Christians, Evolution, and Dinosaurs
On Wednesday nights at (Re)Discovering Jesus, we’ve been spending the last half hour discussing whatever questions about Christianity, religion, and life people want to bring up. This week we talked a little about dinosaurs and evolution. Here are a few of the major points we covered in response:
We need to avoid reading more into the Bible than is actually there.
The Bible tells the story of creation several times, and some of these versions of the story contain details that seem to contradict other versions. For example, Genesis has two accounts of creation, one in each of its first two chapters, and they seem to blatantly contradict each other (was humanity created before or after vegetation?). We could decide that whoever wrote or edited Genesis was a moron, or we could decide that these types of “contradictions” were not seen as problematic (think of me rhapsodizing about the beauty of my wife and some goober coming in and accusing me of heresy for calling her a “goddess”—who’s the moron, me or the accuser who completely ignored the point of what I was saying?). Therefore, we are inclined not to read the Bible’s descriptions of creation as if their intent were to communicate scientific details but as if their intent were to communicate the vastly more important truth that God was the one doing the creating.
We need to avoid assuming science can tell us more than it can.
(In making this point, I desperately do not want anyone to hear me saying that science is dumb or wrong or some kind of enemy of faith as if Christians’ proper posture toward thinking were to avoid it. Instead, I want us think so well that we properly account for what science can and cannot tell us. Let’s avoid blindly using “science” as an answer to all things the same way some have used “religion” to avoid having to really think about difficult questions.)
This point is really the union of five smaller, related points that help us to see that we do not have to make the Bible, particularly with respect to its stories about the origins of the world, answer to science:
First, science is not the supreme referee of all truth because there are questions that it cannot possibly answer. For example, think about a chain of “why?”s. If we start asking why about any particular physical phenomenon, we can probably answer with scientific reasoning. Once we give a scientific answer, we may ask why again, and we may be able to give a more detailed scientific answer. But eventually, we get to a point where we must say, “That’s just the way the world seems to be,” or we must resort to some sort of answer that science cannot provide. Why do we trust the scientific method? Why do we trust that 100 past examples of a physical law tell us anything at all about the 101st? That's just the way the world seems to be--or at least that's what we assume because we don't know what else to do. (Similarly, besides using a chain of "why?"s to demonstrate this point we could use a chain of causes that eventually become unanswerable scientifically: “What caused this to happen this way? The laws of physics. What caused the laws of physics to work this way? The big bang. What caused the big bang? That’s just the way the world seems to be.”)
Second, science is not the supreme referee of all truth because it’s not even clear that it actually tells us any true things about the world. Academics in the specialty known as the philosophy of science routinely ask questions about science itself—its methods, goals, status, etc. One of the questions that philosophers of science vigorously debate is whether scientific inquiry reveals true things or merely useful things (are physicists discovering or creating what we know as physical laws?). In fact, there are highly influential philosophers in history like Friedrich Nietzsche who have cursed science for exactly this reason—because science almost always implies that it’s telling us true things rather than just useful things. (My guess is that most scientists believe that they are actually discovering true things and would argue that when theories end up being corroborated by previously unobserved physical evidence, those theories have been demonstrated to be true, not just useful. However, as surprising as this may be to many of us, it is not actually the case. Whether evidence comes before or after a theory has no bearing on the truth of the theory. In either case, the theory may just happen to fit or be useful, not true. For more detail on this point, see Robin Collins’ 1994 journal article “Against the Epistemic Value of Prediction over Accommodation.”) If we can’t even agree on whether science tells us true things rather than useful things, why in the world would we give it pride of position such that all other disciplines were ultimately accountable to science?
Third, when scientific explanations are forced to explain more than they actually can they sometimes become self-defeating. The prime example of this is with evolution. If we force evolution to say more than it actually can, it undermines our reasons to think that evolution is true. If evolution is the sole explanation as to why we exist and have intelligence we have no compelling reason to think that our intelligence is actually built to discover truth. Evolution works by weeding out traits that are impediments to survival. There is no clear way for traits to be weeded out such that we should think our minds are good at discovering anything other than what is useful. Thus, there is no reason to think that our own scientific theories are true, including evolution. (For a significantly more detailed discussion of this line of thought, see “Is Naturalism Irrational?” in The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader, edited by James Sennett.)
