TalkingSnake

Suspending Jesus but not disbelief

2006-06-29T11:21:00.000Z

Oberammergau might run its Passion Play every ten years: America runs its open-air equivalent for several months every summer, and to any ministers who might consider heading off to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, for the experience, a useful tip: provide some ID to prove you are ordained and they’ll let you in free, saving $23. Can’t be bad.

I’m sorry, I’ll write that again. Of course it can be bad, but let’s list some of the play’s admirable features before I get my knife out. The set is impressive, a good fifty yards across with an array of spaces representing the Temple, Herod’s palace, the Upper Room, Gethsemane, Calvary and many more playing areas. The actors mime to pre-recorded dialogue: I was prepared for this feature, which some commentators have complained about, but the sound always seemed to be coming from the right general area and after a few moments it ceased to distract. Sound and lighting are as excellent, as one would expect. The cast includes camels, horses, donkeys, a flock of sheep and a quantity of doves, released when Jesus cleanses the Temple.

So what was wrong with it? One or two secondary quibbles and a huge primary one. I didn’t much care for the entire action proceeding against a musical background: not that the music wasn’t pretty good, but it never relented and at times our relative closeness to Hollywood, as against Jerusalem, felt all too appropriate. Everything Jesus said had a heart-rending catch in the voice, fit to wring tears from a breezeblock. The script was patchy, taking huge liberties with the order of events in the Gospels, sometimes to quite good effect: thus the content of Jesus’ teaching was conveyed at some depth, whereas at other times I felt the strain. The consequence of having Jesus jump from Synoptic to Johannine discourse in the same breath was to make him sound more like the theology about him than a credible human being. The disciples came across as uninformly thick and one-dimensional, their dumb questions serving as no more than feeds for Jesus’ wisdom; Judas was greedy, stupid and implausible. The writer had much more fun developing the Pharisees as characters, developing Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea into heroic rebels in the ranks of otherwise scheming, unprincipled blackguards. The trial scenes were perhaps the most effective.

Inevitably, the crucifixion scene used all four Gospels for the last words, followed by an earthquake (although not, disappointingly, the tearing of the Temple veil). I was hoping to see the spirits rise from their graves and walk around but in a script that otherwise worked in every detail from Matthew this was unaccountably overlooked. I might send an e-mail to the producers and ask why.

Then my real problems began. Jesus was duly buried in his tomb and the stone rolled in front of it. Then the resurrection happened. Light gleamed behind the stone, dry ice puffed out into the night sky and caught the spotlights. Jesus announced Satan’s defeat as he had conquered death, although he was still waiting to get out. To his aid came a very Victorian-looking angel with slightly wobbly wings, his supernatural brilliance causing the soldiers to pass out, and he then rolled back the stone. Jesus appeared in a new costume, took a bow, and got a huge round of applause. Which was nice.

In cheerful disregard of the two resurrection appearance traditions, in Galilee and Jerusalem, our dramatist conflated most of them into a single narrative close to the empty tomb, and although we were spared Luke’s “here, I’ll show you this is physical, give me a piece of fish” what we had instead was worse: hugs all round, hi guys, I’m back from the dead, you see it wasn’t that bad, was it?

The final coup de theatre involved Jesus ascending. Literally of course, this is the Bible belt, suspended on a hoist which I’d seen earlier: I knew this was coming. As he vanished into the trees and the lights cut out, so the show ended.

I can only say this for now: if I didn’t already believe in the resurrection, this play would if anything have tended to make me believe in it less, not more. If I did believe in the ascension (recorded only by Luke, whose chronology has given him some problems that the other Gospel writers don’t have because to them resurrection and ascension were a single event - which I believe to be the Church’s original teaching) I certainly wouldn’t believe in it now. Portraying miraculous events in this literalistic, in-your-face way leads to them becoming not more credible but far less so.

I hope the Passion Play may have brought some to faith. I fear it may have driven some further away.

The civil war ended when?

2006-06-27T11:38:00.000Z

Not in 1865! The battle continues, along cultural instead of territorial fault lines. The industrial, cosmopolitan North versus the rural South with its more static population. The European-influenced East Coast versus the patriotic heartlands of the South and the Midwest. The secular fleshpots of New York versus the puritanical strongholds of the Bible Belt. Higher criticism, which started in Germany, versus America’s very own Fundamentals; bad ol’ Darwin, my compatriot, versus America’s creation scientists: there is no British equivalent of Henry Morris. A culture war is raging and the country seems very badly polarised. The South is wary of Washington, of Ivy League intellectualism. The bookstores stock the conservative “110 people who are screwing America” - the number 1 enemy is Michael Moore, whose picture is printed with no further comment - and the liberal counterblast “100 people who are REALLY screwing America”, with I imagine G W Bush fairly high up the list. In the blue corner Al Franken, in the red corner the unspeakable Ann Coulter. I know these are headline generalisations but are they so wide of the mark?

Here’s polarisation: Brittany McComb strays from a previously vetted text at her high school graduation, mentions Jesus and they cut the mike on her. What on earth is that about, from both sides of the argument? I’d say the girl was being pig-headed, as teenagers often are, I’d say the school authorities were being legalistic and ham-fisted and for crying out loud we are talking about a speech of 750 words! In England she’d have got away with it, at least as many of those present would have thought she was a nutter as would have admired her faith, and then - no story, never mind national headlines. In America “liberals burn a witch”, according to Ann Coulter. That’s not the language of debate. There’s a war going on here.

