The Soulful Eye

My pastor recently did a multi-week series on the topic of the interpretation of the creation account in Genesis 1.  His purpose was not to tell us how we should think but only to show that there are different faithful interpretations; broadly speaking they are metaphorical, 6 literal 24 hr. days, and something called the day age interpretation.  Shortly thereafter we had a guest speaker, the author of the book “Nature’s Witness: How Evolution Inspires Faith“.   Again, none of this was in order to standardize belief for our congregation but to allow room for discussion on a topic that is usually polarizing to the point of paralysis.

All supremely good and brave stuff.

Here’s my take.  My educational background is equal parts anthropology and psychology.  I’m all about evolution.  That’s not a problem.  My problem is highlighted by two of the comments/questions that were posed during the question and answer time after the author spoke.  They were something along these lines:

1. “I heard that cooking meat is what made us have bigger brains and that’s essentially what made us the humans we are today.”  - maybe not the exact words but something about eating cooked meat makes us human.
2. “We’re different from animals because animals don’t fear death, they will lay down and bare their throats to the blade.”  - that one’s more close to the actual wording, it was so disturbing it’s easier to remember.

Again, these comments came not from the author but from the audience.  The problem for me is that there was no real refutation from the speaker.  Granted, he didn’t come to discuss that point specifically.  I’d thought that the author had done a good job of laying out the super-high level perspective of what evolutionary theory is and isn’t about; a very necessary thing in a church context.  But then he just left those two thoughts in the room.  From what I remember there was more back and forth about when we may or may not have gotten souls, or what souls are in light of evolution and our potential ability to clone ourselves.  We could talk about souls but not about how comments one and two above are, um, seriously shady to say the least and I would have expected anyone representing a serious take on current science to at least acknowledge that.  Maybe it didn’t occur to him, maybe he didn’t want to go there, who knows.

On the contrary … serious students of evolution will say that our bodies reflect a strongly herbivorous design.   They will know that there’s no such thing as The One Thing that gave us bigger brains (our relationship to canines may have had just as much influence as anything else) … but the point is that there is no such thing as the 1 thing. Kathy Freston just did an article on this. I’m not saying Kathy Freston is an expert in evolution and physiology  but the people she references in this article are.

The other thing I recall is a theme of “life requires death”.  This is where it gets creepy.  Start with an evangelical slant toward a penal substitutionary view of atonement, the parallel mindset of “something has to die in order for me to live” or more specifically, “God requires bloodshed” (which I think actually came from the assumption that we have to eat meat in the first place – but that’s another very long story), and you get a discussion about evolution and faith that somehow includes the comments above.  Even though there’s scriptural evidence for God’s non-violent ideal for creation and that the project of reconciliation is towards that goal in the final consummation, and even though our physiology screams herbivore, a group of evangelicals talking about faith and evolution ends up joking about how grilling steak makes us human … with an underlying tone of the notion that there’s no difference between killing an animal and killing a plant … it’s all death after all.  I’ve talked about this here.  God made Adam. For whatever reason, Adam blew it.  Only Jesus makes us truly human again, has the ability to restore us to our pre-fall state, to being a human reflecting the image of God … not the burning flesh of bulls.

Granted – I have not yet read this book and maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised at its contents – I’ll update when I do.  I’m not critiquing the book.  Nor am I in anyway criticizing the questions from people who are encountering this topic for the first time.  I’m talking here about my perception of an underlying theme that looks more like a peculiar slant from and for the assumption that humans are obviously, rightly, and forevermore meat eaters … killers … predators … despite evolutionary, physiological, and scriptural evidence to the contrary.    Something about that is fishy.  And I don’t mean cute little car fish fishy.  We can go to Genesis 1 all day long in search of  mandates that support homosexuality as a sin but we still look right past the part where all animals and people were created to survive on non-violent sustenance (without bloodshed).  Something is amiss.

Sometimes I get the response that the permission/concession in Gen. 9 is the only thing that matters to Now.  I couldn’t put my finger on it but that’s it.  People don’t seem notice the other implications in Gen. 1 & 2.  What about what God wants?  We see the part where we have dominion over animals but not the part where that given dominion specifically did not include killing them for food, the part that might challenge the idea that killing, bloodshed, and flesh eating is and always has been the telos of humanity.

update 7/15:  I finally read the book.  It makes perfect sense that the conversation went the way it did given the authors perspective.  I’m working on some commentary on the actual book.  Here it is.