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I'm not blogging here any longer, and I'm afraid I probably won't pick up on any new comments either. I'm now blogging at The Evangelical Liberal but I'm leaving these old posts up as an archive.

Friday 12 February 2010

Why I believe Creationists get it wrong part 2 - Scripture

Creationists generally fit into the fundamentalist wing of evangelical Christianity, viewing the Bible as God's perfect, inerrant, timeless Word and so to be read as literal, historical and scientific fact wherever possible. Wherever the Bible's account of origins appears to differ from that of modern science, science must therefore give way. They argue that God is perfectly capable of saying plainly what he means, and he knows far better than modern scientists what happened at the beginning.

Finally they believe that the whole Bible stands or falls as a unit, so if you question the historicity of Genesis 1-2 you also by implication query the historicity of the gospels.

Inspiration and inerrancy

It's probably no surprise that I disagree with this view of Scripture at almost all points. I do accept that the Bible is divinely inspired ('God-breathed', 2 Tim 3:16) but I have a very different understanding from the Creationists of how that operates and what that means. For a start, I do not believe that divine inspiration must imply 'inerrancy' as they understand it, still less complete historical or scientific accuracy at all points. In my view this is to fall into the same Modernist-paradigm trap as Dawkins that there is only one kind of truth and knowing which is the Factual, ultimately the Scientific. This is certainly not how the original Hebrew authors would have approached Truth, nor does it in fact provide the best or fullest description of Reality. Scientific and historical truth are both important, but truth can also be personal, relational, philosophical, paradoxical, poetic, symbolic or mythopoeic.

To read Genesis 1-2 as teaching history and science is, I believe, to do serious violence to the texts, to the type of literature, its cultural context, and the intentions and understandings of the original authors. Gen 1 is essentially a poetic polemic for monotheism in a polytheistic cultural context, and Gen 2 can best be read as a mythological and theological account of the origins of evil, sin, pain and death. This does not mean that it contains no history, still less that it is untrue - indeed, it makes it more deeply and timelessly true.

The Gospels and Genesis

But if you believe this, how can you say whether any of the Bible is historically true? Most importantly, what of the Gospels, the accounts of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ? If these events were not historical, then the entire basis of our Christian faith is gone (1 Corinthians 15:14). But in the Gospels we have a very different kind of writing and literature to the early chapters of Genesis. The gospel writers, particularly in the Synoptics and Luke most of all, are explicitly setting out to record eyewitness accounts of events that took place within their own lifetimes, whose actuality or otherwise would in most cases be fairly easily disprovable were it not true. Here we have the beginnings of recognisable modern historical writing - theologically-interpreted history to be sure, but history nonetheless. C.S. Lewis wrote that, to a scholar of mythology, the resurrection accounts bore none of the hallmarks of myth but stood out very clearly as historical accounts. The Garden of Eden, by contrast, with its talking snake and Trees of Life and of the Knowledge of Good and Evil - quite clearly not standard horticultural varieties - bears all the marks of a mythological-symbolic story of origins, written primarily to convey theological rather than historical truths.

Can God not speak plainly?

Finally, let's deal with the point of whether God is incapable of speaking plainly. Of course he's capable, but that does not mean he always chooses to - look at Jesus' many parables and highly symbolical sayings. And sometimes plain factual statement is not actually the best way to convey what you are trying to say - particularly if you are conveying spiritual truths which are beyond the capabilities of normal human language and experience.

Can a leopard change its spots?

Of course, I need to always be open to the possibility that I may be wrong about all this. I sometimes wonder what it would take to make a dyed-in-the-wool Creationist or Evolutionist change their views - so much has often been invested emotionally in their position that to change would almost be a religious conversion (to a Creationist it would probably feel like apostasy, and might even involve a loss of faith). And I also wonder if Creationists and Evolutionists have such fundamentally, structurally incompatible worldviews that it's often not even possible for them to speak comprehensibly to each other.

Nonetheless, I fervently wish that Christians didn't have to divide and fight over this issue, one on which I believe no-one's salvation need depend. I also wish that in their legitimate concerns over some of the implications of evolution, Creationists did not have to set themselves up - and Christianity by implication - as such easy targets for scornful atheists.

Why I believe Creationists get it wrong part 1 - Science

In the last post I looked at the main non-scientific Creationist objections to evolution - non-scientific because I don't believe the primary reasons most Creationists reject evolution are scientific. Now on to why in my view Creationism is founded on a misunderstanding of Science and (next post) Scripture.

