Oh….wait. Science does show clearly (one heck of a lot clearer than it does show evolution) that humans that are truly dead for 3 days don’t come back to life. How can we reconcile this without becoming the closed minded church of Galileo? Maybe the resurrection was metaphor. Maybe the ancients didn’t really care about a real literal resurrection. Maybe they just cared about hope coming out of disappointment.

What? Are you arguing with me? Why are you being so closed minded about things. We all know that the dead don’t literally rise. Don’t we? The sooner Christians stop clinging to silly notions such as this the sooner we can have a genuine faith.

Or…..we could believe what scripture says and let science catch up later. Your choice my friend.

like your posts
Greg R

I guess the problem is that we’re in the thrall of a cherished creation myth.

Number one, it raises the possibility that human beings might evolve to something else, when the Bible says that we are God’s ultimate creation.

Number two, it suggests that someday human beings could become extinct.

In any case, I can agree with everything you say. I don’t believe that implies a literal 6-solar-day creation, or a literal talking serpent, or a literal world-wide flood. They key is in what you say – the story is bound up in actual events. And also I think in a (Freudian) slip you wrote, “while the tools of scholarship have changed radically from Biblical times, the basic knowledge of what constitutes as true and what is fancy are different.” (I’m pretty sure you meant to say “are NO different”)

The task remains for us to discern which elements are story, and which elements are actual events – what is history and what is fancy? So I believe in an exodus of Israelites from Egypt under the leadership of Moses and divine guidance from God. But do I believe there were 600,000 men along with their families? Well … there hasn’t been any archeological or anthropological evidence to corroborate such a massive migration of a single people group in that time and place, so … maybe not. But as the Biblical story moves farther along, it becomes more and more historically aligned with evidence we have from archaeology, so that when we get towards the histories of David and Solomon we’re mostly historical, and into the time of the exile, return, and then, I assume and believe, in the New Testament we are fundamentally historical.

Which I take as a comforting thought. Gen 1-3 is not the summit of Christianity – Christ is. Neither is Gen 1-3 the focus of the Old Testament nor even the Pentateuch. There’s important theological Truth expressed in the primeval history of creation, yes. But the discernment of it is not exactly a closed case.

Now, I’m not saying the church is always wrong. That’s a silly straw man I never constructed. We don’t have to consider only one of two extremes – i.e., either a) church is right and science is wrong or b) science is right and church is wrong. Not only are both of those silly conclusions, but framing the discussion in that way is a silly starting point.

What I am saying is the similarity to the evolution affair remains – i.e., does the Church today approach the Biblical text with a proper negotiation of literal, literate, historic, and scientific context? That’s why we have the fanning out of the conversation from just creation vs. evolution into things like theistic evolution, etc. If we want to go back to the simplistic this-or-that, black-or-white mode of approaching the issue, we would be wise to see how that panned out for us in the past.

Theistic evolution may be for the evolution affair what Newtonian physics was for the heliocentrism affair. I don’t know. I’m not asserting any single side or perspective. I’m arguing for a more open mindset.