Category: Christopher Smith’s story

Various people who read our manuscript in the months and years after we first wrote it raised questions that we agreed we would need to address further. These readers granted that the “two ways of knowing” we were describing might be complementary and even compatible. But how did their results fit together? The questions raised were not scientific ones about natural-historical observations and their interpretation, nor were they biblical ones about texts and their meaning. Rather, they were essentially theological questions.

They raised such issues as how there could have been death (arguably necessary for a process dependent on natural selection) before the emergence through that process of humans who disobeyed God and through that action, according to the Bible, first brought death into the world. Other questions included whether the evolutionary process itself was really of such a character that the God of the Bible could make use of it, and whether the biblical portrayal of the natural world as “fallen” from a previously better state is consistent with an evolutionary description of life having taken on greater and greater complexity through an uninterrupted process.

As these questions accumulated (and the issue of the Bible’s moral authority remained outstanding as well), I began to feel I should share some more reflections in order to address them, even though this meant there would be significant non-autobiographical material in our book after the end of my narrative. With my co-author’s agreement and with encouragement from early readers, I have done just that. Consequently, after I narrate here one more significant episode in my personal pilgrimage of understanding the Scriptures and their description of God as Creator, in future posts I will offer discussions of the grounds for our confidence in the Bible’s moral authority and of the three theological questions just described.

As word spread in my Williamstown congregation about the book Stephen and I were writing, more and more parishioners, particularly college students, engaged me on the subject of origins. Many were concerned about how to establish a correspondence between specific details in the Genesis account and natural-historical occurrences, as if Genesis provided a capsule history of the natural world in symbolic language. To convince them that they didn’t need to look for such a correspondence, I found myself appealing over and over again to the fact that the Bible is written from an observational perspective.

For example, the Bible doesn’t explain to its readers that the sun’s apparent motion is actually due to the rotation of the earth. Rather, it describes very accurately how things appear: The sun seems to “rise” and “set.”   In the same way, it speaks of the sky in the way it appears, as a solid dome over a flat, circular earth that is surrounded by seas. And it speaks of water being above this dome and falling through it as rain. We need look no farther than this to explain the “waters above” and “waters below” of the Genesis creation account. (We certainly do not need to postulate, as one ambitious harmonizing interpreter did, that this is actually a reference to the two arms of a spiral galaxy in formation!)

To me, there seems to be a providential purpose in the Bible’s observational descriptions: They allow it to travel into every culture as the word of God. Imagine what kind of reception it would still get in many parts of the world today if it made claims so counter to our observations as that the sun is not really moving even though it appears to be, or that the earth really is moving even though it appears not to be! That the Bible was inspired and written in cultures that were limited to observational descriptions is thus not a liability, but an asset. But this does require us to be prudent in our interpretations, as we read its words today in a context where we can make objective scientific observations (for example, that the earth rotates).

I think I first began to appreciate the observational character of the Bible’s descriptions back in seminary when, in our Old Testament hermeneutics class, Professor Kline had cautioned that Genesis 7 is not necessarily describing a worldwide flood, even when it says that the floodwaters prevailed upon the earth until “all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered.” “Earth” in Genesis simply means “dry land,” and “heaven” refers to the sky. And so, Dr. Kline observed, the statement may simply mean that all of the “high hills” visible to the observer were covered in this flood. When I had read “earth” in Genesis I had always thought “planet earth” instead, but now I would begin to think in terms of the “land” under the “sky,” and notice other things in the Bible that were being said from an observational perspective.

Over the years I eventually recognized that the Bible’s entire “cosmology,” that is, its description of the universe around us, is consistently observational. For all of the biblical writers, the “earth” is a flat circle of dry land surrounded by water that has been pushed back to clear this space: “the gathering together of the waters he called Seas”; “he drew a circle on the face of the deep . . . he assigned to the sea its limit.” The “heavens” or “sky” is a dome stretched out like a canopy to keep out the “waters above” and create a habitable space beneath: “God made the dome and named it ‘Sky’”; “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth . . . who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in.” Indeed, this dome is considered to be solid, not to consist of air: “Can you join him in spreading out the skies, hard as a mirror of cast bronze?” The sun moves round and round while the land remains stationary: “The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.”

In time I came to be amazed at how pervasive this observational “cosmology” was in the Bible, but even more so at how indifferent I and others had been to it while at the same time being very concerned about reconciling the Bible’s “cosmogony,” or its description of how the universe came to be, with scientific descriptions. Why the double standard? Why did we not bat an eyelash at observational cosmology, but insist on the literal truth of what might be a similarly observational cosmogony?

Most frequently we explain the observational cosmology to ourselves as “poetic.” And sometimes there are clear poetic overtones to the Bible’s descriptions of the natural world, as when David describes the rising sun as “like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion” and “like a champion rejoicing to run his course.” But if we are going to explain the consistent biblical cosmology as poetical, why should we object to a poetical understanding of the Genesis cosmogony?

The matter needs to be taken even farther than this, however, because it is not really legitimate to understand the biblical writers’ entire descriptions of a flat stationary earth, a solid domed sky and a moving sun as poetical. Despite rhetorical flourishes about bridegrooms and track athletes, their descriptions must rather be intended essentially as literal, given the limitations on the observations they and their contemporaries could have made. The biblical authors do not appear to have been granted supernatural insights into the non-apparent facts of cosmology.

Solomon did write, “All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again,” and on the basis of this statement some interpreters praise him for an extraordinarily early insight into the “hydrologic cycle.” But just before this, as we have seen, Solomon also wrote, “The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.” But we do not therefore praise him for a similar insight into the “solar circuit.” Rather, we shift back and forth between a poetical and a literal understanding as we read the opening of Ecclesiastes. Instead, we should see both statements as having been intended literally, within an observational perspective.

It finally occurred to me that we could understand Genesis in the same way. In the fall of 2001, before accepting a call to another parish in East Lansing, Michigan, I spent a three-month sabbatical visiting places in North America where churches were cooperating effectively across denominational lines. This was the official agenda for this study leave. But as we traveled between sites, as we journeyed first across the prairie and then down the Pacific Coast, and later got to see wonders such as the Grand Canyon, I found myself meditating as well on the Bible’s description of creation as earth, sky and sea. Everything certainly did appear to be put together that way, and it was quite beautiful when considered from this perspective. By the end of this trip, I was asking myself why the Genesis creation account couldn’t be understood as a literally-intended observational description.

