Keith
______________________________________________________________________________
>Below is a longish message from Robert Schneider at Berea College in
>Kentucky discussing creation and evolution in the context of college's
>large fundamentalist and conservative Christian constituency. This message
>was originally posted on his campus electronic bulletin board in response
>to some recent debates on campus. Bob's posting is a thorough overview of
>these issues from a Christian theological perspective. Thank you for
>making it available to a larger audience.
>
>-- Billy Grassie
>*************************************************
>
>From: "Robert Schneider" <robert_f.schneider@berea.edu>
>Subject: Creation*and* Evolution
>
>Berea College, where I teach a senior seminar entitled "Science and Faith,"
>is an independent liberal arts college, committed to "the cause of Christ"
>but non- sectarian and non-creedal. Probably 75% of the student body, who
>come from the mountain counties of Appalachian America, are conservative or
>fundamentalist Christians from Baptist, Pentecostal and Holiness traditions.
>
> Recently, a small but active campus Christian group has been vigorously
>promoting the creationist ideology of the Creation Research Institute and
>Answers in Genesis, the Ken Ham organization located now 100 miles north of
>us in Northern Kentucky. Dr. Gary Parker was the featured speaker at a
>creationism seminar held on campus last fall term. This event has provided
>a "teachable moment" for many of us on the faculty, and some of this
>teaching has taken place on the campus electonic mail system on two public
>bulletin boards. One was established as a forum for exploring the
>relationship between faith and learning, as part of the College's
>re-examination of its "Christian commitment."
>
> I suspect that all of us who teach undergraduates wrestle with how to
>get across to the ill-informed the real meaning of creation theologically
>and biblically, and how it can be seen as compatible with the modern
>scientific world view. I offer the statement below as one teacher's attempt
>to do this to a general students readership; it was originally posted on
>our Faith and Learning bb. I would be grateful for comments and suggestions.
>
>
> THE TRUTH ABOUT CREATION AND EVOLUTION
>
> A number of Christian believers are sincere in their view that the
>acceptance of evolution is incompatible with belief in a creating God.
>Since this topic is one that is intimately involved in the question of the
>relationship between faith and learning, and has come up on this bulletin
>board, I would like to address it and help to inform the discussion on this
>topic. What many Christians seem not to know, and what I would like to help
>them to learn, is that there is a rich and fruitful development in
>contemporary theology, Christian and Jewish, that is seeking to understand
>again the meaning of creation as it is revealed in the Bible in the light
>of the overwhelming evidence for, and acceptance by most believers of, the
>modern scientific world view: that is, of a Universe characterized by
>cosmic evolution and the evolution of life on this planet (and perhaps on
>innumerable other planets throughout this vast Universe). This theological
>inquiry begins with the unalterable faith in God as the Creator and
>Sustainer of the Universe, but understands God's creating activity as
>continually taking place in an evolving universe that began in the past
>billions of years ago and is moving toward an unknown future.
>
> First, a clarification. Part of the misunderstanding that exists in some
>Christian circles is a confusion about what "evolution" is. We must
>distinguish between the scientific evolutionary paradigm that is explained
>by various theories of how evolution takes place (e.g., neo-Darwinism); AND
>a naturalistic philosophy that claims that the Cosmos has always existed
>and evolution is a wholly natural process, and that therefore there is no
>God or Creator. Much of the criticism and rejection of "evolution" in some
>Christian circles is in fact a rejection of this philosophy confused with
>scientific evolution. But the SCIENTIFIC theories of evolution in no way
>prove or deny the possibility that this universe was created, and created
>by God. The truth of the matter is that science is not in the business of
>answering these philosophical/theological questions; it only seeks to
>understand and explain the universe as it now exists and how it got to be
>the way it is now. There is nothing in the scientific theories of evolution
>that deny creation. In fact, since the emergence of an evolutionary
>understanding of the Universe, a very large segment of the Christian
>community and its theologians have sought to understand Creation according
>to an evolutionary model. It is not "creation vs. evolution," these
>theologians say, "but creation *and* evolution."
