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5. What is the problem?
So if the arguments of the creationists are nonsense why am I worrying about them? My pastor and my wife have had a conversation where they expressed wonderment that I have a problem. The problem is as Dilbert above discovers as you “look down” in contemplating your faith you can realise how tenuous your grip is. I had been confronted with my view of objective reality being at odds with my faith. Clearly I could do as many other Christians and ignore the cognitive dissonance, which I had managed to do for 30 odd years. Examples of American fundamentalist oddities include: The fact that at the Arkansas trial to get equal time in the school science curriculum for creationist ideas the creationists demonstrated their complete lack of understanding . Calling Chandra Wickramsingh as a witness on their behalf, Wickramsingh and Hoyle (his co-creator of the idea that life had extraterrestrial origins) are noted atheists and he explained on the witness stand that he believed that life was a natural process of the universe – just not on Earth; or the prize own goal was when one of their own testified to believing in UFO’s as Satan’s messengers. These had once been a source of amusement at the stupidity of the gullible followers of a sort of cult. But I had not been confronted with MY denomination/doctrinal persuasion taking a stand I could not accept. So this demanded that I look at what I really believe and how do I believe it. Confronted with this conflict I started to dig into the basis of my faith and the basis of my scientific understanding of the universe and how certain and knowable God is. The creationist line, which had ultimately caused my quest, was that the Bible is literally true. (I accept that that is not just a view of the creationists. However the creationist meaning of literally true does not seem to allow for symbolism, analogy or even idiom in a Biblical narrative. Literal means literal.) That in order for the Gospel to make sense Adam had to be a literal person who was the first man the ancestor of all people. This is required, so they say, to accommodate the statements in Romans that as death came through one man Adam and life through Jesus Christ Adam has to be as real as Jesus. It then follows, in creationist logic that the world can only be as old as Archbishop Usher said it was through his analysis of the ages of the patriarchs and the earliest men. We then conclude that the fossils we find must be the result of the Noachian flood and that this must have been worldwide to create them because there is no other event to explain the existence of fossils. Although the argument starts with the statement in Genesis that the flood covered the whole earth being interpreted as worldwide the need now, for the creationists, is to demonstrate that the Bible is corroborated by the physical evidence. The problem is that the evidence of a global flood is not there and creationists have been guilty of ignoring, fudging and lying about the evidence. For an account of someone who, unlike me, had grown up and been educated by the creationists look at Glenn Morton’s website where he describes how he discovered the problems with the stuff the Institute for Creation Research had taught him. His site is currently at www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk covers a wide range of topics including his testimony where he describes how he found out how shallow and false the creationists teachings were on geology (his specialism). One of the main lines of attack from creationists against the idea of an old earth is to rubbish the reliability of radioactive dating. In Ken Ham’s presentation he took delight in describing how one layer of rock older than one below it according to the radioactive dating techniques applied. What he doesn’t tell the audience is how much the dates are out and just how this fits into the overall picture because if he did it would reveal his economy with the truth. Ham is the acknowledged leader of the creationist spin machine and he is a very accomplished propagandist. In fact if you search the annals of the ICR you find a paper that deals with the discrepant ages of two outcrops of rock in the Grand Canyon the dating of the lower (older?) rock being 1 billion years and the higher being 1.3 billion years. Two points to note 1) the actual observations are not cited by Ham, so you cannot even check the ICR account from Ken Ham’s statements, 2) we are talking 30% here not a million percent. In fact 30% error where the starting conditions are not known or well controlled in an experiment is pretty good and certainly not grounds for rejection of the theory. Ham also fails to mention the hundreds of agreeing observations from the same area. Also when you find out that to get the data for the ICR paper they took observations from several non-creationist papers to get their “data” so it is not first hand and it is filtered to present the worst case they can construct. Even so unless they hide the details there is no way they can construct a case for radioactive dating being anything but an accurate representation of the age of the rocks and ultimately of the earth. [See Appendix B for more details on why radioactive dating is correct.] My observation was that there is a certain amount of economy with the truth if not downright lying on the part of the creationist propaganda machine. Why? William Jennings Bryan (the leading creationist at the time of the Scopes trial) believed in the day age theory (the idea that the “days” in Genesis 1 are really very long periods of time) but felt that if the masses believed anything but six twenty four hour days then the Gospel would lose ground and be compromised (R. L. Numbers 43-44). In fact he accepted evolution as having happened for the animals up to man. So here is the start of the problem. If the Bible is literally true about the age of the Earth how come there is so much evidence that it is older and how come it is felt, by proponents of young earth biblical literalism, that to concede a point about the age of the earth or that there is evidence of change in and between species would compromise the position of the Bible? Sometime in the early searching around for answers I looked at Mormon apologetics and discovered very similar, if not identical, approaches to dealing with the problem of no evidence. In the Mormon case there is the problem of archaeological evidence of the migration of the ten lost tribes into the Americas. Initially when this was seen as a problem as archaeology unearthed evidence of Native American culture and activity the Mormons started their own archaeological research. Their faith said that there must be evidence of a civilisation descended from the ten lost tribes. The book of Mormon described it and the angel Moroni had revealed the plates