Take that, Francis Collins!

I was listening with equal parts fascination and incredulity to Christian radio KBRT 740 am this morning while driving back from the pool.  The topic on today’s segment of “Defending the Truth”: the self-delusion of “progressive creationists” and “theistic evolutionists”—those unnamed iconoclasts who purport to believe in Christ while accepting evolution.   While the guest pastor reluctantly allowed as how evolution was not a “salvation issue,” there was nonetheless a fatal and irreversible slippery slope, he said, from the acceptance of evolution in lieu of the literal truth of Genesis to rejection of the entire Bible.  Someone who is told: ‘well, Eve was not literally created from Adam’s rib,’ or, ‘Noah’s Ark did not actually exist as described,’ could then go on to question whether Jesus in fact walked on water or rose from the dead.  A good point. 

Host Bob Dutko asked his guest rhetorically: But aren’t there lots of metaphors in the Bible?  Why not read Genesis metaphorically, so that the six days of creation were units of God’s time—billions of years, say, per day?  It is true, the pastor responded, that when we say that ‘Jesus is a door,’ we don’t mean that he is made of a few boards and nails, or when we say that ‘Jesus was bread from heaven,’ we don’t mean that he was flour and salt (though I thought sometimes we do kind of mean that).  But when a unit of time in the Bible is preceded by a cardinal or ordinal number, that unit means exactly what it says, the pastor has determined through close Scriptural exegesis.  A day in Genesis 1:1 is 24 hours, no more nor less.  Besides, if we read the days of creation metaphorically as God’s time, he said, while it might be nice to have our mandated day of rest on the Sabbath last one billion years, that would mean we would have to work six billion years to earn it, something we might be reluctant to do.  Another good point.

But I was disappointed that Dutko and his guest did not address the puzzle of animal existence after the Fall.  I can at least follow the argument why a loving God has had to allow millions of seemingly innocent babies and children to be mowed down by cancer, brain defects, landslides, and earthquakes because Eve had the temerity to ignore his command.  Rules are rules and punishment is punishment—at least within the same species.  But I don’t understand why animals—not in any way related to humans, according to Biblical believers–are also punished for Eve’s original sin.   Why are baby gazelles gashed by lions and left to scream themselves to death on the savannah?  According to apologist David Hart, God created a world of “harmony and peace, free from suffering and death.”  It was only after Eve disobeyed that God’s creation started “running red with blood.”  The ethical question of why fluffy seal pups must die gruesome deaths in the clutches of a polar bear because of a human failing is difficult enough.  But the biology of the pre- and post-lapsarian worlds is also a conundrum.  If nature became red in tooth and claw only after the Fall, presumably today’s carnivores were all vegetarians in Eden.  But when were their jaws, skulls, claws, teeth, digestive enzymes, and stomachs replaced from those required to break down cellulose to those required to kill and digest living flesh?  Were peaceful grass-eaters retooled into fanged hunters immediately while Adam and Eve were packing up or did they gradually evolve the morphology of predation?  I am not aware of any explanations of this change, but its mechanisms are not at all self-evident to me.