Alexander

The last of my Sabbatical books I want to comment on is this one. Alexander is an evolutionary biologist who is also a professing evangelical Christian and as you might imagine this book is an attempt to marry those possibly unweddable positions. Does he succeed?

Calamitously not, I'm afraid. I have little doubt that Dr Alexander is something special within the assumptions of his workaday discipline, but in mine - Biblical interpretation - he falls woefully short. His chosen method of interpreting Genesis 1-11 is to wonder whether anything actually means what it plainly says.

This is a legitimate academic approach. We call it liberalism. I can understand it, though I do not believe it it is right and I do not agree with it. I can also understand the Dawkinsian rejection of Genesis as myth or indeed gibberish. That, too, is consistent. The problem comes when a man says, "I believe in the Bible as much as anyone" (Alexander addresses his readers as evangelicals who are just like him faithwise but just not as knowledgable) and then sets about the Biblical text as though it is basically incomprehensible whilst the Theory of Evolution is received Truth.

No reader of the New Testament - I can include Richard Dawkins here I think - seriously doubts that Jesus and the apostle Paul regarded Adam and Eve as the first human beings and derived deep significance from that yet Alexander accepts the idea that not only were they not the first - they were in the later half of the years of the human race. (Of course while his dating of human origins makes sense in his biological framework it makes much less sense when compared to population growth or the development of language - his generations of early humans must have spent aeons of generations sitting watching the trees without reproducing or talking [Did they have souls? Does anyone, comes the question]). His problem is that he does not doubt scientific speculation, he doubts the Bible instead.

Should you read the book, I commend one of many demolitions of it at this link where David Anderson points out the problem I cited above, and, if you have time to read it, a lot more.

So what are we to do with a Genesis account that, even in its own terms, begs many questions (e.g. evening and morning with the Sun not created, creatures designed for a bloody, not paradisical world) when set against chains of leftover genes from our monkey years?

This is what we do.

We genuinely, completely, unequivically accept that the words of the Bible, including and comparing those in Job and the Psalms as well as Genesis, tell us what God wanted us to know for sure about origins, about His creating work. Another word for this material is the TRUTH. It is what God decided we need to know. It is accessible to the child and, by other means, even to the illiterate. We can know where we came from, something of how, and why there is two-gender marriage, a seven day week, clothes, different species and humans are special but not good. We learn why a last Adam was needed.

Then, wherever we learn anything for certain in the natural sciences we see how that relates to that truth, because it always will. Nothing is greater than truth.

But where there are speculations in cosmology, where (as with leftover gene sequences) there are reasonable guesses that might, like natural selection, prove eventually to be inadequate or wrong, we place them in a sidetray that might say 'Not Important'. They can never tell us more than we already know.

Of course by contrast it is a desperate quest on the part of atheists to explain origins; if they could prove the universe is a Mega Accident faith is dead. But they know they will never prove it; origins, creation, will always involve leaps of faith one way or another. They just hope that most people, especially in education, will leap their way.

Dr Alexander has simply leapt their way too.