Last week I described three incompatible notions of the ID/evolution debate that various people have. If you think that evolution means “evolutionary development,” then you think that ID is challenging the “old earth” hypothesis. This, of course, is usually because this type of ID-supporter takes Genesis literally. Some people, like the leaders of ID, do not wish to challenge evolutionary development, but merely Darwin’s version of the evolutionary story. And finally, sometimes the ID movement is about opposing the atheistic conclusions of evolution.
So which, if any, of these three versions of evolution threaten mono-theism? Or I could ask more straightforwardly: do we have to believe in any version of Intelligent Design, merely because we are Christians? Over the next few weeks, I want to argue that Christians, even the most staunch, Bible-beating ones, should not feel threatened by the first two versions of evolution, but only the third. As I mentioned, Christian hostility to the notion of “evolutionary development” is caused by the belief that the first few chapters of Genesis are literal.
This doctrine of taking the entire Bible “literally” is the most shameful of all conservative Christian doctrines, if for no other reason than that there is no clear doctrine of ‘literal.’ If you hold this doctrine up to a microscope, you actually find the conservatives saying this: “We take the whole Bible literally, except for when we don’t.” Here are some examples of things that the conservatives (hopefully) don’t believe are literal: in John 3:3, Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born again. Nicodemus, being an overly-conservative Rabbi, says “Oh, that’s silly. You can’t crawl back into your mother’s womb.” Jesus must have been laughing (or crying) when he informed Nicodemus that this was a spiritual truth, not a literal truth. And hopefully when Paul discusses becoming a “new man,” he doesn’t mean that literally he will shed his skin and crawl into some different skin.
And my favorite of all, after people had decided to build the Tower of Babel: “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower…And the Lord said…”Come, let us go down there and confuse their language…” (Gen 11:5-7). A literal reading of this passage would be very strange. God was literally sitting in the sky, and literally did not have a good view of things on earth with his literal eyes from where he was literally sitting and when God literally saw the Tower he was literally surprised at this development and literally formulated a strategy to ruin the Tower. And the more Bible you read, it starts to become apparent that God rarely speaks literally when communicating anything of importance to us.
So it comes down to this. It appears that much of the Bible is metaphorical (despite what the conservatives may or may not think), and it appears that much of the Bible is literal. Now the question is about the first three chapters of Genesis. Does it fall in the literal category, or in the metaphorical category? Next week I want to introduce some textual evidence that the Creation story was indeed intended as a metaphor all along.
