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If you could ask God one question what would it be? The “Why God Why” podcast is dedicated to exploring the questions that matter most in your life.
Deep questions often don’t have easy answers. We realize that we won’t solve all the world’s problems in one podcast. Our goal is to share our life experience, interview knowledgeable guests and look at how Jesus might interact with our concerns. We also hope to have a ton of fun in the process because even though the issues might be serious, it doesn’t mean that we always need to be.
No matter where you are on your spiritual journey, we are honored to have you with us!
>> Gage Hunt: Hi, this is Gage from why god? Why? We're in the midst of a season titled the credibility of Christianity, and we are diving into all types of topics like faith and science, politics, diversity, faith and beauty, or superficiality and more. And as we go through this season, we want to hear from you. We're going to do an episode at the very end of the season where we discuss the whole season and on to listener questions. So as you listen along and you think, hey, I wish they talked about that question further, or, they didn't really hit on this topic related to the episode. We'd love to hear from you and get a chance to discuss it together. So as you're listening along, if that occurs to you, send your question you'd like us to discuss to Peter@browncroft.org. If you're extra savvy, send us a recording of your voice actually asking the question and we can include that in the episode. We'll only share your name if you give us permission, but we'd love to hear from you with that. Enjoy the episode.
>> Peter Englert: Welcome to the why god, why podcast. My name is Peter Englert. I am here with, my co host friend, Gage Hunt. How you doing?
>> Gage Hunt: Good, I'm good.
>> Speaker C: How are you today?
>> Peter Englert: So, Gage, we are in the middle of a series on the credibility of Christianity. M you and I are going to be responding with our guest, Dr. Drew Johnson, to a podcast that we weren't a part of, but we got a lot of feedback. Positive, I wouldn't say negative, but questioning. And, so the podcast title is, do christians think Genesis is literal? It comes from the first episode of our series on the credibility of Christianity. Why are Christians hesitant with science? With Dr. Steve Pelton. So we got the science side from a dermatologist. Now we're going to go to the theological kind of biblical side with Drew.
>> Speaker C: How do you feel? I'm excited.
>> Peter Englert: You are? Okay, well, before we jump right in, we are part of the Lumivoz network of podcasts through Saddleback. We also have a partnership with IVP. So if you're listening to this podcast within the first two weeks, we actually have a code for you to use to, get a discount on Drew's book. Drew, let's get this started. Why don't you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your story and your journey?
>> Speaker C: which journey? Because I'm almost 50, so I got a lot of story in me, but, I grew up in Oklahoma. I dropped out of high school, failed out of high school after three freshman years, and then, joined the military when I turned 17. And when I started university, when I was still, in the military, when I was in the reserves, I guess at that point I studied social science. I was very interested in the sciences and was actually graduating and putting my PhD applications out for psychology programs. and then, when I was 20, about three years into the military, I'd actually had a radical conversion to Christianity. Was not religious, not interested. but some things made me more interested than I would have been otherwise in the military. and ah, a guy talked me into going to seminary instead of doing the PhD in psychology and not because there's anything wrong with the PhD in psychology. He just really thought, and he was right, he really thought that I would enjoy seminary a lot better. And I didn't know what seminary was when he suggested, so he had to explain to me what seminary was. And I went seminary and started working as a pastor. Did another master's in analytic philosophy where I studied some philosophy of science as well at that point, and always kind of had a hankering. I always was processing everything through my kind of scientific grid and how scientists think about the world and empiricism. And then when I went to do my PhD, eventually when I was in my mid 30s, I was very interested in philosophy, of science, scientific epistemology. How do scientists know things, basically, and kind of filtering that through. Well, what do the hebrew biblical authors think about this question? Like how do they think through the question of science, scientistic thinking, null hypotheses, checking things against chance? Well, it turns out they have lots of thoughts and they uniquely have lots of thoughts, unlike any of the other civilizations that surrounded them, including the gregoroman civilizations. so I traced some of that out and I wrote quite a few books on that topic from various angles, from ritual, from epistemology. but I'd always had this kind of like, I would like to really deal with evolution someday. And then I got a sabbatical and I got a research fellowship at the Henry center, Trinity evangelical divinity school. So I got to spend an entire semester just reading and writing most of this book, where I was just trying to figure out I'd done a lot of these what do the biblical authors have to say about topic x? But I'd never done the evolution one. And I had even written a small book on Genesis one through eleven, a little layperson's commentary where I kind of touched on it a little bit, but it only stoked my questioning. I got to spend basically a year working through my own questions, which, did not. I did not come to conclusions. I actually came to more questions. I tell people the process of writing this book made me more curious and agnostic about both creationism and evolutionary explanations. so I did not end up landing. I ended up landing on the. I'm pretty sure neither of these explanations fully work. but I'm excited to see somebody who does figure out how they work.
>> Peter Englert: You know what? We'll just end the interview now. Anyways, I kind of want to jump in. I forgot that we actually have the book here, so make sure you check it out. So, here's what I face as a pastor, not just from this podcast. So, a, I meet some Gen Z or millennial that has an appreciation for evolution. So they've been taught, hey, six literal days is what the bible says. And then they start reading it. I know that science Mike, who's from another podcast, wrote a book kind of arguing the firmament and the waters. They don't match in lineup, so they come to the Genesis text, and they're disoriented and they're frustrated because they feel like it's too simplistic. And then I got person b. I've had two meetings with individuals just this week that they're probably gen xers or boomers, and they're like, you can't put evolution over Genesis one to two because we didn't come from monkeys. That's not what god says. And they're kind of disoriented when the word evolution is kind of brought up with Genesis. My response, and then I'll let you kind of clean up this whole kind of soliloquy just to help our listeners. Where we're at is, when I read Genesis one and two, and I read kind of even the poeticness in the translation when I read that day seven is rest. I kind of say to both of them, I think the author of genesis is probably not as worried about science as we are, and that's probably eight to ten on their priority list. Usually that somewhat goes over well. but I'm giving you my response. What do you think when you deal with those two camps? Because obviously you probably have sat in those two camps or had conversations. One person, hey, does evolution and science really matter? The other person is, no, this totally takes away from the truth of scripture.
