Is Genesis Real History?

Is Genesis real history? Simple answer... it is, and is not, and a literal reading of a nation's legendary history doesn't make it any plainer as evidenced by archaeological finds discounting parts of it while reconfirming other parts of it.

So why then read the bible? Can God be found in its pages?

Again, the short answer is yes but extrapolating mythic literature into biblical fact isn't quite that easy unless you prefer to rewrite your own religion which has been done lots of times including within today's present Christian groups and movements around the world.

As example, would you read Viking lores and legends as factual? Probably not, unless you're a Marvel comic freak. Otherwise we have to work behind the lores and legends to get to their meaning for a civilization.

Need some biblical examples? For one, there has never been a global flood. Want another? Nor was there an original couple - but one could say with certainty there was a mitochondrial Eve but with no primary Adam.

Do these facts change our idea of God? Sure, but not His presence in our lives. What it rather reflects is the ancient's idea of God sometimes as a violent, angry, judgmental, impersonal God. Of course there were other impressions of God in the Old Testament but we'll leave it at that for the moment.

Then Jesus comes along in the New Testament and says "Love your neighbor" and "Know your God is a redeeming God." The only intolerance God showed during Jesus' ministry was for religious people who wouldn't love their neighbor because their idea of God was screwed up.

As an aside, I think we see this quite plainly in today's radicalized elements of Christianity, don't we? 

Conclusion? Reading the bible intelligently is far more warranted than reading it as you think you understand it however sincere your heart.

R.E. Slater

May 1, 2018

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Is Genesis real history?

https://biologos.org/common-questions/biblical-interpretation/is-genesis-real-history

Introduction

Man from dust, woman from rib. A talking snake. Two mysterious trees. A massive flood. Confusion of languages. What do we make of these stories? Did it all really happen as described by the early chapters of Genesis? Is Genesis giving us accurate history?

Any account of past events can be considered history. Genesis recounts past events—such as God’s creation of the world and human beings—so in this sense, Genesis is history. However, Genesis is theological history and uses figurative language in some of its descriptions. The author of Genesis is not interested in telling us how God created (in material terms) or how long it took.

We believe Genesis is a true account that, like other ancient narratives, uses vivid imagery to describe past events. It is silent on the scientific questions we might wish it to answer. A close reading of the text provides clues that indicate where a plain sense meaning is not intended. For example, in Genesis 1, there are three evenings and mornings with no sun, moon, and stars, so these are not regular days as we understand them (though they function that way in the text; they are literary days). Or consider Genesis 2:7, when God forms Adam from dust and breathes into his nostrils. This could not have happened exactly as described, because we know from other passages in the Bible that God is Spirit with neither hands nor lungs.

Inspiration and authority of Genesis

Genesis is the inspired word of God, but no human observer was present during the creation of the world, and God did not simply dictate a transcript of phenomena or events to the author of Genesis. Inspiration does not work that way.

In Genesis 1, we have an Israelite author’s account of God’s creative acts communicated to an Israelite audience. We believe that the understanding of the narrator in Genesis is God-given and therefore we accept it as offering an authoritative and true understanding of the world. However, it was not intended to enable us to reconstruct the creation events according to the scientific understanding of today or meet the demands of our modern worldview.

The genre and literary style of Genesis

Asking about history is asking about genre. Often when people identify Genesis as history they are arguing against identifying it with other genres (such as myth) or other forms of literary packaging (such as poetry). They might think that identifying Genesis as myth or poetry undermines or compromises its truth claims. But truth can be conveyed through a variety of genres or literary packages. We need to ask how Genesis delivers its truth claims—what the narrator’s intentions are.

The book of Genesis packages its truth claims largely in narrative, interspersed with genealogies. Chapters 1–11 describe the founding of the human race, leading up to God’s covenant with Abraham. Chapters 12–50 recount significant developments in the story of Abraham’s family, the ancestors of Israel, thus providing the backdrop to the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai. The early events described—including the side-by-side accounts of creation (ch. 1–2) and Adam and Eve’s primal act of disobedience (ch. 3)—are the opening episodes of the human story that lead to the story of Israel.

We can benefit from investigating how narratives in the Old Testament and the ancient world packaged truth related to past events. Even when their narratives deal with real events, the events are narrated as a means to a theological end.

Means to a theological end

Narratives—ancient or modern—are rarely bare chronicles of events as they happened. Take a reality TV show, for example. When an episode is filmed, multiple cameras are used to capture many events and conversations. The director then selects, arranges, and edits the raw footage to produce a coherent story consistent with the show’s agenda. Neither the director nor the viewers would expect to be able to reconstruct the raw footage from the finished product. The situation is similar in any historical account, which is a selective telling of events to serve a particular purpose. The case is no different with ancient narratives such as Genesis.

Ancient authors were more interested in the meaning of events rather than the details of the events. In that sense these narratives are not like most modern historical narratives. If we were to try to reduce their recorded event to a series of propositional truth claims, we would miss the entire point of their narrative.

