Is Genesis all literal, all allegory, or somewhere between?

I said early in this thread:

The words of Genesis are true. By this I mean that these verses, as with all of scripture, carry truth for us, and as we encounter these verse we encounter truth. Yet not all truth is historical truth. At one stage when I taught Scripture in School, we spent several weeks on the Passion. I decided that we would have some feedback so i could establish that the children understood what had been said. One question I asked as 'How did Jesus Die?' One of the children stood up and blurted out 'he was stabbed in the back by Judas!'. Initially I thought about the poor job of catechesis I had been engaged in, yet the child had apprehended a truth in the story, not that I had expressed in in that way, but he had encountered something of the truth in the story. Genesis is not National Geographic, it's not science, there is plenty of room for both Genesis and Science to be true, albeit in in different ways, and representing different approaches to the truth.

 

Your understanding of evolution is simply old-fashioned by this point. It's something from the 20th century. As an analogy, you're still fighting tooth and nail to force everyone to accept the heliocentric theory against those primitive Christians, whereas the actual science of physics and astronomy has already left heliocentrism behind. Science as of 2021 is back to a position that again allows for geocentrism. The old polemicists have been defeated. Science has moved on, yet again. Facts don't care about anyone's feelings.

The same goes for evolution. You can repeat the tired 20th century polemics from Richard Dawkins and other outmoded militant atheists. But sadly for them, science has already moved on. Here is an excellent panel on the apocalypse currently taking place in the science of Evolution, over the last ~10-15 years, which basically puts the entire field into a crisis. I send it to you as a fellow believer in evolution, in order to shake you out of scientific fundamentalism.

I hope you really watch it, and not just wave it away in the heat of a polemic. I mean it in charity; this video has scientists and atheists, stating that the current understanding of evolution is unsustainable.

 

You're misrepresenting their positions. Augustine also believed the Earth to be 6000 years old (or rather human civilisation to be 6000 years old. He didn't much care for how much time passed between Earth existing and civilisation existing). That's not relevant. The point is what Augustine said about reconciling interpretation with evidence (and what Ambrose agreed with). Augustine said that when interpretation conflicts with natural truth, our interpretations are wrong and need to be changed. Until then we should read each verse literally. He qualified that even if all of Genesis was an allegory it wouldn't change any of the theological consequences of it at all, but that we should read as much of it literally as is consistent with scientific observation.

At that time there was no evidence the Earth was millions of years old, and only very spurious evidence that civilisation was older than 6000 years old that was trivial to dismiss. So it makes sense he, and all other church fathers, took the age of the Earth/Human Civilisation to be 6000 years old. But he also says if he was shown evidence that the Earth was millions of years old he would change his interpretation to be less literal, rather than stick his head in the sand and refuse to accept he read the passage wrong. We don't hold the church fathers to be omnipotent, of course they didn't believe in evolution, they predate Darwin by 1200-1600 years. That they didn't write in favour of a modern scientific realisation doesn't mean they didn't give us the tools to interpret scripture in light of it.

I'm happy to not weigh every word Augustine wrote as gospel. But I'm going to discount the things I disagree with through reason. Augustine was wrong on the age of human civilisation - we have undeniable evidence humans have been on this Earth with buildings and communities for longer. Augustine was not wrong on nature being an extension of Truth.

 

I’m afraid not. I cited Coyne’s work as a good resource for laymen. His books were published this century and he just retired a few years ago. Whatever the current state of the science is on the subject is what I accept as provisionally true. Since you accept it as well, apparently, it’s a mystery to me why you go to such trouble to nitpick anyway. It’s also rather annoying, since what I actually said was correct: evolutionary biologists do not make a hard distinction between the processes of microevolution and macroevolution, and we do have a lot more evidence from the fossil record than Darwin had in his day.

 

The question was asked: do you believe in evolution? I answered as to what I believe. You want to argue about what I believe, you can stuff it where the sun doesn't shine. I believe what I believe.

 

This is exactly what I mean when I said that rejecting Genesis as literal truth ultimately leads to a rejection of Christ's salvific work. The virgin birth, the resurrection, the ascencion, and all the miracles are no less scientifically untenable, than the creation story. By the standard above, they must be rejected. Do you reject these as being in conflict with known scientific fact? If not, why not?

 

That was mean, childish, and uncalled for. I do not care in the slightest what you believe. Facts are facts whether you believe them or not, and biological evolution just happens to be one of them. That's your problem. I was offering a response to something you had said, and offered further information about it:

When you make statements that contradict established science, you should expect for your error to be pointed out to you. The remedy for that, of course, is to simply stop saying things that aren't true. Since you seem to be utterly incapable of offering either an intelligent or an open-minded (or just un-bigoted) response to pretty much anything anyone else says here on any topic where you have strong yet unsupported "beliefs", I'll be resuming the use of the glorious Ignore button especially for your posts, as they are not worth reading or responding to.
Have a nice day.

