Chuck and Emmy

I really don't know much about Charles Darwin.  Reading Charles and Emma: The Darwin's Leap of Faith was very enlightening.  You can see that this book won lots of awards, and I can see why.
It was especially interesting that I had visited a Sunday School class last week and Rev. Dr. Steven Tuell was the guest speaker!  He teaches at my old school!  I wish he would have taught there when I went there!  But I was so young then, I wonder if I had what it took to appreciate a good professor back then.  I can see the benefits of going back to school when one is older and hopefully wiser.
Rev. Dr. Tuell started the class by naming two big names...I can't remember either of them now.  But one is a big time creationist and the other is a big time scientist who doesn't believe in God.  He said something like, "It is interesting that X doesn't believe in God or a divine plan in creation and that Y believes in creation as it is told in Genesis, but that both of them have the exact same interpretation of the creation stories in Genesis.  And that is totally bizarre because we have two totally different stories of creation in Genesis!" Then we looked at the Bible and the two very different accounts of creation that are there.   Check out his blog here.
One part that really stood out for me because I was listening to this book at the time was something that I really couldn't remember and didn't want to say it wrong!  But I emailed him and he wrote back!  It had to do with the creation story in Genesis being consonant with evolution.
Here is what he said:
I alluded to two features of the creation stories in Genesis that I believe to be consonant with biological evolution.  The first is the fact that God empowers the world to participate in its own coming into being: so, rather than saying, “Let there be plants,” God says, “Let the earth put forth vegetation” (Gen 1:11); so too God invites the water to “bring forth swarms of living creatures” (1:20), and says, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind” (1:24).  In Genesis, life emerges from the earth and the waters.
 The second was that, in Genesis 2, both humans and animals are made from the ground (2:7, 19), and both human and animal are in Hebrew called _nephesh khayah_: “living being.”  That idea too I find consonant with biological evolution.
So that was pretty, pretty neat.  If you are interested in more of this, here is how you can learn more from Dr. Tuell, as he explained:
I have blogged about these chapters extensively at www.steventuell.net: enter creation, or Genesis, in the search field, or go to the archives for September 2013 and move forward from September 8.
I don't know much about the Victorian Era, but here is a nice list of important people of that time.  As you can see, CD is on there.  
This book is really about Chuck and Emma's courtship and their life together.  It is a story of love.