Here’s polarisation: the American Family Association calls for a boycott of the Ford Motor Company because it’s been placing adverts in gay/lesbian publications that might well give offence - excuse my English spelling - to people not of that orientation. So .... how come the AFA saw them in the first place? Do they subscribe to magazines like that? Are they looking for a fight, or what? On the other hand, AFA showed the adverts to me and, yep, they’re offensive all right, obviously meant to be. So what is the Ford Motor Company playing at? They’re looking for a fight as well. Perhaps they reckon they can make AFA look like narrow-minded bigots, but what has that to do with selling cars? This is not advertising, this is culture warfare.

Fundamentalists don’t like abortion, but since when were liberals keen on it? Liberal Christians certainly have no business being so: pro-choice does not mean pro-abortion! Surely any decision to terminate a pregnancy is regrettable and often tragic, and all steps to bring the numbers down - better sex education, help with adoption and so on - should be supported by all Christians. But in America it’s the conservatives shouting pro-life and progressives hollering back pro-choice, it’s keep Roe vs Wade or rescind Roe vs Wade; the only people who stand to benefit from a change in the law would be lawyers, prosecuting and defending all the desperate women who had their terminations carried out illegally - isn’t America already notorious for its litigious tendencies?

In this context, there’s little chance of a fair hearing over the issue that I focus on: creationism vs evolution. In England the consensus among Christians is overwhelmingly for theistic evolution.

In the US my sense is less of enthusiasm for the extreme young-earth position, which seems to be on the wane now, as of deep hostility to everything that “Darwin” seems to represent. However, in the context of the culture war, there doesn’t seem to be much scope for the Right to acknowledge that evolution might be the best explanatory framework available to make sense of human origins; to admit this would be to concede a major victory to the despised liberals. I made a decision early on in my sabbatical not to get drawn into the ID debate, largely because it has yet to surface in Britain at all: I cannot name a single British enthusiast for the view. But here’s my perception of it in America: liberals won’t give ID advocates the benefit of the doubt as philosophers because of who they are all too visibly in bed with politically, and ID advocates don’t trust liberals to give them a fair hearing. I wonder why?

I think I would want to urge this: liberals and conservatives need to call it victory not when they score points off each other but when they find common ground. Conservatives hate pornography; but no decent liberal should defend it either, so let’s talk together tracing about its sources, exposing its promoters, explaining why it’s damaging and dehumanising. Let’s acknowledge that the homosexuality debate is so savagely polarised it might be best if we all walked away from it for a while and concentrated on pro-family policies where there’s a chance we might agree some priorities - encouraging adoption instead of abortion would be an obvious one in the UK context, I don’t know if that’s true here. And above all let’s get away from this situation whereby one side won’t touch an issue because it’s associated with the other side’s agenda - so fundamentalists (I’m told) steer away from environmental issues because they are what liberals get worked up about; and liberals don’t seem too worried about violence in the media because that’s a conservative preoccupation. Of course, I’m coming at all this from a British context where the Church as a whole is so weak that we can’t afford the cultural in-fighting in which Americans seem to revel. Plus, our civil war was much longer ago. But I would plead as a pastor for US Christians to spend more time peacemaking and much less crusading against their neighbours.

Thou shalt not bear false witness, Mr Ham

2006-06-21T03:21:00.000Z

Consider the following statements:

All creationists are fundamentalist Christians
All creationists are stupid
Creationist institutions are secretly funded by the Communist Party

None of these are true. The first I mistakenly believed was so, until the existence of fundamentalist Moslems who also take a creationist position was pointed out to me. Substitute "most" for "all" and the generalisation holds: my point is that only religious people of a certain persuasion embrace "creation science", a fact which alone should make one wonder just how scientific it really is.

I don’t believe the third statement, which might best be categorised not so much as a mistake and hardly as a lie, more as a bizarre fantasy. I imagined it being defended along the lines of: it is the mission of Communism to destroy Christianity; creationism makes Christianity look ridiculous; therefore by funding creationist institutions and enabling them to raise their profile, communism may be hoping to hasten Christianity’s downfall. I doubt that any creationist faced by such a charge would bother to take it seriously. The accuser is condemned out of his own mouth.

The second statement is not only offensive but contradicted by evidence. While I hold creationism to be as utterly stupid an idea as ideas get, and while some of its supporters are none too bright - which could be said of any point of view - to claim that they are all deficient in the brain cell department is absurd. Creationists include in their ranks men of great intelligence; that they make such elementary howlers in approaching the book of Genesis, leading to such uproarious conclusions, is all the more extraordinary. One academic to whom I have spoken attributes much of creationism’s support to low levels of education; but that charge will not stick to the likes of Jonathan Sarfati and Douglas Kelly.

So: untruths can be mistakes, delusions, or lies. Which brings me to the case of Ken "Answersingenesis" Ham, whose book "The Lie of Evolution" I dipped into earlier today. Don’t worry, I have washed my hands thorougly since.

Men who call other people liars should be more than usually careful to speak nothing but the truth themselves. His chapter "The Root of the Problem" throws all such caution to the winds, reminding me of Elton John’s justification for pursuing an expensive libel case: "They can call me a fat ugly poof. They can say I can’t sing. But they mustn’t tell lies about me."

Ken Ham libels all non-fundamentalist Christians. His book perpetrates deeply offensive untruths about us, he obviously doesn’t care, and if I had the means and were so disposed I’d sue him to Kingdom come. But here’s the thing: I’m not sure he actually qualifies as a liar. Or even an idiot. He could simply be deluded. But he does not speak the truth any more than [he claims] evolutionsts do. He also claims to be a Christian, so that matters: but it’s abundantly clear that if he is one I am not, nor any other theistic evolutionist. He has mined any common ground there might have been between us. Nothing but all-out victory will satisfy him. And, I suppose, the same goes for me in reverse, I want to see creationism pack its bags and go home: the difference is I’m right, Jesus told me so. OK, that was flippant. Ken owes the Church an apology. That’s deadly serious.

