The Prism and the Rainbow: A Christian Explains Why Evolution Is Not a Threat

12. In the Beginning

87 B y far the most frequently mentioned passages in the Bible in discussions and debates about creationism, science, and evolution are the early verses of Genesis. The opening words quoted above are as familiar as they are awe-inspiring and comforting to millions of people worldwide. The King James Version has a slightly different translation of the last line: “. . . And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” I have always thought that these opening lines were hauntingly beautiful. In fact, I have often wondered if my fascination with water harks back to hearing these words read to me early in life. As a child, I developed an image of God as a great In the Beginning 12 In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. genesis 1:1–2 Come together, right now, over me. lennon & mccartney, 1969 the prism and the rainbow 88 wind moving over the face of the waters in the same way that it blows through us, and that image remains with me today. This might even explain why I chose to study life in the sea, and why I cannot ever seem to get enough of fly fishing. Right or wrong, in my mind water and God are somehow inextricably linked. I wonder if others feel that, and if that’s partly what baptism is about. Although Christians regard the Bible as being divinely inspired, nearly all serious students of the Bible are aware that Genesis was written by different people at different times. For instance, most people are aware that there are actually two fairly different creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2; they differ markedly in their style, order, facts, and choice of words. In Genesis 1, for example, God is always referred to as Elohim, whereas the writer of Genesis 2 never uses that word, instead referring to God always as Yahweh (YHWH). Much has been written about these differences,1 and whether these two stories contradict or complement each other, and the problems that arise when readers attempt to reconcile the differences or view Genesis as a scientific text. That’s not my purpose here. Instead, I want to address an issue that I don’t think has received much attention to date: the fact that Genesis, and indeed the entire Bible, actually points toward, rather than away from, an evolutionary understanding of life on Earth. What do I mean by this? If someone were to ask you if the overriding message throughout the Bible was one of unity or one of division , what would you say? In both the Old and New Testament, is the dominant theme one of separation or one of coming together? Genesis, in describing the creating of life by God, does not say anything about the relatedness of those forms of life, only that they were all creations of a loving God. There is nothing in Genesis that argues against the concept of a single, unifying tree of all life.2 It is true that there is a lot of “separation language” in Genesis—separating light from darkness, morning from evening, water from sky, land from sea, even creatures separated “according to their kind” (and interestingly, 89 In the Beginning this last creating is done not directly but through natural processes; God orders the earth to bring forth living creatures [Genesis 1:24]). But the overarching story of Genesis is about the relationship between God and mankind; it is a story of the overall “oneness” of creation, of all life having a common origin, explained in the only terms that would have made sense to the ancients. We come from One, and so we have a great yearning within us for “oneness,” for meaningful relationships and connectedness in an often-fragmented world.3 This concept of the oneness of all life is even more clear in the New Testament. In Paul’s letters to the churches of Corinth and Ephesus he refers to the sacred connectedness of all humans when he uses the analogy of a single body consisting of many parts, and where by one Spirit we are all baptized into one body (e.g., 1 Corinthians 12:13–27 and Ephesians 4:4–6: “There is one body...