Is Evolution compatible with the Bible?

I’ve been looking at whether science and faith are compatible in a series of posts. This post is a continuation from “The Skinny on the “Creation/Evolution Debate.” In particular here the question is, can someone be an Evangelical Bible-believing Christian and also embrace evolution? 

As I’ve said before, I personally have no convictions about evolution one way or the other, but this is a hotly debated topic in Christianity today that we do need to address.

Again, my reason for these series of posts is to show that science is not the enemy of faith, or vise versa. I believe we can learn about life from both. We who hold the Bible as the inspired Word of God should not have a knee-jerk reaction to any perceived threats to our current understanding of the Bible. And, in this case, I don’t think evolutionary theory is a threat to our faith or to the authority of Scripture, although it could be a challenge to how we have interpreted the text.

Here’s a couple of videos with Dr. Jeff Schloss, Professor and Chair of Biology at Westmont College, explaining the issues. Here’s the explanation of the first clip:

In this brief video, Professor Schloss addresses what he sees as the two primary reasons that evangelical Christians oppose evolutionary theory. He notes that the ideas of evolution are threatening on a number of levels for evangelicals, but focuses on two in particular that seem to be the most common.

It’s less than three minutes long so it’s an easy watch.

For those of you who are interested in a deeper discussion, this is a much longer clip from The Veritas Forum with Dr. Schloss and Tremper Longman (Old Testament Scholar, Professor of Biblical Studies at Westmont College). Both Schloss and Longman discuss the controversial issue of evolution and the creation account, the age of the earth, the historical Adam and Eve, and the nature and origin of human beings, from the perspectives of a theologian and a scientist.

If you don’t have time to watch the whole video you can skip ahead to a few points worth mentioning by clicking on the appropriate link.

In the first part of the discussion Dr. Longman discusses how we can understand the Genesis account in a non-wooden-literal way, paying attention to genre, literary devices, and the cultural context in which the narrative was written.

Professor Longman discusses how to understand the age of the earth from a biblical perspective starting here. He also talks about how a young earth creation view was not the predominant historical view held by church leaders in church history (It was James Ussher who came up with the 4004 BC beginning of creation in the seventeenth century). For instance, Origen (185 – 254 CE) and Augustine (354 – 430 CE) did not take this view.

Dr. Schloss talks about how science has helped us develop better theology where the meaning of the text is uncertain here.

Both Longman and Schloss discuss the historical nature of Adam here. Dr. Longman talks about how regardless of whether Adam is representative of human nature or a literal historic figure, one can be true to the text.

Interestingly, Dr. Schloss mentions recent findings in biology that may confirm a traditional reading of the historical Adam and Eve here.

I especially appreciated where Jeff Schloss talks about two examples where faith pre-commitments have helped science here.

The interviewer (Josh Swamidass) concludes that while these things can appear challenging they can also be emboldening because it can help put into focus what the core tenets of the faith are, as opposed to the non-core tenets where there’s been honest debate throughout church history which gives us the freedom to explore those issues in the light of science here.

The video ends with some Q & A. Here’s the whole talk.