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.

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.

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.