In other words, our typical approach to this account is that it must either have been intended poetically (and it is a magnificent work of lyric poetry), or else it must be a chronologically accurate description of the world’s origins, even if it does not agree with scientific findings. But if we can accept that when it came to cosmology, the biblical authors described things as they appeared, not knowing otherwise, why couldn’t we accept the same when it came to cosmogony? Could we not see the account as a lyric meditation on the “finished product” of creation, a product that looked compellingly like “six days’ work” to the observer? Three divisions: day and night, sky and sea, then the land. Three populations: of day and night, of sky and sea, and then of the land. And a seventh day of rest and worship, showing that this observer saw meaning and purpose in this ordered creation.

Just like the descriptions throughout the Bible of a moving sun and a flat earth, this could have been intended literally by the original writer, and we could understand it as true from within an observational perspective: Yes, this is how it looks as if all of this was put together. And even as our powers of observation increase, as we study the physics of subatomic particles or look deep into space and find patches of sky that we thought were empty actually swarming with galaxies, we can still be filled with that sabbath sense of wonder and say, with God, “Behold, it is very good.”

This leaves open the question, of course, of how the biblical writers, if they truly were inspired by God, could have been “wrong,” at least by contemporary scientific standards, as they described how the world came to be. When I came to my next parish here on the edge of Michigan State University, I was asked within weeks of my arrival to address the College Life Class on the subject of evolution and creation. I spent the hour describing the “framework” outline of Genesis 1, demonstrating the artistic character of genealogies, and stressing the difference between “methodological naturalism” and “metaphysical naturalism.” I was invited back the next week because the class wanted me to address some theological questions of the type I have already reported encountering, such as, “If the evolutionary process is really without a goal, doesn’t this imply that there could be something beyond humans? And if so, how can this be reconciled with the Bible’s teaching that humans are the culmination of God’s creation?” I did return to address their questions, and in the process became even more convinced that I needed to add some theological discussion after the narrative in my part of this book.

To the two tasks at hand, then. In the posts to come I will first take up the question of the basis of our confidence in the Bible as the word of God, if this confidence cannot be grounded in the assertion that the biblical writers were able to make observations well beyond the range of normal human ability. I will then address the various theological concerns that were expressed to us as co-authors, such as whether the God revealed in the Bible would (or could) have made use of a process such as evolution, and whether acknowledging such a process permits us to continue believing that humans have a privileged place within creation.

The parishioners in my adult class were, for the most part, prepared to accept what the character of the Genesis text obviously indicated about its genre and its goals (although this class seems to have been an important factor in one family’s decision to leave the church!). But our discussion left the class with another urgent question. Like me, they’d always been taught that the source of our confidence in the inspiration and authority of the Bible is that long ago everything really happened just as it describes, because it is speaking from a divine eyewitness perspective. But if a greater familiarity with the text discloses that the Bible is not always making historical statements—indeed, in some places cannot be making them—then what is the source of our confidence in it, and specifically in its moral program? Why not read any other collection of edifying tales, and be guided by their cumulative morality instead?

This question was posed to me at this time not only by the members of my adult class, but from another urgent source as well. During the fall of 1995, my wife and I traveled twice to Montreal to visit with her brother Stephen and his family at the hospital where his newborn son was recovering from heart surgery. My conversations with him in the waiting room covered many subjects, especially our hopes and prayers for his son, but we also kept coming back to a topic of lively interest to both of us: our creationist backgrounds and the way we had moved to new understandings of God as Creator as a result of pursuing our respective vocations. It was on this occasion that we agreed on the value of sharing our stories and came up with the idea for this book.

We agreed that it should consist of personal narratives that would reveal how we had come to our current ways of thinking. I remember that Stephen shared his marvelous rain analogy with me at the time. But he also shared his primary remaining question. It was the same one my parishioners were asking: What is the source of our confidence in the Bible, if it doesn’t make amazingly accurate natural scientific statements long before this was humanly possible? I promised him that I would take up that question at the end of my personal narrative, and I will do so in a future post, once I’ve finished the story of my paradigm pilgrimage.

The rest of the development of my thinking on the question of ultimate origins came about as Stephen and I worked on our manuscript. For one thing, as I read through his chapters and considered in turn the scientific questions each one addressed, I moved away from a position of suspended judgment on these questions and became convinced that the scientific account of natural origins was essentially accurate.

I’d never been entirely convinced that a single flood event could have been responsible for depositing the overwhelming majority of fossils in the ground, and I’d earlier come to accept that the world was billions of years old rather than thousands. Now it also seemed clear to me that any given species had only existed for a certain part of geologic time; all species had not been in existence right from the start. I also accepted that newer species had developed from older ones; they had not been individually created.

I had learned enough to know that within evolutionary theory, classical Darwinists were constantly fending off attacks from new schools of thought, and so I still held a fluid, open understanding of the evolutionary process itself. I also knew that within the theory there were still many fascinating unanswered questions, such as the origin of flight in birds. But I was now convinced that the basic outline of biological history was accurately this: More and more complex life forms had indeed developed out of earlier and simpler ones over a very long period of time, through means such as genetic variation and natural selection.

Once we’d written a first draft of our manuscript, Stephen was able to get a copy into the hands of Dr. Brian Alters, director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University. Dr. Alters kindly offered many helpful suggestions to both of us. Sometime later, his publisher asked me to review a copy of a book he had co-authored with his wife Sandra, herself a science educator, to help biology teachers understand the concerns that creationist students might be bringing to their classes, to help teachers address these concerns sensitively and positively.

The book was ultimately entitled Defending Evolution in the Classroom (though I suggested Understanding Your Creationist Students as a title that might reflect its content and purpose even more clearly). It was a joy for me to read. It brought relief to my mind by offering a simple but elegant and powerful distinction as the key to addressing creationist students’ concerns. Science, the Alters wrote, is committed to a “methodological naturalism,” in that it does not admit supernatural causes as it seeks to explain the phenomena it is observing. There is no necessity for science to insist that there is no supernatural. Indeed, responsible science is aware of its own limitations and acknowledges freely which questions it cannot answer. It simply insists that it is following certain disciplines in its pursuit of understanding, and that one of these disciplines is to limit itself to what is observable and measurable in offering explanations.