I wonder if Ken would sue if I published that last paragraph? That might be fun.

His overall thesis goes: Christianity is under attack. Its values are threatened by enemies who wish to see it collapse; and foundational to their alternative belief system is a commitment to the theory of evolution; which God’s Word (= the Bible) flatly contradicts.

So far, so conventionally creationist; and so manifestly non-scientific. Where Ham raises the stakes is partly in his accusing evolutionsts, to the last man or woman, of practising a religion which gives them license to attack Christianity; partly in his insistence that the creationist view of scripture is the only one possible. This drives him to lump all creationism’s enemies together: Christian, agnostic, atheist, Moslem, Hindu, we’re all coming from the same place.

In his words

"Evolution is a religion which enables people to justify writing their own rules".

"The real battle is aligned with the fact that these people do not want to accept Christianity because they will not accept that there is a God to whom they are answerable."

These quotes deny the integrity of all who oppose creationism, a common move by its contemporary apologists: Henry Morris could be more gracious. If I believe in evolution it’s not because I have studied the evidence and found it persuasive. That cannot be, because Ken has read his Bible, therefore "knows" evolution cannot be true and doesn’t need to study the evidence: there isn’t any. So I must have some other reason for accepting Darwinism, and it’s not even that I have made the honest mistake of assuming that the overwhelming majority of scientists know what they’re talking about; no, it’s because I am looking for a religion with which in my fallen state I am more comfortable than with true, Bible-believing Christianity.

Besides being untrue, that is a gross insult, for which one might account in a number of ways:

Ignorance: Ken has actually never met, sat down with, read the works of, a scholarly theistic evolutionist and considered that, mistaken though such a person might be in his eyes, his views spring from real Christian commitment just as intense as his own.

Bafflement: Ken has done exactly this and still finds theistic evolution such a perplexing point of view, as crazy perhaps as I find his, that he needs to find some way of making sense of it and "evolution is an alternative religion" is his best shot.

Cocksure bigotry: Ken is a bruiser who likes dishing it out; he knows he’s going to offend any non-fundamentalist readers who trouble to pick up his polemical outpourings and just thinks tough, they won’t agree with me anyway so I might as well slag them off.

Blissful unwareness: Ken has no idea how much unjustifiable offence he is giving, because from within his bubble it simply stands to reason that he is on God’s side, so anyone who’s against him is against God.

None of which quite entitles me to call him a liar, although I do wonder who Ken is writing for: it feels very much like preaching to the converted. He certainly is not pitching to persuade Christians from the mainstream denominations that he has a case worth considering. You don’t make converts by insulting their present convictions.

Then we have

"If the Bible is not the infallible word of the One who knows everything, then we have exactly nothing."
"If evolution is not true the only alternative is creation."

These are attempts to marginalise firstly non-fundamentalists, secondly evolutionists of all religious convictions and none, by setting up absolute black and white alternatives.

My instinct is then to write: a moment’s thought should be enough for anyone to realise that both these are false dichotomies as crude as they come. What about: either Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time, or he couldn’t even put a sentence together, which is it? or, if smoking does not cause lung cancer the only alternative is demon possession? There are many, many views of the Bible other than Ken Ham’s; if Darwinism collapses tomorrow it will be because a better scientific theory has taken its place, not because scientists have suddenly gone crackers and mistaken Genesis 1- 11 for a piece of history. But Ken has obviously given this a great deal more than a moment’s thought and still the penny hasn’t dropped ... or has it? Again, let’s consider.

Assuming, on the basis of circumstantial evidence, that he is not a complete moron, he can only be forcing the issue by way of these simplistic either/ors because

- he is sincerely convinced there are no in-between possibilities: there is no dimmer switch, the light’s either on or off

- he has an immature personality that prevents him recognising or coping with shades of grey; or

- he is telling whoppers: he knows the world is more complex than this and hopes his readers will forgive him a specious argument, it’s all in a "good" cause.

But others can force the issue too, Ken: so here’s my pitch.

I do not accept your description of the Bible. I was taught theology by liberals who loved their Scriptures, as I do and never could if I were still held captive by fundamentalism. Am I left with exactly nothing? Hardly. I have wonderful stories to ponder, whose historical truth does not matter to me and if it does to you that’s your problem; I have the Psalms to worship with [and set to music], prophetic poetry to expand my imagination. I have the teachings of Jesus to which I am committed as an ordained minister of the Church, I have Paul to lay the foundations of Christianity as a belief system, and I could go on. That is not even approximately nothing; you say that if I’m not a fundamentalist the Bible is worthless to me. I declare to you the opposite: fundamentalism devalues the Bible by idolising instead it of recognising it for what it is; a collection of writings drawn from one particular culture through which God speaks universally. That is my firm conviction as a mature and educated Christian which you would deny me the right to hold. Well, I deny your right to tell me I may not hold it. I say that your statement about the Bible is false because there is an infinite range of options between your two extremes: so are you mistaken, are you deluded, or are you lying about your brother in Christ? Will you confess your error?

Your call.

Worship in black and white

2006-06-19T16:16:00.000Z

It will take me a long, long time to digest the three hours and more of worship at Golden Gate Church of Christ in New Albany and make real sense of it. My heart was lifted, my mind was blown, I want a shot of whatever that pastor was on, I need a whole new vocabulary here. Church isn’t like this. I’ve seen drearier carnivals, more buttoned-up discos, far less entertaining variety shows, than Sunday morning at Golden Gate. But if what thrilled and perplexed me this morning counts as a church service I feel I need another word for what I’ve been conducting most Sundays for the past thirty years. This was other; alien, although mostly in a very good way.

