Commentary : It’s Evolutionary, and It’s in the Bible : Life: Genesis anticipated Darwin’s theory.

There is no real need for the confrontation brewing between creationists and teachers of science. The Bible literally makes room for Charles Darwin in Genesis 1:20-27, the first of the two creation stories with which it begins.

Translated into English with an eye to literal rendering, the text reads:

“And God said, ‘Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly on the face of the wide heavens over the Earth.’ And God created the great sea monsters and all living creatures that crawl or swarm in the waters in accordance with their species, and every winged bird in accordance with its species. And God saw that it was good, and God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds multiply on the Earth.’

“And evening came, and morning came, fifth day. And God said, ‘Let the Earth bring forth living creatures according to their species, cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the Earth, according to their species,’ and it happened. And God made the beasts of the Earth according to their species and the cattle according to their species and every creeping thing of the ground according to its species.

“And God saw that it was good. And God said, ‘Let us make humanity in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the bird of the heaven and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the Earth.’

“And God created the human in his image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.”

Literalists can check this translation against the renderings favored by their churches.

The creation story that begins with God molding Adam, follows with the provision of plants and animals and ends with the transformation of Adam’s rib into Eve (Genesis 2:4-23) presents a very different temporal order from the first. Creationists are thus faced with a contradiction in creation stories. Whereas the initial sequence presents a temporal version of creation that Darwin only modifies, creationists, in attacking Darwin for the sake of Adam and Eve, unwittingly attack a story of creation in the Bible itself. Literalists damage their credibility when their claims rely on one sacred passage that is contradicted by another.

There is an alternative approach that would put believers in a much more viable position in the fast-approaching millennium. The Torah, the New Testament and the Koran illustrate important moral principles with stories that compound religion, theology, literature, history, philosophy, psychology and science. The aggregate invites the provision of details and interpretations.

The Adam and Eve story says important things about human sexuality and self-consciousness, the nature of love and evil and the moral purpose of pain, whereas the first creation story offers a temporal and geographic outline of creation. Did God have humans evolve from beasts of the Earth after the beasts evolved from creatures that swarmed in the sea? The first biblical account of creation can accommodate that theory.

As a result, firm believers, while entertaining evolution as the most probable explanation of life on Earth to date, can point out the visionary power of their sacred book. Thousands of years before Darwin, the Torah presented a very general creation story that like his theory of evolution traced the beginnings of life to the sea. That same creation story, again anticipating Darwin’s, traced a movement from simpler creatures to more complex creatures, ending with the sexually inclusive creation of humanity--male and female simultaneously. God’s method of creation in Genesis 1 is not specified, but the theory of evolution is certainly one viable explanation that the first account of creation easily accommodates.