>> Speaker C: Yeah. and I, too, run into the. I mean, I have students who are 18 years old that come in with both of those views, depending on which kind of household they're raised. think, you know, the genesis is too simplistic. I mean, I argue in another book for Cambridge University Press that this is the most sophisticated literature and antiquity, bar none. you don't get any more sophisticated philosophical thinking, and I include the Greeks and the Romans in that statement, than what you get in the Torah, at least, the full package of the books of Moses. but yeah, if you're trying, I mean, look at the mathematics of Genesis. There are two chapters for the creation of the universe and the special creation of human beings. And there are twelve chapters on Joseph, who isn't even a patriarch, and all of his descendants are dead by, ah, second king 16, right? We don't even follow Joseph's descendants into the New Testament. They don't even make it to the New Testament, right? They all die off. They get killed by god because of their, rebellion. so twelve chapters for Joseph, two for creation. however, trying to jam all of what happens in evolutionary science and natural selective thinking into two chapters, it's square pegged around hole. It's doing something very different. I think I argue in several other books that actually the basis of scientific thinking comes from these very texts. That's a longer argument, but you really can't get science if you just have grecoroman thought. You'll never get the science if you have grecoroman thinking. in fact, the history of science is the history of them dropping off grecoroman thinking as they realized it was not useful, it was not realistic, and it didn't lead to engineering outputs. That's not me speaking, that's historians of science and intellectual history of science. so in some ways I want to say, like, oh, you appreciate the science, you should probably appreciate the hebraic heritage of the scientific enterprise. There's a unique lineage there that does not come from the Indians, the Chinese, the Greeks, the Romans, Mesopotamians or Egyptians. so kind of bring them into the wider world of where does science come from? How does it come to the conclusions? How does it think about the world? And of course, I've got several books that argue that the way scientists have basically landed on how they think about the world is essentially the hebraic view of the world. This is a real world that's regulated by laws and lawlike action, therefore knowable that, our bodies can be deceived, but we can, create instruments of measurement where we can pay close attention to what the world does, and it can tell us how to think about the world. The ultimate arbiter of whether our ideas are real or not is what creation tells us when we test them against creation. So I can tell you I got my own personal secret calculations about tensile stress of steel. But if you can't drive a truck across a bridge I built and hold the weight, then you don't care about my calculations. Right. And so that's a very uniquely hebraic view of reality that you don't get from these other, cultures and, philosophies. So, not that we don't get good things from those cultures. Not like the creeks didn't do anything. but they had problematic theology that interrupted their critical engagement with reality. So there's kind of a wide story about science comes from somewhere, and it follows a very distinct conceptual world, which is a lot of what this book is trying to do. Compare the conceptual world of scripture with the conceptual world of the evolutionary sciences to show, like, yeah, there's, a lot of affinity between these two worlds. And that's not an accident, I don't think. And this is not like a huge apologetic program. There are lots of atheist scholars who will tell you the same thing. Right. so the. Too simplistic. I agree. What I do in my class, I just taught Genesis one a few weeks ago at the beginning of my Old Testament intro class. I say, let's not read this as modern people. Let's not read this as people in the days of Jesus. Let's read this as Iron Age Hebrew people. and start first day. god says, let there be light. Great. We're Iron Age Hebrews. We believe that light comes from places like the sun, lightning, fire. Where am I pointing the camera, as it were? Where is this light coming from? No explanation whatsoever. If we're in Iron Age Hebrew at, the second sentence of Genesis one, we're already like, what's going on here? What are you doing? You're playing with words in some way, playing with ideas. And then there's day and there's evening, or at night and evening. You're like, okay, I don't know what we would measure night and evening by in day one, because we have to wait till day four. Do we have a sun, moon, and stars that you can actually measure what a day is, where what we would now call a 24 hours period. Oh, and now we have light that is a source of light that we can like the way we think about the world. So I think whatever is happening in Genesis one and two, anybody who's trying to wring this clay tablet for blood, it's just not going to work. As I tell my students, you just have to keep reading. and Genesis one through eleven is probably the better unit of text to put all of these things in conversation with. And you realize their view of the world is focused elsewhere. I mean, this happens all the time. Genesis four, everybody knows. Famously Cain says, don't send me out wandering because people will find me and kill me. And as a reader, you're like, who are you talking about? Who's going to find you? Who's going to kill you? Right? Or as Augustine once said, whence Cain's wife? Where do these people come from? Right? But it's a great moment. Walter Moberley, the Old Testament scholar, at Durham, he says, the biblical author here in Genesis one through eleven, but specifically in Genesis four, where this happens, is showing you that they're aware of a larger human history and population of which they don't want to discuss, right? So they're not hiding the fact that they realize people have to come from somewhere and they're not dealing with that in the story. They're, alluding to it. Even Cain saying he brought his brother out into the country. Well, the country is used in Hebrew as the opposite of the city, so it's already implying some urban life. Why would he need to walk him out into the country to kill him? Why wouldn't he just do it wherever they were? so there's hints all over the text of, yeah, we know, human history, civilization, all of this needs to be explained. But here's what we're talking about. And they stay on it like a laser on the conversation they want to have. So what's the conversation they want to have? So this is how I would talk to both of these people, by the way, person a and b, I do like a good boxer. Drag them into your corner and just pummel them with what you know best. So I'd say, okay, what's the laser focus they have? And this is what generated this book is, at some point, it just hit me, okay, well, they talk about dirt like the dirt is really important. It comes up in the flood. Mean, god, after the flood says, I will never again curse the dirt for the intention of man's heart is evil all the time. And you're like, wait, I thought the flood was to deal with the intention of man's heart and to deal with evil, but it doesn't deal with evil, but it deals with the curse of the dirt, which the flood starts with. Noah was named Noah because he will bring relief from the curse