Abstract
Mark Harris, The Nature of Creation: Examining the Bible and Science, Biblical Challenges in the Contemporary World, Routledge: Abingdon and New York, 2014; 224 pp.: 9781844657247, £55.00/$90.00 (hbk), 9781844657254, £16.99/$29.95 (pbk)
The goal of The Nature of Creation is to promote a new, more helpful, type of religion/science debate. Harris’s analysis is that interactions to date have either seen a chasm between the two disciplines, an over-literal harmonization (creation science, or questions such as whether Adam and Eve existed), or have reduced to philosophy. What has been neglected is anything based on a fuller biblical theology: more faithful to how we read the Bible in other ways, and liable to lead to a richer interaction.
Harris explores this through the subject of creation, chosen as it is foundational to our identity, the character of God and our relationship with him. Along the way he diverts into related areas including theodicy and eschatology. Broadly speaking, the book offers a discussion of creation theologies with scientific commentary upon them, a refreshingly different approach from others which tend to put just a theological veneer over the scientific narrative.
It is certainly an ambitious project which functions better in some parts than others: particularly helpful and novel are discussions of the relationship between creation ex nihilio, creation continua and scientific theories of the Big Bang, and analogies drawn between new creation and emergence.
Elsewhere, however, the debate often seems to be set up in a way which precludes dialogue, either between science and religion or between Harris and other scholars who are sometimes dismissed rather lightly. For instance, a long discussion of the Bible’s eschatological texts notes that they have been historically read mostly literally but should be treated largely metaphorically – things are not so black and white! It is then paired with a scientific discussion of the end of the universe. Harris complains that biblical theologians have commented little on it, but this is unsurprising given the lack of source material. Eschatology in parallel with the potential ecological demise of the planet, an option which Harris notes but doesn’t develop, would have a more fruitful outcome.
This discussion would, however, necessitate bringing other disciplines into the picture: our ecological crisis is more about how humans have misused science and allowed it to become dominant. In the light of Harris’s final conclusion: ‘science can only go so far’, an acknowledgement of how to go further would have been helpful, a challenge not only to those in the science/religion debate but to the New Atheists that their championing of the primacy of science is flawed.
Having said that, this book brings a lot of fruit to the table of the science/religion debate, even if it is sometimes insufficiently sympathetic to those already seated there. Anyone interested either in this subject or purely the theology of creation will find this a highly stimulating read, and a challenge to read the Bible’s teaching on creation for itself, as well as through the lens of modern science.