Christians, is the Biblical account of Genesis ever reconcilable with evolutionary theory?

Question

I'd love to hear thoughts about this, including links and further reading. What are your thoughts about this line of thinking? I like to think there can be some flexibility here, but at the same time I'm cautious along those lines of the "adding to/taking from" warning that is also scriptural. In any case,

- Could a day of creation in actuality be thousands/millions of years?
- Could evolution play out to a point where an Adam individual inherits the "breath of life" through ?

I've also heard theories to the extent that there was no literal 7 days, but instead God created everything in an instance (not sure who proposed this teaching, but it's an interesting one.)

Serious answers please. Thanks.

Answer 1

Okay, there are so many problems with your question it is difficult to know where to start. As a Christian, I understand your problem, but it is very difficult to look at this from the limitations that the net produces. It is a dialogue problem and information can only travel one way in Yahoo Answers.

First, let me set aside the adding to/taking from warning. That was the ancient equivalent to a copyright notice. It was put there, not for the purposes used by most fundamentalists to warn others about adding stories or doctrine, it was put there because it was normal in the ancient world for scribes to alter text. If I produced a book of any type in the ancient world, I did so by writing it. If I sent one copy to a friend in Alexandria, he might send ten copies to his friends. However, it was considered acceptable (except by actual authors) to alter the texts to fit the new audience or the preferences of the copiest. All ancient documents come down to use in multiple forms because of this. There are currently between 200,000 and 400,000 variant passages in the New Testament, all because scribes altered texts. The count partly depends upon how you count them. Think of the hanging chads in Florida, it depends on what you count as to the number you get. No one actually knows which passages were actually put there by the original authors and which were altered. Current translations make use of the translators best guess and their personal and academic preferences. Even if the very first copy was inspired, we do not have it and we do not know which variants are the correct variants. This is only a problem for bible alone Christians. Catholics and Orthodox have held solutions to these problems for nearly two thousand years. But then you have to be Catholic or Orthodox for the solutions to work. They do not take scripture alone, but scripture in light of all other aspects of what was handed down by the apostles. Scripture is only a part of what the apostles left.

So for starters, we do not have the original texts and contrary to myth, we do not have invariant copies that match our current copies.

So do not use the ancient copyright notice, which you will also find out of scripture, as a doctrinal statement, anymore than you would take the copyright notice in front of an NIV as a doctrinal statement.

Second, when you read Genesis 1, think in literal days. That is how it is meant. Nonetheless, that does not mean that God made the world in six days. Rather, what you are reading is the Judaized version of pre-existing stories. The priests altered the already recognized and understood stories and showed how the pre-existing beliefs worked with YHWH in them.

So for example, they had neighbors who worshiped the light and the dark. Day One, God made light and dark. Message to neighbors...my God made your God. Think of the Greek Goddess Nox or the Egyptian God Ra (Remember we are still in the segment of scriptures that accepts there are multiple Gods.)


Day Two, God made the Heavens. Neighboring sky God religions were told the message...my God made your God.

Day Three, God made Earth, Sea and Plants...for the neighbors who worshipped plants, the earth, the sea and nature...my God made your God.

Day Four, God made the Sun and the Moon.....moon and sun Gods are well attested to...message...my God made your God.

Day Five, God made the creatures of the air, land and sea...for the neighbors who worshipped the animals....my God made your God.

Day Six, God made man, for the Pharoh's who believe they are man Gods.....my God made you.

Message ...OUR GOD IS GREAT AND ALMIGHTY and HE MADE YOUR GODS.

You are reading a poetic document outside its tribal message.

When you get to Genesis 2, you run into a story that actually contradicts Genesis 1 in important places.

Nonetheless, the breath of life issue is only an issue if you see an old man in a white beard pick up a lump of clay and breath into it. Otherwise the message is that God is the Creator and all life must spring from him as His idea.

Evolution and the Creation stories are completely disconnected in critical ways.

So what you need to do is try and understand the bible stories for what they were originally intended to do and science for what it is intended to do and do not try and mix them.

They cannot be reconciled because they do not attempt to do the same things at all.

Evolution is true. Scripture also says the Earth is flat. Gallileo went on trial for proving about fifty sections of scripture were false. Compared to Gallileo, Genesis 1 and 2 are minor issues.

First, do not read the scriptures outside their context. You need to read about the academic fields of hermeneutics and exegesis.

Second, read the ancient commentaries on the scriptures. Particularly for the New Testament, some of these were written by people trained by the apostles. They were the first Catholic and Orthodox bishops. There were no Protestants and Protestant ideas and doctrines would not even be an idea for another sixteen centuries. For the Old Testament, there is a rich body of Jewish literature in the Talmud and Midrash.