>
> It is obvious that this *scientific* concept of evolution has something
>to say to theology, and theologians for the past 150 years have been
>listening. And this response to scientific theories and models is nothing
>new in Christian thought. At every point in the history of Christian
>thought, theologians have responded to the new scientific views of their
>times by rethinking their understanding of the creation passages in the
>Bible. The early Church Fathers interpreted biblical creation in the light
>of Plato's cosmology. St. Thomas Aquinas and his contemporaries did this
>again in the 13th century, when Aristotelian science made its appearance in
>the West; other theologians did the same when the new cosmology of Isaac
>Newton became established in the 18th century. In these and other instances
>Christian thought has been enriched by theological reflection on scientific
>and cosmological models of the Creation. In our time, the contributions of
>Darwin, Einstein, Hubble, Plank, the creators of chaos andcomplexity
>theories, and the ecologists, that is, the creators of the new scientific
>consensus of the nature and history and structure of the universe--have
>been challenging and inspiring theologians to think anew the relationship
>of God to God's Universe, to try to understand how God interacts with
>Creation.
>
> Developments in the theology of creation have taken two tacks. One is to
>think anew about what Creation in the Bible is really about. Contemporary
>theologians from a variety of Chrstian traditions understand Creation in
>the Bible to be a THEOLOGICAL concept, not a scientific concept. Their
>understanding is that the sacred Biblical writers are proclaiming that the
>world we live in is a *created* world, created out of nothing by the God
>who reveals himself as its Creator, who takes delight in his creation, who
>brings out of nothing the universe into being through the Word, and
>sustains it by the power of the Spirit, gives it order and structure, and
>fills it with plenitude. These messages are found throughout the Old
>Testament in the Psalms, the prophets, the wisdom literature, and also in
>several key New Testament passages that proclaim Christ as the creator of
>the Cosmos. None of these passages are statements of science, for,
>Christian theologians have long asserted, the Bible does not teach science.
>Rather they are statements of theology. As theology they are true and
>valid, whatever scientific models and theories about the nature of the
>Unverse happen to be current. Scientific models do not cancel out
>theological truth; rather, they invite theological reflection on the way
>these timeless truths might be expressed for our time.
>
> This thinking anew has led to a deeper understanding of the Creation
>statement in the first chapter of Genesis. Against the claim that Genesis 1
>is to be read and interpreted as a straightforward scientific account of
>how God created, modern theologians and biblical scholars, building upon
>thorough and careful studies of the literal and the spiritual senses of the
>text in the light of its own history and cosmology, recognize that the real
>meaning of Creation in Genesis is theological. The Creation account in
>Genesis chapter one exhibits an interesting pattern, as some biblical
>scholars have described. Genesis 1 starts with darkness and chaos, with a
>cosmos that is without form ("tohu" in Hebrew) and empty ("bohu" in
>Hebrew). What the account describes, in liturgical and formulaic language,
>is how tohu is given form and bohu is filled. So, the first three days are
>characterized by processes of *separation*: (1) light from the darkness;
>(2) the waters of the Deep divided to create waters above (the firmament)
>and waters below; and (3) earth (land) is separated out from water (seas).
>Then in the next three days, what has been given form is *filled*: (4)
>lights are called forth into the firmament and the heavens; (5) creatures
>into sea and sky; (6) land creatures, including humans, onto the earth. At
>every stage God declares Creation to be "good." So, the theological message
>is clear: God's creation is orderly, natural, structured, and inherently
>good, and that which God takes delight in. And human beings share in the
>divine image and divine task of taking care of the earthly part of the cosmos.
