The first 11 chapters in the Bible contain some weird stories.
A talking snake, fruit that kills, celestial beings mating with women, a flood that covers the whole world and a tower that reaches up to heaven.
They seem like folk tales, but what can folk tales tell us about God? And if they are folk tales, does that mean we can’t trust the Bible at all?
It took me years to work through all these issues.
It quacks like a duck
When I was a boy, I heard the stories of Adam & Eve and Noah’s ark and I just believed them, just as I believed the story of Santa Claus. Why wouldn’t I?
And when I was a little older, and I heard about the Theory of Evolution, I thought it sounded ridiculous. As if that could happen!
Later still, as a young adult, I read the whole of Genesis, and I was struck by how unreal it was. By then I had read a few other legends and folk tales, and this looked pretty much the same.
Snakes don’t talk in real life but they do in folk tales.
And plenty of folk tales explain things like how the elephant got its trunk. So explaining why snakes crawled on their bellies, why men needed to do hard work and women have pain in childbirth didn’t sound all that different.
As the saying goes, if it quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck it probably is a duck. So since Genesis 1-11 sounds like other folk tales, myths or legends, especially others from the Middle East, it probably is mostly a folk tale, myth or legend.
So for years I didn’t believe that either Genesis 1-11 or evolution were literally and historically true.
The science wins
But I kept reading, and eventually I found four good reasons to accept evolution as true:
- Fossils provide an incomplete, but nevertheless convincing, picture of the evolution of life. Combined with radiometric dating and mapping of rock strata, relative ages can be estimated and the evolutionary “tree” described.
- Homologies are similar anatomical or cellular structures in different animals, suggesting common descent – e.g. many animal forelimbs share the same set of bones – humerus, radius, and ulna.
- Ideas like natural selection can be tested by modern day experiments that show the feasibility of this mechanism.
- The most convincing evidence for evolution is DNA, which can identify common ancestors, the developments of different species, migration paths and genetic similarities between species. This was especially convincing to me because I had found DNA testing to be really helpful in family history research, and so could see (in broad terms) how it demonstrated an old earth and the relationship between humans and other animals.
I examined the arguments of the evolutionary sceptics and found that while it seemed that some evolutionary questions were still far from answered, the difficulties are not killers for evolution:
- “Gaps” in the fossil record create uncertainties but don’t invalidate evolution.
- The Cambrian explosion when most of the phyla known today appeared in a short space of time is not yet fully explained but several explanations are possible.
- Transition processes which lead to a new species evolving cannot be proven (or disproven), but many can be shown to be feasible.
- The origin of life is the hardest aspect to explain, and there is still no agreed explanation. But neither has it been shown to be an impossible natural process.
So while evolutionary scientists can sometimes overstate the certainty of evolutionary processes, it seemed to me that there is sufficient scientific explanation to justify accepting evolution as true.
How does this affect Christian belief?
Once I came to this conclusion I had to decide how it affected my Christian belief. There were three steps here.
My belief is based on the New Testament
My reasons for believing were based on philosophy, personal experience (mine and others’) and the life of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament. None of this rested on the Old Testament, and especially not on the creation account in Genesis, so evolution was effectively not a threat to my belief.
Some critics have said to me that the New Testament depends on the Old, but it doesn’t seem to me to depend on the literal truth of Genesis. The OT helps us understand the NT, but we don’t have to accept every part of the OT to accept the NT.
Understanding the Bible in a new way
Believers and critics alike tend to start with assumptions about the Bible – that it is all intended to be literally and historically true in a way that we understand truth today, and that if one part fails that test, it all fails. But those are assumptions, and I found good reasons to challenge those assumptions:
- Understanding genre: experts say that ancient writers didn’t see history and scientific fact as we do today. There is no reason to suppose that Genesis was intended as a literal history.
- Unfolding revelation: it seems the Old Testament isn’t all the true words of God, but the account of a gradual revelation and understanding that started with many wrong beliefs and was slowly refined.