 

Being committed to the integrity of the scientific discipline need not make one a dogmatic, doctrinaire naturalist. I cannot scientifically prove that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, because that was by definition a one-time, unrepeatable event. The fossil record, on the other hand, is something we can actually observe and make inferences from, and remains of organisms found therein can be used to confirm or disconfirm particular theories about it. The evidential support for biological evolution in the fossil record is incredibly strong, and that's only one of several independent lines of supporting evidence.

Things like the virginal conception or the resurrection of Jesus, however, can neither be proved nor disproved, either scientifically (because they were one-time, unrepeatable events that we cannot observe today), or historically (because none of the biblical authors actually claimed to have observed them at the time). There was no ultrasound running on Mary's uterus that could see a zygote where none was a moment before. All we can say about such events from the standpoint of science is that we know of no natural process that would explain how such events could occur; and that's perfectly fine, because the biblical authors reporting those events specifically claimed that they weren't natural events at all. The Gospels do not claim that Jesus' conception was the result of parthenogenesis (understood in the scientific sense), and indeed it would be a huge problem for Christians if parthenogenesis could result in male offspring, for example, or if there were any observed, documented instances of it in human beings. That's not what the Gospels are saying: Jesus' conception is proposed to our belief as something from God and supernatural. We would therefore not expect science to ever discover how such a thing could occur, nor can we use science to prove such a thing either did not happen or could not have happened. There is no inherent conflict between upholding science and having religious faith, and while we are not required to hold any particular views about how old the universe is or how life developed on Earth, we are required to uphold the other items you mentioned (virginal conception, resurrection, etc.) in order to be Christians at all, and a person who does not believe those things should not claim to be Christian. So there's no dispute there, either, as long as we understand that we must also maintain the essentially mysterious character of these things. We may believe them (and indeed we should), but we can't adequately explain them because there is nothing in our ordinary experience that corresponds to them.

I hope that helps.

 

It does help.

I see clearly now how arbitrary your standard is. Creation was a one time event and cannot be replicated as much as the virgin birth.

Your scientifically inoffensive version of the faith is a wonderland of cherry orchards and cafeterias where moving about requires the most complex of mental gymnastics. I fear you are on the wrong road, requiring one compromise of faith after another, and will only lead to a spiritual dead end.

As for me, I will seek out the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and find rest for my soul.

Blessings

 

Sheesh. At least I can say I tried...

I think you're way off base here. Your view, if adhered to consistently, collapses all distinctions between what is natural and what is supernatural, as well as between the various ways of knowing. There is actually nothing "arbitrary" in recognizing that things we can observe might be subject to different epistemological standards than things we can't. That need not mean that one domain is more or less true than the other. I can't scientifically prove there is such a thing as "justice" but I know via my moral consciousness that justice is nevertheless real and objective. Nor is my affirmation of the virginal conception and the resurrection a hollow one: I do indeed affirm that those events really happened. I simply see no conflict between that and acknowledging that things like the fossil record give us reliable information about how life developed on Earth. Neither, for what it's worth, did Billy Graham or C.S. Lewis, and nobody credibly accused them of being:

Why is it that when we approach any other part of our lives we expect to find complexity and difficulty, but when it comes to pondering the Cause of all of it we expect that to be simple and easy? Oh well.

 

CS Lewis and Billy Graham have both been accused thusly (not by me) by a great many people, including folks on the forum. (There was a lot of strict Calvinists here back in the day)

Just one other point, CS Lewis's opinions on the Creation account (you'll excuse the pun) evolved over his lifetime. Early after his conversion, while skeptical of Darwinism, did not have a problem with theistic evolution. Later, he began to question it. While he never formally came out as a Creationist and declined write the preface to an anti-evolution book, he declined to do so not because of disagreement but out of concern over backlash. He wrote, "When a man has become a popular Apologist he must watch his step. Everyone is on the look out for things that might discredit him."

Indeed, he wrote, "What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders."

 

While I still disagree with Lowly on the question of evolution, I’m also sympathetic to his overall stance (and obviously C.S. Lewis!). I’m still persuaded on the balance of the evidence, and we can continue to have our disagreements on that, but I’m much more concerned on those on the other side. We are seeing a dark and sinister underbelly from those who are scientific fundamentalists. They make pretend they just want reason and revelation work hand in hand, but in fact, they want to suppress and destroy. Nor are they the champions of reason, which in their hands is not a dispassionate study of facts, but a deeply held ideology often at war with the actual facts.

