“Creation and Evolution”
(2nd message in a 5-part sermon series)
Sermon Transcript for October 9, 2005
By Rev. Dan Sinkhorn
In today’s sermon we are going to continue to confront the controversies. Specifically, we are going to talk about creation and evolution. Now in a few minutes I promise to give you a very reverent and respectful approach to the topics that I hope will be helpful for us as we try to juxtapose the Biblical count and scientific explanations of creation. But for the moment, I want to start us with a little bit of comedy, my favorite kind—satire. Now, if you are not in to satire I don’t know if this is going to work for you. Now you might be familiar with the works of an author by the name of Douglas Adams. His work is best known to my generation because he’s the fellow who created The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Now the Hitchhiker’s Guide is a book that you access electronically. It was really quite an innovative idea back in the 1970’s. Now we have them in the form of our palm pilots and so forth. But it is billed as being slightly better than the Encyclopedia Galactica. And Douglas Adams tries to tell us a little bit about ourselves in some of his satire. In fact, hopefully you’ll begin to realize as you hear what I want to share with you today. When we are confronting the controversies, we need to be willing to acknowledge some of the absurdities that we try to press upon one another.
During one of its many instructional monologues, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I’ll refer to as “The Guide”, talks about itself as being more popular than, for example, the Encyclopedia Galactica. And it points out that one of the weaknesses of books like the Encyclopedia Galactica is there limited explanations of God. For example, under that heading it refers to some people on a particular planet who don’t believe that God created in the way that we tend to think; but rather they believe that they were the descendents of the great white handkerchief which will come back one day to wipe them clean. The guide indicates that these people on this particular planet believe that God didn’t create them, but rather sneezed them into existence. And that’s why when those people worship they say “achoo” where we tend to say “amen”.
Now to give you one more illustration, Douglas Adams uses his insightful wit to teach us something about how we are God’s undoing sometimes. Now he is referring in this particular case in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to something called the “Babel fish”. Now the Babel fish is a mysterious creature from another planet that is small and because of some remarkable design feature you can stick it in your ear and you are able to understand every language spoken anywhere in the universe. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was such a thing? And this is what The Hitchhiker’s Guide says about that, “Now it is such a bizarre improbable coincidence that anything so mind bogglingly useful could have evolved merely by chance. But some thinker’s have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this. ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing.’ ‘But,’ says man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead give away, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist and, therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t.’” And then as the story goes, God then disappears in a puff of logic. For we have no use for Him anymore. Could it be that we are at risk of doing that very thing sometimes? When we start talking about these controversial issues, maybe we have neglected to recognize the person and nature of God so that by our own logic we have pushed God right out of existence, even those of us who claim to worship Him.
Now when we talk about creation and evolution, there are basically four ways that people tend to look at the topic. And so we are going to look at those together now.
New Earth Biblical Literal List: The first approach I would like to call to mind is what some people call the “New earth Biblical literal list” account for creation. Now the way the Biblical literalist would approach this is to say that the earth is very young, perhaps as young as 6,000 years old; not more than 10,000 years old. That there is a sort of science to what has happened in creation, but we have to accept that it literally happened in six, twenty-four hour days. And we are told by folks who would call themselves “creation scientists” that this literalistic understanding is acceptable and that there are very practical, scientific explanations.
Now in this particular point of view, they would tell us, for example, that there was in fact a great flood that covered the entire earth. And, in fact, that before that great flood, dinosaurs coexisted with people. And that it was through the great flood, for example, the dinosaurs were wiped out. And that when the incredible weight of all this water on the earth that perhaps came from the collapsing of the ether, this water shell around the earth, that the fossils were formed because of the pressure on the decaying bones was so great.
Now this particular point of view has a lot of scientific merit, but it’s a hard sell because it is so limited in its scope and so unrelentingly committed to the letter of the Word of the Bible. And so it is hard for people to accept that point of view, but it does have great scientific merits. For example, the creation scientists’ belief that the earth is not more than 10,000 years old is calculated by the sum of the years described in the various lineages of the Bible. So that you can just add up the years and you can see about how old everything should be. You can reconcile this idea that the fossils were really compressed by these humongous amounts of weight of water against the silt and the mud and the earth that was under the flood and you begin to say, “Well, now that sounds reasonable.” And it goes along with scientific discoveries.
And you might be interested to know that for well over 3,000 years Judeo Christian scholars, believers, scientists have accepted this point of view as the most likely to be correct. One of the Scriptures that is used to reimburse this idea is to take it literally right from the first two chapters of Genesis and to see a very detailed account of the very scientific construction of creation. This point of view has come into question a lot lately because of new technology, because of the ever changing world of philosophy, theology.