of the dirt. Right. So that curse dirt thing, that's a big deal in this storyline. Most christians, I don't think, ever pick up on the role of dirt in genesis one through eleven. why is that such a big deal? Because cursed dirt means scarcity. Scarcity means violence, and presumably violent competition for scarce resources. what else are they talking about? well, that's the man's curse and Cain's subsequent curse, that ends up in the flood. The woman's curse is human fertility progeny, sexual procreation and propagation, or generation, as they call it, filling the earth, being fruitful and filling the land, with your children and your children's children, which is, again, it's a focus of scripture. It's not just about pumping out babies, it's pumping out great great grandchildren. Right. so it's about your progeny living in the face of the land and carrying on your name and carrying all the benefits of belonging to the people of god. What's the other thing they're talking about? these are short stories, but they're very economically told, so lots of things are twisted together. What's the other thing they're talking about? Oh, the curse. You're not fit to live in this land. This land was designed for you, this habitat was designed for you to be a natural fit to whatever your biological needs were. But because of your behavior, you no longer are fit to the land and you have to be exiled to the east. It happens to Cain, he gets exiled further east. and we see that kind of eastward movement as a symptom of the problem. So we have fittedness to the land, sexual propagation and scarcity, which creates violence as the three central, concerns of Genesis one through eleven. At some point it hit me. I'm like. I feel like I've heard somebody else talk about these three things. Right. and I hadn't read Darwin since college, I think. so I was reading him again. I was reading his letters, his correspondences with people, where I feel like sometimes you get insider information on what somebody thinks outside of what they published. And, he's picking up on these exact same things. By the way, I did look, in ancient creation, is anybody else in the world talking about these three things? Was this like a normal conversation? No. Nobody else, as far as I know. I couldn't find any other creation narratives. now, maybe there's some other style of narratives where they do this, but certainly not in creation accounts where they're talking about. The fundamental problem of humans has become. It's not what it is, it's what it's become is scarcity. Ah. Of resources which begets violence. And how are you going to be fertile and reproduce people who are fit to a proper land? And that fittedness of the land goes into Israel, it goes into even the age of. Right. where the sadducees question Jesus about the age of resurrection and he riddles them with marriage and giving them marriage, which I don't think he's actually talking about marriage at all in the age of resurrection, but he's pushing the question on them. Are you even worthy of the age of resurrection? Are you fit to the new heavens, new earth, the land that's to come? So this is a long, enduring conversation that kind of gets kicked off in Genesis one through eleven. And I feel like the example I give that would be pertinent to these two people is, a friend of mine told me this little. It's like a little pastor's joke. So you guys might appreciate. Know that prayer groups often become gossip circles, depending on who's involved. And so a friend of mine said, imagine the situation as someone comes in the prayer group and they're like, did you hear about Joan? No, what happened to Joan? She got arrested. Arrested? Arrested for what? Stealing. Stealing? What does she steal? She stole tic tacs. Oh, my god. She stole tic tacs at Walgreens? Are you kidding me? What flavor were they? And at some point you're like, not relevant. It doesn't matter what flavor they were. Right. Joan arrested for stealing at Walgreens. Even at Walgreens. A little extraneous, but it puts a little lived body detail on it. Right. but yeah, at some point you cross over into. That's not the story I'm trying to tell you. Stay with me here. Right. And I feel like Genesis one through eleven is a very tightly, economically told story that it's begging its readers to stay very close on the ball. And there's all kinds of distractions and rabbit trails, and they're like, no, we're talking about this thing. And almost every christian interpretation that is trying to deal with evolutionary science is usually kind of ignoring the laser like focus of the authors and saying, I've got this problem and I'm dragging my problem to the text, and this text better give me answers.
>> Gage Hunt: Drew, that was, three semesters worth of content you just gave us. That was incredible. Oh my gosh, that was so good. What I love that you just did at least one thing was you kind.
>> Speaker C: Of did the really savvy.
>> Gage Hunt: Both of you didn't say scripture has nothing to say about, science or that scripture, the Old Testament, the hebraic worldview, and ancient hebraic thought lent nothing towards scientific development. You in fact said it lent a lot. It was perhaps the primary resource in the development of modern scientific thought, however, not in the way sometimes we overly simplistically read it and take it, because they're in fact, in Genesis, concerned with doing something else, not giving us a science textbook, but talking about something else, which were those three things you unpacked.
>> Speaker C: That was awesome. I do say not everybody needs to know Hebrew. It wouldn't kill people. There's a whole movement. Andrew case and his wife Bethany actually have a free Hebrew learning natural language YouTube channel where anybody, like people all around the world, doesn't matter what language you speak or learning Hebrew through them, because they teach it as if you're a child. It doesn't require any other language. So there's that. But there are things going on there. what's the saying? Great, theories or grand theories require grand explanation or grand evidence or something like that. I forget the phrase. Right. So if you're going to hang everything on what's going on in these stories, you really ought to know the wordplay and the literary structure of the Hebrew. so not everybody needs to know that, but the people who are really selling their story of what they think is going on there probably do need to know that and be in tune with what's happening there. I would also say, and again, I was raised in Oklahoma in the, so there's a very christian culture there, but I wasn't really raised in the church. So a lot of this, none of this bothered me at all. even after I became a Christian, none of this really bothered me. But I have students who go to worldview weekend training and they get trained on how to argue against these, my kids in their home school co op even got a book on how to argue against this kind of stuff. And I was like, there's some interesting arguments in there, but we had to talk through carefully, like, what's the point and what are they trying to argue here? But what I've seen, if my students are any litmus test of the wider population of christians, is a they conflate evolutionary, the term evolution with natural selection, which I think is something that everybody should tease apart in their minds as two completely different things. Although they do go together. There's a reason why you need to tease them.
>> Peter Englert: Tease it out.
