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Every Friday, "Science and the Sacred" features an essay from a guest voice in the science and religion dialogue. This week's guest entry was written by Peter Enns. Enns is an evangelical Christian scholar and author of several books and commentaries, including the popular Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament , which looks at three questions raised by biblical scholars that seem to threaten traditional views of Scripture. This is the second of his multi-part series on an incarnational model of Scripture.

Models are intellectual constructs that try to account for data. They are ways of putting the pieces together and aim to achieve the greatest degree of explanatory power.

We all have models of reality, whether or not we know it. We all hold to hypotheses and theories (which I will take as roughly synonymous with "model") to explain what we see.

This is also the case for how we interpret the Bible. All of us--from the most ardent Fundamentalist to the most Liberal Christian--construct models to account for the "data." The models that are the most coherent (account for the most data) wind up being the most persuasive. No model is pure and objectively correct. They are all working hypotheses, and as such are also always up for revision.

One model that accounts for why the Bible behaves the way it does is an incarnational model. Simply put, an incarnational model of Scripture is one that expects Scripture to have an unapologetically thorough human dimension analogous to Jesus' complete humanity. Both the human dimension of Scripture and the humanity of Jesus are essential to making them what they are.

If Jesus were less than 100% human, or only appeared to be human, or if his humanity is something that could be dispensed with, he would not be Jesus of Nazareth, and his death and resurrection would be non-sensical. Likewise, if the Bible were a book dropped out of heaven with only a tangential, peripheral participation in the human contexts in which it is written--sort of a divine dictation--it ceases being the Word of God.

I stress an incarnational model because so often, whether knowingly or unknowingly, assumptions are made about the nature of Scripture where the human dimension winds up being something of an embarrassment or scandal. True, many willingly embrace some form of an incarnational model when speaking of less problematic things like how the personalities of biblical writers affect what they say or how their ancient world view would lead them to assume that the sun revolves around the earth.

But that is the easy part. A thoroughly incarnational model is also poised to address some of the more difficult problems that other models of Scripture have not done a good job of handling--such as the challenges posed by Darwin and Mesopotamian literature in the nineteenth century which I mentioned in my last post.

A literalist/historicistic model has not done a good job at all of explaining Genesis, and this has become increasingly clear over the last 150 years. When faced as we are with the strong, even overwhelming, evidence for evolution and the presence of Mesopotamian creation and flood stories that look like what we see in Genesis, it is clear that models are needed that do not force these data into existing models that are ill-suited to handle them.

An incarnational model accounts theologically for why the Bible would speak in such ancient, contextual terms and not in modern ones. An incarnational model presumes a book like Genesis to express itself in ancient conventions. And such an ancient, contextual expression is not an embarrassment but an indication of how willing God is to meet us where we are--a willingness seen most clearly in the incarnate Lord.

In his preface to J. B. Phillips's translation of the New Testament letters into contemporary English, C.S. Lewis articulately addresses this issue of incarnation. Lewis observes that the Greek style of the New Testament betrays writers for whom Greek was not a language at their full command. He writes:

Does this shock us? It ought not to, except as the Incarnation itself ought to shock us. The same divine humility which decreed that God should become a baby in a peasant-woman's breast, and later an arrested field-preacher in the hands of the Roman police, decreed also that He should be preached in a vulgar, prosaic and unliterary language. If you can stomach the one, you can stomach the other. The Incarnation is in that sense an irreverent doctrine: Christianity, in that sense, an incurably irreverent religion. When we expect that it should have come before the World in all the beauty that we now feel in the Authorized Version we are as wide of the mark as the Jews were in expecting that the Messiah would come as an earthly King. The real sanctity, the real beauty and sublimity of the New Testament (as of Christ's life) are of a different sort: miles deeper and further in.

Although the topic here is translation, Lewis's defense of Phillips is easily applicable to our topic. Lewis's point is that those who take offense at the low Greek style of the New Testament have not come to grips with the incarnation. The same holds for those who take offense at the thoroughly encultured, ancient style of the opening chapters of Genesis and expect from it a more explicitly literal, historical style.

