Part II. Why do some Christians oppose evolution? My experience suggests that both sides of the creation-evolution debate are too busy hurling ad hominim insults to really listen to the rationale of the other side. As someone who is on both side, I don't have this problem. I am a conservative (actually I prefer the term traditional) Christian and a working scientist (just do a PubMed search for Pruett, SB if you don't believe me). Therefore, I have a perspective on this issue that is not available to most people. I hope I will be able to explain to my scientific colleagues why there are real and valid concerns that drive opposition to evolution as well as some mistaken notions. I will summarize both.
Valid concerns exist about evolution and particularly about the way it is taught to students (who are compelled to be in school and in a relatively powerless position as compared to teachers). Thomas Huxley is responsible for some of them. What did scientists think would be the response when the first and most vocal champion of Darwin not only supported his science, but also waged a very public campaign to convince everyone that Darwin's theory disproved the Biblical account of creation and eliminated any need for God as an explanation of the origin of human beings? Since Huxley many prominent scientists and educators have filled this role. As far as I can determine, the idea that evolution is anti-religious did not originate with religious people, but with Huxley and his intellectual descendents. Of course, assigning the blame to someone other than religious people still does not establish that they have any valid reason for concern about evolution. Their valid concern is that many schools, not knowing precisely how to interpret various court rulings over the year, opt for an approach that would lead anyone learning only what was offered to believe in a totally materialistic (and also impersonal, cold, and uncaring) universe. We have moved from inappropriate forced exposure of students to religion to inappropriate forced exposure to a philosophical position that is at its core anti-religious. I know that evolution can be taught in a way that is sensitive to the beliefs of students and does not antagonize. However, having spent much of my life in higher education, I can assure you that science educators at all levels are not taught how to do this. Those who do it figure it out for themselves and do it because it seems right to them. Most people I know who teach evolution at the university level take particular joy in annoying religious students and express an openly condescending attitude. This is inexcusable, and scientists should be the ones who complain about it. If all scientists and educators treated people of faith with respect, I believe the wind would quickly disappear from the creation science and intelligent design sails. Of course doing this would have the additional advantage that it would reflect the objective truth that nothing in science disproves God, and that belief can be held without any logical inconsistencies or irrationality. Scientists who doubt this should simply spend a little more time reading and trying to understand the other side.
What then is the fault of which the religious side, particularly the conservative religious side, is guilty? To be concise, it is not just a literal interpretation of the first two chapters of Genesis, but a very particular and disputable literal interpretation. By way of disclosure, I believe in the authority and accuracy of the Bible. I believe it is all true. Web sites that trumpet all the "inconsistencies" that disprove the Bible are not worthy of serious consideration, because the Bible must be interpreted more literally than the most fundamental fundamentalist to derive these "contradictions". There are a few real contadictions, which most traditional Christians believe are due to transcription errors. However, there is objective evidence that such errors are very rare. The oldest manuscripts of the Bible from a variety of sources are remarkable in their essential consistency. Traditional Christians like myself have problems with the idea that the Bible is just another book, that whole sections are not true, or if true are not to be taken literally. The embarrassment about literal interpretation that is common among liberal theologians stems, I believe, mostly from embarrassment about accounts of supernatural events in the Bible. I believe their embarrassment is misplaced. The supernatural forms the basis of the only philosophical construct in which religion has any advantage over materialism. If nature is all that exists, then human beings can be nothing more than complex machines with no meaning, purpose, or hope of any existence beyond death. In spite of trying for over 3000 years, some of the most brilliant people who ever lived have not been able to derive from scratch a rational basis for meaning and purpose. A God who is beyond nature and controls nature (is not simply controlled by it) is the only rational reference point sufficient to provide meaning. As creator and sustainer of the universe, if He says human beings have value, that is sufficient to give them intrinsic value. Otherwise, we are just a complex bag of molecules. Therefore, the supernatural character of God is necessary, if He is to provide meaning and function as anything more than a robot controlled by nature. Of course, supernatural events must be exceedingly rare, or science would not work. Since it does work well (although not always, as any experimental biologist will tell you), supernatural events must be rare. But science cannot prove that they do not occur. If we select which parts of the Bible we will believe based primarily on whether we find them scientifically or historically supported, we would have to ignore most of it. This does not mean it is factually in error, but there is very little archeological evidence that directly applies, and it (as all scientific endeavors) remains in flux. The Jesus Seminar uses marbles to vote on which passages in the New Testament represent the real words or teachings or actions of Jesus. Their "scholarship" has been well and truly debunked by Luke Timothy Johnson in "The Real Jesus". Traditional and Conservative Christians believe that picking and choosing which parts of the Bible are reliable or believable takes away the power of all of it. Jesus asked people to commit their lives to Him. If we cannot be sure which of his statements in the Bible are correct, then we are unlikely to make any type of committment to Him. Thus, traditional Christians tend to have a take it all or leave it all attitude about the Bible.
