COME EMMANUEL



BIBLICAL CREATION, EVOLUTIONARY CREATION, OR "OTHER"

Dear Friends, Relatives, Colleagues, and Other Denizens of the Blogosphere:

I would like to request your participation in a data-gathering project about Christian perspectives on origins.  First, in your response, self-identify with one of these three options:

A.  I believe in a literal interpretation of the creation stories in Genesis.  Thus, my understanding is that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that all of the plant and animal species that we observe today were created fully formed, and this includes humans. 

B.  I accept what science has revealed regarding the age of the universe and of the earth, and that creation as we observe today took place over millions of years, and that all of the natural world including evolution is controlled by God.

C.  I do not consider my understanding of origins as being either A or B.

Then:

If you have classified yourself as an A, please describe how you reconcile the creation stories in Genesis with the scientific data from multiple disciplines that do not indicate the appearance of all of life during the 6 days of Creation.

If you have classified yourself as a B, please describe how you reconcile the scientific data indicating an old earth and the gradual appearance of species with the Creation stories of Genesis.

If you have classified yourself as a C, please describe your position regarding origins.

You may be as brief or as detailed as you care to be.  I choosing your ID in the comments section, you may respond anonymously, use a fictitious ID, or share your actual ID.  I would ask that if you choose Anonymous, use some sort of signature at the end of your comments in order to differentiate among the anonymous responses.  If you do not want to share your thoughts on this blog but would like to respond, you may send an email to me at swartzendruber46@gmail.com

Also, regardless of your classification, I would like to know if there are any significant issues that remain problematic for you, with either the scientific evidence or the biblical account.

Thanks so much, and hope to hear from you all.

YOUNG EARTH OR OLD EARTH?

Over at the BioLogos Forum, where their mission is to dispel the supposed conflicts between science and Christian faith, there are many fine posts and articles about such issues, especially evolution.  However, most of the writings are quite scholarly and not particularly engaging for the non-specialists.  Thus, this post is a trial of less technical responses to some of the questions that come up in the faith-science discussions.  As such, there no doubt will be some things presented here that will make experts cringe - if you are one of those cringing experts, let me know how to make improvements :-)

Question - The creation story in Genesis speaks of six twenty-four hour days for all of creation, and many Christians believe that this is literally true.  By using the genealogies of the Old Testament, the young earth proponents deduce that the earth has existed for about 6000 years.  However, nearly all scientists, including Christian ones, believe that the universe is very, very old and that the earth is old and that humans have been around for a long time.  Why do they believe this, and if it is true, how are we to understand Genesis?

Well, this could take a while!!  However, let's look at the reasons why scientists accept that the universe, the earth and humans have existed for a very long time.  It should be understood that many different disciplines address the question - astronomy, chemistry, geology, anthropology and biology all contribute to our understanding.  So, let's first look at the age of the universe.

Astronomy and the Age of the Universe

The age of the universe is currently calculated to be approximately 13.73 billion years old.  That's 13,730,000,000 years.  To put that into a bit of perspective, think about the length of a second versus that of a year - there are about 31.5 million seconds in a year; 10 years = 315 million seconds; 100 years =  3.15 billion seconds, which means that 13.73 billion seconds is over 400 years.  Go ahead figure out how many years 13 billion minutes would be; 13 billion hours; 13 billion days.  Since politicians seem to throw around a billion dollars with ease, go here for a nice graphic of a billion and a trillion dollars.

For centuries, humans have looked to the night sky for answers.  Ancient star-gazers gave us the astrological signs and the mythology of constellations [personally I can only recognize the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross, and maybe Orion's belt].   The Bible makes several references to "signs in the heavens" and "star" appears 17 times in 15 verses of the NIV.  However, today we have very sophisticated instruments for observation and measurements of the cosmos.  One of the measurements that we can make is of the different wavelengths or energies of light of various stars and constellations.  Everything we observe in the heavens appears to be moving away from us, and thus the universe is "expanding." 

How can we make this claim?  Let's start with something familiar.  Anyone who has stood and watched a passing ambulance, or locomotive, or car blasting its horn has noted that the pitch of the sound is higher as the source approaches you and then gets lower as the source passes you by.  Here is a short video of what is termed the Doppler Effect or Doppler Shift:



Cool, eh?  If you have a piano, go over and strike middle C.  No piano?  Use this:

Get sound effects & royalty free music at AudioMicro.

This note has a frequency of 261 cycles per second (cps); if you strike the middle A above middle C, you will hear a higher frequency of 440 cps; and as you might have thought, if you hit the A below middle C, you hear a lower frequency of 220 cps.  Thus higher pitches are more cps and lower pitches are less cps .  However, if the sound source is moving, there is a change in the "apparent" cps to you, the stationary observer, even though there is no real change in the cps of the source.