Old Earth Biblical Literalist: So this brings me to the second most common point of view, which is the old earth Biblical literalist point of view which goes like this: Pretty much the same as what you heard about the young earth point of view except that there is room in there—there is a little bit of wiggle room. And it is possible that while these things that are described in the Genesis account of creation literally happened, they may not have happened precisely within the time frame described within the limits of language. For example, in II Peter, Chapter 3, Verse 8, Peter says that for God a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day. And so some could say then, “Well, we don’t really know what a day means when we are talking days of creation in the Genesis account.” It could be that when God did something on a certain day in Genesis it took a long, long time. And this was part of that process. It says here the person or the scientific reasoning theologian, whatever you want to call them, who is anticipating that Genesis is accurate but is not as constrained by time, the earth could be as few as 4.6 billion years old. They’ll offer this with what some scientists in the Genesis creation science realm would call the “gap theory” which goes something like this. If you look at the first three versus of Genesis, you see that in verse one God has created the heavens and the earth before the day is over. And it is possible that while earth has been created but is in its roughest form, this is when the dinosaurs roamed, this is when the earth was surrounded with a cloud or ether or moisture. Something like if you watch a science show about the Planet Venus, let’s say. And there was a sort of tropical environment all over the world. And this was where creation got its start; but not before day one was over! Then in verse two we’re told that the earth was covered in darkness and water. And some people would theorize that that might be again, before the end of the first day of creation, the demise of the dinosaurs. Maybe an asteroid collided with the planet and flooded the earth and covered it in darkness and killed everything that was alive up to that point. But before the end of day one, verse three describes the recreation, so to speak, of the earth. So here’s another point of view. It’s a long if, but it is still a story that you can trust right out of the pages of the Bible, even the first three verses of the Bible.
Naturalist View and a Mythological View: Now to me the most common and most controversial point of view about creation is the naturalist view that says in opposition to the mythological view or another way to put it, a naturalist view and a mythological view. The first one is not hard to explain and yet it is. Though it is simple to explain and yet it is very simple to explain probably the most cumbersome belief about creation because basically this kind of thinking basically says that the naturalistic point of view is that it just happened. That there was a bang, there was a creation, earth started, life started, it evolved, it crawled out of the water and it just became everything that we know it to be today. And that the Bible, particularly the Genesis account, is mythology. It’s a story for ignorant people from thousands of years ago who wouldn’t have been able to understand or explain how things came to be as they are and so they gave up a story rather than to look at things scientifically.
Some of the most hurtful things that I have ever hood said toward Christian believers have been said by people who consider the Bible a myth and science the true God. Some of the most truthful things I have ever heard Christians say to folks who ask questions have been said by those who hold an extreme point of view in the opposite direction. They say the Bible is true just as it is. That’s the end of it and anybody who has a contrary idea is wrong and might even be a little bit stupid. I’ve heard some pretty hateful things said over the years about this topic. And what I find interesting is that the real controversy in the issue isn’t so much how we understand God or God’s creation but how we figure out how to talk to one another about it without getting mean and hateful.
Scientific synthesis: Now there is another point of view that reckons pretty well with my own perspective. It is a sort of synthesis between the Biblical account and scientific understanding. And that is an account that basically allows for the possibility that the Bible is right and science is right. That those folks who interpret the Bible for us—theologians, Bible scholars—would like for us to understand that the Bible is much more about who and why then how and when. That we ought not to consider the Bible a history book or a science book; certainly a book full of truth, but a book that is intended to teach us about the person and nature of God. In this vein of thinking you can accept that science is not in opposition to faith and that faith does not stand in opposition to science. You can accept that God inspired the words of the Bible and that they are trustworthy and true because they speak of the nature of our Creator, because they tell us how to live and exist with one another in the midst of God’s creation. In other words, God has given us creation and God has given us the Owner’s Manual for creation. The owner is, not us. The owner is the Lord God, creator of all things. And the Owner’s Manual tells us about the creator. Not so much about the created.
So there is no reason for us to have conflict between science and faith. In fact, what I find interesting is that there are many instances where science to me proves what I have always believed in faith. Did you know that about 3200 years before someone ever came up with the big bang theory, the Bible had already captured the essence of that theory? Because the Bible tells us in the very first lines that the universe had a beginning, that there was a place where it all started, and that it was from this beginning that all the galaxies, all the stars and planets were formed. Did you realize that 3,000 years before chemists figured out the very basic elements of human beings and all their earth that the Book of Genesis told us that God had taken the dust or the stuff of earth and shaped it into man? And that it should come as no surprise to us that science has revealed to us that the very building blocks, the DNA that make up the cells of our body, are the same kind of building blocks that make up the cells of a cocklebur. That the creator of all things has used the same structure to erect all that God has created!