Unfortunately, this adherence to the Bible and a preference for interpreting it literally seems to somehow lead to the idea that it is possible and even necessary to fully and precisely understand every passage. At least I see this as a major fault in conservative Christianity in America today. The Bible itself and the Apostle who wrote most of the New Testament (Paul) clearly indicate that none of us will ever understand all spiritual things. Another Apostle (Peter) pointed out that the writings of Paul were hard to understand (II Peter 3:15-16). The Bible cautions against disputes about matters of lesser importance, such as geneologies, which are often abbreviated in different ways in different parts of the Old Testament and thus are open to various interpretations. Different views of the relative importance of the sovereignty of God and the free will of man in salvation have been disputed vigorously for hundreds of year by some of the best minds in the world, and no consensus has emerged. I would contend that this does not just suggest, but conclusively demonstrates that the Bible itself does not provide sufficient information to definitively demonstrate which view is correct. This is one of many examples of issues about which reasonable people who believe the Bible is entirely true and is authoritative can disagree. However, recognizing such issues and refusing to allow them to cause divisions seems to be exceedingly difficult. The temptation to take a firm position and then to exclude or belittle those who disagree seems overpowering. The web site of the organization "Answers in Genesis" provides some of the clearest examples. This organization insists that the first 2 chapters of Genesis are to be taken absolutely literally and that the days in Chapter one can only be 24 hour days. When asked why the same word used for day in Chapter 1 (yom in Hebrew) is used to mean an era or age in Chapter 2, they say it always means 24 hours when a number is associated with it. Personally I doubt they have scoured ancient Hebrew texts to determine if this is true. Even if it is true that this is usually or even almost always the case, it remains possible that Genesis 1 is an exception. Nothing in the recognized meaning and usage of the word itself precludes it from being an age. However, they have some rather interesting things to say about people who do not choose to agree with them about the 24 hour days: "This is one more example of the duplicity of atheistic anti-creationists—using the churchian compromisers much as Lenin used ‘useful idiots’ in the West to unwittingly undermine their own foundations." So we "churchian compromisers" who do not accept every nuance of the rigid interpretation of Genesis offered by the leaders of this organization are useful idiots in the hands of atheistic anti-creationists.
Of course, these same leaders have done exactly the same thing in their interpretations of several passages such as, " 30 Tremble before Him, all the earth. Yea, the earth is established, it shall not be moved " (II Chronicles 16:30). They, like virtually everyone else do not insist on a literal interpretion this verse and several other like it, because it would be blatantly irrational to do so in light of the overwhelming objective evidence for the physical movement of the earth. Thus, they find it agreeable to regard "it shall not be moved" as a figurative or metaphorical statement. The evidence that earth is exceedingly old that its development into its present form was a long slow process is similarly overwhelming. Several different independent methods from cosmology (which demonstrates that light from objects billions of light-years away has arrived here demonstrating that the universe is at least billions of years old) to ratios of radioactive isotopes (which decay at a constant and known rate, thus allowing time to be estimated based on ratios mesaured in objects), to dendrochronology. The last method is simply counting tree rings both from live and dead trees obtained as part of ancient structures. Dendochronology agrees very nicely with radiocarbon dating and in particular locations it can be used to date objects back to 10,000 years before present. This is considerably more than the total age of the earth favored by Answers in Genesis (AiG) of 6,000 years. This method does not suffer any of the objections raised by AiG about radioisotope methods (which are themselves easily refuted and simply in error). The use of evidence from the creation to learn about God and by extension to properly understand how to interpret scripture is not precluded and is in fact supported in the Bible ("The heavens declare the glory of God; and the expanse proclaims His handiwork", Psalms 19:1). It is not a compromise of any kind to do so.
Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis in and of themselves, without any reference to scientific evidence for an old earth, suggest that they are not intended to be taken completely literally and that they certainly were not intended as a scientific or sequential historical account. The sequence of events in Chapters 1 and 2 are not entirely consistent if they are interpreted literally and in the most direct and straighforwards way. The AiG web site offers an attempt at rconciling this difference, but it is not compelling. In addition, Genesis describes plants growing without sunlight and days (which AiG insists are always 24 hr) that occurred before the creation of the sun. I believe the events described in Genesis correspond in some way to real events. However, we just do not know enough to understand exactly what is intended. The differing sequence of events in Chapters 1 and 2 can be resolved to my satisfaction only by assuming that these are not both (and perhaps not either) intended as a literal, sequential account of creation. With regard to their spiritual implications, interpreting these passages as figurative i some way or simply deciding that they were not intended to relate to us a scientific or literal historical description of creation changes nothing. The fact that God created is not changed. All of the principles about the nature of God and man are intact. The AiG web site has articles indicating that evolution could not have been used for creation because God declared during creation that each of the groups of animals or plants was good as created. However, evolution is essentially a trial and error process. On the contrary, it is certainly feasible that God's reference to the goodness of creation was that it would fulfill his plans and lead to human beings and an ecological system that could support them. I am not a theologian, and I have been concerned that maybe my ignorance of the Hebrew language and culture has caused me to be unable to interpret the Old Testament properly. However, an interview last year by an Associated Press reporter with Kenneth A. Mathews, professor of Old Testament at Alabama's Beeson Divinity School and Kentucky's Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a real theologian expressed his interpretation that the first Chapter of Genesis was not intended as a chronological history. Southern Baptists are known for their strict adherence to the inerrancy of scripture. Therefore, this interpretation cannot be reasonably regarded as "liberal" or "compromising".
Coming next-Consequences of the Evolutionary Wars for Believers and for Scientists
Valid concerns exist about evolution and particularly about the way it is taught to students (who are compelled to be in school and in a relatively powerless position as compared to teachers). Thomas Huxley is responsible for some of them. What did scientists think would be the response when the first and most vocal champion of Darwin not only supported his science, but also waged a very public campaign to convince everyone that Darwin's theory disproved the Biblical account of creation and eliminated any need for God as an explanation of the origin of human beings? Since Huxley many prominent scientists and educators have filled this role. As far as I can determine, the idea that evolution is anti-religious did not originate with religious people, but with Huxley and his intellectual descendents. Of course, assigning the blame to someone other than religious people still does not establish that they have any valid reason for concern about evolution. Their valid concern is that many schools, not knowing precisely how to interpret various court rulings over the year, opt for an approach that would lead anyone learning only what was offered to believe in a totally materialistic (and also impersonal, cold, and uncaring) universe. We have moved from inappropriate forced exposure of students to religion to inappropriate forced exposure to a philosophical position that is at its core anti-religious. I know that evolution can be taught in a way that is sensitive to the beliefs of students and does not antagonize. However, having spent much of my life in higher education, I can assure you that science educators at all levels are not taught how to do this. Those who do it figure it out for themselves and do it because it seems right to them. Most people I know who teach evolution at the university level take particular joy in annoying religious students and express an openly condescending attitude. This is inexcusable, and scientists should be the ones who complain about it. If all scientists and educators treated people of faith with respect, I believe the wind would quickly disappear from the creation science and intelligent design sails. Of course doing this would have the additional advantage that it would reflect the objective truth that nothing in science disproves God, and that belief can be held without any logical inconsistencies or irrationality. Scientists who doubt this should simply spend a little more time reading and trying to understand the other side.
