The Unknowable Love of God—and the Creation Debate

I wish everyone could see the love that God has for all of us. It is very easy to be distracted from it. Over the last day or two I’ve been kind of casually investigating what Creationists are saying, because I had some kind of curiosity about it. I had some ideas about what their arguments might consist of and what gaps they likely had in their scientific knowledge, and so far I have largely been confirmed in my suspicions. However, that is not to say that they make no valid points. The most valid points of all are the ones in which the philosophy of Darwinism is shown to be dehumanizing and to eradicate love, faith and beauty. If you love Darwin for his scientific observations you probably just guffawed—if you’ve seen the wonder and beauty of ancient life, how can it be dehumanizing? But I am talking about something that has nothing to do with the natural world and everything to do with the modernist justifications for the wars and genocides (not to mention racism, chattel slavery, etc.) of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Darwinism gets rolled into these justifications very neatly, because the fossil evidence for a progression of life from more primitive forms to modern man is easily used to justify the idea that man is nothing but an odd animal, and once you accept that idea it enables you to justify pretty well anything. The only thing restraining or correcting you if you believe this is personal feelings about morality—your conscience—or a desire for social acceptance or avoidance of punishment (i.e. prosecution for criminal acts).

Moreover, it is difficult to see how the narrative of Genesis and the narrative of the geological record can actually be reconciled, which leaves most people in one of four positions: they believe the geological record and take it as a refutation of Genesis; they believe the authority of the Scripture and take it as a refutation of whatever scientists might say to the contrary; they try to create compromises between the two which ultimately satisfy neither and betray a poor understanding of both; or they declare that none of it matters. Then these four groups go and attack each other on the internet.

There are numerous cases of people who truly knew God who declared that evolution was an evil philosophy. Yet not one of these people (as far as I know) were in command of the scientific literature. How can I, as someone who loves science, but only knows God a little, answer them? I do not feel entitled to speak against them; in fact I feel light coming from their words. Yet I also learn from the geological record and from biology and see truth, and often feel I see God’s handprint clearly, even when looking at evolutionary progressions. Am I deluded?

I do not know. I may be; I have been deluded before. But when I asked righteous Adam, the first man, to pray for us sinners, hoping for some help in understanding this problem, I did not receive a scientific denunciation or a philosophical reply. Instead I was permitted to glimpse just a fragment of how God loves us, and that He made all things. So I am led to conclude that this is what God wants us to know about Himself, not because the questions about evolution and Genesis are unimportant, or because there is no underlying truth, but because the first and supreme truth of all is that God is love, and how can we have wisdom about anything else if we do not first have wisdom about this? And He made all things. Why? Because He is love, and He wanted to fill the universe with love and creativity. That’s a feeble and overly-wordy explanation but it’s the best I can do. The point of Genesis is not to be an authority with which to bash heretics or even heresies over the head—yes, Scripture is good for destroying heresy, but that’s not the point! The point is to reveal God Himself, to reveal Christ to us, to reveal His love. The point of Genesis is to reveal the Creator, Who is good and loves animals and growing things, and people as well. He made them just like any artist makes something they love, especially a little sentimental thing they plan to give to a grandchild. It’s private and charming. Who is Christ? He is the one who thought cats and birds and Dimetridons were all good ideas. He made Adam in His own image, and Eve also, and Adam understood the animals so perfectly he could name them—he knew their souls, and they loved him, because he was like Christ. And all things, all Creation longs to be restored to the Creator, and they all wait on Him, from the bones of Tiktaalik to the bushes in your yard. For them, there is no doubt: He is coming!

I’m not any kind of authority, but I think if you feel torn between science and Scripture you are safer believing Scripture and being wrong about the science. I feel people who believe Scripture but get their science wrong have a greater part of the truth than people who do the reverse, and I feel saddened because so many people are enthralled by the beauty they see through science and yet are deterred by the conclusions they drew from it or by some other influence in their lives from allowing for even the possibility that there is a God. I think many of them are afraid that if they allow God in, it would mean they would lose all that beauty they’ve seen through the science, but this is idolatry because it’s viewing God as being joyless and soulless. They have a basically pagan notion of God and they are kind of using the wonder of nature to ward off that darkness. But they are crippled when facing existential questions. If they realized that everything they love about natural history is an expression of the Holy Spirit, they would flock to God.

Yet I also feel a sadness when I see Christians who express their faith by becoming argumentative about paleontology. I feel they are also missing this beauty that I have been blessed to see because I have followed the research, and consequently they are missing something about Christ because they have difficulty framing paleontology as a subject in any other terms than as a tool or topic for polemics. This is a wordy, intellectual way of saying that they are busy fighting instead of just rejoicing in Christ. It is easy to do.

