Professor John Gerstner tells a story about Arthur Schopenhauer, the nineteenth-century German pessimistic philosopher, who was seated on a park bench in Berlin. A policeman, taking him to be a bum because of the way he was dressed, asked him who he thought he was. He answered him, “I would to God I knew.” This question had to do with his identity. But there is another question, “Where did I come from?,” which is no less important. This has to do with man’s origins. And the way this riddle is answered depends upon one’s presuppositions, which in turn lead to other conclusions of a momentous nature.
One school of thought about origins has the agnostic answer “I don’t know” for its underlying presupposition. Not infrequently the agnostic is really saying, “I can’t know.” If that be true, it is pointless to try to find an answer. But there are some agnostics who do not say this. Rather they affirm: “I don’t know now, but I’m still looking for an answer.” The Christian can provide this kind of agnostic with an answer, and he can frame it persuasively so that agnosticism can conceivably give way to conviction and certainty.
A second response to the question “Where did I come from?” is given by people who hold atheistic, naturalistic, evolutionary presuppositions. A cautionary word must be inserted immediately. There is another view which we will look at shortly that is evolutionary without being either atheistic or naturalistic. But it remains true that atheists and naturalists generally accept the evolutionary hypothesis, which they conceive to be dynamically related both to their denial of the existence of God and to the naturalistic premise that is a substitute for God. For them man is a part of nature.
The problem for the naturalist is not resolved until he can answer the question “Where did matter come from?” Phrased another way it is this: “If man comes from nature through the evolutionary process, does matter have a beginning or has it always existed?” If it had a beginning, then there must have been a first cause, and that first cause could only have been God, whose existence naturalists deny. Thus they must conclude that matter is eternal; there was no beginning.
This viewpoint leads relentlessly to current atheistic existentialism, which has for its philosophical center-piece the notion that life is really meaningless; it makes no sense. And who would disagree with this conclusion, given the underlying presupposition of atheism, naturalism, and evolution? Where man came from, given this starting point, makes no difference anyhow. But this much we do know: those who hold this view are not agnostic. They do have answers. Professor George Gaylord Simpson of Harvard University says, “In the post-Darwinian world another answer seems fairly clear: man is responsible to himself and for himself” (Science, April 1, 1960, p. 974). Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard Observatory, said, “Our God is humanity; our creed is effective participation in universal evolution” (Beyond the Observatory, Scribner, 1967, p. 171). Professor Michael Ghiselin, University of California teacher, argued that the evolutionary hypothesis makes supernaturalism obsolete and God “a superfluous hypothesis” (Science, March 9, 1973, p. 964). For them man is part of nature, the beginning and end of everything. He is here for a time but disappears without leaving more than a trace and has no continuing existence. He is simply a temporary manifestation of a higher form of life that is derived from lower forms in an ascending scale.
The third, and only other, answer to the question about man’s origins is the theistic alternative. This category comprises two different schools of thought, special creationists and theistic evolutionists. They hold certain views in common if they are Christians. Both regard man as creature and God as creator. Both agree that man was made for God, is responsible to God, is fallen, and needs redemption. From the theological perspective, the Christian theistic evolutionist opens himself to criticism that the special creationist does not face.
The first question theistic evolutionists must answer is whether matter is eternal. I know of no biblical theistic evolutionists who would argue for the eternity of matter. All presumably would agree that creation is ex nihilo, that is, fiat creation in which God by the word of his power brought matter into existence. Thus, before matter there was only God, who is spirit. If this be true, then in principle it would be possible for God to make man ex nihilo. The question would be not whether God could do this but what God actually did do. It is here that theistic evolutionists tie man into the processes of nature. They accept the findings of modern science or at least the hypothesis of science about man’s origins, but they attribute the outworking to God, who authored the process through which man came into being.
