GENESIS, CREATION, AND LIFE

On Wednesday Christine and I visited a solicitor to have our will updated. The solicitor commented on how many people never bother to write a will. Many people seem to think they’re immortal; they fail to reckon with the brevity of life and the inevitability of death. His comments sent a host of thoughts running through my mind: the judgment on Adam and Eve, “in the day you eat of it you shall surely die”, the litany of Genesis 5, “and he died”, “and he died”, “and he died”; the words of Psalm 90, “all our days pass away under your wrath, our years come to an end like a sigh”, and the words of the funeral liturgy, “in the midst of life we are in death”.

How to understand the basic issues of life and death – these are the concerns of Lutherans for Life. This evening I want to talk to you about Creation and Life, about our Creator God as the source, giver and the preserver of all life, and the Lord of life and death.

A few weeks ago scientists launched a rocket that will probe the surface of Mars for any signs of life. They know that the surface of Mars is sterile, but they’re hoping to find evidence of life, or more immediately, of water, a necessity of life, beneath its surface. These expensive projects will no doubt bring some scientific benefits, but I can’t help being sceptical about their chances of finding evidence of life on Mars or any other planet. As Christians, we believe that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. As amazing as this may seem, in view of the vastness of our universe, this would seem to indicate that the earth has a special place in the scheme of things. But our modern scientific thinking finds that hard to accept. Surely if evolution has produced life here, there must be life and even perhaps more advanced forms of life on other planets. Of course we know that there is life beyond our planet - the Scriptures tell us about the heavenly hosts that God has also created - but this is not what the scientists have in mind.

Let me give another example of the scientific thinking that constantly confronts us: For the last few weeks we’ve been bombarded with advertisements for a BBC programme called “Walking with Cavemen”. I haven’t seen the programme, but judging from the ads, it purports to be a scientific study of our first ancestors. On the screen they appear as large, hairy, grotesque creatures, some with a huge tooth or fang at the corners of their mouths – a tooth that reminds me of the sabre-toothed tigers that preceded our present-day tigers. Whatever evidence there may be for sabre-toothed tigers, there’s absolutely no evidence that any human ancestor with fangs like that is the source of our life as humans. This is not science; it’s creative fiction. Yet we’re constantly being brainwashed with such evolutionary propaganda.

I’m saying all this as one who was a theistic evolutionist from university days through my time at seminary and my first six or seven years in the ministry. By “theistic evolutionist” we mean someone who accepts most of the tenets of evolutionary thinking, but thinks God is guiding the whole process. Like thousands of Lutherans and other Christians, I comforted myself with the idea that after all the six days of Genesis 1 could mean 6000 years, six million years or six billion years or however many you needed.

Theistic evolution simply cannot be reconciled with the account in Genesis 1-3. According to Genesis, everything God created was very good, including the first humans. And there was no struggle for survival and no death until the first humans sinned. Only then, as a consequence of Adam’s sin, was the creation subjected to decay and death. The order is: everything (including humans) created good, then sin, then death. But evolutionary thinking, including theistic evolution, reverses all that. Evolutionists think there was primitive life, from which, through aeons of struggle and death, the first humans finally emerged and kept evolving to become better and better. The order is: primitive life, struggle and death, then the emergence of higher and higher, more complex and varied life forms – this despite the evidence before our eyes of a creation that is groaning (Romans 8) and under threat. Rather than everything becoming more differentiated, the enormous variety of the original world is breaking down, while we desperately fight to preserve many of the remaining species and varieties of wheat or potatoes or birds or animals (a visit to the zoo should blow the mind of evolutionists).

If you choose to espouse the position of theistic evolutionist, you have to accept that God, the author of life, has chosen to use death, suffering and decay to create life. Death then is not a curse but something that preceded the fall of man into sin, and death and violence are God’s preferred means for his creative work.

There’s no way to marry these two opposing world-views of Scripture and evolutionary theory. The world’s leading evolutionists, people like Richard Dawkins of Oxford University and Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard (known for his theory of “punctuated equilibrium”) are frankly anti-Christian naturalists. They rule out any notion of design or purpose in the created world. As far as they’re concerned, you simply can’t marry Christianity to their world-view; in fact, they laugh at Christian attempts to do so (see Philip Johnson, Darwin on Trial).

As Christians our attitude to life will be very different because we believe the origin of life to be very different.