Here is an interesting analogy:  Suppose that you are a parent watching your child play at the beach. If the child stands still in the shallow water, you note that one wave reaches your child's position each second. However, suppose that the child decides to "rush out to meet" the waves. The child will encounter the waves more frequently as she rushes out toward the deeper water. Instead of one wave reaching her each second, she might meet two or three each second. Conversely, if the child "runs away from the waves" back into the shore, instead of one wave reaching her every second, a wave might only reach her once every 1.5 to 2 seconds. The child can change the "apparent frequency" of the oncoming waves through his motions. How much the frequency changes depends on the child's relative speed.

To impress [or perhaps depress] your relatives and friends, you can do a living-room demo of the Doppler Shift.  If you have a tuning fork, tie it securely to the end of a four-foot rope.  Strike the fork to illustrate the pitch of the fork.  Then, strike the fork and swing it around above your head and the folks will hear the increase and decrease in pitch as the fork moves toward them and then away from them.  If you are a bit concerned about swinging the tuning fork, just strike it and move it quickly toward and away from your captivated audience.  As another alternative, I like to use a piece of soft, flexible rubber tubing and the whistle from our small teapot.  Secure the whistle in the end of the tube and blow through the other end.  Then, as above, swing the whistle around your head and the folks will hear the pitch changes. 

Now - switching from sound to light.  The rainbow reminds of the multicolored nature of light.  And, as you may know, light also has characteristics of waves, and wave frequencies/energies correspond to color, like this:



And, the principles of the Doppler Shift also apply to light and to anything that has a wave as one of its characteristics.  Let's assume that you are stationary and a green light source is stationary - you see green.  But, if the light source is moving toward you, what color might you see?  Would there be a shift toward the blue or toward the red?  The "apparent color" would be of a higher energy/shorter wavelength, and would thus be blue-shifted.  If the green light source was moving away from you, the "apparent color" would be red-shifted.  Every energy source that we can measure "out there" in the universe is red-shifted, and thus everything is moving away from us.  Here is a "real" astronomer giving an explanation of this:

Here is another video, a bit longer and a bit more detailed, but definitely worth your time:





If you want to do an interesting visual for yourself, get a brightly colored balloon; blow it up about 1/3 of its maximum; use a black magic marker to make numerous dots on the balloon; circle one of the dots and call it our own Milky Way; now continue to blow up the balloon.  What is the relationship of the Milky Way to all of the other dots?  What is the relationship of every dot to every other dot?  As the balloon expands, every dot gets further and further away, and likewise, in our expanding universe, everything is moving further and further away from everything else.  You may also note that if you blow up the balloon at a constant rate, the dots move away from each other at a faster rate.  If you want to learn more details about how we measure distances to other places in our solar system and in the universe, read this.

Because of the known rate of the expanding universe, calculations can be made to trace backward in time to when everything in the universe was at one point - the "big bang" - and this is where the 13 billion year age of the universe comes from.  Probably the most important contributions to our understanding of all of this were made by Edwin Hubble and the spacecraft telescope that bears his name.  Here is a link to the amazing photographs from the Hubble telescope and below is an interesting summary of Hubble's work:

And here is a sneak preview of the successor to the Hubble Telescope - the James Webb Space Telescope:

Thus the heavens can declare the glory of God, and the heavens can also tell us a great deal about the history of our universe.  If we are to accept the findings of science regarding the age of the universe, then we must reexamine the literal interpretations of Genesis 1 and 2 and redefine how we read the texts.   A future post, hopefully by Pete Enns, Senior Fellow of Biblical Studies at BioLogos, will address these issues.

FAITH & SCIENCE

It has been requested that I re-post a couple of articles/blogs that I have written about the interrelationships between science and faith, and particularly evolution and creation. So, here is the first one.  At Pepperdine, I taught a course on Science and Religion, and wrote an article for the Perspectives Section of Pepperdine Magazine. Here is the Introduction by Dean Rick Marrs and the article - and you can read the comments here.

In the premiere issue of Pepperdine Magazine, Provost Darryl Tippens offered a cogent and compelling case for academic freedom in a Christian university. He rightly noted that universities are most true to their calling when they engage issues that matter with respectful dialogue and measured reason.


