John Walton has released a series of Lost World books. I aim to review most of them in preparation for a series of courses on the Pentateuch. The present title focuses on Genesis 1 with the subtitle, Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. The central concept behind the book is a familiar hermeneutical one: readers of any text–much more Scripture–are responsible to enter the author’s world as much as possible. We live in the (post)modern world, the Bible is from the ancient world. As it concerns Genesis, we’re approaching a document that’s from the second millenium BCE. While it’s a bit misleading to say that the Bible’s world is lost, our work is still cut out for us. Walton’s desire to bridge the cultural gap is laudable; however, Walton’s work leaves much to be desired. I would have said that the topic outstrips Walton’s expertise, except that he also makes claims about Genesis that are readily refutable. The biggest flaw with this book is not that he’s completely wrong, but that he overstates his case. 

I. Summary
II. Evaluation
II.A. Where Walton Succeeds
II.B. Criticism
II.B.1. In Brief
II.B.2. Philosophical Flaws
II.B.3. Scientific Flaws
II.B.4. Exegetical Flaws
II.B.5. Concluding Assessment

Summary

The book is broken into 18 propositions that move along a primarily logical path:

• Proposition 1 orients the reader hermeneutically: Genesis is an ancient literature, not natural science. 
• Propositions 2-6 introduce the central feature of his interpretation. To do this, he articulates the difference between functional and material ontologies. Ontology means the study or principle (-logy) of being (ontos). So, functional ontologies are systems of objects determined by their social purpose or function. Material ontologies are systems of objects understood as strictly material or physical stuff. The famous, ancient Ship of Theseus puzzle shows that debating the priority of material over social function is not new. Walton’s central contention is that Genesis 1 describes functional origins, rather than material origins. 
• Propositions 7-8 connect the dots from the functional concepts to the cosmic temple concept. Walton argues that the purpose of the cosmos was for God to establish a dwelling place, a temple.
• Propositions 9-12 apply the foregoing directly to the text of Genesis 1.
• The final portion of the book (props. 14-18) addresses some of the more politically charged components of the discussion. What is appropriate to teach in schools? Does intelligent design qualify as a science? 

Evaluation

Where Walton Succeeds

Walton’s book is not without strengths. The book’s discrete digestible chapters make for an easier read. Each chapter is also concluded with a short bibliography dubbed, Technical Support. Walton’s not just presenting his own views in a vacuum. He has support and wants you to check his work. 

Walton succeeds in helping his readers realize that Genesis is an ancient document and should be treated with appropriate care. No doubt, much of this type of hermeneutical orienting is for a popular audience. Walton probably imagines a reasonably literate person with some basic understanding of evolutionary biology and physical cosmology; that is, anyone who has taken some high school science. Given the wide availability of the biblical text, such a person could easily pick up a Bible and start reading it without training. Walton’s warning is well-needed and should be well-heeded by such a reader of Genesis. If Genesis 1 is read cold, a sensible assumption is that it presents a rival scientific text. Since astronomical and paleontological data contradict the Genesis-as-science interpretation, many toss aside Genesis and the rest of the Bible rather than investigate whether this interpretation is appropriate. I respect Walton’s request that we slow down, read carefully, and try to place Genesis within its literary context. Even as one who has read Genesis 1 many times, each careful re-reading has yielded fresh surprises.

Finally, Walton continually resists a God-of-the-Gaps presentation of God’s relationship to nature. The God-of-the-Gaps model essentially treats God as a mere explanatory posit to carry us until scientifically respectable explanations squeeze him out. Believers in God are placing themselves in dangerous territory if they adopt a God-of-the-Gaps approach. I stand with Walton in resisting some of the “irreducible complexity” and design arguments that carry with them a strong God-of-the-Gaps odor. Any time we place God in as an explanatory place holder, it is an invitation to natural scientists to find the natural cause. Even theistic scientists would be motivated to search for an explanation. By rejecting the God-of-the-Gaps, we embrace the idea that the whole working order bears witness to God, not just the superstitious spiritual mortar between the natural bricks. For Bible-believing theists, adopting a God-of-the-Gaps approach is unwise because it is not biblical. The Biblical God represents himself as the architect of natural law (Jeremiah 31:35-36, 33:19-22) which means that he stands behind all natural causal activity. 

Criticism

In Brief

Almost all of my criticisms amount to witnessing some degree of clumsiness on Walton’s part. I can’t tell whether that is due to a genuine lack of care, or due to his overstating things for rhetorical effect. When writing for a popular audience, authors tend to elevate their rhetoric more than when interacting with academic peers. As I conclude below, my fear is that the project itself requires some sleight of hand. What’s unclear is whether Walton has fallen for his own tricks. Either way, in what follows, I plan to examine philosophical, scientific, and exegetical errors.

