How the Creationists Sell God Short

Entire books have been written analyzing the scientific problems with creationism. Much less has been said about why creationism makes no sense from a religious point of view. Here are two of the key points.

First, creationism grows out of a basic misunderstanding of the Bible. The Bible is not a scientific text. When the Bible was being written, there was no such thing as science as we now understand it. The book of Genesis, for example, is a collection of powerful stories handed down through oral tradition to explain certain timeless truths about the relationship of God and human beings. It is not an attempt to describe the physical mechanisms by which the universe, the earth, and living things came to be.

If the "authors" of Genesis were interested in crafting a scientific account of the origins of our world, they would have been more careful about making it logical and consistent. For example, Genesis includes two contradictory descriptions of the creation of Eve. First it says that God created humans "male and female" (Gen 1:27) and instructed them to populate the Earth. Then it gives the "Adam's rib" version (Gen 2:20-23), in which the creation of a woman is apparently an afterthought. (How God originally expected Adam to reproduce isn't explained.)

The contradiction between these two versions causes a logical problem only if you assume that the Bible is some sort of scientific text. But there's no problem once you recognize that the authors of Genesis are more interested in expressing their views about the nature of human beings and the moral connection between the two sexes--that male and female are deeply intertwined physically and spiritually, etc.

The fundamentalist attempt to transform a book of moral and spiritual teachings into a science text is silly and betrays a fundmental ignorance about what holy scripture is all about.

The other problem is that creationism assumes a simple-minded notion of divine creativity.

I was once chatting with a creationist acquaintance when some topic relating to the wonders of human nature came up. Shaking her head, my friend remarked, "And to think that some people believe we evolved from the mud!"

I suspect that some variation of this emotion underlies much of the appeal of creationism. Fundamentalists are offended by the idea that God's plan for creation might be carried out through squalid, mundane, and seemingly random processes, such as mutation, competition, selection, and worst of all, sex. The idea that God created humans through miraculous fiat (while speaking in a voice like Charlton Heston's, I guess) seems more in keeping with their concept of the divine dignity.

For me, the truth is just the other way round. Every writer knows that the most artfully crafted novel, play, or movie is one in which the story is set in motion with a particular cast of characters and a couple of basic premises--and then seemingly works itself out from that point on, with no visible sign of authorial tinkering. By contrast, you know an incompetent writer is at work when the plot requires several "miraculous" interventions to end up in the right place--astounding coincidences, out-of-the-blue surprises, unmotivated changes in the characters' personalities, and so on.

To me, evolution is a fabulous tribute to the sophisticated creativity of God. It implies that he set the universe running and then let the story of life unfold with minimal further intervention, knowing from the start how the plot would develop--through the emergence of humans, the spread of sin and suffering, and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, right up to our own day.

Maybe Darwin said it best, in the famous final paragraph of The Origin of Species:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. . . . Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

What a genuinely inspiring view of creation--fruit of a brilliant scientist's lifetime of study and contemplation of how nature, God's masterpiece, really works.