For the past several years, scientists at Seaver College have been at the forefront of undergraduate research, helping students explore the mysteries of our glorious universe, participating in much of this work through generous support from agencies such as the Templeton Foundation, an organization dedicated to integrating the disciplines of science and religion. We also have been blessed to have outstanding scientific thinkers, such as John Polkinghorne and Kenneth Miller, visit our campus to speak about their faith and how it integrates with their research.


This fall Seaver College will host an international symposium titled “Why Darwin Still Matters.” The symposium will bring leading scientific minds to our campus to address key issues surfacing at the intersection of science and faith. In the following essay, Dr. Douglas Swartzendruber, professor of biology and interim associate dean at Seaver College, sensitively presents several of the salient issues involved in a discussion that continues to intrigue people of faith—the integration of faith and scientific (in this case evolutionary) theory.

Rick Marrs, Dean, Seaver College

“Do you believe in evolution?” This question arises in educational institutions, churches, presidential debates, the media, and around the kitchen table. Most often “the question” comes not in the context of science, but rather as a prelude to a discussion of matters of faith. It is asked by students, parents of potential students, alumni, and friends. Similarly, colleagues at secular institutions have asked, “Can evolution be taught at Pepperdine?”

Embedded in both of those questions is the presumption that one cannot accept both evolution and faith in God the Creator. To me and many of my colleagues who are both scientists and followers of Jesus, this is a false dichotomy that forces individuals to the misconceived notion that one must choose either science or faith. For many young people, a cognitive dissonance develops while they try to integrate their faith and their growing understanding of the natural world. Too often, they reach a crisis point in their faith because of the seemingly contradictory truths of their faith and of their understanding of science. We are most fortunate that one of Pepperdine’s affirmations is “that truth, having nothing to fear from investigation, should be pursued relentlessly in every discipline.” This is a profound encouragement for us to decipher the myriad truths that are found in the sciences, theology, humanities—indeed in all disciplines.

I welcome “the question” because it presents an opportunity to engage discussion of science and faith and to highlight two critical points.

First, the question itself is misdirected, because evolution is not a belief system. Although some philosophers would argue that scientific knowledge is one type of belief system, it is pragmatically different from other belief systems that are not based on independent verification or falsification. Like gravity, atoms, plate tectonics, and all fundamental scientific paradigms and theories, evolutionary theory is about observable knowledge of the world of biology, and it is the unifying concept for all of the biological sciences. Asking about belief in evolution is akin to asking about belief in light. Light has paradoxical characteristics of particles and of waves, and thus any theory of light must explain all of the observed characteristics of light. Likewise, evolutionary theory is currently the best explanation that unites and makes sense of all of the knowledge we have about the living world, present and past.

Second, we must recognize that science is one of several ways of knowing—scientific knowledge is based on observation, postulation, experimentation, peer review, independent verification, and progressively deeper understanding. At one time many scientists, and thus many others, understood that the earth was the center of the solar system. However, as observations and experimentation progressed, the earth-centered paradigm yielded to the sun-centered paradigm. In Darwin’s era, the paradigm for explaining biological diversity was based more on theology than on scientific observation and research. It is unfortunate that Darwin’s opus, titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life is usually shortened to simply The Origin of Species. This has led many people to incorrectly conclude that Darwin’s theory addresses ultimate biological origins, which would thus conflict with a belief that God is the originator of all life. Thus, when polls ask the improper question “Do you believe in evolution?” only 39 percent say yes, and 51 percent say that God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years. The poll responses reflect the false dichotomy of having to choose between science and faith and also indicate that there is an inappropriate influence of religious understanding on scientific understanding. Paraphrasing Saint Augustine, who warned against such confusion more than 1,500 years ago: “It often happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about eclipses of the sun and moon, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It can be ruinous for our community if the non-Christian should hear a Christian speaking in error on these matters.” —After De Genesi ad literam [AD 408].

Augustine argued that if our Biblical interpretations conflict with established science and our Godgiven intellectual capabilities, we should re-examine our interpretations. If we ignore the truths of science, how can we possibly convince anyone of the truths of scripture and of our faith in God?

I have the great privilege of working with Pepperdine colleagues who accept and teach that God created a universe that is knowable, and that our increased knowledge of the natural world does not decrease one iota of our faith in Creator, Redeemer, and Guide. Likewise, I have prominent colleagues such as Darrel Falk, Karl Giberson, and Francis Collins who are leading the proclamation that one can be a scientist and an evangelical Christian. Each has written a book describing his journey toward integrating his faith with his science, accepting that God is present in all of creation, and incorporating a theistic understanding of evolutionary biology. At Pepperdine, we are fortunate to be able to pursue truths in all disciplines and to have the intellectual freedom to pursue the goal of integrating our scientific knowledge with our faith in God.