\n A frequent objection to the credibility of Christianity is the seeming incompatibility between faith in an ancient God who created the world and the ‘modern’ world of science. This objection is most often seen in the area of creation and evolution. Some argue that if you believe in God you can’t believe in evolution and that if you believe in evolution you can’t believe in God. So let’s address this topic by looking at two things.
\n\n First, it is important to carefully define our terms when engaged in a discussion on this topic. It’s important for us to understand what we mean by “evolution.” For most people today that word has come to mean an overarching way to describe our identity (who we are), our history (how we got here) and our destiny (where we are going). That is, everything from our morality to our aesthetics to our collective logic has been shaped by non-directed genetic mutation that helped our ancestors survive. This is a significant departure from understanding evolution as a scientific biological process that seeks to explain how species have changed and adapted over the years. One is a worldview that is no less a faith position than Christianity, the other a scientific hypothesis. So if evolution is contained to the realm of a scientific hypothesis and not as a way to answer the questions of identity, history and destiny then as one scholar put it:
\n\n “It would seem that there is little reason for conflict between the implications of Christian belief in the Creator and the scientific explorations of the way which--at the level of biology--God has gone about his creating processes."1
\n\n Second, when seeking answers to the questions of identity, history and destiny that those who reject the traditional view of the Bible (“God created the world”) first take the time to honor the writers of the Bible by taking them seriously – which means asking the question ‘how does this author want to be understood?’ One way to discern how an author wants to be read is to distinguish what genre the writer is using. So in the book of Genesis, which is the part of the Bible that contains the creation account, the genre is what one writer called ‘exalted prose narrative’ – which allows for the fact that the author was making truth claims about the world, but that those claims were written in such a way that it was not meant to be taken literalistically. For example, in Genesis 1 natural order means nothing (light appears before the sun is created) where in Genesis 2 natural order is followed (Genesis 2:5). So it seems clear that the author’s primary intent was to show that ‘In the beginning God created...’ How he did it (i.e. in seven 24 hour days or over millions of years) is not the point. Once this is understood, evolution, or any other scientific theory, is no longer a ‘threat’ to the Bible’s authority because the primary thesis of Genesis is that the omnipotent, personal, God created and sustains all things.
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