Misquoting Augustine Part 5

Having looked at Augustine’s view of Genesis from his “City of God”, it is clear Theistic Evolution advocates should not use Augustine’s “Literal Meaning of Genesis” to make that case because Augustine was fairly thoroughly committed to positions that are in direct opposition to their central premise.

I have my reasons for trusting the “plain meaning” of scripture where scripture seems to be plain, though I acknowledge not all in scripture is equally plain. There are many quotations from Augustine, Athanasius and others in the early church as well as the reformers, well prior to the “modernist/fundamentalist” controversy of the early 20^th century, that assert long held belief in the trustworthiness of scripture.

Having said that, I do not completely accept the Young Earth view in many details because I am not sure the text is entirely clear as to its meaning. I do not think the age of the earth is a critical issue and I think the length of a day in the creation week seems a fairly secondary concern, hardly central to the faith.

I am, however, sympathetic to the main concerns of YEC. Those concerns are

1) that the definition of science must not be limited to naturalism and

2) Christianity without the historical fall of Adam and Eve is more like a placebo than a medicine. I settle my own mind by focusing on a couple of key ideas.

Creation as described in Genesis 1-3 is a completely supernatural event where “nature” is in the process of being formed. As such it seems theologically foolish to think that “natural” explanations of what happened in the formation of the universe can be found.

For example, I would tend to think it a necessary axiom that if a Creator created all things, then the initial acts of creation involved not only the creation of matter and energy, but also included the creation of time and the creation of natural law to govern all He created. Until the creation is fully realized, natural law cannot be thought of as having a full definition. So the description given in Genesis 1 is an attempt to put into language processes that cannot be explained in terms of natural law at all – precisely because nature itself is not yet complete.

Russell Humphrey’s much maligned proposal that a sudden expansion of the universe similar to a big-bang would potentially lead to massive distortions in time is of interest even if his precise theory is wrong. The possibility that stars might be billions of years old in relative time while our own solar system might be younger is nothing more than an acknowledgment that time is a variable. Whatever forces might have been present in the creation of a universe out of nothing might imply that time during the creation week cannot be measured by current clocks.

If this is true, the length of a day in Genesis 1 is completely irrelevant. A “solar day” is a term that would correspond to nothing yet realized in “nature”. Words are usually defined by context, and a context in which there is no sun should lead us to be somewhat humble in asserting a day is a solar day.

Perhaps this idea that natural law cannot apply during the creation of nature seems “unscientific” to the academic mind. But it is not a repudiation of science. The suggestion that some things are beyond nature in no way suggests nature is itself unpredictable or that nothing is governed by natural law. Belief in a Creator leads to belief in an orderly creation and ultimately to a strong belief in natural law – but does not lead to a belief that natural law is the final reality. My own personal view is that until creation was complete, natural law was incomplete.

Even if I were to grant that “nature is all there is”, I would still be quite skeptical about assertions made from present observations about events that took place billions of years ago. But bald naturalism is not my concern here. I am dealing specifically with those who wish to confine a theistic belief in a creator with a naturalistic approach to the physical data. If God is beyond nature, then a supernatural creation event would seem to me to be beyond natural science.

I do not mean to propose a new amateur cosmology. Precisely the opposite. I am simply saying the events of the creation week would have been completely unique, completely unobservable, and is in a separate category from belief in an orderly knowable universe once creation was complete. As such my purely personal and somewhat “loose” view of Genesis 1-11 is something like this:

At some undefined point in the past, God began his work of creation. The brief and summary biblical description of separating the light from the darkness can probably not be correlated to anything we can now observe, nor should we place any time frame on it. The word “day” may well describe a period with a beginning and an end but we should not be concerned about its length. All the stuff of nature may all have been in a state quite different from what we now can observe. The Biblical revelation depicts real events but only minimally described.

The acts of separating seas from land likewise should not be tied too closely to anything natural law can currently observe. The biblical description of the setting of the sun and moon as “lights to govern” the day and night may be descriptions of the “settling” of the cosmos into a more normative state. Time itself might have been fairly ill-defined. Certainly natural law might have begun to reach a level of consistency as the building blocks of the natural order are placed, but it should not be assumed natural law is the final reality or is without some variance as the Creator continues to create.

