Not Literally Six Days: Why Theistic Evolution is Consistent with the Bible, and a Literal Interpretation of Genesis 1-2 is Not.

elief in a Six 24-hour Day Creation on biblical grounds is irrational and should not be taught to Christians today.

Them's fightin' words, against the cherished beliefs of many "Evangelicals," I know.  In fact, I discovered last month that the denomination in which I was baptized, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, has as one of its beliefs, which no LCMS pastor can preach contrary to, a commitment to literal six-day Creationism.*  Not the reason I left, but a decent reason to stay out, even were I not so enamoredly Catholic.  I really think that Christians' bad arguments and irrationally dogmatic insistence on literal six-day Creationism cause atheists and other unbelievers to reject not only this peripheral issue, but the entire idea of Christianity, and the amazing person of Jesus Christ.  At the very least it makes a tempting straw man argument that we should not provide the enemies of our Faith.

Raphael wasn't lying, either: School of Athens (1511, C.E.)

So why am I so sure the literalists are wrong?  It's quite simple, and (this may surprise you) it has nothing to do with the current state of Academia's research into evolutionary and geological history.  Yes, Earth science obviously points to the fact that our planet is billions of years old, rather than thousands.  But that in itself does not mean that an all-powerful God could not give Adam a belly-button, as it were:  make the planet seem as though it were so old, for the same aesthetic reasons a painter might place perspective into a flat painting.  The painter does not lie to his audience by doing so, and neither would God be lying if he so desired.  But, patient reader, we have zero scriptural reason to believe He did, as I will show.

The reason I can be so sure is that the Bible contradicts itself if one interprets it literally in this regard.  As biblical scholars know from stylistic analysis of the Hebrew text, there are two Creation accounts given in Genesis from different literary traditions.  Genesis 1: 12-13 reads: "The earth brought forth every kind of plant that bears seed and every kind of fruit tree on earth that bears fruit with its seed in it. God saw how good it was.  Evening came, and morning followed--the third day."

If we skip ahead a bit to day six, we see that on the sixth day God first creates the animals (24-25), then he creates man, male and female (verses 27-31).  In this account, then, we have this order: 

(1) All Plants, (2) All Animals, (3) Man and Woman 

But in Chapter 2, we get a very different and temporally contradictory order:

(1) Man, (2) At Least Some Plants, (3) Animals, (4) Woman.

"At the time when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens--while as yet there was no field shrub on earth and no grass of the field had sprouted, for the LORD God had sent no rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the soil, but a stream was welling up out of the earth and was watering all the surface of the ground--the LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.  Then the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and he placed there the man whom he had formed."  Later, in verse 18, we hear God saying that he wants to make a partner for man, and as a result in 19, he forms the animals, followed by woman as the final solution to man's loneliness:

God always has the best solutions for man's problems.

So as I said, in this account we have man appearing before field-shrubs (a type of plant), after which the plants are placed in a garden, and then later, animals appear followed by woman: 

(1) Man, (2) At Least Some Plants, (3) Animals, (4) Woman.

Now I say "at least some" plants for the sake of argument.  Literalists have tried to rationalize their irrational interpretation of the text by explaining that the second account mentions only certain kinds of plants.  Yet logically, if we're going to be woodenly literal, these plants also would have been made on the third day of creation along with the rest, before man.  To make matters worse for the literalist case, in the first account, animals are made first, while in the second, animals are made for the purpose of ruling them out as a suitable partner for man, who has not only already been made, but is situated in the garden.  Again the literalists demonstrate their intellectual dishonesty by translating the simple past verb "formed" as pluperfect "had formed" (cf. New International Version) to try to extricate themselves from this problem.  Scholarly consensus agrees this is not how the Hebrews read the text, nor is it a good translation based on Hebrew mechanics (nor does it solve the plants-or-man-first timing problem).*

"...and he became a living being."  Sistine Chapel (1512, C.E.)

Praise be to God that he inspired the scriptures so as to prevent our misinterpreting the intended scope of the Creation passages.  For in the first account, God's orderliness in developing his Creation from the lower beings to the highest pinnacle of physical Creation--mankind--is emphasized.  Over and against the bloody Creation myths of the Babylonians and pagan tribes the Israelites lived around, God speaks the world into existence as transcendent lawgiver.  But then, lest we should misinterpret God's transcendence as indifference, the second account emphasizes the immense and personal care God takes in his love and care for man, and how all of Creation was made for him to rule over as God's steward, with his help-meet, the crown of God's creation, the woman.  