Theistic evolutionists must cross another bridge that is narrow and perilous. They cannot for one moment postulate that lower forms of animal life had souls such as we find in homo sapiens today. Thus at whatever point in the evolutionary process some animal became man, God must have created and implanted in man the soul that distinguishes him from animals. To put it another way, when did the imago dei get into man which made man man? Something was added at some point to the evolutionary spiral. That something was not there before. It came about by direct divine intervention—God added a new component that did not spring from nature.
If this be true, why need we suppose that the body of man came through an evolutionary process when the soul did not? The Christian evolutionist replies by saying that this is the way God chose to do it. By doing so he projects science into the picture.
Once science is introduced, it raises these questions in connection with man’s origins: “What is the relationship between science and the Bible? What do we do if and when the so-called sure conclusions of science appear to contradict what we read in the Bible? Do we interpret the Bible so that it agrees with science? But if the Bible’s teaching cannot be reconciled with science, do we then let science sit in judgment on the Bible or do we let the Bible sit in judgment on science?”
The reason why this sort of question must be asked is that some Christian scientists today are deeply committed to the emergence of man in an evolutionary context, and they insist that the findings of science are so certain that the Bible is not normative at this point or it can be interpreted as Heilsgeschichte (salvation history) rather than Historie (real history). For them the purpose or the intent of the Bible is not to give us scientific information that is precise or necessarily correct. The purpose or intent of revelation has to do with salvatory (soteriological) matters, with faith and practice, and not with those things that have to do with science, the cosmos, chronology, or even numbers.
It seems to me that man’s entrance into history via the theistic evolutionary approach suffers from certain drawbacks that make it a most unlikely prospect, leaving us with special or immediate creationism as the best answer to the question of man’s origins. The first drawback is that the evolutionary answer must presuppose the emergence of a male and a female from higher animal forms of life of which we have no counterparts. The missing link is still missing. Secondly, who can rule out the possibility that other human beings might have emerged so that the human race today did not spring from a single first ancestor but from a number of ancestors? This latter possibility would gravely complicate the biblical account of the fall of man through the Adamic line and leave us with other human beings who did not inhabit Eden and of whom there is no biblical information that they ever fell. The evolutionary approach forces us into a hermeneutic which regards the creation accounts as saga or myth rather than history and fact. This in turn does gross violence to even didactic portions of the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments and creates other problems for which there are no answers. In the light of this, let’s take a hard look at the special-creation view.
By special creation we mean that man did not come from prior existing forms of life. The biblical account in Genesis does say that God fashioned man from the dust of the earth. It can be argued that dust had in it elements of life such as bacteria. This appears quite appropriate. But when we speak about creation from the dust of the earth and say man did not come from prior existing forms of life, the meaning is clear: man did not come from earlier forms of vertebrate life; he did not exist as a subhuman with a body similar to or comparable to Adam’s body; Adam did not come from pre-existent animal life. Adam was an immediate creation of God, who fashioned him from the dust of the ground.
Adam was the first man; from him all future human life was to spring. Some say that the Hebrew word for Adam is a generic term meaning only “man.” This is quite true, but it hardly proves anything significant. Virtually every human name springs from common words. David means “beloved”; Joshua means “Yahweh saves”; Henry means “ruler of the home”; Ralph means “wolf in counsel”; William means “desired helmet.” For the name Adam to mean “man” hardly supposes that the word did not refer to a specific person who was the first of the human species.
Adam was regarded as the first man by the biblical writers. In First Chronicles 1 the genealogical table begins with Adam. Since the other people named in the table are obviously historical, who could deny that at least in the understanding of the Chronicler, Adam was the beginner of the human race? In the New Testament genealogical table given by Luke (3:23 ff.) he traces the descendants of Jesus straight back to Adam, whom he designates as “the son of God.”
