive bias and none of them make their case well enough for me to agree with them. I don't think any of them deserve to win...

Interestingly, Scott Adams says much the same thing for different reasons, and then explains it again for the people who didn't understand it the first time.