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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Elise Harboldt

Does Theistic Evolution Create More Problems Than It Solves?

I am super grateful for the chance to be here with you all for Creation Weekend and last night we spoke about the theology of humor.

Now what does that have to do with Creation Weekend?

Well I think it's important because love is in the little things, in our relationships, in our friendships, in romantic relationships.

It's often the little attentions, the little joys and little gifts that people give that are so meaningful and so heartwarming.

And I think the same is true with creation.

God tells us to remember the Sabbath, to remember creation, Not only because he wants us to remember the meta things like who we are and how he's our creator, the moral governor of the universe, all those things are important, but also because when we intentionally remember the little things in creation, then we will feel loved.

So for example, engaging our senses in God's creative gifts is part of what communicates his love to us, whether that's, you know, eating an orange and feeling or tasting the bursting flavors.

What does that orange communicate about God's love?

What does a hug communicate about God's love?

What does the beauty of nature or the unique personalities and funny behavior of animals communicate about God's love?

And what does humor create about God's love?

When we laugh, we can see evidence of his love as our creator.

So if you didn't listen to that 1, it's on the YouTube channel.

And this morning, we're going to look at how can we see God's love not only in what he created but how he created it, right?

Both things will communicate something about God's character.

Now before we dive into this talk, I wanna tell you a little bit about my research because I had to get special permission to leave my school.

And so I said, well, I'm gonna recruit research participants.

Really, I just wanted to come share for Creation Weekend.

But now I'm going to make an announcement about my research because it's part of what allowed me to come.

But I do wanna recruit research participants.

So I am examining the phenomenon of religious scrupulosity within the Seventh-day Adventist context.

Scrupulosity refers to when people have experiences where they're so anxious about being accepted by God or feeling safe in their salvation that it ends up becoming maladaptive and very stressful psychologically.

So this refers to when it kind of becomes a mental illness.

Sometimes it's referred to as religious OCD and we can read about these kind of experiences for example in the life of Martin Luther who was extremely anxious about his salvation he he would beat himself and confess for hours and hours and hours and the priest said please stop confessing you haven't done anything that interesting.

But scrupulosity plays out in different ways in different religious contexts, in Judaism, in Islam, in Christianity, and it takes on the form of the particular beliefs that different religious groups are advocating.

So I'm examining religious scrupulosity within Adventism, not because I believe that Adventism has more of it, but because this issue is particularly prevalent in highly devout religious groups.

And so we want to know as a church, how can we minister to people who are having these experiences and need to feel more safety and assurance in God's love.

And So I'm trying to do it in a way that's very affirming and respectful of Orthodox Adventist theology.

I'm interviewing theologians, pastors, Adventist mental health professionals for their perspectives, but also individuals who have had these sorts of experiences.

So if you have had these sorts of experiences with a lot of anxiety related to salvation, I would love to connect with you, or if you know someone else, maybe you could tell them.

Maybe there are people that will hear this later on AudioVerse, et cetera, because the more people that can speak in and share their experiences, the better my research will be, and hopefully, the more useful it can be for the church.

Although, I'm doing it independently, I should add.

So with that said, oh, and you can contact me.

My email is just my first and last name, eliseharbold at gmail.com.

Our message is entitled, Does Theistic Evolution Create More Problems Than It Solves?

Now this topic can be addressed from multiple angles, so I want to say at the beginning I am not a scientist and I'm not going to be sharing scientific arguments against theistic evolution.

I will point you to some resources if that's what you are interested in, but I'm going to look at some of the philosophical, theological, and ethical challenges with theistic evolution.

And we'll look at a definition of theistic evolution here in a little bit, in case you're not sure what it is.

This is not a broad overview of theistic evolution.

It would take many, many hours to do this topic justice, but I've become more interested in it since moving to the UK and studying at Cambridge because I realized even though there are many Christians among the students that I'm studying with in the Department of Divinity, I'm really a minority in terms of what I believe about how God created the world.

There's many, many very devout, dedicated Christians who have different ideas than Seventh-day Adventists do about the interpretation of Genesis.

And so I became inspired to try to study this better so I could dialogue more effectively with the people around me.