Philosophical Flaws

Walton’s presentation of the radical divide between functional and material betrays both philosophical and historical confusions. He develops something like the following narrative: 

In the ancient world, they only cared about functional origins. In the modern world, we only care about material origins. Many of the problems in reading Genesis can be avoided by recovering the “lost world” of functions.

This sounds like an unsympathetic reading, except that he makes statements as extreme as this:

To the author and audience of Genesis, material origins were simply not a priority. To that audience, however, it would likewise have been unthinkable that God was somehow uninvolved in the material origins of creation. Hence there wouldn’t have been any need to stress a material creation account with God depicted as centrally involved in the material aspects of creation.

Lost World of Genesis One, Emph. Added, p. 95

On the modern view he writes:

[I]t can be seen that our culture views existence, and therefore meaning, in material terms. Our material view of ontology in turn determines how we think about creation.” (Walton, 22)

Lost World of Genesis One, p. 22

It is not hard to see that such exaggerated claims will give way to counterexamples. Both modern and ancient people speak of functional and material origins. One of the first examples of a modern (so, material) object that Walton develops is of a chair. The problem is that a chair is a human artifact with a very strict function. It is much more than mere wood. It’s a device employed by humans for sitting. Likewise, in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the god Marduk made the heavens from parts of the defeated sea goddess Tiamat’s body. The heavens are formed to resemble a palace (their function), but they are from Tiamat (their matter). Walton’s clean divide between past and present, functional and material does not survive scrutiny. This is too bad because a tempered form of this is accurate.

Much of this discussion would have been improved had Walton interacted with Aristotle’s four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. Consider a bronze statue of Socrates. 

1. The material cause is the material out of which it is made (bronze). 
2. The formal cause is the shape of the statue (Socrates-shaped). 
3. The efficient cause is the initiator of the sculpture (the sculptor). 
4. The final cause is the purpose of the statue (honoring Socrates). 

Much trouble would have been saved if Walton had simply availed himself of this clear and well-developed framework for understanding the very issues he’s discussing. Many of his examples seem to have been cooked up cold and bear little relationship to an ironically ancient philosophical history. Drawing on this framework, Walton is claiming that the Genesis 1 account is focused on the final cause (the function/purpose of the universe) and the efficient cause (God), whereas our culture ostensibly concerns itself with material causes. I would also say our culture is concerned with formal causality given the place of mathematical language in scientific discourse.  

What’s especially too bad is that Walton is on to something. Scientific discourse in the 21^st century is primarily oriented around formal and material causes, especially the physical and biological sciences. The social sciences are different since their primary objects of study are the purposes and activities of persons and institutions, i.e., efficient and final causes. There are interesting historical questions regarding the way that natural scientific practice has so narrowly oriented itself, but that’s what we’re facing today in the natural sciences. If people have been taught that this is the proper way to understand origins for the majority of their education, it’s no surprise that they stumble over the focus on efficient and final causes found in Genesis. What I resist is the idea that ancient literature (let alone Genesis 1) doesn’t address material or formal causes. So, Walton is correct to draw our attention to these final causes (“functional origins”). He just goes too far.

Scientific Flaws

The popular nature of this work makes it difficult to pin down what’s wrong with his approach to science, but one gets the impression that Walton has not read or interacted with much professional philosophy of science. Most of what he says about science is sloganized from the works of Karl Popper and the Vienna Circle; viz., science only concerns the demonstrable and the falsifiable. Thinkers such as Quine, Kuhn, and Lakatos repudiated this approach to science as long ago as the early 1950s. Each of those thinkers demonstrated in different ways that the clean lines between science and the rest of human knowledge are not so clean. All of these thinkers were die-hard naturalists, but resisted the science-as-falsifiability thesis for a variety of persuasive reasons, not least of which that scientific practice doesn’t conform to this portrait. It would be too much to expect Walton to have expert familiarity with such debates, except that his argument depends on this assumption that there are clean lines between material and functional origins, scientific and “non-scientific” discourse.

Either way, I want to focus on a tasty analogy that he develops in Proposition 13. He describes the God-of-the-Gaps approach as like a pie: part of the pie is natural cause and effect; the other part is God’s intervention in some way. As discussed above, Walton correctly rejects this picture, noting that as science advances, God’s share of the pie shrinks to the vanishing point. Instead of pie, Walton urges us to have some cake. In this metaphor, the bottom layer of the cake comprises the natural descriptions of cause and effect in the physical world. The upper layer is the divine description of God’s activity. So far so good, except that Walton would like to have his cake and eat it too—I couldn’t resist! The interpretive work that Walton has the analogy do makes it so that there is no significant relationship between the layers. But even in actual cakes, the layers relate in significant ways (the weight of one on the other, the marrying of flavors if they’re different).

