You Tube Theology

Hebrew Thought on Evolution and Natural Selection

Dru Johnson will explore how the Hebrew biblical authors reasoned about the nature of reality, using the scientific principle of natural selection as a test case. By considering the Hebraic thought of nature and selection, we will learn to take the biblical authors more seriously than we might have previously.
July 2: What is Hebrew Thought and What Can It Say about Evolution? What does “Hebrew thought” mean? The biblical literature displays a concerted effort to reason with Israel, and later with Jewish and Gentile Christians, about the nature of biology, ethics, knowledge, political philosophy, and even evolution. [We apologize that due to technical problems, Session 2 of this series was not recorded.]
July 9: How does Hebrew Literature (the Old Testament) Reason with Us? We will consider well-known Old Testament passages to see how they reason with us beyond the stories, laws, and poetry at hand. And we will focus on the narrative structures and repetition of theme in preparation for tracing natural selection through the Bible.
July 16: Eden in the Real Israelite World of Scarcity, Violence, Exile, and Sex. Israel was one of the least fertile parts of the ancient Fertile Crescent; the land of “milk and honey” did not mean “oozing with food.” What was daily life like and how did the story of Eden figure into the realities on the ground?
July 23: Apocalypse Now? Natural Selection and the New Heavens and Earth. We will trace the development of the core factors of natural selection – scarcity, fitted-ness, and sexual propagation – across the biblical literature. And finally, we will look to the future-scape of the Bible to see how they will shape natural selection.