I feel God wanted us to find fossils and see the immense past diversity of life and how wonderful and odd it all was and continues to be, not for the purpose of arguing over whether the Flood happened, or when, or whatever (we know that it did, but I do not know more than that really), but so that we would rejoice at the handiwork of God and yet mourn over the loss of all those creatures, and thus long for Christ to come and restore all things. In short He wants us to find them so that we will do just what the rest of Creation is doing, in hopefully awaiting His return. I think at heart every paleo nerd is unwittingly called in this way.

I kind of think that an evolutionary tree of life exists as a fragment of how all life and all things were connected and united before the Fall. We get dropped on top of that tree because we are still meant to go out and spread the beauty of Eden to the rest of reality—this is the nature of the dominion God commands that we have over creation. But we are not involved in it in quite the same way as the animals because we are created differently—we are closer to the angels and closer to the nature of God, so the nature of our struggle in the fallen reality is different from that of animals. I am tempted to say that for animals it is enough simply to be, but in reality I think it is kind of this way for us too, in that we are meant to act simply according to our true natures. The trouble is that unlike the animals we are very deluded and don’t want to do that. Our natures also give us responsibilities the animals don’t have, and because we know good and evil, we are constantly tested to see which we will choose. We can do such horrible things when we fail, far more destructive than any other organism can do. This is nothing but the perversion of our power to spread the beauty of Eden to Creation. We cannot exercise this power properly even when we try because our hearts are not purified. When our hearts are purified, we will see God and beauty will pour out of us.

It is also my opinion that a lot of the debate over “literal” or “metaphorical” interpretations of Scripture are missing the point, because both sides rely on assumptions about the nature of reality that I do not think are true. God is Spirit, and all of reality is made by and upheld by Him, and I find reality to be essentially spiritual, mysterious and unknowable with a thin membrane of the familiar lying on the surface. Mathematics, science, logic, and Divine revelation all agree that this is the basic pattern of reality—that is, that the known is infinitely exceeded by the unknown, and the unknown in turn is infinitely exceeded by the unknowable. Even what is knowable—like God’s love—is also unknowable. Our reality is full of apparent paradoxes that belie deeper truths and mysteries. How glorious are Thy works, o Lord! I thank God that it is impossible to know both the location and velocity of an electron simultaneously. I love that “imaginary” numbers are critically important to real-world physics. I love that Edaphosaurus has bizarre knobbly bits on its sail, and that (last I heard) we are still struggling to understand why it had the sail to begin with. God not only made all these things, they each express something about Him! But if Genesis is telling the truth, then it is telling the actual truth about a reality we do not perceive very well. God can just kind of warp reality aside when He wants to step in, like something out of Dr. Who or a super-advanced race in Star Trek. He upholds all of reality constantly and at every level from the super-sub-atomic to the super-galactic and perhaps far beyond either of those, so He has total control at both the infinite and infinitesimal scales. He can blink and cause all of it not only to cease existing, but to never have existed.

I think this is actually what leads such a surprising number of young-earth creationists to believe in flat-earth geocentrism. If you have a very concrete view of reality dominated by rationalism, it becomes very hard to believe that God could, say, stop the sun in the sky for a day if the Earth is rotating around it. It seems like it would be too disruptive somehow, like it would be too big. But if the sun actually goes around the earth, then it’s a much more doable task. God does not need this help. He can simply bend reality. He is not constrained by the physics He created in the slightest.

The central question of the debate between evolution and creation is always about Adam. We know from revelation that Adam was a real, particular individual, made in the image of Christ, who was completely human and had no mother. Yet the fossil record demonstrates a pretty clear progression from apes to hominids and hominins, with Homo sapiens and several other Homo species diverging I believe around the start of or during the Pleistocene (I am not a human evolution expert), with plenty of admixture between these species in that time prior to our species becoming globally dominant and the others disappearing. Moreover, late Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens are so indistinguishable as to make a division almost arbitrary. The eternal and temporal realities seem to disagree greatly. I do not know the answer to this problem. However, I can observe a couple facts. First, it is obvious that the entire evolutionary record along with the cosmological record preceding it come after the Fall. Things, organisms and people are being constantly formed, eroded, diseased and destroyed through all 13.5 billion years of observable time. That means every bit of this came after death had entered the world, after the expulsion from Eden. Second, when Adam and Eve are expelled from Paradise, they are given the skins of animals. They do not become animals, neither are they re-born as children of animals, but they are expelled from Paradise and given garments of skin. I do not feel I totally understand what’s going on here, but I think this might be important. Christ says that in the regeneration, we will have bodies like the angels. We will not become angels, we will still be ourselves, but we will be elevated in a transformative way. To me this implies that the Fall had a transformative effect on human beings that was more than “just” spiritual or behavioral; the expulsion from Paradise altered everything and separated us from our original state of being.