When ancient narratives are interpretations of the past, they are generally not written simply to describe the past. Rather, they serve the present. Their work may be based on real events and real people, but their narratives do not explore “what really happened” in the style modern readers tend to expect. Rather, ancient narratives address the world of the narrator’s time, shedding light on that world and providing a perspective for the hearers to embrace. It is this perspective on the world, not the details used to reconstruct the events of the past, that the narrator wishes to convey to his audience.

Case study: the Flood of Genesis 6–9

Let’s apply this approach to one of the most famous stories in Genesis: the story of Noah and the Flood, found in Genesis 6–9. The Genesis Flood story is likely based on a set of even more ancient stories about an actual catastrophic regional flood event in the ancient Near East. These older legends were part of the cultural backdrop in which Genesis was written. The inspired author is re-casting these older stories using ancient literary conventions, in order to teach about the seriousness of sin and the merciful love of God for his creation. The story, based on a past flood event, is told using hyperbolic language to serve these theological points.

Genesis 6 portrays a world spinning out of control because of rebellion against God’s order. God acts to preserve his creation by returning it to the state of watery nothingness depicted in Genesis 1:2. Noah is called to participate in this preservation plan through the building of an Ark, which will allow the Earth to be repopulated and renewed after the destructive waters of the Flood subside. When this happens, God renews his covenant with humankind and reiterates his love for creation. This narrative pattern of human sin, God’s judgment, and God’s mercy is repeated throughout Genesis. The story of the Flood is intentionally told in a way that weaves the story into this larger narrative.

Like all of Genesis, the Flood story is part of God’s revelation to humankind. It informed Israel’s understanding of God’s relationship to creation and to Israel as his chosen people. This is a revelation of God to the people of Israel, not a revelation about the bare facts of science or natural history. In trying to reconstruct the details of “what really happened,” many have missed the theological point of the story.

The story of Genesis

The narratives of Genesis focus on conflict and resolution. God’s purpose from the beginning is to have his presence fill the earth; humans are to image God and subdue the earth, i.e., bring about order and fruitfulness in creation (Gen 1–2). Conflict enters the story when humans rebel against God (Gen 3). Shalom is shattered, and the earth is cursed. Further degeneration takes place (Gen 4–6) until God brings judgment and mercy (Gen 6–9). Humans then attempt to restore God’s presence (Gen 11) before God launches his own initiative to re-establish his presence on Earth (the covenant).

Genesis 1–11, then, is the founding story of humanity, ending in crisis. These narratives give a real and true assessment of God’s initial purposes and the human plight. Genesis 12–50 is the founding story of the nation with whom the covenant is eventually made at Sinai. The covenant establishes the relationship to Abraham and his descendants, provides the structure for living in God’s presence, and lays the foundation for God’s presence to be established on earth.

Conclusion

All narratives have purposes and perspectives. Genesis is a collection of ancient narratives, written and compiled by those who share the culture and literary styles of the ancient world. Like the narratives of their ancient Near Eastern neighbors, these narratives eliminate all details except those the narrator thinks are important to shape the message for his particular purpose.

The creation narratives are not included in Scripture so that we can receive a direct transmission from God about the phenomena of pre-human history; they are there because the inspired author’s interpretation of his present situation, through his narration of the events of the past, reveals truth about God and God’s purposes.

The truth of Genesis must not be judged by whether we can use it to reconstruct the “plain facts” of creation. The author wrote about past events (e.g., creation of the cosmos and humanity, humanity’s initial innocence and rebellion), but did so using evocative imagery. While all Christians can read the Bible profitably, our theological understanding is enriched as we learn more about the original audience and cultural context of Genesis. In turn, we see the continued significance and relevance of the text for our own lives.

- biologos

Biologos - Evolutionary Creationism vs. All Other Christian Schemes

Leafs in Decay. A Lesson for the Christian Faith where Rebirth evolves continually.

Years ago as I was working through what it meant to be a Christian while holding to Darwin's Evolutionary Science. During this time I had to accept some very hard things about my faith, my bible, and how I thought about the God I loved and adored. What I learned is that God is amazing. And wonderful. And wonderfully complex in His Creatorship.

It allowed me to find an integration with the bible I couldn't find earlier in my university training of applied mathematics, organic chemistry, and classical physics (sadly, quantum physics hadn't been embraced yet by my college; this I had to later learn and teach myself). It brought reconciliation to my faith. And it deeply changed both me and my faith.

Basically, I had to let go of the old paradigms I grew up with which weren't working anymore as my world expanded and got more complex. Old bible teachings were out of date. Old traditions were too easily toppled by poignant academic studies. But when I did let go, I found a livelier bible, an open theology no longer closed off to the world, and a God who blew my mind and no longer was trapped in the box of religious belief I had accepted and allowed to stay too long.

This, among many other fundamental discoveries, began my journey towards an open and relational faith which brought a level of integration with the world I had never imagined before. It allowed the complexity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to live-and-move amongst a world become foreign to them in my belief system. For the first time I could see God's handiwork, actions, love, and presence all around me as if the bedroom curtains had been lifted to allow the morning's strong sun into my illumined sleeping eyes.

It was beautiful.

And it brought a kind of soul-healing I dearly needed.

