Once again, I have resources to offer on science and religion.
First off, I have discovered that the very best and most concise discussion of creationism and intelligent design can be found in chapters 8 and 9 of Francis Collins' The Language of God. For those of you who heard Dr. Wesley Wachob's speech at Annual Conference, many of the arguments will be very similar. Collins helps explains both the scientific and theological reasons that creationism and intelligent design are not only unhelpful but also dangerous to both faith and science. I wish we could read those chapters aloud from the floor of Annual Conference.
I have been fascinated by my initial perusal of The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism, by Ronald L. Numbers. We are often given the idea that all Christians, and all people in the West generally, thought of creation like the scientific creationists do, until Darwin came along with his idea of evolution, which was rejected and continues to be rejected by true Christians except the liberal, Bible modifying kind. This characterization is completely inaccurate. Young earth creationism with a pseudo-scientific view of Genesis 1-2 is a very new phenomenon. Even William Jennings Bryant, some of the authors of The Fundamentals (the series of pamphlets on fundamental conservative Christian beliefs from which the term "fundamentalism" arose), and conservative Presbyterian Princeton theologian Benjamin Warfield believed in some forms of evolution and read Genesis 1-2 in a theological manner. Modern scientific creationism dates to the publication of Henry Morris's The Genesis Flood in 1961 and the subsequent development of Creation Science societies (I read The Genesis Flood when I was a child and at one time, I was the youngest member of the Kansas Creation Science Society!). This relatively recent way of looking at the Bible and the fossil record has influenced state law on science education and has brought us to the current conversation in our Annual Conference.
I've said before that all Christians affirm the Apostles' Creed's statement that "I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth," and so we are all creationists in one sense. We may be faithful Christians and have varying views on the way that God has created and is creating.
Unfortunately, arguments about creationism and differing views on the interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 tend to flatten out the doctrine of creation. Whatever we think of the science around creation, the doctrine of creation is rich and central to our faith. It has implications in the world that are much more important than how science is taught in the classroom--it has everything to do with how God views the world he created and called good and how we, the pinnacle of God's creation, will live out the first thing he commanded us to do, to tend the garden. As Wesleyans, we believe in "The Great Salvation," that God saves souls first and foremost, but that his salvation extends to all things and that even the cosmos is redeemed by the salvific work of Christ. When we limit our doctrine of creation to a conversation about God making the earth in six days or six thousand years or whatever, it gets awfully difficult to think about salvation in those grand and cosmic terms.
I think a robust conversation on the doctrine of creation would help us have a much more meaningful conversation about science and religion than we currently are. Here are a few resources that might serve as helpful conversation partners:
Dorothy Soelle. To Work and To Love: A Theology of Creation. More accessible than Moltman, Soelle explores how the doctrine of creation impacts all kinds of contemporary issues. The average reader from our part of the world will likely disagree with her on many of her conclusions, but she serves as a great conversation partner to get a sense of how a genuinely orthodox understanding of creation causes us to consider how God is working in the world in ways we often dismiss.
Jurgen Moltmann. God in Creation. Moltmann is always incredibly good and rich. He's always pretty difficult to read, too. This book is complete on the doctrine of creation, and has terrific interaction with Karl Barth's volumes on creation in Church Dogmatics. A serious reader of this book would walk away with a rich theological understanding of creation and God's interaction with the material world.
Deitrich Bonhoeffer. Creation and Fall. Bonheoffer's work tends to be short, accessible, and incredibly meaningful to both laypersons and scholars. Creation and Fall is based on Bonheoffer's lectures on Genesis 1-3. It's a wonderful example of the kind of amazing insight into God's world, humanity, and the relationship between God and people available to us through these texts. So often, when our conversations about these texts turns to fighting evolution, the ability to learn these kinds of insights from God word is lost. Genesis is not a science textbook. Even if the young earth creationist are right, they are using Genesis for a different purpose than God intended for it. This book points us back to what Genesis 1-3 was intended to teach us.
Eugene Peterson. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. Read section 1, entitled, Christ Plays in Creation. Read the whole thing. Peterson writes beautifully and worshipfully, as a person who has taken the glory of God seriously. Our conversation on these matters often veers far from worship. Peterson helps brings us back. Remember--conversation about creation and worship are inseparable in scripture, particularly in the Psalms and wisdom literature. Maybe worship is what Genesis 1 is about, too, and if we are fighting about science, we may very well have missed the whole point. It might be time to direct our hearts back to God rather than the directions these debates point us.
Well, that's all for now. More to come. [But probably not much more]
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