Every Friday, "Science and the Sacred" features an essay from a guest voice in the science and religion dialogue. This week's guest entry was written by Peter Enns. Enns is an evangelical Christian scholar and author of several books and commentaries, including the popular Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament , which looks at three questions raised by biblical scholars that seem to threaten traditional views of Scripture. This is the first of a multi-part series.

The Problem

It is no secret that developments in modern thought have challenged traditional notions of the Bible--not simply how to handle a verse here or there, but how to think of the Bible as a whole. To say, for example, that the Bible is inspired or the revealed word of God is fine, but it does not really address the situation at hand, for it leaves unaddressed how we are to think of inspiration and revelation in light of these recent challenges.

Two of these challenges crystallized in the nineteenth century and are still very much with us today. In biblical studies, texts from ancient cultures surrounding Israel began to be discovered and deciphered, and these texts bore striking similarities to foundational texts of the Old Testament. The first and still most famous of these discoveries are stories of creation and the flood from ancient Mesopotamia that are older than the biblical account. Although there are important differences between the Genesis stories and these other texts, it quickly became very hard to escape the conclusion that the authors of all of these texts--Genesis included--share a conceptual world about the nature of reality; they "breathed the same air."

In subsequent generations, as archaeological studies shed more light on the ancient Mesopotamian world, the Old Testament came to be seen more and more as reflecting the environments in which those writings were produced. An entire field of inquiry arose called "The Bible and the Ancient Near East," or similar designations. It was clear that the Old Testament could be profitably set in its ancient settings, and doing so would yield a deeper understanding of the Bible and its world, even if it challenged some traditional views. This is not to say that the Old Testament is "just like" other ancient writings or could be understood merely on the basis of these comparisons. No two writings from antiquity can be so closely equated, and certainly the Old Testament has many distinctive marks. But the pressure point was the striking similarities.

It is beyond any reasonable debate that the various writings of the Old Testament reflect the ancient contexts in which they were written. The interconnectedness of the Bible and the ancient world can be both confirming of Evangelical instincts regarding the Bible, but also presents very important challenges concerning the uniqueness and historical content of the Old Testament, Genesis 1-11 being a particularly famous example. However one may think through the specifics of these challenges, the more basic point should not be lost: any move to articulate very important concepts like inspiration and revelation cannot blissfully ignore the circumstance described above, but rather must account squarely with the "ancient near eastern way" God chose to speak.

A second challenge to traditional notions of the Bible in the nineteenth century is well known to readers of this blog: Darwin and evolution. Here we have a way of looking at human origins that was persuasive to scientists, spread quickly, and, in tandem with advances in geology from the previous century, called into serious question whether Genesis 1-11--especially creation, the flood, and age of the earth--has any historical value whatsoever.

It was a tough century for Christians. Challenges were coming from the halls of academic inquiry, both biblical studies and scientific disciplines. For traditional thinking about the Bible, the dominoes were unraveling down the slippery slope, so to speak. And judging by the persistent resistance offered by conservative scholars during the latter half of the nineteenth century (particularly at Princeton Theological Seminary), the threat was very real indeed.

It is not at all an exaggeration to say that, for many, "attacking" the Bible in this way was nothing less than an "attack" on the gospel itself. It is fair to say that Fundamentalism and by extension Evangelicalism were born out of this conflict between older views and new discoveries. In my opinion, even though some of the dust has settled, the nineteenth century is a blow from which Evangelicalism has yet to recover--a point demonstrated by the very existence of the BioLogos project.

The work before Evangelicals is essentially one of synthesis. How can we (1) speak of the Bible as God's word while also (2) facing with integrity things like archaeological discoveries and advances in scientific knowledge of the world? This is an important, even vital, question to consider, for apologetic reasons as well as encouraging the faithful. How can we talk about God and the Bible now, in view of these circumstances?

I would like to suggest that a very helpful way of talking about the Bible that can account for the present challenges is what I call an incarnational model, where the nature of the Bible is understood on analogy with the person of Christ. As Christ is both completely divine and human, the Bible is a book that is both authored by God and by human beings. This has important implications for how we read the Bible, indeed, for what we expect from it.

