The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate

by John H. Walton

One form of this practical deism is particularly noticeable in some permutations of “theistic evolution” in which God is seen as responsible for “jump-starting” the evolutionary process and then letting it unwind through the eons. Alternatively God is sometimes viewed as involved more regularly at critical junctures to accomplish major jumps in evolution. The problem is that these approaches not only potentially remove God from ongoing operations in nature, but they even write God out of most of the origins story. The deism view gives too much to the ongoing functions of creation as well as rendering them too independent from God. The interventionist view treats the functionality of natural proc-esses too lightly, as being inadequate to accomplish God’s purposes. Potentially, the processes left to run on their own might very well fail to achieve God’s purposes, but this possibility reveals the all-or-nothing assumption behind these two views—that what happens in natural history is either all due to natural processes running on their own or is due to direct divine intervention in the natural operations. That God might be working alongside or through physical and biological processes in a way that science cannot detect is one possibility that this either-or assumption ignores.[1]