This won't be an ordinary book review, because I personally know or am acquainted with at least half of the people involved in this book and both of its editors, as a result of my involvement with this question for the past decade-plus, and of my participation in the BioLogos Voices team. So this was less "let's find out what other people think" than "let's find out WHY these particular people agree on this thing." As such, I can't really assess its persuasiveness, being already persuaded! However, I did pick up on some interesting parallels as I read through the books, taking each as a letter written in a human heart.
If I had to pick a favorite chapter, it's probably NT Wright's, even though it's the least personal of them all. Wright looks on this phenomenon from the outside and ties it to American history. As a country, we're trying to talk about race and the past, and I personally am finding more ways in which the past lives on today. It actually never occurred to me that both the Scopes Trial and the Creation Museum are in the South, and that evolution is connected to the great American sin, chattel slavery -- and also to the red-state--blue-state cynicism and mutual antagonism. Wright puts all that together in a mere page, much like he puts together ancient history with theology in his other work.
The other stories are much more personal, and each one is kept short enough that the ultimate cumulative effect is all the stronger for it. Most (but not all) start as Christians and then come to evolution. Most (but not all) focus on the personal rather than the data, leaving the actual arguments to other books. What I think would be interesting at this point would be another book about "How I Changed My Mind About Science," in which Christians talk about the positive influence faith has on their scientific work. But this book is a necessary first step to remove the barriers, before we can talk about the synergistic boost that both faith and science can experience when they are put together.
Monday, October 10, 2016
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
A Letter to My Son About Creation
Dear Sam,
Today you are fourteen. I am so proud of how you’ve grown up
from a little drooling turkey-sized thing to the young man you are today. I
keep thinking about how we really only have four more years with you until you
move out to college. I’m left with too many things to say in such a short time.
You inherited half of yourself from me. I see myself in your
constant reading, in the way you are interested in so many things that it’s
hard to pick a single thing, even in the way you file away the comics in your
head. And it makes me remember what it felt like to be fourteen.
I had a lot of questions about how to put all that reading
together, especially trying to reconcile the first few pages of my Bible with
the first few pages of my science textbooks. After three decades of these
thoughts, I’ve tried out just about every possibility to see how it works. When
I was your age I read many people who insisted that the stories of the Bible
and the stories of evolution don’t fit at all. These people said you have to
trust one set of stories and throw away the others. Creationists said throw
away the science, and Isaac Asimov (my favorite science writer) said throw away
the Bible.
I remember a Saturday afternoon I spent sitting in church
learning about how the six days that I read from the first chapter of Genesis
were 24 hours long and each creation event was an abrupt creation from nothing.
I started out believing them when they said that it gave God the glory to trust
His Word over that of the scientists. But the more I learned and did
experiments myself, the more I felt like there must be other ways to read all
these books. So, I went through an “Intelligent Design” phase, and then a “God
created everything else with evolution but Adam and Eve were separate” phase,
and now?
I’d like to tell you where I am now in a story. I could tell
you my biographical story, of how I changed my mind and why, but instead I’m
reminded of the recent movie version of Noah.
This movie took a lot of risks, and all of them didn’t work, but one of them
worked very well. In the darkened ark, during the 40-day deluge, Noah sits down
with his family and tells them the story of creation. In the movie, this is
animated beautifully with images of nature, and I’m sure you remember how I’ve shown
it to you on YouTube. (I even have a few issues with how the movie did this,
but it’s better to tell your own story than correct someone else’s!)
Noah’s children walked out into a new world after 40 days.
For you, it’ll be four short years. You need to know where you came from, and
that God was here before you, me, anyone, or anything.
Here are a few words trying to capture a fraction of that
story. Some of my words will be proved wrong, but the story remains true if it shows
you who God is.
The story starts in the darkness. In the beginning, there
was God. The Spirit of God fluttered over the empty chaos like a bird over the
ocean. He spoke a word, and a pinpoint of something emerged, bright with light.
Time and space flashed open, inflating like a balloon, obeying his command. Matter
separated into pieces with positive charge and negative charge. These attracted
each other like a swarm of magnets and joined into a multitude of indivisible
bits that could snap together like so many LEGOs. God called these bits atoms. God
set a limit for these atoms: they could not travel faster than light. God saw
the atoms obey his limit, and he saw that it was good.
We watch as evenings and mornings pass. This ends the first
part of the story.
God said, let many lights form. God made gravity, and the
atoms gathered together. In some places, billions upon billions of atoms
pressed down with enormous pressure. God called these places stars, and saw
that they were good. Inside the stars, some atoms were squeezed into newer,
bigger atoms, and the extra energy leaked out as light. One by one, the stars
caught fire, blooming like flowers. They grew, and aged, and burst like seeds,
spreading the new atoms across the universe.
We watch as evenings and mornings pass. This ends the second
part of the story.