As I previously posted, there are now fundamental concerns among atheist scientists about the coherence of the theory of Evolution. But will such folks seize that moment to pull back and look at the evidence? No they’ll push harder, crush harder. That may be the fanatical twistedness already seen by Lewis in the people of his time from way back in the 1950s. This is an old mindset, a mental fanaticism, not actually rooted in reason and facts.

 

This is all very obscure (and potentially misleading), and none of it amounts to what (apparently) you and those of a fundamentalist bent seem to want it to amount to. At present, evolutionary theory is one of the most coherent paradigms in the discipline, and is certainly one of the best supported from the available evidence. Whatever may be getting debated on the periphery, those fundamental aspects of the theory haven't been diminished. That doesn't mean that an even more coherent theory won't replace it in the future, but such a theory would not amount to a denial of the underlying facts, anymore than the move from geocentrism to heliocentrism denied the existence of the sun, or the move from cycles and epicycles to ellipses denied the existence of planets. That evolution has occurred is a fact; the theoretical explanation for how it occurred is something that will continually be refined, and that's not a controversial point among actual scientists.

 

I must confess that I'm more than a little disappointed that a forum pushing for orthodoxy of faith has so few members willing to defend the historicity of biblical narratives. It's truly sad how similar the mind sets of TEC and the more conservative Anglican jurisdictions are. Afflicted with the same virus of modernism, open to compromise on almost any doctrine for the sake of not looking foolish or fundamentalist to the zeitgeist, only differing in degree. I once heard someone remark that the ACNA (and other jurisdictions) was simply TEC with the clock turned back a few decades but still marching inevitably down the same path. I hope that isn't so, but I don't find much hope here.

 

I actually have a problem with evolution which people may be able to help me with. The readers digest version of evolution is, a blob somehow became alive and this blob slowly changed into all the life forms we have today. There are millions if not billions of different species today, multiply that by 100 for the now extinct species that might not have gone extinct but for meteorites or whatever and we have a huge amount of species around.
I can't do the integral calculus but with these figures the time line for a new species to evolve I would have thought would be shorter that the historic time period. But tigers have always been tigers same for zebras etc. We have seen no evolutionary new species in historic time apart from possibly microscopic bacteria, and I would assume these things (the bacteria) are only evolutionary grandchildren of the blob.

 

I’m not 100% certain what you’re asking specifically, but it’s probably fair to point out that there are far too many variables involved for speciation to occur at anything like a uniform rate. I would need to double-check this, but if my memory is correct, in terms of geologic time, animals like whales and birds evolved rather “rapidly” while others like sharks and amphibians did so comparatively more slowly. You mentioned tigers…the derivation of the family Felidae is a rather interesting one, as is their relationship to the other carnivore families (dogs, weasels, mongooses, bears, raccoons, and hyenas), which broadly divide into feliform and caniform types. There’s bound to be a good book out there somewhere that details the evolution of each these groups, or just the cat family specifically. If I think of one I’ll let you know.

 

A 'blob' is perhaps too generous a word for the first living micro-organism. It was more like a microscopic self-replicating protein (like a single DNA molecule or something, that was programmed to copy itself). This is one of the problems of evolutionary theory still being solved. We have no agreed upon theory for how new species arise, but there are several respected ones contesting each other. All of them struggle with the immense improbability that we have as much natural diversity across so many kingdoms given how long life has been around. One theory is that at certain time periods the probability of mutation rapidly spikes (this was the original inspiration of the X-Men Comics, funnily enough), but we have no understanding of why that might be the case. That's not necessarily a sign evolution is wrong, but rather that we still really don't understand how it works yet.

That's because you're misreading the historical interpretation of those biblical narratives. The modern approach is yours. It's not compromise, it's looking at the world and accepting what my eyes can plainly see. And then not having the arrogance to think my eyes have been deceived instead of accepting perhaps I was wrong.

 

I apologize.

But please feel free to ignore me.

 

There is a specific case study that supports your intuitive concern, namely the epoch of our planet called the Cambrian Explosion. The natural cataclysms prior to that epoch had wiped out practically all living creatures from the planet. Then came that Epoch, during which in just a few million years appeared basically all of the species we have with us today. Evolution works on the scale of billions of years. It does not work on the scale of millions. Thus the findings of archeology have falsified at least some of the theory of evolution as currently understood. That is one of the biggest problems which the atheist biologists are citing when explaining the current crisis in biology. I posted the link above, but here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noj4phMT9OE

As Francis Bacon had said, a bit of science may lead to atheism, but a bit more of science leads to religion.