By contrast, “metaphysical naturalism” is a philosophical position which holds that there is no supernatural (or, in milder form, no supernatural that we can meaningfully access). Many metaphysical naturalists, in promoting their own philosophy, have appealed to evolution as a paradigm that, they say, can offer a comprehensive account of ultimate origins and purpose. But such an appeal has no more place in a biology classroom than one to the book of Genesis.

Science answers questions of what, when, and how in seeking to explain origins, but it responsibly remains silent on questions of who and why, which are instead the purview of religion and philosophy. In reflecting on this comfortable separation of competencies, I thought back to my childhood when I was first told of the lake in Massachusetts, known as Lake Webster in English, whose long Algonquin name, Chaubunagungamaug, is sometimes translated, “You fish on your side, we fish on our side, nobody fish in the middle.” Apparently this is an inaccurate translation, but it is nevertheless a good motto for science and religion to adopt.

Indeed, as I read the Alters’ distinction between “methodological naturalism” and “metaphysical naturalism,” I felt that identifying the two and insisting on the former in the biology classroom provided the grounds for an abiding truce between religion and science, which had been incorrectly portrayed as combatants for far too long. There was nothing disloyal to God about looking for the most reasonable explanation of the observations biologists had made to date, or even about concluding that the most reasonable explanation was that later, more complex life forms had developed from earlier, simpler ones in a process extending over time.

I sent a grateful, glowing review to the publisher, and I would henceforth use the Alters’ distinction between “methodological naturalism” and “metaphysical naturalism” in all of my thinking and speaking on the evolution-creation controversy. This distinction actually gave me a measured retrospective appreciation for the creationist materials I had read and distributed in earlier years. In some places a “metaphysical naturalism” really was being asserted, rather than a science that knew its own limits, and wherever this was the case, someone needed to blow the whistle. Metaphysical naturalism had no more place in the classroom or the laboratory than more overt religion. I could see clearly what the creationists were so upset about—their children really were being indoctrinated in a rival faith, at least in some cases. But the solution, I saw more clearly than ever, was not to let any religious or philosophical positions become confused with reasoned descriptions of scientific observations. As soon as the limits of those observations were reached in the biology classroom, it was time to head down the hall to a different classroom to continue the discussion.

The preparation I received in graduate school gave me a solid footing for ministry, and for further research and reflection, once I had completed my program. I defended my dissertation, which was on Jonathan Edwards’ theology of history, in June of 1992. The next month I accepted a call to the First Baptist Church of Williamstown, Massachusetts, a college town in the Berkshire Hills.

Adult Sunday School teaching was among the responsibilities I eagerly took on in my new parish. At the beginning of my fourth year in Williamstown, in response to numerous requests that we “really dig into” a book of the Bible, I led an inductive literary study of the early accounts in Genesis. I studied in Hebrew each passage we would consider and made a class worksheet with translation notes and investigation questions for each week. This research eliminated the last vestiges of my literal, historical reading of the book.

I entitled my course “Genesis and the Human Condition,” convinced by now that the purpose of the book, and especially of these early accounts, was to explain the brokenness of human existence as the cumulative result of alienation from God. My class, however, wanted to talk about “Genesis and Human Origins,” since they were equally convinced that the purpose of the book was to tell us where we came from and how we got here. The only way I could push past my introduction into the course material was finally to say, “If you want a class on ‘Genesis and Human Origins,’ you’ll have to start your own in the next room.” Nobody left, so we spent the rest of the quarter talking about Genesis and the human condition.

My first lesson was on the “days of creation.” I presented the interpretation I’d found so satisfying when I learned it from Meredith Kline, which I’d also taught my students in the Ontario Bible College extension program. Calling the account the “Song of the Seven Days,” I established its “lyrical,” poetical character. I showed how God’s creative activity, as described, solved a twofold problem (“the earth was without form, and void”) by making a place for everything and then putting everything in its place. The point of the passage, I stressed, was for us to recognize our paradoxical status within creation, our simultaneous exaltation and subordination. We are God’s stewards and vice-regents, meant to superintend creation, but we are specifically meant to do this in service to God, in whose sabbath enthronement we must participate.

The class discussion turned immediately to the question of human origins. Even if what I’d said was the point of the story, people wanted to know, this didn’t preclude its being a valid description of how we got here, did it? I sketched briefly the textual difficulties inherent in a literal reading and the literary failings of the “gap theory” and the “day-age view.” But my main response was that if they really wanted to know why this account could not be understood as descriptive of actual events, even in a poetic way, they should return the next week.

The second class was to consider the first episode of the immediately following section of Genesis, which in the book is entitled “The Generations of the Heavens and the Earth.” This first episode of the section corresponds to the portion of Genesis we identify as 2:5-25 by our modern chapter and verse divisions. Many English translations treat Gen. 2:4b as part of this specific episode’s narrative opening, but my linguistic and literary inquiries convinced me that all of what we consider verse 4 belongs together. It follows the conventions of Hebrew poetry by forming a united couplet that says the same thing twice, in different words:

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth
when they were fashioned,
In the day that Yahweh Elohim
made earth and heaven.

This is a poetic introduction, in other words, to the whole “Generations of the Heavens and the Earth” section.

I saw, furthermore, that the episode I was considering, like the Song of the Seven Days immediately before it, describes how a twofold problem was solved. The problem is described at the outset:

Now no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herbage of the field had yet sprung up
Because Yahweh Elohim had not caused it to rain upon the earth
And there was no man to work the ground.

The first problem, that of a water supply, is solved first:

And a stream arose from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.

Then, a groundskeeper is found:

And Yahweh Elohim formed the man from the dust of the ground
And breathed into his nostrils the breath of life
And the man became a living soul.

With both problems solved, the earth’s vegetation could be watered and tended, and so God planted a garden in Eden, where it was irrigated by a fourfold stream. He placed his groundskeeper in the garden. Problem solved.

But God immediately recognized another problem. It was not good for the man to be alone. So God made many different kinds of birds and beasts that could be appropriate helpers for the man, but none of them was found suitable. Then God made a woman from part of the man himself; she proved to be the perfect companion. The episode ends by celebrating this complementarity and partnership as the foundation of the marriage relationship, which, it specifies, is to be considered supreme even over patriarchal ties.

