Excursus on the Origin of Life and Evolution of Biological Complexity (Part 7): A Critique of John Walton’s Functional Creation Interpretation

A Critique of John Walton’s Functional Creation Interpretation

Today we want to continue our discussion of John Walton’s functional interpretation of Genesis chapter 1. We ended last time by saying that Walton has an enormous burden of proof with regard to justifying his interpretation. He needs to show that Genesis 1 involves only functional creation and not also the creation of material objects at the same time. Otherwise, his view will reduce to the typical literal interpretation of Genesis 1 that God actually brings into being over the course of six 24-hour days the dry land, the plants, the animals, the astral bodies, and so forth. Walton needs to show that all that God does during these six days is to assign functions to material objects.

Can he sustain this burden of proof? Walton claims that when we look at ancient Near Eastern creation myths we find, “people in the ancient world believed that something existed not by virtue of its material properties, but by virtue of its having a function in an ordered system.”[1] But does the evidence support this claim? I think that the answer is clearly, no. Walton points out, “Nearly all the creation accounts of the ancient world start their story with no operational system in place. Egyptian texts talk about a singularity – nothing having yet been separated out. All is inert and undifferentiated.”[2] Creation sometimes begins with the primeval waters out of which dry land or gods emerge. You'll recall that when we discussed creatio ex nihilo we saw that the typical form of these ancient creation myths was “When ____ was not yet, then ____.” This typical form of ancient creation myths is what you find in Genesis 2:5-7:

This is the form that Walton identifies in the myth of the founding of the Babylonian city of Eridu. This is what this ancient text says:

Contrary to Walton, the descriptions of the primordial world in pagan myths were not descriptions of material objects according to which plants and animals and buildings and people all existed but merely lacked a function. Rather, they are descriptions of a state in which distinct material objects of these sorts do not exist at all. None of them existed at that time.

This is especially evident in the Egyptian myths mentioned by Walton. Egyptian mythology was a form of monism or panentheism. It was an attempt to solve the ancient problem of “the one and the many,” that is to say, what is the unifying factor behind the multiplicity of things that we observe in the world? The monistic answer to this question was to say that originally there was a primordial, undifferentiated, single reality from which then multiplicity evolved or emanated. In these Egyptian myths you have such a primordial, undifferentiated, inchoate, characterless condition out of which then multiplicity evolves. Creation involves the creation of an orderly system of functioning objects that come into being. It involves the coming into existence of these objects and not just the specification of functions for material objects that were already present. So when Walton concludes, “consequently, to create something (cause it to exist) in the ancient world means to give it a function, not material properties,”[4] he's drawing a false dichotomy which is foreign to these ancient texts.

When it comes to Genesis chapter 1, for this text to feature only functional creation we must imagine that the dry land, the vegetation, the trees, the sea creatures, the birds, the land animals, even man were all there from the beginning, but they just were not functioning as an ordered system. But such a view is implausible (not to say ridiculous). It would require us to take as literally false all of the statements about the darkness, the primeval ocean, the emergence of the dry land, the earth's bringing forth vegetation and fruit trees, the waters bringing forth sea creatures, the earth's bringing forth animals, and God's making man. Notice that Walton cannot say that these things cannot exist apart from an orderly system, for the moment that you say that, then the functional creation view collapses into the traditional view of a six-day creation – actually bringing these things into being over those six days. That's the traditional interpretation. God both brings the things into existence and specifies their role in an ordered system.