Creationists seem to me to show a fundamental misconception of science, particularly its remit and limits, when they seek to bring God into science to explain the origins of the universe and of life. God can never be invoked as a scientific explanation, mechanism or cause for the simple reason that science deals solely with the natural, and God is super-natural: he stands outside or beyond or above nature, and is not a part of it nor physically discernible within it. Science can of course study God's works within nature, but in so doing it can only focus on their physical aspects and causes; supernatural causes must be excluded. (NB this does not mean that God is not a cause or explanation on a different level and of a different kind to the scientific and natural.)

So the proper subject of science is physical nature, and that nature is a seamless whole; it is not littered with parts that God left behind like an untidy mechanic, nor with unaccountable gaps that require a non-scientific explanation.

It's important to understand that God works invisibly within nature; his actions are not discernible from within nature except by spiritual (i.e. non-scientific) means. So for example we may perfectly validly believe that God 'knits together' babies in their mothers' wombs (Psalm 139:13), but an ultrasound scan will not reveal God tinkering away inside - his knitting-together utilises entirely natural biological processes. Similarly, the Genesis 2:7 description of God forming Adam from the dust of the ground is a powerful metaphor containing a deep truth, but it doesn't mean that if we could go back to the beginning we would be able to see God literally sculpting a human figure out of mud. The Creation accounts in Genesis simply are not, nor could they be, a scientific description of what happened; they are a God's-eye view, or a theologically-illuminated view, not a scientific one.

But what of miracles?

If God's acts are generally natural acts (or performed through natural agency), where does that leave miracle? Well, it partly depends what you mean by 'miracle'. Is it something scientifically impossible, against the laws of nature, or is it something wonderful, unusual, significant - an act of power and perfect timing?

The words the Bible uses tend to fall into the latter category. However, it's clear that many of them - walking on water, turning water into wine, raising the dead etc - do not comply with the normal workings of any current laws of nature as we understand them. These can perhaps best be seen as foretastes - or temporary in-breakings - of God's Kingdom, the renewed heavens and earth, which will have a new nature and new laws, and so presumably (if such pursuits are still relevant) a new science. They are the signs of another world and of a power beyond nature.

In one sense all of God's acts are miraculous; in another, they are all 'natural', or mediated through natural laws, processes and matter. So the Creation of the universe and of life were, in this sense, miraculous acts; in another, they involved entirely natural and scientifically-studiable processes.

Flaws, gaps and anomalies

Creationists and ID-ers can and do usefully contribute to science by pointing out potential flaws, gaps and anomalies in current evolutionary theory and in the evidence for it. But it seems to me that almost their whole case is built on on these gaps and anomalies, which they desperately hope can sustain proof of a young earth and undermine the science of evolution. Mary Schweitzer's discovery of soft tissue in a T. Rex bone; fossils apparently out of sequence in the geological strata - these kinds of examples seem to be the primary materials of 'Creation science'.

But it is a false hope to imagine that these flaws cannot be ironed out, the gaps cannot be filled or the anomalies not be explained without reference to God; that they will somehow topple the vast edifice of evolution. Rather, they provide fruitful areas for new research which time after time leads to new findings which strengthen evolutionary theory (such as with Michael Behe's well-refuted examples of 'irreducible complexity').

Creationists remind me irresistibly of conspiracy theorists, clinging to their minority beliefs not because the evidence justifies it but simply because their worldview demands it.

Speaking of which and going off on a tangent, did you know that there really still is a genuine flat-earth society? Check out http://theflatearthsociety.org. You couldn't make this stuff up.

Now on to part 2 of this post - Scripture...

Tuesday 9 February 2010

Addressing Creationist concerns

This post came out of an email conversation with a Creationist friend. He is a good, kind, patient, thoughtful and intelligent man of faith, as far from Dawkins' stereotype of Creationists as moronic anti-scientific flat-earthers as you could get. I consider his beliefs on evolution/creation to be mistaken, but he raises valid concerns for those like me who seek to reconcile their Christian faith with their acceptance of current evolutionary science. In this and following posts I want to look at these concerns and also why I believe Creationism is fundamentally flawed.

Christians who reject Darwinism usually do so because of a set of theological and philosophical concerns. These concerns are so serious for them that they are unable to brook evolution on any terms, however strong the evidence may be. (I'm not convinced that most Creationists reject evolution initially on the basis of the science - rather,  I suspect they generally construct their science and marshal their evidence after having already philosophically rejected evolution.)