In my next post I will define more clearly what an incarnational model is before we begin looking at specifics.

In the mid-seventeenth century, John Mayow conducted a series of experiments in which he showed that burning candles in bell jars consumed one-fifth of the enclosed air before extinguishing. Remarkably, mice placed in bell jars did exactly the same thing (although the conclusions of these experiments were rather more terminal for the living subjects than for the candles). He concluded that a substance making up 20% of air was necessary for both combustion and respiration. He named the mystery gas 'nitroaerus.' More than a century later, Joseph Priestley showed that a mouse in a closed container would not die if a plant was included. Apparently plants were capable of restoring nitroaerus, which Priestley called "dephlogisticated air," removed by animals.

In 1774, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier replicated the relevant experiments in more controlled ways to demonstrate that mass was conserved during combustion. He also renamed the part of the air that burned 'oxygène.' English scientists resisted the French scientist's new name, not least because the English Priestly had already published his discovery of the gas. 'Oxygen' nonetheless entered the common English vocabulary in part due to one of the first popular science books, The Botanic Garden (1791), which included a poem praising the gas using the preferred French name. By coincidence, this book also promoted some early ideas about biological evolution (specifically, it suggested that sexual reproduction might be important to evolution, which might help to explain the popularity of a book of poems about science). It was written by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, who first proposed the modern form of the theory of biological evolution in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species.

150 years later, we are discovering that the lines connecting evolution and oxygen run deeper than the Darwin family tree. We now know, for instance, that for roughly half of the Earth's 4.6-billion-years of history, there was little to no oxygen in the atmosphere. Instead, oxygen entered the atmosphere in two major pulses, with one between 2.4 and 2.2 billion years ago, and another between 0.8 and 0.54 billion years ago. Recent evidence suggests that the first pulse may have actually been the largest event in a series of fits and starts beginning at around 2.7 billion years ago that finally produced a stable low oxygen atmosphere by around 1.8 billion years ago.

Remarkably, both episodes of atmospheric oxygenation happened just before explosions in biological diversity. We have spotty evidence of unicellular eukaryotes (cells with nuclei) before 2.4 billion years ago, but the first fossil evidence for large, diverse eukaryotic communities comes at 1.5 billion years ago. If you are a human, this is part of your history; humans are multicellular eukaryotes descended from one of these early unicellular pioneers. Multicellular animal life is an innovation that seems to have required more oxygen: animals don't appear in the fossil record until about 0.61 billion years ago, toward the end of the second pulse of oxygen.

It is, perhaps, not surprising that major evolutionary events in the eukaryotic family tree, including the origin and diversification of the animals, would be tied to or even driven by major changes in atmospheric oxygen abundance. Eukaryotes generally, and animals specifically, are oxygen lovers. As the subjects of Mayow and Priestly died to prove, we require oxygen for respiration. In general, the larger and more organizationally complex we are (for instance, a human versus a slime mold), the more oxygen we require.

But where did all the oxygen come from? Ultimately, it was produced by the bacterial equivalents of the plants in Joseph Priestley's experiment, a group of photosynthetic microbes called the cyanobacteria. These bacteria are the first and only organisms to have evolved the ability to produce oxygen by photosynthesis. In fact, plants are able to photosynthesize only because their cells harbor descendants of one of the early cyanobacteria. We call them chloroplasts and think of them as little cellular organs, but they are actually the great-great-great... granddaughters of a cyanobacterium that long ago gave up its independence in exchange for the stable environment inside a eukaryotic cell. In any case, photosynthesis is the only known geological process capable of producing oxygen at the rates required for the two pulses of atmospheric oxygenation. The first pulse was probably largely accomplished by cyanobacteria, while the second pulse was probably mostly associated with the cyanobacterial denizens of eukaryotic algae.

What is remarkable about all of this is the extent to which modern life and the atmosphere are products of each other's evolution. The tiniest of photosynthetic organisms played one of the most important roles in shaping the sky, and the sky helped to usher in the age of animals! As a Christian and a geobiologist, I do not believe that this relationship is anticipated or predicted by the Biblical creation accounts.

