God’s Nature and God’s Light
There is a popular saying: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” What if this were true of the Church?
If the western church found itself in another Galileo-type controversy, would we want to know?
Unnecessary Conflicts
The Galileo controversy of the seventeenth century exposed serious errors in Church teaching and scriptural interpretation. For centuries the most respected scholars of the western church taught that the earth stood at the center of the solar system. These ideas originated from the Greek paradigms of Aristotle and shaped how theologians read scripture. The earth’s central place was understood as proof of humanity’s special importance in God’s plan. So, although Galileo Galilei provided astronomical evidence that the solar system was heliocentric and theologian Antonio Foscarini explained that scriptural misunderstandings had produced the geocentric theological views, Church leadership responded by convicting Galileo of suspected heresy. It took nearly two hundred years for the Catholic Church to correct its official teaching on the matter, and three hundred fifty years after Galileo’s death to issue a formal apology.
A similar pattern appears today. Much of the ongoing tension between science and Christian faith has been produced by the western church’s continued reliance on Augustine of Hippo’s interpretation of Genesis 1–3. That interpretation also became the foundation for the doctrine of Original Sin and for the related claim that creation itself is “fallen.” Together, these generate unnecessary conflicts with Scripture and the natural sciences.
Augustine’s Limitations with the Genesis Text
Augustine loved God and Christ, yet he approached Genesis as a former pagan and a Neo-Platonist. He could not read the Hebrew of the original text and had little familiarity with the Jewish worldview shared by Jesus and the apostles and their understanding of the Old Testament Scriptures. As a result, the Hebrew noun ha-adam/adam (“the human”/”humans”) used in Gen 1:26–27 and the rest of Genesis 1–3 was frequently treated as the proper name of single individual. This reading, already present in the Greek Septuagint and carried into the Latin Vulgate, encouraged an ancestral rather than an archetypal understanding of the figure in the garden. Only later, in Genesis 4, does “Adam” become the proper name of the historical father of Cain, Abel, and Seth—the one who passed this pedagogical story down through his descendants.
Equally important, Augustine interpreted the ancient Mesopotamian Genesis narrative through Greco-Roman paradigms shaped by the lost-paradise myths of Hesiod and the philosophy of Plato. In place of the Jewish portrayal of an archetypal humanity entrusted with the “very good” creation, tempted into sin, but restored by God, the western tradition received a story of an original pair whose single act corrupted the entire created order, cursed humanity into perpetuity, and introduced biological death, predation, and pain as divine punishments. That Greco-Roman overlay, rather than the text itself, is the source of many of the conflicts still felt between Christian theology and the sciences. [See “Unthinking Old Narratives: Augustinian vs Mesopotamian Paradigms in the Science-Religion Debate”.]
Scripture and the Claims of a Fallen Creation
The resulting doctrinal claims stand in tension with the broader witness of Scripture:
The assertion that sin is inherited from Adam is directly contradicted by the Lord’s declaration in Ezekiel 18:1–32 that each person is only responsible for his or her own sin, and sin cannot be inherited.
The claim that children are cursed into perpetuity by Adam’s sin conflicts with the Lord’s decree in the Ten Commandments that the children of those that hate God will only be punished to the fourth generation whereas the children of those who love God will be blessed to a thousand generations (Exodus 20:2–6).
The claim that infants are born wicked in Adam's sin and die damned unless baptized contradicts the consistent scriptural portrayal of children’s innocence (Psalm 106:37–38; Jeremiah 19:4–5).
The teaching that children are born in a sinful state of total depravity contradicts the teaching of Jesus, who presents children as models of those ready for the kingdom of heaven and never associates them with inherited wickedness or total depravity (Matthew 18:1–10; 19:14).
The Old Testament never treats Adam and Eve as the cause of a catastrophic cosmic fall; from Genesis 4 onward, they are never mentioned negatively and the loss of a deathless paradise is never discussed. Instead, passages like Job 38–41 describe the created order – including death and predation – as part of God's unchanged, unfallen handiwork since the beginning of creation.
When the scientific literature on pain, predation, and ecosystems is examined, these features are revealed to be integral to the good functioning of creation under God’s providential care, not punishments for an ancient transgression. The misunderstanding arises when pleasure-oriented value systems are imposed on nature rather than the love-oriented perspective found in Scripture. [See "The Purpose of Pain in a Good Creation".]
Augustine’s Own Warnings
Ironically, the western church has at times invested Augustine’s reading of Genesis with near-infallibility, even though Augustine himself rejected that level of certitude. He repeatedly acknowledged the difficulty of deciding whether particular passages should be taken figuratively or literally, spiritually or materially, allegorically or historically. Reflecting on that struggle, he wrote:
“With these facts in mind, I have worked out and presented the statements of the Book of Genesis in a variety of ways according to my ability; and, in interpreting words that have been written obscurely for the purpose of stimulating our thought, I have not rashly taken my stand on one side against a rival interpretation which might possibly be better.”
(The Literal Meaning of Genesis 1.20.40)
He also issued a clear caution against forcing preferred interpretations of Scripture into conflict with established knowledge of the natural world:
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
“Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
“If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books [of Holy Scripture], how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?”
(The Literal Meaning of Genesis 1.19.39)
Science and Theology in Harmony
God’s creation and God’s Word proceed from the same Source; in the end, they cannot contradict each other. The apparent conflicts we experience today largely stem from the historical replacement of the Jewish and Mesopotamian worldview native to Genesis with Greco-Roman lost-paradise paradigms. When the western church recovers a reading of Genesis that respects its original Ancient Near Eastern context, those conflicts will disappear. The path is then cleared for a more coherent witness that presents both the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture as reliable revelations of the same God.
As Galileo observed, “The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.”