Evolution and Faith
The
following is reprinted from Evolution and Faith,
ACU Press,
A little
boy was asked by a minister why he believed in God. He replied, "I
guess it's been in our family for a long time." Unfortunately, that answer
is the reason many of us hold to the religious convictions that we have. We
really do not know why we believe what we believe; we have simply accepted the
traditions of our childhood and are following that acceptance through life. I,
too, accepted the traditions of my childhood; but, unlike many people, my
belief system was one of atheism. My memory of religious statements by my
parents and many of their associates involve things like:
"Do you really believe
there's an 'Old Man' up in the sky zapping things into existence here upon the
earth?"
"Do you really believe
that the church makes any difference in what people do?"
"How can anyone
believe all that 'mumbo jumbo' that preachers preach?"
By the time I was 8 years
old, I had accepted the notion that only foolish, ignorant, uneducated people
believe in God. As I moved into adolescence, I became increasingly active in
atheism. As my science education accelerated, I became more and more committed
to the idea that science and technology held the keys to solving man's
problems. By the time I was 16 years old, I was a hard-core, aggressive
atheist, attacking anything that smacked of religion in any way.
Late in my high school
career, I had the fortune to take a physics class
under a teacher named Mr. Gross, whom I had grown to respect from my contact
with him in the 8th grade. Unlike the 8th grade class, however, the physics
class had laboratory periods when a student could talk to the teacher and get
to know him. My caustic remarks about God and the Bible were
always met with a warm smile by Mr. Gross, but never a response. One day
after an especially biting remark from me about "the stupidity of religion
and the Bible," he asked me if I had ever studied the scientific accuracy
of the Bible. I had never even read the Bible, much less studied it, so I had
to answer negatively. He said, "You know, John, I had a terrible time
trying to decide whether to become a teacher or a preacher. I finally decided
that God speaks as well in His creation as He does in the Bible and the two
agree exactly. I suggest that you study both. Start with Genesis...."
I was shocked to learn that
this man whom I respected as a scientist would be a
believer in God, much less that he had considered becoming a minister. I was
even more appalled that he would suggest that Genesis 1 and science would
agree. All my life, I had heard that the biblical account was a lot of
foolishness and myth that no logical person could accept. If Genesis were myth,
it could not be scientifically accurate. In addition to this stimulus from Mr.
Gross, I had a young lady friend who was encouraging
me to read the Bible. She was a Christian who attended the services of the
church regularly. We had been dating two years or so, and I suspected that I
was in love with her. She was a moral giant, uncompromising in her beliefs, and
confident about her faith. When arguments came up, she always reverted to the
Bible as the basis of her decisions. I decided that, if I could prove the Bible
wrong, I could win a lot of arguments with her as well
as prove to myself that Mr. Gross was wrong. So, I
decided to study the first chapter of Genesis in detail. I was sure that with
the knowledge of geology and evolution that I had gained by that time, I could
easily destroy any credibility the Bible might have. My parents had told me
that the Genesis record gave many teachings which modern science had proven to
be false. I was so sure about the ease with which I could destroy anyone's
belief in the integrity of the Genesis record that I decided to take exhaustive
notes and write a book which I could title
All the
Stupidity of the Bible. Now I could add the making of money to the
motivations I had to prove the Bible wrong.
Armed with this truck load of prejudice, dictionaries, and a dozen or so
books on geology and evolution, I began my personal annihilation of the Genesis
account of creation. Having never attended a Bible class and not having heard a
sermon would turn out to be an advantage for me, for I had no preconceived
ideas about what the Genesis record taught.
My first surprise came in
the very first verse of Genesis . When I read,
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," I realized
that this first verse dealt with a subject to which evolution could not address
itself--creation. As an atheist, it
had never occurred to me that evolution assumed everything.
Genesis 1:1 states that
matter exists and it exists in a way that could produce and sustain life.
Evolution does not deal with creation. It only deals with how things may have
changed once they were already created.
I dislike the term
"creation science" when that term is applied
to rebuttals of theories of evolution. The creation of the cosmos "out of
nothing" is creation. Hypothetical models of how living
things may have changed from one form to another is not creation!