When you consider the synthesis between science and the Bible you begin to realize that there is room for both points of view. One thing that I am appalled at, personally, is that in history we have ample evidence of Christians in the name of Jesus punishing science when in fact science was simply trying to affirm God. Many of the great scientists, let’s say Copernicus and Galileo, set out to affirm God and they got punished by the church for it. We might think that it is unique living in a time where science seems to be in such opposition to the church, but the reality is it has swung back and forth for centuries. And in reality, science has a lot to say to us about the nature of God.
Let me see if I can wrap it up this way. The Bible tells us the whole story of God’s relationship with God’s creation, from beginning to end. The Bible tells us that God created everything using basically the same formula. And the one unique thing about people was that God had breathed in to us His own image. That God had given us something more. Now, let’s just break that down and take it as simply as we know how because there has been so much hurt done over this. To say that we have been made in the image of God does not mean that because God made man first, God’s a man. Nor is God a white guy with a long beard down to here. There is nothing in the Bible that says that to us and it’s high time we just get rid of those kinds of notions. We don’t know what God looks like but we can get a hint by doing something very simple. Go look in a mirror. You see, God has created everything in God’s good way, but God created only one thing in God’s image—us!
And I’ve come to discover this is where parenting has been helpful in my Christian living because I’ve come to discover that there aren’t a lot of differences between human people, especially children, and other parts of God’s creation. For example, one of my greatest and favorite ways to do my personal anthropological study is to sit on my back porch and watch the children at recess at Webb Elementary School. Now that’s like a nature show if ever I’ve watched one. And you begin to realize that people behave a lot like the other things that God created unless we chose to embrace the image of God that we’ve been made in. We begin to realize that like everything in nature we have a tendency to take the path of least resistance. And yet Christ points us to the image of God who does things the hard way for loves sake. We begin to realize like everything else in creation we are people of habits. That’s why most of you are sitting in the same place you sit in every Sunday.
But God calls us to be more like God. Now here’s where we’re get in trouble. Here’s where I wax like the ultimate liberal when I tell you that I believe even those who claim they don’t know God have been made in God’s image. They just haven’t figured it out yet. When we look at beautiful senseless things like art, when we see that we have been given the gifts of creation which are just like God suddenly we wake up and realize that there is this God-like quality even in those who don’t yet know God which is, friends, one of the reasons it is so vitally important that we look around every Sunday morning at the people sitting in the pews amongst us and recognize that in that person next to you is the image of God. The question is, “How thoroughly have they gotten in touch with it?”
Each one of us is given the gifts of the Creator to create. And so we make children; we make things; we make beautiful things that serve no useful purpose. We make music; we make art; we use science to be like God in preserving life, improving the quality of life. Let me tell you that as the father of two children with terrible disabilities, I am beholden to science because God has steered us towards the scientists who have the answers that only God could give to the image of God and the scientists. The Creator has unraveled some of the mysteries for them and because of their God-like qualities and imagination they were able to find out how to fix what was wrong. And so I talk to a lot of hard-core scientists over the years and some of them, I’m sure, think that I’m a fool because of my belief in this invisible God, because of my need to have them pray with me before they operate on my child. And yet, when it is all over I always say, “You see, God made you better than you thought you could be. You see, God revealed to you what was going on in there because God made it. And God used you to answer my prayer.” And then science and mythology have to agree to disagree or to finally get along. And it happens every day.
I believe that we should teach children that there is an intelligent design to this earth. But I also believe that if we didn’t teach them, they’d figure it out just like we have. I have observed in my own life over the years some of the most spectacular sites that nature has to offer. I’ve found myself in awe before God’s creation. I witnessed the birth of my own children and there is nothing so awesome as that. I have experienced God when I didn’t even know who God was in a very personal way because I came in touch with God’s creation. And like you I know many, many people who started there relationship with God, that saving, eternal relationship, because they encountered God’s creation and knew that this was no accident.
So I’m okay with not teaching evolution in the schools if that’s so darn important. I’m okay with, I’m not okay with evolution exactly, but I’m okay if they want to talk about that because I know that God is bigger, because I know that God will prevail just as God always has throughout all of creation. Could it be we spend too much time arguing about petty things and not enough time encountering the real person of God and allowing Him to open our minds to what the world is all about and what all of creation points to—which is the Creator.
I close here with this little bit of Theology 101. God existed before all of creation and God’s existence does not depend upon creation. However, we aren’t God. We are the created and we owe all of our existence to the Creator. This person we are talking about is big, really, really big. So we do the best we can and keep loving Him because He first loved us.
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