A good way to study your
scientific origins.  Leave the problem of 
your spiritual destination to the Bible.

Had the passages been written differently, our imperfect knowledge of the original context might lead us to these crazy literalist interpretations, but an honest reading of the text, fortunately, does not allow this.  The text is intended as a spiritual guide for man, or as Galileo Galilei (a Catholic priest himself) said and was later repeated by Pope John Paul II who exonerated Galileo in 1992, "The Bible was written to show men how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."  As John Paul II further said, "Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo...understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture." -L'Osservatore Romano, November 4, 1992 

Similarly, if we wish to know the scientific origins of the world to fully appreciate its complexity, orderliness and beauty, we cannot expect the Scriptures to answer questions they were never written to solve.  Rather, we must use the brains, principles of reason and clues from the existing world that Providence has given us to sift out what is probable and accept this as the truth whether or not it agrees with our prejudices. 

Notes:

*From the LCMS website:  After some gobbledy gook about not wanting to impose a "litmus test," the LCMS says this:  "Official members of the LCMS (congregations, pastors, rostered church workers), of course, pledge to honor and uphold the official position of the Synod on doctrinal issues, including its official position on creation" which then links to a PDF that says this:

 "We teach that God has created heaven and earth, and that in the manner and in the space of time recorded in the Holy Scriptures, especially Gen. 1 and 2, namely, by His almighty creative word, and in six days. We reject every doctrine which denies or limits the work of creation as taught in Scripture. In our days it is denied or limited by those who assert, ostensibly in deference to science, that the world came into existence through a process of evolution; that is, that it has, in immense periods of time, developed more or less of itself. Since no man was present when it pleased God to create the world, we must look for a reliable account of creation to God's own record, found in God's own book, the Bible..."

*The context of the story reveals that the original Hebrew word in Genesis 2:19a (http://interlinearbible.org/genesis/2-19.htm) can be rendered only in simple past tense and not in past perfect or pluperfect tense.  The majority of English translations use this tense.

John Sailhamer gives a similar opinion: “The NIV has offered an untenable solution in its rendering the waw consecutive in wayyiser by a pluperfect: ‘Now the LORD God had formed.’ Not only is such a translation for the waw consecutive hardly possible, . . . but it misses the very point of the narrative, namely, that the animals were created in response to God’s declaration that it was not good that man should be alone(2:18).” John Sailhamer, “Genesis,” The Expositor’s Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), p. 48 

Another resource that gives the same judgment is the online Biblical study tool Net Bible: "Or “fashioned.” To harmonize the order of events with the chronology of chapter one, some translate the prefixed verb form with vav (ו) consecutive as a past perfect (“had formed,” cf. NIV) here. (In chapter one the creation of the animals preceded the creation of man; here the animals are created after the man.) However, it is unlikely that the Hebrew construction can be translated in this way in the middle of this pericope (context), for the criteria for unmarked temporal overlay are not present here. See S. R. Driver, A Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew, 84-88, and especially R. Buth, “Methodological Collision between Source Criticism and Discourse Analysis,” Biblical Hebrew and Discourse Linguistics, 138-54. For a contrary viewpoint see IBHS 552-53 §33.2.3 and C. J. Collins, “The Wayyiqtol as ‘Pluperfect’: When and Why,” TynBul 46 (1995): 117-40."

Meanwhile the Septuagint Greek translation of the Bible (the translation that Jesus and his disciples invariably quote from in the New Testament Gospels) translate the word as "έπλασεν" which is undeniably in the simple past tense, not the pluperfect. 

Abortion is a Form of Murder: Let the Violinist Come unto Me

robably the most unpopular aspect of the Catholic Church's social teaching today is what she has to say about sex and procreation.  Contraception we can leave for later, but Abortion is the travesty I'd like to discuss today.  The proponents of atheism and more "liberal" religion often paint the Church and her allies as being fanatical because of their tyrannic control over the bodies of pregnant women.  Their body, their choice.  If you don't like Abortions, don't have one.

What this simplistic argument fails to address is that a human life is being terminated in the act of an abortion.  Biological science is on our (the pro-life) side here.*

Many Abortionists argue this is not
significantly different than a tumor.

