Sunday, December 17, 2006

Interpreting the Bible in Light of Our Understanding of the World

I have argued before that we should let our growing understanding of the world impact our theology. I'd like to explain what I mean by this. We have always used analogies from the natural world when we try to apprehend God. At the very least, our language is firmly rooted in our understanding of the world (exceptions like "sunrise," springing from a previous cosmology, serve to prove the rule). As we better understand our universe, it is inevitable that we struggle to reconcile the Bible with our day-to-day perceptions of the natural world. When we deal with revelation that claims to disclose information about the natural world, we treat some of that revelation as metaphor, and some as fact - based in part on our knowledge of how things work.

As we learn more about the natural world, we either have to rethink what parts of revelation are fact and what parts metaphor, or risk having the entire revelation rejected as untrustworthy. This is a normal course of events when we reach new scientific insights. For example, Martin Luther (one of the founders of the Protestant movement in the Christian faith), thought that the earth was the center of the universe, based on the then-universal way of interpreting the Bible. This biblical teaching has now been reclassified from fact to historical artifact, and no branch of the Christian faith takes the geocentrism of the Bible "literally," in spite of its impeccable pedigree.

With relentless regularity, science presents us with a better grasp of the natural world, in turn causing us to look at teachings in the Bible and ask, "fact or metaphor?" Some attempt a contrarian position, and argue that the discoveries of science are in error, or even misleading. Some give up, and stop questioning the religious texts, assuming they have nothing to offer, having been wrong about the simple things like cosmology and evolution. Most of us simply suspend judgement, and postpone asking the hard questions.

Still, many folks seem to have a sense of "Other." They are unwilling to inhabit a world of pure physics, chemistry and biology. They sense a pattern in the fabric of their lives not accounted for by the products of science. They experience an intimation of something beyond the mundane world, and find a shared experience with communities of faith spread over the globe and through time.

There are discoveries of science that bolster confidence that there may well be "something more." The sheer overwhelming complexity of life is one such discovery. No simple mechanisms end up accounting for life; each discovery of the "fundamental" building blocks of life seem to give way to yet another, even more fundamental layer (or field or emergent property). Others look at the highly-tuned constants that make life possible, others the shared experience of synchonicities, of meaningful "accidents," others at the very fact of all this order in the midst of such a vast, empty universe. Or perhaps it is more personal for some - a sense of being known by Another, of touching the Divine - a wholly personal lens through which the rest of life is filtered.

Faith cannot yet justify itself to the satisfaction of science. This is in itself a bit perplexing, because, we tend to think, if it cannot be studied scientifically, we are uncomfortable believing it is "real." It is also perplexing because many faiths posit an interventionist God - one who does in fact change things in the natural world, and in ways that should be measurable. And yet, so far, the only measurements are in terms of personal experience - not the conclusions of scientific experiments. It is also perplexing because faith finds itself ceding ground to science, and never the other way around. When the Bible and Galileo came to blows over the position of the earth relative to the sun, it was the interpretation of the Bible that changed, not earth's place in the cosmos.

So I am arguing that we treat science as an extension of our senses and our intellect - and that we use our understanding of the natural world to help us intepret the Bible. God does not ask us to ignore the evidence in front of us when we think about God. We are invited to "Taste and see that the LORD is good" (Psalm 34:8) - to use the evidence of our senses to understand God's goodness. If we believe that God is the driving force behind the Bible, then we also believe that s/he knew the earth circled the sun when he inspired the texts that speak of the earth standing still and the sun moving across the sky. We assume that s/he knew that the earth was billions of years old when he inspired the story of 6 days of creation some 6,000 years ago. We assume s/he understood the intricate web of common descent when s/he spoke of the special creation of the various "kinds." If this is true, then we don't need to fear that we will distort God's message - we could even form, as a working assumption, that God uses the cultural assumptions of the day when discussing the world and how it works - that is, these are shared assumptions that are used to fuel analogies of spiritual matters, not attempts to teach about the natural world. Rather than insist that these views are accurate, we should focus on what message was being taught about God and how we should respond to that teaching.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

More on the Future of Theology

Faith and science are two approaches to understanding how the world works and our place in it. Religion starts from the premise that this information is essentially unknowable (so we have to be told). Science springs from the notion that we can figure it out. It turns out that faith has not done such a good job of explaining how the world works, and science is able to explain the “how,” but is so far silent on the “why” and “so what.”

It is easy to think that religion is the search for meaning, for transcendence – but I think that removes it from the original context of profound ignorance of the way that the natural world worked. I wonder if religion was much more like science to folks who struggled to survive though millennia when the natural world was an impenetrable veil. Religion filled in the “how” questions with spiritual beings, accounts of struggles between rival forces, and natural events synched to how well we obeyed the dictates of the gods. And yes, sometimes transcendence – the notion that there has to be something more than this brief life.

Nowadays, the transcendence part is what is left to religion – though billions still think that their lives are shaped by spiritual forces, and that many (most?) of the events of their lives are somehow influenced by how closely they adhere to the tenants of their faith.

This is in sharp contradistinction to modern science, which paints a picture of natural forces that so far leave no room for manipulation by God or gods. History and sociology answer for the rise and fall of peoples, nations and communities. Psychology, economics, family dynamics and heredity account for personality, and double-blind scientific trials look in vain for a demonstration of the power of prayer – or for that mater, any “spiritual” power.

And yet it is remarkable that we are here – apparently alone at the bottom of a gravity well in what is essentially an empty universe. We find ourselves bound to a spec of dirt, surrounded by light-years of space, inimical to life. We find ourselves the only self-aware beings in this universe. Who are we, that we should end up here, alone and without really understanding how we got here or where we are going?

And we treat each other so poorly – we commit genocide, engage in religious and civil wars, enslave each other, bully and exploit each other, we even find it hard to treat our friends and family with respect and honor for any length of time.

Science seems to suggest that this is what we should expect, given our history. Science seems to suggest that we probably are not alone, but we may be beyond reach of any other life (and so functionally alone). Science seems to suggest that if there is a God or gods, He or She makes no measurable impact in the natural world.

Still, billions of people do think that there is a transcendent part of us. Some part that endures past this life, some part that is tarnished or enhanced by how we live here – and so there is a reason to live up to a set of standards, even if it has little or no payback in this life. We find the idea that some part of us endures worth struggling for, and we find that a faith community keeps us pointed in the right direction.

Religion is in a time of transformation never before experienced. There have been clashes of religion, and conversions from one faith to another – but now we face a time when the very voice of faith is being questioned. Religion used to explain how the natural world functioned – but no longer. Religion used to explain how communities and people should interact – but its authority in this area has been severely eroded – we now feel it important to modify what religion teaches in light of what we have come to know about how people are made.

For example, just 500 years ago in Europe, the Bible would have been seen as the authoritative source for cosmology, geology, the origin of plants and animals, history, ethnography, sociology, psychology; predictive of future history, and descriptive of the future of the earth, nations and your and my soul. Now, at best, it speaks of personal morality (greatly circumscribed by advances in our understanding of biology, sociology and psychology) and a future that has been recast from concrete description of an imminent fate to figurative language largely suggestive of possible outcomes.

So religion is left to speak to us about immaterial things, future things, states only dimly grasped, and then only in imagination. Our exposure to other sects, faiths, cultures, histories have made it difficult to imagine that only we have truth – and on top of this we find we have no objective way to choose between your view of truth and my view of truth.

All the same, religion seems to be alive and well. We treat texts as rich sources of advise on how to live, how to treat one another, and how to shape our mind and character. Religion forms the basis for bedrock identities, and for identifying communities, compatible world-views and political and social agenda. Far more people consider themselves religious that not, and far more people think God exists that think He or She does not.

Is this just a brief flourish of growth before some massive die-back, or does it reflect that a faith position is worked into the human psyche at such a deep level that it will survive the transition from arbiter-of-all-truth to suggester-of-a-life-beyond-our-grasp?

I think faith will survive, because faith is recognition of an ultimate meaning. Most of us seek to understand patterns – it is one of the ways we deal with complexity and the rush of input. We sort, we categorize, retain the significant, dismiss the unimportant. For many of us, faith is what emerges when we sort the “big-picture” category. We experience connection, causality between our actions and how life goes for us, mysterious connections and synchronicities with other people and events that convince us that there is in fact a pattern just beyond our grasp. Often, we find a religion that articulates that pattern in a way that makes sense to us, and we take it on as our own grid by which we orient ourselves to our life, our times and eternity. When that happens, we become a person of faith - something I don't think will stop happening any time soon.

