In this book the two authors recount the pilgrimages of understanding that have led them from the young-earth, "scientific creationist" position they were taught in their youths to new perspectives on what it can mean to believe in God as Creator. Dr. Godfrey describes the field work he has done as a descriptive paleontologist and the successive paradigm shifts that his discoveries led him through as he sought new ways to understand what he had been taught in light of the evidence he was uncovering. Dr. Smith describes how the integration of his background and training in literary studies with his work in biblical interpretation similarly led him to a new way of understanding the Bible, especially the early chapters of Genesis. The book as a whole presents an alternative way of understanding how the Bible and natural history relate to one another. Dr. Godfrey and Dr. Smith have both given seminars and presentations on the topic of this book in church and academic settings. This book will be of personal interest and practical use to college students and college-educated adults who have evangelical or fundamentalist backgrounds and who are seeking to integrate the study of the Bible with a commitment to academic and scientific inquiry.
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From the Publisher
"The sad state of affairs that sees a continuing ‘conflict’ between science and Scripture simply does not have to exist. This book is a breath of fresh air. I pray that the book may have its intended good effects." —Dr. Mark A. Noll, Wheaton College
"There are a multitude of books on the polar ends of this issue, but this book gently and personally takes the reader from one side to the other, with good rationale for the travel." —Dr. Brian Alters, McGill University
"An excellent and much needed volume." —Dr. Sam Riffell, Mississippi State University
About the Author
Stephen J. Godfrey (Ph.D., McGill University) is the Curator of Paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland. Christopher R. Smith (Ph.D., Boston College) is pastor of the University Baptist Church in East Lansing, Michigan.
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How Two Sincere Believers Came to Terms with Evolution,
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This review is from: Paradigms on Pilgrimage: Creationism, Paleontology and Biblical Interpretation (Paperback)
Most people who reject evolution are not driven by doubts about the scientific evidence. Nonscientists for the most part, they are not passionately concerned about DNA or radiometric dating. What they are passionate about is the tension they feel between science and their own religious faith. They are wrestling with deeper, existential issues, such as the meaning of life, the explanation of evil, and the existence of God.
Paradigms on Pilgrimage is a rarity: a book for people trying to think their way through the conflicting claims of fundamentalism and modern biblical scholarship as well as natural science. It should appeal to, and maybe persuade them, because it is the highly personal story of two former fundamentalists who made that same intellectual and spiritual journey themselves. Together they moved toward a new understanding of God as having created by means of evolution. In sharing their stories, they document the thinking of real people as they moved into and out of the creationist worldview. Along the way, they provide some original, ingenious arguments against creationism and biblical literalism - which are of all the more interest because they were arguments that actually helped change these individuals' minds. In a final section, they also offer an original reading of Genesis 1 with commentary, to show how this creation account presents (and makes good sense as) a naïve observational cosmology radically different from our objective scientific one. The authors' argument - that the biblical writers were not and did not claim to be omniscient about the natural world - restores to the biblical text the integrity it loses in the hands of literalists. This enjoyable and stimulating read will give evolutionists insight into the minds of their opponents, and give creationists persuasive reasons to change their minds. To my mind, it's a valuable contribution.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Authoritative, persuasive, and a very welcome breath of fresh air,
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This review is from: Paradigms on Pilgrimage: Creationism, Paleontology and Biblical Interpretation (Paperback)
"Paradigms on Pilgrimage" is just the book for the Christian who is trying to be intellectually honest while staying loyal to God. Between them, the authors-- one an expert in paleontology, the other in Biblical interpretation-- show that a literal view of the first chapters of Genesis is neither true to the scientific facts nor true to the Bible itself. Best of all, this book is not just a recitation of facts. It lays out the heartfelt, personal struggles of two believers who start as Biblical literalists and come to recognize that there is a wiser and more genuine way to understand God's Word. The controversy over the beginning of the Bible often seems to demand that we sacrifice either our faith or our minds. Drs. Godfray and Smith show that we can keep both.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
worthwhile to read and to share,
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This review is from: Paradigms on Pilgrimage: Creationism, Paleontology and Biblical Interpretation (Paperback)
This is a part of my continuing interest in the Creation-Evolution-Design (CED) debate. It is however a bit off my usual reading schedule, it is in the genre of personal stories, of transition from young earth creationism (YEC) to something else. I don't usually read personal stories or books with substantial personal involvement, i prefer to spend my time on science and ideas rather than with people's personal struggles. This was an online recommendation that i took seriously and am frankly glad i did. It is not a spectacularly argued book, careful but not with great flashes of insight, more understated and calmly through the years type of analysis. It has as a goal not to discourage people from reading the whole thing, not to push hot buttons and have people just put the book down in disgust and move on. It has a goal of personal involvement and sympathetic identification with the authors as they tell you their journeys in the field, and as such it is very well done. Don't read this for big ideas in the CED debate, for great pieces of refutation you can take to the online boards, it isn't that type of a book. What it is, is a gentle, kindly story of two rather smart and sensitive men studying how their youthful background ought to interact with their adult callings and their studies of both God's World and God's Word over time and with increasing maturity and sensitivity to nuance.