Allow me to add a couple of layers to Walton’s two-layer cake to bake an Aristotelian four-layer cake. Since Aristotle’s cake contains Walton’s two, any point I make here will apply also to Walton. Return to the statue of Socrates. The four causes of the statue, while distinct, are highly dependent upon one another. For example, a statue of Socrates made from crumpled garbage might have the same shape and maker, but would fail to honor the man. The material and final causes are connected. It’s easy to imagine Socrates in different honorable poses (say, thinking or speaking), but the sculptor would fail to honor Socrates if the statue were using the latrine or bore the likeness of Plato. So, while there is a not a relationship of necessity between these causes, there is a range of tolerance. Some materials, forms, and perhaps even makers would be incompatible with honoring Socrates. Bearing this in mind, a functional-origins-only account is a myth of Walton’s making. Materials and forms are relevant to function. My own interpretation of Genesis is that there is a range of compatible materials and forms, but that certain scientific hypotheses should at least be capable of contradicting biblical literature. What Walton presents here makes it so that no scientific account of material origins could contradict Genesis 1. In that case, science is falsifiable by definition, but cannot play a disconfirming role for the biblical text. This is not only strange but is eerily similar to Stephen Jay Gould’s famous and flawed thesis of Non-Overlapping Magisteria: science and religion operate within distinct spheres of authority. As someone with deep respect for science and religious belief, I think both are served best by permitting open conflict rather than blind acceptance.

I need to offer a brief clarification and/or qualification. On the one hand, when I speak of science above, I am talking about what is currently accepted in the scientific community. Such things can easily contradict Scripture. On the other hand, scientific method involves the testing of hypotheses and designing tools to understand the cosmos, i.e., the way that God designed the world. Assuming—as I do—that the Bible is inspired by God, properly practiced scientific method—continually applied, correcting and refining historically accepted scientific hypotheses—will eventually harmonize with a properly interpreted Bible. God designed the world to operate according to elegant laws and symmetries, and He designed the mind of humans to apprehend such laws and symmetries. Therefore, the integrity of the scientific method necessitates that the scientific community can only stray so far from God’s design. If they go past a certain point, it is because they are not actually practicing science anymore, no matter what honorifics society bestows upon them. 

Exegetical Flaws

What makes this book so baffling is that Walton is an Old Testament scholar. While scholars are not immune from error, some of his claims are not difficult to falsify. Here are a few:

1. Walton’s claim that Genesis 1 involves a cosmic temple has merit, but there are a few oddities to it. First, the portion of the creation account that has clear temple overtones is Genesis 2. Eden has a similar structure to the temple: the center of the garden (Most Holy Place), the garden (Holy Place), and outside the garden (Court; cf. Genesis 4:1-4). The closest echo of the temple in Genesis 1 occurs in Ex 24:15ff where God takes seven days to settle on Sinai before he reveals the design of the tabernacle. So, I’m not saying that there are no temple motifs in the first several chapters of Genesis. I think there are, but not with the same bravado and interpretative totality as Walton. Second, given Walton’s confidence that Genesis 1 is no more than an account of functional origins with God establishing his dwelling place, one would expect these motifs to be more explicit in Genesis 1. What we get instead are a bunch of day’s and good’s.
2. Expanding on the last point, rather than seeing a ton of temple imagery in Genesis 1, there is Edenic imagery in the tabernacle and temple. I mentioned the tripartite structure above from Eden. The lampstand is the shape of a tree (Ex 25:31ff), which some argue symbolizes the tree of life from the Garden. Others claim that the seven lights of the lampstand represent the seven classical planets (five planets + sun + moon; cf. Ex 27:21). The curtains of the tabernacle have dark nighttime colors with cherubim woven into them (cf. Gen 3:24). For more on this overlap, see GK Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission. Ultimately, this shows that the temple and creation share common imagery. However, Walton never addresses the explanatory possibility that the temple imagery depends upon the creation rather than the other way around (as he has it).
3. To say that there is no priority on material origins is misleading at best. In Genesis 2:7, Adam is formed from the dust. This is a description of Adam’s material origin. To say it’s not a priority would be to undermine the power of the judgment found in Genesis 3:17-19, especially 19.
4. There are a few sections in Genesis 1 that are clearly functional. On Day 4, the luminaries are “to give light on the earth,” Genesis 1:17 (NIV). Here, a purpose is explicit. So too on Day 6, man and woman are created for the purpose of ruling. Given the fact that there is language that explicitly indicates purpose on only certain days raises doubts as to Walton’s sweeping claims. Why is such language missing for all other days?
5. For further discussion of Walton’s interpretation, see John Lennox’s excellent, Seven Days that Divide the World, especially Appendix B. Lennox addresses Walton’s idiosyncratic interpretation of bara (create).

Concluding Assessment

As I mentioned, Walton’s project is harmed by his overstatement of things. And yet, Walton’s project depends on the overstatement, because he tries to indicate that Genesis 1 is a functional story which one may lay over apparently any material story. Given that I reject his claim that Genesis (or other ancient literature) has no account of material origins, I think his project fails.