>> Speaker C: Yeah. well, natural selection, I can show you research today that everybody, if they read the research and they didn't believe the researchers were lying, obviously shows that natural selection happens today. I think anybody who reads the Bible would say, if you just presented them, here's what Darwin thought was going on with natural. Something like this was going on, tweak it one way or the other. I think anybody who reads the Bible would be like, yeah, that seems to be kind of what the Bible is describing in some way, or it's at least possible it's within the realm of possibility. and that is like, the fox experiments in Russia in the mid 20th century where they're bringing in foxes and they're manually selecting them for friendliness. Right. They're separating them out by how friendly the fox. So it's basically unnatural selection, but they're doing something that they think mimics natural selection in some way. So they're saying, we want friendly foxes. So if a baby fox, a puppy fox, I don't know, a cub, I don't know what foxes are, if it has these particular attributes within so many days of birth, we'll separate it out and keep it as one of the friendly ones. Otherwise we'll consider it one of the natural foxes, the feral foxes within, I think it's something like twelve or 15 generations. So like 40 years of doing this, kind of selective breeding, this unnatural selection, the physiology of the foxes changed measurably. And by measurably, I mean their snouts were like a centimeter shorter, their canines had shortened, their ears went floppy. They physiologically changed the dogs not by genetically encoding, but by selecting for a feature of friendliness, which is kind of an unexpected feature of, foxes. Right? So you can get foxes now that are super friendly, you can get pet foxes. they're not dogs, they're not domesticated dogs, they're still foxes, that have been bred through this program. that's a natural selection process. You can see it before the. But over 40 years that happens. Darwin was when he was describing the origin of species, he is almost entirely describing natural selection. He's trying to figure out in the Galapagos Islands, there's a group of islands there, why do the same birds he didn't know about genetics, of course, but why do the birds that appear to be the exact same kind of birds by feather and color and shape, why do they have different beaks when they live on different islands? He's trying to piece that together. And I think any christian today, even if you're a seven day creationist, would say, oh, yeah, the different kinds of fruit and food available on those differing islands cause the beaks to change shape. Same thing with skin tone. Why do people have different skin tone in different places? The places, the crass way of saying it is places made races, right? That humans in different places had different exposures of skin and environments and that over time changed their skin tone. you don't have to be an evolutionist in the full sense to believe that that's true and to see the evidence for that today. and you can think of all kinds of smaller ways in which that's true. These are the big changes to morphology of bodies. So when you say, well, we came from monkeys, well, a, no evolutionary scientist believes anybody ever came from a monkey, or an ape, right? They believe in common descent, not, descent from monkey to human. So, that just tells me like, oh, you don't really know the story of evolutionary science that well, which is fine, because evolutionary scientists aren't always great at explaining it clearly. and to wit, it is kind of complicated. The natural selection part is pretty easy. You can just say, like, if you have a mole rat that gets transplanted from Louisiana to Missouri, it's probably going to physically change sometime over generations by different soils and trees and different things that it encounters, right? And eventually we might call it a different type of mole rat, or something like that. So that part is fairly simple and intuitive. And everybody, once Darwin and Wallace laid it out, everybody's like, oh, yeah, that kind of makes sense. And they're pretty brilliant in thinking through the details of that simple arrangement. But when you get into gene drift and gene flow, and tectonic, plate distribution, animals by tectonic plates, it does get kind of confusing and common descent. And like, where do they think humans are? And then this is the one where christians, I think, get nervous, rightfully and unrightfully. So is they'll see a news article from in Science magazine that says, anthropologists have had to reset the human story by 500,000 years because they found a new skeleton in a cave somewhere, right? And then we're all like, what the heck? Ah, in what scientific theory are you resetting by a half million years. Your view on what happened, I think that speaks to the fragility of certain aspects of evolutionary thought. but that's an evolutionary story of common descent. That's not natural selection. And so if you're constantly conflating those together, you're in a minefield, stepping on the wrong minds. Like, you need to pick the right minds and see if they're actually a problem for you. You're misidentifying your targets. If you want to be combative about it, you're not even arguing about the right things.
>> Peter Englert: I want to come back to the Bible. I'm so glad that you did that and kind of like gauge, hope college, they should probably charge us something, or maybe, this is like free publicity for them. But let's come back to genesis just for a second, because I think what I heard you say is every kind of scientific method, maybe from the enlightenment all the way up to even like, the 19 hundreds. The fact that Darwin is thinking through these things, they got this from hebraic thought. And one of the things that I'm thinking about is one of the things that I tell people is in the creation story, there's three questions that I ask when I read the Bible. First, foremost, what did the original readers think of this passage? So kind of, you've already alluded to it. Iron hebrew person. They're trying to read this. What are they thinking? The second one is, what does this passage always mean? So taking it from 300 ad to 1000 to 1900, when Darwin was here, and then that leads us to the last question. What does it mean for us today? A ton of times we try to jump to question number three, and I think a lot of what Genesis is trying to do is the first century readers would read Genesis one and two, and first of all, be blown away. There's not a battle. god just creates the world.
>> Speaker C: Right.
>> Peter Englert: they would be blown away by, god being gracious. And even some of these hebrew thoughts, like the natural selection, and I'm not the scientist, but the fact that there is wrong and evil, the fact that the world does change. But humans have this special, they're created in God's image. It's almost like it pairs so well. So kind of walk us through the biblical sense of if you were alive during the scopes monkey trial, or if you're having discussions about, let's just have some fun here. The giants in Genesis eleven. Supposed giants in Genesis eleven.
>> Speaker C: Yeah.
>> Peter Englert: What do you think is the heart of what the hebrew writers and even what god is trying to do in these first eleven chapters for the original audience, then for us today.
