What does the Bible teach us about creation and evolution[1], and can the two be reconciled?

Many Christians attempt to reconcile the Christian faith with the creation story of the modern world, the theory of evolution. They claim that the two are compatible, and that God used the process of evolution to create the world. Yet what do the Scriptures have to say about this?

The Bible gives us an account of the creation of the world in six days.

The early chapters of Genesis are part of a continuous Biblical narrative that runs virtually uninterrupted from the creation of the world through to the end of the book of Acts. The line of this narrative can be followed through Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch (Gen – Deut), then through the parallel accounts in the Deuteronomic history (Joshua – 2 Kings) and the history of the Chronicles (1 Chr – Esther), then through the four gospels, and then finally through the book of Acts. The literary style throughout these books is simple, straight forward narrative. It is a very different literary style from something like the book of Revelation, which is presented as a vision rather than as an historical narrative, and has obvious symbolic elements. It is not poetry like the Psalms or certain parts of the prophets either, but prose. This simple, straight forward narrative suggests that it should be read in a straight forward way.

This narrative tells us of the creation of the world in six days. It is quite clear that six literal earth days are intended, because we are given the definition of a day at the beginning of the account when God created the first day (Gen 1:4-6). For every subsequent day we have the repetition of the phrase “and there was evening, and there was morning – the second [or third, etc.] day.” So in case there is any confusion, the text spells out for us exactly what is meant.

Arguments about the meaning of the Hebrew word “Yom” are a red herring. “Yom” in Hebrew means exactly what “day” means in English. It can be used literally for either a 12 hour period of time (if the night is excluded) or a 24 hour period of time (if the night is included), or else it can be used figuratively for a long period of time. Context determines what is meant. For example, in the sentence “In my father’s day it took five days to drive across the Nullarbor by day”, the word day is used in all three senses, but there is no confusion because of the context. In the context of Genesis 1, we are told specifically what is meant by the word day, and so there is no confusion.

Reference to 2 Pet 3:8 is also a red herring: “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”. Of course the Lord has a very different perspective on time than we do. That does not mean that he doesn’t speak our language when speaking about earthly events. When the Scriptures say that Christ was raised “on the third day” God is speaking our language, as he is in Genesis 1.

This fact that six literal days are intended gains further support from Exod 20:11, where we are told that “in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day”. This then becomes the basis for the weekly pattern of work and rest. This is a very odd foundation for the working week if God actually created the world in six long periods of time instead of six literal days. Furthermore, according to evolutionary timescales the overwhelmingly vast majority of the history of this planet occurred long before human beings got on the scene. If this is true, then Jesus’ statement that God created human beings “in the beginning” (Matt 19:4) is at least misleading, if not downright false.

Now many people try to read these six days as six long periods of time so that it fits better with the conclusions of evolutionary science. Yet the result is still a very poor fit, for the sequence is all wrong. For instance, in the Genesis account light is created on day 1, vegetation on day 3, and the sun, moon and stars on day 4. This should be no problem for the believer, for of course the Lord can give light to the earth in all sorts of ways if he so chooses, such as being the source of the light himself (c.f. Rev 22:5). He doesn’t need the sun. Yet this does not accord at all with the modern evolutionary story of life on earth, which assumes that the sun existed long before the earth and has always been the source of its light.

Furthermore, Genesis 1 teaches us that God made the creatures of the earth to reproduce “according to their kinds”, rather than to evolve from one kind into another. These created kinds are not very precisely defined. There is no reason to assume that they correspond exactly to the modern day term “species”. Yet since we are told that there are many different bird kinds, fish kinds, plant kinds, and land animal kinds, the kinds are obviously smaller than these larger groupings. Variation within the created kinds is never ruled out, but the sort of huge transformations that are included in the evolutionary story (reptiles into birds, fish into frogs and then into mammals, apes into humans, etc.) are excluded.

This means that simply taking recourse to the six days being long periods of time is still not enough to reconcile Genesis with evolutionary thinking. Instead, the whole account needs to be allegorized. Yet as Lutherans we have never said that an allegorical interpretation can be used to trump a literal one. If we are to say that it is legitimate to do this here, that has enormous consequences for how we read the rest of the biblical narrative. Why not also allegorise the resurrection, as Rudolph Bultmann and many others have done?

The New Testament treats the narrative of the early chapters of Genesis as factual.

The New Testament, however, never resorts to allegorising these passages. Instead, it expounds on them as if they are factual, historical accounts. So the New Testament teaches us that Adam and Eve were real people (Matt 19:4-6), and the fall took place as a result of their sin (Rom 5:12-21; 1 Cor 15:21-22, 45; 1 Tim 2:13-14). It teaches us that Cain and Abel were real people (Heb 11:4; 1 John 3:12). It teaches us that Noah was a real person, and that he and his family were saved in an ark from a flood which destroyed the rest of humankind (Matt 24:36-39; Luke 17:26-27; Heb 11:7; 1 Pet 3:20). The public teaching of the LCA also quite clearly upholds the historical facticity of the early chapters of Genesis (DSTO B3).

The fall precludes evolution as the mechanism of creation.

Even if we were to concede that the early chapters of Genesis are purely figurative, there is still one enormous problem involved in wedding evolution to the Bible. That is the simple assertion of the Bible that when God originally created the world it was completely good, and only subsequently fell through human sin. “Sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin” (Rom 5:12) is what Romans teaches us. This is in accordance with the Genesis narrative, where God looked at all that he had made and saw that it was “very good” (Gen 1:31). Yet humans then sinned, and suffering and death have plagued the world ever since.