I think somehow we were given this animal “skin” which connects us physically to the animal world both as a mercy, due to something about the Fall, and also as some way of calling us back to God. When two people have sex, they can conceive, but they do not create the child; the child is created instantaneously as a whole person by God, but that person must pass through all these biological stages which are frankly pretty humbling, and sometimes they don’t make it. Along the way they will have, at various times, been a single-celled organism, a simple tube-shaped worm, an embryonic mammal with a tail, and a few other odd things that don’t look very “human” from the outside, but they were a complete person the whole time. Yet we inherit traits from our parents, because reproduction itself is a spiritual action that has physical ways of manifesting. It is also a way of participating in God’s Creation.

When I look at the evolutionary record, I see something similar happen with animal life and even plants, microbes and so on. When a new group emerges, usually they first start engaging in a new behavior, and then after that you’ll see them specialize and adapt or improvise on that behavior. So broader evolutionary changes are actually emerging from within, from the hidden reality, from what God is commanding His creatures to do. I think each time this happens you’re looking at the seed of a new creature being planted, and then its children, so to speak, emerge from that. This would be consistent with the statistical reality that random mutation rates explain speciation but not large-scale evolutionary movements (though maybe epigenetics would shake that up somehow, I don’t know). This I think would also answer the criticism from Creationists that Genesis says God creates all His creatures after their kind, and that there is no muddling of their natures, whereas evolution suggests the presence of transitional forms; in fact it seems to me like when you look at paleontology, in some sense everything is a transitional form, and yet each creature is its own particular being which exists for a particular purpose. In other words, the underlying reality reflects what Genesis says about creation, but it is veiled, and in a sense what you are seeing is filtered through the lens of fallenness. It’s not that these creatures were not part of Creation before the Fall, but that something about how life has to emerge into our reality after the Fall requires this kind of process. And of course death is ever-present and is often used to play a role in giving new life forms an opportunity to have their time on earth by opening up ecological space, and kind of segregating all these living things into environments and time periods where they can kind of muddle along and manage to eat and reproduce, and express themselves as they are able, until their time comes to an end. All of these processes are happening so that in time God can bring human beings into the world, not because He requires it in order to create us, but maybe to set the stage in a way—and ultimately to set the stage for the birth of Christ. I feel this is true because there are so many places in the fossil record where just a little difference here or there would have radically altered what living things would be around today or in the recent past.

On a related note, the next biggest conundrum in trying to resolve the differences between science and Christianity is always the paradox presented by a 6-day Creation versus a natural historical record billions of years deep. None of the attempts to answer this paradox I’ve seen out there satisfy me. However, one thing I have not seen anyone point out in relation to this topic yet is the paradox of God creating all things in six days and afterward resting from His work, and yet all around us constantly new organisms and people are popping into existence. So is God’s creative work over, or not? What day of the creation are we living in? If you analyze these questions you can start coming up with all sorts of hypotheses, but I want to simply look at the thing itself, the fact that God finished and rested from His creation on the 7th day, and yet is constantly creating. To me this suggests that the apparent paradox between a 6-day creation and a very, very old universe may actually reflect our own ignorance of how God creates. However, I am not qualified to go much deeper than this.

I’ll finish with a brief comment on evolution itself. When I talk about evolution, I am not talking about the idea that all life emerged spontaneously from random chemical processes and then developed from there according to other random or natural processes, separate from or instead of Divine creation (i.e pure Darwinian evolution by natural selection). I am however talking about the fact that you see clear progressions of primitive species leading to more derived species, and if you have a very good fossil record for an organism you can even track change within a species over time, including a shift from an older form to a more modern one. This is true of gray wolves and American bison. Pleistocene gray wolves were slightly morphologically different from modern wolves, and Pleistocene bison were different enough to be regarded as a distinct species; and this species—the steppe bison or wisent—was common all across the northern hemisphere. Modern bison have narrower horns but are otherwise quite similar. There are many more examples, but these were top-of-mind for me. As to the origins of life in deep time, it’s apparent to me from reading about the Precambrian that there is a progression of living things from almost the formation of the earth up to today, although the fossil record gets patchier the farther back you go. This leads me to think that you would certainly find natural chemical processes involved in the emergence of that first living cell, but you could never separate them from God. In fact they would be nothing but His created things joyfully acting out His commands. I think He likes to involve natural processes in His creative acts in this way because it allows His creation to respond to Him with prayer. So instead of trying to pit natural processes against God in our minds, I think we should be looking for that unending dance between God and His creation. This is the dance we ourselves are continually called to participate in. We are constantly called to answer to the Lover knocking at the door.