>
> When Genesis 1 is looked at as a literary schema rather than a
>scientific description, then one gets a deeper appreciation, I believe, of
>its theological message. And let me add that this literary approach to
>understanding the Creation text is not an invention of modern Bible
>scholars and theologians. The early Church Fathers who wrote on Genesis
>also did not take this as a scientific description. Two of the greatest
>minds of the early Church, Basil of Caeserea and Augustine of Hippo (4th
>and 5th centuries), in their commentaries on Genesis, understood that the
>pattern of the "six days" was to be taken as a topical pattern for setting
>forth of the elements of creation, not of literal days of creation. In fact
>both held that God created everything in an instant, time included, and
>that everything that has gone on since has been an unfolding of the
>creation (a theological concept not incompatible with "big bang" theory and
>evolution).
>
> Now, biblical scholars have long recognized that there is a cosmology in
>Genesis, and it is the same cosmology as the Mesopotamian neighbors of the
>ancient Israelites. When this cosmology is seen for what it is, when the
>literal sense of the Bible is recognized in its words about the cosmos,
>this ancient cosmology becomes clear. This Semitic model of the universe is
>of a circular but flat earth anchored on the Deep, so that it cannot be
>moved, and covered by a transparent dome called the firmament, which
>separates the waters of the Deep from the waters above the firmament which
>the ancients believed was the source of rain, snow, hail, etc. And the
>moveable lights like the sun and moon were between the firmament and the
>earth and its sea. Now this was a pretty good model of the Universe for its
>time. It made a lot of sense, and it is no wonder the ancient Israelites
>shared it with their semitic neighbors like the Mesopotamians. But there is
>a crucial difference between the Hebrew and the other Mesopotamian
>cosmologies, and the difference is THEOLOGICAL. The others believed that
>there were many gods who inhabited the cosmos and were expressions of its
>parts and forces, and that this cosmos was in constant conflict and
>turmoil; and that human beings were created to be slaves of the gods. How
>different is the Hebrew theology of creation! Only one God, creation
>natural not divine, peaceful, and orderly (ecological), and humankind made
>in God's image!
>
> Genesis 1 teaches believers a valuable lesson: you can take whatever is
>the cosmology of your day and interpret it theologically. That is what the
>sacred writers of Genesis did, and they have given every age of Christian
>thinkers since their time a model for doing the very same thing. And this
>is the second tack. When we take the current scientific model of the
>universe, the evolving universe, and engage in theological reflection on
>it, we are doing just what the Bible writers did with the cosmological
>model of their own day. And there is a conflict in our day too.It is
>between those who take the current scientific world-picture and base a
>philosophy or ideology on it that says that there is no God, no creator,
>and that the universe has no purpose and is pointless. But we who believe
>that God is the creator can take the same scientific model and understand
>it in a quite different light: we can integrate it with our own theological
>reflections about creation. We can still proclaim, as many Christian
>thinkers who are both scientists or scientifically knowledgeable on the one
>hand, and theologians or theologically literate on the other, are
>proclaiming: that this universe is created by a loving and gracious God and
>that it is purposeful, meaningful, moral, and good.
>
> Here are just a few of those theologians: you will find books and
>articles by most of them in the Hutchins Library if you want to look
>further into their ideas:
>John Polkinghorne (Anglican priest and mathematical physicist);
>
>Arthur Peacocke (Anglican priest and biologist; founder of the Society of
>Ordained Scientists);
>
>Nancy Murphey (Church of the Bretheran minister and theologian);
>
>Robert Russell (United Church of Christ minister and physicist; founder and
> director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences);
>
>Langdon Gilkey (Theologian and Bible scholar);
>
>Lloyd Bailey (Bible scholar and professor of Hebrew);
>
>Jurgen Moltmann (Evangelical theologian);
>
>Karl Rahner (Roman Catholic priest and theologian);
>
>Ernan McMullen (Roman Catholic priest, philosopher and physicist);
>
>John Cobb (Presbyterian theologian working in process theology);
>
>Willem Drees (Reformed Church of Holland, physicist);
>
>Ted Peters (Lutheran theologian in the field of bioethics);
>
>Philip Hefner (Lutheran minister and theologian; director of the Chicago
>Center
> for Religion and Science);
>
>Sally McFague (Feminist theologian at Vanderbilt Divinity School).