My second surprise in
reading
Genesis 1:1
was that it was not dated. I had
always been told that the biblical record taught that the earth was
created in the year 4004 B.C. To maintain such a position, every verse in the
Genesis record had to be dated. This first verse was not
dated. It also was not stated as a summary
verse, but as a historical event. The verse does not say that the next 28
verses are explaining what the first verse says. "In the beginning God
created..." is an event. Something took place. It is not an introduction
to duplicate statements in later verses. As I continued reading through the
early part of Genesis 1, I read about other conditions on the earth which I knew were essential to the development of
life. The atmosphere, water, land, and all the other conditions needed for life
were described. I became uneasy as I saw this careful
and accurate description, but I was still confident that the evolution of life
would ultimately expose the fallacious nature of the Bible's history.
At verses
10 and 11, I came in contact with the first description of life on the
earth. In my studies in science, I had learned that the first living thing on
the earth was a plant. It was logical that an organism which
could turn sunlight into food was necessary for the origination of life.
In addition to this logic, I had seen plant fossils and had studied the
sequence that plants follow in populating a barren area whether it be on land or in the sea. I knew that simple plants like
algae or lichen are followed by gymnosperms (ferns and conifers), which are
followed by angiosperms (seed plants like dogwood or apple trees). Imagine my
surprise when I found Genesis giving exactly the same sequence!
"God said, Let the earth bring forth grass...." The Hebrew
word deshe is used here, indicating moss or
algae or lichen. The word catshir is not used, which is the kind of grass on which one uses a
lawnmower. The second kind of plant was "the herb" from the Hebrew
word eseb. This word is used
when referring to the kind of plants science calls "gymnosperms." The
most recent kind of plant, according to Genesis, was the flowering "tree
yielding fruit." What better description could be given
of the succession I knew to be a modern concept of science. How could the
ancient writers of Genesis have accurately described the logical sequence in
which plants were created?
In
verse 20, I was to
receive more surprises. The biblical record identifies the first animal to
appear upon the earth. The statement was clear and, for the first time, I
thought I had something in the Bible I could prove to be wrong. "And God
said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving
creature that hath life...." Clearly the
indication was that the first animals upon the earth were water creatures. That
point could not be argued. The trilobite and other
marine fossils have strongly testified that animal life began in the sea. The
Genesis account indicated that many forms of sea life came into existence at
the same time. In my biology classes, I had been taught that life began as
simple animals and gradually evolved to more complex animals.
I had drawn models of how the sponges might have evolved into corals and how
the various mollusks might have led to higher forms of life. I had also been told that backboned (vertebrate)
animals were very recent additions to the earth's life forms compared to the
trilobite and its friends.
I was elated at this
obvious conflict between the biblical record and the facts, and I rushed to the
geology library to get pictures to document the facts. As I studied the
listings of fossils and their ages and classifications, I found Cambrian
fossils (the geologic period at the beginning of life on earth) which were extremely advanced. The graptolite was a fossil which was very abundant in the fossil record of the
Cambrian period; but the graptolite was classified as a vertebrate. The acorn
worm and lancelot were other
Cambrian fossils which were vertebrates. In no way did the fossil record verify
the transitions that I had always had presented to me. I returned to
Genesis 1:20 and
received another blow to my confidence in evolutionary theory.
One of the models used in
evolution is the model of the evolution of the bird. The theory has usually
been that the first birds were walking birds like an ostrich. The idea is that
the breast bone, wing muscles, feathers, and hollow
bones would have to develop gradually over long periods of time. The idea then
was that flight evolved. Good flyers would be the more recent birds, and the
first birds would have been non-flyers or poor flyers. In
Genesis 1:20-21, we
are told that the "winged fowl" became
abundant "in the open firmament of heaven." Once again, I was
confident that this biblical assertion that the first birds were flying birds
could be proven to be wrong. And,
once again, a visit to the geological library proved the Bible to be right.