Creationists' main problems with evolution are that, in their view, it:
  1. denies the accuracy of Genesis 1-2 and therefore undermines the whole Bible, which they see as God's perfect and literal Word

  2. denies the historicity of Adam and Eve and the Fall, and so undermines the gospel and our need for salvation

  3. relegates humans from the pinnacle of creation, made in God's image, to technologically-advanced monkeys

  4. replaces God's good and purposive actions with random, meaningless chance and cruel, selfishness-driven processes

  5. renders a divine creator unnecessary and so gives atheism an intellectual backing it would otherwise lack, leading many to stop believing in God

  6. leads inevitably to 'might is right' philosophies, fascism, eugenics etc.
I do not deny the seriousness of these concerns for Christians, but I read them very differently. In my view:
  1. Evolution does not deny the accuracy of Genesis unless you are committed to a particular modernist and literalist way of reading the text (more about this when we get to why I think Creationists are wrong). In my view, Genesis 1-2 was never meant to be read in this way and has not generally been read this way throughout history. I see evolution as quite compatible with the original intentions of the Genesis account, and indeed as quite an obvious reading of it in places.

  2. Similarly, I don't believe that the precise historicity of Adam and Eve was ever the point of Gen 2, or that the eating of a literal forbidden fruit is in any way necessary to the Christian gospel. The language and forms of Gen 2 are, in my view, clearly symbolic and mythopoeic, and the point is to convey a deep spiritual truth about our alienation from God and one another. The need of redemption is in no way removed by a different understanding of the Adam and Eve story. I personally see little need to read Gen 2 as literal history at all, but it's certainly possible to see a genuine neolithic couple behind it, chosen by God as the first 'spiritual' humans.

  3. It does indeed seem that evolution relegates us biologically to the position of upright-walking monkeys. But it all depends on how you understand 'the image of God'. What makes us valuable to God - as I see it - is that he has specially chosen humans and put his spirit in us, his consciousness, the ability to think and choose and to know him in ways that (as far as we can tell) no other animal has, however intelligent. We mirror his image in far deeper and more important ways than our biological natures.

  4. Perhaps the greatest difficulty is to see how the Christian God of love could be behind the violent, selfish competitive processes we see at work in natural selection. However, denial doesn't help - the evidence of prehistoric animal suffering is clearly written into the fossil record. There are a range of possible answers to the dilemma, including downplaying the horror of animal suffering and saying that it's the only way to let morally free beings develop in the universe, and it's all worth it in the end. However, some are starting to suggest that genuine altruism may play a larger part in the mechanics of evolution than has previously been realised, and that primal evil/chaos might be behind most of the selfishness and suffering inherent in natural selection. If evil has been present within creation pretty much from the outset, it simply means that God's redemptive work must also have started then. I admit these are deep and murky waters though (see my post on Why does God allow evil?).

    The other objection is that instead of God's purposive action we have 'blind chance'. But that Darwinian evolution relies on blind chance is a fallacy. Evolution is on the whole a tightly-constrained process of tiny adaptations and incremental accruals, not a series of blind leaps. And I'll look at why this doesn't push God out in the next point.

  5. Evolution is not inherently atheistic, nor does it inherently relegate God to irrelevance. Whatever processes, whatever 'chance' may be involved on the natural side of the equation has nothing to say about what's going on on the supernatural side. Seemingly random events and even purposefully evil creaturely acts can be woven by the supernatural God into his greater purposes (as Joseph says to his brothers who had sold him into slavery, 'You intended to harm me but God intended it for good, to accomplish... the saving of many lives', Gen 50:20).

    Similarly, there's nothing in evolution that denies God if you rightly understand the relations of God, nature and science - something I believe neither the Creationists nor the New Atheists do, which I'll deal with in following posts. Unfortunately evolution has been co-opted by both these extreme positions on the spectrum, but it is this co-option and conflict that damages Christianity, not evolution itself. Sadly I believe well-meaning Creationists have often done more to put people off Christ than evolution itself could ever have done.

  6. Finally, the biological theory of evolution merely describes what happens in nature - it does not provide an imperative or mandate for how we are to behave. The obvious fact that there is competition for survival in nature and that the best-adapted generally do survive to bear offspring has no bearing on how we should live our lives. 
Nonetheless, I am on the whole glad that Creationists raise these concerns which certainly need grappling with.

Next time - why I believe Creationism is based on a set of fundamental misunderstandings of Science and Scripture. Apologies to all my Creationist friends, most of whom are much better people than I am. :-)

Monday 8 February 2010

Why the New Atheists don't get it

It seems to me that the New Atheists - Dawkins, Atkins, Hitchens, and all their other friends whose names disappointingly don't rhyme so well - are no longer classic atheists but anti-theists. Their perfectly reasonable not-believing has transmogrified into a largely irrational positive (or negative?) anti-belief, and they actively and aggressively seek to stamp out belief in God and the supernatural.

