An
article on science and biblical interpretation caught my eye last week
(Oct. 13, 2013) not because Dr. Jason Lisle is a “young earth” creationist (he
is the director of research at the Institute
of Creation Research), an untenable position
from my perspective, but because of his claim that people should not “rely on
science rather than the Bible to answer questions about our origin, even for
just parts.” Let me cite a portion of the article.
A "young earth" creationist, who also believes the
universe is much younger than many astronomers calculate, says once people
begin to rely on science rather than the Bible to answer questions about our
origin, even for just parts, they are asking for trouble.
"It's a very slippery slope when you decide that there
are some sections of the Bible that you are going to allow the secular
scientist to tell you what it really means," said Dr. Jason Lisle, during
an interview with the press shortly after his debate at the National Conference
on Christian Apologetics with astronomer and pastor Dr. Hugh Ross, who argued
for a universe that is nearly 15 billion years old.
"You've opened a very dangerous door," Lisle
continued. "Basically, you've decided to say that 'I'm going to make the
secular scientist my ultimate standard by which I interpret the scriptures' and
if you are consistent with that, and most people are not, thank goodness, but
if you are well, hey, most scientists don't believe the resurrection of the dead
is possible."
In other words, people become susceptible to their own
interpretations of the Bible at other points in its books and chapters as well.
The problem, he suggests, is that if one allows “the secular
scientist to tell you what it {the Bible} really means,” “you've decided to say
that 'I'm going to make the secular scientist my ultimate standard by which I
interpret the scriptures'.” This creates further issues, according to Lisle,
because “most scientists don't believe the resurrection of the dead is possible.”
Finally, the article says, though it is not clear that these are Lisle’s words,
if people doubt a portion of the Bible they “become susceptible to their own
interpretations of the Bible at other points in its books and chapters as well.”
The article states that “Lisle's full-time apologetics
ministry is focused on the defense of Genesis.” About the age of the universe,
he says that “when you make an age estimate scientifically you have to make
certain assumptions, and for that reason you can never really prove the age of
something scientifically…You need a history book and fortunately we have a
history book and not just any history book. It's the history book by the one
who actually did the creating, the one who never lies and the one who knows
everything – that history book is the one written by God.”
At the conference at which he spoke, Lisle was asked as to
whether issues of the age of creation were related at all to salvation. He
answered that
“in a sense it's not. You know, believing in six days [for
the creation of the earth] is not a requirement for salvation … God makes it
very clear in His word – we're saved by His grace received through faith in
Christ and not by works. It's not requiring to have our theology exactly right,
but that doesn't mean we should be sloppy in our theology. The time scale of
creation does have an effect on Christian theology," he said.
"I would argue that although you can be saved apart from
believing in six days, in a way, salvation does not make sense apart from
creation in six days. If you believe in millions of years, if you believe the
fossils are millions of years old, you have death before Adam sinned, in which
case death cannot be the result of Adam's sin if it was already there for
millions of years. If death is not the penalty for sin then why did Jesus die
on the cross?
"The Gospel message which is predicated on death being
the penalty for sin and Christ paying that for us. That itself is predicated on
Creation, that goes back to a literal Genesis," Lyle concluded.
I wanted to outline the article carefully because I think
there are a number of faulty or limited assumptions and claims made about the nature and
process of biblical interpretation and its relationship to science and also one
significant point he makes about the relationship of the age of the earth to
Christian doctrine.
Let me first outline what I see as the faulty or limited assumptions
or claims:
1)
We should rely on the Bible rather than on
science to answer questions about our origin;
2)
We should not let secular scientists tell us
what some sections of the Bible really mean;
3)
If people pay attention to science they “become
susceptible to their own interpretations of the Bible at other points in its
books and chapters as well;”
4)
Science causes you “to make certain assumptions,”
with the implication that how Lisle reads the Bible does not rely on
assumptions;
5)
The Bible is a “history book…written by God.”
The one significant point he makes is about the possible or
potential implications of the age of the universe for Christian teaching about
original sin and the purpose of Jesus’ death on the cross if physical death was
not “the penalty for sin” but had existed for millions of years. There are
possible answers to this problem, but he has here pointed out a significant theological
issue.
As to faulty or limited assumptions or claims:
1)
Should we rely on the Bible rather than on
science to answer questions about our origin? I think there is often a mistake
about what the Bible is and what the Bible is intended to answer and this is
related to the various genres of biblical literature. At some level, Genesis
does tell us about our origin: creation was the purpose oriented result of a
loving God, who created this world as very good. These are theological claims
about the nature of creation, but it does not seem that Genesis can answer the questions
related to the processes of creation. We can see the theological impetus in the
mythological nature of the creation accounts, and that there is more than one
creation account for instance in Genesis 1-3, but the claim that science has
nothing to teach us suggests that interpretation is a
literalistic enterprise, obvious to any reader and intended to be read as an
historical narrative and not as a mythic-poetical theological account.
Such a reading is also
anti-rational, in that it proposes that whatever reason can propose to us, in
this case the empirical processes of natural science, must be rejected a priori because they disagree with a
literalistic, historical reading of Genesis 1-3. This leads to the second assumption.