I'd recommend this to every YEC, to anyone who struggles with the issues in CED, to anyone who reads Genesis and asks real hard questions. It is designed for this audience, it is very sympathetic to their concerns and sensitivities, and ought not to upset even the most hard boiled YECist. I'd just read it front to back, in order, not because the chapters are in a logical and necessary order requiring this, but because the author's have given some real thought to how important ideas interact and structure the book to be such a journey. It really is best just read as a novel, then go back and highlight and read for detail. Just breeze through the first time for the passion and the pain the authors wish to transfer to the reader as their story of their studies. Outline and pull-quotes Introduction: "Many believing Christians have experienced crises of faith, and personal rejections when they have chosen to accept an account of origins that is based on reasoned interpretation of centuries of scientific observation, because this account does not coincide with a literal interpretation of Genesis." pg 11 "but this way to a middle position has been made perilous by the bitter polarization between proponents of 'either/or" positions on both sides." "in its place they have embraced understandings that are more modest, tentative, and nuanced, but ultimately also more satisfying, durable and empowering." pg 12 "of how the Bible's moral teaching can be considered reliable when its cosmology and other scientific claims must be recognized as derived from a primitive, observational perspective." "after demonstrating that this account's cosmology is indeed phenomenological(it describes how things appear, rather than how they actually are), the authors explore the implications"pg 14 "This occurs when people who are not familiar with the Bible mistakening equate creationist claims, which are ultimately untenable with the Bible's actual teachings." pg 16 "Although it felt as if they were abandoning their faith, as a step of faith they began to trust the fruits of the vocations to which God had called them, rather than the dogmatic pronouncements that had always provided such security up to that point. The end result has been to trade security for adventure in the continuing life of faith." pg 17 Part 1: Creationism and Paleontology, by Stephen J. Godfrey Chapter 1: The dog skeleton and my grandmother's toothbrush "to answer this question first by engaging the book of Genesis, rather than the theory of evolution. I was raised in an evangelical Christain home. We considered the concept of evolution a rival to the Bible's explanation of the origins of biological diversity. We equated it with man's attempt to deny the existence of God." "evolution proclaimed an "ateleology," or absence of inherent purpose in the created world. Therefore, by implication and overt affirmation, anyone who espoused a belief in evolution necessarily had abandoned belief in the existence of God and had a strictly naturalistic and mechanistic view of the universe." "The appeal of evolutionary theory to the atheist, we were taught, lay in its apparent ability to absolve man of his moral responsibility to an almight God who had created all that there is." pg 23 "my trust in the Bible as a book of divine origin hinged at that time upon the expectation that when it spoke on matters relating to science, its statements would be accurate by today's standards, rather than reflecting the observational perspective of the culture in which it was composed. Establishing objective scientific accuracy in a book from ancient times would prove that the author had been given some supernatural or divine insight with the natural realm, and this would be a sign to indicate that when the Bible spoke on matters relating to morality, it drew on the same supernatural, authoritative source." pg 31-2 Chapter 2: Those fossilized footprints in kansas "It would be difficult for me to overstate the impact these simple fossilized fooprint impressions had upon me. In retrospect, I don't think anything else I have ever seen has so profoundly changed my life." pg 39 "Many years later, as I read more widely on the history of the development of geology, I discovered that some nineteenth-century geologists had suggested that the Flood had been a quiet one, leaving no significant geological effects. They had been pushed to suggest this alternative in an attempt to preserve the historical reality of the story, while admitting that they were unable to identify global effects of Noah's Flood. Having never seen this alternative suggested in any creationist literature, I was impressed with the ingenuity of these nineteenth-century geologists." pg 43 "Once i entertained the notion that the earth migh be old, I had to call into question all the rest of the 'scientific creationist' paradigm. Why? Because it was all based on a single lynchpin claim about the age of the earth. ... matters of eternal importance were on the line. After all, the paradigm was based on the explicit statement that the truth of the entire Bible hinged on the scientific accuracy of a literal rendering of the first chapters of Genesis" pg46 "Footprint fossils spoke to me personally as silent witnesses to the great antiquity of this planet." pg 52 Chapter 3: same place, different times-or same time, different places? "any given organism will only be found with certain other organism, and only in certain areas." pg 57 "the proof that the answer is 'same place, different times' lies in the observation that the vast majority of fossils are preserved at or very near to where they lived." pg 61 "I knew now that in their vast majority different kinds of organisms had lived at different times on earth." pg 71 Chapter 4: what did it mean to create? "How many times had God created new kinds of organisms, and when had He done so?" pg 73 "I would have been content to believe that God had miraculuously created every species instantaneoulsy at different times in the geological past, except that I could not help but notice the lines paleontologists were drawing connecting fossils so as to describe evolutionary lineages." pg 74 "Perhaps a created kind could encompass all the species that we currently place within a genus, or even all the species and genera within a taxonomic family. ... So maybe no originally created kind boundaries had been bridged. ... As appealing as this second possibility was, I recognized that to embrace it would be to take another significant step away from my creationist origins." pg 79 "it seemingly removed God from being a necessary link in the creative process?" "First, there were bridging morphologies between major groups of organisms, such as dinosaurs and birds. Second, it was also true that similar organisms were more likely to occur close together in geologic time than they were to be separated by vast amounts of time." pg 81 "I felt as though God as a proximal agent in the creation of life, was being removed from the creative process. This belief was too fundamental a conviction for me to waltz away from without emotional consequences." pg 82 Chapter 5: atheistic meteorolgoy of divine rain? "I wondered what part a person of faith should consider God to play in sending rain. Furthermore what part, if not all, of meteorology should we not bother studying, because therein lies the domain of God, a realm beyond scientific study." "for our lack of consistency when it came to biblical interpretation. I realized at that time that we were content to let natural processes account for precipitation, but when it came to the origin of biological diversity, we were adamant that no natural processes could or would ever be found to account for something the Bible attributed to the actions of God." pg 84 "If none of these came to us from a close reading of the Bible, but rather from a careful study of nature, then we should reasonably expect to have to study nature at least as closely to learn anything about the mechanisms that generated biological diversity, especially in the light of the fact that the Bible is also silent on the natural mechanisms of evolution." pg 85 "So how have Christians reconciled meteorology with the Bible's clear message that God is responsible for... Read more ›
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