Creationism Disneyworld

America is about to gain a new tourist attraction;  'Embark on the adventure of a lifetime where the past comes alive and ancient mysteries are solved' runs the marketing blurb. It all sounds rather Indiana Jones, but in fact it's a theme park dedicated to seven-day creationism. The park features include;

•  a 'stargazers room' where spectators are invited to view evidence that "the latest images of the stars confirm an all powerful creator, not a random bang",
• Adam and Eve living in paradise alongside a big friendly animatronic T. Rex,
• A chance to experience what life was really like on the ark,
• a 'Bible Authority Room' where you can discover that "the Bible is true. No doubt about it!' I bet God's relieved.

The group behind this nonsense (lest you have any doubt of my opinion) is 'Answers in Genesis', a fundamentalist group dedicated to affirming the literal truth of every word of the Bible. I had the dubious privilege of discovering their magazine when, after a lecture I gave on evolution and Christianity a few years ago, someone felt that my soul needed saving, and signed me up for a year's free subscription. I was about to cancel it when I concluded that if they wanted to waste their resources on sending me their magazine, the least I could do was to lovingly compost it for them. Clearly they didn't squander enough of their resources on me, for they've raised the money to build a theme park.

Why do they hold such views, and why do they want a theme park? It seems to me that the issues at stake are truth and authority.

Authority will have to wait for a future article; I'll  just talk about truth here. Creationists view the Bible as a logical proposition that is either all true or all false. In the face of literary criticism and scientific knowledge that they believe erodes the authority and simplicity of the Bible, they have taken an entrenched position that the Bible is very simple, and that it is true in the plainest, most literal way possible. An example of this can be found in the conclusion of an article about sauropods on the Answers in Genesis website;

While some scientists study sauropods and make evolutionary conclusions as to the origin and probable extinction of these majestic creatures, Christians must never compromise the clear teaching found in the history book of the universe, the Bible.

This sentence contains four assumptions that I want to challenge. They are;

1. The Bible is incredibly straightforward, and Christians are under seige from people who want to complicate things for us.
2. God has communicated the full truth about how the universe was created to a pre-literate, pre-scientific people without simplification or generalisation.
3. Those same people were able to transmit this truth faithfully, even if they did not undersatnd it.
4. The questions we bring to the ancient Biblical texts are the same as the questions the ancient authors had in mind when they wrote or recorded it.

To our modern understanding, historical enquiry is about recording chains of events and understanding the causal factors that link them. We must ask if the original authors of the Old Testament intended to write history as we now understand it, or if they had a different intention.

Some parts of the Old testament are clearly recognisable to us as history. Most obvious are the accounts of the kings of Israel and Judah in the books of Samuel and Kings, but even there, the formulaic structure of the narrative suggests that these accounts are not intended as a dispassionate recording of facts but rather of the presentation of a theological interpretation of events. When we turn to the first 11 chapters of Genesis, it is rather harder to identify the texts as historical writing in the modern sense. There is little concern for accurate dating, and the motivation of the actors is sublimated to the theological interests of the narrator.

Creationists deal with these issues by saying that either the text is truthful as a modern historical account, or it is false. The latter possibility is hardly an option, and so the text is read as if it were modern history. This is a fallacy of restricting the options. It discounts the possibility that the text doesn't fit neatly into a modern literary category, but is a product of its time. Rowan Williams calls this a category mistake.

Treating a biblical text as if it were a modern literary form such as history writing is like putting a jigsaw piece into hole in the puzzle where it doesn't belong. You may force it into place, but you'll damage it in doing so, and it won't help you to understand the complete picture. Worse still, forcing it into the wrong place makes it much harder to see where it properly belongs. Similarly, forcing an ancient text into a modern category of writing in which it doesn't belong restricts the ways we can understand it, quite possibly leading us to an interpretation that was quite alien to the original author.

