9) Making sense of Genesis 1-11

In a world where the birth of the universe is now explained by the theory of the Big Bang and where the complexity of life on our planet is  understood by means of the theory of evolution you would not be alone in feeling like a dinosaur believing in the Biblical account of creation. People find themselves wondering whether the Bible has lost its credibility and that the sceptics and atheists might be right after all.

There are some Christians who fight tooth and nail to prove the credibility of the Biblical accounts as factual accounts, on the other hand there are those who would dismiss Christians and the Biblical accounts as having nothing to say because they are simply stories. It is important to acknowledge that,  in a sense,  both the Big Bang and evolution are stories in their own right as they narrate how the universe we inhabit came to be as it is, and the series of events over millennia that led to the development and evolving of the many species that inhabit this amazing planet with us.  Charles Darwin identified survival of the fittest to be the engine room driving development and change. It might come as a bit of a surprise to proponents of evolutionary theory that the first eleven chapters of Genesis describe a similar phenomenon as the human family tends towards the kind of chaos where dog eats dog, where brother kills brother and the competition extends so far that human beings like Lamech will indulge in self-praise when a young man is killed in retaliation for being wounded and where vengeance extends to seventy-seven fold (Gen 4:24). This is survival of the fittest in a most extreme form. This example is not meant to suggest that evolutionary theory and the first chapters of Genesis can, or should, be synchronised in any way. They offer very different perspectives and set out to give answers to different questions.

It is not the purpose of the Big Bang or evolutionary theories to explain everything from every perspective. It would be unreasonable to expect them to. They are scientific accounts, not religious or philosophical in their purpose. The biblical stories are concerned with describing the creation of the universe by a God intimately related to all of creation. Both the creation accounts in Gen 1-2 highlight the privileged place of humanity in the created order as the stories develop. Gen 1-11 is concerned to relate how God's original blessing of all creation, humanity included, is threatened by a humanity that comes to be at war with itself and with God. What the biblical stories relate is not just how the world was created, but the interaction between God's will, human freedom and failure.  In the midst of human frailty God keeps opening new doors, new vistas, so that humanity family does not totally tear itself to pieces.

Ultimately the worth of the Gen 1-11 is not to be judged on the basis of historicity so much as their veracity - in other words - do they ring true, do they describe humanity accurately? They are unashamedly written from the perspective of faith with a view to explaining the world as we experience it. That there are two creation stories should already alert the reader that this material should not be judged according to the conventions of modern history writing or scientific enquiry. There is profound truth to be found in these chapters, but not in the form of science but in narrative  where human family seems hell bent on its own destruction, and God is heaven bent on saving us from ourselves!

Science and the Bible Professor John Lennox

Can Genesis Be Compatible with Evolution? The Veritas Forum

N.T. Wright on Evolution