In New Albany, as elsewhere in Mississippi, there are black churches and white churches. It’s not that anyone’s excluded; just that they have dramatically different styles and they don’t mix like Stainer doesn’t mix with the blues. Earlier I had attended the First Baptist church, a curious experience in some ways but not one to challenge my preconceptions of what ought to happen in worship. Robed choir, printed order of service. Centre piece: this guy delivering a tightly structured sermon in polished sentences to which we listened in respectful silence: he had a meaty message requiring concentration. The most obvious link with what was to follow came in a solo just prior to the sermon, delivered over a pre-recorded backing track with expertise and flair by a young woman whose style was mainstream MOR pop, soulful sliding around, blue notes, vibrato shrieking on the high notes, all the usual tricks. If you’d heard it over the PA in Wall-mart it would NOT have screamed at you: this is a "Christian" song. You’d have thought - a typical contemporary ballad and, hey aren’t those Christian words? I’m saying: that solo fed off and straight back into the daily culture, it was in no way set apart from it, advertising itself as "sacred".

But this was still a white church and white folks conduct themselves with formal dignity while their doing their religion. They stand up and sit down when they’re supposed to. They remain quietly in their places through the preaching. The deal is they know roughly when the service ends and if it goes too long over the hour it’s like the contract has been broken.

Golden Gate is a black church and practically the only formal thing about it is the dress code. Sunday best means you wear what you would if you were expecting to meet royalty; which in a way you are. After an hour things are just nicely warmed up with the real fire still to come.

When I drove by earlier I was startled to find the morning service timed for 11.30; but that of course was to allow for two hours’ Sunday school earlier on. Sunday school for all ages, natch.

I’d had to slip out of First Baptist during the last hymn to make Golden Gate even approximately on time, but there were lots of approximate things about the place so that was no big deal. It seemed my arrival was, though. The usher greeted me, clocked my whiteness and led me to the best available seat .... right at the front. Good job I’m a hard man to embarrass, but it got better, though my wife - who is embarrassable - would say worse. Next thing I knew I was being shown to a seat on the platform, among the elders, right behind the main pastor. Talk about being put on show! Various people, deacons I assume or the equivalent, came and shook my hand and in greeting me registered my double novelty: not only am I white, I speak a different version of English which, if they had as much trouble understanding as I did in understanding theirs, makes me wonder if I really communicated with them when I had the chance.

The worship band was in full swing. Two keyboard players, one on a jazz organ who sounded like a real pro and unless my ears deceived me was laying down a bass groove with the pedals, another guy on electric keyboard; a guitarist and a drummer. Above them were singers who kept the flow going, but what was scarcely bearable in its intensity was the way all the musicians seemed to function as a unit, throwing tricksy rhythms and scrunchy harmonies from player to player like it was the most natural thing in the world. The classically trained musician in me says come on, you don’t get to be that good and spontaneous without years and years of first training and then practising together, but maybe for black instrumentalists raised in that Gospel tradition it IS the most natural thing in the world.

If this had been a club you’d have to say it was jumping. Everyone was clapping along, one woman in particular got up and danced like a newly-freed slave in the aisles, with others strutting their stuff alongside her, throwing their arms in the air ... Some of the older guys just sat and - I think! - enjoyed it, there was no compulsion to throw yourself into the proceedings, though it was better if you did. In my restrained white way I did my best, at least from the waist up. As anyone who knows me will confirm, I can feel dance, I can write dance, but I haven’t learned TO dance. On the dance floor I give a whole new meaning to the word gauche and there’s a time and a place to make an idiot of yourself.

Then the choir filed up onto the raised pews behind me, seeming at some points to outnumber the congregation, whose size varied as people drifted in and out: call of nature, restless children, they had to go and fix dinner, they’d already had dinner and were turning up an hour late? I’ll ask. Anyhow the choir - no scores needless to say, I saw neither printed music nor lyrics anywhere, black worship does not presume literacy and there could be historical reasons for that - produced a gleaming wall of sound which enveloped me in full stereo, built of that uniquely black combination of improvisation and musical discipline. The soloist called out in counterpoint with the other singers, sometimes musically, sometimes just shouting. The band went skilfully berserk, the fantastic organist as opposed to the ordinarily good one turning tricks on the electronic keyboard now. The choirmaster simultaneously kept time with his arms and broke into a dance that would have made John Travolta in his Night Fever days creep away forlornly to the bar. And just when you thought you’d heard just about enough of that song, the rhythm would change and another one would launch itself out of nowhere.

It was an experience to surpass the blues club at Clarksdale in the Delta three days earlier; here the musicianship was not quite as virtuoso in technique but the style and harmonic language were more complex and the sense of mutual dependence among the players so strong it was like a one-man band with eight arms and legs. There is another point to this comparison: the blues we heard at Clarksdale are part of the ordinary cultural scene, and so was the music at Golden Gate although serving a different purpose: it was black music first, sacred only in terms of lyrical content. The awful churchiness of most Christian music in Britain would be shamed by comparison.

I’m filling up as I replay the memory just as I did at the time. Difficult to wipe your eyes discreetly when you wear glasses but so what if anyone did see. Worship cannot be this liberated, this chaotic yet purposeful, this flamin’ loud, connecting not just with heart and mind but with feet and guts too, this much of a threat to the windows, floors, fire regulations, blood pressure and more besides, this much of a pharmaceutical-free high like you’ve won the lottery and topped the charts and got married all on the one day, and still be holy; yet God was in this or I haven’t encountered him yet. I would have to say something to explain my highly visible presence and I hoped I’d have collected myself sufficiently when I got the look.

