I have been asked to answer the question, "Does evolution
disprove the Bible?" In other words, Does evolution show the
Bible to be untrue. I must begin with a few words on what it
means for the Bible to be true or untrue.
In my experience, the parties seem to assume an unusual
definition of the word "truth" when discussing the validity of
the Bible. People I have known who believe the Bible is true
seem very reluctant to admit as truth anything but strictly
literal truth, fearing that acceptance of figurative truth in the
Bible would open the doors to wildly varying personal
interpretations. And the people I have known who want to dispute
the truth of the Bible seem glad to accept this restrictive
definition of truth, presumably partly because it is so absurdly
easy to attack the Bible when the defenders' own definition is
accepted. A friend of mine once argued, "The gospels can't even
agree on how many women went to the tomb. How can the Bible be
accurate?"
The problem with both sides is insisting for whatever reason
that in the case of the Bible--and in that case only--literal
truth is the only kind of truth we may accept. Language is not
this precise, and, because we normally recognize that, we do not
demand literal truth in any other situation. I don't suppose,
for instance, that anyone has quit reading this essay already
because of intellectual furor at my reckless disregard for
literal truth. But already, I have anthropomorphized evolution
(in the first paragraph it is potentially demonstrating and
disproving propositions as a logician would), I have suggested
that acceptance of an idea could open doors, and I have pictured
people attacking the Bible (with pitchforks and torches, no
doubt).
My fellow defenders of the Bible need to quit defending the
necessity of literal truth, perhaps first by realizing that they
don't really believe that the truth of the Bible must be literal.
("He will cover you with His pinions, And under His wings you may
seek refuge," says Psalm 91. I have never known a Bible believer
who would insist that that passage be taken literally.) What
these people are really concerned about, I believe, is a
wholesale figurative view of the Bible, so figurative in fact
that no truth remains. But the recognition of figurative
language does not in fact mean the absence of truth or
communication. If you didn't like the figurativeness of my
statement that "acceptance of figurative truth in the Bible would
open the doors to wildly varying personal interpretations," I
could tell you that my literal meaning was something like the
following: "A person who believes that the Bible may be
figuratively true is more likely than others to develop a unique
interpretation of a given passage hardly resembling standard
interpretations." With the original construction, I may be
speaking figuratively, but I do mean something. My lack of
literalness does not mean either that doors are being shut rather
than opened or that doors don't exist. God may not have
feathers, but He is capable of preventing, in some way
comfortable to the reader, some certain type of harm.
By the same token, the parties arguing the fallibility of
the Bible need to quit attacking the straw man of literalness.
Matthew says that two women went to the tomb; Mark may say that
three went without contradicting him. Neither says the list he
offers is exhaustive. My friend who saw this discrepancy as
evidence that the Bible is not to be trusted would think nothing
of telling me he had been to a concert without naming each of the
other 15,000 people who had attended.
I take the whole Bible to be true. (My reasons will have to
be the subject of another essay.) But I recognize that the Bible
is written in human language, language which the Bible itself
admits was confused by God for a purpose. (Gen. 11:7)
Therefore, I don't expect it to be literally true any more than I
expect any piece of writing to be literally true. I allow the
Bible to be poetic, figurative, even exaggerative ("Your faith,"
says Paul to the Christians in Rome, "is proclaimed in all the
world") without admitting or having to admit that it lies,
misleads, or is meaningless.
Now, for the answer to the original question, "Does
evolution disprove the Bible?" The answer, it seems to me, has
two parts. First, evolution itself would have to be proven in
order for it to disprove the Bible. Second, once proven it would
have to contradict the Bible in such a way that the biblical text
cannot even be afforded a normal amount of figurativeness.
As to the first part of the answer (please hear me out!), I
don't see that evolution has been proven. We have a hypothesis
that seems to present a possible explanation for the facts.