Just how bizarre Walton’s interpretation is becomes evident in his statement that the material creation of the biosphere may have gone on for eons prior to Genesis 1:1 and then at some point in the relatively recent past there came a period of seven consecutive 24-hour days during which God specified the functions of everything existing at that time.[5] Walton notwithstanding, this is the farthest thing from a literal interpretation of the text that you can have, which he claims his view is.[6] It implies that all of the descriptions of the world at the beginning of and during that relatively recent week are literally false. If you were to ask, what would an eyewitness have seen during that week?, Walton either begs off answering the question or he admits that the answer is that the world before those seven days would have lacked only humanity in God's image and God's presence in his cosmic temple.[7] In other words, everything looked exactly the same except that the people who existed then had not yet been declared by God to function as his vice regents on Earth, and God had not yet specified the cosmos to function as his temple. An eyewitness would not have observed, and they did not observe on his view, any change whatsoever in the world as a result of that creative week.

If we're to adopt a reading of the text which is so at odds with the text’s prima facie description of the world, we must have extremely powerful evidence, I think, for adopting such an interpretation. So we now want to ask next what evidence Walton gives for a purely functional interpretation of Genesis 1.

His first argument is that the Hebrew word bara – the Hebrew word for “create” – concerns functional creation. He provides a chart listing approximately fifty passages in the Old Testament where the word bara is used. The objects said to be created include things like the heavens and the earth, sea creatures, people, the starry host, a cloud of smoke, Israel, the ends of the earth, north and south, disaster, a pure heart, and so forth. Incredibly, from this list Walton concludes, “This list shows that grammatical objects of the verb are not easily identified in material terms, and even when they are, it is questionable that the context is objectifying them.”[8] I should have thought precisely the contrary was true! Most of these objects in the list are easily identified as material objects. Now, admittedly, some are not material objects. For example, a pure heart – “create in me a pure heart O God.” Or Israel. Or north and south. Those are not material objects. But these are the exceptions. The three objects of bara in Genesis 1 – the heavens and the earth, the sea creatures, and man – are all clear cases of material objects. Just because they're not created ex nihilo doesn't imply that they do not come into being at the moment of their creation. Apart from the possible case of Israel, none of the objects of bara in the Old Testament are existing things that are merely given a new function. Of the objects on the list, none of them (except perhaps Israel) is an already existing object which is then simply assigned a new function. Walton opines that the reason the functional interpretation of Genesis 1 is “never considered” by other scholars (itself a telling admission) is because they have been misled by “cultural influences of our material culture.”[9] Hardly, I think. Such a claim impugns the credibility of scholars of the ancient Near East. I suspect that the reason that no one else has so interpreted the text is because it is such an obvious misreading of the text.

The Old Testament scholar John Collins says, “I agree with almost everyone else that Genesis records some sort of material origins, and I do not grasp exactly why Walton keeps making a distinction between material and functional.”

Walton’s next argument is that the creation account proper begins at Genesis 1:2. He says verse 1 is just a summary of the whole week, not an initial act of creation prior to verse 2. He says creation does not involve bringing matter into being but just establishing functions.

It's important to understand just how radical Walton's interpretation is. We might think that he means that creation begins with the primordial waters in place and then over the next seven days God introduces order and functionality by making the dry land appear, having sea creatures and birds come on the scene, having vegetation sprout from the dry land, land animals come to be, etc. But that would not sustain his claim that only functional creation is involved. Even if these things are not created ex nihilo they would still be instances of creation, just as the construction of a chair is the material creation of that chair by a carpenter, even though he uses material in the construction of that chair. No, if this account is to be exclusively functional, as Walton claims, then all of the plants and animals and even man must be there right from the start. So Walton affirms that prior to the seven days of Genesis 1, the dinosaurs and the hominids were alive and well, only waiting to be given their respective functions. Even if we agree that creationproper begins at verse 2, there's nothing in the text to support Walton’s novel functional interpretation.

But is Walton right in thinking that verse 1 is not part of the creation process? He is not. And here I simply refer you back to our discussion of creatio ex nihilo earlier in the doctrine of creation. Walton does not, at least in this book The Lost World of Genesis One, interact with the exegetical arguments which support verse 1 as a statement of creatio ex nihilo. If that's correct, then Walton’s claim that Genesis 1 is purely functional collapses.