Creation — GENESIS — Evolution, a blog

Frank K. Flinn, the retired adj. professor of religious studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and Stone Spiral Coffee House customer, submitted this article to 40 South News.

Creation — GENESIS — Evolution

The creationism vs. evolutionism debate is heating up again. The Science Guy Bill Nye debated Ken Ham at Kentucky’s Creation Museum (Feb. 4). Missouri Rep. Rick Brattin has re-introduced “intelligent design” as a scientific theory on equal footing with the theory of evolution for inclusion in high school textbooks. Similar attempts are being made in other states.

In the 2005 Pennsylvania federal court case Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, conservative Judge John E. Jones III ruled that Intelligent Design is not science and cannot be uncoupled from its religious antecedents. This ruling has not deterred ID advocates.

The arguments for ID have their roots the creation story in the book of Genesis—clearly a religious text. A sad fact of modern times is that some, but not all, churchmen understood Charles Darwin’s book on evolution, The Origin of Species (1859), as a direct challenge to the teachings of Genesis, Chapter 1. Thereafter literalist believers felt compelled to read Genesis as a kind of “science”, equal and counter to Darwin’s theory. But is the Biblical creation story a historical, geological or biological account of how the physical world and its species came to be?

The short answer is no. Medieval and Renaissance commentators could read the Bible often better than we moderns. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) and Myles Cloverdale (d. 1569) knew that the days lined up in a double set of three (1-4, 2-5, 3-6). They also understood that the world Genesis shows is not about “back then” but about “what’s out there now.” The world God divided into day and night, sky, seas, and dry land, the heavenly bodies, and all living creatures, including us, is the very world you and I can see out our window.

Genesis reads like a purged version of the Babylonian creation story. In that story everything begins in chaos and confusion. Then Tiamatu, the ocean waters, and Apsu, the god of the fresh waters, beget the first gods. Later the sky gods battle the earth gods. Marduk defeats Tiamatu, dismembers her body and makes the world out of it. In Genesis no gods beget gods or fight each other. However, there a hint of the chaotic confusion preceding the world’s division. In verse 1 the Bible says that before the beginning there was tohu-wa-bohu. Tohu is derived from tehom, meaning “the deep” or the “abyss” and is cognate with tiamatu . the Babylonian deep, personified in the goddess Tiamatu.. Translations omit the double word-play of the Hebrew. For reasons that become clear below, I translate this phrase as “the Slithering and Writhing.”

In many Mesopotamian cylinder seal impressions, Tiamatu is portrayed as a mixed monster with a feline body and the heads of seven serpents. The image recurs in the books of Daniel and Revelations.

This beast can move only in a chaotic motion, now following one head this way and the second that way. It is a congery of parts and a confusion of motion. In contrast is the “hovering breath of God” bringing ordered motion to this primal confusion. The writhing Seven-headed Dragon is measured in the same but inverted unit to the single Lord of the Seventh-Day Rest (shabbat).

In between are the Six Days in which God divides the universe into distinct parts. The first set of three defines regions (day/night; sky/waters below; sea/dry land) and the second set names the beings that move in those regions (sun, moon stars that mark the seasons and festivals; birds and sea creatures; cattle, creepers, and humans). Most things are seen as good. Some are given blessings. Significantly humans are not called good because they are capable of evil, a theme taken up in the second story at Genesis 2:4b. Unlike the second story, God creates both sexes at the same time, equally in the divine image or pattern. They are given dominion but it is not absolute. Their food is restricted to the vegetarian products in Day Three.

Genesis 1 lays out the pattern for what foods are to be clean or unclean in the book of Leviticus. Clean foods have distinct motions and distinct parts. There are birds that wing on the wing, fish that fin with the fin, and cattle that hoof on the hoof. Then there are creeping things. Any animal that mixes parts or motions is going to be taboo. The paradigm of tabooed food is the creeping animal that points backward to the confused motion of Tiamatu before the ordered creation. Flying fish are taboo because they mix the motion of birds with that of fish. Camels are taboo because they have a cloven stomach but not a cloven hoof. Pigs are taboo because they have a cloven hoof but not a cloven stomach.

The first creation story lays out a paradigm of living in harmony with ordered creation. While the whole is indeed very good, humans can transgress that order and let evil into the world. That is the theme of second creation story in Genesis 2:4b-4:1. Humans are destined toward to the good, yet inclined toward evil, a profound drama that unfolds in the rest of the book of Genesis.

In all this there is zero talk of one species emerging from another. This biological question is neither included nor excluded in the Genesis story. To turn Genesis into a biology textbook is to misconstrue both the profound story Genesis is telling and to disfigure the achievements of modern science.
It is far better to embrace the vision of the Anglican divine Charles Kingsley, quoted by Darwin in the second edition of the Origin. Kingsley, a gifted naturalist, asserted God gave the primal forms of creation the power of self-development. God did not create dumb, passive creatures but endowed the material world with creativity itself. This is a far nobler vision of the creation and of its Creator that now prevails among many true believers.
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*Frank K. Flinn is the retired adj. professor of religious studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he still offers courses in University College. He is author of Encyclopedia of Catholicism (2007).

Update: Frank K. Flinn died in July 2015. 40 South News editor Doug Miner knew Flinn since he often worked at Stone Spiral Coffee, and wrote an appreciation. A celebration of Flinn’s life held at the Regional Arts Center on August 9 was attended by hundreds.