(That the hypothesis has serious flaws seems painfully obvious to
me and is well documented in, for instance, Darwin on Trial by
Phillip E. Johnson, but is unnecessary for my response.) But
this hypothesis has not been proven to provide the correct
explanation for the facts. The other explanation, that a
transcendental intelligence intended the origin of life and the
differentiation of species, is simply not accepted by
evolutionists as a possible alternative. According to the
National Academy of Sciences, an explanation of events is outside
the realm of science if it "fails to display the most basic
characteristic of science: reliance upon naturalistic
explanations." ("Science and Creationism: A View from the
National Academy of Sciences," 1984.) Such a limitation is
entirely appropriate for a field establishing the boundaries of
its inquiry. But when a body of thinkers declares its field of
inquiry to be the universe of factual truth, they cross the
bounds of proper thinking. "Science" used to mean simply
"knowledge." It is wrong to suppose since the narrowing of the
field of scientific inquiry in the 16th century that "science"
and "knowledge" are still synonyms. Given the entirely unfounded
assumption that all true explanations are naturalistic
explanations, some kind of evolution must have occurred. Perhaps
making the assumption helps to clarify thinking so a clear model
can be worked out, a model that could then be considered by
people who want not just to be scientific but to know--considered
and weighed against other explanations. But there are only two
primary explanations: either life came from within the natural
system, or life was started by something outside the system.
Assuming the impossibility of one, we can never prove the truth
of the other.
But what if the philosophers and mathematicians, thinking
rationally (perhaps even getting the scientists thinking
rationally again), look at the best model of the naturalistic
explanation that science can offer (assuming science ever agrees
on an explanation) and at the best understanding of a
supernaturalistic explanation that theology can offer and decide
that evolution is the better explanation for the origin of
species. Would this event disprove the Bible? The only
potential problem would be with Genesis 2:7, which says that God
formed man from the dust of the ground. The order of the
appearance of species in Genesis 1 fits roughly the order
evolutionists supply. The problem of the "days" of that chapter
seems to me to be a nonproblem: the sun, moon, and stars, which
were made "for seasons and for days and years," were not created
until the fourth "day." So, what of Genesis 2:7? As long as God
had a hand in the creation of the human race, I don't see how the
verse could be untrue. So God made man (or preconditioned nature
itself to make man) out of an animal that was made out of an
animal that was made out of an animal . . . that was made out of
the dust of the ground (no doubt dust heavily laden with carbon
and close to water). Normal, everyday figurative language could
shorten the proposition without making a lie of it.
The short answer is this: if evolution were ever truly
proven, it would not disprove the Bible as long as the Bible gets
to use language the same way everybody else gets to use language.
But I have serious doubts it will ever be proven. It was
concocted in order to provide a naturalistic explanation. The
assumption that the explanation must be naturalistic shows no
sign of going away; and as long as it remains, the truth of a
naturalistic explanation cannot be proven because to prove what
you assume is to argue circularly and thus invalidly.
The final problem: What prompted anyone to seek a
naturalistic explanation in the first place? The honest
conviction that the facts don't fit the hypothesis of special
creation? I doubt it. My experience of human nature, including
my own, tells me that people have a deep personal interest in
explaining the world without the existence or relevance of God:
belief in God means we have to change how we live, and we don't
want to do that. One of my favorite atheists, Aldous Huxley,
wrote in Ends and Means,
Does the world as a whole possess the value and meaning that we constantly attribute to certain parts of it? . . . I took it for granted that there was no meaning. This was partly due to the fact that I shared the common belief that the scientific picture of an abstraction from reality was a true picture of reality as a whole; partly also to other non-intellectual reasons. I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. . . . For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. (pp. 312-316)
As you ponder the question of evolution and the Bible, ask yourself why you are so interested in the question in the first place. Can you honestly say you are simply disinterestedly curious about the truth? Can you honestly say you have no personal interest in the success of the God-less solution? Are you honestly willing to change your life in any way demanded should the supernatural origin of life (including your life) turn out to be true? If not, can you trust your thinking, influenced as it is by personal motives, to lead to the objectively true answer?
Ken Stephenson
Associate Professor, Music
If you have any questions or comments you can E-Mail me at kstephenson@ou.edu