The narrative development is splendid, I explained to my class, and the vision of connubial bliss positively charming. But the story is told with blithe disregard for any chronological harmonization with the immediately preceding song. Man is made before the animals in Genesis 2 (this is practically the whole plot), but after the animals in Genesis 1. The inescapable conclusion is that the early chapters of Genesis are not necessarily intended as “history,” that is, they are not always attempting to portray, even in stylized form, actual events as they took place in the past. The point of these stories is primarily a moral one instead: in Genesis 1, the need to defer to God’s supremacy; in Genesis 2, the priority of marriage ties over kinship.

My pilgrimage in understanding had brought me a long way from the confident creationist days of my youth. I now felt that I had to be somewhat more tentative and allow for more unanswered questions when I spoke about human origins. But I also recognized much more clearly the moral imperative the Genesis narrative was communicating, and felt much more strongly the urgency of complying with it. This was more a matter of obedience than of knowledge, and was a worthy goal for a lifetime of personal and spiritual growth.

As I explained last time, when my local association reviewed my ordination paper, I discovered that I couldn’t say in it that humans had been made “last but highest, to rule over creation,” because as one minister pointed out, man is created after the animals in the opening Genesis account, but before them in the next account.

I had to give the Genesis author credit for knowing that if both accounts were taken as history, they would be contradictory. They were too close together for this detail to have been overlooked. The only conclusion I could reach was that this author did not understand himself to be writing history, contrary to our characteristic expectations of his work. The implications were profound. It was not necessary to struggle to match up the Genesis narratives with the events of natural and human history! Something else was going on in the pages of this inspired ancient book. I didn’t have the opportunity to pursue this question in depth at this time, but I would return to it in due course.

The third challenge to my thinking came in the course of my service in those years to the church in Newton Centre. I led an eighteen-month inductive Bible study through the entire gospel of Matthew, working from the Greek text and organizing my studies according to the book’s inherent literary divisions. (I would later write up the results of my linguistic and literary background research for publication in New Testament Studies.)

The first section I had to tackle was the book’s opening genealogy. It contains two famous puzzles. The first has already been discussed in an earlier post: Why does Matthew omit three names, jumping from Joram to Uzziah? (This was evidence for Dr. Kline’s “gap theory” of the biblical genealogies.) The second puzzle is why Matthew’s lists still do not add up to the 14-14-14 pattern he specifies.

There are fourteen generations “from Abraham to David” if the first and last figures are both counted, but fourteen generations “from David to the exile” (i.e. to Jeconiah) only if the first figure is not counted. The final series works only if the first and last figures are once again counted, or, alternatively, if Mary is counted along with Joseph, even though they belong to the same “generation.”

The solution to these puzzles, as I suggest in that earlier post, is that Matthew is presenting a portrait of the Messiah as coming at the beginning of the seventh seven of generations in Israelite history. The first, third, and fifth “days” in this “week” of seven-generation days begin at significant redemptive-historical moments: the call of the patriarch Abraham; the foundation of the royal house of David; the destruction of the first temple. The actual historical generations involved are compressed or stretched as necessary in order to accommodate this scheme. The final effect is the portrayal of Jesus as arriving at (indeed, as constituting) the beginning of a time of spiritual rest and renewal in the life of the nation, corresponding to the concepts of “sabbath” and “jubilee” in the Old Testament. Genealogy provides the canvas on which this portrait is painted, but what we have before us is clearly closer to art than history.

As I prepared a Bible study outline for this passage, I referred my students by way of analogy to the similar but much more elaborate redemptive-historical patterning found in the Book of Jubilees, a non-biblical Jewish work from the second century before Christ. According to this book, Moses was given the law on Mount Sinai 2,401 years, or (7×7)x(7×7) years, after the creation.

I also called attention as well to other genealogies in the Bible that are similarly shaped by artistic and theological designs. The principle of artistic arrangement can be seen in parallel genealogies in Genesis that portray two lines of descent from Adam. The line of Cain, who is cursed, is traced to seven generations; the last figure, whose story is expanded, is described as the father of three sons. The line of Seth, given by God in place of righteous Abel, is traced to ten generations; the last figure, whose story is expanded, is similarly described as the father of three sons.

A more elaborate example is found at the beginning of 1 Chronicles. The sons of Jacob, when first enumerated in this long genealogy , are grouped according to their mothers: first Leah’s sons, then Rachel’s, then Bilhah’s (Rachel’s handmaiden), then Zilpah’s (Leah’s handmaiden). There is one prominent exception: Bilhah’s son Dan is listed right after Leah’s six sons. But the records of the descendants of each of Jacob’s sons are not then elaborated in this order.

Rather, the genealogy develops politically and geographically. Judah is listed first, because the royal house of David is Judean. Simeon, who territory was integrated into the southern Judean kingdom when Israel was divided, is listed next. The territory of Benjamin also formed part of the southern kingdom, but Benjamin’s descendants are described last of all, to de-emphasize the tribe that produced the abortive royal house of Saul. After Simeon come instead the two and a half tribes who settled across the Jordan and were taken into exile earlier than the rest (for idolatry, we are told): Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh. The Levites, whose cities were scattered throughout Israel, are listed next. Then come the tribes that made up the northern kingdom, with one significant exception: Dan is never mentioned at all. Given his prominence at the opening, we recognize that this is deliberate. When we recall that the Danites were notorious as the first idolaters in Israel, we see that this “genealogy” is being shaped as an emblem of Israelite history and geography, and particularly as a warning against idolatry.

Such examples helped me explain, in the Bible study I was leading, how the genealogy in Matthew develops and how it “works.” But they were helpful to me personally for another reason. The background research I did for this lesson fixed firmly in my mind the principle that the genre of genealogy in the Bible uses “history” only as a jumping-off point for theological statements that are made through artistic portrayals. Biblical genealogies are historical only secondarily, in other words. This being the case, it is not appropriate to use them, especially not cumulatively, in seeking to answer historical questions such as the duration of human civilization or the age of the earth.

So my years in graduate school, my pursuit of the ordination process, and my service in a local church gave me the opportunity to reflect in depth on my theological convictions and on their biblical foundations, and specifically on these questions relating to the issue of human origins.

Around this time I also read an interesting book by Francis Hitching entitled The Neck of the Giraffe: Darwin, Evolution and the New Biology. It took its name from one of the famous unsolved problems of evolution: How did the giraffe get its long neck? The book was not by a creationist; its author didn’t even describe any religious beliefs he may have held. Rather, working within the evolutionary paradigm itself, he explained why more and more scientists were questioning the classic Darwinian model, in which all life arises gradually from a common source through beneficial mutations and the process of natural selection.

