The Problem with Creationism
By Charles Rush
February 22, 2009
Genesis 1: 1-2
[ Audio
(mp3, 8.8Mb) ]
ery year (it seems) the Kansas Board of Education argues as to whether or not Intelligent Design should be part of the public school curriculum as a corrective to the theory of evolution. As foreign or bizarre a debate this may seem to some of us, it is a very real concern that occupies much of the discussion in the State Capitol: Topeka, which, by the way, is also home to the infamous Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church (who travels the country to scream at gay people). A nationally syndicated editorial cartoon that circulated the nation a few years ago summed it up best. The comic showed a large book. The title was Kansas Science Textbook. Beneath the title (in smaller print) it read: King James Version.” [i]
I am somewhat
astonished that we still that we are actually still having a discussions like
this by relatively serious people. I say ‘relatively serious' because most of
the problem here lies on the side of bad theology and I blame our conservative
seminaries around the country most of all. This is not to say that our
conservative religious leaders are not all that smart. Quite the contrary. I've
known enough of them personally, had some of them as students. They know
better, but at some level they have chosen to accommodate their intellect to
serve within a fairly conservative religious culture. When in Dallas…
They have a
commitment to the authority of Scripture that is fundamental. As a child in Memphis or in Mississippi, I
remember hearing the preachers intone with this utter seriousness ‘The bible
says'…. I remember thinking, even then, ‘wow, I wish I had that kind of
resolve'. I wish everything were so clear. There was a bumper sticker that the
Moral Majority put out in the 80's, a kind of counter to what they perceived as
liberal political correctness that said, ‘The Bible says it, I believe it'.
Wouldn't it be great to such simplicity, such conviction?
Alas, it is not
so simple and even most of these Evangelical preachers make that clear
themselves when you get them out of the pulpit and into the well of debate on a
particular issue. The bible does have important authority when it describes
human nature, when it probes us to reflect on the meaning and purpose of our
lives, when it points us towards the profounder spiritual life of love shown to
us in the teaching and the life of Jesus.
But when you
begin to study it deeply, you continually bump up against the challenge of
reading a pre-modern text as a modern person.
Almost all of
our modern academic disciplines are less than 300 years old. Before that, we
didn't think this way. What we take as common sense questions, are only modern
questions. The nearly lone exception is mathematics. Geometry and higher
mathematics, we believe were practiced for 2,500 years, perhaps 3,500.
But to list a
few examples:
1. History – Yes,
there were a couple historians in Greece and a few in Rome that tried to
chronicle wars and their political resolution. But history as we know it,
history as a discipline where you try to independently verify that something
happened this way rather than that, history as a discipline where you seek
facts, causes, and outcomes- this is less than 500 years old and really only
300 years old. A book like Gibbons ‘The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire'
simply could not have been written the way that it was earlier. We didn't think
like that and didn't ask questions like that.
So for the
bible- The bible contains historical narrative. Some books tell their story in
reference to major historical dates. Luke begins by citing the birth of Jesus
happening during the reign of Herod and Pontius Pilate. That we can date and is
fairly close to the way that we would write it. But other books are remarkably
loose and fast with these matters. Exodus contains precious little information
about who was Pharaoh or when this epic changing event actually took place. To
this date, archeologists have a pretty good idea of when the Exodus took place.
But we are not certain because the writers of the Bible were pre-modern people
who didn't think historically like we think historically. They simply weren't
concerned with these issues like we were. They wrote their story pretty much
the way that preachers tell historical stories today, with more attention to
the moral of the story than details of events for the footnotes. So the bible
contains some historical material but it does not try to write history like we
would write history and we cannot get from it answers to our modern historical
questions straight away.
2. Psychology – We moderns want to know the
back story. We want to know the inner thoughts and conflicts that people are
going through. That is the most interesting part of our movies. For us, it is
not just the action but what is the motivation? Think of the of a great
psychological movie, ‘Sophie's Choice' where the plot moves between the present
and the past. The actress, Meryl Streep is such a master-actress because she is
able to embody the emotional turmoil that past actions can have decades later
as she lives between contradiction and resolve.