Which brings me to the organization of Biologos. For many years I thought I labored alone (as you can tell from the vast array of articles I had worked on under the "Science section" found along the topic list on the right). But I was not alone. Many others were hashing this adventure out with me as well. One group which was has come to be known as Biologos. Unlike myself, as I tried to make sense of the subject within a wider matrix of theological truths, Biologos was simply concentrating on the one subject of Evolutionary Creationism.

Not Theistic Evolution. That was a different theology for an older time using an out of date theological system (that of Calvinism, mostly) as I've pointed out many times in the past. But a system which would place an emphasis upon God being fully involved and present in the process of chaos and random natural selection we know as evolution. An oxymoron if ever there was one. But this I have discussed many, many times as well. That the sovereignty of God, and His decree of creational indeterminism and free will, allows for the fullest explanation of how He has worked through the Divine process of evolution.

A process always tilted towards the evolutionary creation and survival of life against the worst environmental hazards of the earth's geologic ages as they come-and-go. When the world breathed in methane air, life survived. When the deadly gas of oxygen evolved, so did biologic life as we know it today. When the seas changed in their salinity content, so did the life within them. When the sun could no longer penetrate earth's atmospheres and species died off, new life went underground and thrived in the darkness.

There was always a deep longing within evolutionary life to live, to survive, and to evolve, according to the environment it was presented. This was the wisdom of God.

After discovering Biologos it allowed me to move from the basics of the subject to the complexity of the subject. And when I do, I no longer need to re-create the wheel, but may plow ahead into what evolution was, is, and is becoming in the world of science. Especially within the context of a developing corpus of contemporary, postmodern theologies as it does the same with the church's past, present, and future traditions and belief structures.

Biologos allows me to be more hard core. Perhaps less Christian while being more fully Christian. I don't have to explain subject ideas as much any more but may leap into the pile of gathered ideas, discoveries, and known facts to make sense of them all. Or, mostly, to elucidate what these new ideas now means to an open and openly complex faith as it too evolves in its permutations and labyrinths of thoughts and ideas.

I love it. And I love the world of theological imagination as it re-embraces God in dynamic ways of fullness and meaning in a world of beliefs which too often live in lands of fear and defense. These latter outcomes was never a help to the church. Mostly, it held back the church's mission to the world which might grant a holism of spirit with a holism of living.

But a living God heals. He heals the mind, the soul, the spirit. He breathes His divine breath upon mankind and says "I AM" the ONE who evolves with you in the symmetry of creation seeking life in  its disorders and chaos. It means my life may also be chaotic and out of order but that my God of Shalom will bring me into fellowship with Him through the redemption He has provided in Christ, and in this world He has made, if we but look and imagine His grace and wisdom.

R.E. Slater

October 12, 2017

http://biologos.org/common-questions/christianity-and-science/biologos-id-creationism

At BioLogos, we present the Evolutionary Creationism (EC) viewpoint on origins. Like all Christians, we fully affirm that God is the creator of all life—including human beings in his image. We fully affirm that the Bible is the inspired and authoritative word of God. We also accept the science of evolution as the best description for how God brought about the diversity of life on earth.

But while we accept the scientific evidence for evolution, BioLogos emphatically rejects Evolutionism, the atheistic worldview that so often accompanies the acceptance of biological evolution in public discussion. Evolutionism is a kind of scientism, which holds that all of reality can in principle be explained by science. In contrast, BioLogos believes that science is limited to explaining the natural world, and that supernatural events like miracles are part of reality too.

Read more on scientism and evolutionism

According to Young Earth Creationism (YEC), a faithful reading of Scripture commits Christians to accepting that the earth is young, between 6,000 and 10,000 years old. YEC claims that Scripture is not compatible with the idea that humans share common ancestry with other life forms on earth, and most YEC proponents feel that evolution is a direct threat to Christianity.

Read more on Young Earth Creationism

According to Old Earth Creationism (OEC), the scientific evidence for the great age of the earth (4.6 billion years) and universe (13.7 billion years) is strong. This view typically maintains that the days of creation in Genesis 1 each refer to long periods of time. OEC does not accept the common ancestry of all life forms, often opting instead for a theory of progressive creation in which God miraculously created new species at key moments in the history of life.

Read more on Old Earth Creationism

We at BioLogos maintain that the scientific evidence from many branches of modern science would make little sense apart from common ancestry and evolution. We also believe that the cultural and theological contexts in which Scripture was written are key for determining the best interpretation of the creation accounts.

In contrast to EC, YEC, and OEC, Intelligent Design (ID) does not explicitly align itself with Christianity. It claims that the existence of an intelligent cause of the universe and of the development of life is a testable scientific hypothesis. ID arguments often point to parts of scientific theories where there is no consensus and claim that the best solution is to appeal to the direct action of an intelligent designer. At BioLogos, we believe that our intelligent God designed the universe, but we do not see scientific or biblical reasons to give up on pursuing natural explanations for how God governs natural phenomena. We believe that scientific explanations complement a robust theological understanding of God’s role as designer, creator, and sustainer of the universe.