But then again, why should it have been? The original audience for these accounts would have found concepts like bacteria or even oxygen incomprehensible. The people for whom the Bible was originally addressed thought about origins primarily in terms of ongoing national conflicts and the current human condition. Faced with a variety of violent creation myths that reinforced national conflicts, Genesis said that the universe was created to be good, peaceful, and orderly by one god. It specifically listed things worshipped by other nations as creatures of that god, and in the climax of the creation account, Abraham was called by the same god to be a blessing to all the nations through Israel.

I am not claiming that the Bible cannot be read in a way that can shape us in real and meaningful ways today. In fact, for those who believe that the Bible is inspired, part of the meaning of inspiration has to be that the Bible is God's powerful word to both those with no concept of modern science (most of the world's population, both today and in the past) and to those deeply engaged in its practice. But, and this is a big but, we contemporary Americans read the Bible best when we are sensitive to the assumptions of the original audience, carefully observe how the Bible transformed those assumptions, and look for opportunities to do the same thing with our thinking.

I think that it is important for Christians to reflect on the view of origins that science has given us in light of the thinking evident in the Biblical creation accounts. We have to do this because science gives us a story that is inherently without philosophical or theological meaning; it is up to us to give it meaning by understanding it in relationship with our beliefs. For instance, some see the evolutionary history of life and the Earth and give that history meaning by elevating chance and necessity to the level of prime actors in their own modern creation account. This meaning is not inherent to the theory of evolution; it is supplied by an atheistic belief system external to the theory. I suggest that this view mistakes created things (chance and necessity) for the Creator.

Others have preferred to see the regularity of the universe as the action of an orderly God. This is an old approach to natural theology that was popular among many early scientists, and saw God as responsible for doing such things as maintaining the planets in consistent paths around the sun. Still others look for God in the unexplained. This is a newer approach that sees God as acting primarily in short bursts not explainable by the regular, orderly function of the universe. Looking for God in these ways is a little like trying to capture him in a bell jar, an approach that worked perfectly well with oxygen for Mayow, Priestley, and Lavoisier, but one that is unlikely to impress the Creator described in the Bible.

I prefer to see the same history in the light of a God who desires to share aspects of his nature with his creation, notably including his creativity. Just as he has made humans to be creators (with a little 'c'), he has given the rest of our world the gift of being instrumental in its own creation through the process of evolution. This surely must have been part of what God saw when he described his creation as good! It is my hope that the modern American church can learn to see the goodness of creation in things like the evolutionary history of life and the atmosphere, as well.

Every Friday, "Science and the Sacred" features an essay from a guest voice in the science and religion dialogue. This week's guest entry was written by Shelley Emling. Emling is a freelance writer for the International Herald Tribune and a former foreign correspondent based in London. Her new book The Fossil Hunter -- which goes on sale today -- tells the real-life story of Mary Anning, a poor 19th century girl whose fossil discoveries helped change our view of the Earth's history.

Exiting the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History last weekend, I found myself caught in a science-religion crossfire.

Across Independence Avenue stood a handful of Christians carrying placards encouraging the museum's visitors to forego the evolutionary leanings of Darwin. On the steps of the museum stood an increasingly vocal crowd chanting Darwin's name over and over.

For several minutes, the two sides traded insults and it wasn't long before the hoots and hollers reached a frightening crescendo.

The incident - also witnessed by my 11-year-old son - raised the following question in my mind for the umpteenth time: are Christianity and Darwinism mutually exclusive? Fortunately, as I've come to find out, there's a growing movement between the two fronts that says one can have faith in both religion and science.

I began reading up on the subject after recently writing a nonfiction book titled The Fossil Hunter on the life of Mary Anning. Anning was a dirt-poor girl who exhumed one never-before-seen prehistoric monster after another from its Jurassic tomb in the cliffs along England's southern coast in the early 1800s.

Darwin and others pointed to her fossil finds -- including many of the world's first ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterosaurs -- as proof that new ideas about Earth's history were inevitable.