Friday, November 24, 2006

The Future of Theology

For many, many people of faith, revelation is not just a personal matter - the Bible is viewed as revelation from God that is public, accurate and historically verifiable.

As an example, consider the religious conflict between the prophets of the LORD and the prophets of Baal (from 1 Kings 18).

22 Then Elijah said to them, "I am the only one of the LORD's prophets left, but Baal has four hundred and fifty prophets. 23 Get two bulls for us. Let them choose one for themselves, and let them cut it into pieces and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. I will prepare the other bull and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. 24 Then you call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of the LORD. The god who answers by fire—he is God.

The story goes on to show that Baal could not get the fire going, but that the LORD could. I hope that this story makes it clear that religion is not just something that is carried in the heart- and it is the same today - for the large group of religious conservatives the world over, God impacts the natural world in a tangible and powerful way.

You see the difficulty - the conflicts over the age of the earth and the common ancestry of life go right to the heart of what the Bible is, and the kinds of truth it contains. For many conservatives, the Bible contains the inerrant word of God. In this frame of reference, there is no easy way to sort truth statements between literal and figurative, historically / culturally bound and transcendent, or valid for only a brief time and eternally true. To question one part of the Bible is to bring the entire Bible into question.

Science has made people look at religion and faith in God in new ways. Many of the traditional ways of thinking about God predates the scientific revolution, and the traditional conservative approach to faith reflects that.

Before science, the Bible explained not just why the world came into being, but how. It was not only the standard for belief and daily life conduct – is was also viewed as containing accurate information about the natural world. The scientific revolution changed that - and in the process removed a huge swath of influence and power from the religious domain to the secular one. The conservative church is not just protesting that the Bible is right when it describes the natural world - it is also demanding its lost prerogatives be returned (that is, the right of veto power over the laws that are passed, the conclusions that science can reach, and the way day-to-day life is carried out).

Another factor that should not be ignored is the deep-seated anti-intellectual bias of the conservative church in America. Because honestly dealing with the products of science and modern scholarship changes our beliefs about the Bible and the world around us, education is seen as having a negative impact on faith.

Partly, this is because most anyone can read the Bible and take its worlds at an approximation of face value. But once you have studied the Bible in its historical context, listened to the voice of modern textual criticism, and factored in data about the natural world from science, you see the Bible in a new light. For folks who have not gone through that education process, it looks like education strips people of faith, and it is not clear why. Their working assumption is that education is controlled by an anti-god cabal. It is obvious to them that too much education is a bad thing.

Now intellectuals have come along with PhDs and law degrees and engineering degrees, and they say that science and educated opinion actually supports the naive or literal reading of the Bible. This approach is tremendously popular among conservatives, and a great relief. Since the average person did not follow the scientific arguments against a literal view of the Genesis, when some intellectuals defend literalism, this is enough to assure them that conservatism was right all along.

Given this, I do not expect that either a literal view of the Bible, or the popularity of intellectual defenses of that approach to faith will go away anytime soon. Smart conservatives, wanting to defend their literal reading of the Bible, will continue to evolve new responses to anything science can come up with.

What I think the future holds for religion is that there will be an acceleration of the trend to attribute fewer and fewer things to the supernatural. As science understands more about how the natural world works, there will be fewer and fewer places where we know little enough of the process to suggest that God may have done the hard parts. As the picture of God intervening to bridge the limitations of natural causes gives way to plausible mechanisms for natural evolution, God will become, among the educated faithful, the Designer who made the whole thing work.

This is already happened - but it left behind a large number of people who are ignorant of the scientific discoveries of the past few hundred years - and their implications for the natural world, the Bible, and our understanding of God. We face the displeasure of those "left behind," who are unwilling to let go of a supernatural view of the world. This is not only a conservative Christian movement. There are fundamentalists of almost all religions, and even adherents of various "new age" religions who believe that the supernatural (whatever that means to them) is the true motive force behind the world we live in. These groups represent the "rear guard" in a withdrawal from understanding the world in terms of supernatural causation. It will be generations before this group becomes a true minority, and even then only if we are more successful than we have been in educating people about science.

Science literacy then is not just an economic advantage - it becomes a critical public policy tactic in an attempt to prevent a cultural divide over how people understand the world to work. How people view the world impacts how they make decisions, how they face the future, how they interpret current events, and what items are at the top of their agenda for their leaders and elected officials. Pretty important stuff.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

IS ID Creationism?

So this is the rough idea - because Young Earth Creationism (YEC) buys what they call mirco evolution, there is some overlap with evolution. I guess Old Earth Creationism (OEC) gets a bit more overlap, since it buys an old earth, and ID gets even more, since it buys the mechanisms, and even the general idea of evolution. But all brands of creationism ignore the discoveries of science in favor of their interpretation of the Bible.

Here are a couple of quotes I pulled off of the Wikipedia article on ID

Dembski: "Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory," Touchstone Magazine. Volume 12, Issue4: July/August, 1999

Johnson: "I have built an intellectual movement in the universities and churches that we call The Wedge, which is devoted to scholarship and writing that furthers this program of questioning the materialistic basis of science."..."Now the way that I see the logic of our movement going is like this. The first thing you understand is that the Darwinian theory isn't true. It's falsified by all of the evidence and the logic is terrible. When you realize that, the next question that occurs to you is, well, where might you get the truth?"..."I start with John 1:1. In the beginning was the word. In the beginning was intelligence, purpose, and wisdom. The Bible had that right. And the materialist scientists are deluding themselves." Johnson 1999. Reclaiming America for Christ Conference. How the Evolution Debate Can Be Won

I think the answer is yes - ID is an approach to creationism that does not talk about God, evidently in the hopes that it could then be taught in schools.

Of course, some will object that evolution only knows about natural processes - in which case there could be no overlap at all with creationism. So for the sake of the clarity, evolution is only about natural causes, and the overlap is the parts of evolution even creationists grant - no implication that evolution recognizes supernatural causes.

Why does it matter? Because creationism starts from the view that how they read the Bible takes precedence over what we learn about the natural world via science. I am not talking about issues like the existence of God or the meaning of life - those are beyond science, and science cannot prove anything about these subjects one way or the other. Science has made a convincing case for an old earth, common descent, and natural processes at work in the world, resulting in what we see around us.

This poses some challenges for people of faith - but the right response is to face those challenges, not to pretend that science does not exist, or that by claiming something is true, that makes it so.

Monday, November 20, 2006

Does Creationism Honor God?

Creationists are essentially insisting on pretending ignorance about anything that touches a literal interpretation of Genesis. This ignorance allows them to say, "Science has not figured it out - so I could be right - God could have just gone 'poof.'"

The dominant scientific theory is that life emerged spontaneously, and folks are trying to work out how it might have happened. We know more about how that could have happened now than we did 50 years ago, and in 50 more we’ll know even more. We do know enough now that we can say that God did not poof everything into existence 6,000 years ago.

Now we could just say, "Genesis says God did it, so we'll accept this and go work on something else." But creationists say that they don't advocate censorship of science - so it must be OK for scientists to explore how life could have spontaneously developed. Really, you can't have it both ways - either the Bible said it and that settles it (so stop doing research), or scientists can pursue the idea that there is a natural explanation for the origin of life.

The starting point of methodological naturalism, which underlies the scientific method is that there are natural explanations for all observed phenomenon. One of the things that concerns me about the various ID/Creationist positions is that their basic assumption is that a particular interpretation of revelation trumps observation.

Of course, there are a variety of creationist positions, and they differ based on how they interpret the Bible. If they believe that Genesis 1:1 covers a long period of time, then you’ve got old earth creationists. If Genesis 1 refers to 7 24-hour days some 6,000 year ago, you’ve got young earth creationists, and so on. The point is that what is driving the debate is not science (or even an objectivley literal reading of the Bible), but differing interpretations of certain revelations found in the Bible. For the moment, various creationist camps have all joined together to fight science, but logic will tell you that they can’t all be right. Will Wells Unification Church theology win, or will it be Johnson’s old-earth creationism, or Gish’s young-earth approach? Or will ID win out, and with it a syncretistic approach to creation, where anyone’s God can step up and take the credit for creation?

