Reading: Notes Chapter 6

1. See the insightful remarks of James Barr’s article “Literality,” in Faith and Philosophy 6, no. 4 (Oct. 1989): 412-28.

2. Quoted in C. C. Gillespie, Genesis and Geology (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 53.

3. Howard Van Till has developed this point at length. See The Fourth Day: What the Bible and the Heavens Are Telling Us about Creation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986) and Portraits of Creation: Biblical and Scientific Perspectives on the World’s Formation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1990).

4. The confusion of God’s providence with his acting in creation is common to a wide variety of thinkers. One notable example is found in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 136-41, 174-75. The mistake is also endorsed by Carl Sagan in his introduction to the book.

5. For example, Gerald Schroeder’s Genesis and the Big Bang (New York: Bantam Books, 1990). Yet other recent writers go even further and try to use scientific evidence to prove God’s existence. They contend that various features of the universe are statistically so improbable as to compel the conclusion that they had to have been intelligently designed. But while theists all know from revelation that the world was planned by God, the statistical improbability of any of its features alone can never prove that. This is because however small the probability of any occurrence might be, it could only yield the conclusion it was designed if that probability could be known to be smaller than the ratio of planned to unplanned things in the universe generally. For example, suppose the probability of X developing apart from intelligent design can be shown to be 1/100,000,000. That would tell us nothing about whether X was more likely designed than not unless we already knew that for every designed thing in the universe there were fewer than 100,000,000 non-designed things. For the argument to work, therefore, we would have to have antecedent access to the ratio of designed to non-designed things in the universe and compare that to the likelihood of X’s unplanned occurrence. But not only is that information unavailable, it is also dependent on knowing already whether God designed the world! For if He did, then there are no non-designed things whatever, whereas if He didn’t then the only intelligently designed things (we know of) in the universe are those produced by humans and higher animals. The argument is therefore an enthymeme, and its suppressed premise forces any inference from the initial probability of X to beg the question with respect to belief in God. (See John Venn’s The Logic of Chance [New York: Chelsea Pub. Co., 1962].)

6. It is important to notice that Scripture itself gives a statement of the extent to which we may expect its inspiration to guarantee its truth: “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). This seems to fit admirably with what I’ve been calling the “religious focus” of the Bible since, taken in its own context, this remark is speaking of scripture as furnishing a pastor with true teaching about the “righteousness” that is God’s covenantal gift. There is not the slightest hint that the inspired authority of scripture is intended to extend beyond what it teaches concerning God, our proper relation to God, and whatever else would have to be true for those teachings to be true.

7. N. H. Ridderbos, Is There a Conflict between Genesis 1 and Natural Science? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1957). See also C. Vanderwaal, Search the Scriptures (St. Catherines, Ontario: Paideia Press, 1978), vol. 1, 53 ff. and Meredith Kline and Lee Irons, “The Framework View,” in The Genesis Debate, ed. D. Hagopian (Mission Viejo, California, Crux Press, 2001). I have defended this reading of Genesis in “Genesis on the Origin of the Human Race,” in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 43, no. 1 (March 1991): 2-13; and in “Is Theism Compatible with Evolution” in Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, ed. Robert Pennock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 513-36.

8. Henry Morris has expressed this all too well: “But there was still the problem  of the age of the earth. . . . If this could be settled anywhere it would have to be in scripture. . . . It seemed impossible that God would have left so important a matter . . . unsettled in his Word. . . . Surely God has the answer in his Word!” The History of Modern Creationism (San Diego: Master Books, 1984), 96.

9. This view of human nature is not a new proposal as it was held by a number of church fathers, such as Athanasius [On the Incarnation (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1953] and by Calvin (Institutes, I, iii, 3). It should be understood to mean that being religious is a requirement for being at least human (Ps. 8:5). Angels are also religious but are super-human (Ps. 8-5). Concerning Gen. 2:7 as an account of the beginning of redemption rather than a second creation account, see Joseph Soloveitchik: The Lonely Man of Faith (NY: Doubleday, 2006), 22.

10. Several points need to be appended here. First, the account has nothing to do with any claim that femaleness owes its origin to maleness, as some older interpretations have suggested. Second, it eschews the fundamentalist claim that Genesis contains good science as well as the many claims of the critics of Genesis who have tried to accuse it of bad science. For example, some have misread Genesis as implying that prior to the Fall, there were no such things as death, weeds, or pain in childbirth. Not so. What the text says is that Adam and Eve, as the first to be put on religious probation, were placed in a special “garden of God” in which they were protected from those things. Once they disobeyed God and were exiled from His place of special protection, they were then exposed to all the vicissitudes of life from which they had previously been shielded in Eden. That this is the viewpoint of the text can be seen by comparing Gen. 3:24 with Joshua 5:13-15 and with Joshua’s remark in Numbers 14:9.

In Romans 5:13 Paul makes the remarkable comment that before Adam and Eve sinned against God’s command sin was already in the world but God didn’t hold it against them (?) because He’d not yet given any law (commandment). This law cannot be a reference to the law of Moses, as God had held people accountable long before that: Adam and Eve, Noah, and Abraham, for example. So the only people this could possibly be referring to are the ancestors and contemporaries of Adam and Eve. In fact, in his sermon, as recorded in Acts, Paul mentions a time when God “overlooked” people’s sin, but now calls on all to repent (Acts 17:30).

