Science, Scripture and the Church: The Search for Genuine Authority (Part II)

In the previous post I told the tale of my Jenga-tower belief system being knocked down.  It needed to be knocked down because it was weak, but rebuilding a coherent belief system has not been easy.  One thing that I have learned in the process is that we take a great deal of our beliefs on authority.  The nature of the authority may vary depending on what we are talking about.  We may disagree about which sources of authority are legitimate and which ones are not, but the fact remains that we all hold beliefs on the basis of outside authorities.

My journey to re-establish a coherent belief system has been a journey of searching for sources of genuine authority.  Along the way I have never doubted the authority of science.  I’ve always been impressed by the ability of science to get at the truth of the physical world.  Once I was convinced that there was good evidence for an old universe, an old earth and for an evolutionary explanation of biodiversity, I was willing to accept these things as true even though I didn’t see how I would reconcile them with my faith at the time.  I could share the story of how I became a theist and a Christian again but that is tangential to what I'm trying to communicate in this series of posts.  So I'm going to skip that part and pick up the story at my junior year of school at Messiah College.

During that year I was privileged to take a class with Dr. Ted Davis which was entirely dedicated to exploring different perspectives on the relationship between Christian faith and science, particularly focusing on questions of origins.  We looked at young earth creationism, old earth creationism, theistic evolutionism, the Intelligent Design movement and atheistic evolutionism.  We covered the spectrum from Ken Ham to Richard Dawkins and everything in between.  There are three things that I received from this class that were invaluable to me.  First I got an historical perspective on various understandings of the relationship between faith and science and how the contemporary faith versus science debates fit into that history.  Secondly, the class helped me clarify the issues I was struggling with and identify questions that I needed answers to.  Thirdly, I became acquainted with a wide range of alternative ways of thinking about issues of faith, science and scripture.  If you are interested in these kinds of issues and would want to explore these topics for yourself please visit this link: http://biologos.org/blog/author/davis-ted.  This is essentially an online version of the course that I took.

For the purposes of this post I want to highlight one particular thing from the class that changed my whole perspective at the time.  I read an article called “Dinosaur Religion” by Conrad Hyers (http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1984/JASA9-84Hyers.html).  In that article Hyers presented a thoughtful exegesis of the Genesis creation accounts that explicitly rejected a scientific interpretation of the text and offered a very satisfying alternative based on textual and contextual arguments.  Here is an excerpt that summarizes the key point of his interpretation:

“Even a cursory reading of the context in which, and to which, Genesis 1 was written would indicate that the alternative to its "creation model" was obviously not some burgeoning theory of evolution. All cultures surrounding Israel had their origin myths, some impressively developed in epic proportions and covering almost every aspect of the cosmos in great detail. Yet they were, from the standpoint of Jewish monotheism, hopelessly polytheistic… 

In the light of this historical context it becomes clearer what Genesis 1 is undertaking and accomplishing: a radical and sweeping affirmation of monotheism vis-a-vis polytheism, syncretism and idolatry. Each day of creation takes on two principal categories of divinity in the pantheons of the day, and declares that these are not gods at all, but creatures--creations of the one true God who is the only one, without a second or third. Each day dismisses an additional cluster of deities, arranged in a cosmological and symmetrical order.”

This was an interpretation of Genesis that was long overdue in my life.  It didn’t seem forced in the least, as if the author were simply trying to side-step the issue of evolution.  On the contrary, it seemed wholly supported by good biblical exegesis.  I read the article and said to myself: “Aha!  But of course that’s what Genesis is trying to say!”  It was an epiphany moment for me that represented a paradigm shift.  From then on I could never go back to viewing the creation accounts in Genesis as attacks on evolutionary theory.  That no longer made sense to me.  My new perspective was reinforced by studying the history of the creation versus evolution debate and realizing that young earth creationism was a very recent movement.  Christians of the past did not find it necessary to believe in a young earth or in six literal days of creation in order to believe that the Bible was authoritative or true.

I admit that I was a bit angry that I had been deprived of this viewpoint for much of my life and that the faith crisis I had experienced as a young person could have been easily avoided.  I felt that the tradition of scriptural interpretation that I had come from must have a fatal flaw in it somewhere because it had utterly failed me on this point.  I began wondering why I had never encountered this kind of interpretation of Genesis before.  Why I had grown up feeling the need for the Genesis creation accounts to be construed as science?  Such an approach now seemed almost laughable to me.  As Conrad Hyers puts it: “Attempting to be loyal to the Bible by turning the creation accounts into a kind of science or history is like trying to be loyal to the teachings of Jesus by arguing that his parables are actual historical events, and only reliable and trustworthy when taken literally as such.”  I had to agree, but I was left wondering why some Christians (including me) had felt the need for the Genesis creation accounts to be science.  I started to suspect that the answer had a lot to do with authority.

Scientific validation is perhaps the primary currency of authority in contemporary intellectual society and I think that’s why I was drawn to it.  By construing the Genesis creation accounts as science I was provided with a means for verifying and validating the Bible’s accuracy and, therefore, investing it with the same kind of authority as science.  The flip side of borrowing this authority from science is that I staked my entire faith in God on a very specific scientific theory.  Without scientific validation of the Bible I felt that I didn’t have grounds for accepting the Bible as authoritative.

In my class with Ted Davis I discovered that there were vast numbers of Christians (both throughout history and in contemporary society) who didn’t think Genesis was making scientific claims at all, who did not feel the need to interpret Genesis as a scientific account, who accepted evolution as being true, and who still accepted the Bible as the inspired and authoritative word of God.  Furthermore, and of great interest to me, I discovered that many of these Christians were in the Catholic and Anglican traditions.  This triggered more questions in my head.  Was there something that these traditions had gotten right that my own tradition had missed or rejected?  How is it that young earth creationism found such a stronghold in Evangelical Protestantism, while the Pope issued a statement declaring the compatibility of evolutionary theory with Christian faith?  My thoughts naturally turned toward the Reformation and the role of Scripture in Catholic and Protestant churches.

-David