Today the earliest known bird is called "protoavis." It is a bird that
could fly beautifully. All of the equipment needed for flight is there, in
advanced form. The archaeopteryx, a fossil of more recent age, is also capable
of flight and possesses feathers and bone structures designed for use in the
air.
As I continued to read
Genesis, I found the mammals were the next living things to come into existence
on the earth. The most recent thing to appear on the earth, according to
Genesis, was man. Once again I could offer no
criticism. The fossil record supports this sequence of life beautifully. I
could not find a single statement in the Genesis account that I could prove to
be in error. There were many things that the Bible did not
explain, but everything it did say was correct. Amoebas, viruses,
platypuses, echidnas, walking and swimming birds, and a myriad of other life
forms were not included in the account, but what was
described was correct. Many questions about "time" remained
unanswered because they were not germane to the Bible's message that God
created all things.
All this destruction of my
prejudices about the Bible led me next to question further what I had been told about the theory of evolution. It was obvious
that change was a working agent in creation and that this type of change
could in a sense be called "evolution." New
breeds of dogs, cattle, roses, cats, etc., are not alien to the Bible. Jacob
used this kind of change in manipulating Laban's
cattle. The fact that all races of men on the earth are descendants of Eve
(whose name means "the mother of all living"), further demonstrates
that evolution (minor changes) takes place.
The question, then, is
whether evolution can explain the existence of 20th century man in terms of
"natural, chance modifications of an original amoeba." My faith in
evolution had been shaken by the biblical
confrontations; so now I wanted real proof that the evolution of man from an
original amoeba was true. By this time I was in
college. My training in science was advancing rapidly. During my sophomore year
at
In the class, we learned
other things that I could not fit in with evolution. We learned that evolution
is dependent upon the assumption that the earth has always functioned in a
consistent way--that there have been no global catastrophes like the flood,
which could have stopped evolution and made gradualism impossible. Even at that
time, I had seen pictures of quickly frozen elephants and had seen huge meteor
craters, both of which indicate that uniformitarianism
in geology was a bad assumption. In the 1980s, there have been
discoveries of asteroid material in stratified layers marking the mass
extinctions of such animals as the dinosaurs. These discoveries have further
supported catastrophism as an agent of change in the
earth's history. It was becoming obvious to me that my faith in evolution as
the explanation of how everything came to be was based
on some bad assumptions.
My further study of Genesis
and my experiences of life convinced me of one more biblical truth
which ultimately led me to become a Christian. That was the realization
that man is not just an animal, as evolution would have us to believe, but he
was rather a spiritual being--uniquely and specially created in the image of
God! When the Bible writer tells us that we are created
in God's image, it should be obvious that the Bible is not referring to our
physical bodies. God is not a man, but a spirit (John 4:24). If we are
all in God's image, we must all be alike, in some real sense.
Obviously we are not alike physically, so it must be
our spiritual nature that the Bible is referring to. Even as an atheist, when I
looked at man's creative ability in art and music, his ability to experience
such emotions as guilt and sympathy and compassion, and man's desire and
ability to worship, it was obvious that man was not just "a naked
ape." When I discussed these characteristics with my anthropologist
friends, I found them trying to explain them in terms of intelligence or
environment. In my studies in psychology, I had seen that putting intelligent
apes in human homes would not make them human. I also had seen severely
retarded humans who could do all of these things. To try to explain all of
man's unique characteristics in terms of intelligence or environment is to
ignore mountains of scientific and educational data that show that man is a
special and a spiritual being. Questions of morality and love cannot be answered in the framework of reducing man to a
purely physical being. My life as an atheist was a life of alternating pleasure
and misery. There had to be more to man's existence than what I had experienced
and learned as an atheist.
I became a Christian
because of the evidence available to support belief. My journey arrived at
faith, which although it reaches beyond a certainty, is not near the "leap
of faith" which the atheistic evolutionist has to take. My experience
since my conversion to Jesus Christ has brought me to see that we live in a
world where many want to believe, but the saturation of our world with bad
theology and bad science has made belief difficult for many.
Let us speak to this
frustrated world with both clarity and love, to come to God the Creator by
studying both His Word and His Creation.