While Christians differ on their views of the age of the earth and evolution, we all agree on the essentials of the faith: that all people have sinned and that salvation comes only through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We agree that the God of our salvation is the same God we see in the wonders of his creation. Whether we ponder the intricacy of DNA, the beauty of a dolphin, or the vastness of the Milky Way, we can lift our hearts together in praise to the divine Artist who made it all.

http://biologos.org/resources/biologos-basics

Read more on our mission and what we believe

Read more on Intelligent Design

Biologos - Adam, Eve and Human Population Genetics, Part 3: Language, populations and speciation

Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics

Part 3 -

Language, populations and speciation

http://biologos.org/blog/adam-eve-and-human-population-genetics-part-3-good-butter-and-good-cheese

In this series, we explore the genetic evidence that indicates humans became a separate

species as a substantial population, rather than descending uniquely from an ancestral pair.

by Dennis Venema

December 12, 2014

In yesterday’s post, we drew an extended analogy between genetic change within a population over time, and change within a language over time. While no analogy is perfect, this one is remarkably good – and it will continue to be useful as we now turn to discussing how new species form.

Flags of Friesland and England

With a last name like Venema, it will come as no surprise to many that I have Frisian ancestors. Friesland is a province of the Netherlands with a distinct language, West Frisian, that is one of the most closely-related modern languages to English. My paternal grandparents, immigrants to Canada in the post-World War II era, spoke a delightful hodge-podge of English, Dutch and Frisian to each other, often using mostly Frisian and only reverting to Dutch or English if it happened to have a better word for the concept at hand. As a child, I remember hearing Frisian and noting how similar many of its words were to their English equivalents – far too many similarities, I thought, to be merely coincidence. A well-known sentence will serve as an illustration: it is pronouncedessentially the same in both Frisian and English:

Butter, bread, and green cheese is good English and good Frise.

Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.

Later, I would come to understand the reason for these striking similarities – English and West Frisian are modern descendants of an ancient language – they share a common ancestral population of speakers. As we have seen, languages change over time. In the case of English and West Frisian, the original population, which spoke a language ancestral to both modern-day English and modern-day West Frisian, was divided: some remained on the European continent, and others travelled to what is present-day England. Once separated, each sub-group – which at the point of separation spoke the same language – went on to acquire differences over time that were independent of each other. In due time, the changes that accumulated in both groups rendered them mutually unintelligible to each other: they had become separate languages. The precise point at which they became “different languages” of course is impossible to pin down, since there was no such precise point when it occurred. Both groups changed their language over time incrementally, as a process on a gradient.

Species form through a process much like language development. Should two populations of the same species become separated, they too can accumulate genetic changes that shift their average characteristics over time – changes that are not shared and averaged across the two groups due to their genetic isolation. In many cases, geographic isolation acts as the first genetic barrier – much like the ancestors of the English parting ways with their continental cousins. Once separated, should enough genetic changes accrue between the two populations, eventually they will not recognize each other as members of the same species – which would be analogous to my experience as a modern English speaker in present-day Friesland.

Species, like languages “begin” as populations – and “begin” isn’t the right word

Our language analogy also helps to counter some common misconceptions about how species form. Often when I am speaking about human origins, folks who have heard about modern humans descending from around 10,000 ancestors wonder how on earth those 10,000 people suddenly appeared on the scene without ancestors. Of course, they didn’t suddenly appear – they too have a population that gave rise to them, and so on – stretching back to our shared ancestral populations with other apes and beyond. There is in fact no point in our evolutionary history over the last 18 million years or more where our lineage was reduced below 10,000 individuals – and 18 million years ago our lineage was not even close to “human” in any sense, since this timepredates any hominin (i.e. species more closely related to us than to chimpanzees) in the fossil record. The 10,000 number is simply the smallest population size we have in our history over the last several million years. The lineage leading to modern humans experienced what is known as a population bottleneck, a time when our ancestral population size was reduced to around 10,000 breeding individuals, only to expand again afterwards.

Despite these explanations, it is a common misperception to think that species, should one go back far enough, started off with one ancestral breeding pair “becoming different”. Hopefully our language analogy is useful here. It is of course not reasonable to expect that English or West Frisian got its start when two individuals began speaking a new language. The lineage that led to either modern language did so as a population of speakers – and each generation within both lineages was perfectly intelligible to their parents and their offspring. In the same way, species form as populations shift their average characteristics over time – but always remaining the “same species” as their parents and their offspring. So, to speak of a language or a species “beginning” is to hit up against the limits of language. Neither “begins” in some sort of discontinuous sense – they become, over time, in continuity with what came before.

So, one of the reasons for the common expectation that humans had a discontinuous beginning with a single ancestral couple has nothing to do with Genesis or Judeo-Christian theology: I have met many non-theists who also have this same expectation. We are used to thinking in discontinuous terms – species should have a defined beginning – and we are used to thinking that species therefore begin with a radical change to a single ancestral pair. For evangelical Christians, these incorrect assumptions about how species get their start fit hand in glove with the common view that since species require a discontinuous start, only God can miraculously provide it through an event of special creation. Once one understands how species form as populations over time, however, one is then prepared to investigate the question of how large our population was as we became human – a question we will begin to address in the next post.