I told them I’d been to the Baptist church first, then I’d died, gone to heaven and woken up at Golden Gate. Well, I thought that was a good line; so did they and I meant it. Then I said: it’s a pity there’s black churches and white churches, some of you black folks ought to get out there and teach white folks how to worship, and that went down well too; but again, I meant it at that point. We need to use music and dance the way they do, not be so scared to freak out, get lost in our exuberance.

These folks were treating me like royalty - they even offered to feed me as I was leaving, and hope it didn’t seem rude when I declined. But then came part 2 of the service, and here I struggled.

If part 1 had been collective, collaborative worship largely in the hands of the musicians, we were now to focus more on the pastor, who had disappeared for a while, to return in a striking cream gown to signify he had become the Preacher.

I knew I would not be in for a monologue to which the congregation would dutifully attend. I was ready for the question and response approach to preaching, cries of "Yes preacher!" and "Amen!", of significant phrases being echoed back to him, giving the impression of sermon construction by popular approval, each affirmation being checked with the congregation to make sure it had been understood and endorsed. I wondered how much scope this gives the pastor for feeding new ideas to the people, ones which they might have to ponder for a while. Perhaps that is the role of Sunday School; however, I was not prepared for the theatrical range of the preacher. In describing him I don’t want to condescend or make him sound like a madman, although out of context his behaviour might seem deranged: what proved it otherwise was the way he carried his congregation, working the jokes, scoring his points, making sense to them, feeding them as a shepherd should. But I did have one huge problem: his delivery was so fast and so strongly accented I reckon I picked up one word in twenty. I needed an interepreter.

The pastor/preacher rattled away, starting with a verse of scripture but then darting about as inspiration took him. Not only unscripted (I’d seen his notes, which were simply a list of Bible passages, and if he touched on half of them I’d be surprised), it was also unplanned; since I could not follow content, I observed the style.

He shouted, he whooped, he screamed, he pointed his finger, he worked up his congregation into a response and got it; then he’d hit on a word - usually "Father", his theme being the fatherhood of God as a model for human parenting - and sing it; then the band would pick up his pitch and riff on it, followed by some keyboard noodling underneath his next few sentences. Sometimes there’d be a HEY! Jesus!, spat out almost belligerently; he’d play for a laugh, he’d play for applause, he’d rise above the constant babble, then he’d blend in with it and pick up on phrases called out to him, sometimes accidentally on purpose forgetting a word and casting around for a prompt. It was the performance but of a man absolutely not on an ego trip, almost the opposite of that, a man riding pillion on some alternate form of consciousness careless of where it might take him. I had the feeling he no more knew what he was about to say/scream/sing next than the rest of us did. I felt no trace of exhibitionism, of attention-seeking: I might want to call it idiosyncratic but I’ve no basis for comparison; perhaps a lot of black preachers are like this.

In and amongst there would be sharings of concern about individuals, present and otherwise; this being Father’s day, all dads present were called forward and prayed over: I’m a dad so I went. The anointing, sensitively done by a big guy tipping olive oil from a bottle and pasting a little on each forehead, was a wonderful moment of challenge and affirmation. Visitor or not, white or not, I was a child of God along with all these black folks and if I had chosen to be among them for these hours who were they to say I didn’t belong? If ever I felt the truth of the old cliche about there being no strangers, just friends you haven’t met, I felt it at this service.

I’ve got some questions, inevitably: there was a strange emphasis on money, with people being asked to declare openly how much they were putting in the collection, to wave their tens and twenties aloft as their offerings were blessed; I want to know what was actually preached through all the histrionics. I think I heard "the rapture might come any moment", which worried me. Looking around I felt that some of the younger people who weren’t in the choir actually switched off during the preaching, didn’t take part in the exchanges; how much impact was the Gospel actually making on their lives, I wondered. In Britain there is a culture of disaffection among young black men, many of whom underachieve at school, fall into bad company and don’t stick around to raise any children they might beget - but this is rural, religious America so presumably it’s different ... or is it?

Questions for the pastor when I meet him, but for the record - and another cliche, sorry - if ever there was a time when I went to church as I was but didn’t come back the same as I went, then June 18 was that time. That’s when I dropped by at Golden Gate, they treated me like a king and anointed me along with their own. Glory!

Family Values in the Bible Belt

2006-06-19T15:56:00.000Z

The Christian Right gets very steamed up about family values, and with Father’s Day coming up there was a natural peg on which to hang their concerns. I read newspapers, listened to some Christian radio and drew some conclusions which may not exactly correspond with those I was meant to.

First, to conservatives "family" = nuclear family. That’s interesting for a start, because it’s hardly a Biblical equation, any more than marriage now means what marriage meant back then. The unconscious use of a single word to denote very different institutions separated by continents and centuries of custom is typical of the fundamentalist denial of history.

Second there’s no question in my mind that fatherhood matters a lot; if I thought I’d failed as a father it would break my heart whatever else I might have achieved in my life. If I hear that it’s the father’s rather than the mother’s influence that conditions whether children continue to attend church in adult life, because American surveys have proved this, I simply wonder if there’s a British survey that confirms what I feel I already know. If I read a newspaper story about American prisoners eagerly pouncing on cards to send out on Mothers’ Day but leaving whole piles untouched on Fathers’ Day because they felt their dads had let them down, which is why they were where they were, that rings true.