>> Speaker C: Yeah. I read these texts every semester with my students, and so I always get kind of a new insight. And one of the things that has struck me before and recently is the nature of the book of Genesis itself. We're talking about the first eleven chapters for a reason, because. And I tell students or parishioners, if I said, hey, read Genesis tonight, it'll take you like, an hour and a half. Just, sit down and read it from front to back, maybe an hour and 45 minutes. and divide it up by what seemed like very obvious and natural divisions, seams in the text. Every single person would come back with at least this three part view. Genesis one through 1112 through 37, 39 ish, depending on how you cut that story, and then 37 to the end. those second two divisions, the Abraham, Isaac and Jacob stories, they're topical. And then the Joseph stories, it's because the people involved in those stories, it, splits very nicely into those two different parts. The first division, one through eleven, is not because it's a different topic, not because it's a different people. It's because it reads so differently than the rest of the book of Genesis. Right. and it, to me, has this feel, and I'm talking about mainly from reading in the Hebrew, but not exclusively. I think you can pick this up in whatever translation you have. It feels very much like somebody has included this text who is also slightly mystified by what is going on. Almost like this. I don't know. M maybe let's call him Moses. Right? Moses, has these stories that are written down, that are being passed down to him. He's like, all right, we got to get all the patriarchs in here, and we have these creation stories all the way up to the flood. but there seems to be a reticence that you don't see in the rest of Genesis to make comments, to make corrections, to make updated place, names. okay, there might be some exceptions here, but when you get to Genesis 14, he says Abraham chased lot's, hostage takers all the way to Dan. Well, Dan is not a city that's going to exist until 1000 years after Abraham lives. Right? So they're using, like I do in class, like, hey, this is modern day Afghanistan, modern day Iran. They're using a later place name to identify an earlier place, or Genesis 22. that's why we say to this day, on the mountain of Yahweh, it shall be provided. Like, clearly somebody who is living in the time of the temple, talking about, some kind of song or phrase that is used as they approach the temple to give an animal sacrifice in, a post levitical period or a post Leviticus period. none of that happens in Genesis one through eleven. There's no, like, hey, let me explain this to you. And here's why he took off his sandal at the gate, because in those days, people took off their sand. There's none of that cultural explanation, historical explanation, none of the, to this day, statements that are trying to explain to it. It's doing something very different. and, I think it's difficult for us to acknowledge that, even for ancient Hebrews. They might say, like, hey, we're not exactly sure how all of this text works, but this is what was handed down to us, and so we're going with what was handed down to us. And now some people might think that's a cheat or a, ah, cheap move. I just want to point out that the early church did that all the time, right? There were all of these ideas floating around, and I'm talking like the early second century, polycarp and Papias and Ignatius, who are disciples of the apostle John. who, if you look at their epistles, they are constantly saying, people have some, we should do it this way. We should do this. And their rebuttal is, that is not what was handed down to us from the apostles. Like, maybe fine, but that's not what they handed down to us. That is not from the memoirs of the apostles, I. E. The gospels. so I don't think that that's a bad way to look at Genesis one through eleven, as this is what was handed down. When I say economic storytelling, I challenge students. I'm like, write me a story, like Genesis one or two, using the same amount of words, that has that many implications, right. That connects that deeply to all the other stories, that are coming in the text. I don't think most people could do it. maybe a professional writer or poet could, but I don't think most of us could do it. so I completely forgot what your question is, because I got on this rabbit trail of the purpose of Genesis one through eleven, which I think was your question. What's the purpose of Genesis one through eleven? I think it is trying to largely lay out. So I'm a minimalist. Like, what's the minimal thing we can say that is true of this passage, which I think was kind of one of your questions that you asked of the passage as well. What clearly is the world used to be one way, it is no longer that way. It got really bad for a while there. and despite that, the most controversial thing I think you see in Genesis one through eleven for ancient near eastern person is god comes and speaks directly to humans, instructs them and cleans up their messes. god speaking to humans is unheard of in Mesopotamia and mostly in Egypt as well. Like, gods don't talk to humans. They don't give them instructions, they don't give them commands. they have omens, right? The gods keep all the secrets to themselves and you find out what they don't like by accidentally doing it, right? It's like an alcoholic parent or something, where you can set them off at the easiest thing, but you never knew that you were breaking some invisible rule of theirs. So, having a god who comes down and talks to people and the scene with Cain is almost unbelievable. It's like, hey, Cain, get yourself straightened up here, right? It didn't work, by the way. Even if god comes and talks to you and takes a knee and has a chat with you about what's wrong with going on, doesn't mean it's going to change anything. The next sentence is, and he brought his brother out in the field and killed him, right? So it went really wrong. And god still makes a treaty with animals and humans. He binds himself against all the popular worship music that god can do whatever he wants. Well, no, he can't. As soon as he makes a treaty saying, I'm going to do these things, and he's saying, I'm not going to do these other things, right? And he makes that treaty with animals and humans alike and, then sets some basic ground rules, like, hey, if you kill humans, you're going to die. Doesn't matter whether you're an animal or human. you're going to die either way. And kind of sets us up so that we can then understand why the Torah, the later instruction that comes from Moses, is so precious and so vital and is worth god killing off ten of the twelve tribes of Israel because they won't do what he asked them to do. so it plays this kind of, the fancy word is the proligominal role. and the rest of what's going to happen, it's the first two minutes of a four hour movie. I think that's really worth stressing with people, because with students, I'm sure you see it, as well, they want to instantly jump to theology. Instantly jump to practical theology. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're in the first two minutes, this is like the person sitting next to you going like, oh, I bet he's going to kill her and he's going to bury her in his fridge in the backyard. And you're like, they're just rolling the credits right now. Just let the movie roll. Right. I will admit it's difficult to see how integral genesis one through eleven is in the rest of the Bible linguistically. I mean, the way the biblical authors use it, use literary devices to constantly call back to Genesis one through eleven, how they quote it and use it rhetorically in their own thinking. it is basically the source book of the thinking, including Jesus. When people ask him questions about sex, he does not go, thank goodness to Abraham, Isaac or Jacob's sex life. Right? That would be a complete nightmare. M. Right. he says, it was not so in the beginning. and then cuts to, the sex life. someone was asking him about divorce, and he goes back to men and women being, having a sex life together. So it almost implicates that they were asking, can we get a divorce so we can have sex with a younger girl? We can remarry and have sex with a younger girl. Right, but that's his source book for thinking as well. and it pops up in all kinds of weird places. Like, it's, quote, luke 24 is the only place in the bible that quotes Genesis 37. Their eyes were open and they knew, right? when they eat the fruit, their eyes were open and they knew. Luke 24, on the road to Emmaus, finally has dinner with his disciples, where he also takes food and gives it to his disciples, just like she took the fruit and gave it to her husband. and then Luke quotes Genesis 37, and their eyes were opened and they knew him. so it's even featuring at that point, you're like, wait, why is Luke quoting Genesis 37 of all things in scripture? about the resurrected Jesus, making himself known to two disciples who were arguing about why these things had to happen. That's like some real deep theological matrices being pulled upon there. so if I were to go to a prisoner, I'd say, hey, if you want to understand Genesis one through eleven, read the rest of the bible really well and then start thinking about what they're doing with Genesis one through eleven and their thinking, how it funds and fuels all of their thinking and all of their constraints on what they think is right and wrong. And I have to point out also Genesis twelve through 50 does not fund their thinking on what is right and what is wrong. And in fact, I think it's true to say almost every behavior you see in Genesis twelve through 50 is expressly forbidden in the Torah. Right? You, can't have sex with your sister like Abram did. You can't have sex with your stepmom like Reuben did. You can't have sex with your father in law, which, Tamar did. You can't have a woman for a wife and take her sister as a wife. That's Jacob. As a rival wife, that's Jacob and Rebecca or Rachel, like everything, right? You can put names from Genesis next to each one of those laws in Leviticus 18 and 20. but not so in Genesis one through eleven. It's really laying the groundwork for it was one way and it really went the other way really hard. And this is the pullback. This is the compromise document that, we're dealing with now. Here's what we do in light of the fact that everything is rucked from beginning to end.
