Science and the Doctrine of Creation

I often find myself bewildered by the debate in American churches over the theory of evolution and the veracity of the biblical account of creation.  Even a cursory examination of the first two chapters of Genesis reveals two distinct stories, each with its own sequential order.  If you truly are a literalist, you cannot maintain that they are both "true" in any factual, historical sense, quite apart from any argument involving the discoveries and theories of science.

In the first account, 1:1—2:4, the very first thing God creates is light, followed in order by the "firmament" to separate the primordial waters; the gathering of the waters below the firmament into oceans, revealing dry land; vegetation; the "lights" of the sky, sun, moon, and stars; birds and marine life; the land animals; and finally, humankind, whom he creates in his own image as male and female.  There is no implication here that male takes precedence over female, but each is complementary to the other, two halves to a whole.  Both are needed to reflect fully the glory of God.  The account then concludes with the blessing of the seventh day, the Sabbath, the day on which God rested, long seen by Jewish and Christian commentators alike as the crowning glory of creation.   

The second account, 2:5-25, has a very different order.  The story takes up after God has created the heavens and the earth, but before any plant or other variety of life has appeared.  A stream rises up from the ground, creating mud, from which God forms man, a male human, and breaths life into him, the very first creature to have life.  He then plants a garden for him, to provide both enjoyment and nourishment.  Next, he creates out of the ground all the animals, not for food for the man, but to provide him companionship, since it is not good for him to be alone.  This effort fails miserably, however, so God causes a sleep to fall upon the man and takes from him a rib, out of which he creates a woman.  When he presents the woman to him, the man becomes very excited and declares, "This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!"  The creation portion of the story ends with the declaration the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.  There is no mention of a Sabbath.

If we were to chart the sequence of each account, it would look like this:

Order	Genesis 1:1—2:4	Genesis 2:5-25
1.	light	earth and heavens
2.	firmament	human male
3.	oceans and land	vegetation
4.	vegetation	animals
5.	sun, moon, and stars	human female
6.	birds and marine life
7.	land animals
8.	humankind
9.	Sabbath

There are other differences, too.  The first account is rhythmic, poetic in structure, like a litany.  The second is written as a more conventional narrative.  The first account calls God Elohim, while the second uses the sacred name YHWH.  In the first account, God creates solely through his word, while the second is much more anthropomorphic, picturing God forming creatures out of dust of the earth, breathing life into man, planting a garden.  They are clearly distinct accounts from separate sources. 

All of this raises certain questions in the mind of the believer, whether Jewish or Christian:  If we are to understand Scripture as word from God, in what sense are these stories true?   Why do we have two creation stories, rather than one?  And how are we to understand God at work in the processes relating to our origins that science describes, including evolution?

The stories in Genesis are mythic in the best sense of word.  They are symbolic stories pointing to  deeper truths than what they literally convey.  We have two distinct stories because each reveals a different set of these truths.  The preoccupation of the first is the creative power of God's word and the goodness of what it creates, while the second is more an introduction to the story of the fragmentation of human relationships that follows in Genesis 3.  We are meant to understand from the first that the world we experience is the creation of God, that it is good, that humanity is the pinnacle of his work on earth, and that the Sabbath rest has a holy purpose.  We also are made to understand that humanity reflects the glory of God in a unique way and that male and female are both required to reveal that glory in its fullness.  The second account focuses on man, on God's desire to provide for him, including the excitement of the erotic companionship of woman.  Its "conclusion," which of course is not conclusion at all, but a set up for the crisis created by the disobedience to come, is a presentation of human innocence and intimacy as a gift from God. It gives us a glimpse of what the relationship between man and woman was intended to be. 

The unknown editor of Genesis who, centuries ago, set these stories together in the text seems to have had no difficulty with the fact that the details of these stories do not "line up."  The ancients, whether we are talking about the rabbis of the Mishnah or the early fathers of the Church, understood Scripture to reveal truth on many different levels.  They did not suffer the preoccupation with factual truth, whether empirical or historical, that so haunts the modern mind.  Ironically, the modern fundamentalist is as much a product of Descartes and the Enlightenment as the scientific materialist.  For both, it seems, the only truth that really matters is factual truth. 

Evolution is best understood theologically as the mechanism through which God has created--and continues to create-- the breathtaking variety of life, in all its fullness and beauty.  Creation is not static, but dynamic and ongoing, "evolving," if you will.  It has a history, a direction, moving ever forward into greater levels of complexity.  Salvation history, the biblical vision of the working out of God's purposes in time, with all things reaching fulfillment in the "fullness" of time, intertwines with the narrative arc of creation, the natural history of the cosmos, each shaped by the same divine energy.  

Though it may be disconcerting to some, there is no inherent contradiction between the scientific theory of evolution and the theological doctrine of creation.  Indeed, they are beautifully, even elegantly complementary.  But it does take a work of imagination to see how they connect, a willingness to step outside the confining box of Cartesian thinking and embrace the power of symbol and myth.