A couple of semesters ago, I took a Hebrew Bible study course at Tulane. I took it merely as an elective which I thought would be interesting. The class studied the Bible from a literary perspective, instead of a philosophical one. Don't misunderstand and think the class diminished the Bible's values because that was not the case at all. The class allowed me to look at the Bible through a different lens and I was able to find additional value in what the Bible actually was. I walked away thinking not only was this book the ultimate life application book, parts of it were love songs written by God for his people.
In the beginning of class, I would quickly become offended when it was suggested that certain chapters in the Bible, such as the Creation story in Genesis, may not be for literal interpretations, but poems to describe God's ideas. Once I was able to be comfortable knowing that even though poetic, these parts of the Bible were just as serious and meaningful as the literal parts, my mind was open to more accurate interpretation of what the Bible was saying. The result was appreciation for not only an instruction book, but a compilation of the finest art ever produced by the ultimate creative author.
The following semester I took a neuroscience class to satisfy my science elective requirement. How is this class relevant to this topic? Well, what I learned in that class was the endless depth of our advanced biological systems. Most days I spent realizing God's unfathomable I.Q. evidenced by the architecture of our nervous system and brains. One of the things I learned (be it stated EXTREMELY basic compared to the way it was presented in class) is that the neurons in our brain are designed in such a way that the more we learn and make new discoveries, the more advanced the neurons and their relationship to other parts in our body become, specifically, our brain.
This brings me to the following (and last) semester, which happens to be the one I am in now, where I am taking an Anthropology 101 class. I was ambivalent at the start of class which teaches the "theory" of evolution. I have always had my reservations on this theory, since it seemed a stark contrast from the Bible's depiction of how we were created. I've heard so much from both sides on why the other is wrong, and given my limited experience on the scientific part of evolution (science, which is so humanly stamped), I was not ready to seriously accept evolution as a factual part of our history.
Just as in the Hebrew Bible class, I became quickly offended at the suggestion that we evolved from apes. This seemed like a contradictory scream from what God had in mind for us humans and our presence on Earth. Our brains were so much more advanced than apes, the math did not add up. As the class progressed, and evidence presented, I began to pray that God reveal the truth to me. I could not wrap my human brain around the idea that this "evidence"--fossils of pre-modern human remains being discovered--linked us characteristically to similar body format of modern day apes. This did not make sense. However ...
I began pondering dinosaurs and the fact that those were never mentioned in the Bible (specifically). Then I remembered what God told me about this. Many people wonder why Dinosaurs existed before humans. Some people (be it few) refuse to believe Dinosaurs existed specifically because they were not mentioned in the Bible, even though bones proven otherwise. This is simply senseless to me. Anyway, the point is that if there were no puzzles to put together, how else would we have been able to advance to the point where we are now? If everything were written in the Bible that answered every question and that told of the Earth's history, how exciting then would it be to never be able to gain more knowledge? Better, the self-correcting part of this knowledge, which happens regularly as we learn more and make new discoveries, enables us to grow, therefore allowing us to become even smarter and more advanced.
There lies the answer to my evolution question. If everything were created in the beginning in today's form, nothing on Earth would be linked or make sense. When God created the Earth, he created the genotype and phenotype all at once, creating the foundation from which everything would evolve. And my opinion today is that the more humans evolve, the more we become in God's image--although we will never fully be in his image regardless of how advanced we become.
Evolution states that we shared a "common ancestor" with apes around 50 million years ago, and that around 25 million or so years, we "broke off" from that ancestor and began to evolve in what today is the modern human. I can clearly see how this was part of God's plan, since this connects us to everything and allows us to compare our progress in the stark differences between modern day humans and modern day apes. By learning our ways of life that have been "theorized" by evidence found of fossilized remains, tool use and dietary habits, it makes sense to me the barbaric addressing of life in the Old Testament, compared to the new ways instructed in the New Testament, and why the two are both equally important. One may think that the Old Testament illustrates barbaric and embarrassing behavior in humans, but if you consider where we came from you see it as an advancement, and a huge puzzle piece that explains why we need instructions to begin with. Early human fossilized skulls indicate our brains have systematically grown--almost doubled--in the last two million years. This is in correlation with what I learned in my neuroscience class.
This supports the story of Creation, and why this poetic telling of God's plan can be non-specific. The fact that God uses numbers repeatedly in the story of creation emphasizes his "architecture-style" planning in the design of Earth and everything in it. It is not so much about details, but rather, an emphasis is on the fact that this was God's design, all planned from the very beginning. What better way to tell about this than through a poem, lest we become bored with too much detail and thus have nothing to gain from it.