>> Gage Hunt: I really like that kind, of movie intro analogy. If we're reading scripture in its full form as an incredible, beautifully artistic, literary work with a variety of literary styles throughout. And, a story, the Bible project. I love listening to the Bible project. their slogan, I'm going to butcher it a little bit. But it's basically, helping you read scripture as, ah, a story about, you know, viewing scripture as a literary work that's a story about Jesus or a story about god. I love that image of reading the whole, and then kind of going back and looking at that first bit, those first chapters of Genesis, as setting the scene and recalling, or now seeing maybe more fully what that was saying and how the story, the tension that set up has now come to bloom. and it sounds like what you said just to sum up, because, again, that was another two semesters worth of awesome content.
>> Speaker C: Sorry.
>> Gage Hunt: No, it's incredible.
>> Speaker C: Monologue in again. Is that what syndrome says?
>> Gage Hunt: It's incredible. No, please. but it sounds like what you're saying is those first chapters of Genesis are less a metaphysical or scientific textbook for how the material world came to be and more explanation, for to the ancient peoples first receiving it, of, this is who god is, this is who you are, and this is what's going on with the world. Is that fair?
>> Speaker C: Yeah. I also want to say, I think it's also fair to say that the hebrew biblical authors also thought that all of that was basically a rough history. A good enough history, or a good enough. Maybe history is the wrong word, because we load history with all kinds of meaning that maybe isn't helpful. It's a good enough origins story, if you want to put it in Marvel cinematic universe terms. It's a good enough origin story to give you everything you need to understand everything else that's happening. And that will happen. and the will happen is, in the book, I frame this metaphysical problem with the Gloria patriot, as it was in the beginning, is now and shall ever more be. And I say in the book, the biblical authors seem to think very strongly, with their view of Eden, present time, and then the new heavens, new earth, and the future as it was in the beginning. No longer is right now, but one day eventually will be right. And so I, think that's where we can cut some slack for Darwin, an evolutionary scientist or scientist of all sorts, to say, like, look, we're all dealing with the world as it is now, but the biblical authors don't think it used to be this way, and they don't think it's going to persist to be this way forever. Now, if you're just a Joe blow or Jane Doe, evolutionary scientist, you kind of have to believe in the uniformity of energy and the laws of the universe in order to do some of the things that you do. Not necessarily everything, but some of the things you do. but that kind of fundamental reorientation of the metaphysical nature of the universe, I think, is fundamental for the biblical imagination, including the imagination for redemption, right, because it's what you see in the miracles of Jesus. Like, how else does Jesus, resuscitate, not resurrect Lazarus? Right? Because we assume he died and he's not rolling around the earth today. he reorients his cells and reanimates them as the creator did, showed his creation power there. We assume that he doesn't do some de novo miracle where he just zaps and like. Like you see in some of the catholic, or the pseudopigraphal texts that have Jesus making little clay doves and breathing life into them and sending them, but. But rather you see him taking what is there and reanimating it. I, love the story of blind Bartimaeus. I'm part of my doctoral work is in the gospel of Mark and, blind Bartimaeus, who, when he says, what do you want me to do for you? Bartimaeus is very clear. He says, I want to recover my sight, blind, is not the way I was supposed to be. It's not the way my eyes are not functioning the way they're supposed to. I want them to be normal. Right? I want them to be natural, as I argue, is the real use of natural here. I want them to be the way god designed them to be. He doesn't ask for a third leg or a beer opener on his shoulder or, whatever bionic kind of stuff we might ask for. He just says, I want to recover my sight. And I think you see that across all of Jesus'healing ministry is he's returning things back to. He's metaphysically reorienting things back to the way they were supposed to be, at least for a time. We assume those people all grew old and died and suffered the ultimate, consequences of death. but that's how you make sense of Jesus's earthly ministry. It's also how you make sense of the new heavens and new earth, that God's not going to burn this up, nuke it, throw it away, but he's actually going to reorient what's already here and at the end, that's why I have to talk about life extension and psychedelics is because you have to look for real physical examples of what reorienting the body or our universe might look like today. Otherwise, everything I said is just a sham, unless there are actual physical and metaphysical explanations. and the one I use in general, or the one I think I've heard from somebody else, is cancer cells are not cells that come from outside to inside the body and infect it. They're not a virus or a bacteria. cancer cells are human body cells that have been turned against the human body and convince other cells to do the same. that's an orientation issue, right? That it's a misoriented human cell, which means the misorientation means it has the potential to be reoriented or properly oriented in the first place. you can slap on metaphors, like redemption onto this. Now you can redeem somebody. We call it healing, or in some cases, in the Greek, they call it saving sodzo. Right? Healing and salvation, ah, are used simultaneously. but all that's happening there is you're redeeming the physical structure by reorienting to what it should have been in the first place. If that's the kind of the natural state of affairs from beginning to end, then, and that's why I go into psychedelics, although I always have to disclaim that is in no way approval of the use of psychedelics. I used them as a teenager in the can definitely say you should not be using them unless you're doing so in a, government funded study, which they are doing right now. I have a friend who does psychedelic trauma therapy. Not with psychedelics yet, because they're not legal, but he's trained to do it. But I am not advocating it, but it is one of the interesting. The use of psychedelics actually provides a good test case for your brain is already wired. All psychedelics do. They don't cause something to happen in your brain. They just turn on a receptor that's already there and cause your brain to do something it was caused to do naturally, not the, free floating, free association stuff that happens with psychedelics, which can go really wrong, by the way. It can go really wrong on you. I tripped enough to be able to say that, the long term effects of psychedelics are, you feel a closer connection to nature, a closer connection to humanity, and, a resistance to authoritarianism, wrongful authoritarianism. Right. I think we can all agree if all humans had those three traits, it might make the world a better place. Be a good fiction novel if somebody wants to take it on, right. That you just felt more closely connected to your environment, and that if humans were naturally disposed to do that. So I give a couple of examples and I think it would be great if people look for more examples and see whether it's a testable case. Is this true or not? Life, ah, extension is another one. there's no biological reason you die at 100 or 120 years old. It doesn't matter if I talk to an atheist or, a theist, biologist or geneticist. They all say, yeah, no, this is not a problem to live 900 years. That part of genesis is actually not biologically problematic at all. And there are chinese labs working away right now trying to crack that issue so they can get people to live longer, live an extra 5100 years. but those, to me, offer examples of possible ways in which we can think of the physical world reoriented in the way the biblical authors are conceptualizing it.
