Recently I exchanged e-mail with a fellow who thought because I was a
Christian I must necessarily be on the Creationist side in the Creation
vs. Evolution sweepstakes. He seemed rather disappointed when I said I
wasn’t–though not a Christian himself, he said he was definitely on the
Creationist side of things, and thought that Evolution was manifestly
untrue.

My position on the subject is rather more complicated than the tag
“Creation vs. Evolution” would imply.
On the one hand, I don’t read the opening chapters of Genesis as a
precise description of how the world was created; nevertheless I do
believe that the universe is God’s creation. On the other hand, I
don’t think that random forces produced modern human beings;
nevertheless, all those fossils had to come from somewhere.

I’ve been pondering this ever since, and I’ve decided that there are two
related topics I’d like to expand on. The second, which I’ll address in
another post, will contain some thoughts I’ve had on the nature of
creation, and how creation and evolution can play together. This one, however, is
on the two documents I believe God has left us–the Book of Spirit, and
the Book of Nature–and the relationship between them.

The Book of Spirit is, of course, the Bible; the Book of Nature is the
physical universe we find all around us. Both reflect God’s character,
and both have much to teach us.

As a Christian, I believe that the universe is God’s handiwork, and as
such makes manifest his desires and his character. There’s
much we can learn about God from studying the world around us.
He loves diversity, but he also loves order in that diversity. And as
Professor Haldane famously (and no doubt facetiously) remarked, he’s
surprisingly fond of beetles. I won’t say “inordinately,” as Haldane
did; from our study of the world it should
be clear, if nothing else is, that God’s likes and dislikes aren’t
exactly the same as ours, but I’m confident that he has his reasons.

Now, the Book of Nature is notoriously difficult to interpret. The
history of science is the history of ideas that were once judged correct
and were later found to be inconsistent with reality. On top
of that, no matter how well we interpret the Book of Nature it can’t tell
the whole story. If you ask why the sky is blue, science will tell you
that sunlight scatters and bends in the atmosphere, leaving only blue
behind–but that doesn’t really answer the question. That only explains
how it works, not why. Science has much to say about mechanism, and
little or nothing to say about meaning.

And that’s where the Bible comes in. The Book of Nature tells us much
about How and What; inspired by God, the Bible tells us Why–or, at
least, as much of Why as we are capable of understanding and need to know.

A digression on the inspiration of Scripture. There probably are Christians who
believe that God dictated the books of the Bible to the
original authors as an executive dictates a letter to his secretary, but it’s
really more complicated than that.

God, for some reason I do not know, likes to work through people.
I’m sure St. Paul spent hours on his letters, pondering just which word
to use. I’m confident that St. Luke revised the book of Acts with great
care before sending it on its way. And no one with any sense for style
would ever confuse St. Luke’s writing with St. Paul’s.

In truth, the Bible as we know have it is the work of many minds and many
hands: those who witnessed the events of which it speaks, and remembered
them; those who wrote them down; those who edited the documents into
their final shapes; those who determined that these writings would become
part of the Biblical canon, while those writings would be abandoned. And
all of this work was done by human beings. And yet, God was behind all
of that work at the same time. He helped St.
Paul find the right words; he helped the early church fathers winnow the
many writings about Christ down to those in our Bible. No doubt he
arranged for some of Paul’s letters to go astray, lest they lead us
astray; not even even saints bat a thousand. In the end we have the
Bible, which, though the work of human hands, says just what God wanted it to.

And the importance of the Bible is that it is God’s communication to us, in
which he tells us that which we need to know but cannot infer solely from
examination of the world around us. The Bible does not supplant the Book
of Nature as a source of knowledge, but it augments it; the one lends
meaning to the other. For this reason, the Book of Spirit and the Book
of Nature can never truly contradict each other.

Now, back to the opening chapters of the book of Genesis. Does Genesis
attempt a scientific discussion of the beginning of the world? Of course
not. Genesis isn’t about mechanism; it’s about meaning. It tells us
the things we need to know to make sense of God’s creation.
So what are these things?

First, Genesis tells us, simply, that God is the creator; that the
universe, and all that is in it, is his creation; that we are his
creatures. This is his universe, not ours.

Second, it tells us that we screwed up. We are fallen people, and we
live in a fallen world. Some folks make much of Eve’s sin, and blame her
for Adam’s sin, but as I see it there’s plenty of blame to go around. It
wasn’t just Man who sinned; it wasn’t just Woman; it was the whole damned
species.

Now, if you were to ask me whether I believe in a literal Garden of Eden, with
a literal Adam and Eve, and fig leaves and all that, I’d answer,
categorically, “I don’t know.”–an answer I’ll elaborate on in another
post.

But grant, for the sake of argument, that there was a Garden.
You know what people are like. Do you really think that two kids
stuck in a garden with a forbidden fruit wouldn’t eventually give in to
temptation and take a bite? Perhaps his name wasn’t Adam, and perhaps
hers wasn’t Eve, and perhaps the real story was a lot more complicated
than the tale that was passed down, mouth to ear, to the one who first
wrote it down. Perhaps it happened much longer ago than the Bible
indicates. Nevertheless, I suggest that the essence of the story remained
unchanged, and is clear to this day–that given a choice between joyful
union with God and the short-term gratification of their own desires, Man and Women
made the wrong choice.

And we still make the wrong choices. G. K. Chesterton said that Original
Sin was the only religious doctrine that was experimentally verifiable,
and he’s clearly right. How many saints do you know?

And that’s the point of the rest of the Bible–first, verification that
perfection is not in us, and then the Good News of how to get out from
under our sins and back into joyful union with God.

Does the Bible tell us everything there is to know about God? Of course
not. Consider all that we know about the Universe, and how many volumes it
would take to write it all down–and consider that God stands in relation to
us as an author does to his novel. Which is more complex, the novel, or
the author who writes it? But if the Bible doesn’t tell us everything,
yet it tells us what we need to know, until
that blessed day when, the race complete, we can see for ourselves.