Except for one small fact - just as the storehouses for hail or snow referenced in Job 38:22 are not accurate meteorology, Genesis 1 is not a scientific explanation for the origin of the universe, the earth and life. No science that is constrained by a single sect’s theology can be successful in explaining how the world works. By insisting on injecting private opinion (in the guise of one group's reading of Genesis) into science, what will emerge is bad science – and bad science is ineffective science, wrong science – science that does not work. Fewer discoveries, fewer medical advances, the inability to compete technologically with cultures that do not shackle their scientists – and an inaccurate view of the world that God has made. That is just plain wrong – and does not honor God in any way, shape or form.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Ways Forward in the Faith / Science Dialogue

Are faith and science at an impasse, with faith insisting that it’s view of revelation is the final arbiter of reality, while science refuses to discuss anything that can’t be weighed, measured or tested?

Both faith and science have important contributions to make to our ordinary life. Science makes sense of the natural world, explaining how things work and what the world is made of. This information is used to enhance life, make the world more manageable and extend the reach of our senses. Like any tool, it can also be used to control, and its use can have unexpected consequences.

Faith makes sense of our life experience in the world, explaining why we are here, and our relationship to the world and the people in it. This worldview enhances our life by helping us make sense of our context, our purpose and our future. Like any prescription, it can be divisive and controlling.

Science is an aide to faith because it helps us filter fact from fiction, and provides a means of testing claims that faith makes, especially when it comes to claims about the nature and origin of the world. It also rescues us from a world of caprice and superstition.

Faith can be a useful context for science, suggesting connections and directions for the world and our place in it that are not deducible from strictly material observations.

Faith that is divorced from the real world and how it works slides into superstition and ignorance. Science with no ethical content can become empty materialism. Faith is not the only context for ethics, but it is the source for millions of people.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Creationism Has Become Hate-Speech Disguised as Religion

Follow the tone of the creationist debate, and you realize that it is taking an increasing nasty and divisive direction. James Kennedy, the influential Christian broadcaster, promotes a DVD series entitled “Evolution, the Heart of the Problem.” This is an odd conceit for a minister who surely must believe that sin is the heart of the problem – but the hyperbole makes my point – a natural explanation for human differences and behavior is at the heart of his problem – a direct challenge to the primacy of conservative Christian theology over every aspect of life (political, religious, economic, cultural or scientific).

The book “I don’t have Enough Faith to be an Atheist” asserts that scientists promote evolution, even through they know it is wrong, in order to gain sex, money and power. Of course, it is absurd on the face of it to think that evolution is a vast conspiracy, or that all scientists participate in some grand façade (let alone that scientists are rewarded for their participation in this scheme with sex, money or power). Still, this concept is put forward as a serious answer to the question, “If evolutionary theory is so flawed, why is it still in universal usage?” It is hard to see how any rational person could take this seriously – and yet, many conservative Christians accept this reasoning without question, apparently because it is just what they want to hear.

Scientists are regularly portrayed as part of an anti-God conspiracy, and the teaching of evolution, one of the best documented theories in science, is viewed as a deliberate broadside against the Christian faith.

Why has it become fashionable to deride and denounce science and scientists, and in fact the whole notion of a secular society? I see three main reasons.

First, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the selectively literal approach to Genesis favored by many Christian conservatives. In the light of overwhelming scientific evidence for common descent and a very old universe, their assertions of special creation, a 6,000 year-old earth and a global flood are simply not plausible. Rather than face this fact, these conservatives have taken the offensive, and are attempting to discredit science. Their hope is that in the ensuing ignorance, they can step in and insist we adopt their viewpoint as the only allowable alternative.

Second, increasing secularism is eroding the authority of conservative churches, and resulting in a society that does not mirror the ideal order they envision from their reading of the Bible. Again, science is an obstacle in their path to a Christian society, because it offers explanations for human behavior and alternative social policies not grounded in their particular view of God. By working to eliminate the competition, the hope is that a theocratic state will emerge, in which conservative Christian values are imposed via legislation and self-censorship. We already see these trends in the attempts at inserting Christian dogma into public school science education, the movement for constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, and the ardent desire to outlaw abortion.

Third, this movement underscores conservative Christians’ status as a persecuted minority. These persecuted believers have been given secret knowledge (via their reading of the bible) unavailable to science or reason. They view the broader culture as the playground of the devil, who has ensnared and blinded non-believers (that is, anyone who does not believe like they do). In this scenario, science is the handmaiden of the devil, weakening Christians’ faith in their interpretation of the bible, and providing “intellectual fulfillment” for atheists. Science-as-the-work-of-the-devil validates their self-image as a select group of persecuted saints who alone know the truth, and who will soon be rescued by the hand of God (who will at the same time destroy the earth, along with all unbelievers).

In this view, science is simply a causality in a war to establish a particular, sectarian vision of reality. Because science does not validate that reality, it must be consigned to the same fiery lake as everything that does not serve God. The Kennedy’s and Dobson’s of the world may use this kind of imagery as rhetorical devices to stir up their support base – but a generation raised on this hate speech and empowered by inflows of cash and political will from the far right may well form a modern tribe of Vandals, who take this "trash-secular-culture" rhetoric as literally as their reading of Genesis.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

A Celebration of Ignorance

Creationists want "their side" inserted into science textbooks. However, they have no real interest in teaching school children about actual controversies in science. How do I know? Just look at the subjects they focus on: origins of life, and common descent (evolution). They are totally uninterested in any other area (they'll get to cosmology eventually), because their real goal is to make the classroom safe for their narrow interpretation of Genesis.

The science textbooks take the approach that, after hundreds of years of scientific progress in understanding the natural world in terms of physical processes, there is in every likelihood a natural chain of events leading from non-life to life (even if we never figure it out). After all, the reasoning might go, here we are. Trying to stay clear of a confrontation with a multitude of religious claims, the textbooks do not attempt an analysis of natural versus super-natural causation. What they do teach is the consensus view of our understanding of the natural world (albeit always a few years out-of-date).

The creationists here are coming from a different viewpoint - they already know God "poofed" everything into existence 6,000 years ago, and so reject any claim that a natural chain of events led to life, because they "know" that is not how it was done.

Just as with ID, even if we can't figure out HOW it could have happened, this does not mean that God did it via a supernatural event- it just means that we have not figured it out. So we are back to the classic God-in-the-gaps explanation. YEC-ers argue for gaps in our understanding where they can say, "see, God did it." Inevitably, the gaps reconfigure, and the YEC-ers are forced to say "What I meant was, God did that."

Compare this with geocentrism in Martin Luther's time. The gap was different, but the approach is the same.

Quote:
"Scripture simply says that the moon, the sun, and the stars were placed in the firmament of the heaven, below and above which heaven are the waters... It is likely that the stars are fastened to the firmament like globes of fire, to shed light at night... We Christians must be different from the philosophers in the way we think about the causes of things. And if some are beyond our comprehension like those before us concerning the waters above the heavens, we must believe them rather than wickedly deny them or presumptuously interpret them in conformity with our understanding."

- Martin Luther, Luther's Works. Vol. 1. Lectures on Genesis, ed. Janoslaw Pelikan, Concordia Pub. House, St. Louis, Missouri, 1958, pp. 30, 42, 43.


Martin Luther based his geocentrism on the Bible (just like YECs), he denied the evidence in deference to his interpretation of Scripture (just like YECs), and he was demonstrably wrong (just like the YECs).


The YEC position results in:
  • a celebration ignorance (God acts only where we don't know what happened - as soon as it is explained "scientifically" God disappears from view),
  • discouraging real science (any attempt to demonstrate the "hows" of a gap are seen as part of an anti-God agenda), and
  • distorting our educational system (instead of learning about the world, the classroom is given over to partisan wrangling about the validity of the Genesis account of creation).

So not only do I think the YEC approach is flawed as both an approach to biblical interpretation AND as science; it also shrinks God to fit into a set of ever-diminishing, tawdry gaps.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Dinosaurs and Humans? Oh No!

