Who is God to you?

I really didn’t want to read it, but I couldn’t help myself. I’m speaking of the big feature article in the Press Register Saturday on the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. I was hopeful that the reporter at some point in the article would offer an intelligent critique; at least an acknowledgement that not all Christians believe this way, but alas there were no such qualifications. There was a photograph that showed the spacious museum with a long line of people waiting to enter.

On the museum’s website is the banner saying “Prepare to Believe.” Their crusade, of course, is to convince people that the cosmos literally came about as narrated in Genesis (actually there are two creation stories in Genesis written by different authors); and that the theory of evolution is erroneous. According to the founder/director, as shown in the pictorial exhibits in the museum, every species of animal life is descended from the animals that were gathered into the ark; that the earth is only 5300 years old; carbon dating is a hoax….you get the picture. Literalism deflates the rich meanings of scripture, which are forever being interpreted and reinterpreted. Literalism belies the very deep truth we seek. It is an easy and irresponsible way out. I have never understood why some think the theory of evolution is in opposition to the Genesis accounts of creation in the first place. The two are entirely compatible. They just come from different sides of the brain….one, mythic art; the other, science.

I remember a Bill Moyers interview of Jonas Salk some fifteen years ago, a few years before he died. Amid a fascinating conversation on a range of ideas, Moyers asked Dr. Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine and arguably one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, “Who is God to you?” Salk mused for a moment and said, “Well, there are many, many metaphors that we could employ in order to speak of God, but there is one that perhaps suits me best, and that is evolution. “Evolution?” Moyers replied a little surprised. “Yes,” Salk continued. “God is the inexorable life force of our world that continues to reinvent itself from generation to generation, adapting to the vicissitudes of life on this planet in ways that stun the imagination; that God is still creating the world with an extravagant palette; that God becomes Godself through the infinite diversity of God’s own imagination.”

Moyers replied, “You sound like you are a person of faith.” “Oh if you only knew….”