In the bible,
we are given almost no access to people's inner thoughts. And such thoughts as
we have, we tend to extrapolate a great deal. People would like to know what
Jesus was thinking that last week when he was arrested. Was he afraid? Was he
sure of his convictions? Was he conflicted between his desire to serve God and
have a normal family life like everyone else? What was going on in his mind?
These are modern psychological questions we all ask. Ancient people simply did
not have an understanding of themselves like we do and did not ask these
questions the way that we would. So the answer, over and over, in the bible, is
we don't know. And we won't know.
3. Medicine – Almost all of what we think of
as ‘modern medicine' is just over one hundred years old. We weren't able to
really understand the need for antisepsis until then. Before that physicians
hadn't figured out that the reason so many people died in hospitals is that physicians
themselves were bringing germs from one patient to another because they were
examining people one after another without washing in between. Our whole way of
looking at disease, the sophistication of cause and effect, was simply not
possible before the advent of the microscope and the development of biology and
chemistry as advanced sciences.
So in the
bible, we have people coming with diseases that are only generally described,
sometimes remarkably accurate, other times so vague that we can't really tell
what they even have. The cures for these were so limited that the vast majority
of them were either healed miraculously or they simply died anonymously.
We moderns
always want to know, what caused this healing? It is a modern question. Ancient
people would simply say, ‘God' or ‘your faith' or ‘it was a miracle'. They did
not know and did not think that they would ever know. It is just not
accessible. You can't expect ancient people to grant us access
4. Geology,
dating rocks and the age of the earth; Anthropology, understanding the age of
the human species and trying to understand our major changes across the past
100,000 years that gave rise to higher culture and civilization.
5. Physics- the
structure of the universe. It is so vast and beyond our comprehension that
today with all of our tools, and all of our understanding, we now know that we
can't even see the majority of the mass of the universe. We are convinced of this only because of our
ability to measure the movements of distant galaxies and mathematically deduce
this dark matter as an inference of our calculations. We now know that what we
don't know so far exceeds what we do know that this science has just barely
been birthed.
I could go on
at length. None of these ways of knowing had been invented when the Bible was
written. So we cannot expect to ask these questions of the bible and get
meaningful modern answers to our questions because they could not and did not
think about the world like we do.
The vast
majority of Christian theologians agree on this. However, there are a minority
of our most conservative Protestant theologians who argue that because the
Bible was inspired by God, there is some sense in which the biblical writers
must still have gotten it right even though they didn't have the mechanism for
understanding how right they were. So, even though the Bible is not a Science
book, the scientific parts of it, are not untrue, because the Bible is the
authoritative Word of God.
These arguments
are usually buttressed with anecdotal examples of insights where the Bible
turns out to be right in some fashion, even though it is clear from the vague
language that surrounds the biblical text that the authors wouldn't understand
just how right they were.
I should like
to add that we have also heard this same argument in Islam. We had an Imam here
at Christ Church, explaining that the Koran is the ipssissima verba of God, the
literal words of God. Among other examples, he pointed out that there were
apparently vague references in the Koran to diseases that would only be
understood centuries later when medical science unlocked the key of say
‘Tuberculosis'. I picked up that tract, leafed through it with one of our
physicians. Alas, all of the brilliant examples that are cited, turned out to
be either ‘lame' from a medical point of view or simply ‘incredible'. They are
equal parts bad science and bad interpretation of the text.
This is where
you get these Creationist Museums, like the one in Kentucky that purports to
explain certain ‘gaps' in the fossil record to show how the theory of evolution
isn't so airtight and how the Noah's Flood might have really altered the fossil
evidence in ways that indirectly suggest that the Bible might have been
literally right all along. I've read enough of these. I've never seen one that
was remotely convincing. They generally read like certain papers by earnest
College kids that know just enough science and just enough religion to be
dangerous.