The belief that dinosaurs and humans could have lived at the same time is an idea that has been kept alive past its time. The evidence for human and dinosaur co-existence seems to be:
  1. Biblical references to behemoth and leviathan, assumed to be actual creatures and dinosaurs,
  2. Literary references to dragons (said dragons assumed to be dinosaurs),
  3. Cave paintings believed to depict dinosaurs contemporary with the humans who drew them, and
  4. Human and dinosaur footprints in the same rock.
Arguing against humans and dinosaur’s having co-existed:
  1. The plants and animals found with dinosaurs are not the same plants and animals found with humans (not even close). No modern plants or animals have been found with dinosaurs, for example, and no plants or animals found with dinosaurs have been found with human remains.
  2. Dinosaurs and humans are not found in the same strata. For example, in Kansas, dinosaurs can be found in the remains of a shallow sea, while people are found in the remains of a vast plain. Note that the biblical references to behemoth and leviathan refer to these creatures as being alive in the author’s lifetime, so they all could not have died off pre-flood.
  3. Unlike other extinct creatures that humans interacted with (the mammoth, for instance), there are no artifacts demonstrating interaction. We have found mammoth bones scored by spears, charred bones of mammoths in trash heaps, carved mammoth tusks, etc. There have been no such finds involving dinosaurs.
  4. Ancients ran across dinosaur fossils as well, and tales of large creatures could easily have come from these bones – just as our dinosaur stories in our popular culture have. Furher, dragons don't actually look or act much like dinosaurs (except that they are both large).
  5. The Bible's references to dinosaurs? There isn't any. The Bible refers to creatures known to the readers - and we have no evidence that dinosaurs lived with people (remember the evidence for human-mammoth interaction - and this is in pre-literate, pre-historic cultures; by the times of the Bible, we are dealing with literate cultures where we would have every reason to expect dinosaurs to show up, just like bears, lions, locusts and a host of other clearly identifiable animals do, in paintings, in literature, in "scientific" treatises, etc.).
  6. The claims of human footprints found in the same rock with dinosaurs have turned out to be made in error. Even a quick Google of the subject puts the claims to rest (sure, some people still support the idea, but there is no substantive evidence - none at all).
Notice how these points have nothing to do with the age of the earth or evolution. Of course, when you place humans and dinosaurs in their proper timeframes (tens of millions of years apart) it is obvious that they never co-existed. When you compare the kind of plants that existed during the reign of the dinosaurs with the vegetation human's evolved around, it is clear that a large span of time separates us from dinosaurs. Even setting these arguments aside, however, there is simply no basis on which to conclude that humans and dinosaurs ever met face-to-face.

There is a big difference between explaining how something could be true, and actually looking at the evidence we have, and concluding it actually IS true. You can believe that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time only if you look at a small sub-section of the evidence, and present that sub-section in the best possible light. Look at all the evidence, and subject that evidence to critical thinking, and you realize that people and dinosaurs never met.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

What Do We Mean by Special Creation?

Special Creation is the term creationists use when they want to say that God created the world, and everything in it, pretty much the way we see it today. Further, they contend that He created it all at once, bypassing the natural processes and mechanisms we see at work around us in the universe. So while we see proto-stars, this is not how God made the current stars, though we see material from which planets will form, and material left over from planets that have formed, this is not how God made the planet we are on. Though we have discovered vast plates on which all the surface of the earth rides, these had nothing to do with the formation of the land masses we now see. Though we see evolution at work every day, evolution is not the process through which the diversity of life developed. It is true that some creationists recognize that natural forces are at work in the world, and ascribe trivial changes to them - but creationism ascribes the vast majority of the natural world to a 6 day stretch of time during which everything simply came to be.

Is there any scientific support for the idea of special creation? That is, can the facts we observe about the natural world be reconciled with the idea of a recent (6,000 year) earth, brought into existence over a 6-day period of time? The simple and best answer is no. At every level you look at it, the account of creation in Genesis 1 does not stand up as a "scientific" explanation of how the world was created. For me at least, this does not mean that it is not true - it is a declaration of freedom from bondage to the elemental forces thought to rule the earth - not a scientific explanation of the earth's construction.

It turns out that creation is a metaphor for processes that were not understood at the time, and for which people had neither the world-view, technology or even vocabulary to comprehend. And like all metaphors, it breaks down when you push it to the level of detail required to see the world as it is.

Take the opening sentence "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." When we contemplate these words, we most likely think of the familiar picture of a blue earth resting in vast space. This is not what the original hearers imaged at all - they pictured a vast sea, on which the earth, plate-like, rested on pillars. More pillars supported a dome of sky, and above that, the heavens - the place where God literally dwelt. Below the earth was a place of danger and chaos, where the dead went. The entire world was centered on the middle east, and Australia, North and South America did ot exist. Even much of Asia, India and Europe were unknown, or the merest fables. Ships kept close to the shore for fear of getting lost or eaten by monsters, women and children were property, slaves were a natural part of everyday life, and the world was ruled by powerful and unseen forces, investing all of nature with supernatural menace - capricious gods and spirits who had to be placated at every turn. This is the world pictured by the hearers of Genesis 1.

And where do we live now? In a world with 10,000 species of micro-organisms in a GRAM of soil. In a world where there are 350,000 species of beetle, where we can see the evidence of the slow shift of continents, and find the fossils of - not just strange creatures who have gone extinct- but entire ecosystems (plant and animal) who have developed and died out not just once or twice, but over and over during the 4.5 billion year history of the planet. Seas have formed and dried up, only to be replaced by plains, mountains have thrust seabeds into the sky, entire mountain ranges have been washed into the oceans - not once, but many times. We are not just related to the other apes - we share something like 98% of our DNA with them.

Yes life is wonderful and amazingly complex, and yes, there are still things we have not figured out - but one thing we have figured out is that we were not created 6,000 years ago from the dust of the earth.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

If not us, then who?

While we are all living our lives with a "it could never happen here" philosophy, people are moving into the vacuums created by our non-involvement.

No one around to demand integrity and accountability in politics? The unscrupulous and opportunistic step into their niches.

No one willing to preach the gospel of Christ, knowing what it will do to their TV ratings and "free-will" offerings? Tell people what they want to hear - appeal to their vanity, their pride, their weaknesses, their fears, their prejudices.

No one around to insist that capitalism be balanced with compassion and concern for 'the commons?" Corporations take it as their duty to maximize profit - no matter what it does to people, society or the environment.

We drop duty, service, mercy from our personal values? People get ahead by being selfish and self-serving, and entire industries arise to help them along.

We humans have a remarkable ability to shape our environment - and the shape of that environment determines the behaviors required to succeed. We create and strengthen our environments by every action we take – which is why character matters, and why mercy and compassion matters, and what gives meaning to duty and sacrifice and service.

If not us, then who?

Monday, August 21, 2006

Can A Christian Color Outside the Lines?

Have you read Acts 1:9 where Luke writes about Jesus' ascension into heaven:

"After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight."

Do we think that heaven is up in the air, above the dome of the sky? The disciples seemed to think so.

Do we think that heaven is anywhere in this physical realm at all?

If heaven is not "away beyond the blue," then why did Jesus travel up a few hundred feet in the air, and then disappear behind a cloud? And where did he go? And why couldn't he have just gone there from right on the ground?

Of course, it is fine to say that there may be things about heaven we do not understand (surely we understand little or nothing) - but we can be fairly certain that heaven is located in no physical place that we can see, or reach, or locate on a map or celestial chart. In any event, we can be pretty certain that heaven is in no place that required Jesus to lift up off the ground and disappear behind a cloud.

So why did he do it? Is there a sense of theater here, playing to the expectations of the disciples? Is Jesus meaning to teach something about the location of heaven, or is he underscoring that that is indeed where he was headed? Certainly the disciples would have seen this as an unambiguous act by Jesus - literally ascending into heaven. The creeds affirm as much. It certainly cannot mean the same thing to us - we've seen what is "up there" and it is space and a planetary system and very distant stars.

So yes, science can make us take a new look at the Bible - and it "makes us look" whether we want to or not. We do not read the bible or experience the world in the same way Abraham or Moses or John or Paul did. We cannot make it otherwise - except by imposing ignorance through the process of demolishing science. This is just what well-meaning people do when they insist that matters of faith be taught as if they were scientifically demonstrated facts. When any heartfelt belief can be legislated into science, then science is in danger of losing its essential character, and truth becomes a word meaning only the opinion promoted most forcefully.

In the name of piety, there certainly are those who are taking an axe to the tree of science. They will be shocked to discover that what grows up is a crop of weeds - all claiming to be beautiful flowers of truth. Let's hope that someone is always around to stop such senseless vandalism - and let's resolve to be that someone.

Saturday, August 05, 2006

“Proving” God's Power and Might

I believe the driving force behind "creation science" and Intelligent Design is the desire to demonstrate, in concrete terms, that God exists and impacts the natural world.