Such problems as the giraffe’s neck had so far proven insoluble within this model, and so, he reported, alternative avenues to understanding were being explored. These included the theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” in which different species come into being with relative suddenness (although nevertheless through processes such as Darwin postulated, including geographic isolation and natural selection), and the discipline of cladistics, in which species were grouped according to their significant characteristics. (At the time I thought that this was done without any conclusions being drawn about ancestry. I did not realize that one of the most fundamental assumptions behind cladistics was that evolution had indeed occurred, and that characteristics considered significant for classification were believed to have been evolutionarily-derived.)

I had typed a paper in college for a student who had researched theories of the origin of flight in birds; he had found all of them unsatisfactory. And so I already knew that creationists were not the only ones dissatisfied with a classic Darwinian explanation of natural history. These alternative approaches, particularly as I understood them, provided more middle ground for me to explore once I no longer felt compelled to believe in a recent creation based on biblical authority. (I’ll explain in a future post how that shift occurred.)

At this time I also read Northrop Frye’s book The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. I admired Frye as a literary critic, having come across his work in several of my courses at Harvard, and so I was eager to read what he had to say about the Bible. His book helped me continue integrating my thinking by giving me a model within which I could approach the Bible using the literary-critical skills I had been taught.

While living in Ottawa I taught several courses on biblical books for the evening extension program of the Ontario Bible College. For each course, I worked from a literary outline of the book we were considering, rather than from chapter divisions, which I now knew were often misleading and not representative of a book’s inherent developmental transitions.

I showed my students how the book of Hebrews, for example, alternates several times between exposition and exhortation, with clearly marked literary transitions. And when I taught a course on Genesis, I passed along the insight into its structure I had gotten from Meredith Kline, that the ten repetitions in the book of the phrase “these are the generations of . . .” mark off its major sections. “Generations” here means “things generated”; the “generations of Adam,” for example, are what Adam brought forth—not his genealogy. (After further study, I would now say that the Torah or Pentateuch is divided into sections by twelve repetitions of this phrase. There are actually 11 in what we know as the book of Genesis; Dr. Kline counted Genesis 36:1 and 36:9 as a single occurrence. The other is in Numbers 3:1.) My interpretive paradigm was becoming ever more consistently literary, not literal.

Within my Genesis course I naturally discussed the creation account. I first stressed, presenting the exegesis of that passage I had learned from Dr. Kline, that the most important thing, whether we took the chapter literally or not, was to appreciate its moral message. We needed to witness and participate in the “Sabbath enthronement of God” as the culmination of creation. This account does not “cater to our curiosity” about origins, I insisted. “What is that to you?” it asks, just as Jesus asked Peter when he inquired whether John would live until His return. “Follow me,” Jesus had said, and so we should also follow God without asking too much about things that were beyond us.

I did, however, share a few thoughts about whether we could legitimately take Genesis 1 as the grounds for believing in a recent creation. I observed first that “the poetic character of the passage is indisputable,” but added that “poetry can describe events that actually took place, so genre does not force a non-literal view, although it arguably permits it.” (By non-literal I meant one in which words and phrases are not necessarily descriptions, even figurative ones, of historical events.)

I then acknowledged the difficulties of a sequential, descriptive reading, specifically light on earth without the sun. The best resolution of this difficulty I could manage was to envision Genesis 1 as having been revealed from God’s perspective, insisting in my lecture, “There is not, as for us, with God a distinction between purpose and accomplishment, between seeing what does appear and what will appear. From the time God said there would be night and day, there was night and day. Nevertheless, as we all know, the sun gives light on the earth.”

I concluded with some objections that could be raised against the theory of evolution as a rival to the Genesis creation account, some taken from standard creationist arguments and others from sources such as The Neck of the Giraffe. My main point was that the prevailing belief about natural history had changed first, in response to the “spirit of the age” or Zeitgeist that emphasized “progress.” The physical evidence for evolution had come later, in the hands of people who were specifically looking for what they claimed to have found, but in many cases turned out to have been mistaken.

I noted the continuing gaps in the fossil record, which were leading to such theories as “punctuated equilibrium.” And I questioned the reliability of radioactive dating, noting that it depended on the assumption that the ratio of radioactive material to non-radioactive has remained constant throughout geologic time, an assumption incapable of scientific proof. I also noted the circular argument by which, in my understanding, the geologic time table had been constructed: Fossils were dated at a certain age because they were assigned to certain periods, but these periods were assigned that same age because they contained these fossils. My ultimate conclusion was, “if you want to believe that the earth is thousands of years old rather than millions, you are perfectly justified.”

So my seminary experience and my later reflections on it had brought me to a point where I could accept a poetic, figurative reading of the “days of creation,” but my understanding of the biblical chronology implicit in the genealogies running from Adam to later personages still committed me to a young-earth view. What science I knew did not present an insurmountable obstacle to this position.

However, I did have to respect the scientific expertise of one Christian I knew well, trusted, and admired, and his claims were becoming unsettling. In these same years my brother-in-law, Stephen Godfrey, became suddenly and deeply disillusioned with creationism. As he pursued his Ph.D. in paleontology, he began to complain the expectations about the fossil record he had had as a young-earth creationist were not being borne out in his field research. Now he didn’t know what to believe about creation and evolution, or about the rest of the doctrinal package that had come wrapped in the creationism he had been taught.

I didn’t fully appreciate the paleontology involved, but I knew him well enough to know he was not motivated, like the evolutionists I’d heard caricatured, by a desire for an ateleological natural world that would free him of moral responsibility. Clearly he had seen something in the ground that had shattered the “creation science” I was still considering reliable. I slowly began to hold this “science” at arm’s length, releasing my embrace of it and regarding it with a critical eye.

I was won over to Dr. Kline’s “Framework View” on the textual level, I should specify. I wrote in my notes, “This exegesis is correct, but the implications with respect to chronology do not necessarily hold.” What I meant by implications was that a reading of Genesis 1 as “poetry” could easily allow creation to have taken much longer than six literal days, and thus would allow the earth to be very old. But I still did not consider this possible, because I continued to believe that I should establish my understanding of the earth’s age by beginning with the Bible, and that the Bible still only allowed this to be about 6,000 years, however long the original creation might have required.

