I have a wide variety of reading interests. They mostly relate to classes I teach, but I also have some long standing research interests. And perhaps the longest standing is what to think about Genesis as a book of the Bible and its relation to modern scientific thought.
From what I have read and studied, its fairly obvious there are no easy answers. There’s barely easy questions. Instead, it’s a nexus of topics, clustered together and potentially jigsawed together in multiple ways. Here’s a sample:
- Genesis as Hebrew Scripture
- Genesis in relation to other ancient near Eastern documents
- Genesis 1-11 in relation to other narrative portions of Genesis, and the Old Testament itself
- The nature of ancient near Eastern creation and origin stories
- The nature of ancient near Eastern cognitive environment
- The nature of modern scientific methods and theories
- The nature of origin science and how it differs from normative science
- Our current understanding of astrophysics and its relation to the age of the universe
- Our current understanding of geology, and its relation to the age (or apparent age?) of the earth
- Our current understanding of ancient catastrophes (i.e. mass extinctions)
- Modern paleontology’s reconstruction of the eras of the dinosaurs (which don’t overlap with humans)
- Modern geology’s reconstruction of the comet impact that wiped out majority of the dinosaurs
- Modern anthropology’s (and genetics) understanding of human origins and migrations (i.e. how and when people arrived in the Americas)
Even this, I think, is just a sampling. And I didn’t even mention theological implications, like how to take Romans 5 in relation to Genesis 1-3. More could obviously be said, but let’s just work with these topics for now.
If we’re going to invoke the puzzle analogy I mentioned a bit ago, we could say there are a variety of ways of putting the pieces together. One would want to make sure that they have all the pieces available first. But, after that it doesn’t particularly matter which order you place them down to make a complete picture.
However, I think it does matter whether one starts with modern scientific thought as a given (that doesn’t require scrutiny) or whether one starts with a particular reading of Genesis as a given (that doesn’t require scrutiny).
For instance, in the book you can see on the top of the stack, Ken Ham starts with a young earth reading of Genesis and then rejects modern mainstream scientific thought. He does this because if the account of Genesis he gives is correct, then pretty much all modern scientific thought is wrong.
On the other hand, Deborah Haarsma, president of BioLogos, begins with the assumption that modern scientific thought is basically right. From there, Ham’s young earth of reading of Genesis is entirely implausible. Hugh Ross, another contributor has a similar starting assumption, but comes to different conclusions about reading Genesis. He is an old earth creationist, but not an evolutionist (or evolutionary creationist as they prefer to be called). He is more interested in harmonizing science and Genesis than Haarsma, so his reading of Genesis and understanding of modern science are both different.
Now, what I think is more difficult to do, but probably a better way forward, is to hold both traditional readings of Genesis and modern scientific thought as theories that either fit the data or don’t. Rather than treating either as a given, I’m treating most everything as an open question. To be clear, that means I’m committed to teaching Genesis in a way that is authentic to its status as an ancient document and in inerrant portion of Christian Scripture. But, I’m also committed to do justice to modern scientific thought, and thinking through how it might relate to what we find in Genesis.
So, that means that “how we’ve always read Genesis” isn’t necessarily correct (and isn’t necessarily along young earth creationist lines). But, neither is something like evolution just because it is the current scientific consensus. The issues are multifaceted and require more than just reading a book or two and deciding you’ve figured it all out.
In that spirit, I’ll probably start posting more detailed thoughts on the books you see pictured, as well as others (probably more about dinosaurs). Not sure what that time table will look like, but it should be an interesting journey nonetheless.