From the faith position, the argument goes something like this (I am generalizing about many evangelical and conservative Christians -I realize that this does not represent the experience or beliefs of all people of faith):

A large number of people believe in God. They base this belief on a combination of personal experience and revelation. We have books that claim to contain the words and acts of God. We have subjective experiences that we believe are the result of God interacting with us. We observe effects in our life and in the social, political and natural world that we attribute to the activities of God.

From these experiences and observations, we come to believe that God has a tangible impact on our lives and the workings of the world. By tangible impact, we mean measurable, noticeable - that God is potent and effective. Isaiah 55:10-11:
quote:
10 As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,

11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

The success of science in the past few hundred years has been to describe how the world works without reference to God (not in denial of God, but reflecting the understanding that supernatural intervention is not needed for all natural processes so far identified). So far, no cause-and-effect has been demonstrated to depend on God, and no experiments have been successful in detecting God's activities.

To be sure, there are many, many stories of things happening that are attributed to God - healings, recoveries, fortuitous happenings, incredible coincidences, chains of events leading to results that people feel can only be the action of God - but so far, no way to demonstrate that belief in the laboratory or in the field to a "scientific" level of proof.

This stands in stark contrast to the success of science in understanding how the natural world works.

The "creation science" and ID movement is an attempt to rectify this imbalance by demonstrating the power and effectiveness of God in terms that cannot be denied. So far, this attempt has not been successful. This has resulted in some people of faith "declaring victory" anyway, and trying to convince the rest of the world that areas of uncertainly, complexity and debate represent the genuine activity of God. The world's response has been skeptical.

For now, it seems that the kind of hard proof people of faith are looking for is not forthcoming. It makes sense to keep looking - but integrity demands that we be up front about how the search is going - full of confidence and faith, yes, but declaring victory - not yet.

Of course, there is another approach - to consider the possiblity that the world that science uncovers is the world God has made. God may not be detectable via science because what science reveals is what God does - all of it. In ways that we obviously do not understand, perhaps God makes his will known though what we perceive to be the natural processes we experience everyday. If this is true, then we will never (or always) find God via science. This does not make science any less useful, but it can make science less threatening.

Friday, August 04, 2006

Science and Religion Both Faith-Based?

Do scientists who accept evolution have equivalent a priori assumptions (old earth, evolution, common ancestor etc.) that causes them to process all facts through a filter that can yield only support for their assumption? That is, are YEC and evolution two faith-based competing theories?

I do not think so, because there are many, many independent lines of evidence that do not make sense in a YEC interpretation of Genesis, but do make sense in the context of evolution and common descent. And of course, this is how the theory developed. A YEC scientist (Darwin) went out and looked around, and realized what the facts he observed led to - evolution. After some rather contentious debate, other scientists came to the same conclusions. Years later, thousands of scientists recognize that evolution makes sense of the facts, whereas special creation does not. Some of these facts include the geological column and the fossils indexed to them, psuedogenes, broken genes, junk DNA, greater similarity correlating with shared ancestry, etc. etc.

So you have evolution emerging from the systematic observation of facts about the world, and the YEC approach coming from an assumption about how to interpret Genesis 1.

While science does not have anything to say about the existence of God, it does have things to say about things that have and have not happened in the natural world. When your confidence in God is tied to the accuracy of statements about the natural world contained in books of revelation, then science is in the uncomfortable position of “disproving” some possible interpretations of that revelation (Genesis can’t be both "true in a scientific sense" and teach that the world is 6,000 years old, for instance, if science is a reliable guide to nature).

Unfortunately for creationists, criticism of our evolution is not the same thing as defending the Genesis account of creation. It may be that mutation and natural selection are not the only forces acting on species to cause evolution. This just means that the theory will get better over time – that there is more to learn. While the theory of evolution will change and grow, there is no reason to expect that the evidence will suddenly start pointing to special creation, a global flood, and a young earth.

None of this rules out the possibility that God designed the universe, especially if He did it in some way that is beyond our detection – and in a way that also preserves the true random nature of the cosmos. This is a position that cannot be proved or disproved by science – two people look at the same facts, some see God, some see chance.

So faith and science two faith assumptions? Christians challenged to believe the Bible or believe science? I don’t think so. Do the findings of science challenge our beliefs? Of course. All Christians used to believe that the Bible taught geocentrism – today, YEC-ers argue strongly that the Bible teaches no such thing. The reason everyone agrees on this point is because scientists demonstrated a fact about the world (heliocentrism) that no one can successfully dispute. Like it or not, we have to test our interpretations of revelation against our real world experience. Science is a tool that magnifies and strengthens our ability to think accurately about our world. And that is all it does – but that is quite a lot.

Monday, July 31, 2006

So What is Wrong With ID?

I have a few objections to ID. These include:

ID is an interventionist theology, that states that God MUST miraculously intervene to do the "hard parts." By this I mean that ID in general agrees that some evolution has taken place, but that certain things (e.g. species, major organs (like the eye), the bacterial flagellum) represent too much complexity to have evolved. So God, in some unspecified and unknowable way intervened in the process of evolution and added the missing information. This is not my view of how God acted in creation, based on the evidence so far - so I am not an advocate. It also specifically EXCLUDES my theistic evolution approach *which essentially states that science is uncovering how God made the world). Id differ from young earth creationism only in that ID accepts far more of evolution and grants a much longer time frame for life on earth than those folks who think that Genesis 1 accurately describes creation events.

The whole movement is driven by a prior commitment that we know, based on our interpretation of the Bible, better than the evidence of the natural world. Though ID claims to be agnostic about the Designer, both Behe and Dembowski have admitted that they think the designer is the Christian God. The only reason to remove "god talk" is the hope that it will then stand up to constitutional challenge. ID has not made its case, so we are jumping the gun, and asserting things contrary to fact, when we advance the ID idea.

I also think that most of the furor over ID has been whipped up under false pretenses. Conservative Christians have been told that "mainstream science" promotes atheism. This is not true (though there are scientists - both Christian and atheist - who do claim that science supports their beliefs). Science is the most successful tool we have to explore the natural world. Because it has not turned up evidence of the existence of God (something it was not ever designed to do), it is now being made to suffer accusations of being anti-Christian.

Yes, there are cultural, moral and ethical issues we need to face. Yes, scientists (just like pastors, lawyers, politicians, plumbers, etc.) have a variety of personal views - some we embrace, some we reject. Science is being singled out for attack because it speaks with authority about issues that touch on the validity and accuracy of the Bible. ID is an attempt at a scientific case, but in spite of claims to the contrary, it has not yet made its case. Will ID be able to support its claims? Time will tell - and we should give it all the time it needs (however long that turns out to be), not rush it, half-baked, to the table, and then insist that it be the star of the banquet.

Sunday, July 02, 2006

Science and the Art of Biblical Interpretation

I've written lots about what I am against, so what am I arguing for?

First, that the natural world is a continuum with revelation. What I mean by this is that the natural world is like a “fossil” of truth – it provides an accurate picture of what has come before.

An example? The world really is 4.5 Billion years old. Why do we know this? Multiple dating methods converge on this date, using independent properties of matter.

The implication? When Genesis describes creation, it is not describing the events in any sort of scientific manner. This would have come to a surprise to the original hearers, to believers during the life of Jesus, even to early scientists like Isaac Newton.

So how can I justify ignoring the plain meaning of the text? Well, because the plain meaning is not suported by any evidence - none. Not just in the timing of creation (6, 24-hour days), but also in the order of creation (light, day and night before the creation of the sun, for example).

One objection is that this is how God decided to do it; it was a miracle, and one of the (unintentional? unavoidable?) fallouts is that the scientific evidence points in a different direction (old earth), but the Bible sets us straight (young earth). This objection is unassailable – this could be the truth. But when I consider the odd situation that puts us in – the truth (young earth) is of no help to us (for example, flood geology is useless in finding oil), and the scientific “lie” (old earth) proves very accurate and useful information (a good way to find oil) - I am not satisfied with this explanation.

Is this kind of dualism really Biblical? For spiritual purposes, we believe in a young earth, but when we want to have an accurate model of the earth and how it works, we have to resort to the lie of an old earth?

I suppose the same can be said of evolution. In spite of all the hype, no evidence actually exists that disproves evolution, and no support for special creation can be found. What is left is personal disbelief that evolution can work. But inability to believe is not compelling, especially when you follow the evidence, and find that all the claims made to have disproven evolution turn out to be mistaken or worse, fraudulent.

