Evolution and Biblical Faith: The Messiness of it all

Last updated on: March 16, 2015 at 5:38 pm by Deborah Arca

12 Comments

Evolution and Biblical Faith: The Messiness of it all 2015-03-16T17:38:04+00:00 Deborah Arca

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Old Testament scholar and preaching professor John C. Holbert joins a Patheos roundtable conversation on “Evolution and Christian Faith,” sponsored by BioLogos. Click here for more perspectives — from evangelical to atheist — on this topic.

I would like to respond briefly to several of the videos provided by Biologos, an organization dedicated to the conviction that there need be no incompatibility between belief in the theory of evolution and belief in the tenets of the Bible. Though these videos, in the main very well done (despite some rather irritating voices used on a few of them), are aimed at persons far more conservative in their use of the Bible than I am, we progressive Christians can still learn much from these reasoned and reasonable presentations. Things have come a long way since 1925 in Tennessee and the infamous Scopes trial.

The video entitled Evolution and the Bible gave as clear and helpful an explanation of the theory of evolution as I have heard, focusing squarely on the multiple definitions of “randomness.” The argument is that evolution, or speciation, is in fact not random in the way it has often been portrayed by those threatened by it, those who are convinced that if evolution is accepted as a way of explaining how the vast multiplicity of the world’s plants and animals came to exist, God will be completely removed from the process, and acceptance of evolution will lead necessarily to atheism. The video nicely demonstrates that within the processes of evolution one finds randomness, but also discovers that species develop in ways far from random as well, ways that include DNA mutations within fixed possibilities, natural selection that means much more than that old bogey man “survival of the fittest,” but in fact survival of those “mostly fit” to their environments. For Christian, Jewish, Muslim believers, God can either be seen as creating these possibilities and allowing them to unfold (the “Deist” view) or God may be intimately involved with these processes every step of the way (an “intimate/personal” view).

I admit to finding all this talk not especially difficult for me, since I have long felt that there is inherently no contradiction between these worlds of ideas, since the Bible, for me, has nothing whatever to do with science, while science has little necessary interest in faith. I understand how my more conservative colleagues could be troubled by this sort of discussion, but I am not. I would, however, add one factor in all this that I learned now over 40 years ago in the wonderful book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), by Annie Dillard, a book that led me to the word “messiness” in my title.

When we speak of the world as created by God, we too often speak of its astonishing clock-work precision, its puzzle-piece-like unity, the incredible conviction that so many factors had to be exactly right—time, temperature, the correct stew of molecules and amino acids, etc.—to create life as we know it. Older theologians, especially Thomas Aquinas, named this the “argument from design,” claiming that the intricacies of life, human, animal, and plant, are too bound together to have occurred by happenstance only. More recent persons, arguing that the complexity of things is too astounding to believe that it all “evolved randomly” (note my comments above), often point to the human eye, and conclude that “someone must have designed this,” and for some religious types that someone is God.

However, I want to note Dillard’s meticulously poetic observations at a small Virginia creek, and suggest that really to see and notate the workings of nature more often than not leads one to wonder just who is running such a railroad anyway? Dillard watches in some sort of horror as a frog, swimming lazily on the surface of the creek is, before her very eyes, sucked dry and dead by a huge and terrible worm that lives for such as this. She witnesses thousands of an insect species drown in the creek in order that the species may survive from the few that make it across the drowning backs of its fellows. She summarizes in what I find to be one of the great passages in recent literature:

“The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.”

In that grand paragraph I find what I believe to be the complementarity of science and faith. We faithful ones, whether we are scientists or not, (and I plainly am not, as any real scientist can easily conclude from my stumbling presentation of science earlier in this article), stand mute before the free wonders of the world the creator has given to us, and however we attempt to explain it, theologically sophisticated or scientifically nuanced, what rests at the bottom is that realization that the creator we worship and praise, that mystery who hides in bush and cloud, in the end loves pizzazz, every clack and buzz and whistle and roar. God is madly in love with the world, with the cosmos, and will do about anything to make it rich and myriad and fecund and wonderful. Let us have the best science, O God, and help us to think hard theologically about who you are, but, more, let us stand by the creek and witness and wonder and laugh and sing and dance. For before we can think hard, we must love hard; before we can praise with power we must be overpowered by your huge love for us.

Photo credit: Shutterstock / James E. Knopf

John C. Holbert is the Lois Craddock Perkins Professor Emeritus of Homiletics at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, TX. Holbert’s popular column, “Opening the Old Testament,” is published every Monday on the Progressive Christian Channel at Patheos.

Evolution and Faith

Previous Post

March 12, 2015

Dear Church (A Letter from Your Future Self)

Next Post

March 13, 2015 No Sinners Allowed: The Battle Over the Body and Blood of Christ

Recent Comments

12 Comments | Leave a Comment

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Advent Author Interviews Battle Over the Body and Blood of Christ Bearing Beauty Book Reviews Christian Education christian spirituallity christianity Christmas Church Church Leadership Contemplation Creation Care Death and Dying Death Penalty Disruptive Change Disruptors Series Easter Education Evolution and Faith Future of Progressive Christianity Gun Violence Health & Wellness Holy Week Interfaith Israel-Palestine Leading Differently Lent LGBTQ Living with Cancer Meditations on the Cross Mental Illness millennials Mimetic Mondays Monday Meditations Movie Reviews New Monasticism Pando Populus Parenting Patheos 10+1 Q&A Series PC(USA) Politics Pop Culture Practical Theology Series Prayer progressive christian Race Relations Reformation religion Religion and Politics Religion in America Rethink Church Social Justice Spirituality Spirituality of the Body Stump a Scholar Technology and Faith Thanksgiving Theodicy Trust Me Church Uncategorized Why I'm Still Christian Youth Ministry

Select a Month December 2025 April 2025 January 2025 September 2023 September 2022 May 2022 February 2022 January 2022 November 2021 October 2021 May 2021 February 2021 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 June 2020 May 2020 March 2020 June 2019 March 2019 January 2019 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

To whom did Jesus say, "Today you will be with me in paradise"?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Peter The repentant thief Nicodemus Pilate