The Hump of the Camel

There’s a rather revealing recent thread over on BioLogos. The article heading it up is part of Dennis Venema’s technical series on “junk DNA”, but a new poster named Crude opens the discussion thus:

In your view, is evolution an entirely unguided process? Or was it guided by God, even if not in a way science is capable of detecting?
Atheists (well, let’s say most atheists) believe that evolution is a process which accomplishes what it does without guidance or input from any divine mind – the outcomes being neither foreseen or preordained. Do you disagree with that view, and if so, how?
I think it would add to your critiques if your views on as much were made clear – though perhaps you’ve stated them elsewhere.

Apart from raising the very same key questions JamesR and I pursued with little success on another recent thread  of, currently, 149 posts the question was quite relevant to Dennis’s post for two reasons: firstly his use of terms like “junk” in itself implies an ontological position, and secondly although Dennis, one of the seven BioLogos team members, has dealt quite extensively with human origins he has never made his own theological position very clear.

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I’ve mentioned John H Walton’s contribution to the interpretation of Genesis several times before on this blog. I won’t explain his thesis again in any detail, but in essence it’s the understanding than the creation account of Genesis is intended to be literal, but literal concerning principally the function of creation rather than its material existence. It is about how God organised the Universe as his temple, with man as his image (in the sense of temple-image) and priest. This privileged calling for man is reflected in the fact that creation’s function is described in relationship to humanity’s needs – the heavens as his calendar for planting, the vegetation as his food, the animals as his subjects and so on.

Because of this, the Genesis account cannot be said to be opposed to scientific findings because it is not describing the same things – or more properly, it is describing the same things, but from a radically different viewpoint. Walton even allows Genesis to describe a literal, chronological week – though not one in which God forms all matter de novo (he does this – but not in the Genesis account), but one in which he assigns everything its function and order.

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