According to most accounts, Anning remained a deeply religious woman her entire life, one who could often be found praying or reading the Bible and who almost never missed a Sunday service. Apparently she saw the beauty of God's handiwork in the coastline she knew so intimately even while others were using her fossils to raise questions about the biblical account of scientific history.

Anning's close friend, Anna Maria Pinney, wrote of how the two often talked of the idea of creation and other spiritual topics. "To think that life shall never have an end quite fills the mind, but to think of God without a beginning is more than a created being can comprehend," she wrote.

As Anning aged, and began working alongside Britain's clique of British male geologists -- most of them Anglican clergymen -- there were countless attempts to use biblical stories to explain the new knowledge about the natural world that was resulting from Anning's fossil discoveries.

For example, the fact that fossils sometimes were found at high altitudes was taken as proof that the global flood had been so overwhelming it had reached to the tops of the highest mountains.

No doubt Anning would have been bowled over to learn that - some 200 years later - many are still seeking ways in which to reconcile religion with science.

But Simon Conway-Morris, the renowned paleontologist at Cambridge University, is just one scientist who argues that religion and science are completely compatible.

The British professor believes evolution isn't as accidental or random as one might suspect. In his opinion, if evolution began all over again, human intelligence would develop pretty much in the same way as it has. Conway-Morris emphasizes that developments happen as a result of pre-existing conditions, such as the need for blood cells to have hemoglobin in order to transport oxygen. Evolution, therefore, works only because it plays out within a certain set of rules.

Evolution "is after all only a mechanism, but if evolution is predictive, indeed possesses a logic, then evidently it is being governed by deeper principles," he recently wrote. "Come to think about it so are all sciences; why should Darwinism be any exception?"

Peter Hess, the Faith Project director at the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, Calif., also believes that scientific inquiry and religious belief are not mutually exclusive.

"Because the evidence for evolution is so overwhelming, we must consider it to be a truth about the natural world -- the world which we as people of faith believe was created by God, and the world made understandable by the reason and natural senses given to us by God," he recently wrote. "Denying science is a profoundly unsound theological position. Science and faith are but two ways of searching for the same truths."

Most telling is that the proportion of Christians among the science faculty in certain departments at Oxford and Cambridge universities -- such as the Earth Sciences Department in Cambridge or the Physics Department in Oxford -- appears higher than the national average, says Denis Alexander, director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, an academic research enterprise based at Cambridge.

"There are generally more Christians in the sciences than in the humanities," he said.

And what about the clergy? Michael Zimmerman, a biology professor at Butler University in Indianapolis, said his work with the Clergy Letter Project has led him to believe that a vast number of religious leaders of all denominations are fully comfortable with science. He argues that religious fundamentalists are the exception, and that they tend to assert themselves "more aggressively" to maintain their waning influence.

Yet the public remains sharply divided.

A Gallup poll released this year found that 39 percent of Americans "believe in the theory of evolution," while a quarter said they do not believe in the theory, and another 36 percent said they don't have an opinion either way.

Even in Anning's native and more secular Britain, less than half -- or 48 percent -- of citizens said in a 2006 survey that they adhere to the theory of evolution. And about three-fourths of British respondents to a recent survey said that science is unable to explain everything.

Today many people would love to believe that science has all the answers. But people say there are plenty of mysteries that have yet to be explained.

Despite centuries of astronomical observations and decades of space exploration, it is thought that more than 90 percent of the mass in the universe still hasn't been detected.

Scientists can't explain a human being's free will, which may or may not be just an illusion, and there's still no rock-solid scientific reason as to why everyone must die.

In the end, as in Anning's time, there are still many who have absolute faith in the fact that species never evolve or become extinct.

Many others believe that neither evolution nor extinction denies the hand of God.

Still others don't believe in God at all.

So, in this year of Darwin anniversaries, can science and religion ever be fully reconciled? For the first time in a long time, I am hopeful. As more scientists come out in favor of faith, and more clergy accept the teachings of science, perhaps reconciliation is inevitable.