But of course I would then go on to ask what sort of social policies might make it easier for men to be good dads; and as I see it the free market capitalism so beloved of the Christian as well as the political Right, insofar as these can be distinguished, sets economic above family values and always will. People are expendable, only profits matter. There can be no challenge to that from within the far-right mind-set; it’s going to come from a more liberal perspective, call it social democratic, Liberalism with a capital L, call it socialism. Here’s the truth; capitalism is the most efficient engine for generating wealth. Unbridled capitalism is the most efficient engine for generating economic, social and racial injustice. Ooh, and screwing up the environment. In its heyday the proof of that was the British Empire; today the proof is G W Bush. Government needs to be about providing the best bridles. Republicans think government should be hands off. The effect of that on family life can be brutal: give me the nanny state any day.

Third, the most widely talked about "challenge" to family life in the US right now is homosexual marriage. I think liberals have made this one unnecessarily difficult for themselves by using the m word; one gay minister I know sees his relationship as an alternative paradigm which can critique heterosexual marriage. To a straight guy like me it does seem ridiculous for two men to speak of getting married but not about their husband or wife. The language is wrong. In Britain we have civil parternships and only a few people fret about this, but it is a question of RIGHTS, and that seems to be getting overlooked in the American debate. But there is of course an elephant in the room. The geatest challenge to American family life is divorce, the rate over here being much higher than anywhere else in the world and precisely because it’s so widespread there is very little if any talk of bringing in restrictive legislation. And that again is surprising because here is what Jesus had to say about homosexuality

whereas he mentioned divorce more than once and wasn’t too happy about it. In fairness, one of the conservatives I have spoken with acknowledges the inconsistency of emphasis but he struck me as unusual.

Morris’ monster

2006-06-08T09:47:00.000Z

Anyone who doubts that creationism’s battle is not with sensible science, nor even with informed Biblical scholarship, but with liberal ideology as defined by the American right, should ponder this troubling cartoon, reproduced from John Morris’ book "The Young Earth".

I’d guess that anyone presented with the graphic but without labels for the monster’s various heads would, knowing its source, be able to identify two straightaway: abortion and homosexuality. Yep, they would have to be there, wouldn’t they. These are the two great moral "evils" on which the Right incessantly campaigns and the link with evolutionism is too good to miss. The others need a little more thought.

[Incidentally, the Snake would distinguish utterly between a woman’s legal right to abortion and the morality of her making this choice, a much more complex question to which there is only one wise answer: it depends on the circumstances. Homosexual practices are not evil. Irresponsible, predatory and self-indulgent expressions of sexuality are immoral whether straight or gay. End of sermon.]

Racism? er, is it not a matter of history that America’s racial problems have been concentrated in the God-fearing, Bible-believing South? Did not the masters of apartheid appeal to allegedly Christian doctrines of a somewhat fundamentalist kind? Never mind that; what’s in Morris’ mind is the link between Darwin and the all too human monsters of the 20th century who plundered his theories to justify their racially driven slaughter. Certainly there is a line of twisted thinking that runs from Darwin through Nietzsche to Hitler and Stalin, but blaming Darwin for the Holocaust is like attributing Hiroshima to the horror fantasies of H G Wells. Now, Morris knows full well that liberals condemn racism as routinely as the Right condemns homosexuality, but he wants to say to them - the origin of that which you despise is to be found in your beloved Evolution.

Marxism has undoubtedly exploited Darwin for its own purposes, though it’s hard to imagine that the cause would have foundered had the bearded biologist died in his cot. Marx’s atheism owes far more to Feuerbach. Notice however the automatic identification of Marxism as an evil. It would not occur to Morris that for some Christians, especially in Latin America, Marx’s writings help us understand salvation in a new light, as liberation from the structures of oppression. As a critique of raw capitalism, for example of the kind embraced by the current generation of neocons running America, Marxism has a continuing relevance, however much it seems to have failed in practice. Other Marxists might say, as some Christians would of Christianity: it hasn’t failed - it hasn’t been tried, not the real thing.

So global capitalism is such an unqualified success? Its emphasis on competition might also be traced back to Darwin, but since the Market is sacred to the Right, we won’t be seeing its name on any of Morris’ monster-heads. As for lawlessness (whatever that means) and promiscuity, the most superficial acquaintance with world history ought to remind Morris that these phenomena have been around for centuries.

Morris’ monster illustrates his prejudices admirably. It’s easy enough to reply in kind by changing the labels, so the second cartoon now illustrates mine. Except, of course, that my prejudices are far better informed.

An answer that speaks for itself, I think

2006-06-07T17:24:00.000Z

I’ve been locking antlers with creationists through e-mail correspondence. Just before I left England I prepared a statement offering summary conclusions of my studies so far. I’m primarily after a response from mainstream evangelical outfits, but I thought I would send it to one of my more lucid creationist correspondents too, not that I expected him to like it very much. He feels I’m sarcastic and uncharitable; moi? of course I am, but towards creationISM, not towards its advocates, for whom – much as they annoy me – I also feel desperately sorry. Well, I try.

I append without further comment one of the propositions in my statement and his response.

A "conspiracy theory" is required to explain why mainstream science and much of mainstream theology condemns creationism, often emphatically. Creationists frequently suggest that their opponents have fallen prey to Satanic onslaught, and make no distinction between Christian and atheistic opposition to their views.

Comment: No conspiracy theory is necessary to explain why so many people prefer evolution. In part, this is due to human nature, and the desire to be independent and reject any idea of being answerable to a Supreme Being. Scientists who are committed to “naturalism” have already excluded the possibility of a Creator from their thinking, and must interpret everything within an evolutionary straight-jacket. There is no such person as an “unbiased scientist” — we all approach the evidence with a bias, whether evolutionist or creationist. Most Christians who accept evolution do so because they believe what the secular scientists tell them. However, personally, I do believe that evolution is a Satanic lie.