>> Peter Englert: So I want to ask you a personal question. how did your service in the military influence how you study all of these topics?
>> Speaker C: Whoa. I've never, ever thought about that before in my life. I feel like it has to have. I can't say, oh, it had no impact. I mean, I was in for seven years, from 17 to 24 years old, which were very formative years, obviously. I think one basic way I could say it did. It certainly did. is, my mom was a real feminist. She later was lesbian, whatever Rush Limbaugh used to call feminazi or whatever. she's great. May her memory be blessed. She was wonderful, and she really taught me, which is just early feminist teaching. Like, the body matters, right? she would say, men want to tell you it's all about what you think. but we know that our bodies matter and what we do in our bodies matter. And I think I was just like, yeah, whatever, mom. She's got some ideas. and then I think after my second or third combat deployment, I think I came fully on board with that view. Like, oh, my body matters. Because I think when you're faced with actual situations where you might lose part of your body or you lose it all and you die or whatever, it's not just like acute coincidence that we have bodies in this shape and that we inhabit space in this particular kind of way. So I think that caused me to do a lot of reflection on ritual. That's certainly how I got into ritual studies and ritual theory, which I'd written a few books on. and that certainly made me think much more about. If you want to understand something, you need to think much more about the embodied ways in which you're inhabiting those thoughts and how much they cohere to reality. So I have, for instance, an extremely low tolerance for theological bs where people say things that just sound. I poor person. I had to examine a PhD recently. I don't want to give away any details that will say which one. I examined several phds recently in, the last six months, and I was the external examiner, which means I'm supposed to bring the heat a little bit, right? Be a little bit more critical. And it was just a lot of pie in the sky romantic ideas about humans and reality, and I just couldn't handle it because I was just like, hey, everything you're saying could be tested against reality, but you're not doing that. You're just trying to string together a web of ideas. And the way they put it, it all sounded lovely. I'm pretty sure it was not true or accurate to reality at all, but it sounded good. and so I think being in the military definitely gave me a low tolerance for bs, except for my own. I have a very high tolerance when I'm spewing it. Like, I can put up with it all day and all night, but other people's I'm very sensitive to. So I think that's my fallen nature, though, that causes that.
>> Peter Englert: As you were talking kind of about natural selection, again, I might be out of my lane. I always think about the author, Jack London, and his books, and it seems like as you talk even about science, about Genesis, like, I love what you just said. There's something about your story that you're just trying to say. There's a reality to what we feel and what we think and even what our body says. I mean, I can go back to where we started. my wife's a mental health therapist. she's probably okay that you didn't get your phd in psychology, not because you did what god called you to do. So don't take it the hard way. But when we enter these conversations, person a that says, do I have to give up on science to believe genesis one to two, you can feel the anxiety there. And then person b, they walk into a passage like Genesis one to two and their son or daughter, or maybe it's an 18 year old that's only heard it this way. I have to give up everything that I've been taught about Jenna. That's a body experience, and I think you're trying to bring the thoughtfulness of. Before we throw the baby out with the bathwater on either side, let's see what the writer of genesis is actually saying. So I guess I just kind of wonder, with your personal history and your personal story, if there's a reason why you feel comfortable with the ambiguity is because you've had to live in this reality, so to speak.
>> Speaker C: Yeah. I think, like a lot of young men, I was a black and white thinker. I was raised in a broken. What we call a broken home. Today, it's a lot of instability. Right. And so, I was certainly looking for stability. and of course, when I found an academic world where you could just figure out what's the facts, and then you could just say, hey, we now know, because the facts say. I think that was very appealing to me in the, early ninety s in college. I would have been what you consider your classical annoying right wing thinker. But actually probably back in the 90s compared to now, that probably wasn't as annoying. That was probably more thoughtful than you're getting now with, some kind of people hanging in that zone. but I needed. Because of emotional reasons, I needed things to be black and white. And also, I now know my frontal cortex was not fully developed. So for physiological reasons, I also needed things to be black and white. And I'm very sensitive of that with my students, that a lot of the young men, their frontal cortex actually isn't fully allowing them to be comfortable with the gray stuff. Yet that actually comes 22, 23, 24 years old. Like, you just physiologically cannot do it for most people. which is why I'm like, the old testament should not be taught to freshmen. The literature is too sophisticated, and the boys can't handle the ambiguity. Right. And it's not their fault. It is not their fault at all. tweet that. Or if you teach it, you have to teach it to the boys very differently than you do the girls for physiological reasons. That's probably the more controversial statement, the physiology of the boys and girls. so, yeah, I'm very sensitive. Ah, to think. I think my time in the military, while I will say this, I was not a Christian, and I started doing volunteering for combat deployments in South America. These are counter narcotics deployments down in Colombia. and I went down absolutely as a naive agnostic, thinking that humans were basically good and given the opportunity to do the right thing, humans will do the right thing. And that's coming from years as a skinhead on the mean streets of Tulsa, oklahoma. I knew people could do dirty things. I knew people could be mean. But at the end of the day, people are basically good. I think after my second combat deployment, I was like, oh, no, humans are horrible. and they will do way worse things than I ever thought they would do, and I would do worse things than I ever put in the same situation. Like, I was doing things, even as a non Christian, that I did not find acceptable at all. And it was really bothering me. And so, I think when you have that kind of radical jolt, and that was part of me coming to Christ and finally being willing to admit I really need god, and everybody does, and it's not just me, but, that radical jolt of, I was pretty sure the world was one way, and then discovering in the worst possible way it is not that way at all. It's actually completely, different. That just kind of opens you up to all kinds. Then you're like, what else is not what I think it is? And so I think academics provided kind of a safe route from that point on, because I was deploying while I was in college. Every Christmas I was on deployment. Every summer I was on deployment. Spring break, if I could squeeze one in, I would go down for two weeks and work counter narco and get enough money, because this is before September 11. And the GI bill was like, $100 a month or something like that. so I think academics then became like, oh, here's a world of people who actually care about misunderstanding things and then nuance and then understanding them properly. So I think academics became, because of that experience, much more attractive to me. which also meant I was probably insufferable because I couldn't put up with people who didn't want to understand the nuance. or I was making caricatures and I didn't want to hear their nuance or whatever. but, yeah, I think that probably is what made it more comfortable with me. And I grew up in craziness. My wife has also grew up in a very broken, ah, home, and she can handle it as well. And I think a lot of people look at our history as a couple. We've been married 26 years, and they're like, man, how do you guys do this? We lived in four continents and raised four children, adopted two, and, had two biological. That's a little bit of a chaotic last 26 years. but for us, we're like, yeah, that's fine. We just kept on stepping into the chaos a little bit more and more. It's not for everybody. I am fully now aware that our biographies have allowed us to be the kind of people that god called us to be in these different places. so I don't in any way ever advocate people doing what we did. but it is certainly part of the biography that allows me to be that way. And there are certain things. I mean, there are certain things I'm, like, wide open, hey, I'm fine to sit in the gray. There are other things where I'm, like, I can't do. Like, I need an answer, or I'm just going to believe this until change my mind. this is true. You're going to have to change my mind otherwise.