The New Atheists are brilliant, best-selling and highly entertaining, but I believe they completely and unfailingly miss the point at all levels. Here's a starter list of why - I'll try and unpack each in later posts if I get time.
  • Dawkins & co utterly fail to understand the religious concepts of 'faith' and 'mystery', mistakenly equating the former with blind belief in the face of evidence and the latter with obfuscation and a reluctance to explore or investigate. No thinking Christian would accept these definitions - I'll need another post to explore what we do mean by them.
  • They fallaciously assume that God is an alternative explanatory hypothesis to scientific theories of evolution, the Big Bang etc. In fact no-one except the New Atheists, the Creationists and their Intelligent Design cousins is trying to bring God into science at all, as to do so is to make a fundamental category error.
  • Following from this, they misapply the Principle of Parsimony (Ockham's Razor) to 'disprove' God because it's simpler to explain the universe without invoking God. (Dawkins also badly misapplies mathematical probability in an attempt to show that God is so improbable as to be impossible.)
  • They believe that if science/reason can find mechanisms or reasons for the universe, humans, consciousness, conscience etc, then God and religion are no longer valid or necessary (as they are merely wrong alternative explanations for these phenomena). In particular, if reason can suggest mechanisms for the evolutionary development of religion itself, this must render it invalid. Logically, these are non-sequiturs, based on a confusion of physical cause with purposeful or personal cause. 
  • Similarly, they are commited to ontological (as opposed to methodological) reductionism, which confuses composition with meaning, failing to understand that the essence of anything is not the same as the sum of its component parts, and that (for example) a disassembled human being is no longer a person but merely a corpse.
  • They fall into the profound and basic error that God is of the same type of being as imaginary mythological creatures such as fairies, goblins and unicorns. If God is God at all, he (apologies for male pronoun) is the Ultimate Reality, the eternal and infinite uncreated source, the Ground of all Being. He is not merely a 'god', simply a part of the created universe; he stands beyond and before and beside all else; 'in him we live and move and have our being'. (In this sense, they are actually right that God does not exist - technically he pre-exists, or super-exists). 
  • The New Atheists are committed a priori to philosophical Materialism - the non-demonstrable presupposition that physical matter/energy is the central and sole reality. They then use this supposition to 'prove' by circular argument that God cannot exist and that any god would either have had to evolve or else be designed in an infinite regression of designed designers. (Incidentally they also fail to recognise that the whole of science is based on the premise of the universe being rationally intelligible, for which there is no scientific basis but which makes perfect sense within a theistic cosmos.) 
  • They are also stuck firmly as fossils in the Modernist weltanschauung, and thus see science as the only valid truth-finding and truth-telling discourse and means of knowing, which supplants and supersedes all others. They therefore reject all other ways of knowing and understanding, such as the relational (the means by which we know people) or the poetic and symbolic (the means by which we understand truths that cannot be expressed in formulas). They also downplay or disallow alternative types of evidence and means of arriving at truth such as those employed in historical and legal discourse.
  • They conveniently (and fallaciously) assume that religious texts must only be taken literally and that all true religious believers must be scriptural literalists - and therefore fools. It's unfortunate they are backed up in this by the very vocal minority of Creationists. 
  • They are at a complete loss to account for religious belief in intelligent people, particularly scientists, falsely assuming that their beliefs must be somehow in spite of their intelligence.
  • They make a very strange and non-demonstrable case that moderate religious belief is what allows religious extremism and fanaticism to flourish - that C of E churchgoers somehow prop up or lead to 'God hates fags' nutcases and suicide bombers (by the same argument, do moderate atheists prop up the extremists who would advocate killing religious believers?). They do not bother to distinguish between different kinds of religion or spirituality, lumping both good and bad, reasonable and ridiculous together as superstitious rubbish. This seems to demonstrate not clarity of analysis but rather lack of understanding.
  • They imagine that morality, meaning, significance, purpose, human dignity and rights, true love and community can all be constructed and sustained perfectly well in the absence of theism / God. Unfortunately, both reason and experiential evidence are against them in this as I'll try and unpack later.
  • They believe that religion can and should be stamped out, failing to recognise that religion is embedded in the human being as deeply as sexuality or the instinct for survival. It's particularly ironic then that the New Atheists are in some ways more deeply religious than many nominal churchgoers! I do not believe it is possible to eradicate religion from humanity even were it demonstrable that it would be desirable to do so. As the old adage has it, the correct response to mis-use is not disuse but right use, and the correct response to the abuse of religion by fundamentalists, terrorists and oppressive religious authorities is for each one of us to use the religious impulse for the common good.
Finally, and this is not an argument against their reasoning but their methods, the New Atheists have often lapsed into such unreasonable ranting aggression and arrogance in their fight against religion that they have sadly come to resemble the religious fundamentalists they deplore. Even if they were right that religion is a delusion and a scourge, their methods and behaviour in trying to rid the world of it would strongly argue to my mind against the goodness and reasonableness of their alternative. Any revolution won by such means merely replaces the old oppressors with new and more deadly ones.