2)
Is it problematic to let secular scientists tell
us what some sections of the Bible really mean? I must admit that I interpret
the Bible, not with an eye toward secular scientists, but with my full attention
on the text of the Bible, using all of the resources available to an
interpreter, such as historical context, the creation myths of other ancient
peoples, the literary genre of the text, and human reason. Human reason is
where secular science might come into play, but it is not because they are “scientists”
as such, but because what such scientists propose about the nature of reality
seems reasonable. The reality is that we all must pay attention to reason and
the reasonableness of our claims. We can certainly have foundational
disagreements about what we accept as reasonable evidence for interpreting
biblical texts, but the fact that evidence begins with scientists does not mean
that they are “interpreting” biblical texts, only that we accept some of their
evidence as valuable for interpreting certain texts. There is a major
difference in these stances, as I still accept the revealed nature of the
Bible, which many scientists (and non-scientists for that matter) would find unreasonable,
but which I find reasonable to maintain along with some scientific evidence
about the age of the cosmos and the origin of human beings through the
processes of evolution. The fact that I see evolution and creation guided by
God would set me apart from many scientists, yet I see it as reasonable, and
can accept both the theological claims of Genesis and the scientific claims of
science.
3)
The claim that if people pay attention to
science they “become susceptible to their own interpretations of the Bible at
other points in its books and chapters as well” supposes that Lisle does not
have his own interpretation of the Bible, but “an” interpretation of the Bible
which is “the” biblical interpretation. This sort of naïve realism is common
among some interpreters, who do not see themselves as influenced by bias,
prejudice, limitations of understanding, or their own historical time period,
but only by “the truth,” or “the proper interpretation” of the Bible. Yet, all
biblical interpretation is personally and historically conditioned and has not
always been agreed upon or accepted at other stages of history. This is not a
relativistic position, but one that takes into account perspective and the need
to constantly have one’s own interpretations placed under scrutiny in the cold
light of evidence and reason.
4)
So is it true that science causes you “to make
certain assumptions”? It does; it makes the assumption that you will pay
attention to evidence, even if, ultimately, you reject that evidence or
disagree with that evidence. If scientific evidence is the product of human
reason then we ought to pay attention to that evidence. Science does not cause
you, however, to make the assumption of a non-theistic world, if that is what
Lisle means by “make certain assumptions.” All interpreters make certain
assumptions about the world. I assume that there is a God and that the Bible
was revealed by God through human beings in history; I also assume that this
world can be studied and understood empirically, although that is not the
extent of human knowledge or knowing.
I would suggest that Lisle reads
the Bible with a number of assumptions – that it is the literal world of God,
that it is inerrant, etc., - and that he would be willing to support these
assumptions if called upon. Every interpreter brings assumptions to his or her
reading of the text and science, which relies upon reason, is one of the
assumptions that rational readers of the Bible must bring to the biblical text,
that is, that the biblical God acts in ways which make sense to human readers,
though they ways of God are not always obvious or clear. If rationality does
not underlie our reading of the Bible, it is not clear how interpreters can
speak to one another.
5)
One assumption I do not make, however, is that
the Bible is a “history book…written by God.” There is history in the Bible,
and there are historical realities upon which Christian faith is based, but not
every text in the Bible is intended as “history” or as “historical.” Some passages are mythic, some are poetic,
some are prophetic, and some are historical. This does make the task of the
interpreter more complex, as the interpreter must make decisions and arguments
as to the genre of the text and propose why a text must be construed in one way
or another, but it is the proper task of the interpreter. I would certainly
argue for the historicity of Jesus’ life, crucifixion and resurrection, though
not every interpreter would, and this is the job of the interpreter.
The second issue is what is meant
by the Bible being a book “written by God.” This implies that God has
transcribed the Bible, or inspired human beings almost as automatons to write
the Bible as directed by God. The nature of inspiration is a difficult issue
for Christians of all sorts, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Evangelical, but
the general Christian understanding is that human beings used all of their
abilities, knowledge, skill and personality to write texts which are, in some
way, guided by God, but that these are texts which emerge from and reflect the
historical time periods in which they are written, the scientific limitations
of those ages, and actual skills and abilities of the authors. If the claim
that the Bible is a book “written by God” is meant to suggest that there is no
human involvement in the writing of the Bible, this does not make sense of the human
production of the texts or the actual texts in their historical context.
Lisle is correct, though, that scientific understandings might
impact the nature of Christian theological claims about an actual “Adam and
Eve,” or the doctrine of original sin. I wrote about this a couple of
years ago at America Magazine and it is a more complex issue than many
Christians might think. Catholic theology itself is not as clear cut on this
issue as it might first seem. I
wrote there,
Apart from the general claim that we cannot ignore the
relationship between science and theology, significantly he {Pope John Paul II}
stated that “theology will have to call on the findings of science to one
degree or another as it pursues its primary concern for the human person, the
reaches of freedom, the possibilities of Christian community, the nature of
belief and the intelligibility of nature and history.” This is a task that will
be perpetually unfinished in some ways, as both science and theology are
perpetually unfinished, but it seems that clarity is still needed in determining
the basic implications of what even a theistic understanding of evolution
implies for human origins. This is quite apart from the literary study of
Genesis, which has clearly outlined the complex nature of these myths of human
origins, their relationship to and dependence upon other ancient Near Eastern
accounts of human origins and the theological not historical nature of these
accounts. As John Paul II asked,
These are all excellent questions, but for those of us who
have thought the answers of human origins in Catholic theology were more
clearly in line with the findings of evolutionary theory, there seems to be
more ambiguity than I was aware. Even if Catholic theology is long beyond
Mohler's unease that the Bible is more than history or his rejection of
evolutionary theory, it seems that the questions he asks regarding Adam and Eve
still have answers vaguely similar to his.
The theological issues Lisle raises are significant, but
biblical interpretation will not be able to answer them if it rejects science
out of hand, for the rejection of science as such is the rejection of reason
and biblical interpretation must rely on reason. There is no other option.
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