Answering Some Good Questions

My brother-in-law has recently asked some interesting questions on his blog (my title above links to his blog) and is interested in answers. This flows out of a continued interest of his in science, as well as a paper he is currently working on regarding the influence of Charles Darwin upon church history. I will try to give my own answers to those questions here.



1. Must one choose between young-earth creationism and and atheistic interpretation of evolution by natural selection? Is there a middle ground?



Of course, one can choose a via media on this issue - many do so. The problem is that this particular issue has two poles that are quite opposed to one another and middle positions are not merely compromises that try to justify science and religion, specifically the Bible's creation account in Genesis. In the process of coming to some compromise, it is necessary to rule out the validity of the Genesis account, or at least some parts of it. This is often done in a somewhat sneaky way by claiming that the account is not meant to be factual but metaphorical. The problem is that the Bible never even hints at an understanding of those first chapters of Genesis as metaphor - everything points to them as concrete facts.

Additionally, those who first began to take compromise positions on this issue, philosophes during the Enlightenment, first established themselves as Deists and then moved into becoming atheists. In other words, the middle positions tend toward the atheistic position, historically. You can see this with various people - Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, etc.

An especially good example is Rene Descartes ("I think, therefore I am"). He attempted to create a way of knowing that was based upon doubt - acknowledge only that which could be proven beyond doubt. In so doing, he attempted to remain a Christian, even claiming to have created a new argument for the existence of God. However, his critics could see that his middle position, which was hardly orthodox by the way, tended toward atheism, and his followes, Cartesian philosophers like Spinoza, moved within one generation to all-out atheism.



2. Is you view consistent with as-yet-undiscovered scientific facts? In other words, is your argument based on a current unknown remaining unknown?



This is often an accusation leveled at theists who hold to a non-evolutionary position - that they believe in a "god of the gaps" theory, meant to explain anything we don't currently understand as being justification for God's existence. Of course, this is a bad argument, since, as history has shown, knowledge does increase and, if this is the reason you believe in God, belief in God diminishes as knowledge increases. Those who hold to this sort of argument for the existence of God are put into the strange position of desiring that mankind discover nothing further about the world in which we live - a quite terrible position.

To me, being a young-earth creationist is about being a Biblical in-errantist. Therefore, I would argue that there has never been even one true scientific fact that discounts what the Bible claims for itself, including the Genesis creation account, and I am not afraid that any new discovery will discount a Biblical claim.

In fact, science, especially archaeology and language studies, have increased the certitude of the Bible, not lessened it. Only one hundred years ago, many Old Testament place names and characters, such as the Babylonian king Belshazzar in the book of Daniel, were thought to be fictional because no such places or people were then known to history - and these were used by scholars to claim that the Bible was full of error. However, today, that king has been identified to have been acting as king of Babylon during its last days in place as co-regent with father, Nabonidus, who had run off to an oasis to worship the sun god full-time while his kingdom was falling apart. Another example would be scholars who claimed for centuries that Moses could not have authored the Torah because he must have been an illiterate. We now know that literacy was much more common in Moses' day than was once thought and that he most likely was quite well-learned for any ancient person. Both of these old arguments against the veracity of the Bible are sometimes still recycled in universities, but they have been thoroughly discounted by scientific learning. I, therefore, am confident that science will do nothing more than uphold the Bible.



3. Supposing that the modern understanding of evolution is true, life, even sentient life, may have developed some other place in the universe. How does your theology handle this possibility?



Supposing that evolution is true and that there is nothing special about the earth, then yes, sentient life is possible somewhere else in the universe - extremely unlikely, but possible.

I'm not sure how to answer this question. I'm inclined to argue that it is not relevant, but that would not be in the spirit of this exchange.

Christian theology has little or nothing to say about other forms of life, especially if no other sentient life exists elsewhere. For, all of creation, we are told, was subjected to futility because of the fall of Adam and Eve. This surely includes non-sentient life here on earth and would include such life forms found elsewhere. In that sense, I suppose, non-sentient life, no matter where it is found, is included in Christian theology as God is at work redeeming even the universe for Himself.

Sentient life is much harder, and would be a difficult thing to reconcile, I believe, with the Biblical account. Christian theology concerns God's response to man's sin through the saving work of Jesus Christ. Several fundamental questions would be raised by another sentient species: have they fallen? If so, has God taken steps to redeem them? Is there a Christ for them or some other way? More basically, are they morally free?

The only problem with such questioning is that it cannot lead anywhere.


I will post my answers to the other three questions in my next post.