The headship of Adam and Eve relative to the rest of the human race is also, therefore, to be taken as religious rather than biological: they were the first to be put on religious probation and so were the representatives of all people relative to God’s commands and promises. But there is nothing in the text to support the claim that all humans descended from Adam and Eve.

The nearest thing in scripture to any biological idea is when Adam calls Eve “the mother of all living.”  But that is said in the context of her being promised that one of her descendants will be the Messiah. So Adam’s remark refers to the full sense of “life” that concerns the proper relationship to God, rather than merely to biological descent. It appears therefore that interpreting Adam’s religious headship of the human race as equivalent to his being the progenitor of all humans is (another) case of giving a religious point a non-religious (biological) interpretation. That this is a mistake is even clearer in the New Testament than in Genesis, since Jesus is said to be the Messiah and thus the “new Adam,” and surely his headship of the human race is exclusively religious since he was never the ancestor of anyone. For a more detailed account of this understanding of Adam and Eve, see my article “Reading Genesis” in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Vol. 68, Number 4, December, 2016.

Finally, it is significant that much of the theistic opposition to the theory of evolution has arisen from the confusion mentioned earlier between God’s providence and his miraculous acts. Darwin himself noticed that this would be a key point at stake when, in the first edition of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London: John Murray, 1859), he wrote:

To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. (p. 488)

Most of the opposition between fundamentalists and non-theistic evolutionists can thus be seen as each insisting on only their favored side of truth:  one says there were only natural processes, the other says there was only God’s direct action. 

The reason that Darwin later gave up belief in God and became an agnostic had nothing to do with the theory of evolution. Rather, it was because he could not reconcile God’s goodness with the death of his daughter. See Howard Gruber’s Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 242.

11. While I have been criticizing the fundamentalist claim that scripture guides theories by supplying or confirming their contents, I have also tried to make clear that I do not mean to suggest that this never happens. For example, it’s surely the case that the Bible teaches that the universe is not self-existent and has clear teachings about human nature, each of which have been denied by theories. But, as I said in chapter 5, while there are occasionally revealed truths that should be part of a theory or can confirm a theory, these are few and far between and cannot constitute a model for the general relation of religious belief to theories, owing to the scriptural teaching that belief in God impacts all truth and all knowledge.

12. Some critics have objected that it makes no sense to speak of unconscious beliefs since to have a belief one must be aware of its content. This, I think, confuses the dispositional with the manifest sense of “belief.” At the end of chapter 2, I took the position that a belief is an acquired disposition to regard a state of affairs as in fact the case and the statement of it as true. This sort of disposition can exist while remaining unconscious to its possessor either in the sense of not being thought of at a given moment or in the sense of never having been consciously articulated at all.

13. Many well-known discussions of presupposition by philosophers and linguists are not relevant here since they deal with it in the sense of truth conditions instead of belief conditions. For example, B. Russell, “On Denoting,” Mind 15 (1905); P. Strawson, “On Referring,” Mind 59, no. 235 (July 1950), and “Identifying Reference and Truth Values,” Theoria, vol. 20, pt. 2 (1964); G. Lakoff, “Linguistics and Natural Logic,” in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. D. Davidson and G. Harmon (Dordrecht: Riedel, 1972); J. Katz, Semantic Theory (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). The use of “presupposition” in these articles as truth conditions is a technical term that does not correspond to its meaning in ordinary speech, which is why other thinkers have at times designated the ordinary meaning by other terms. Isabel Hungerland, for instance, has proposed “contextual implication” in an article by that title (Inquiry 4 [1960]: 21158). Dierdre Wilson has called the technical meaning “logical presupposition” and the ordinary meaning “non-logical presupposition” (Presuppositions and Non-Truth Conditional Semantics [New York: Academic Press, 1975], 141 ff.). It should be clear that the sense of “presupposition” I am using here is the ordinary or “non-logical” meaning. A more formal statement of the definition of this sense of “presupposition” is as follows:

A person P who holds a belief X may be said to presuppose another belief Y in relation to X, provided that: 

There may, of course, be many possible presuppositions to a particular belief, and they need not be mutually consistent. It should be noticed that although the “have to” in part 2 of the definition has a logical aspect, it is not restrictively logical since its violation does not result in a formal contradiction. To believingly assert X and (believingly) assert Y , where Y is a presupposition of X , makes that set of beliefs what I have called ”self-assumptively incoherent” rather than self-contradictory. The relation is a broadly epistemic one, rather than a narrowly logical one. Strawson has also noticed that more than logical rules alone are involved in this sort of incoherence, though he points it out in a discussion of presuppositions as truth conditions rather than as belief conditions. See his Introduction to Logical Theory (London: Methuen, 1967), 175.

14. Often actions as well as beliefs are spoken of as having presuppositions. This is an elliptical expression which is, strictly speaking, not accurate. People presuppose; their actions may be motivated by what they presuppose.

15. Nicholas Wolterstorff has coined this expression for the way particular revealed beliefs can regulate theorizing in Reason Within the Bounds of Religion (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1976). It is interesting that in this work Wolterstorff starts from what appears to be a roughly scholastic orientation, but significantly amends it in the direction I am advocating here. He says, for example, that theories must not only be consistent with religious beliefs but also “comport” with them (72), and that the control exercised by religious beliefs should be “internal” to the process of theorizing rather than merely serving as external checkpoints (77). But he does not then analyze or define “comport,” or give an account of what internal versus external control would be. I therefore offer the position developed in the succeeding chapters as an exposition of those two concepts.