I based this continuing conviction, even given my new understanding of Genesis 1, on the genealogies in the Bible that began with Adam and ran down to datable historical figures, providing the age of each father at the time of the birth of each son. Using these genealogies, Bishop Ussher had made his famous calculations that put creation in the year 4004 B.C. I had not made all the calculations myself, but six thousand years felt about right.

Dr. Kline was well aware of these genealogies, but still did not believe in a recent creation. He accommodated the vast ages of geologic time postulated by natural scientists by appeal to the possibility of “gaps” in the biblical genealogies. And here I thought I detected a bit of inconsistency on the part of the “old professor” (as he liked to call himself).

In addition to promulgating his own “gap theory” of genealogies, he emulated those who read “day” to mean “age” in Genesis 1 by sometimes reading “son” as “descendant” in the genealogies, and by sometimes understanding “begat” to mean “was the ancestor of.” To defend such readings, he called our attention to Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus at the beginning of his gospel (Matt. 1:1-17). In verse 1, Jesus is called the “son” of Abraham and David, even though he is a more distant descendant of each of these figures. And in verse 8, Joram is said to have “begotten” Uzziah, who was really his great-great-grandson.

But the same objections Dr. Kline had raised to popular interpretations of Genesis 1 could be leveled against his reading of the first chapter of Matthew. Is not its first verse a “summary introduction,” and is it not therefore unfair to read it as if it were part of the genealogy proper? And does not Matthew omit the kings between Joram and Uzziah in order to maintain a 14-14-14 pattern, to portray Jesus as coming at the beginning of the seventh seven of generations after Abraham, the generation of sabbath or jubilee? In other words, is he not really writing “poetry,” more than “genealogy”?

As I would later discover, all of the biblical genealogies have strong poetical aims and characteristics, obviating the need to read them literally and to postulate a young earth on biblical authority. But Dr. Kline had not carried his analysis this far, and so had to live with some interpretive inconsistencies. One day while carpooling to seminary the conversation turned to Dr. Kline’s reading of the genealogies. I said I was unconvinced, and thought he had adopted this interpretation mostly to accommodate the vast ages of geologic time somewhere in his reading of the Bible. The driver said, gravely, “I think we need to do that.” I still didn’t.

My other seminary courses were just as challenging and exciting. The year I spent at Gordon-Conwell in 1981-82 was a wonderful time of stretching and growing. But I didn’t return the following year, as I was reluctant to borrow heavily for my education and I wanted to invest some quality time in my still-new marriage relationship. (I concluded, finding reassurance in an analogy, that the exemption of new husbands from military service found in Deuteronomy should apply to seminary students as well.) Some friends in Ottawa, Ontario connected us with a small church there and I became its pastor.

After a little over a year, I found that I needed even more of a break and resigned my pastorate, eventually finding work as a writer in the Canadian Department of Communications, where I worked for more than three years. The time I spent out of seminary and then out of the ministry proved to be an excellent opportunity for personal growth and for the consolidation of my thinking on a great many previously-closed questions that seminary had opened. This included the question of the Bible and human origins.

At one point I struck up a correspondence with a friend who wanted to know how I, as an educated person, could continue to believe in a recent creation in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that the universe is ancient. As I recall our exchange of letters on the subject, I felt I was being encouraged to embrace an ateleological world view. I shrank back from what I felt the moral implications of this view would be: “survival of the fittest” as the rule of relationships between people, with might making right.

My friend explained that these were not necessarily the implications of an evolutionary paradigm if the lesson of evolution for us was that humans had survived and thrived through cooperation among themselves. This was the first time it had been demonstrated for me that I did not necessarily have to make a stark choice between a creationist paradigm (unscientific, but moral), in which people are accountable to God for how they treat others, and an evolutionary one (scientific, but amoral), in which life consists of a ruthless quest for domination. There were some options in between.

After the “gap” theory, Dr. Kline took up the so-called “day-age” theory, in which the “days” of creation are understood not as 24-hour periods, but as long stretches of time, possibly lasting millions of years. This view appeals to the frequent figurative use of the word “day,” in Hebrew as in many languages, to mean a longer period of time (for example, “in the days of the Romans”).

I had encountered this view before as well. Once a biology teacher in our high school (not the one whose course I had taken) visited our weekly Bible and prayer club and asked why we had trouble believing in evolution, when the best description of it she knew was found in the opening chapter of the Bible. She meant that Genesis 1 described simpler forms of life coming into being before more complex ones. But her reading depended on a figurative understanding of the word “day.” It would also have broken down with more careful scrutiny, as in Genesis life appears on land before it appears in the sea, contrary to the evolutionary scenario. But I did not entertain her interpretation long enough even to make this simple observation; I was convinced that a day was a day was a day.

Dr. Kline’s analysis of the “day-age” theory included some observations about its impracticality. He questioned, for example, how there could have been vegetation on earth (day 3)—not to mention light (day 1)—for many millions of years before the sun was created (day 4). This had been Calvin Chao’s “very good question,” I recalled. He described the typical answer to this objection: the sun actually became visible on earth on the “fourth day”; before this, it was in existence and warming the earth, but obscured by clouds or mist. But such a statement, he observed, appears nowhere explicitly in the text.

I found this very convincing. But most of his response to this interpretation, like his response to the gap theory, did not require going outside the text to show the impossibility of correspondence with natural history. Rather, he just challenged us to read more carefully. He called our attention to the way the “days” of Genesis have “evenings” and “mornings.” Why should this be specified, he asked, if they were not meant to be understood as literal days? I was with him all the way on this one.

Things got more uncomfortable for me, however, when he took up the third prevailing interpretation, the so-called “literal” reading of Genesis 1, whose natural-world corollary was a young earth. Here he found the same sequence problems as in the day-age view, if this chapter were to be taken as a description of actual events: light and vegetation before the sun.

The solution to this problem I had always heard within creationist circles was that God had exercised some supernatural influence on the created world during the first week, until everything needed for its natural operation was in place. For example, God would have made vegetation spring forth from the earth even in the deep freeze before the sun’s creation, and somehow have sustained it until the sun was created and had warmed the earth. If one was already prepared to believe that God was performing supernatural acts such as creation ex nihilo (“out of nothing”) by the spoken word, certainly the notion of a divine greenhouse effect could not strain credulity.

