Fortress Press

According to Christianity, God created the material universe and gave it order. Science investigates the material universe and affirms its order. Logically, then, Christianity should embrace science as the discipline that examines God's creation and shows us God's works and plans. Yet, Christianity's reaction to science has been largely negative, even violent. A few conflicts have been over theological doctrines, but most have centered on certain passages of scripture.

Prominent among these passages is the creation narrative at the beginning of Genesis. In Genesis, God forms the universe in brief, decisive steps, and when God rests, the work of creation is finished. From that moment on, little changes. The universe is essentially static. According to biblical chronology, the universe and Earth are barely 6,000 years old. God created each biological species separately and fashioned humankind as a single pair, Adam and Eve. Soon, they disobeyed God and were cast out of Eden, their garden paradise. God punished Adam with hardship in farming, Eve with pain in childbirth, and both with mortality. Science tells a different story. According to science, the cosmos has developed for some 12 billion years, Earth for 4.5 billion, and organisms for approximately 3 billion. The universe is always in a dynamic process of change. Biological species evolved from one another. Humankind is simply another species, evolved like other species and from other species. All creatures are mortal, and garnering resources and reproducing are the tasks of all living things.

The three branches of the Christian church have had three different reactions to this collision between science and Scripture.


Science and Scripture

Conservative Protestant churches have asserted that the Bible is a scientific and historical document, to be read literally and treated as inerrant or infallible. Where science and Scripture disagree, science is wrong, even demonic.

The modern Roman Catholic Church has taken a second, more moderate position. Having learned from its mistake over Galileo, it recognizes the claims of science. It says the Genesis creation narratives contain figurative language. However, where questions arise about the historicity of Adam, Eve, and the fall, the church insists that the narrative in Genesis is historical: "The account of the fall in Genesis 3 . . . affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man" (Catechism 1994, 98; emphasis in original).

Taking a third position, the liberal Protestant churches say the Bible is not a scientific or historical document. They treat the creation and fall as metaphor and myth that tell us about ourselves and our relationship to God, but not about science or history. These churches are willing to accept the scientific story in its entirety.

Each of these positions has its difficulties. The position that the Bible is infallible is challenged not only by science, but also by evidence internal to Scripture. Claims to inerrancy are not logically tenable because the Bible has internal inconsistencies. Doublets of narratives, events, and even genealogies contradict each other so that both cannot be true. Genesis 1 and 2 provide an example. In Genesis 1:11-27, God creates vegetation, then sea dwellers, then birds, then land creatures, then humankind, male and female together. In Genesis 2:5-22 God creates a male human being first, then plants, animals, and a female human being. Both these accounts cannot be historically, inerrantly true. Either human beings were created together or separately, either plants and/or animals were created before or after the first human being.

Such contradictions are not limited to the Hebrew Scriptures. The infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke also contradict each other. In Matthew 1:18–2:23, Joseph and Mary travel from Bethlehem to Egypt to Nazareth. They are motivated by fear of a massacre, then by a desire to avoid settling in Herod's son's territory. In Luke 2:1-39, they travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem to Jerusalem and back to Nazareth. Their initial travels are motivated by a census/taxation by Rome, their trip to Jerusalem by their desire to fulfill Jewish law, their return to Nazareth by their wish to go home. Matthew has a star leading astrologers to Joseph's house, Luke an angelic host pointing shepherds to a stable. Again, both these narratives cannot be historically, inerrantly true. Astrologers at Joseph's house or shepherds in a stable, massacre or census, Egypt or Jerusalem—only one story, if either, is true. To read the Bible literally and believe it infallible means rejecting the simple logic indispensable in daily life. The price is too high.

The liberal option also pays a high price. Liberal churches have tended to embrace the God of the gaps. The God of the gaps fills explanatory gaps left by incomplete scientific explanations. For example, the Middle Ages considered God to be directly active in every event. In 1687, Isaac Newton demonstrated that gravity, not the mighty hand of God, moved the planets in their courses. A gap closed.

The response was to find God's hand in the familiar, natural world. God might not move the planets, but God directly created each biological species. In 1859, Charles Darwin closed that gap. Since then, other gaps have closed, and God has continued to retreat. As the twentieth century ended, the God of the gaps was vanishing over the horizon. It is true that God is still seen as creator of the Big Bang and of laws governing the universe. However, this is not the personal God of Christianity but the distant God of Aristotle and of the eighteenth-century Deists; the God of the philosophers, not the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; the unmoved mover, not the living God who meets, rescues, and frees us. This is the originator of everything, the sustainer and savior of nothing, the God whose creation we inhabit but whose presence we no longer need. From this perspective, Jesus becomes a great man, a sage or a prophet, but he is no longer divine.

As far as the fall is concerned, liberals insist it be retained as central because of its theological importance for the atonement, yet they consider it a myth. Logically, however, the living, historical Jesus can no more atone for the sins of fictive, mythological forebears than we can suffer the real consequences of their fabled sins. On a strictly logical level, treating the narrative as myth means it has no theological work to do. The liberal response is that it is a myth with a message. It tells us about human nature, about our condition of exile and alienation. Yet, as I will argue, we evolved here. Earth is our home. We are not exiles. If the myth is primarily about alienation, it misleads us about the human situation. Moreover, as Christians, we should look to Jesus for revelation about the human condition, not to an ancient Hebrew myth.

The Catholic Church seems unusually aware of the theological dangers of treating Adam, Eve, and the fall as myth. Although it does not assert the inerrancy of the Bible, it claims infallibility in its Pope. In spite of maintaining that the creation narratives use mythological language, the Pope insists on the historicity of the fall (Pius XII [1950] 1956, 287). Catholicism thinks the doctrine of the atonement will crumble if the fall is not a historical event creating original sin. As it notes, "We cannot tamper with the revelation of original sin without undermining the mystery of Christ" (Catechism 1994, 98). Without a historical fall, Catholicism thinks Christianity itself is in danger.
— from Chapter 1

Preface
Introduction

Part One: The Demise of Adam and Eve

1. Science, Scripture, and Doctrine
—Science and Scripture
—Central Scriptural Doctrines
—Central Theological Doctrines
—Controversial Doctrines

2. Tests of Truth
—The Interpreter and Canalization
—The Coherence Test
—The Correspondence Test
—The Consilience Test

3. The Fall
—The Early Church
—Harold Bloom
—A Gnostic Christian
—Augustine

4. Original Sin
—Calvin and Protestantism
—The Canalization of Evil
—Aquinas and Catholicism
—Athanasius and Orthodoxy

5. The Demise of Adam and Eve
—Coherence and Genesis 1–3
—Correspondence and Genesis 1–9
—Consilience in Science
—The Demise of Adam and Eve

6. Scripture and Truth
—Coherence and the Torah
—Symbolic Truth in Genesis 2 and 3
—Correspondence and the Gospels
—The Authority of Scripture

Part Two: The Unification of Science and Christianity

7. The Theory of Evolution
—Coherence and Natural Selection
—Correspondence and Speciation
—Consilience and Human Evolution
—Canalization and Resistance

8. The Sociobiological Consilience
—The Evolution of Altruism
—Altruism's Legacy
—Reciprocity
—Human Sociality

9. Original Sin and Sociobiology
—Freedom
—Sin
—Love
—Punishment

10. The Problem of Evil
—A Developing Universe
—Locating Ourselves
—Locating Evil
—Solving the Problem

11. The Atonement
—Four Difficulties
—Jesus and Sin
—Suffering and Death
—Atonement Now

Conclusion
Glossary
References
Index