For further reading:

“Evolution Basics: Becoming Human, Part 2: Language Evolution and Lines on a Gradient”

“Evolution Basics: From Primate to Human, Part 1”

---

Dennis Venema is professor of biology at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. He holds a B.Sc. (with Honors) from the University of British Columbia (1996), and received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 2003. His research is focused on the genetics of pattern formation and signaling using the common fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism. Dennis is a gifted thinker and writer on matters of science and faith, but also an award-winning biology teacher—he won the 2008 College Biology Teaching Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers. He and his family enjoy numerous outdoor activities that the Canadian Pacific coast region has to offer. Dennis writes regularly for the BioLogos Forum about the biological evidence for evolution.

continue to -

Biologos - Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics, Part 1:

Scripture, science, and defining the issues

Biologos - Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics, Part 2:

A premier on population genetics

Biologos - Adam, Eve and Human Population Genetics, Part 3:

Language, populations and speciation

Biologos - Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics, Part 2: A premier on population genetics

Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics

Part 2 -

A premier on population genetics

http://biologos.org/blog/adam-eve-and-human-population-genetics-part-2-a-primer-on-population-geneti

In this series, we explore the genetic evidence that indicates humans became a separate

species as a substantial population, rather than descending uniquely from an ancestral pair.

by Dennis Venema

December 10, 2014

Evolution as gradual change at the population level

One of the most common misunderstandings about evolution is failing to appreciate that evolution happens topopulations, not individuals. But, you might interject, populations are made up of individuals – so how does that work? The answer is that yes, genetic variation enters a population through mutations in individuals – but that only when such variation accumulates within a population and shifts its average characteristics do we observe its effects.

Perhaps an analogy will help here – one that I have used before, that of language change over time. Languages are like populations – they have a large number of individuals who speak it. While each individual has their own particular quirks (favorite phrases, word preferences, and perhaps even chronic spelling mistakes) any one person cannot, on the whole, cause significant change to their language within their lifetimes. Additionally, any person who does change radically from their language group will effectively be placing themselves outside it – if their changes are large enough to hinder their intelligibility to others. So, language evolution is not an individual affair. Yet languages do change over time, and individuals do contribute to that change. Someone might invent a new word that catches on, for example. Others might be part of the “catching on” – hearing a new word, or new phrase, and repeating it to others. Over time (perhaps generations) a language will slowly adopt new words, new spellings, and new rules of grammar (such as split infinitives in English – to boldly split what no man has split before – but I digress). Yet, such adoptions are gradual. They enter the language as rarities, slowly become more common, and eventually become the “normal” way of doing things (much to the chagrin of English teachers). Thankfully, such changes typically take longer than one generation, sparing those of us who cringe at the novelties of our day. If the English words “there, their and they’re” ever officially collapse into one word determined solely by context or the use of apostrophes to form plurals becomes standard, I’m thankful I won’t be here to see it.

Just as a language has many speakers, a species has many members. They must be genetically compatible – i.e. speak the same language – but they are not all genetically identical – they have their own particular variation within an acceptable range to be in the group. In other words, though populations are a unit (they interbreed) they have genetic variation.

In the terminology of genetics we can understand this in terms of genes and alleles. While all members of the population have the same genes, they do not all have exactly the same version of any given gene. Different versions of a gene are called alleles, and they arise through mutations – that is, copying errors when chromosomes are replicated. For humans, we may have up to two different alleles for any gene – the allele we inherit from our mother, and the allele we inherit from our father. If have two different alleles, we are said to beheterozygous for that particular gene. If we have two identical alleles for a gene, we are homozygous for that gene. While any individual can have up to only two alleles, populations as a whole can have hundreds or even thousands of alleles.

In any given generation, the vast majority of the alleles present in a population were inherited from the previous generation – just like a language group learning from their parents, and picking up the language as a whole, but also some of their particular linguistic quirks. Each generation also can contribute its own novelty to the population in the form of new alleles arising through mutation – just like teenagers coming up with new words or phrases. These new alleles, are rare of course – they are only held by one individual at the beginning. Over many, many generations, however, such new alleles can become more common within a population if they are passed down, progressively, to more and more offspring. In time, the new allele might become the most common one within a population. Many generations later, it might be the only allele present for that gene in the entire population. Combined with the actions of other new alleles of many other genes, over time the average characteristics of the population can change. While it’s challenging to imagine this for genes and alleles, it’s simple to illustrate with language – for example, the change we see in linguistic trajectory towards present-day English in a verse from John’s gospel:

John 1:29, West Saxon Gospels, c. 990

Anothir day Joon say Jhesu comynge to hym, and he seide, Lo! the lomb of God; lo! he that doith awei the synnes of the world. (Wycliffe Bible, 1395)

The nexte daye Iohn sawe Iesus commyge vnto him and sayde: beholde the lambe of God which taketh awaye the synne of the worlde. (Tyndale New Testament, 1525)