The Bible traces our life to the life-giving Father, who created all things through the Word of life, his only Son, in the power of the Spirit, “the Lord and Giver of life”. Just as the Father did all things very well when he first created the world (Genesis 1:31), so the Son did all things well when he recreated and restored God’s broken creatures in his miracles of healing (Mark 7:37). For he is the Word of Life who was with the Father from the beginning. Just as the Father spoke his word, “Let there be light”, and immediately “there was light” (Genesis 1:3), so Jesus speaks his word and immediately things happen. A royal official comes to him, full of anxiety for his sick son, and Jesus tells him, “Go your way, your son is alive”. The man goes his way, and on the way he meets his servants who are bringing him the good news that his son has recovered. The official asks the servants at what hour the lad had come through the crisis, and they tell him: “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him”. And the official knew that that was the hour when Jesus told him, “Your son is alive” (John 4:46-54). The Word of God speaks, and it happens. If we have ears to hear, we’ll hear a strong echo of the Genesis creation story behind this miracle.

And just as the Father and the Son give life, so too the Spirit is life-giving (John 6:63), “the Lord and Giver of life” as we confess in the Nicene Creed.

The Old Testament books most quoted and most alluded to in the New Testament are Genesis, Isaiah, and Psalms. Of these books, the book of Genesis has suffered enormously at the hands of our modern criticism and scepticism. You only have to read the letters to the Editor of The Australian newspaper, for example, to see how many people dismiss the early chapters of Genesis as a lot of myths. So our faith in and respect for the Triune God as Creator and author of life has been badly shaken. This has had a serious impact on our lives on many levels. Let me give a few examples.

Some time ago Christine and I were talking to a medical doctor who graduated from Monash University about 20 years ago. At graduation time the dean of the medical school made it clear to the students that they would not be taking the Hippocratic Oath. Apparently this is now the case Australia-wide: doctors no longer take the Hippocratic Oath. You’ll recall that this oath is a pledge, formulated by a pagan Greek about 400 years BC, that the doctor will do all he can to preserve his or her patient’s life and health, and will never do anything to take a patient’s life. Our doctor friend told us there were two reasons why the oath was no longer required in Australia: firstly pressure from modern evolutionary thinking, which sees humans as just a collection of atoms randomly assembled and with no special worth that merits its preservation. The second reason is pressure from the feminist lobby, which objects to the clause in the oath which promises not to give a woman the means to bring about an abortion.

So evolutionary thinking has brought about a situation where a patient’s life no longer stands under the sacred protection of the doctor’s Hippocratic Oath. Let me list some more of the poisonous fruits that have grown from the evolutionary tree planted by Charles Darwin and others:

1. In PNG in the 1920s and 1930s the newspapers published letters and articles by white men running down the local Papuans and New Guineans as if they were savages who’d only just come down from the trees (see the journal New Guinea). One explorer claimed to have seen a tribe of people with tails and this was reported in all seriousness in the press. Whites used Darwinist evolutionary ideas to justify their ill-treatment and disregard of the local people. Many similar examples could be given from the history of white-aboriginal relations in Australia and the treatment of other indigenous people around the world who have been regarded as lower on the evolutionary tree. (see John Harris, One Blood, 27-36)

2. Hitler’s racial theories were based on Darwinist ideas of eugenics, including the survival of the fittest, the supremacy of the master race, and the need to liquidate Jews, Gypsies, and people with various handicaps as being ‘unfit’ and therefore rightly to be eliminated to make way for the fittest.

3. In our own time a self-centred, utilitarian ethic prevails. Abortion is legal and common. Euthanasia for the elderly and disabled is widely promoted and in fact quietly practised. Thousands of embryos are destroyed in IVF programs. Embryos are being experimented on and by-products from fetuses harvested for profit. Why not if we are no more than a chance collection of atoms destined to make way for higher life forms. Why not help the process along?

4. In the absence of a God-given order, the relationship between men and women, gender identity and the family are under threat.

These are issues that are going to trouble people in your congregations perhaps more than any other. As pastors we need to be clear ourselves and able to help our people pastorally to deal with these issues.

Evolutionary philosophy is leading to a world where human life is assigned less and less value (in its extreme forms, it leads evolutionists to accuse Christians of “specieism” – the idea that the human species is superior to animals species – Peter Singer). We face a choice: either we believe that human life came into being by chance, with no designer, no higher purpose and no accountability to any higher being, or we accept the creation narrative that we are God’s creatures, all of us “fearfully and wonderfully made” by the triune God and in his image.

A consistent Christian view will continue to place a high value on all human life as made and sustained by a Creator who knows every hair of our heads and cares even about the sparrows. He has loved his creatures so much that he has sacrificed his beloved son for them, especially the poor, weak, diseased, vulnerable, unwanted and dying. His spirit comforts us, groans for us and prays continually for us, creating life anew in us so that we can be as he intended us to be – precious sons and daughters, born in his image, heirs of the kingdom of God.

Greg Lockwood 3/7/03