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.
2 comments:
But Greg, science does NOT know how the world works.
Sientists do not know what the "big bang" really was, or how life began, or the basis for human consciousness.
They may in principle never know.
Only by faith in YOUR God, science, can you claim that these questions will be answered.
Your theories are provisional in the most fundamental sense.
Blair, I imagine I agree with you in some respects - but relying on the bible for how the world works would have us still looking for the pillars that support the dome of the sky and the storehouses of snow and hail.
True, we may never know how life began - but we learn a lot about the world as we close in on some of the ways it may have began.
We also learn more about God as we read the bile in light of what we know about the world.
When I advocate science, I am also advocating that we not put on blinders and limit our consclusions to those asnwers that square with how we interpret the bible - historically, we can see that would have led to error after error, both about the world, and about God.
Post a Comment