The next day Iohn seeth Iesus coming vnto him, and saith, Behold the Lambe of God, which taketh away the sinne of the world. (KJV, 1611)

The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. (KJV, Cambridge Edition)

The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (NIV, 2011)

Note well that these “forms”, as we see them here, themselves have many gradations between them, of course. These selections are useful for our illustrative purposes, however. Note that the overall shift to the “modern” text is the cumulative result of many individual changes. To return to our analogy, if every word is a gene, we see shifts in alleles over time as follows:

cwæð → seide → sayde → saith → said

synne → synnes → synne → sinne → sin

to hym cumende → comynge to hym → commyge vnto him → coming vnto him → coming unto him

Though the changes in each word contribute to the overall transformation, each word has only a relatively minor effect on its own. Yet the combined actions of changes in many words, over time, can change West Saxon to modern English. There are not, however, large jumps at any point along the way – each generation of speakers could easily understand their parents and their children – but over time, the shifts are large enough that West Saxon and present-day English are not even close to being the same language.

In the next post in this series, we’ll consider how changes in alleles can lead to new species – much like change over time can lead to new languages.

For further reading:

“Evolution Basics: Becoming Human, Part 2: Language Evolution and Lines on a Gradient”

---

Dennis Venema is professor of biology at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. He holds a B.Sc. (with Honors) from the University of British Columbia (1996), and received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 2003. His research is focused on the genetics of pattern formation and signaling using the common fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism. Dennis is a gifted thinker and writer on matters of science and faith, but also an award-winning biology teacher—he won the 2008 College Biology Teaching Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers. He and his family enjoy numerous outdoor activities that the Canadian Pacific coast region has to offer. Dennis writes regularly for the BioLogos Forum about the biological evidence for evolution.

continue to -

Biologos - Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics, Part 1:

Scripture, science, and defining the issues

Biologos - Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics, Part 2:

A premier on population genetics

Biologos - Adam, Eve and Human Population Genetics, Part 3:

Language, populations and speciation

Biologos - Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics, Part 1: Scripture, science, and defining the issues

Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics

Part 1 -

Scripture, science, and defining the issues

http://biologos.org/blog/adam-eve-and-human-population-genetics-part-1-scripture-science-and-definin

In this series, we explore the genetic evidence that indicates humans became a separate

species as a substantial population, rather than descending uniquely from an ancestral pair.

by Dennis Venema

November 12, 2014

Note: In this series, we explore the genetic evidence that indicates humans became a separate species as a substantial population, rather than descending uniquely from an ancestral pair.

Back in 2011, Christianity Today ran a cover article on what was fast becoming a hot-button issue for Evangelicals – the genomic science that indicates humans descend from a large population, rather than from a single couple in the relatively recent past. Since 2011 Evangelicals have become increasingly aware that modern genetic studies of humans support this conclusion; however, there remains a great deal of confusion about exactly how this genetic evidence works, and, not surprisingly, suspicion about its accuracy. In this series, we will explore several lines of genetic evidence that shed light on our species’ past in an attempt to rectify these misunderstandings.

Defining the issues

Part of the challenge this subject generates for Evangelicals is due to confusion over exactly what the science can and cannot say about human origins in general, or the historicity of Adam and Eve in particular. Briefly stated, genetics is well suited to addressing scientific questions such as whether humans share ancestry with other forms of life, and what our population structure looked like as we separated from our evolutionary relatives. And what we see in the genetics of our species is unremarkable for a relatively large-bodied mammal – we do indeed share common ancestry with other species, and we descend from a large population that has never numbered below about 10,000 individuals throughout our evolutionary history. Scientifically speaking, these issues are straightforward and uncontroversial.

In addition to these scientific questions, however, Evangelicals are also strongly interested in the question of Adam and Eve’s historicity: were they a literal couple that lived about 6,000 – 10,000 years ago? Unfortunately, genomic science is not at all equipped to address this question – it simply does not have the ability to establish (or rule out, for that matter) the historicity of any particular individual in the ancient past.

For many Evangelicals (or for that matter atheists), the idea that we are the products of evolution and became human as a large population over time is on its face contradictory to the idea that Adam and Eve may have been historical individuals. The reason, of course, is not a scientific one, but rather an interpretation that the Genesis narratives preclude understanding Adam and Eve as anything other than the first humans, directly created by God without shared ancestry, who are the sole genetic progenitors of the entire human race. This is, of course, a very common evangelical interpretation of Genesis, but it is not the only one – several other options are available that attempt to respect both Scripture and science. After all, Genesis has long been noted to imply that Adam and Eve’s family is part of a larger unrelated population (for example Cain worries about being killed for his sin, leaves to build a city elsewhere, and takes a wife in the process). The fact that Genesis presents these facets of the story without comment or clarification also shows us, in my opinion, that the narrative is simply not concerned with telling the story of our genetic origins, but rather is focused on theological concerns.

So, the decision to equate the historicity of Adam and Eve with the expectation that humans descend uniquely from an ancestral couple is a hermeneutical one, not a scientific one. As such, the historicity question needs to be addressed hermeneutically, not scientifically – it simply lies outside the purview of what genetics can tell us.