And God said, let a disc fly out from a new star and let it
gather into new planets. After an intricate dance, eight planets obeyed his
call. God saw that it was good, and he called that star the sun. Some say that
the biggest planet moved in and out around the sun, clearing the space for the
four planets inside. God set a limit: the planets settled into cycles, like
dancers repeating the same steps again and again around the central star.
We watch as evenings and mornings pass. This ends the third
part of the story.
One of the planets was not like the others. It was wet and
open to the sun, warm but not too hot. God called this planet earth. God gave
it a single moon that lit up its night sky and pulled the oceans over the dry
land. God said, let the water form a cycle of weather, and, look, the water
went up into clouds and came down as the rain. The water mixed with the dry
land and, like an artist, drew shapes on its surface. And God said, let a cycle
of life spring up from these atoms. And the earth brought forth tiny creatures,
and they ate food that God gave them from the hot insides of the planet in
chemical cycles. God blessed them, and the creatures built shelters and grew and
changed. They filled the earth, and God saw that it was good.
We watch as evenings and mornings pass. This ends the fourth
part of the story.
And God said, let the earth bring forth green things. And plants
grew from the waters and the earth. These caught the light from the sun that
God made, and turned it into sweet sugar and fresh oxygen. Oxygen’s power rusted
and reacted with the planet and took away most of the food. There was a famine
and life fell back. But, faithfully, the sun kept giving its light, and that
light became more oxygen, and the oxygen became new life. Creatures learned to
breathe the new air, and to use cycles of oxygen for energy and for building
new things. These cells grew abundantly and joined together into animals big
enough to see, but there was no one to see them yet.
We watch as evenings and mornings pass. This ends the fifth
part of the story.
And God said, let the earth bring forth different kinds of
animals, and the earth brought forth amphibians that crawled from the water,
reptiles that basked in the sun, great sea creatures that lurked in the oceans,
and birds that flew through the air. Some kinds ate plants and evolved strength
and defense. Other kinds ate animals and evolved quickness and intelligence.
Together the animals grew into cycles of biology that turned together to make
ecosystems, like dancers repeating the same steps. Great extinctions pulled
back on life, yet great expansions of new life followed.
Then God said to the earth, let us make humans in our image,
after our likeness, male and female. God spoke, and his breath went out, and new
cycles formed in the brains of humble primates. Out of those brains emerged minds
that could see, understand, and even control the plants, the cattle, and the
birds. And these humans became living souls reflecting the Creator into the
creation. And God blessed them, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply,
and replenish the earth. I have given you all this – take care of it.
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, yes, it was
very good.
We watch as evenings and mornings pass. This ends the sixth
part of the story.
In the seventh part, God ended his work. The heavens and
earth were complete. God set a limit: God blessed the seventh day of the week,
and set it aside, so that we too can enter God’s rest.
We watch as evenings and mornings pass.
Then, something happened that was not good. The father and
mother of us all were deceived because they did not believe that God was good.
They followed evil whispers and stepped outside of God’s limits. We all
followed in their footsteps, and death ruled in us. Brother killed brother in broken,
decaying cycles of greed and fear, and we were lost.
Into this darkness, God again brought light. God called a
man named Abraham to leave the limits of his father’s country. From this man
God called the nation Israel. The name Israel means “struggle,” and they indeed
struggled with God. They received stories and limits from God, but they forgot
them and failed to trust God. So God gave them judges and kings, but they fell
back. One day the light of God’s glory left them. They did not notice.
Then, as a humble carpenter, God’s glory returned. We did
not notice. Life ruled through Jesus, a different kind of king. He was full of grace
and truth -- yet he was cut off and killed by the people of Rome and Jerusalem
together. It was another broken cycle of violence and fear.
But the broken cycle was fixed! On the third day, on the
first Easter Sunday, God vindicated Jesus by giving him new life, through the
same Spirit that formed the earth, recreating and raising him from the dead,
with a new body that goes beyond our limits.
The Gospel of John hints that Easter Sunday was the eighth
day of creation, recorded not in rocks or trees but in transformed minds,
bodies, and words. Like the first seven days, it was a unique act of God that
built on and emerged from the previous events in surprising and creative ways.
This Eighth Day is repeated when Jesus is born again in
someone’s heart and mind. Together we look forward to that day when God will
raise the bodies of all who believe as he did Jesus’ body, and will restore all
of God’s creation, and will reveal God’s Kingdom here on earth.
If you look in the right places, with eyes of faith, you can
already see God coming, as God is creating new life and filling the earth with
good things through the community of believers. The best part is that you don’t
have to just watch -- you can join in as God uses your life to bring more life
to this beautiful, broken world. God made you with love, as he made this
planet, to be part of the continuing, evolving act of new creation.
I hope this shows you how I have found peace in reading
first the Bible and then the science books. God told us some of this story in
each book, and part of life is putting it all together. Now, what questions do
you have? This story isn’t complete without them.
Love, Dad
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