Reconciling Evolution with Scripture
One of the most difficult parts of my Creation studies has been the topic of Evolution. What to believe? And it’s more than just figuring out a theory that fits the evidence, it’s prayerfully working out what God actually did.
Most of the problems with Evolution stem from a combination of two things: our tremendous knowledge of what is in the fossil record, and our lack of knowledge of what is NOT in the fossil record. Why is something missing from the record? Well, it’s either because it just never got fossilized or it’s because it never existed. So, how do you know which it is?
Science takes what is known and theorizes the unknown. That is what it does. Unfortunately, I have seen Christians continue to point to what scientists theorized incorrectly, and point at their changing theories as if they were failures and can therefore be dismissed. I find that disheartening and nonconstructive.
So, what do we know? What do we think we know? What is a good theory for filling in the blanks, admitting from the get-go that the theory will not be correct on every point, but that it will be as correct as we can get it? What is the best theory we can come up with if we proceed in faith?
Well, the first thing to do is take a lesson from our righteousness studies. Believe God, and it will be accounted to us as righteousness. Well, God has been speaking through scripture and through the fossil records, and for the last several years I have developed arguments that use the scriptures and science to predict each other… and to my surprise it’s been working! I predicted from Genesis 1:1-3 that there must have been a time when the earth was covered in water, and something was preventing there from being light. I had never heard of such a time, and when I couldn’t find it, I started reading newer scientific articles, and guess what! I found it! Zircon crystals appear to prove that contrary to the previous theories that state that oceans didn’t exist until 3.9 million years ago, the first oceans existed 4.5 billion years ago, or at were forming… meaning the earth was being covered with water. This was awesome, because during this time the atmosphere was too dark to let the sun through, and meteor strikes (recorded by the moon’s craters) were preventing that from changing… until they abruptly stopped 3.9 million years ago… almost as if someone stopped them. It was as if someone said, “Enough!” And then we find that God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. For me, this was an awesome discovery, and served as the first domino for figuring out how the rest of Creation maps to the scriptures in a similar fashion.
On the other end of things, I started to wonder about the creation of man. Was Genesis 2:3-7 describing a precise moment in time? I didn’t know, and it took me another 3 years to discover that the conditions I’d figured out for Genesis 1:1-3 describe precisely the conditions of Genesis 2:3-7! No plants, no land, no man to till it, and a mist rising from the ground! It described precisely the conditions of the earth just before “the deep” formed in Genesis 1! And according to Genesis 2, it is from that perspective that God created man, from the dust of the ground! Well, obviously Adam was not alive 4.5 billion years ago, but that is just before God started the Creation Days recorded in Genesis 1. I found that it quite exciting.
I then realized that after homo sapiens were created, it seems that evolution kind of stopped… I mean, it’s possible more species still formed, but but not humanoid! And so it meant that God started creating man at Day 1, and stopped after Day 6. The scientific record actually makes it look like God “rested”… and then we read in scripture that He did! And this, in a nutshell, is my primary driver for starting to solidify my views on Evolution on a bit. It was seem that according to scripture the entire fossil record (up to 200,000 years ago) is a recording of God’s work in Genesis 1. It means that every change in a species, every extinction, every appearance of a new species, it all happened while God was working. Scripturally, I see no other possibility.
Now, here are the gotchas. Genesis 1 does not record every single action God may have taken. Generally speaking, Genesis records what God did to tip the first domino, leading to the end of the chain. Day 1 tips the domino tips the domino for light. Day 2 for settling down of the oceans and sky. Day 3 for seeded plants… even though they don’t appear until during or after Day 4. Day 4 tips the domino for seeing the sun, moon, and stars. Day 5 recovers the fish and birds from the dinosaur extinction event, and finishes off with making whales. Day 6 deals with modern mammals and homo sapiens, and tips the domino for mankind subduing the earth. But a lot more happened then just tipping the domino!
Besides starting plant evolution, the plants actually evolved. To clarify, plants appear in the fossil record, in order of complexity, and showing a reduced dependence on available water sources. The end of the line for plants are seeded plants, where the seeds keep the plant’s “egg” moist and viable until it can get nourishment. What happened along the way? Did God really just tip the domino, and the transitions we see reflect true evolution, just as secular scientists say? Or did God actively perform every change, at His leisure, recording merely the first step, for simplicity’s sake?
That is the question I will be working on developing an answer for!