What then is the fault of which the religious side, particularly the conservative religious side, is guilty? To be concise, it is not just a literal interpretation of the first two chapters of Genesis, but a very particular and disputable literal interpretation. By way of disclosure, I believe in the authority and accuracy of the Bible. I believe it is all true. Web sites that trumpet all the "inconsistencies" that disprove the Bible are not worthy of serious consideration, because the Bible must be interpreted more literally than the most fundamental fundamentalist to derive these "contradictions". There are a few real contadictions, which most traditional Christians believe are due to transcription errors. However, there is objective evidence that such errors are very rare. The oldest manuscripts of the Bible from a variety of sources are remarkable in their essential consistency. Traditional Christians like myself have problems with the idea that the Bible is just another book, that whole sections are not true, or if true are not to be taken literally. The embarrassment about literal interpretation that is common among liberal theologians stems, I believe, mostly from embarrassment about accounts of supernatural events in the Bible. I believe their embarrassment is misplaced. The supernatural forms the basis of the only philosophical construct in which religion has any advantage over materialism. If nature is all that exists, then human beings can be nothing more than complex machines with no meaning, purpose, or hope of any existence beyond death. In spite of trying for over 3000 years, some of the most brilliant people who ever lived have not been able to derive from scratch a rational basis for meaning and purpose. A God who is beyond nature and controls nature (is not simply controlled by it) is the only rational reference point sufficient to provide meaning. As creator and sustainer of the universe, if He says human beings have value, that is sufficient to give them intrinsic value. Otherwise, we are just a complex bag of molecules. Therefore, the supernatural character of God is necessary, if He is to provide meaning and function as anything more than a robot controlled by nature. Of course, supernatural events must be exceedingly rare, or science would not work. Since it does work well (although not always, as any experimental biologist will tell you), supernatural events must be rare. But science cannot prove that they do not occur. If we select which parts of the Bible we will believe based primarily on whether we find them scientifically or historically supported, we would have to ignore most of it. This does not mean it is factually in error, but there is very little archeological evidence that directly applies, and it (as all scientific endeavors) remains in flux. The Jesus Seminar uses marbles to vote on which passages in the New Testament represent the real words or teachings or actions of Jesus. Their "scholarship" has been well and truly debunked by Luke Timothy Johnson in "The Real Jesus". Traditional and Conservative Christians believe that picking and choosing which parts of the Bible are reliable or believable takes away the power of all of it. Jesus asked people to commit their lives to Him. If we cannot be sure which of his statements in the Bible are correct, then we are unlikely to make any type of committment to Him. Thus, traditional Christians tend to have a take it all or leave it all attitude about the Bible.
Unfortunately, this adherence to the Bible and a preference for interpreting it literally seems to somehow lead to the idea that it is possible and even necessary to fully and precisely understand every passage. At least I see this as a major fault in conservative Christianity in America today. The Bible itself and the Apostle who wrote most of the New Testament (Paul) clearly indicate that none of us will ever understand all spiritual things. Another Apostle (Peter) pointed out that the writings of Paul were hard to understand (II Peter 3:15-16). The Bible cautions against disputes about matters of lesser importance, such as geneologies, which are often abbreviated in different ways in different parts of the Old Testament and thus are open to various interpretations. Different views of the relative importance of the sovereignty of God and the free will of man in salvation have been disputed vigorously for hundreds of year by some of the best minds in the world, and no consensus has emerged. I would contend that this does not just suggest, but conclusively demonstrates that the Bible itself does not provide sufficient information to definitively demonstrate which view is correct. This is one of many examples of issues about which reasonable people who believe the Bible is entirely true and is authoritative can disagree. However, recognizing such issues and refusing to allow them to cause divisions seems to be exceedingly difficult. The temptation to take a firm position and then to exclude or belittle those who disagree seems overpowering. The web site of the organization "Answers in Genesis" provides some of the clearest examples. This organization insists that the first 2 chapters of Genesis are to be taken absolutely literally and that the days in Chapter one can only be 24 hour days. When asked why the same word used for day in Chapter 1 (yom in Hebrew) is used to mean an era or age in Chapter 2, they say it always means 24 hours when a number is associated with it. Personally I doubt they have scoured ancient Hebrew texts to determine if this is true. Even if it is true that this is usually or even almost always the case, it remains possible that Genesis 1 is an exception. Nothing in the recognized meaning and usage of the word itself precludes it from being an age. However, they have some rather interesting things to say about people who do not choose to agree with them about the 24 hour days: "This is one more example of the duplicity of atheistic anti-creationists—using the churchian compromisers much as Lenin used ‘useful idiots’ in the West to unwittingly undermine their own foundations." So we "churchian compromisers" who do not accept every nuance of the rigid interpretation of Genesis offered by the leaders of this organization are useful idiots in the hands of atheistic anti-creationists.