Evolution on the other hand teaches that death and destruction and the struggle to survive were going on for millions of years before humans ever got on the scene. If God used the process of evolution to create the world, the implication is that there never was a pristine original creation. Instead violence, sickness, and death have always been a part of this world. This means that God is ultimately the author of all this suffering, rather than it being a result of human sin. That has lots of implications for how we view God and the suffering in this world.

Some proponents of theistic evolution claim that Rom 5:12 is only referring to human death, and not to death in the animal kingdom. Obviously human death could not have taken place before humans were around. Yet the Scriptures make it quite clear that the fall of human beings affected not just humans but all of creation, so that “the whole of creation is groaning” (Rom 8:22) and is waiting “to be liberated from its bondage to decay” (Rom 8:21). When Isaiah describes the renewal of creation he tells of a world without any violence, where “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.” This indicates that the God who cares about the birds of the air (Matt 6:26), who does not want to see cattle perish needlessly (Jonah 4:11), and who is concerned to save both mankind and beasts (Ps 36:6), does not consider all the violence we now witness in the natural world to be “very good.”

Some people argue that there had to be death before the fall, because humans and animals ate plants, and therefore the plants had to die. Yet it should be noted that Genesis itself makes a clear distinction between the animal kingdom which has “the breath of life” (Gen 1:30), and the plant kingdom which does not have the breath of life. So although plants are considered to be alive according to a modern scientific definition, they do not have “nephesh”, the Hebrew word for “breath” or “soul” or “life”, so according to Genesis they are not living in the full sense of the word.

Scripture teaches us that the created world gives us clear evidence of the hand of the Creator.

“But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind.” (Job 12:7-10)

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.” (Ps 19:1-4)

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Rom 1:18-20)

The verses above teach us that the created world itself points us clearly to the hand of the Creator. Many modern scientists claim that the created world points in the opposite direction, to blind chance and natural selection. Yet the Bible postulates no clash between faith and science, but rather tells us that the evidence of the created world points clearly to the Creator. In other words, either the Bible is deceiving us when it makes this claim, or else many modern scientists are deceiving us, either deliberately, or else through inadvertent misinterpretation of the data.

Why is this important?

Now many people would say, “Why does this matter? Surely all that matters is that we have faith in Jesus as our Saviour?”

In answer to that I would say that all Scriptural teaching is interrelated, and we can’t meddle with one bit without it affecting everything else. We can’t meddle with the doctrine of creation before it starts effecting how we see the Creator (e.g. as a God who is happy to see the creatures of this earth rip each other limb from limb). Furthermore we can’t meddle with the doctrine of creation and the fall without it affecting our understanding of salvation, for salvation presumes these things.

Yet the greatest problem with the teaching of evolution is the way it undermines the Scriptures, and thereby the whole Christian faith, since the Scriptures are the indispensable foundational for the faith (Matt 7:24-27). If we can simply get around the plain words of Scripture at this point, what is to stop us getting around them at other points? If the early chapters of Genesis are a myth, or a relic of an antiquated worldview, or need to be allegorised or explained away, what is to stop us doing this with the rest of Scripture? Or else, some people in our church have gone one step further than merely trying to allegorise Genesis, and have asserted that the doctrine of Scriptural inerrancy only applies to matters of salvation and not to matters of science or history, and that while it can be trusted to infallibly make us “wise unto salvation” (2 Tim 3:15), it cannot always be trusted when it speaks about other matters such as how the world was created. They then assert that we should not be concerned about these errors in Scripture because they don’t directly touch on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet if Scripture gets it wrong when speaking about history and science, then why should we trust it to get anything else right? As Jesus himself says, “If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” (John 3:12) Or elsewhere, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? (John 5:45-47)”

Some pastors I have spoken to about this issue take a pragmatic approach. They say that if we try to uphold a literal interpretation of Genesis, this will be too big a pill for people to swallow, and will harm our mission. Yet surely before we ask what will help our mission we need to ask what is true. If the Bible refutes evolution, theistic or otherwise, then we are compelled to teach this part of God’s word. We may rightly choose to put a far greater emphasis on other aspects of the Christian faith. Yet the one who is the Truth calls us to reject falsehood of all kinds, and I for one do not believe that we can ever advance the mission of God by cultivating error. If we start teaching people that it is OK to disbelieve what the Bible clearly teaches about evolution, then what seeds of later unbelief are we sowing?

Conclusion

The Bible clearly rejects the creation story of our time, the theory of evolution. This should not surprise us, as human beings have always invented falsehoods. Creation stories have come and gone throughout the history of the world, and the Scriptures have always denounced the beliefs of the surrounding unbelievers. Yet it is a call for us not to be deceived, but to instead refute this error, so that the Creator may be glorified.

Pastor Michael Lockwood

Melbourne. September 2006.

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[1] The word evolution can be used in many different senses. When I use it in this paper I am referring to the belief first proposed by Charles Darwin that all the diverse biological species on earth have arisen over a very long period of time from common ancestors through a slow and gradual process of slight variation and natural selection. I am referring to what is sometimes called “macroevolution”, as opposed to “microevolution”, which is far more modest variation within organisms.