Evolution as a population-level phenomenon

Aside from the hermeneutical issues surrounding human evolution and population genetics (which are confusing enough for many of us), there are the scientific issues – which, for many Evangelicals, are similarly fraught with misunderstanding. One of the main misconceptions is failing to understand that evolution is a population-level phenomenon: species form slowly, as populations, due to the accumulation of numerous slight genetic differences that shift the average characteristics of a population over time. All that is required to start this process is to have some sort of genetic barrier between two populations – perhaps a geographic barrier to start. Once two populations of the same species are reproductively isolated, genetic changes in the one population are not shared with the other – and vice versa. Over many, many generations enough changes may accumulate in the two populations that their average characteristics are different enough such that they would no longer recognize each other as members of the same species. At this point, even if the two populations were brought into contact again, these differences (perhaps behavioral or physical) would keep the genetic barrier in place by reducing or preventing interbreeding, and thus prevent the two groups from collapsing back into one large population.

If, on the other hand, one is used to thinking that species form when they are founded by a pair that has undergone a marked genetic change compared to their source population, one is more likely to think that it would have been possible for humans to get their start in such fashion. These sorts of misunderstandings are common among non-scientists, and Evangelicals are not immune to them. For example, even among Christians who accept that we share ancestry with other life, I frequently get asked what “the mutation” was that “made us human”. Sometimes, folks wonder how such a dramatic mutation could have occurred in two individuals at the same time to provide a male and female member of the same (brand new!) species – and speculate that God must have directed it to occur to form Adam and Eve. Their understanding of human speciation is that it was sudden, involved only one couple, and required dramatic genetic change. In reality, speciation is almost always precisely the opposite: it’s slow, takes place in a population, and requires the accumulation of many discrete genetic differences, none of which are particularly dramatic. In the next post in this series, we’ll begin to explore how a population can accumulate genetic changes, and perhaps shift its average characteristics over time – beginning with how genetic diversity arises in the first place.

For further reading

Models for integrating genetics and Adam and Eve

Evidence for common ancestry, including common ancestry for humans

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Dennis Venema is professor of biology at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. He holds a B.Sc. (with Honors) from the University of British Columbia (1996), and received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 2003. His research is focused on the genetics of pattern formation and signaling using the common fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism. Dennis is a gifted thinker and writer on matters of science and faith, but also an award-winning biology teacher—he won the 2008 College Biology Teaching Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers. He and his family enjoy numerous outdoor activities that the Canadian Pacific coast region has to offer. Dennis writes regularly for the BioLogos Forum about the biological evidence for evolution.

continue to -

Biologos - Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics, Part 1:

Scripture, science, and defining the issues

Biologos - Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics, Part 2:

A premier on population genetics

Biologos - Adam, Eve and Human Population Genetics, Part 3:

Language, populations and speciation

Biologos - How Are Christianity and Evolution Compatible?

Charles Darwin's Glad Reception Amongst British and American Churches

How Are Christianity and Evolution Compatible?

https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/content/how-are-christianity-and-evolution-compatible

by Denis Alexander

June 2, 2014

Asking whether evolution is compatible with Christianity is a bit like asking whether playing baseball is compatible with being American or playing cricket compatible with being British.

The very first written response to Darwin’s famous book On the Origin of Species [1859] was from an Anglican priest and was so positive in tone that Darwin quoted from it in the second edition of the Origin.

The priest was the Rev. Charles Kingsley and on November 18th, 1859, six days before the publication of the Origin, he was thanking Darwin for his kind gift of an advance copy, writing that:

‘All I have seen of it awes me’, commenting that it is ‘just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that He created primal forms capable of self-development...as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas [gaps] which He Himself had made’.

Since 1859 most Christians have been equally happy to incorporate evolution within their biblical understanding of creation. Yes there was some opposition at the beginning, as there is for any radically new theory, but the most influential church leaders soon realized that Kingsley was right. The idea that evolution was greeted with general horror by the Church is a myth.

The British historian James Moore comments that:

‘with but few exceptions the leading Christian thinkers in Great Britain and America came to terms quite readily with Darwinism and evolution’,

and, the American historian George Marsden reports that:

‘…with the exception of Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, virtually every American Protestant zoologist and botanist accepted some form of evolution by the early 1870s’.

One of those biologists was Asa Gray, professor of natural history at Harvard and a committed Christian, who was Darwin’s long-term correspondent and confidante, helping to organize the publication of the Origin of Species in America.

Some Christian theologians were particularly welcoming in their response to evolution. One such was the Rev. Aubrey Moore, a scientist-priest at the University of Oxford who was Curator of the Oxford Botanical Gardens. Moore claimed that there was a special affinity between Darwinism and Christian theology, remarking that ‘Darwinism appeared, and, under the guise of a foe, did the work of a friend’. The reason for this affinity, claimed Moore, was based on the intimate involvement of God in his creation as revealed in Christian theology, for:

There are not, and cannot be, any Divine interpositions in nature, for God cannot interfere with Himself. His creative activity is present everywhere. There is no division of labour between God and nature, or God and law… For the Christian theologian the facts of nature are the acts of God.

