Evolution, God, and exclusive disjunction

All too often in this world we want to define things in a way that fits into a black or white, right or wrong, up or down definition.  When we do this we can fall victim to wrongly using exclusive disjunction in our arguments and decision making.  Exclusive disjunctions place constraints on arguments that may not always be true or necessary.  For example, if it is sunny outside it cannot be raining.  It is sunny, therefore it cannot be raining.  As anyone who has lived in Florida will tell you, it most certainly can be raining while you are getting a sun tan.

If all wrong-headed use of this argument structure were as trivial as the example I gave, there wouldn't be much se in this article.  However, I can't count the number of times I've come across this argument when discussing the existence of God or evolution with someone.  It shocks me how many times someone tries to use the existence of one to disprove the existence of the other, without the slightest concession that both could coexist.  The argument is either "God is real and therefore evolution cannot be real" or "evolution is real and therefore God cannot exist."  It saddens me that people have used this argument in such a way and cheapened the quest for truth of scientists or discarded the omnipotent power of God.

To give a little background on myself so you can judge my biases coming in to this article, I will say that I have been brought up in a christian home my entire life, I believe in God, and try to live my life according to His teachings in the Bible.  I also have a bachelor's degree in microbiology and cell science from the University of Florida and worked in two research labs while I attended the school in Gainesville.
I'm writing this article in the hopes that I can convince someone who has refused to believe in God because they believe in evolution that the two are not mutually exclusive.  And to convince someone who distrusts or refuses to believe scientists and evolution because they believe doing so will discredit the existence of God that they can broaden their horizons and allow God out of the box they've constructed for Him.  Hopefully, this will lead to more constructive conversations about the subject and create tolerance and a quest to know God better.

First, let's look at the evidence of evolution.  We have fossil records that go back tens of millions of years before any evidence of human existence.  The methods used to date these fossils have been designed, tested, and validated by the same process that allows us to harness the power of atoms into usable electricity.  I have no reason to doubt that dinosaurs walked the earth or that life on earth started as single-cell organisms.
Now let's look at how this information fits pretty conveniently into the creation story from Genesis.  We're told the universe was void and all that existed was God and He created the heavens and the earth - sounds like a symbolic rendering of the big bang to me.  Let there be light, separation of water and sky, development of land, vegetation, then animals, and then man - matches up pretty nicely with how scientist explain us coming to be here right?

So here's my point on not putting God into a box.  If you believe that God is truly all-powerful and that His will is greater than anything we can fathom and supersedes anything else, why couldn't God create us by using evolution as the mechanism?  If God is truly who we say He is, doesn't He get to choose His own methods?  Also, believing the Bible is true doesn't take away from our argument here either: nowhere in Genesis does it say "and then some chance mutations took place and God said 'whoops, guess I'll have to do something with that at some point'."  God is the creator, whether natural selection, genetic mutations, or magic potions were his tools, it does not take away from the fact that He is still God.

This isn't post-modernism trying to diminish God.  This is an attempt to allow God to exist inside of science.  Galileo is quoted as saying "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  I would argue that all of science - mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, etc. are all the language of God and as we learn more about the inner-workings of our universe it should not diminish our thoughts of God, but instead fill us with more awe and reverence for the being that created such perfect and intricate systems.

Matthew 20: 1-16 Equal Reward is More Than Ok

In the twentieth chapter of the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells a parable of a land owner and workers.  As the story goes, the land owner goes out in the morning and tells some people looking for work that he would be willing to pay them at the end of the day if they were willing to come work in his fields.  Later in the day, the land owner does the same thing with a second group, and right before the work day ends he does it again.  When it comes time to pay the workers he pays each worker the same amount. 

This is where it gets interesting.  The workers who had worked the entire day become upset because they thought their pay would be greater than those who came in at the final hour.  The land owner then replies that they knew the reward when they agreed to work in the morning.

As we can see, this is a pretty transparent analogy to the reward of eternal and everlasting life.  It's easy for many of us who already believe in Christ as our savior to unwittingly become like the first workers in the field when we are presented with the possibility that someone who lived a very different lifestyle than ours found Christ late in life.  It's easy to ask what the point is to be in the first group of workers if everyone receives the same reward. 

I would challenge us all to view this story from a different perspective.  Let us look at the story from the point of view of one of the workers in the last group. If we read the story more carefully we see something  extremely critical.  Verses six and seven give us a glimpse into the last workers: "...He asked them 'Why haven't you been working today?' 7 "They replied, 'Because no one hired us.'"  Notice the answer there; these workers didn't spend their day sleeping until noon and then partying.  They had been searching all day for something to dedicate the day to, for something to give them the reward they were seeking, but nothing could do that except this land owner.

If there has ever been a time in our country's history where we should be able to view what that existence must be like, it should be now.  Imagine you have lost your job.  You don't know how much longer the money you have will last you or how long you'll be able to put food on the table.  You spend your days and nights searching for openings and applying to the ones you find.  Still, nothing seems to be going your way.  Your days are full of anxiety and uncertainty of what will come next.  This is the life without Christ.

It is the nature of this world that we will have hard times and we will suffer setbacks.  Throughout my short time here I've had my share.  But I also have an inner-peace that is always with me, because I know this life is temporary.  I have moments when I grumble about how nice it would be to not have to do the work that God calls us all to do and just do whatever I wanted, but I always end up coming back to the fact that I'm thankful to know I have work to do.  I'm no longer filled with anxiety of how I will get my reward.   I'm no longer searching.

You see, there's something amazing about kingdom work - they're always hiring.  Maybe instead of worrying about measuring our reward, we should be sharing the help wanted ads with the people we see searching.