But Dr. Kline asked a question that would never have occurred to me: What does the Bible say about how God sustained the creation while it was in process? Was this through supernatural agencies, or through natural providence? He called our attention to Genesis 2:5, which read, according to his translation, “Now no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up, because the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground.”

If “no plant of the field was yet in the earth,” he noted, we were back in the six-day period; the narrative of the book proper (2:4ff) was picking up the story at a certain point in the prologue (1:1-2:3). But clearly, during this period, God was working through natural providence: there were no plants because there was no water and, in effect, no one to mow the lawn. Once these were furnished, plants could grow—naturally.

This did not sit well with me, as the premise of supernatural agency was the key to my literal reading. I wrote in my notes, “The whole argument rests on ‘because.’” Dr. Kline had acknowledged that this word was not to be found in most translations of the Bible. (The majority of versions do say “for,” which can mean “because,” but it can also be interpreted in other ways.) I raised my hand and asked him why he thought this was so.

What I was getting at was, “Why do you think your translation is right and everyone else’s is wrong?” But it did not even occur to him to defend himself against my implication that he was adopting a self-serving translation. He simply replied, with evident frustration at other translators, “I don’t know why it isn’t in our translations, because it’s definitely there in the original.”

Not knowing any Hebrew, I was not qualified to investigate the matter myself, but I found reassurance in the thought that the consensus favored a translation that posed no problem for my literal-supernatural reading. (Years later, when I did learn Hebrew and began using it regularly in sermon preparation, I discovered repeatedly how tradition and extra-textual exigencies do slant our translations. And I saw for myself that “because” really is in the text of Genesis 2:5.)

Having objected to the three prevailing understandings of Genesis 1, Dr. Kline proceeded to present his own view. (I’m not sure whether it was original with him, but my generation of Gordon-Conwell alumni will always associate it with him.) He first made the case that the opening creation account in Genesis must be considered “poetry.” He showed us that the whole account consisted of a sequence of formulaic “strophes” (variations on the sequence “God said . . . God made . . . God called . . . God saw . . .”), punctuated by a repeated refrain (“and there was evening and there was morning, the Nth day”).

He also assured us that in the original Hebrew the account featured the poetic devices of alliteration (repetition of consonant sounds) and assonance (repetition of vowel sounds). And even in English we could appreciate the presence of parallelism or repetition of meaning, a defining characteristic of Hebrew poetry—for example, “God made man in his own image, in the image of God he created him” (v. 27). So our expectations of this account should rightfully be those of poetry, not of narrative. It was literal interpreters who had to labor under the burden of proof.

He then showed us, from the text, how days 1-3 describe God making “creature-kingdoms”: day and night; sky and sea; the dry land. Days 4-6 then show how God populated each of these kingdoms in the same sequence in which they were made, setting within each a “creature-king”: the sun, moon, and stars to populate the day and night, with the sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night; fish to swim in the sea and birds to fly in the sky, with the “sea monster” to rule the sea; and cattle, creeping things, and humans to populate the land.

Humans, Dr. Kline noted, are “creature-kings” not just of the land, but of the sky and sea as well. They are God’s vice-regents, in other words. But even they must defer to God’s prerogatives, hence the sabbath of the seventh day, when the entire created structure pauses to acknowledge its Creator. (Dr. Kline winced at the separation of the seventh day from the first six by an unfortunate chapter division in modern Bibles.)

Here was an amazing depth of meaning I had never appreciated before in the account of the days of creation. This passage was not so much a description of how we got here as an explanation of why we were here. It had a moral purpose, challenging humans to acknowledge God’s supreme lordship, despite their pretensions to self-determination and self-sufficiency. I was immediately won over to Dr. Kline’s reading of the passage. His literary arguments had had a compelling effect on a literature major.

Having sensed a call to the ministry even before entering college, my plan had always been to go to seminary afterwards. The summer after graduation, however, these plans were suddenly but pleasantly put on hold for a year when I became engaged to a young lady with whom I had maintained a long-distance friendship over the years, Priscilla Godfrey of Sherbooke, Quebec. After devoting a year to wedding preparations and to deepening our relationship, we were married on May 23, 1981. (In the process, I became formally related to my future co-author, Stephen J. Godfrey, as his brother-in-law.)

I entered Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary that September. As a multidenominational evangelical seminary, Gordon-Conwell exposed me to a much broader range of Christian thinking and practice than I had yet encountered, all of it nevertheless falling solidly within the stream of historic Christian orthodoxy. I would soon discover, as I took classes in church history, that the evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic, and Pentecostal groups with which I had become familiar, even though they appeared quite diverse from one another, were really very close cousins within the extended family of Christendom. I would meet greater and greater numbers of my other relatives in the faith as I engaged my professors and fellow students in the days ahead.

One of the most remarkable of these newly-discovered relatives was Dr. Meredith G. Kline. I took his Old Testament Hermeneutics course in my first semester at Gordon-Conwell, as did most students in those years. I sat back in awe as he spoke: He was brilliant, and a meticulous scholar, but his deep faith and Christlike character shone through everything he said and did. This was a rare combination. I felt it set a standard towards which I should aspire.

Much of what Dr. Kline presented in class was very challenging to me, but in a most welcome way. He was, for example, an Orthodox Presbyterian and as such a “Five-Point Calvinist.” (The Calvinist tradition stresses the sovereignty of God, as opposed to the “Arminian” tradition with which I was familiar, which stresses human freedom of will and consequent moral responsibility. The “five points” are total depravity, specifically, the fallenness of human reason; unconditional election; a limited atonement; the irresistibility of grace; and the perseverance of the saints, or their eternal security.)

Students would chuckle outside of class that Dr. Kline somehow found the elect and the reprobate on every page of Scripture. From him, and from other professors in the same theological tradition, I received a new appreciation for the grace of God by which alone we come to salvation. I did not embrace all of the “five points” in the end, such as the notion of a limited atonement, but in retrospect I recognize that my theological categories were helpfully broadened by the encounter.

This was not the main way Dr. Kline influenced me, however. His theological commitments, strong as they were, were not primary; he was first and foremost a biblical scholar, and he carried out his scholarship specifically through a careful reading of the text. His insightful reading of one text in particular, the account of the days of creation at the beginning of Genesis, changed forever the way I would understand that text, and the way I would henceforth read all others.