I would think at this place in the narrative that the appearance of trees and plants and vegetation could have happened relatively rapidly. Genesis gives us a brief outline without any detailed explanation. What is described actually happened, but we cannot even speculate what methods were used.

I would tend to believe that the appearance of animals, birds and sea creatures also happened in a relatively short “geological” time, but would not insist on 24 hour “days” even at this stage of the creation.

None of the above is central to the faith. But I do believe the linkage between sin and death is a fairly critical issue and so the question of animal death before the fall takes on a great deal of importance. Theistic evolutionists would suggest that a normal cycle of life and death would occur prior to the fall because animals would be eating plants. But in no way should the eating of vegetation be considered “death” before the fall. Mowing my lawn does not “kill” the grass. “Life” in scripture is generally associated with breath, blood or both. Until the first animal death, the first shedding of blood, the first cessation of breath, there is no biblical “death”.

It has been suggested by some, including CS Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, that animal death in the sense of a calm, peaceful ending of natural life would not be inconsistent with the death/sin linkage in the New Testament. Death through violence, through the chase, with pain and suffering might be a better description of death as a result of sin. I would not hold that view but would not strongly oppose it. Another view suggested by Lewis is that the fall of Lucifer (which would have happened before Satan tempted Eve in the garden) may have caused a certain disorder in the universe. So as a matter of pure speculation, it could be possible that the animals were created and lived long lives without death of any sort until Lucifer was cast down from heaven. Could such a scenario account for some of the catastrophic death seen in the geologic record? I do not know, but it might allow for death being the result of sin and death occurring before the fall, and would give Adam and Eve and understanding of the phrase “If you eat of the tree…you will surely die”.

Finally, at a relatively recent point in time as we might measure it, perhaps 10-20,000 years ago, the first human beings were created. (Gaps in the genealogies in the Old Testament suggest we cannot pin a date on specific individuals). The uniqueness of man is very clearly stated in scripture. I believe humans are unique. In spite of the assertions of geneticists that human and chimp DNA is strikingly similar and must point to common ancestry, I would agree with the counter argument that similarities in various species may be evidence of common design as much as common ancestry. ID proponents also point to the massive amounts of information in so-called “junk” DNA that governs the construction of body parts to bolster the view that the similarities between humans and chimps are evidence of unique, though similar design, and not common ancestry.

At the completion of creation, supernatural activity would be complete, natural law would also be complete, save for the curse. Natural law by that time would have been settled, the constants of space and time, matter and energy would have become essentially fixed. The rebellion of Adam and Eve, the refusal to be creatures in obedience to a good creator who created a good world led directly to a curse, one which "all creation groans" for its release from. The principle of sin and death as well is now fixed in our world, as much a part of natural law as gravity.

Am I an expert in any of this? Not at all. This is a personal viewpoint based on varied lines of reasoning from starting points that are sometimes quite distant from the creation/evolution controversy. I trust scripture for a variety of reasons, some having little to do with science/faith questions. I have no idea when the most distant star was created. But I do believe that Adam and Eve were historical figures, I also believe sin introduced both physical and spiritual death into our world, as did Augustine.

To believe otherwise would be, in my mind, to believe a different form of Christianity altogether. Paul said that if Christ was not raised then our faith was in vain and we were to be the most pitied of all men. His suggestion was that a supernatural event, the resurrection from the grave of a God/man was the central fact of the universe, an event that is simply not tied to natural law. He connected that resurrection of the “second Adam” to the death of the first Adam. Our eternal life is linked to Christ's physical death and resurrection just as surely as our predicament is linked to the physical, spiritual and eternal death that resulted from Adam's sin. It was central to Paul’s theology and to Augustine’s.

The point is simply this: Creation, like any other miracle in scripture, cannot be fully explained in terms of natural law. It is by definition a supernatural event just as the virgin birth, the resurrection and ascension are events “beyond nature”. The error theistic evolution makes lies precisely there. Theistic evolutionists attempt to utilize natural law to explain supernatural events in the distant past and sacrifice the fairly plain meaning of Genesis 2-11 on the altar of naturalism in the process. What is left is a Christianity that no longer has any coherent answer to the question of evil, death and suffering. What is left is a mere shell of the Christianity that Augustine clearly believed in. And to use selective quotes from Augustine to sell their viewpoint is false and dishonest.