>> Peter Englert: Wow, drew, this went by really fast. knowing Gage, we're going to have you back on. I just really appreciate this. Well, the good news is we have a final segment. It's called our final remarks. So it goes back to, do christians really believe Genesis is literal? So Gage and I get to just give some of our thoughts, and then whatever mess that our prefrontal cortex did not mature on, you can fix. Does that sound good?
>> Speaker C: All right, well, we'll try.
>> Peter Englert: Do you want me to go first, or do you want to go first?
>> Speaker C: Go for it.
>> Peter Englert: our hope in doing this podcast episode with Drew, a lot of what Drew said is stuff that not necessarily the Darwin stuff. I'm not an expert on Darwin or hubraic thought, but you know more than I do. You might have slept in a Holiday inn. If that doesn't age me, I don't know what will. But I think my final remarks is I hope that whether you're person a, that you're wondering about evolution and Darwinism and Genesis, or you're person b, that you have to see genesis literal, I hope you leave with an inspired vision to recapture what Genesis actually is and what the writers are actually doing. And just one example from this episode, I just want to repeat the economy of words. I would encourage you go and read Genesis one to two and try to rewrite that. I think that that is a brilliant assignment that Drew gave us because I think what it allows you to do is the ancient writers were doing, they wanted to write what was true and what was noble, but they were doing it with a different set of rules. And for you to understand the purpose of that and to see the whole story of scripture, you need to immerse yourself in that. So I would just on both sides, the literalist that feels like Genesis is six literal days to the one that's wondering where does evolution maybe release the air out of the room and just let Genesis be Genesis. Those are my thoughts.
>> Gage Hunt: That was good. I'm just going to build on that. I love what you just said about true. I think some of this tension comes in with this topic between maybe folks who have a deep conviction in belief and faith in scripture and its power and its goodness and its truth, and so when their understanding of scripture or what they think scripture says upon the first read seems challenged or poked, especially by those, maybe outside the church community, there can be a, ah, pushback, a defensiveness. but what I love, and again, to mention the Bible project, which I think is a super great resource with topics like this. and I'm intrigued to dive more into your work as well. this understanding, one of the questions you were asked in an interview recently that we didn't have time to bring up today, but this was an interview with Christianity today, you were asked, how do you work to maintain a high view of scripture as you put it into conversation with darwinian science? this idea that something can be in the Bible being a work of literature comprehensively, is true. You don't have to step an ounce away, an inch away from that deep conviction and faith in the truth and goodness of the Bible and scripture, to entertain some of these conversations, in fact, it, I think, is often a deeper stepping into when we're confronted with these tensions, to explore deeper, and try to understand better the text like you unpacked so well in much of this episode.
>> Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's well said. And I think the sentence that I would pick up on what you said, Gage, was, what the Bible says and what they think the Bible says. And I think that's the main problem I run to in churches. The main problem, and I shouldn't say problem, it's just the way we are. We carry around caricatures. Those are usually helpful. I just need little thumbnails of what people think in order to get me through the day kind of a thing. but at some point you have to realize the thumbnail is not enough, especially on important issues, if this is important to you. and I think for most people, it's very difficult to actually, pull back the layers and get to what scripture is actually saying because they're just so used to reading it with their pastor's voice or their Sunday school teacher's voice or some theologian they've heard or some idea. this is all over the place. When they say god needed to go down to see Babel, they're like, why do they need. He's omniscient. Why did he need to go down? Well, he had to go down to Sodom and Gomorrah to see whether the reports are true. Why did he need to go down. He's omniscient. Well, he says to Abraham, now I know that you fear me. What do you mean? Now I know that. Why is god saying these things? Right. Those to me are the indicators that I'm not as in touch with what scripture says as I probably think I am. and I think if the church was more in tune with what scripture is saying and how it's saying it, that's the literary dimension. it often helps us to rewrite and re narrate and honestly, it often helps us to back off of our dogmatism a little bit and say, hold on to be real reformist and say, where do we need to tweak what we've always thought was true? It might be true, but in this new way that I've never appreciated before. And I think this conversation on evolution and what the biblical authors are doing has helped me to appreciate both Darwin's thinking and the biblical author's thinking in new ways that I couldn't have if I hadn't had the privilege of getting to spend this extended amount of time working on this book.
>> Peter Englert: Well, just a reminder, what hath Darwin to do with scripture? We, encourage you all to check that out. person, a person, b. Whoever you are, Drew, you got a podcast, and you got a ton of books. Where's the best place people can find you?
>> Speaker C: I don't really know if anybody really wants to find me. I'm guessing if they've made it to the end of this episode, they're thinking to themselves, that was interesting. I think I'm good. I've had enough. So, yeah, that would be my guess. I can barely go on the street without being mugged by autograph seekers, so, I'm not looking for more fans at this point in my life.
>> Gage Hunt: At the very least, you have your own podcast, don't you?
>> Speaker C: Yeah, I have a podcast. Tell our listeners it's not as well produced as yours, but, the biblical Mind podcast.
>> Gage Hunt: awesome.
>> Peter Englert: Well, go look for the biblical Mind podcast. If you want to google him, it's Drew, D-R-U Johnson. So we'll go from there. You can find more about us@ygodypodcast.com. Thank you so much for joining us.