In a class lecture presenting research he had published in one of his early articles, “Because It Had Not Rained” from the Westminster Theological Journal, Dr. Kline explored and assessed the interpretations of Genesis 1 then current among evangelicals. This was a lecture he probably gave countless times, but hearing it was a watershed in my personal understanding of the Bible. These interpretations, he explained, arose in light of the need readers felt to reconcile the Bible’s apparent description of a recent creation with geologic evidence suggesting the earth was very old.

One of these interpretations was the so-called “gap theory,” which postulated that a very long period of time had transpired between the events described in the opening sentence of the Genesis creation account (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”) and in the next sentence (translated to read, “The earth became without form and void”). The former statement, in this interpretation, was a description of an original creation in which all of the dinosaurs and other extinct creatures known from fossils had lived, and the latter was a description of some catastrophe that had wiped out life on earth. The rest of the account of the “days of creation” was held to be actually the story of a re-creation. I had heard this interpretation before, in a “Jesus People” coffeehouse, but I had dismissed it, mostly because I saw no need to accommodate a long period of time in the story of creation, convinced as I was by young-earth claims.

Dr. Kline also took issue with this interpretation, but on very different grounds. He explained that, in keeping with the conventions of Hebrew literature, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” was just a summary introduction, like a headline or lead paragraph in modern journalistic writing. (Other examples of this literary convention abound in the Hebrew Scriptures; to cite one other instance, the statement later in Genesis, “Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more,” provides a summary introduction to the account that follows about Joseph sharing this dream with his brothers.

Proof that the opening statement was indeed a summary of the entire account, the “creation of the heavens and the earth,” could be found later in the account itself, in verses 7-8, where the creation of the “heavens” was described in more detail, and in verses 9-10, where the same was done for the creation of the “earth.” The cosmological implications, of course, were that gap theorists would have to argue for a total destruction and re-creation of the universe, not just the ruin and restoration of terrestrial life. But Dr. Kline did not find it necessary to draw out these implications. It was enough for him to show that these interpreters were reading literature badly.

This was probably the first time I’d ever seen that if we want to interpret the Bible accurately and credibly, we need to approach it on its own terms, that is, by understanding and respecting the literary conventions according to which it was written. The integration I had not made so far, between literature and the Bible, was now under way.

Even though I now had many questions, I continued to believe that the opening account in Genesis was an exact description of the events of the first six days of the physical creation. If I’d had to account for light without the sun on the first three days, I would have appealed to some supernatural agency. But as I would later learn from Meredith Kline (about whom much more will be said in future posts), the Genesis text itself posits natural agencies at work during these days instead.

At the start of one year in college, another member of our Christian fellowship described to me her experience setting up a weekly Bible study for the summer that had just ended. She had gathered several interested students who were home from different colleges, and it appeared that she and another young man would take turns leading the study. But the first week, she told me, it turned out he wanted to explore such questions as, “Why are there two creation accounts in Genesis?” This approach struck her as too critical, almost skeptical, and she came home very distressed. She told me that it was an answer to prayer when he suddenly proved unable to attend any more of the meetings. Even though she had to lead them all herself, she had a much more comfortable experience than she had imagined she would after the first week. I was genuinely happy that her group had been free from tension and discomfort. But I also could not help wondering, “Why are there two creation accounts in Genesis?” I wouldn’t get an answer to that one for a long time.

I dealt with any difficulties in my literal reading of Genesis, in other words, by suspending judgment on questions it could not resolve. I was not in the habit of seeking explanations of difficult statements by careful attention to the surrounding context, and this shielded my position further. I therefore was able to go through Harvard College as an open-minded but pretty thoroughly convinced creationist.

In fact, when my grandfather gave me a gift to allow me to buy any books I’d been wanting, as his personal acknowledgment of the “Detur Prize” I’d received for being among those in our freshman class who’d achieved highest honors, I chose three creationist books, including Whitcomb and Morris’s The Genesis Flood. Looking back, I can see that these books appealed to me particularly during this time when I was working so hard to integrate my faith within a new realm of intellectual activity because they represented an attempt to reconcile faith and reason. They didn’t reject science; instead, they claimed to present scientific evidence that validated a literal reading of the biblical accounts. I would find out later that both this “evidence” and that way of reading were problematic. But for the time being, these books helped reassure me that the two ways of knowing were compatible.

Still, the presence of these writings on my bookshelf at college sparked many interesting discussions with fellow students, especially other members of our Christian fellowship, some of whom turned out to be, to my astonishment, “evolutionists.” When I mentioned to one such Christian student, completely outside the context of discussions we’d had earlier about creation and evolution, that I admired the works of C.S. Lewis and hoped one day to write books myself defending the reasonableness of Christian faith, he replied, “Just don’t use anything from the Creation Research Society in your books.” This unexpected reference made quite an impression on me. I admired both the faith and the thoughtfulness of this student, who was a year ahead of me in school. His adamant opposition to what I considered good science and good biblical interpretation made me consider creationism with some suspicion, practically for the first time.

In my final year of college I roomed with a Christian biology major who wrote a creationist senior thesis. It was quite puzzling to me when my roommate’s extensive presentation of the best evidences creationism could muster did not seem to sway his faculty readers, who were surely in a position to appreciate these evidences. Was it really the case that these professors were willfully blind to physical facts because they wanted a moral carte blanche?

I didn’t know much about these particular readers, but I’d encountered many other Harvard professors in my own courses, and I had found them in general to be fair-minded and objective when it came to the strengths and weaknesses of positions they didn’t personally hold. Indeed, one of them, a history professor, had explained a troubling passage in the Bible for me better than any preacher ever had. “When Jesus said, ‘The poor you will always have with you,’” this historian had explained, “he meant orphans and widows, not victims of structural injustice.” So I had to entertain the possibility that the Harvard professors who had read my roommate’s thesis could have been, like their faculty colleagues whom I knew, objective people of good will. Was the problem therefore with what we considered evidences of a recent creation? The only other option was that the biology department had attracted most of the bad apples in the school.

I now find it significant that when I graduated from college and took my other possessions home, I left my creationist books behind. Officially I donated them to our Christian fellowship’s small, eclectic library. But I think symbolically I was leaving them for others to wrestle with, in the place where I had become much more disillusioned with their teaching than I realized at the time.