What Hath Darwin to Do with Scripture? (eBook)

DARWIN’S BIBLICAL IMPULSE

I will make the case in the coming chapters that an alliance of factors features centrally in both the biblical and Darwinist accounts of creation, some of which persist in evolutionary science. Moreover, this distinct discourse about the pressures of selection cannot be drawn from any other creation accounts in the ancient world. For most of us, that makes this conversation inherently interesting. If nothing else, our fascination with this Darwin-Bible parallel could be justified merely from the fact that it complicates that well-worn conflict narrative: science against religion. It is unexpected.

What makes the parallels interesting is not a bizarre causal link between them—as if Darwin unconsciously picked up his three pressure points of natural selection from his Old Testament and adapted them to constructs du jour. Rather, my interests are in Genesis’s ability to critically engage and critique ideas such as Darwin’s because Genesis speaks about the very same universal pressures on humanity: how to survive in this disordered cosmos. What is it about scarcity, fit, and propagation that makes them inherently useful for explanation in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and, later, Darwin’s thinking?

APPLES AND ORANGES: APPROACHES TO DARWIN AND GENESIS

For a long time now, scholars have posed Genesis’s creation accounts side by side with origin stories gleaned from evolutionary science—nothing new there. To say it again, we cannot forget that both the biblical and evolutionary accounts technically fit into the genre of mythos—narratives intended to explain the origins of matter, flora, and fauna. The genre of mythos does not deal with the question of historicity, only the aims of the story being told.

In her book Evolution as a Religion, skeptic philosopher Mary Midgley does not mince words on this front: “The theory of evolution . . . is . . . also a powerful folk-tale about human origins.”7 It is not as if the biblical account is a story and the accounts of evolutionary science represent “the facts.”8 They both employ narrative to collate the data for their rhetorical goals. These narratives are good enough, but never exhaustive in their details. Hence, Midgley deems them folktales (or mythos).

Whether these folktales are true to “natural history,” in the ordinary sense of the term, is a matter for better minds. What matters most about this kind of mythos, whether biblical or scientific, are its rhetorical aims, even if set apart from the historical issues with which both folktales must inevitably deal. They both seek to explain a present reality by means of a dramatic story about a distinct and unfolding past. We will look at Darwin’s stories of selection in the coming chapter. As we have already seen, the creation narratives of science continue to indicate how we should then live today.

Given the above parallels between Darwin’s views and the rhetoric of Genesis, it might seem somewhat surprising that some Christian scholars are willing to set aside aspects of the biblical narratives as irrelevant at best or inconsequential at worst. However, the intellectual category in which they place the biblical texts informs why they think the biblical accounts are mythic apples to scientific oranges.

Genesis (and other biblical creation texts) tells of origins differently in tone and register from how we would today. The Bible’s creation accounts do not address scientific concerns in the way we conceptualize them. The ancient Hebrews were using narrative somewhat differently than we typically think of narratives today. Many of these scholarly examinations of biblical and evolutionary approaches rightly point out those differences.

According to these scholars, biblical accounts sate the concerns of ancient audiences with mythos, while evolutionary science gives the most accurate account of natural history.9 Many of these treatments of creation, especially by biblical scholars, lack attention to the intellectual world of Israel’s Scripture.10

David Livingstone sums up one intellectual hurdle for scholars in the late nineteenth century that accounts for a version of this apples-to- oranges conflict:

It is incorrect to say that the origin stories in the evolutionary sciences are somehow equivalent to the biblical accounts in their aims to describe what actually happened. Scripture gives a particular story that leads to a particular people in history. Livingstone notes those who were attracted early on to Darwin’s thought were also offended by the specificity of the man’s “creation, probation, and fall” found in Genesis.

A universal and scientific account of humanity cannot have named people within it. Scientific creation accounts name the circumstances of creation, not the specific people or their lineages. Many increasingly found this one specific Hebraic story line untenable and unnecessarily binding—a specificity not required by a more comprehensive evolutionary account of how creatures came to exist in general.12

Another theological attempt reconciled Eden to the emerging evolutionism at the end of the nineteenth century by converting “Adam the specific person” into “Adam the character in a story” as a representative type standing in for all humankind.13 This move attempts the same: to extricate the actual origins story of humanity from the specific history of a man and woman as the direct genealogical ancestors of humanity. Again, the problem of the specificity of the Genesis narrative interferes. Or as N. T. Wright put it recently in terms of the new naturalism: “We had ‘discovered’ that a sharp division existed between the hard facts of this world, which does its own thing without divine intervention, and the vague fantasies of ‘religion,’ which were unprovable, unreliable, intolerant, and unhealthy.”14 An Eden that could be placed on a map with two named progenitors made Genesis a rather intolerable account for biblical scholars attempting to reconcile Genesis to evolutionary thinking.

AN APPLES-TO-APPLES APPROACH