But lately, the arguments have more frequently gone in a somewhat different direction.  The trendy tactic is to concede (for the sake of argument at least) that this is a human being and yet to argue that in an analogous situation, we would do the same thing and kill the person dependent upon us.  Enter Judith Thomson's 1971 paper, A Defense of Abortion, starring the sickly violinist.  (Yeah, it's forty years old, I know, but the argument is becoming more mainstream now as science is proving the pro-choicers for the specious reasoners many of them are).

The article can be found here and its gist is summarized here.

Fifty Shades of Non Sequitur

Now, to do my own summary, if a sickly violinist needed to be hooked up to me for nine months via tubes and such into our bloodstreams to survive, putting me into practical bondage, I'd let him, assuming we and my family weren't going to starve in the process.  As even Peter Singer (a truly wacky and hypocritical philosopher who is pro-choice) agrees, the right thing to do is to stay hooked up to the violinist.  It does not make me a good Samaritan to do so in the sense of exceeding what is morally required of me.  Rather it makes me a Good Samaritan in the sense of doing what is right.

Consider my own little thought experiment.  In a similarly coerced way as the violinist was hooked up to me, I and a friend of mine have been spirited off to two rooms adjacent to each other.  In one, I have a gun and a baby, and if I shoot the baby, I may leave.  Otherwise I'll be stuck there for the next nine months, kept alive in captivity with the baby.  In the other room, the baby has a mechanical device around/on/in him (whatever you like) that will kill him if triggered, and that will trigger if my friend walks out the exit door in the room, which he may do, or else spend the next nine months, being kept alive in captivity with his baby.  First of all, I say it is self-evident there is no practical moral difference between my situation and my friend's.  Second, once we admit that fetuses are humans, there is no difference between our moral predicament and that of the mother who wants to abort, i.e. intentionally killing the innocent human being for your own convenience is always wrong, self-evidently.

WWII: An allied soldier bandaging a German.

Now, regarding the legalization of abortion, the opposition will say that this is me pushing my moral values upon others, in that it is supposedly un-American to ask people to give up their freedoms and risk their lives for the sake of others.  But this is also manifestly untrue.  In wartime we ask Americans to do their duty for their country and serve in the Army, which in a way is even more extreme, since I'm putting my entire life at risk in that situation for people I've never met.  We make sacrifices for society and our freedoms are always accompanied by obligations.  Society relies upon the continued birth of new children to make up the new generation.  By aborting them away, we do damage to our civilization, sacrificing the adult lives of the future for increased comfort today.  The modern healthcare and social security crises are in part due to the fact that the baby boomers failed to reproduce themselves, so that now there are not enough able bodies or production to take care of their needs.  Children are as much a societal asset as soldiers are and more so.  It is perfectly justified for the government to protect this interest by asking women not to kill their unborn children already in their wombs.  Observation of the world and reason take us to the same conclusion that theologians come to morally:  abortion (like other kinds of murder), while momentarily convenient for individuals who do it, is ultimately deeply detrimental to society.

I really hope they don't kill her off despite the
narratorial signs of impending catharsis!

Okay, this part is for the Christians in the room.  Although we in America are wealthy and prosperous, partly because of moral relativism and modern alienation from our neighbors we are tempted to doubt that life is worth living and fighting for.  More than ever before, there is hope for the future of our race and the opportunity for happiness even for the poor among us (and it would be possible even in a zombie apocalypse for fellow The Walking Dead fans).  Those of us who are Christians can trust that God has a plan even for those without an earthly father and that death is not the solution today any more than it was the solution in Hitler's Germany 80 years ago, or in Herod's Bethlehem 2,016 years ago.   "Be it to me according to your word," spoke Mary the mother of God the Son.  Despite her poverty and the dishonor she chose to follow God's will for her life and to sacrifice her life to God.  We must follow her holy and unblemished example.

Paulo de Matteis' "The Annunciation" (1712, C.E.)

A different but capable refutation of Thomson's argument can be found here in which important differences between the bizarre scenario of the violinist and the universal situation of fetus and mother are discussed.  While I disagree with him that the violinist deserves protection as well despite the unnaturalness of his predicament, his thoughts also have merit in making clear how intuitive should be the conclusion that mothers should not kill the fetuses inside their wombs while any other leads to logical absurdities.

