Putting God in Box without realizing it

I became an Evangelical Christian when I was 12, through a friend's church and subsequent summer camp experiences.  It was a Baptist church in my hometown, and I don't think I heard the word "Born Again" used, but that would be what some Christians would call it.  My family was nominally Anglican, with Church going grandparents and uncles.  Previous to this, I attended church in the summers with my grandparents, and had been taken to Sunday school in the past, but the evangelical experience demanded much more, a heartfelt belief that had been absent in the Anglican sermons.

I liked church, the community and the youth group, I began reading the bible, enjoying the stories, and loved the history behind them (I still love history).  I remember a meal in the basement after church showed me how different evangelical christianity was from my former Anglican church experience.  We were eating and talking about creation.  I mentioned evolution and my friends said it wasn't true.  The pastor, who was also our youth leader, sat down and I asked him.  He said evolution was a "bunch of garbage".  I was mildly surprised and knew this would not be appreciated in my house, religious ideas that were not mainstream were viewed as superstition.

I don't really know how I dealt with Evolution in the years following, I remember my science teacher having us write a paper on how the Universe began.  I was somewhat of a keener and spent a long time on the paper.  We presented our papers to, a less than stellar, science teacher.  One of my Sunday School/Public School classmates said he believed God created the Heavens and the Earth - the teacher said that was fine, he respected his beliefs.  I was ticked off, why had I bothered to do the work?  I could have done that too.  If I did think about Evolution vs. Creation, it was in a very dualistic way.  If I was in church, out with Christian friends etc., I just agreed that God did it "like the Bible said", but if I talked with Christians who were scientists, or otherwise well educated who explained that God could have used Evolution, that 6 God days were not 6 earth days etc. I was fine with that too.  If I was talking to a non-christian, though, I suddenly felt compelled to point out all the problems with evolution, as if that would help them believe in Christ.

University brought out the dualist in me.  I sympathized with science majors who had to write exams on Evolution, feeling that the professors must be very anti-christian, but also agreed with other students, who insisted that Christians shouldn't insist on belief in Creationism, it was driving decent science types away from God, Christianity, etc.  I didn't major in Science, rather Fine Art and History (with a minor in English).  Evolution was not a major topic for my classes, and myself and many Christians who went through with me, avoided Evolution classes and remained firm in the belief that Creation was the (or a valid) way.

Around this time, My University Church's Young Adult group began to shift from an evangelical form of Christianity to a more Charismatic style.  Our leaders travelled to Charismatic conferences, and the focus of our bible studies shifted more to the Charismatic (Gifts of the Spirit, Biblical Prophecy, and so on).  I finished up my University, and moved to a town where many of the conferences we had attended were held.  I boarded with a family from the Church we had often visited and began teaching in that town.  The Charismatic church was quite different in focus from the Evangelical churches I had attended before.  Many people had become Christians as adults, some very recently, emphasis on knowing and reading the bible was not as strong as in evangelical churches, Spiritual gifts, prayer and worship were far more sought after.  The church had many great musicians, very connected in Christian music - we had Delirious come to our church youth conference before they were known in North America.  Prayer meetings would go in for hours, with everyone prophesying over each person at the meeting, even the teenagers loved this.  Pastors preached from the Old Testament as often (or more) as the New Testament.  From all this, the Bible was viewed to hold certain messages that were not explicit in the first reading.  For example, Song of Solomon was not just about a King's love for his bride, but a message about Jesus' love for his church, or any follower of him.  This would later help me look at the Bible in a less literal way.

I moved on, later meeting my Husband, who was doing his PhD. in Biology, when I returned to another University to get an additional education degree.  I didn't think much about Evolution, life was busy, I had two kids, worked and went to church in a much larger city, evolution was not a main topic.  Once my husband finished his PhD. he got a teaching job out in one of the city's suburbs.  We moved out there and attended the Charismatic denomination I had attended in town of my first teaching job, but that church was on a lifeline and soon folded.  We then went to the church down the street from us.  It is Evangelical and I had not been to an Evangelical Church in over 15 years.  Evolution is a big deal, or, at least, a deal at all.

This would have been completely lost on me, however, my PhD. husband got asked to write a book about Christian faith and Science, a geneticist by training, he had been doing most of his work on fly genes, teaching stuff to his students like immunology, genetics etc.  I don't know what he had said about evolution, but it didn't come up much at home.  This book chapter changed things.  He had to look at Evolution and Intelligent Design.  Evolution looked good, ID not so much.  That started a little schism between us.  Not much, just a little.  I had gone through the gamut, from a young evolutionist (product of Public Education), to creationist (product of Evangelical literalism) to a non opinionated, but deeply suspicious of all things evolution, Christian (product of too much bickering in on the web, and serious doubts about it's usefulness in the first place).  I was comfortable not knowing.  I mean, did it even matter? it wasn't like we were going to evolve into something else in my lifetime and human would be raptured or cast away long before anything else got around to replacing us.

The post's title is: Putting God in a Box without realizing it.  Although I explained that I was very dualistic in my approach to science and faith, at certain regular intervals I secretly believed that if God said he made man and women, at some point, from the dust, then science, which always changes, would one day reveal this.  I also took it as a badge of true faith to believe that God could have created the world in 6 days, if he wanted to and that trying to square science up with faith was a waste of time, either we didn't understand what the bible meant (Read the rest of Genesis chapters one to eleven, and the world gets ever weirder) or science hadn't turned over the magic fossil, archeologists had yet to unearth the magic, tell-tale grave - and all would be made clear at a future date.   Somehow the Bible would be justified, the rest was a distraction.

It never occurred to me that the first 11 chapters of Genesis could be a myth, and still be from God.  I guess the prevalent attitude in Evangelical circles is that a literal interpretation of Adam and Eve is necessary to understand our fallen sinful state.  Tampering with the validity of this, would cause a Christian to question everything else and become a wishy-washy pseudo-believer (insert non-evangelical protestant denomination of choice).  My God, was safely and securely in an Evangelical literal-reading-of-Genesis box - take him out and watch your faith unravel at your own risk, but don't bring that stuff up around here.

Then my husband began to lift Genesis chapters 1-3 out of this box.