Third, don't sweat it. At an academic level or at the level of seminary training, hermeneutics and exegesis are very important as are the writings of the Fathers and the Rabbis. For most people, you can get by just fine without worrying about it. After all, what does it actually matter unless you are a physicist, biologist, chemist, geologist or pharmacologist. If you were those things, then the Genesis story would not play into anything you do anyway professionally. If you are not, you probably do not need to worry about it. It will not alter how much work you do in the next few days, nor will it alter critical life events.

I am not saying it is unimportant, its just not important enough to rise to the level of political debate, choice of medicines, or car selection. It is important in that it frames ideas, such as what role does God play in our lives.

Answer 2

The only fact that is indisputable is that God can do anything, how and when and why he wants.

That being said, he would have no reason to count 7 days for the creation of the earth and everything in it unless there was a lesson in it for us. And there is, it was one of the very first lessons, to work six days and rest on the seventh. Praise and glory were supposed to then and now be given everyday of our believing lives, but the seventh day was set aside for worship and rest. God never said not to save another in danger or not to care for the sick and such. That law was made up by the leaders of the temples who needed something to do to seem smart and importand, so they "tweaked" Gods word and added hardship to what is supposed to be a day filled with the Joy of worship, fellowship and rest.

Evolution does not work with the bible, no matter how hard some try to make it work. The plain and simple fact is if you go to the beginning of any evolutionary theory, you will find that they say it all began with "ONE" something. Be it a cell that crawled out of the ocean or a bang and something started growing.

Either way, if we all started as one something, there would be no need for two of us to recreate and to continue evolving.

At some point we would have had to de-evolve and decide that we wanted two sexes and make sure the two sexes could re create. Huge hole in any evolutionary theory.

Answer 3

There's no biblical basis for the belief that a day of creation could have taken 1,000 years. In fact, claiming that God couldn't do it in seven days is the same as saying he's not God. And God LITERALLY breathed life into Adam.

The purpose of evolutionary theory is to provide an alternative to creation, so that God's existance can be denied. The two theories cannot coexist as fact.

Answer 4

NO

You need to refer what Carl Sagan said about creation:

"As far as I know, India is the only ancient religious tradition on the Earth which talks about the right time scale. In the West, people have the sense that what is natural is for the universe to be a few thousand years old, and that it is billions of years is mind-reeling, and no one can understand it. The Hindu concept is very clear. Here is a great world culture which has always talked about billions of years."

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still."

~ Carl Sagan

Answer 5

I tend to agree with your line of thinking about the flexability of the measurment of time here. I mean a day = 24 hours is a man made thing (obviously with the flaws that require leap-years and such).

Also, have you noticed how the order of creation that read about in Genesis matches the order of evolution conjectured by scientist - first the plants, then the water animals, then the land animals...

I can't say I know the exact details, but those are the thoughts running through my head.

Answer 6

Genesis and Evolutionary Theory are two fundamentally different things. Genesis is an account of the history of the Jewish people as no doubt first told by nomadic wanderes by voice and handed down generation to generation. It was an attempt to answer questions human have always pondered such as "Where did we come from?" and "What is the purpose of all this?" and others. The ancient peoples who told these tales were not scientist, they were simply nomads and elders of their tribe handing down stories. Eventually these stories were recorded in written form (Genesis). Evolutionary Theory was developed using observation of the natural world and scientific means. Since Darwin first proposed his idea, literally tons of evidence has been unearthed, and researched and produced that validates the theory. Two entirely differnt ways of looking at the world. One is legend and fairytale the other is knowledge.

Answer 7

Well first what is a day to God if God stands outside of time, the genesis book is one of the first examples of evolution. I support both theries to an extent very well. but Ill be the first to tell you I didnt evolve from a monkey.


A day simply means that there is a division between things happening for instance the creation of the earth then the water it is a seperate "creation" so it was on seperate "days"

Answer 8

Actually it should be the other way around. If any theory, evolutionary or whatever, somehow contradicts what the bible says, throw the theory out.

There is no need to reconcile anything man comes up with the biblical account of creation. In my opinion, God's word trumps anything else. I don't have this point of view from nowhere. I have spent ten years studying the bible. That is how I came to believe I can trust it as true. Especially over any other supposed "evidence" that men come up with.

Answer 9

Yes I do think the "days" of God could be millions of years to us. I also think God created Adam and Eve but that people also developed through evolution. Cain was banished to the land of Nod where their were people. I think these people evolved. The Bible and evolution do not cancel each other out so that you can only believe in one or the other. Why is that a hard concept for people to comprehend?

Answer 10

No. Evilution teach millions and millions of Years to create.
In Gensis it talks about evening and morning the 1st day. This says to me that it was a literal 6 days and rested on the 7th.