buried in the ground to Joseph Smith. So to confirm their faith they started excavating. This rapidly became counterproductive as the archaeologists dug up the wrong evidence. So they manufactured stories to keep the faithful, faithful. At one time they had a fictitious couple digging in South America finding fictitious evidence of the lost tribes. The Institute for Creation Research no longer does research of its own. The parallel to me was obvious, that in face of a lack of any real arguments they had retreated into a fantasy world in which their own “science” is reviewed not for its scientific consistency and ability to explain the world, but for its doctrinal purity. So here is another aspect of the problem, are the beliefs of my church any more real than the Mormons? Could the only difference be that the Christians have been around longer? So I looked at what a real scientist, who is a Christian, had to say. Roger Berry is a Christian and an eminent biologist. He believes in the Bible as much as, if not more than, evolution. In his book “God & the Biologist” he describes his reconciliation of the issues of a long period of development of life on Earth and his belief in the God of the Bible. Berry sees Adam as a peasant farmer somewhere in ancient Mesopotamia. God reveals himself to Adam and then sets him the test of ignoring the trees with fruit. The problem this highlights is: in what way Adam can be held accountable for the whole human race? How does the story of Eve coming from Adam’s rib have meaning if human’s were around and breeding before them? What do the fruits mean anyway as trees that dispense fruits made of concepts seem a bit mythical not to mention the talking serpent! The trees at the centre of the creation story are a good example of the mythical properties of Genesis 1-3 if not Genesis 1-8(to include Noah) and maybe even Abraham. Given that one of the trees is labelled “The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” why were Adam and Eve condemned if, not having eaten the fruit so far, they didn’t know the difference between good and evil? Adam is condemned because Eve was duped, by a streetwise talking snake, into taking the fruit. But if Eve had no experience of life how was she supposed to cope? What about Adam? He too has lived in idyllic innocence, according to the literal reading of the story, since his creation how is he meant to analyse the situation and apply leadership? Berkhof [17] speculates that the fruits were perfectly ordinary fruits (e.g. date or fig)[17 p222] and the constraint set by God was the thing that conferred the “Knowledge of Good and Evil” property. This does not work however since the other tree was The Tree of Life. One does not get eternal life from figs. So if Adam had picked from the other tree what would have happened? Would God have had to confer eternal life because he ate a fig instead of a date, and what would have happened with the knowledge of good and evil and sin? Would the punishment of death have been averted even with the sin? This is the implication of God’s decision to eject man from the garden. So the trees are not declared to be ordinary fruit with special properties conferred by their status but they were magical trees. Of course the easiest explanation is that this whole story is a myth a sort of just-so story. That way there is no conflict with the problem of how one man represents all of us or how the universe was or was not created in a week. Just like the elephant getting his trunk the incidentals like the fact the snake talks is just one of those bits you accept like the idea of a snail walking into a pub in a joke. It only happens in the story the problem lies with you if you take it too seriously. However the point is this that in accepting the evidence of an old earth and the concept of evolution – even theistic evolution. We have to ask how the Garden of Eden Story fits the facts for it to be anything other than just another creation myth. Gene Roddenberry once said, "We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." To summarise I was faced with either a magical creation which left many unanswered questions or a long period natural creation which did not fit with the Genesis account. Maybe Adam was a farmer in what is now modern Turkey but then his experience of God and his view of creation do not correspond to anything I can relate to today. If he did have the experience of God that the Bible claims how do I know it wasn’t just a shamanistic trance that he or someone else recorded, given that the information is no more than an ancient Turkish farmer would have known about cosmology. The simplest interpretation is still that Adam, Eve and the Garden are myths produced to explain the fact that life is short and hard especially for a subsistence farming community 4000 or so years ago and it was never intended to be more than a campfire story. Maybe this is a good point to introduce another problem I have the Oh-that-doesn’t-mean-that problem. This problem arises when a reasonably literal reading of a text that appears to be meant to be read as it stands, i.e. its not as far as you can see an idiom or symbolic, is declared to not mean that because it conflicts with the orthodox view of theology. An example would be Jesus cursing the fig tree, which reads like Jesus is acting in a fit of pique. Or what about Jephtha recorded as a man of faith in Hebrews 11 but who offered and executed his daughter as a human sacrifice. This was after God had said to Abraham that there was to be no more human sacrifice. Hebrews does not explain why Jephtha gets his honourable mention in the list of people who have shown exceptional faith. Maybe he is one who just believed that if you are sincere you are right. The incongruous entry for Jephtha was noted by Martin Gardner in his book Did Adam and Eve have navels? The story in Judges of how Jephtha made a promise to God to sacrifice the first thing that came to greet him from his house if he succeeded in defeating his enemies has always seemed odd. Jephtha was met by his daughter. Instead of considering his rashness and throwing himself on God’s mercy he allows a brief stay of execution and then sacrifices her. Even though, one presumes he knew, God had outlawed human sacrifice. The really awful bit is that he is commended for this in Hebrews as a man of faith. It is inconsistencies like this that lead me to conclude that Bible is no more inspired than any other book.
So the problem is – or was – how do I reconcile the the Bible with the real world as it appears in an objective analysis? Particularly given the problem of reconciling the Bible with itself, as in the case of Jephtha, as more of these issues appeared and refused to be ignored as they had in previous, more credulous, times. As my scepticism grew so did the problems the Bible and its apologists would have to solve. |