But the point
is this. The real agenda behind these scholars is to prove to us the ‘veracity'
of Holy Scripture. The bible is true. And it is an argument made out of fear.
They are worried that if we start to question the veracity of biblical history,
if we question the veracity of the explanation of Creation, then won't we shortly
be questioning if Jesus is really the Messiah? And won't we shortly be
questioning whether Jesus is right about our salvation? Won't we be wondering
if Jesus really is the ‘way, the truth, and the life' as the Gospel of John
proclaims?
Arguments from
fear, like arguments from guilt, don't work for very long. The Mighty Wizard of
Oz can silence a few quaking tin men, scare crows, cowardly lions and little
girls from Kansas for a while with their billowing smoke. But eventually, Toto
will jump out of the basket, pull back the curtain, and ask who that nice man
is pulling the levers. I don't want to be disrespectfully dismissive, but I am
dismissive of these arguments. They aren't serious academically.
The bible is
not a science text, a history text, an economics text or a geology text. It is
a spiritual text that tells us about the meaning and purpose of our lives.
About spirituality, the Bible has a deep authority and that authority is best
expressed in the quality of lives change because of it.
We cannot
really take these fundamentalists seriously because the issue is not exactly,
the relationship between religion and science. The issue, for them, is
defending the Bible from the threats of modernity and a whole secular way of
looking at the world that has no need of God. That is one pole, and I would
maintain that they have been the biggest part of the problem.
Then you have
the reaction against them that has been almost as ridiculous as fundamentalism
itself. I know many of you have read their arguments because you have left
their books on my desk. Time magazine, a year ago or so, called them, the ‘New Atheists'.
Among them is Richard Dawkins, who used to teach at Oxford, Steven Weinberg at
Harvard, Sam Harris. But if you read their attacks, they don't attack
theologians that teach at Yale or Cambridge. They are attacking preachers in
Dallas and Tulsa.
People give me
these books to review. With every last one, I open hoping for a good back yard
fight. Alas, they disappoint. As one reviewer put it, whatever you thought of
the first generation of atheists they were major intellectual movements that
had to be dealt with. He was referring to Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche,
and Karl Marx.
The ‘New
Atheists' have a much more limited agenda. Their work reads more like the big
bully from the Biology department at Harvard shows that barely educated
preacher from West, Texas is not very smart, and hasn't read many books. And
these diatribes are delivered with a naïve glee that all of Christendom has
just been toppled. Unfortunately the big bully from the Biology department at
Harvard has read almost nothing in the history of Christian thought and even
the secular reviewers at the London Times find it distressing that these
intellectual bullies can attack a religion they obviously know nothing about.
They succeed in
pummeling the straw man of fundamentalism, but then they presume that they have
settled the argument between religion and science itself. They just dismiss the
question altogether.
Then you have the
vast majority of Ministers, Rabbi's, theologians and a very goodly number of
scientists as well, that don't make headlines because they aren't making
outrageous claims or scurrilous attacks.
Example one at
the moment is what appears to be a very thoughtful volume written by Professor
Adam Frank., who teaches Astrophysics at the University of Rochester. The book
is titled “The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate”. I
haven't read the book but I heard yet but I heard him interviewed and the way
that he approaches the subject is similar to the way that I've heard other
Astrophysicists approach the subject and it is a very helpful start.
I've been
privileged to know a number of Astrophysicists at Princeton University and the
Institute for Advanced Study. And I've heard many lectures on the Cosmos in
various aspects. All of these guys, of course, are mad smart, and almost all of
them appear to go to the same barber as Albert Einstein. I don't know where
they get that hair that stands on end.
Often these
lectures include amazing photographs of distant stars and galaxies and a
blackboard that is full of equations, literally covering the board. And the
professor has a certain humility of demeanor in describing the vastness of time
and space that is the universe. It is the unmistakable quality of wonder and
awe. This is the spiritual dimension of the intellectual quest.
