It’s no wonder then that it took Lamoureux a long time, and a little help to sort some of this out for himself.
A person of great importance to Lamoureux was Loren Wilkinson, an interdisciplinary professor at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C., whom Lamoureux refers to as his intellectual hero.
When Lamoureux first started at Regent in the 1980s he says he was a “fire-breathing, dragon-slaying, card-carrying young earth creationist.” He was willing to battle anyone, professors included, against the merits of evolution with his “battle axe” (ie. his Bible).
He remembers the end of one particular class on science and religion. Wilkinson looked at Lamoureux in front of the whole class and said, “Denis, I have a concern for you that should you see evolution as true, would you then lose your faith in Christ?”
“Of course,” Lamoureux says, “that wrecked me. That day Wilkinson started the process and got me asking whether there was something more to this that I had not yet seen.”
It turns out there was.
It’s easy to imagine someone like Lamoureux, who has three doctoral degrees including one in evolutionary biology, would accept evolution because of the scientific evidence.
But that was not the case. Lamoureux actually accepted the theory of evolution because of the Bible, not science.
He says the Bible simply doesn’t support an interpretation that takes the early chapters of Genesis literally. According to Lamoureux, “Young-earth creationism from a scholarly perspective is, well, it ain’t scholarship. It’s a bunch of really devout people — I don’t question their faith — but here is the irony: they simply don’t know enough about the Scriptures. Of course that is a shocking statement to say, but speaking for myself, I left young-earth creationism for biblical reasons.”
He goes on: “I believed in young-earth creationism because I was taught a bunch of nonsense in Sunday school and I read a bunch of people who shouldn’t be writing on the topic. You know, smart people like medical doctors or engineers or historians, but most of the time they don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to the Bible.”
Lamoureux is troubled that most evangelicals today simply do not understand how to read the Bible, much less the early chapters of Genesis.
“Hermeneutically, we evangelicals are generally not that good. As much as we pound on our chests thinking we are the sharpest people of Christendom, it’s not true. Just because we can cite John 3:16 or John 3:3, that doesn’t make us theological geniuses, despite the fact that most people think they are.”
Lamoureux was clear to stress that the Holy Spirit inspired the biblical authors, but that doesn’t mean they escaped being a product of their time. They wrote in ancient history, which means they wrote out of an ancient cosmology, with ancient languages, through ancient literary conventions.
Theologian J.I. Packer, for example, refers to the ancient writing of the early chapters of Genesis as “picture language” — language that tells a story or paints a picture rather than explaining literal events of history.
Young-earth creationists and biblical literalists have many loopholes and reasons for why they take the Bible’s picture and poetic language literally. But their rationale carries an arrogance that assumes the Bible was written for future audiences, specifically 19th and 20th century evangelical Christians, not ancient or 1st century audiences. In the same way that Ham dismisses “historical science,” many evangelicals go ahead and dismiss all of history itself.
