Wednesday, October 29, 2014

In the beginning, God

Pope Francis said this recently in an interview: 
When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything — but that is not so.
He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment.
He gave autonomy to the beings of the universe at the same time at which he assured them of his continuous presence, giving being to every reality, and so creation continued for centuries and centuries, millennia and millennia, until it became which we know today, precisely because God is not a demiurge or a magician, but the creator who gives being to all things.
God is not a divine being or a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life. Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.
In a sign of the times perhaps, I have no quarrel with anything he said, with the possible exception of "God is not a divine being." Not too sure what he meant there, but the point is this: I have evolved on evolution. Or rather I've seen my stance on Genesis roll around from not believable to fully literal to somewhere safely and surely in the middle of it all.
In other words, I literally take Genesis and the origin stories (of which there are two, by the way), uh, not literally. It doesn't mean I don't believe them, however.
And therein lies the question.
Do you have to believe in seven days creation to believe in the Bible? Do you have to believe God took dust and created flesh? Do you have to believe in rib from a man and man named all the animals and the whole thing line by line?
Some say yes. It is a litmus test of belief even faith. Take out a comma and you're done.
Some say no. Not even close. It's all a fable.
And some, like I believe me at this stage in my faith journey, say the important thing is being missed or at best mis-labeled. The tale is about God, and the words that are important are these: In the beginning, God. 
How he digit is as mysterious to me as how my blood flows so wonderfully through my veins or how my lungs fill with oxygen or how, for that matter, a phone works or this computer I'm typing on and so on.
Does that mean I believe man descended from apes? Nah. I don't. Does that mean there is always a missing link in evolution? Nah. I don't see it.
But it does mean that my faith has the possibility built in that God created men and women who didn't look exactly like we do today, those beings who have through evolution now some fitted with a smart phone attached to their ears.
It matters not to me whether a day was 24 hours or a day was a century or a day was a 1,000 years (which interestingly enough is equated to God's timetable later in scripture). What matters is God did it. God created. A source for all this absolutely is necessary.
If someone wants to ask where did the source come from, hey, In the beginning, God. That's what faith is for.

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