The Apostle Paul builds his theology of redemption in Romans around the first and the second Adams. Jesus for Paul is the second Adam. The first Adam was the inhabitant of the Garden of Eden, our first ancestor through whom original sin with all of its consequences came. And it was the first man’s sin that made necessary the second Adam’s sacrifice on the cross of Calvary. To argue that the first Adam was a mythical figure while holding that the second Adam was true man boggles the imagination and turns Scripture on its head. Moreover, if there was no first Adam, from whence did original sin come? The Bible allows for no other explanation for the intrusion of sin into the human race once Adam is regarded as non-historical. Clearly the Bible teaches that the entire human race springs from the first ancestor Adam and that he came from God as a special and immediate creation.
What adds significance to the creation story is the account of Eve’s beginnings. There are only two possible approaches to the Genesis account of Eve’s creation: either it must be regarded as mythical or it must be accepted as non-evolutionary in character. There is nothing in the biblical account that could make possible the evolution of Eve from previously existing animal forms. A deep sleep came upon Adam. God removed a rib from his rib cage. God fashioned Eve out of that rib that he took from Adam’s body. No evolutionary proposal could possibly digest this information and make sense out of it from that standpoint.
What is clear is this, however: to accept the story of Eve’s beginnings as given in Genesis in any historical sense is to knock the theory of evolution into a cocked hat. It brings to bear upon the creative process divine intervention that drives the uniformitarian hypothesis and the endless eons of evolutionary development into the ground. If, in the face of the biblical data, the theistic evolutionist chooses to accept the hypothesis of some scientists, he at least should be conscious of what he is doing to the Bible in the process. He no longer makes it the source book for his knowledge of origins. In place thereof he chooses the verdict of science and allows it to sit in judgment on the Bible rather than letting the Bible sit in judgment on science.
It is not difficult to understand why men steeped in science may be inclined to choose the findings of science over Scripture. They have been nurtured among many people who have presuppositions that are antithetical to the plainest teachings of the Bible. One of them is anti-supernaturalism. Another is that which puts God at the mercy of uniformitarianism. Opposition to miracles is another. Need we say in response that science is built on an empirical base? Scientists can only observe and report what happens. They cannot say what cannot happen. Once they say what cannot happen, they have moved out of the realm of science and into the realm of metaphysics. And metaphysics belong to those who start with Scripture. The best that scientists can say is that they do not think Adam came into being by special creation. For them to say that Adam could not have been created immediately by God (fiat creation) is to vacate science and enter the field of theology, which is based not on the empirical but on special divine revelation.
If a Christian scientist is a theistic evolutionist, this does not mean ipso facto he cannot be a Christian. But it does mean that he has placed his scientific opinions above the Bible, and this is unfortunate. This puts Scripture into a straightjacket; it must then conform to his scientific ideas.
But he is not alone in doing this. There are theologians who have fallen into the same snare. One of them is William Barclay, who says in his autobiography that “within the universe itself we see a process of evolution in which man has come to be what he is after millions of years of development. The long climb from amoeba to the man—may we not see design and purpose there?” (A Spiritual Autobiography, Eerdmans, 1975, p. 38).
Barclay provides an interesting illustration of that which is far more important, not to say devastating. He confesses that Jesus is not God, that man is essentially good, and that Jesus was not born of the Virgin Mary. He says that he is a universalist and that he is mystified by the Resurrection. Since he is out of harmony with biblical teaching on theological fundamentals, why should anyone expect him to regard God’s immediate creation of Adam seriously?
The long held view derived from the Bible that God created Adam immediately out of the dust of the ground, that Adam was made in the moral and spiritual image of God, and that he was placed in the Garden of Eden to order and tend it is by far the most acceptable explanation of the biblical data. It makes unnecessary the reduction of that data to myth or saga. It places the revelation of God above science without creating problems for Christian scientists who accept the supernatural and regard miracles as part of the data of Scripture. And it answers the question “Where did I come from?” in a way that makes sense and is in accord with the integrity of the Bible, whose inner harmony would be fractured by the acceptance of other viewpoints.
