Alternatively, instead of God creating evolution, maybe evolution created God? Some believe that religion is an adaptation – the product of evolution. Over human history, those populations with religion survived and reproduced better than those that did not. (Instead of survival of the fittest, this would be “survival of the religious”.) Some 72% of prominent evolutionary biologists believe religion is an adaptation according to the same American Scientist survey. Yet, that skirts the real question of what religion can explain that science cannot.
Maybe these Biblical texts are meant to be interpreted contextually – with an awareness of the historical and cultural setting. For example, Genesis was written by the Israelites as a reaction to the very dark, negative creation story of their Babylonian captors. The Israelites wanted to distance themselves from the Babylonians and their gods – especially the primacy of their god, Marduk. Marduk’s rise to power involved a violent battle, which ended with Marduk splitting the rival god in half. The halves become the heavens and earth. And out of the defeated god’s eyes came the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. (I now appreciate why after each day in the Genesis creation story, we are reminded that “God saw it and it was good”!) In this contextualist interpretation, Genesis was more of a theological statement – “the God of the Israelites was a kind and loving god, unlike the Babylonian gods.”
Do I believe in pre-destination? Am I a literalist or a contextualist? What is the meaning of faith and spirituality to an evolutionary biologist? Clearly, this is getting personal. So, here’s the backstory:
The parallel development of my interest in science and development of spirituality all started long before I could imagine. As an elementary aged skateboarder from San Jose, I’d get dragged to my grandmother’s “house” once a week at Magic Sands Mobile Home Park. We would sit around a small round wobbly card table discussing the French Impressionists, the Royal Family of England, and other sophisticated topics which required frequent examination of the appropriate alphabetical volume of the World Book Encyclopedia. Often the discussion turned to the controversy over creationism and evolution. (In preparation for her teaching credential, my grandmother had taken a course at the University of Washington by a proponent of evolution–and it stuck with her.) We would argue about “survival of the fittest” and the relationships between humans and primates and whether these ideas contradicted with what was taught in the bible. At the time, I was a bit confused. Why was it important to argue about evolution vs. the bible when we only saw bibles twice a year – when we attended church at Easter and Christmas?!