In contrast to the robustly theistic views expressed by Kingsley and Moore, Darwin himself was a deist (see here and here) when he wrote the Origin, meaning that he believed in a God who started life at the beginning, but who after that had no direct involvement with it. This is clear from the very last poetic sentence of the Origin, quoted here from its sixth and last edition (1872):

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Darwin eventually became an agnostic in later life, but was never an atheist, maintaining that indeed it was possible to be ‘an ardent Theist and an Evolutionist’.

Contemporary Evolution and the Church Today

Given that Darwin’s Christian contemporaries largely embraced evolution, how is it that today, 150 years later, many American Christians reject his theory?

First, it should be noted that evolution is still widely accepted by the Christian community in Europe.

Second, it is an unfortunate fact that evolution since Darwin has become infested with different ideological agendas that have nothing to do with the biological theory itself. For example, some have sought to invest evolution with an atheistic agenda, so Christians who naturally reject atheism are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Third, a sizable segment of the American Church has adopted a literalistic stance towards the interpretation of the Bible. Reacting against the inroads of liberal theology into its ranks in the earlier decades of the 20th century, many American Christians started reading Biblical texts, such as Genesis 1-3, in a highly literalistic manner, as if it were teaching science rather than theology. Such modernistic handling of ancient texts inevitably leads to a clash with science.

Once we return to a more traditional way of interpreting the Bible, assisted by the early Church Fathers, then any possible clash between science and Biblical texts simply vaporizes.

Augustine, for example, wrote a commentary between AD 401 and AD 415 entitled The Literal Interpretation of Genesis. The twenty-first century reader coming to this volume expecting to find the term ‘literal’ interpreted in terms of strict creation chronology and days of 24 hours, is in for a surprise. Instead Augustine read Genesis 1 as a theological literary text written in highly figurative language. Other Church Fathers (such as Origen, 3rd century) did likewise, as did Jewish commentators like Philo of Alexandria in the 1st century.

The biblical creation theology of the early Church Fathers, mediated to the European Church by great theological scholars such as Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, provides a framework within which evolution can comfortably be accommodated. The Christian understanding of God creating is very different from human types of creating. God as creator in the Christian view is the ground and source of all existence. Anything that exists, be it the laws of physics, mathematics, quantum fluctuations, Higgs bosons or the processes of evolution are therefore, ipso facto, aspects of this created order. When human beings make things, they work with already existing material to produce something new. The human act of creating is not the complete cause of what is produced; but God's creative act is the complete cause of what is produced.

So speaking of God as the ‘creator’ of the evolutionary process is not some attempt to smuggle ‘God language’ into a scientific description, as if God were some ‘extra component’ without which the scientific theory would be incomplete. Far from it, for then such a concept of ‘God’ would no longer be the creator God of Christian theology. Rather the existence of the created order is more like the on-going drama on the TV screen – remove the production studio and the transmitter and the screen would go blank.

The biblical writers underline this point by employing the past, present and future tense when speaking of creation. God is immanent in the created order, an insight with a Christological focus in the New Testament, where John insists in the prologue to his Gospel that “Through him [Jesus the Word] all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” and the Apostle Paul makes the astounding claim that not only by Christ have all things been created, but also that in Christ “all things hold together”.

It was such reflections that led 19th century theologians like Aubrey Moore to celebrate Darwin’s theory because, in their view, it helped to move theology away from the deistic notion of God the distant law-giver to the idea central to Christian theism of the creator God actively involved in upholding and sustaining the complete created order in which the evolutionary process is a contingent feature.

This is the evolutionary process which, as a matter of fact, provides the best explanation for the origins of all the biological diversity on this planet. Taken overall it is a tightly constrained process. The late Stephen Jay Gould likened evolutionary history to a drunk lurching around on the side-walk, but the point about a side-walk is that it’s a very constrained space. In the phenomenon known as ‘convergence’ the evolutionary process keeps finding the same adaptive solutions again and again in independent evolutionary lineages. Replay the tape of life again and it’s very likely that the diversity of life-forms would end up looking rather similar. There are only so many ways of being alive on planet earth. A pattern of order and constraint is rather consistent with a God who has intentions and purposes for the evolutionary process.

Does the fact of evolution raise challenging theological questions for Christian faith? Of course. For example, when did humans first become responsible to God for their actions? How should Christians understand the doctrine of the Fall in the light of evolution? And what about the problem of pain and suffering? No-one pretends that such questions have simple answers, and I have written a book that tackles them in some detail (Creation or Evolution – Do We Have to Choose? Oxford: Monarch, 2008). Understanding evolution is a help rather than a hindrance on that last question. There are necessary costs in the existence of carbon-based life and all living things, including us, play our part in sharing the burden of those costs. Biological existence, with all its rich diversity, is a costly existence.

“Nature is what God does” wrote Augustine in his commentary on Genesis. We exist within God’s created order and the evolutionary process is a key feature of that order, essential for our existence. That means a lot more than mere ‘compatibility’. And the good news is the future tense of creation. The best is yet to come.