Of course, these same leaders have done exactly the same thing in their interpretations of several passages such as, " 30 Tremble before Him, all the earth. Yea, the earth is established, it shall not be moved " (II Chronicles 16:30). They, like virtually everyone else do not insist on a literal interpretion this verse and several other like it, because it would be blatantly irrational to do so in light of the overwhelming objective evidence for the physical movement of the earth. Thus, they find it agreeable to regard "it shall not be moved" as a figurative or metaphorical statement. The evidence that earth is exceedingly old that its development into its present form was a long slow process is similarly overwhelming. Several different independent methods from cosmology (which demonstrates that light from objects billions of light-years away has arrived here demonstrating that the universe is at least billions of years old) to ratios of radioactive isotopes (which decay at a constant and known rate, thus allowing time to be estimated based on ratios mesaured in objects), to dendrochronology. The last method is simply counting tree rings both from live and dead trees obtained as part of ancient structures. Dendochronology agrees very nicely with radiocarbon dating and in particular locations it can be used to date objects back to 10,000 years before present. This is considerably more than the total age of the earth favored by Answers in Genesis (AiG) of 6,000 years. This method does not suffer any of the objections raised by AiG about radioisotope methods (which are themselves easily refuted and simply in error). The use of evidence from the creation to learn about God and by extension to properly understand how to interpret scripture is not precluded and is in fact supported in the Bible ("The heavens declare the glory of God; and the expanse proclaims His handiwork", Psalms 19:1). It is not a compromise of any kind to do so.
Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis in and of themselves, without any reference to scientific evidence for an old earth, suggest that they are not intended to be taken completely literally and that they certainly were not intended as a scientific or sequential historical account. The sequence of events in Chapters 1 and 2 are not entirely consistent if they are interpreted literally and in the most direct and straighforwards way. The AiG web site offers an attempt at rconciling this difference, but it is not compelling. In addition, Genesis describes plants growing without sunlight and days (which AiG insists are always 24 hr) that occurred before the creation of the sun. I believe the events described in Genesis correspond in some way to real events. However, we just do not know enough to understand exactly what is intended. The differing sequence of events in Chapters 1 and 2 can be resolved to my satisfaction only by assuming that these are not both (and perhaps not either) intended as a literal, sequential account of creation. With regard to their spiritual implications, interpreting these passages as figurative i some way or simply deciding that they were not intended to relate to us a scientific or literal historical description of creation changes nothing. The fact that God created is not changed. All of the principles about the nature of God and man are intact. The AiG web site has articles indicating that evolution could not have been used for creation because God declared during creation that each of the groups of animals or plants was good as created. However, evolution is essentially a trial and error process. On the contrary, it is certainly feasible that God's reference to the goodness of creation was that it would fulfill his plans and lead to human beings and an ecological system that could support them. I am not a theologian, and I have been concerned that maybe my ignorance of the Hebrew language and culture has caused me to be unable to interpret the Old Testament properly. However, an interview last year by an Associated Press reporter with Kenneth A. Mathews, professor of Old Testament at Alabama's Beeson Divinity School and Kentucky's Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a real theologian expressed his interpretation that the first Chapter of Genesis was not intended as a chronological history. Southern Baptists are known for their strict adherence to the inerrancy of scripture. Therefore, this interpretation cannot be reasonably regarded as "liberal" or "compromising".
Coming next-Consequences of the Evolutionary Wars for Believers and for Scientists
posted by Stephen Pruett at 4:34 PM
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