What happens if we liberate Genesis 1 from the category of modern history writing? There are signs in the text that suggest it might be read as a story told to illustrate a set of theological truths rather than historical facts. So here's what I read these truths to be;

God, and God alone, created the world, and created it to be good. He made it out of nothing, thus refuting the Babylonian creation myth in which the good creator god made the earth out of contaminated matter that was made by another god. He made lights in the night sky (which the narrative doesn't even dignify with the usual Hebrew names for moon and stars), thus refuting a Caananite creation myth in which they are gods in their own right.

Admitting the option that Genesis 1 is not history as we know it, but a story told to convey theological truths allows the possibility that scientific theories of the big bang and evolution are true, and they do not compromise the truthfulness of the Bible. It allows us to put aside the contorted linguistic and logical manoevers that creationists go through in order to make something approiaching a self-consistent creation narrative that has some vague grounding in modern science.

It also places an extra burden on readers of the Bible. Every text has to be read with one eye on what it meant to the original hearers, and the other on how we might understand it today. This burden is to recognise that the truth of the Bible is more complex and subtle than that offered by fundamentalists. They sometimes claim that this is a slippery slope that leads to the rejection of the truth of the Bible. It doesn't. It treats the Bible with deep respect, and opens it as a rich source of wisdom and truth for the complexities of life.

 

Technorati tags: creationism, theme park, museum, truth, authority, Genesis, creation, hermeneutics, text, Bible

Comments

[Andrew]

Good stuff, Dean. I wish I could have said it so well!

[Andrew]

I've done a link to this blog at http://fizzogblog.typepad.com/held_/2007/04/creationism_dis.html

[Andrew]

'Every text has to be read with one eye on what it meant to the original hearers, and the other on how we might understand it today.' - I couldn't agree more with that statement however I disagree with most of the rest of what you have said.

I assume from your position that therefore Adam and Eve are not literal people and therefore the fall is not an actual event and original sin is a story. That God's judgment on the world in the flood never happened. If this is the case then why did Jesus need to come and die for our sins. Why did Jesus refer to Adam and call himself the last Adam? Christ Himself also referred to Noah as literal.

On what basis do you believe scripture if you believe 'and the motivation of the actors is sublimated to the theological interests of the narrator'. How does this then not apply to the rest of scripture?

The Bible is not straightforward in a simplistic sense and without the Holy Spirit bringing it to life would just be a dry read.

Do you believe the resurrection to be 'read as a story told to illustrate a set of theological truths rather than historical facts'?

I personally cannot see how a Theistic Evolutionary position can be supported by scripture? I am not saying to hold that view rules out a person from being a genuine believer, absolutely not, but it does undermine confidence in scripture!

Regards

Andrew

[Andrew F]

I'd like to point out that the three Andrews who have posted comments here are two different people! I've done the first two comments, but not the third. I'm the one who agrees with the blog author's approach. I don't agree with the last comment. I'm calling myself 'Andrew F' here to make the difference clear!

[Mr Underhill]

Good read.

As a scientist I approach this from a particular viewpoint. I went to a series of lessons at a fundamentalist church. They were a welcoming group of Christians. However, they used the 'scientific method' to attack science.

What do I mean?

Science does not deal with absolutes. It seeks to come up with the best theory that fits the facts as we understand them. This means that for any position there is likely to be others who disagree, or take a subtly different position. These teachers tried to use this to state that '... scientists do not agree on evolution ..'.

I find much religious fundamentalism deeply worrying. Recently I was on holiday in Abkhazia (Ex-USSR). In my hotel room was sat. TV! The only English channels were BBC news and a whole host(!) of US Religious channels, the latter were not edifying.

M

[Dean Ayres]

Dear Andrew (the author of the 3rd comment on this post),
Thank you for leaving a comment. I'll offer a response to the points you raise, recognising that we will agree to differ on this, but in the conviction that Christians have something in common that transcends the need to agree about how we understand our faith.

