The debate among evangelicals over creation, evolution, the historicity of Adam, the age of the earth, and the flood continues to rage, as proponents of the disparate views make their case through a variety of media, including books, articles, lectures, sermons, podcasts, and videos. Resources spanning the spectrum from highly academic to popular-level fill the bookstores and online platforms, with no apparent end in sight.
Despite the complexity of the debate, we can frame it around one basic problem: How are we to interpret Scripture in light of the physical world, and the physical world in light of Scripture? I would venture to say that this is the question that underlies the entire discussion over origins.
We have a biblical text and our interpretations of the physical world: Which source takes hermeneutical priority? Does Scripture interpret the physical world? If so, how? Does what we see in the physical world correct our interpretation of Scripture? If so, when?
The Need for Revelation Before the Fall
Many have attempted to address this question with greater or lesser rigor. This piece is not an attempt to match highly-technical works that address the interface between science and Scripture. Rather, I want to make a basic exegetical observation from the opening chapters of Genesis that must inform our thinking about the interpretational priority between God’s Word and the physical world. This observation notes the order in which God gives his Word to Adam.
Taking Genesis 2:1-25 as a detailed description of what occurred on day six in Genesis 1:26-31, we see that God gave Adam a word that related directly to how he was to interpret his physical surroundings.
The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen 2:16-17)
God did not simply put Adam in the Garden and allow his unaided reason to assess his environment. No, immediately after God placed Adam in the garden, he gave him a divine word that would enable him to safely navigate his new physical world.
Indeed, it was precisely the neglect of this word that disabled Adam’s wife, Eve, from making a right judgment about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. After a barrage of sophisticated questions and outright denials of God’s Word from Satan, Eve finally succumbed to her enemy’s onslaught:
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate (Gen 3:6).
Accurate Observations Are Not Enough
What’s astounding about Eve’s assessment of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that she made accurate observations about it.
- It was good for food – That is, the fruit of the tree was not poisonous or rancid; the tree produced fruit that was good for food. This was a correct observation about the physical nature of the tree.
- It was a delight to the eyes – This was also true. The tree was physically attractive, ascetically pleasing, and beautiful.
- It was desired to make one wise. Again, a true observation. The tree provided the knowledge of good and evil.
We must note, however, that the last observation—that the tree was desirable to make one wise—was not, strictly speaking, an observation about the physical nature of the tree. Rather, this observation derived from the way God had already classified the tree. In a sense, it was true that the tree provided knowledge. But most importantly, God had forbidden his human creatures from accessing this knowledge.
Nevertheless, Eve took from its fruit and ate, and gave to her husband with her, and he ate. As a result, a tidal way of sin and death entered our earthly existence.
We see, then, that even prior to sin’s corrupting influences, Eve’s reason and sense perception on their own were not adequate to assess her physical environment and draw right spiritual conclusions about it. She needed more than the material world and her own mind to interpret her physical surroundings and their relation to God. As a finite creature, she needed God’s Word from the very outset of her existence.
Eve: The World’s First Enlightenment Philosopher
Satan had removed this word from Eve’s interpretive grid by calling it into question and then directly contradicting it (Gen 3:1-5). By undermining the authority of God’s Word, Satan made Eve’s mind a blank slate, as it were, with which to synthesize the data she was receiving from her senses. Eve was, unwittingly, the world’s first Enlightenment philosopher.
As John Frame has remarked, the history of philosophy is simply a history of intellectual autonomy—God’s image-bearers reflecting on life and the world without divine revelation.1 Eve was the prototype of this approach to empirical study and philosophical contemplation.
The conclusion that Eve drew from her scientific inquiry of the physical world, however, was entirely wrong. Despite her observations about the appearance of the tree, it was not the case that the tree was available for eating. The fruit, though good for food and pleasant to look at, was forbidden.
God did not disclose the exact reason why it was forbidden, but apparently Adam and Eve were not ready for the wisdom the tree offered. Yet, without God’s divine Word, Eve was unable to rightly assess this aspect of her physical environment, and she made a disastrously wrong interpretation.
What we see from this section of the Genesis narrative is that God never intended his image-bearers to assess the physical world apart from his divine Word. Even before sin infected our minds and hearts, God’s Word was essential for accurately judging the world around us. Now, our fallenness and sin makes us more likely to turn from God’s interpretive Word when assessing our physical environment. We now have an inward bent to suppress the truth of God’s existence (Rom 1:18-32). In our unregenerate state, we don’t want to acknowledge God’s existence or yield to His Word (Eph 4:18; Rom 8:8).
Intellectual Autonomy and Scientific Inquiry
We are naive to think that this spiritual bent to assess our physical environment without God’s Word hasn’t affected the scientific study of origins. Like Eve, scientists are able to make many correct observations about the world. But the moment they start interpreting those observations and relating them to knowledge of ultimate reality, they veer off into error. Why? Because they are attempting to interpret their physical environment apart from divine revelation.
The lesson for Christians, then, is that we must hold tenaciously to God’s verbal revelation as we assess our physical world. Science—simply defined as the careful and methodological study of the creation—is a gift from God and, done rightly, increases useful knowledge of the world for human benefit (Gen 1:26-31). But our inquiry into the created order must be guided at every point by humble reliance up God’s verbal revelation in Scripture.
Immanuel Kant once proclaimed, “Have the courage to use your own understanding!”2 In other words, rather than trust God’s revelation, trust your own reason and sense perception to deliver truth about the fabric of reality. The Enlightenment gave birth to an approach to scientific inquiry that eventually supplied intellectual credibility to Darwinian evolution—a framework for the origin of life that undermines the Bible from the very first verse. The result has been an erosion of confidence in Scripture that has permeated Western society, both outside and inside the church.
It is no coincidence that Scripture says the exact opposite as Kant: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding, In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight” (Prov 3:5-6). Intellectual autonomy led to the fall of mankind, and has led, post-Enlightenment, to a large-scale distrust in God’s Word across the West. While our cultural troubles may be traced to multiple factors, we would be foolish to conclude that a removal of God’s Word from our society’s collective consciousness has not had a profoundly negative impact on how think about morality, ethics, government, and the major questions of life.
My prayer for myself, my family, and my church is that we would learn from the Genesis narrative and the history of Western thought that our wisdom will turn to folly the moment we drift from God’s Word. Satan’s strategy from the beginning has been to make it appear foolish and embarrassing to hold fast to divine revelation. May we, by God’s grace, have the courage to not rely on our own understanding, but to trust in God and his perfect Word at all times and in all areas of intellectual inquiry.
NOTES
1 See John Frame, A History of Western Philosophy and Theology.
2 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983).