Fourth, we should probably exercise even more restraint in our assessment of the value of the science dealing with the origin of the world. If we recognize the above limitations of science that apply to easily demonstrable and repeatable physical phenomena like gravity, we should be even more uneasy about the ability of science to tell us actually true things in the cases that we are dealing with significantly more theoretical speculation. This point is further supported by the fifth and final point below.
Fifth, we need to realize that science can tell us what looks like it’s true but not necessarily what is actually true. Equivalently, we might say that (1) what looks like it’s true depends on the other facts we already know as well as any assumptions we’ve made, but (2) what is actually true depends on neither the facts that we already know nor any assumptions we’ve made. There are two examples that have helped me to think about what this means. The first example is of a crime scene investigation. A genius investigator may be able to determine the exact order of events of a violent struggle from a blood spatter pattern if he also knows whether or not there were outside forces in play. If the investigator assumes there were no winds when there were in fact very strong winds, he may come to the wrong conclusion about the details of the struggle—in other words, what he think it looks like is true is very different than what was actually true. The second example is to assume for the moment that the earth is only a few thousand years old and that Adam was created as a mature adult the way that Genesis 2 seems to describe. If we had the technology to send a doctor in a time machine back to examine Adam the day after he was created but gave this doctor no hint who Adam was, what conclusions would the doctor come to? Wouldn’t the doctor come to all sorts of incorrect conclusions about Adam’s age and medical history, even with the best and most current medical knowledge and testing available to us? So if God created a mature human that confounds our best science when we make wrong assumptions or have incomplete information, couldn’t the same be true of God creating the earth? Again, it seems that what looks like it’s true could be very different from what is actually true.
Most importantly, we need to remember that our views on evolution and dinosaurs do not define us as Christians.
Christians can have a variety of views and be Christians. You can believe in evolution or not. You can believe that the earth is young or not. We are Christians because we believe in the God who created all things and sent His Son to redeem this world from the inside, not because we hold particular views on the merits of modern science. (Of course, there might be related issues that limit our potential options if we want to remain within the realm of historical Christianity. For example, regardless of our views on evolution or origins, it would be hard to make sense of much of what Paul says if we deny that God actually created a first human named Adam.)
So what do I tell my kids about dinosaurs?
You can tell them whatever you actually believe about dinosaurs.
I probably wouldn’t tell my kids that the days in Genesis could just be really long days that encompass millions of years because this doesn’t actually solve any problems. The earth is created several days before the sun and the moon in the Genesis 1 account, and if these days are really periods of millions of years, then we would have to argue that the earth came into existence millions of years before the sun. That doesn’t make much sense to me. We can certainly be Christian and hold to an old earth (millions or billions of years old), and doing so solves our dinosaur problem. However, doing so does not so easily solve the other questions about the interpretation of Genesis 1. (Again, maybe science shouldn’t be the thing ruling our interpretation of Genesis.)
The idea of a young earth (thousands of years old, not millions or billions) makes a bit of sense to me for all the reasons mentioned above. However, if this is the case, we have no explanation for dinosaurs. Maybe fossils were just part of the mature earth that God created, in which case we have no record of Him explaining why He chose to put them there. We could speculate as to why, but that’s about all we can do. Maybe God made fossils just to entertain us. Maybe He did it so that we would have crazy discussions like this. Maybe He did it to give us the opportunity to trust Him rather than our own eyes. Maybe He let Satan put them there to test us. Maybe. Who knows.
The third possibility I have in mind is one that not many people hold but I find intriguing. Perhaps the stories of creation in Genesis are not about creation from nothing. The Bible certainly teaches that God created all things out of nothing in places outside of Genesis, but maybe this isn’t what Genesis itself is telling us about. In fact, if we go back to the very first few verses of Genesis, this seems to be a legitimate possibility. The first verse may be (as many interpreters understand it to be) simply an overview of what follows, like a title to the section: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” If we were to paraphrase this, maybe we’d say, “Here’s the story of when God created the heavens and the earth.” This verse then tells us no details and we have to move to verse two to look for the first details: “The earth was without form and void…” So at the beginning of Genesis, it seems to be a distinct possibility that the earth already existed in some sort of disordered, chaotic condition. Who knows why this was the case, but perhaps there was creation before there was creation. Perhaps dinosaurs existed back then before God recreated the world in Genesis 1. This would explain dinosaurs nicely, it would help us understand the creation stories in the Bible that say God created the world by killing a giant sea monster named Leviathan (see for example Psalm 74:12-17), and it would fit with God’s pattern of repurposing broken things into beautiful things (like He did with Noah and the flood and like He’s promised to do when Jesus returns).