So does that mean that science stands in judgment over the Bible? For me at least, not really. I view science as a natural extension of our curiosity about, and knowledge of, the world. We understand the world in a very different way than did the original hearers of the various books of the Bible. We do not believe in geocentrism. We do believe in the germ theory of disease. From Augustine to Galileo, the church taught that no one lived on the opposite side of the world (the antipodes), because Christ’s message could not have reached them. We now know that in fact people did live there, even before the time of Noah.

God, however, would not have been unaware of any of this. A clear implication is that God spoke to people in terms of their local cultural understandings and expectations. It turns out that the Bible is not a science textbook; God uses the language and experience of the people he is dealing with to communicate to them – how could he do otherwise?

It is true that this opens up sections of the Bible to interpretation; what in the Bible is cultural, and what transcends culture? This is a question that we must, and do discuss (consider the issues of multiple wives, slavery and the role of women to name just a few issues where our modern approach differs from the world found in the New Testament). It is naïve to pretend that we do not reinterpret the Bible for our time and culture. Even literalists have to explain away the order of creation in Genesis and the geocentrism of Joshua; so the question is not IF, but HOW to intepret the Bible. I believe that we must let our understanding of the natural world play a role in our approach to Biblical interpretation.

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Science Versus the Bible?

When we discover that the natural world is different than the picture we expect from our reading of the Bible (for example, geocentrism) do we suspend our thought processes, or hold both the Biblical narrative and the discoveries of science in tension?

Some try and resolve the conflict with creationism, whereby “science-like” explanations for “literal” readings are used in an attempt to justify a pre-determined attitude toward the text. This approach is the very opposite of science, because a determination of what the text means has been made before any facts are checked. For example, the existence of a global flood in 2,500 bc is inferred from the text, and facts are winnowed for support, no matter how the evidence actually falls out. Even in the face of clear evidence that the case for the flood is full of omissions, distortions and manipulation, this prior commitment to the meaning of the text is maintained IN SPITE of the evidence.

Some reasons why we know the Bible is not to be taken literally:
1. Genesis 1 does not describe creation in anything like a “natural” order. For example, light is made before the sun, and day and night are separate creations, independent of light and the sun. Green plants precede the creation of the sun, and the stars are called by name (though they are virtually infinite in number).
2. Explanations of events like the lengthening of the day in Joshua are incorrect, representing a cultural understanding of the causes of day (the sun moving across the sky, Jesus rising up into the clouds on his way to heaven, etc.).
3. The Bible itself represents a consensus, based on hundreds of years of conflict over theology (see Arius, Athanasius, Pelagius, etc.). Even now, there is not unanimity about the cannon between the three major branches of Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant), let alone other traditions. This does not mean that the Bible is not inspired, but it does mean we have to appreciate the human process used to assemble, recognize and preserve the Bible. These same human processes are reflected in the content of individual books – which in fact reflect the cultural assumptions of the authors and audience of the various books.
4. We do not have original manuscripts on which to base an inerrant, infallible approach to the Bible. The earliest partial manuscript dates to over a hundred years after the events recorded, and there are irresolvable textual problems that prevent us from recreating an “original” manuscript (for example, we have 4 endings of Mark, and doubt that any of them is the original). This does not mean that the Bible is not reliable – just that it is not inerrant or infallible, at least as concerns the manuscripts we have. The evidence for this is in the public domain (just Google, and skip past all the spin.

As a result, I think it is clear that the Bible cannot be taken as literally true as regards the natural world (6,24 hour days of creation, day and night created before the sun, global flood about 2,500 years bc, the notion that stopping the sun would cause the day to be longer, etc.). The Bible reflects the cultural assumptions of the age in which it was written. We have to keep this in mind when we read and interpret the Bible. As a result, we have to recognize that the Bible does not teach science. Instead, it communicates spiritual truths in the context of the cultural beliefs of the author and original audience.

This does not mean that all historical details are inaccurate – just that the Bible’s authority does not rest on its containing a modern, scientific understanding of the world. Accurate understandings of the world can be used as part of the interpretation process. For example, Genesis 1 should not be viewed as literal history. We only know this because science has demonstrated that the order, timing and cause-and-effect relationships between various elements of the creation story in Genesis is not accurate. When the accuracy of certain historical claims are crucial (for example, Moses’ existence or Jesus resurrection) certainty can be based on other foundations than the claim of an inerrant, infallible Bible.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

The Long and Short of Biblical Literalism

Some people have been having trouble knowing just what to take literally in the Bible, and what can safely be explained away. For example, the story about the sun standing still in Joshua DOES NOT teach geocentrism. But Genesis 1 DOES teach a literal 6, 24 hour day creation. How can you tell them apart? Well, you can't. That is why you need good Bible teachers (cause you'd never figure it out on your own).

I guess the moral is, take the Bible at its word, except when you need to reinterpret it. If you don't keep its literal meaning (except when you have to change it), then it will lose its authority. Except when Catholics interpret the Bible - good conservatives don't hold with those Popes. Or Protestants who don't reach the same conclusions we do. And don't get me started on Orthodox Christians. Where did all these churches come from, anyway?

You see, we can't have any interpretation going on, except when WE say it is OK. And when it is OK, we'll let you know - because you sure can't tell by looking at the passages. Its tricky - two passages can seem to be historical recitations of facts, but one needs to be interpreted, and the other must be treated as literal truth.

Only we can tell you which is which (and don't ask us how we know, it is a spiritual thing - you just know, if you are us). And those Church Fathers - they don't know what they are doing either, except when they agree with us. In fact, this is how we know the interpretation is right - we agree with it. Those other Christians in the past 1900 years - you just can't trust them. Stick with us, we'll tell you when to interpret, how to interpret, and who you can trust (mostly just us, and if it comes right down to it, me and not them).

Saturday, May 27, 2006

Faith in A Scientific World

The past few hundred years has witnessed a sea-change in the way we think about the world. Science, not theology is accepted as the final arbiter on everything from the power of prayer to the age of the earth. This would have been unthinkable to the vast majority of folks even 300 years ago. True, the YEC camp has to fall back on an alternative science to justify their positions - but the point is, they don't just say "it was a miracle" and leave it at that - no, they go to amazing lengths to argue that THEY have the 'true science" and the more accurate view of the world. In other words, they grant the primacy of science when it comes to the natural world.

Most religions record interactions between gods and people. Gods are revealed to change history, perform miracles and dwell in the heavens (or some such place) - which were viewed not as extra-dimensional or outside of space and time, but as PART of the natural order - albeit generally inaccessible. All the same, Orpheus went into Hades, and John had visions of heaven - which are portrayed as actual, physical places.

The point is, we are transitioning from a worldview in which God built the universe, populated it, and physically inhabits it, to a vague notion of God as Spirit, but no longer actually living in the same physical universe with us. Yes, we discuss God as being present in Spirit with us - but the notion that God, who is part of the Universe, extends that presence via his Spirit is quite different than the notion that God is somehow outside space and time, with no natural properties at all, yet somehow interacts with us via spirit, which itself has no natural properties at all - but still has the power to impact us in undetectable (that is, purely subjective) ways via an unknowable mechanism.

Do we need to update our theology (in the classic sense of knowledge about God) to take into account what we now know about the universe?

Monday, April 17, 2006

4 Thoughts About the Faith / Science Dialouge

First, the religious discussions (here, and in the broader cultural context) have been hijacked by a group who, while claiming to represent "authentic" Christianity, actually represent a narrow and narrow-minded subset of Christian faith and practice. As has been noted before, the church (in space and time) has had a variety of approaches to Genesis 1 - and it is neither accurate nor honest to dismiss them in favor of one group's vociferous insistence that they alone know the truth. Geisler's "either/or" logic is an attempt to capture the entire "biblical" faith perspective for literalism. Though it is fine for literalists to think they are right, the plain truth is that folks we will meet in heaven, folks who have defended and helped define what we know as historic Christianity, helped define the very contents of the Bible, the historic creeds (and even the "founding fathers" of fundamentalism) held beliefs that differ from this modern group of literalists.

Second. There is overwhelming evidence that the earth is old and that that the we evolved from a common ancestor. These facts have to be taken into account when we interpret scripture, in the same way that we use what we know about the world when we read (for example) Isaiah 55:12:

You will go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands.

We recognize that this is poetic, because we know trees do not have hands. Likewise, we know that Genesis 1 does not refer to 6, 24 hour days, because we have learned that the earth is billions of years old, and was not created in the order listed. An alien might think, reading Isaiah, that trees "obviously" had hands, and could clap. Only knowledge about life on earth could set it straight. Likewise, our knowledge about the age of the earth lets us know that Genesis is meant as poetry, not science (not false – Isaiah 55 is true, just not literal, as is Genesis 1).

