Matthew Nelson Hill - Embracing Evolution: How Understanding Science Can Strengthen Your Christian Life

Unlike those Christians who started out as young earth creationists and became convinced of the validity of biological evolution later in life, I have no memory of ever dismissing evolution as fundamentally incompatible with biblical faith. Having become a Christian at a young age, I not only accepted in my teenage years that the earth was very old (based on what seemed to be reasonable scientific research) but as a young adult read widely about the evolution of Homo sapiens and our various hominin relatives.

Thankfully, my home church in Kingston, Jamaica (Grace Missionary Church), never insisted on young earth creationism. And when I began my undergraduate studies at Jamaica Theological Seminary, I took two courses in my first semester that made such a view of creation untenable.

The first was a course on the Pentateuch, where one of the textbooks assigned was Bernard Ramms The Christian View of Science and Scripture. Here I found an evangelical theologian outlining multiple views of how the Bible related to a variety of scientific issues. Although Ramm articulated his own opinion on the issues he discussed, he noted that there was no single obvious biblical answer for questions such as the age of the earth, the great flood, or even evolution. In each case, this was a matter not of biblical authority but of scientific evidence.

In my first undergraduate semester I also took a course on hermeneutics, or biblical interpretation, where the textbook was A. Berkeley Mickelsens Interpreting the Bible. While this was a bit of a dense read for an eighteen-year-old, I never forgot Mickelsens point that since there was no human observer at creation and since the eschaton is still future, biblical language describing the beginning and end must be largely figurative; these descriptions inevitably transcended human experience. Therefore, just as it would be inappropriate to read eschatological imagery in the book of Revelation as a journalistic account of what a movie camera might record (which seemed obvious to me), I came to realize that it would likewise be a misreading of Genesis to treat the six days of creation as a scientific account of origins.

These two courses at the start of my theological studies combined to convince me that there was no conflict, in principle, between science and the Bible on the question of origins. More than that, these courses (along with the rest of my seminary education) encouraged me to be open to the scientific exploration of Gods world.

During my undergraduate studies I was also developing an interest in a holistic theology that affirmed the goodness of creation (in the beginning) and Gods intent to redeem the cosmos (in the end). By the time I graduated with my bachelor of theology degree, I was on a track to take seriously what the sciences were telling us about how this world, including biological life, came to be.