Gardening notes

2006-06-07T17:20:00.000Z

There is an annoying plant in my garden. Looks as if it might be related to the stinging nettle and, like it, spreads by extending runners just below soil level. Its main growths are 18” spikes which bear rather drab, purply flowers at the height of summer. It has a strong, unpleasant smell and left to itself gets everywhere. Well behaved it is not. A weed? Not sure, but I treat it as one.

I don’t know its name. I am the only gardener in the household, so when I see it I grumble and do the necessary. I think “oh it’s that again”. There are other weeds in my garden and I don’t know their names either, but I know what to do with them.

My point is a simple one. In the absence of anyone else with whom I need to communicate, it is unnecessary for me to give names to things I encounter. Why then should Adam, at the time the only language-user in the garden of Eden, name the animals? I can give a perfectly good answer to this from my non-literalist perspective, but I wonder if a literalist can.

I can imagine some creationist or other stepping right into my elephant trap here: aha, he would say, but there was another language user: God!

What a foolish person that creationist would be, failing to realise that by so responding he would have committed the sin of anthropomorphism, that is to say, portraying God as just like a human being only bigger and better, using language in just the way we do. Come on now: when God speaks to you does he say “different from” (good English English) or “different than” (good American English)? Creationists: your God is too human. Mine is Other.

Creationism? Not among the academics in Philadelphia either

2006-06-07T17:17:00.000Z

June 4, evening: I attended a lecture in Philadelphia, presented by a guy called John Haught, who was a star witness for the prosecution in the Dover trial, which a little while back ruled against Intelligent Design as authentic science. He was a Roman Catholic, raised on Thomism, immersed in Teilhard and process theology. The event was hosted by an interesting, seriously high-powered, academically reputable, organization called Metanexus of whose on-line work I have been aware for some time. Follow the link if you’re interested.

The lecture was critical of aspects of evolutionary theory and proposed an intellectually reputable attempt to do what ID failed to do: make a place for theism within a naturalistic approach to science. Not all were convinced, but we saw the value in what was attempted. The audience were academics with an interest in issues around science and religion; the consensus, as reflected in the plenary session would be theistic, old-earth, evolutionist. But creationism? yawn, so last century. An event such as this quickly nails the creationist lie/delusion that theistic evolutionists are uncritical of Darwin and bent on undermining the Gospel.

I was quite surprised how robust an apologia the speaker offered for a God of providence and design; it had echoes of that old time natural theology – but obviously, in this arena, took a relativistic view of sacred texts: it would have been inappropriate to prioritise the Christian scriptures, and indeed we spent some time in plenary looking at creation from a Buddhist perspective. Fascinating stuff. That’s an example of where the science and religion debate is in the US. It’s not looking at the creationists’ agenda, it’s moved on, which is why evolutionists get so annoyed at them.

Pitching for a laugh and getting one

2006-06-07T17:07:00.000Z

June 4, morning: Preached at Glen Mar United Methodist Church, Maryland, an hour out of Washington DC. Large, successful growing: ethos - pluralist. Its senior pastor, my old friend Andy Lunt (now Rev Dr, and it’s a real doctorate too, from England’s as opposed to America’s Oxford) doesn’t have much, make that any, time for creationism. More surprisingly, he says there’s no debate in the United Methodist Church as a whole, at least here on the east coast.

It was Pentecost and I’d already decided to take “Are you talking my language” as my theme when it occurred to me that this gave me a chance to try out an American congregation’s reaction to some creationist writing. The point I was illustrating was this: if we come at Scripture with preconceived agendas, knowing in advance what it “must” say, we will fail to hear what it actually is saying, and be unable to communicate with each other. Instead, we need openness to the Spirit’s guiding. Here’s my text, more or less as I delivered it. I pitched for some of the laughs, others came when I wasn’t expecting them.

....let me illustrate my point about Christians failing to communicate in terms of a story from the Bible which takes me to my reasons for being in the US at this time. I am on sabbatical, and working on a project whose focus is the phenomenon of young earth creationism, which puzzles, intrigues and infuriates me in just about equal measure. (laughter) I want to contrast British and American perspectives on this.... My illustration is itself about language; it’s the story of how God asked Adam to give names to all the animals.

Question: given the number of animals there are, would he have had time to complete this task in a single day? For a writer like Hugh Ross, this seems unlikely – he would have to do it at a gabble, and besides some of the animals might have been difficult to track down, they’d have been shy and flown off again while he was thinking of a name. (laughter) So Hugh Ross reckons that Adam took his time over this; Ross wanting to make the point that when Genesis talks about the days of creation it does not necessarily mean day as in period of 24 hours. Ross is, I’m sorry to say this, an old-earther. He’s as Bible-believing as they come, or so he says, he certainly denies evolution as Bible believers do: but he is persuaded by evidence that suggests the earth is a lot more than 6,000 years old, so he goes down the line that the days of creation were actually more like hundreds of thousand of years long.

But for the young-earth scholar Jonathan Sarfati this is heresy. When Genesis talks about days it does mean days of 24 hour hours, and if the Bible says Adam named all the animals, from aardvarks to zebras in a day, then name them he did. How long would it have taken? Sarfati points out that Adam would not have needed to track all the animals down, God did that for him; that he would not have had to give names for the creeping things, insects or arachnids, because these are not mentioned, and fish don’t count. (laughter). He would have named only kinds, not species or varieties, and that leads Sarfati, making assumptions about how intelligent and linguistically skilled Adam was, to conclude that the task of naming the animals would have taken him four hours, allowing him a five minute break at the end of each hour. (huge laugh – that’s the one I wanted.)