Third. What is driving the "teach the controversy" movement is an a prior commitment to what is and is not "literal" in the bible. The fear seems to be that if some parts of the bible are not taken literally, then no part will be. This is not true, as demonstrated by the fact that Christians have survived the demise of the divine rights of kings to rule, and the notion that the earth was at the center of the universe. Both were thought to be undoubtedly true, based on a literal reading of the Bible, but somehow Christians have survived the switch in thinking. Likewise, Christians can survive this change in thinking as well.

Fourth. It is of no value to your relationship with God to believe things that are not true. All the time people spend on defending the obvious falsehoods presented by young earth creationism would be much better spent dealing with the world the way it really is, and seeking to address genuine problems that we face (take your pick, justice, morality, human suffering, coming ecological catastrophes).

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Creationism Doesn't Belong in the Science Classroom

There is a measurable, meaningful difference between evolution and creationism. This difference justifies excluding creationism (in any of its wedge or Trojan horse variations) from being inserted into the public school science classroom.

Evolution is a mainstay of scientific thought. 300,000+ articles have been published in science journals keyed to the word evolution in the last 15 years, in comparison to a handful of ID review articles (containing no research). Evolution is a well-established, accepted theory, used every day by scientists all over the world. Contrast folks who graduate with a geology degree from a creationist college, who have to use old earth models of geology to find oil, and who admit that they are not able to use anything they learned at school, as it does not correspond with reality.

Compare the success of evolution in explaining the world with creationism, which offers no coherent theory, no reseach program, no facts - only apologetics, criticism of evolution, and a belief that it must be true because that is the way creationists read the bible. These are not competing ideas that deserve equal time. One explains the world around us, the other confounds our understanding by telling us that the clear facts we observe in nature are wrong.

All the pressure to insert "critical analysis" of evolution into public school classrooms comes from creationism camps, and parents & politicians who have been told by their religious leaders that this is an important issue. Especially telling is that calls for critical analysis in science are limited strictly to those items that contradict YEC claims (with the exception of geocentrism - I guess they have conceded on that one). What about controversies in areas that the Bible does not address? They aren't interested.

As a result, there is no scientific or educational value to teaching a creationism perspective on scientific controversy, since it is strictly an apologetics tool, intended to justify YEC theology.

What is worse, there is no legal or logical reason to limit the discussion to creationist talking points - so we are opening the door to astrology (as ID proponent Behe noted in the Dover trial) and any other form of religious belief being certified as science, as long as there are enough members of the local or state school board to insert it into the curriculum. This will result in children getting the clear message that all truth (even about the natural world) is a mater of personal conviction, based not on evidence, but on what religious leaders say must be true. This is a giant step back in knowledge, and presages a return to superstition, ignorance and fear as we lose our grasp on our understanding of the natural world.

Monday, April 03, 2006

Is Evolution Really The Problem?

From Dr. Kennedy's website:
Dr. Kennedy and The Coral Ridge Hour examine the bitter fruit of Darwin's theory that man evolved from matter. This broad-ranging DVD, Evolution: The Root of the Problem shows that Darwin's idea has unleashed horror—bringing death to millions through movements it fostered, such as Nazism and Communism. In America, Darwinism has displaced moral absolutes with moral anarchy in our courts and schools. Evolution: The Root of the Problem features a powerful message from Dr. Kennedy and five in-depth Coral Ridge Hour report.

There is a perceived link between science and atheism, because science provides natural explanations of the world, and seems to leave God out of the equation.

The argument then goes, if God is not needed to explain the world, he can be safely excluded from other parts of life- like religion.

With religion out of the picture, people no longer follow the moral rules laid out in the Bible.

By not following these rules, the argument goes, society falls apart.

Is this really something that can be laid at the feet of evolution? I seem to recall reading in 1 & 2 Kings that Isreal's society fell apart every other generation or so, and at no time was evolution part of the landscape.

At the same time, there is no doubt that accepting special creation is every bit a huge as the realization that the earth is not the center of the universe (the Copernican revolution). Theologians have always explained where people came from - that is, until scientists started investigating the world around them, and discovered that it was somewhat different from they way the Bible described it. Now there are two voices competing for attention - a religious voice, and a secular voice. And they are asking compelling questions.

On what underlying principle do we set up rules to guide us: the principle that we were created by God and so are answerable to him? Or the principle that we "just happened" and so are answerable to no one? This is a great question, but it is not connected to the truth of evolution.

I happen to think that the dichotomy is a false one - and one that faith is bound to lose, if it insists on asking its followers to believe things that are not true as the basic premise of their argument. We do share a common ancestor with other apes. Evolution does happen, and the earth is billions of years old. These are facts that we have to face, and we ought to be dealing with reality, not fighting it in the name of truth.

Thursday, March 30, 2006

Do you have to be a literalist to be Christian?

Because most of the science / evolution debate centers around the notion that a literal reading of the Bible is the only correct view, I though it might be interesting to look at ways that the bible is viewed that are not literal, but folks who are both closer to Jesus in time, and undoubtedly Christian. Here are some quotes from various Church Fathers (these folks predate the Catholic church,and helped define what we think of as the basics of the faith). Then there are some quotes from early Fundamentalists (these folks got the movement started), and even CS Lewis. None of them are Biblical Literalists (of the 6 24 hour days persuasion).

I am not trying to say that you can't be a literalist - just that many prominent people in the faith did not seem to think that being a Christian required biblical literalism.

Here are a couple of church fathers who thought that scripture required that the days of creation be 1,000 years long.

Justin Martyr:“For as Adam was told that in the [d]ay [h]e ate of the tree he would die, we know that he did not complete a thousand years. We have perceived, moreover, that the expression, 'The day of the Lord is as a thousand years,' is connected with this subject.”(Dialog with Typho the Jew chapter 81 [AD 155])
“And there are some, again, who relegate the death of Adam to the thousandth year; for since "a day of the Lord is as a thousand years," he did not overstep the thousand years, but died within them, thus bearing out the sentence of his sin.”(Against Heresies, 5:23 [AD 189])

St. Cyprian of Carthage:
“As the first seven days in the divine arrangement containing seven thousand of years, as the seven spirits and seven angels which stand and go in and out before the face of God, and the seven-branched lamp in the tabernacle of witness, and the seven golden candlesticks in the Apocalypse, and the seven columns in Solomon upon which Wisdom built her house l so here also the number seven of the brethren, embracing, in the quantity of their number, the seven churches, as likewise in the first book of Kings we read that the barren hath borne seven”(Treatises 11:11 [A.D. 250])

And Origin does not seem to found of the literal interpretation:
“…We answered to the best of our ability this objection to God's "commanding this first, second, and third thing to be created," when we quoted the words, "He said, and it was done; He commanded, and all things stood fast;" remarking that the immediate Creator, and, as it were, very Maker of the world was the Word, the Son of God; while the Father of the Word, by commanding His own Son--the Word--to create the world, is primarily Creator. And with regard to the creation of the light upon the first day, and of the firmament upon the second, and of the gathering together of the waters that are under the heaven into their several reservoirs on the third (the earth thus causing to sprout forth those (fruits) which are under the control of nature alone, and of the (great) lights and stars upon the fourth, and of aquatic animals upon the fifth, and of land animals and man upon the sixth, we have treated to the best of our ability in our notes upon Genesis, as well as in the foregoing pages, when we found fault with those who, taking the words in their apparent signification, said that the time of six days was occupied in the creation of the world, and quoted the words: "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens."(Against Celus 6:60 [AD 248])

Here is Clement of Alexandria:
““That, then, we may be taught that the world was originated, and not suppose that God made it in time, prophecy adds: "This is the book of the generation: also of the things in them, when they were created in the day that God made heaven and earth." For the expression "when they were created" intimates an indefinite and dateless production. But the expression "in the day that God made," that is, in and by which God made "all things," and "without which not even one thing was made," points out the activity exerted by the Son. As David says, "This is the day which the Lord hath made; let us be glad and rejoice in it; " that is, in consequence of the knowledge imparted by Him, let us celebrate the divine festival; for the Word that throws light on things hidden, and by whom each created thing came into life and being, is called day. “(Miscellanies 6.16 [208 AD])

St. Augustine:
“But simultaneously with time the world was made, if in the world's creation change and motion were created, as seems evident from the order of the first six or seven days. For in these days the morning and evening are counted, until, on the sixth day, all things which God then made were finished, and on the seventh the rest of God was mysteriously and sublimely signalized. What kind of days these were it is extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!”(City of God 11:6 [AD 419])

And from this web page, some early Fundamentalists from the 19th century:

By the very early 1900s, even conservative theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary acknowledged to varying degrees:
a) the lengthy history of the earth,b) the transmutation of species by evolution, and even,c) an evolutionary past for the human physical form.