And I'm going to share some of the things that I learned that I thought were the most interesting.

So Richard Dawkins tends to mock people who don't believe in evolution.

He wrote, you cannot be both sane and well-educated and disbelieve in evolution.

The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution.

Now this statement isn't surprising because Richard Dawkins is definitely a critic of Christianity, so we're not surprised that he would say this.

However, Christians have said similar things.

For example, Daryl Falk, who's a Christian scientist and former president of a Christian university, said, it is a travesty that young people who begin the journey of following Jesus are told that they have to believe something which a little science education makes clear cannot possibly be the case.

So for Falk and other proponents of theistic evolution, it's kind of embarrassing when there's Christians who reject evolution And they say, well, this is maybe bad evangelistically because how are we gonna reach people in the world if they see us as anti-science?

And so for them, it's important to bring these things 2 together because they don't want there to be a discrepancy between faith and science.

Now, I also agree that faith and science should harmonize, but I don't think that we have to accept the evolutionary theory in order for that to happen.

Well some of the key ingredients are, 1, the universe was created by God, so this is different than naturalistic evolution, which would, you know, which would say that life was formed through the evolutionary process but not by God.

Second, that God uses mutation and natural selection to gradually develop life.

Third, all living organisms share the same common ancestor.

So this isn't referring to all humans having Adam as a common ancestor, but rather all living organisms from human to animals to bacteria, all are part of the same family tree and originated from the same tiny, I don't know what you want to say, cell or parts of cell or whatever.

At some point in the process, humans were endowed with a spiritual nature.

We'll talk a little bit more about that shortly.

And the biblical creation account is theological rather than scientific.

It's not necessarily meant to be read as historical narrative.

Okay, so we're gonna look at a few challenges with theistic evolution.

This is a picture of the oldest known fragment of the creation account.

It dates back to about a hundred years before Christ And it has in Hebrew the first 3 days of creation.

And there's strong reason to believe that throughout the history of God's people, the Hebrew people, into the Second Temple period, the time of Christ, the predominant view was certainly that the Genesis creation week was to be interpreted as a literal week and was to be interpreted as historical narrative.

We see in Christ's teachings that he interpreted Genesis literally.

He said in Mark 10, 6 to 8, but from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female.

For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the 2 shall become 1 flesh so then they are no longer 2 but 1 flesh." He's quoting from Moses from the creation account.

He's affirming the idea that in the literal creation event, male and female were created and marriage was instituted.

We also see in many biblical authors, both in the Old Testament and the New, that they interpreted the Mosaic creation account literally.

For example, Paul said in Acts 17 26, and he, God, made from 1 man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.

So Paul is affirming not the idea that humans and animals and bacteria all have a common ancestor, but rather that Adam is the common ancestor of all humans.

So it's clear that the authors of scripture interpreted Genesis literally, and in the early church, I think that the same, in the apostolic times, I think the same would be broadly true.

However, there may have been a minority of people that didn't, and 1 of the arguments of people that promote theistic evolution is, well, the church fathers interpreted Genesis allegorically.

The church fathers are the people who after the apostolic times were significant in theology, in the church.

Yeah, after the apostles died off in the centuries following that, we see the church fathers.

There are many church fathers, and they were theological thinkers and developed different systems of theology and thought.

And so proponents of theistic evolution will say, well, Augustine said that we should interpret Genesis metaphorically.

Or this has been an orthodox view since way, way long ago, the church fathers.

And so it's not really even dependent on Darwinism.

And when I first encountered these arguments, I didn't know what to do.

Usually, Adventists don't pay a whole lot of attention to the church fathers.

But it's not actually accurate to say the church fathers thought this about Genesis because there were multiple different views.

So the 3 church fathers here on the right, this is just a sampling, there were more, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine, they tended towards more allegorical readings of the Genesis account, while those on the left, Theophilus of Antioch, Basil the Great, John Christosome, tended toward more literal readings.

Why is it that not too long after Christ and after the early church, there were these divergent views about Genesis.

Well in order to answer this question we need to rewind and go back several hundred years before Christ to the Greek philosophers.

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Does Theistic Evolution Create More Problems Than It Solves?

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