February, 2009:

This is a guest post by Edgar de Blieck, who blogs at Sincere Ignorance and Conscientious Stupidity

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   If you look at the bible passages which deal with creation (not just Genesis, by the way) then it is clear that the bible says that God made and directed the making of everything. In other words, from nothing, God’s will had to do with the *becoming* of something, in fact, everything.

In the bible’s book of Job there is an elaborate bit of rather dramatic discourse in which the author depicts God asking Job a bunch of picturesque questions, along the lines of
“Well, smarty pants, answer me this!” (Job was complaining, because he didn’t like the way things were going for him, even though he had been morally upright.)

If you have a look at the things God is depicted as saying in reply, you get a clear view of what the author of the text believed that God had done. Firstly, he imagines God as a sort of cosmic builder:

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.

Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?

On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone-

while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?”

Then he uses another literary device – that of anthropomorphism – to paint a picture of the way that God organised things so that the earth would have seas and water, earth and fertile land, night and day, and moral organisation. Here we see God as midwife, tailor, ruler, letter writer, and voyager:

“Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,

when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,

when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,

when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?

“Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,

that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it?

The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment.

The wicked are denied their light,
and their upraised arm is broken.

“Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?

Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the shadow of death?

Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.”

The picture in the bible is of a God who is intimately connected – and personally involved with creation, to the extent that moral identification with God’s character is something which the creation has imprinted within it.

In other words, what the bible doesn’t allow, in terms of Darwin’s theory, is a view of evolution as a mechanism beyond ultimate control. “Does the bible allow for any sort of evolution,” you ask.  ”No” is the answer – if you believe that evolution means that that God had nothing to do with making the earth, or that God could never be sovereign over so random-seeming a scheme, or that the mechanism precludes the possibility of absolutes of right and wrong.

Now, what should really melt your melon here is not the idea that God creates things. Rather it should probably be the thought that a good God, by literal application of that principle, just became responsible for making the parasite that eats the baby’s eye. In other words, God causes calamities – he “creates” them. But that’s also what the bible says.

The bible has not a lot to say about the science of it all. Why would it?

Modern science answers the questions that boil down to: “How does this happen?”

The theologians were more writing answers to the other question: “Why does this happen?”

“Why” and “How” both have to do with causes, but the “why questions” have something to do with transcendent causes, whereas the scientific “how questions” are within the province of natural – i.e. created causes: the realm of, for want of a better word, the physical.

Nobody in the ancient near east was reading the bible’s text to discover the scientific truth about how the world came to be. Similarly, nobody in the ancient near east was writing a narrative of HOW the world came to be, in the strictly physical sense.

They were reading it to discover why we are here, and what we should do about it. Let’s face it, before you even know the secrets of many metals, the type of science you are able to pursue is pretty basic. But the human soul has an inbuilt propensity to ask the why questions. Every person is created in God’s image – in the sense that we are more than bodies, we are souls and bodies, life and breath.

In the Genesis narrative, they would have been startled to discover not some limited dualistic theology, but an unlimited all-powerful God who doesn’t wipe out everyone and start again from scratch.

The essential point the bible makes is that God is the one who created us and everything else, for his own reasons.

The bible doesn’t really go into the mechanisms he used, because God didn’t inspire the writers to understand the mechanisms.

Besides, I bet most of us are way too dumb to think God’s thoughts after him like that. (A few years of struggling through high school chemistry and physics certainly makes me believe that to be true of myself…) On the other hand, it’s rather good to discover that God does do things for a beneficent reason, when the world and we are in such a mess.

Edgar is a husband and father, and a youthworker, working for a mainstream evangelical church in Scotland. He knows just enough about God to make him dangerous. He blogs the bible a wee bit at a time over at http://caughtnottaught.blogspot.com/