You end by saying 'I personally cannot see how a theistic evolutionary position can be supported by scripture'. Well, theistic evolution is a respectable theological position for Christians, even among evangelicals. Intelligent Design certainly falls into this category, even though it seems to me to push too much of God's activity into the domain of science.

But I wouldn't expect scripture to support evolution or any other scientific account of the origin of the universe directly; it isn't what the Biblical authors set out to do. They wanted to communicate their understanding of God and his relationship with the world. As I've argued, I believe this falls short of providing an account of how creation happened, as opposed to why.

I agree entirely with you that the Bible without the Spirit is just a dry read, but I'm also with Augustine of Hippo when he said "I refuse to believe that the same God who gave me sense, reason and intellect also expected me to forgo their use". I do believe in the Bible, but I suspect you and I mean different things by this. I believe that the Holy Spirit brings the Bible alive to us, and one of the ways it does that is via our intellect. The Bible is the work of human hands, however we understand God's inspiration to work, and we can use the resources of literary criticism to deepen our understanding of God.

Since God has created this rational world that is accessible to our intellect, that too is a source by which we learn about God. Part of our work is to see how that relates to scripture. I've offered a way of doing this that is theologically and intellectually credible. If you are really interested in trying to understand this tradition, reading a book like Kirsten Birkett's Unnatural Enemies would be a good place to start. It's written from a theologically conservative position, and so you might find it helpful.

Mr Underhill,
One of the classic critiques that creationists level at evolution is the charge that it isn't accepted by all scientists. That is strictly true, but disingenuous. The vast majority of scientists agree that evolution is the best account that we have. It puzzles me that creationists are so concerned to argue (in the face of a lot of scientific evidence to the contrary) that their theory is scientifically credible, rather than simply recognising that they hold the Bible as a source of authority that overrides science. The reason for their scientific defence is something I'll return to in a second article.

[Helen]

This is such an interesting debate raising many interesting questions. It is surprising that Christians are still arguing over whether the world was created in six days or not as that argument was lost in the Victorian days; I wonder if the literalists will go on to make a “world is flat” theme park next?
However I haven’t yet found a satisfactory theological explanation of the book of Genesis. It seems to me that the beginning of the bible begins with an explanation of why we are here, who made us and why we suffer and die. (Which is quite an astonishing first chapter of a book). If the events didn’t happen as described then the explanation given doesn’t make sense. If Adam, Eve and the garden of Eden didn’t exist then we have no Christian understanding of why we work hard, suffer and die. Also the understanding of Christ’s death as a sacrificial substitute doesn’t work.

[Mr Underhill]

Dear Dean,

'....That is strictly true, but disingenuous. ...'

Precisely.

I'll look forward to your next article, and your response to Helen's question.

M

[Dean Ayres]

Helen, the third comment above shows that the argument was far from won among Christians in the Victorian age. It was won among scientists, but the outstanding questions for Christians are to do with whether the Bible or nature has ultimate authority to speak about origins, and whether it is valid to read and interpret the Bible through the lens of the insights of science. This is partly what I'll try and address when I get round to writing the second article.

As for your question about how we read Genesis, that really needs a book to answer, not a blog post. But I've indicated the method in my reading of Genesis 1; come to an understanding of the theological truths the text is trying to convey through the story, rather than taking the story itself as a literal truth. My reading of Genesis 2 would be that our disobedience and quest for power and knowledge has disrupted our relationship with God, and Jesus' death and resurrection is God's way of healing that breach. There! In one sentence I've grossly oversimplified something that can be given nuance and theological rigour, but I hope it gives you a flavour of the way to go.

As for your suggestion that this way of reading Genesis invalidates the sacrificial substitution of Christ's death; it doesn't. But it does lead us to read the Bible to find other ways of understanding the atonement. One reading that I would thoroughly recommend is found in James Allison's Tablet Lecture.

[Helen]

Well done Dean- both intellectually respectable and Christian