>
>I've given these names to help readers realize how intimately involved
>these people (most of them ordained ministers) are in the life of the
>Church, in learning, and in constructing for Christian people a theology of
>creation for our new scientific age.
>
> Well, if evolution and an evolutionary cosmos doesn't rule out God as you
>say, Schneider, then how does God interact with God's universe? A good
>question. A question that these and other theologians was been reflecting
>upon in recent years. Let me mention a few lines of thought these
>theologians are following, with the understanding that these lines of
>inquiry are incomplete--new theological expressions of God's interaction
>with the world do not pop up overnight complete--but are being seen as
>fruitful. Here's a few:
>
> GOD AS PERSUASIVE LOVER: if God is love, as we believe, and the nature
>of love is to call forth from the beloved the fullness of the beloved's
>being, then God can be understood to relate to the Universe God created as
>a lover to his beloved. Lovers do not coerce, rather they persuade. God, in
>this theological model, allows the Universe to freely come into being,
>respecting the independence God has given all of Creation. All of creation
>has "free will" so to speak. Such a view of God and the cosmos makes
>theological sense of an evolutionary world-view. God says, "Let there be"
>but does not dictate the forms that will come into existence, instead God
>allows the potential that chance and the inherent organizational properties
>of matter (that God built into matter) to be realized in the infinite
>variety of ways both inanimate and animate matter have evolved in the
>cosmos. The old theological model of a divine determinism gives away to a
>still biblically valid model of the God who allows indeterminism as the
>natural process of coming into being.
>
> THE "KENOTIC" GOD: In Philippians 2:5-11, Christ is described as
>"emptying himself of divinity"--the Greek word is kenosis. This biblical
>metaphor is applied to God's relationship to the world (for, in Christian
>theology, Christ is the Word through whom God creates). For the universe to
>be distinct from its Creator, it must have its own internal
>"self-coherence" or autonomy. God "voluntarily" withdraws or witholds
>divine power to let the universe be and become itself. Thus, Creation is an
>expression not of divine might but of divine humility--the humility that
>every lover shows toward the beloved. Creation co- operates with God, so to
>speak, in the creative process. Divine Love invites the world into being
>and continually challenges it to higher levels of complexity. The universe
>is not God's robot but the object of God's intimate love and joy as it
>comes more and more into being in its evolution. The creation is in a co-
>creating partnership with its Creator.
>
> GOD AND THE UNIVERSE AS PROCESS: related to the first and second
>models, in process theology, God and the universe develop together, so to
>speak. God as transcendent stand outside of the universe God creates, but
>God as Immanent is intimately involved as Lover calling the universe into
>being and knowing the Universe as it becomes known. (This complementary
>model of God as both transcendent and immanent has ancient roots in
>Christian theology.)
>
> None of these models *explain* just how God interacts with the cosmos,
>but there is work in that area of theology also. Some theologians are
>suggesting that God interacts directly in the processes of nature on the
>quantum level. But whatever theological models emerge of God's relationship
>to and interaction with the Universe, they will be no different in one
>respect from ancient models such as God as Craftsman, or Monarch, or Molder
>of Clay; that is, they like the ancient models will be metaphorical.
>Because, metaphor is the only language we can use to speak of God. God in
>the final analysis is ineffable, beyond the power of words to capture
>God's nature and activities. God remains eternally shrouded in mystery,
>where, when all is said and done, we must encounter God. And that is
>biblical, too.
>
> This seems like a good place to end this set of reflections on God and
>Creation and the modern evolutionary world-picture. Your comments and
>questions are welcome. I shall be happy to pursue further any of the topics
>I've raised in this note with anyone, here on Faith and Learning, or
>privately.
>
>Robert Schneider
>Classics and General Studies
>Berea College
>Berea, KY 40404
><robert_schneider@berea.edu>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Keith B. Miller
Department of Geology
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506
kbmill@ksu.ksu.edu
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/