Dinosaurs and Darwin and Genesis: summing up

  • dinosaur-n-darwin.jpgI fin­ished sift­ing through my thoughts and spec­u­la­tions about Gen­e­sis and fos­sils. And I fin­ished feel­ing bad for need­ing to say any­thing. I’m not com­pletely sure that’s wise, but I con­sider the point that Fr. Thomas Hopko made in his series of pod­casts on Dar­win and Chris­tian­ity: that this is an area where the Church has lost a lot of ground by seem­ing to have noth­ing to say or to only want to argue against science.

    And I’m not quite insane enough to pre­tend to have answers, but I’ll share my spec­u­la­tions in case they can lead bet­ter minds to some­thing closer the truth. In a bet­ter world, per­haps none of us would have to come up with ideas to com­bat Dar­win­ian the­ory, but keep­ing a dig­ni­fied silence while we wait for an addi­tional book of the Old Tes­ta­ment doesn’t seem like it’s been work­ing for us.

    First, per­spec­tive: “In the begin­ning, God cre­ated the heav­ens and the earth …”  “In the begin­ning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the begin­ning with God. All things were made through Him, and with­out Him noth­ing was made that was made. …” This is the bot­tom line. The only rea­son to inves­ti­gate any­thing else about begin­nings is to inform those verses from Gen­e­sis and the Gospel of John, not to take any­thing away. This is the revealed truth of God, and the most impor­tant met­ric of any other thought about what hap­pened before recorded history.

    So what could be true? Any­thing, really, as long as it added to the verses above and didn’t take any­thing away. So the asser­tion of cre­ation­ists and young-earthers that the Gen­e­sis account should be read as if it were today’s ship­ping log and con­tained no mys­tery or sym­bol­ogy what­so­ever could be true. But it also wouldn’t upset my faith to think that the earth actu­ally is bil­lions of years old and that there were eras of time — some even bil­lions of years long — before Adam and Eve and the Garden.

    dinosaur-n-darwin.jpgSup­pose the pale­on­tol­o­gists are right. Sup­pose the earth is 4.5 bil­lion years old and there’s a record of life that begins with tiny specks, grows into enor­mous crea­tures and indi­cates a pro­gres­sion of hominids that devel­oped over many ages into homo sapi­ens. Does that mean Gen­e­sis is wrong? It doesn’t have to.

    What IF, for example:

    • the “days” in Gen­e­sis were meant to refer to some­thing like the cre­ative chap­ters that led to Eden, each one of which may have taken mil­lions or bil­lions of years? Is it really any less awe-inspiring, mag­nif­i­cent or won­der­ful? (I actu­ally think it’s quite a bit more, but that may just be me.)
    • the crea­tures that led up to us were just that: crea­tures? Then the sig­nif­i­cance of Adam may have been that he was the first man that God ensouled, the first one who was truly made in His own image and capa­ble of choos­ing good or evil. And that event may have been the work of an instant, in the way we’re used to think­ing of things hap­pen­ing in Gen­e­sis. In that case, Adam would’ve been the first one who could “surely die,” in the sense of going to eter­nal pun­ish­ment. Dogs and fish and dinosaurs aren’t held to that stan­dard, because they don’t pos­sess an eter­nal soul. And in that case, the only fit help­mate for Adam would’ve had to have been taken from him in a super­nat­ural way, since none of the oth­ers of the species would have pos­sessed a soul. Doesn’t that help explain how Adam could­have  under­stood the word “death,” or how he was capa­ble of lan­guage at all, or who his sons could have found to marry?

    If that were so, it would mean that at some point after hominids had evolved over mil­lions of years, God chose one and that was the begin­ning of human­ity as we know it. Maybe that sounds like a kind of waste, but at any rate, it mir­rors what we find repeated through­out the rest of the Old and New Tes­ta­ments. How many other men existed when God chose Noah and Abra­ham? How many tribes and peo­ples when God chose Israel? How many good and upright indi­vid­u­als were in Galilee when Jesus chose 12 apos­tles? We have to con­clude, I think, that God doesn’t waste any­thing, but that our imag­i­na­tion is too lim­ited to under­stand how He puts all things to their right­ful purpose.

    Maybe the same thing could be said for all those bil­lions of years that pre­ceded the most recent mil­len­nia that con­cern us. If we’re going to be offended because it seems like a waste, then we really need to look out at the night sky and the bil­lions of galax­ies and con­clude, in the words of the woman sci­en­tist from “Con­tact,” that it’s “an awful big waste of space.”

    If we’re going to be huffy that this idea of mutat­ing species seems to indi­cate a process of cre­ativ­ity rather than a finger-snap, then I sup­pose we have to look askance at the pass­ing of so many gen­er­a­tions before the Incar­na­tion of Christ.
    On the whole, it seems to me that we haven’t been “good sci­en­tists” as Mpn. Bloom explained it**. We had notions of what Gen­e­sis meant, which were sen­si­ble given the infor­ma­tion we had. But when more infor­ma­tion came to light, we were afraid to chal­lenge our assump­tions and have been try­ing to sup­press the guesses of curi­ous peo­ple ever since. I don’t think we need to ignore pale­on­tol­o­gists, and I also don’t think we need to apo­s­ta­tize and say that Cre­ation and the Fall weren’t every bit as real and sig­nif­i­cant as the Church has held to be true.

    That’s what I say, any­way. And then, with a big sigh, I stop wor­ry­ing about it one way or the other.


    Related posts:

    1. Dinosaurs, time­lines and everything
    2. “… a liv­ing word, warmed with love …”
    3. Me and my diplodocus
    4. Still look­ing for the Gar­den of Eden
    5. God doesn’t desire sorrow

    May 2nd, 2010 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 05.02.2010

    Well said. The qual­i­ta­tive dif­fer­ence between any­thing else and “us” is the inbreath­ing of God’s breath and our soul. Evo­lu­tion does not threaten that dis­tinc­tion in my mind one bit. We need not accept the meta­physics of athe­is­tic pale­on­tol­ogy, just its facts inso­far as they are facts and not spec­u­la­tions. Those are BIG dif­fer­ences that most peo­ple don’t seem to think about.

  • Grace

    That’s just it. There was, and is, an under­stand­able push­back from Chris­tians who felt threat­ened by the new infor­ma­tion. There was also a bad attempt from sci­en­tists to shape the infor­ma­tion into a god­less nar­ra­tive. The mid­dle way is a whole lot more dif­fi­cult to find.

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