Rudolf Otto
said that our ancestors, when we were all still hunters and gatherers, would
gather on certain clear nights to behold the heavens above us. What we
experienced together he called the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans – a
profound and fascinating sense of Mystery. He used to say that this the
fundamental quest for Holiness. It is a fundamental spiritual disposition.
Professor Frank
says that when he teaches Astronomy 101, he always shows a movie that depicts
the birth of the universe. He says, “it has cool animation and the music soars,
and afterward I ask my students about the music which is designed to make them
respond emotionally… [I want them to see] their interest in scientific inquiry
as a way of honoring this sense of something more, this unseen order, as
William James called it… We should show people that science is a hierophany
(the SAT word that means the sacred unlocking of mysteries). It is part of a
long tradition of encountering the world through awe and wonder.”[ii]
A reporter was
asking him to distinguish between religion and science and he responded by
using the older language of the sacred and the profane. He says “If you trace
the etymology of ‘sacred' you'll see that it's related to the architecture of
Roman temples. The sacer was the
domain inside the temple, where you met the gods. So the sacred was the inside,
and the profane was the outside of the temple where you sold walnuts (or
religious trinkets or post cards) or whatever. It's this sense that we have,
that we sometimes encounter- it erupts in our lives- this sense of the world
being wholly other than our profane and everyday experience. You just suddenly
notice how weird everything is, or how beautiful.”[iii]
That is on the
right track. Science largely describes how things work. Religion largely
describes the meaning. And a holistic description requires not either/or but
both/and… If I could make a simplistic analogy. Science describes mating
behavior. Religion describes the nature of love in our lives. You need both to
have a holistic appreciation of that characteristically human behavior we call
Romance.
Today, we need
each other, as never before in human history. We have made truly stunning
progress harnessing scientific knowledge in technical prowess. I heard someone
interviewed on National Public Radio who suggested that the sum total of human
knowledge doubled in the last decade. That is a staggering pronouncement and
probably true. 100,000 years of accumulated human understanding doubled this
decade alone. The graph would go straight up.
And we are in
the midst of a Promethean leap forward we could only step back and view the big
picture. Very shortly, we will have decoded our genetic structure. If you look
on-line, you will see the exponential growth in our understanding of
genetically inherited diseases. We are finding more and more markers and they
are, interestingly, not all where one would think they would be. It is much
more complex that even the genetic researchers imagined that it would be.
Very soon, we
will find ourselves in the god-like position of being able to alter our genetic
destiny for the very first time. Like Prometheus, who wanted to steal fire from
the gods, we will shortly find ourselves having to answer the question of what
we should do with this new-found power? What limits shall we place on it? To
what ends shall we use this knowledge?
Alas, our moral
imagination, our spiritual imagination -collectively speaking-has not caught up
with our technical prowess. You cannot really answer the question of what to do
with genetic engineering, without asking the spiritual question, ‘what is the
meaning of human nature?' ‘Who are we?' ‘What are we put on this earth for?'
‘What is our destiny?' Our purpose?
Those who are
even remotely thinking about these issues know that the stakes are high. We
have come close to eradicating ourselves a number of times because we have
developed concentrated technical ability that was not matched with spiritual
maturity. No sooner had we developed the technical skill to enter the era of
nuclear energy than we realized that we had precious little idea of what to do
with it.
I wish that I
could wrap this up neatly and put a bow on it for you but that won't work on
this subject. It is not an either/ or. It is a both/and. So many of us, when
faced with difficult things we don't entirely understand, just hope they will
go away. They won't. Let us pray for wisdom in our leaders and commit ourselves
to raising them in our homes. The next generation is going to need it. Amen.
[i] From Pilgrim Congregational
United Church of Christ, The Rev. John Tamilio III,
Senior Minister, Sunday, 15 February 2009… all the references come from a web
site that publishes sermons on the topic of evolution. See www.butler.edu/clergyproject/Resources/Res_Sermons.htm
[ii]
See, and this may be a first in 30 years of ministry, “The Nation” (March 2,
2009), p. 29
[iii]
Ibid.
© 2009
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