Evolving Christian doctrine
This approach to the Bible and especially to Genesis does raise some problems.
- Evolution entails animal predation and suffering before there were any humans. So death is not necessarily the result of human sin, as many Christians believe.
- DNA evidence indicates that there couldn’t have been a literal Adam and Eve, making it difficult to believe in a literal “fall” or in original sin (a doctrine I always thought was unbelievable as often expressed).
- References in the New Testament to Adam and Eve and to creation have to be understood in a new way.
In the end, I can honestly say changing how I understood and believed these matters hasn’t troubled me at all.
Noah and the flood
Long before I questioned the Biblical creation account, I was sceptical of the Noah story. A trustworthy Christian minister raised the issue when he asked the question: “Were there koalas on the ark?”
For those who may not know, koalas are tree dwelling marsupials only found in a small part of Australia. They are not very mobile and live on a diet of eucalyptus leaves. There is no way they could have travelled to the middle east to board the ark, and no way they could have survived without copious eucalyptus leaves. – except if God miraculously moved them there and back and miraculously fed them.
This is just one example of the larger questions raised by the story.
- Could a ship that size have carried two of every animal and bird in the world? Every insect?
- Could Noah have gathered every type of food required? Enough extra animals for the carnivores?
- How much water would be required to flood the entire earth? Does that mean up to the top of Mt Everest? Or could the Himalayas have been formed in 40 days by the cataclysm of the flood, as some creationists believe?
- Would a good God destroy so many people, including the innocent as well as the supposed guilty?
The logistics of the Santa Claus story make it easy even for a child to recognise that it can’t be true. The logistics of Noah’s ark are almost as formidible and soon lead to a similar conclusion.
Yet flood stories abound in the ancient middle east, so maybe there is some actual event behind the story. John Walton suggests that cataclysm stories in the middle east are typically exaggerated, and the Biblical story should be read with that in mind. So maybe we should simply accept the Noah story as telling us something about Hebrew culture and theology without thinking it is either literal history or a reflection of God’s actions?
What does this tell us about the Bible?
In my last post, Murder, mayhem and millions of refugees? I concluded that:
I believe it fits better with history, archaeology and the loving character of God to say that the scriptures God has given us are human documents reflecting the beliefs at the time, and showing how God gradually moved people from this ethic of violence to an ethic of love.
I suggest our consideration of the creation and flood stories reinforces this conclusion. These stories are either unbelievable in the light of modern science, or require God to have acted in ways that seem contrary to his character. It makes more sense to me to believe that God chose to reveal himself through scriuptures that include legend and folk tale as well as history.
If God did create the world in 7 days, he made it look as if it evolved over millions of years, so he can hardly blame us if we believe what our God-given brains have observed.
Answers to the questions we started with
- What can folk tales tell us about God? The Bible’s creation and flood stories have similarities to other ancient middle eastern stories, but with the difference that:
- they portray a single powerful God (not a bunch of squabbling polytheistic gods),
- God creates humans with dignity (rather than as slaves for the gods), and
- God is interested in the welfare and the ethical behaviour of the humans he created (unlike the other gods).
- If they are folk tales, does that mean we can’t trust the Bible at all? It’s all a matter of purpose and genre. We don’t trust folk tales to be accurate historically, but other parts of the Bible are history (e.g. Acts) and historical biography (e.g. the 4 gospels), which aim at being reasonably accurate history.
Where to from here?
Perhaps Christians should feel free to believe the Bible is a slightly different book than we have sometimes been taught. (More on this in my next post.) See also Evolution and God for a discussion of Christian responses to evolution.
And critics of Christian belief do their arguments little good if they focus on beliefs about creation and the flood that don’t withstand scrutiny. Focusing on an anti-scientific view may be useful in arguing against fundamentalist Christians but will miss the point if arguing against Christians who see things differently.
Graphic: Adam & Eve from Free Bible Images Legends of the Fall is, of course, the title of a 1994 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt. I just liked it as a title for this post. My apologies if you were searching for the film!