*The equivocation of a living, growing embryo with, say, a living, growing cancerous tumor that we would extract without hesitating ignores the biological fact that tumors do not develop into adult humans and as such a definite separation can be made so we can say, "This is a living human, and that is not."  But we cannot easily make this distinction with aborted embryos, unless we base it upon their location inside or outside of the womb, which makes little sense.  I do not lose my right to life depending on where I am (although I might be more likely to have my life unjustly taken in, say, Papua New Guinea, than in my study in Orlando, FL).  No, we need something more definite than that, and conception is the obvious place.  Beforehand, it was two gametes, immensely improbable to be joined together.  Now it is one genetically distinct individual, relatively likely and capable of maturing into an adult human given only nutrients and time.

Aρχή

his is the first post.  I talk about religion (among other things) from a rational perspective, based upon evidence that both my interlocutors and I agree is reliable.  The big mistake many Christians make when trying to lead others to Faith is by appealing to an authority that their unbelieving friend does not recognize.

I believe that my faith in the Holy Catholic Church, led on earth at the moment by Pope Benedict XVI, is well founded.  I believe her doctrines are true and worthy of belief, and that the world is a much better place on account of her.  I also believe that a perfectly rational person faced with the same evidence that most people reading this blog have access to should come to the same conclusion, that what the Catholic Church teaches is true.  I used to believe in her (the Church) because she agreed best with the Bible: being a former Protestant, the Bible was my first assumption, my ἀρχή.  But now one of the best reasons for believing that the Bible is divinely inspired for me is that it is the Church's book, and the historical evidence points towards the Church.  The Bible needs to be interpreted, and throughout History, the Church, led by the Spirit of Truth, has been figuring out what it means for each new age.

 Raphael's "Disputation of the Holy Sacrament" (1509, C.E.)

I am starting this blog because I frequently get the feeling that I've looked up the reasons for a belief that I have, perhaps even remember the outline in general, but I cannot remember exactly how I reached the conclusion.  Only that I did, and it seemed rational at the time I investigated.  This is a natural failure of memory more than anything else, one the blog will help.  This is true in a lot of areas, not just religion:  I can remember proving that any triangle inscribed in a semicircle will be a right triangle and I could prove it again, but I don't remember exactly how at the moment.

Refutation by Tasteless Art (No one knows nor cares, C.E.) 

An example from religion: I was talking to an atheist the other day who asked me, "Why Christianity?  Why not Zoroastrian dualism, or Buddhism, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.?"  Now I remembered I'd read what seemed like a very good refutation of dualism (the eternal struggle between two equally powerful deities, one evil and one good) in C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, but what was it again?  It's nice to have a resource like this to refer back to my own intellectual (and I hope on the whole rational) journey and milestones along it.

So, ground rules:  I will attempt through the post labels to distinguish between four kinds of posts: (1) my personal beliefs, but not necessarily that of the Church (like Evolution, Politics, Economics, whether Vice President Biden is a good Catholic, etc.), (2) defenses of the Church's policies (which are sometimes flawed: e.g. Spanish Inquisition, allowing itself to become the State Church of Rome), (3) artistic posts exploring music, art and liturgy, and (4) defenses of the divinely inspired teachings and doctrines of the Church through reason.  I'm going to let the latter dominate the content because it is the most important to me.

If you're going to comment, please do so by backing up your factual assertions with facts.  If another commenter asks you a direct question, answer it directly, do not respond at all, or I will delete your original comment.  Use a screen name and stick to it: no anonymous comment sniping.  I reserve the right to delete anyone's comments, for any reason.  But follow these ground rules and I invite you to share your views in the comments and in emails as my guests here.  When I use terms like "he," "his" and "man" in a general context, this applies to both men and women of the human race.  It is a compact way of writing, not in itself a declamation against feminism, and certainly not implying any intrinsic inequality between the sexes.  For in Christ there is no male or female.

St. Peter said in his first scriptural letter:

Rembrandt's "The Stoning of St. Stephen" (1625, C.E.)

"Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence; and keep a good conscience so that in the thing in which you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ will be put to shame. For it is better, if God should will it so, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong." 


I'm going to try, and no doubt fail at times, to keep to this standard of inquiry, sanctifying my heart toward Christ through the process.  I hope to provide an effective encouragement for fellow believers on the one hand, and a respectful rebuke to the enemies of Christ's Body the Church, as well as to her sincere but mistaken members and allies, on the other.

2016 UPDATE: The methods, purposes and goals of the blog have been expanded. See this blog post's conclusion for details.