Today's entry was written by Kathryn Applegate. Applegate is completing her PhD in Cell Biology at The Scripps Research Institute.

Genetic switches that act during development to produce a newborn baby seem, like Michael Behe's mouse trap, irreducibly complex. As Darrel Falk pointed out recently, however, irreducibly complex switches also drive the proliferation of bacteria and viruses which kill millions of people each year. Christians must wrestle with a difficult question: is God responsible for designing these killing machines?

Falk says no--evil in the world is a by-product of the freedom God has given his creation. According to Christian theology, Satan is not a co-creator with God, so we cannot attribute to him the existence of harmful microorganisms. But to say that God hand-crafted each irreducibly complex structure in a virus would seem to make him the author of evil. Falk argues that God's creation has freedom built into it, such that natural selection produces both darling babies and deadly bugs.

Bill Dembski, a prominent figure in the Intelligent Design movement, responded to Falk's piece with a post of his own. He argues against trying to absolve God of specially creating bad designs: "for the Christian it does nothing to resolve the problem of evil by passing the buck to a naturalistic evolutionary process (a process, in that case, created by God)." In his eyes, whether God creates "directly by intervening or indirectly by evolution," God is responsible, just as a mugger is responsible whether he uses his own hands or a vicious dog to assault his victim.

This week Karl Giberson countered Dembski, contending that Christians have always shifted the responsibility away from God when it comes to the problem of evil. He reiterates the need to invoke human freedom by reminding us of the Holocaust: "The freedom God gave humans was exercised most effectively in the construction of gas chambers at Aushwitz and Dachau. But, because humans have freedom, we do not say that God created those gas chambers. God is, so to speak, off the hook for that evil."

The belief in a good and sovereign God seems to be at odds with the realities of death, disease, and evil we experience in this life. This apparent paradox exists at least in part because of our near-sighted view of God's purposes for suffering. Consider the this familiar verse, Romans 8:28: "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose" (emphasis added). God always works to bring good out of human suffering, whether that suffering is caused by people or by nature.

The story of Joseph in the Old Testament illustrates how human evil can be used for good. Years after Joseph's brothers beat him and sold him into slavery, he saves them from starvation during a famine. Upon realizing who Joseph is, they fall down before him in fear, but he reassures them, saying, "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives" (Genesis 50:20).

On multiple occasions, Jesus affirms that physical suffering is neither meaningless nor necessarily the result of sin, but an opportunity for God's glory to be revealed. In John 9, Jesus heals a man blind from birth. His disciples ask whose sin caused the man's blindness, and Jesus tells them, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned...but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life." In Luke 13, Jesus asserts that a terrible tragedy is not punishment for sin but a wakeup call: "...those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them--do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish."

Surely the best example of God using evil for good can be seen in the death and resurrection of Christ. We don't like to think that God actively willed the murder of his own son, but from the earliest chapters of the Bible we see God's promise of redemption from sin (Genesis 3:15). Indeed, the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, considered primitive and bloody by our culture today, pointed forward to the atoning work of Christ. Thus our greatest blessing as Christians--the promise of salvation--came through a horrific act of violence.

In Isaiah 45:7 God says, "I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the Lord, who does all these things." It is alarming to realize that God is not as predictable as we might expect. He is completely and utterly sovereign; he does whatever he pleases (Psalm 115:3). This would be terrifying if God weren't also good. Even in his goodness, though, he does not prevent us from doing evil or experiencing suffering. That is why Falk and Giberson are right to emphasize man's and nature's freedom. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes:

If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata--of creatures that worked like machines--would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other...

God's sovereignty and nature's freedom will forever be in tension. But we can keep testing our assumptions and looking at the evidence on various topics like evolution. The conclusions we come to may be different, depending on our theological and philosophical positions and our differing levels of scientific knowledge. That's fine, as long as we keep seeking truth and acting in humility and love. Personally, I find the evidence for evolution of all living things by natural selection extremely compelling. Yet my understanding of nature would be grossly impoverished without the rich depths of truth found in Scripture. I am grateful for forums like this where both scientific and theological truths are sought after and celebrated.