Such theologians included B.B. Warfield, the famous Presbyterian inerrantist, whose famed defense of Scriptural inerrancy and plenary verbal inspiration was published in the Princeton Review (1881), and republished since then (B.B. Warfield and Hodge, A.A., Inspiration. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), and who continues to be highly regarded among conservative Protestants.

Even when the twelve-volume series, The Fundamentals (an interdenominational work that spearheaded this century's "fundamentalist" movement), was published between 1910 and 1915, it contained the cautiously pro-evolution stances of conservative Christian theologians like George Frederick Wright, R.A. Torrey, and James Orr. (It was only in the eighth collection of The Fundamentals that the previous cautious advocacy of evolution was matched by two decisively and aggressively anti-Darwin statements, one by someone who remained anonymous and another by the relatively unknown Henry Beach, both of whom lacked the theological and scientific standing of the senior evangelicals already mentioned.)

Reverend Orr, one of the more renowned contributors to The Fundamentals, was a theologian of the United Free Church College in Glasgow and widely respected as an apologist for Evangelicalism, but expressed doubts as to how literal, Genesis, chapter 3, ought to be taken: "I do not enter into the question of how we are to interpret the third chapter of Genesis -- whether as history or allegory or myth, or most probably of all, as old tradition clothed in oriental allegorical dress..." [James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World (1897), p. 185, see also p. 447]

Evangelical Christian apologist, C. S. Lewis, admitted he was not disturbed by the thought of Genesis being "...derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical" [C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (London: Collins, Fontana Books, 1958), p. 93]. "We read in Genesis (2:7) that God formed man of the dust and breathed life into him. For all the first writer knew of it, this passage might merely illustrate the survival, even in a truly creational story, of the Pagan inability to conceive true Creation, the savage, pictorial tendency to imagine God making things 'out of' something as the potter or the carpenter does." [Lewis' essay, "Scripture," in Reflections on the Psalms] Lewis found more truth in the story of the "Garden of Eden" when he regard it as a myth than as history. [See, Michael J. Christensen, C. S. Lewis on Scripture: His Thoughts on the Nature of Biblical Inspiration, The Role of Revelation and the Question of Inerrancy (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1979), pp. 34-35)]

Evangelical Christian theologian, Henri Blocher, wrote: "The style [of Genesis chapter 3] is lively and picturesque; the pictures take shape spontaneously in the reader's mind. The Lord God takes on a human form: we see him mold clay, breathe into man's nostrils, walk in the garden when the breeze gets up and make for the guilty couple better clothes than their improvised cloths. There is a dream-like garden with strange trees and a cunning animal who opens a conversation; you could believe you were in one of those artless legends, one of those timeless stories which are the fascination of fokelore..." [Henri Blocher, In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis (InterVarsity Press, 1984)]

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Is Science a Religion?

The idea that the world can be explained by natural processes is not a metaphysical assumption, opposed by the theist position that only God makes sense of the world. It is the way that science works.

Imagine for a moment a science experiment designed to test if God gave you a cold to improve your character... go ahead and try... I can't either. This does not deny that God could have given you a cold to improve your character - just that there is no scientific way to test the assertion. Further, from a scientific point of view, the pious notion that "the cold is from God" adds nothing to the germ theory of disease, or the search for the virus responsible, or the search for a cure.

It is the same for other areas of science. Its silence about the existence of God is an artifact of the scientific approach - not a metaphysical bias. In fact, adding a "proper theological perspective" in which you only consider possibilities that are supported by your reading of the bible would ruin science, because what you end up with is apologetics (justify faith, not explaining the natural world).

Science is not reigion. Its main fault in the eyes of conservative Christians is that it has failed to validate their theology - for which it is hardly to blame.

Is Science True? II

Is our exploration of the natural world a reliable avenue towards uncovering truth?

Judging by our success at explaining the world around us (eclipses are natural events), the root of diseases (viral, bacterial, mental and genetic), and the fabric of the universe (matter breaks down into verified components of fantastical properties), I'd have to say that science is, indeed, a reliable avenue towards truth.

And so would everyone who does not still fear that elementals cause storms, earthquakes and eclipses, everyone who does not live in fear of spirits, and pray that they spare their children, their crops, themselves from sickness and disease, everyone who knows that the world is a reliable place, and not at the command of alchemists, sorcerers, magicians and capricious spirits, who can bend the very earth to their will.

The reason that we face the world with confidence is because of the work of science. It was science who discovered the roots of disease, the regular motions of the stars and planets, and the physical laws governing matter.

Of course, many of us do leave in fear – fear of the stars, of god's wrath, of bad luck. But even this is within the context of an implicit trust in technology – like cars and planes and telephones – that are founded on faith in the truths we have discovered about the natural world.

Are there any limitations to this amazing tool?

Yes, and they strike at the heart of who we are, why we are here, and what other forces inhabit the universe with us. If we cannot formulate an explanation for what we see happening, predict (in both a negative and positive sense) what should happen based on those expectations, and then carry out experiments (and not just us, but anyone who wants to verify the results), then the tool fails us.

So no proofs about the existence or lack of gods, the supernatural, the afterlife. Not because science is hostile to faith, but because God is invisible to science - by definition.

So when you look at science and ask only, "Does it support my religious faith?" you may wonder why science does not endorse religion - this is why; it can't. When you look at the complexity of the universe, you may wonder why scientists don't just give up and admit that God did it - this is why; it isn't that it is a wrong answer; but it isn't the RIGHT KIND of answer.

When you look at science from the perspective of the quest for understanding the universe, "God did it" is an unsatisfactory answer - because the scientist is asking a different question - "How did it happen?" And as an answer, "God did it" is not nearly specific enough.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Is Science True?

In science, truth = facts that fit into a coherent explanation. This is not a claim for ultimate Truth – it is a claim that we can know accurate things about the natural world, and that from that knowledge we can develop coherent explanations that, when not falsified by evidence, form reliable models of reality.

The explanations do change, and they are sometimes contiguous with previous explanations, sometimes not.

From a metaphysics standpoint, we can never know if we have Truth, or just an explanation that is consistent with all known facts. This is why science cannot deal with the supernatural - there is no way to detect the supernatural, only its effects on the natural world. ID is an attempt to infer a designer from complicated structures in the natural world. When it is defining rules for complex things, and where these rules can be tests and falsified, it is doing science. When it is criticizing evolutionary theory, and proposing tests that could falsify evolution, it is doing science. When it is claiming that complications equal design, it is engaging in metaphysical speculation that may be tru, but is not science.

Is there a God? From a scientific perspective, we don't know.

Is the world 6,000 years old? From a scientific perspective, all facts say no, but science can't rule out some form of "last Thursdayism" - that some designer just made it to look old.

Does evolution work such that it explains observed development of anti-biotic resistance? It seems so, but again, it is possible that some designer has set things up so this is just an illusion - and science cannot detect this.

Did this designer actually design the "hard parts" of evolution, and let nature take its course on the rest? At best, all we can say, should we identify some such hard part, is "we don't know."

On what basis could we resolve this difficulty? The only answer I am aware of is an appeal to authority. For example, in John 1, John states that Jesus created everything. Now it is not clear to me if by this is meant Theistic Evolution, Intelligent Design, or Old or Young-earth Creationism, or something else we haven't figured out yet.

As this is an appeal to authority, it is not a valid logical argument. This does not make it untrue, just not propositionally compelling.

ID takes the bull by the horns, and argues that "We can see no way it could have happened using current evolutionary theory" means "It is reasonable to infer a Designer." Of course, Christians then reasonably (to their mind) infer the God of the Bible is the Designer.

This leaves the debate to 2 questions:
1) Has the ID movement provided a hypothesis that accounts for all the facts (recall that Einstein's equations had to work for all the situations where Newton’s would work, plus solve some where Newton’s broke down), and performed experiments that would falsify their deign hypothesis?
2) In the meantime, does "We don't know" actually infer "a designer did it?"


So far, I would say "No" to the first question, and "No" to the second as well.