A Biblical View of Biology

This question used to mostly a debate about origins as I've noted in my other articles before this.  Namely, do we believe in literal, six-day creation of Genesis 1 and 2 and referenced in other places in the Bible like Exodus 20:11, or do we believe in the "molecules to man" and "goo to you" origins narrative.  I've talked about that questions in this blog post:  www.danielwestfall.com/faith-and-culture-biblical-apologetics/the-question-of-origins.

Today, I would like to approach the other aspects of the biblical worldview of Biology--Meaning, Morality, Destiny, and Identity and I want to specifically focus in on the issue of identity.  We are now halfway through a worldwide celebration of "Pride Month" where the question of SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) is at the forefront.  The devil is great at trying to redefine terms, so lets' be clear about some things up front.  Words have gender in many languages so that masculine nouns have masculine adjectives that modify them and feminine nouns have feminine adjectives that modify them.  Anyone who has taken any Romance language (languages based off of Latin) knows about this.  I'll leave it to the reader to investigate this more, but this is the concept of gender--masculine and feminine (typically used to classify words and adjectives).

Now to the word "identity."  This is a concept in logic and mathematics.  An identity is an equation where the left hand side of the equation restates the right hand side of the equation in a way that is always true in all circumstances.  It is not a conditional equation, but a tautology and usually they are rules that help us express something complex in a simpler way.  The idea of an identity breaks down if for instance we start trying to redefine the terms and operations within the identity.  The whole concept of an identity is that the rule is unchangeable.  In fact, the Law of Identity is the first Law of Logic (See this article for more information on that topic:  www.danielwestfall.com/faith-and-culture-biblical-apologetics/the-connection-between-math-science-logic-philosophy-and-theology).  We have a real issue then with SOGI if someone's "gender identity" it described as being "gender fluid" meaning it is not grounded in anything other than how they feel at the moment and may be anywhere on a scale from 100% feminine to 100% masculine.  We've gone beyond that though and we now are talking about "identification" (how you choose to identify yourself with pronouns and other qualifiers) to say that a person need not even describe themselves as feeling like a human--they may feel like they are an animal or a tree or any other number of things.  It has gotten to the point where it is almost impossible to have a conversation on the issue because no one can use words that have concrete meaning, and that was part of the objective all along.

I will not be using the word "gender" much in this article because that's not how the Bible talks about this issue.  It instead talks about the concept of sex--male and female.  Not sexual preference or sexual orientation (who you are attracted to and want to couple with--there are specific words for those actions that I'll use when I talk about those actions later).  No, Jesus quoted Genesis 1:27 as authoritative and assumed His audience read and understood it, and I have the same assumption today.


Genesis 1:27
English Standard Version
27 So God created man in his own image,
    in the image of God he created him;
    male and female he created them.

Matthew 19:3-5
English Standard Version
​3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

The passage in Matthew deals directly with the question of marriage and divorce (another topic that comes up a lot during the month of June), and it gets to the questions of both Meaning and Morality.  Why did God created two and only two sexes?  The idea of biblical complementarianism probably deserves its own article at some point, but let me address the issue by saying that God designed a family unit and the purpose of the family (husband and wife) was to cleave to each other and have such a strong love that it would be as if the two had become one.  This gives us a little picture of how it is possible for there to be one God in three persons.  The only thing on earth that comes close to the love that exists within the Trinity for the other members of the Trinity is the love of a husband and wife for one another, especially when they also both love God.  The marriage is a reflection of the gospel message (more on that later as well, though I've talked about it some before throughout various articles) and the result of this love is something reproductive.  There is the command to Adam and Eve after they are "married" to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and have dominion over it.  The command is given to both of them together as a team--not just to men alone, and not just to women alone, but to men and women working together in the cooperative union of marriage so that they complement each other.  In being obedient to this design we glorify God with our bodies as we are told to do in the book of Romans.

So, what then should we make of SOGI?  We should reject it completely and call it what it is--rebellion against nature and nature's God.  There is Natural Law that is so absolute that it's a category outside of morality.  Natural Law is something that doesn't allow for the concept of "your truth" and "my truth" there is just the truth that an object in freefall must obey the law of gravity--no matter how much you want to claim gravity doesn't exist, you will be subject to its effects.  So it is with biology that any human with a Y chromosome is male and any human without a Y chromosome is female (usually in the combinations of XY and XX, but sometimes genetic anomalies happen that produce an XXY--by definition these are still men because they have a Y chromosome).  It is God's design for men to act like God in the marriage and to model His love for us.  It is the job of the woman in the marriage to model our love for God and we show Him how much we love Him by submitting to His authority.  That is the way it works in the home and that is the way it works in the Church--woman can be deacons, but not elders/pastors because the responsibility of leadership is given to the men.  That is not to say that God doesn't gift women with talents that help them be good leaders in their families, churches, and communities (see the Proverbs 31 woman for instance).  I've met many women blessed with the gift of administration.  However, they use these gifts to complement their husbands at home or their elders at church and not to usurp power from them.

I'll have to leave it here for now and probably come back to this topic later (I'd assume that I'll be prone to write something about what the Bible has to say about our sex and what we should and what our sexual relationships should and shouldn't look like at some point every June as I'm faced with a world that wants to celebrate its rebellion against God in this area).  If you have questions about anything I've written today or anything else on this topic, please use the Contact Us form and I'll try to answer your question from a biblical position.