My script now says: either this gets a laugh or it doesn’t. biggest laugh of the morning). If it does, say “I am glad that got a laugh”, if not “that would definitely have got a laugh in England, so the fact it didn’t get one here is telling me something”. (as you see, I’d built myself an exit strategy in case my dig at creationists prompted nothing but stony stares: but I didn’t need it..)

Notice two things here. First, Ross and Sarfati both have a prior agenda. For Ross the days of Genesis cannot be literal 24 hour days, so anything which the Bible says was done within in a day and which looks as if it might have taken longer, helps Ross’s cause. For Sarfati the days of Genesis must be literal 24 hour days, so any argument which seems to undermine that has to be dealt with somehow. Secondly, both men are assuming that it is OK to interpret Scripture in the light of modern knowledge about how many animals there actually are and a modern understanding of what language acquisition involves. The word for that is anachronism. It’s like: on the fourth day God created the stars. Some of them, we now know, are millions of light years away, so how come we can see them, if the world is only 6,000 years old? Creationists need to devise some cosmology to explain this; to me, it’s a question of saying – but whoever wrote Genesis didn’t know what a light year was, how big stars are, how far away they are, so it wasn’t an issue for him. Creationists say that the speed of light must have been a whole lot faster back then. (laughter).

If you don’t have those agendas, if you don’t burden yourself with assumptions, what you read in Genesis is a simple story with a challenging point. Men and women are given by God the freedom to shape their world by the use of language. Adam not only names but implicitly classifies, recognises differences and similarities. He sees a lion and gives it a name; then he sees a tiger maybe gives it a name that means “lion-like thing only with stripes”. (laughter) This is how we use language; to give order to our world. I once visited a school for the profoundly deaf, where children were taken from three up. Deaf children are always educationally disadvantaged at first for one obvious reason and for another one that wasn’t obvious to me, and I can still remember gulping as the head teacher told me this one: deaf children, he said, have to be taught that things have names. Once they’ve grasped that one, they can progress at the same rate as hearing children. If you forget everything else I say this morning, remember this. We use language to give things names: and by the names we choose, we shape the world. And it was God who gave and entrusted us with this awesome facility. That’s what Genesis is really saying.

Adam in his unfallen state did this without an agenda and with total clarity of perception. His world will have been perfectly ordered, conceptually speaking: this is what the story tells us. Contrast if you will the way we in our sinful state often order the world to reflect and reinforce an agenda which may be confused, riddled with hate, fear and aggression towards other world views and other kinds of people.

And when that happens, that’s when we stop talking each other’s language. We become imprisoned in our cultural fortresses and can only let each other know we are there by hurling miss – aisles, as I would say: mistles as you would! (laughter at the linguistic play, but appreciation of the theological point too)

My sermon text was overlong and I had to trim it to honour time, but it was very well received. I’d hate to think all those pleasant Americans were just being nice to me.

Creationism? Not in Washington, apparently

2006-06-07T17:00:00.000Z

June 3: spent 3 hours at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, Washington DC. A national showcase and as huge and impressive as you would expect. Admission free.

Picture of a dinosaur skull at the museum entrance shows the visitor what to expect – note the highlighting I’ve put on the superimposed description. If you’re offended by the proposal that the earth is 4.6 billions years old and we know that, run away and play. Evolution confronts you from every display. The geologic column, divided into layers illustrating the aeons of earth’s history, forms a centre piece in one of the great halls. No suggestion anywhere this might be contentious, controversial, unproven. Darwinism is a given: but there’s no nasty naturalist agenda on view, no Satanic deception, no liberal conspiracy: just an excitement in discovery and an eagerness to present knowledge in an accessible way. One or two displays acknowledged that dating errors had been made previously, which better research had now been able to correct; in other words, dialogue between scientists had served to fine-tune evolutionist methodology; but it had not been thrown into confusion, as creationists are fond of alleging.

In the bookstore, could I find one volume making the case for a young earth? Only one or two giving ID short shrift, otherwise, there is no hint of what creationists insist is still a debate. The show is over. This is America, where creationism is relatively strong. And here in the nation’s capital prime science museum, creationism is invisible. There were school parties everywhere, getting excited by dinosaurs, lapping up old-earth chronology as they did so. Creationism is not even seen as something that is worth responding to. I really did think there might be, somewhere in the Smithsonian, some acknowledgement that not everyone thinks the world really is this old, some Americans hold other points of view, but not a whisper. The great (relatively) creationist institutions of America might as well not exist so far as the Smithsonian is concerned. In all this time they have made no impression.

I visited some general bookstores to find much the same thing. The “religion” sections are generally better stocked in terms of both quantity and quality than one typically finds in Waterstones, the principal chain of British bookshops – but creationism… nowhere. I’ll see if the US’ equivalent of SPCK stocks any more creationist titles than the approximately zero held in British stores: I’m guessing not. I’ll need to go to a Baptist bookshop to find some, roll on Mississippi!

2006-06-02T19:28:00.000Z

Hi America, I’ve missed you. It’s been too long.

I flew from Manchester (high 50’s, rain) to Philadelphia (low 90’s, dry and humid). My carrier was US Airlines, a good start: the warm outgoing professionalism of the hostesses, not to mention the accents, put me in the mood, which was in no way dampened by having to trek for miles along airport corridors on arrival (couldn’t get a direct flight). Philly airport, like many in the States, is designed around the requirement for a separate terminal per airline; it was a ? ¾ mile trip by courtesy coach between terminals A & F, then another half mile walk to F22…all of which gave me orientation time. Advertisements for health care provision, baseball games, films that won’t be released in Britain for another six months, the various reminders of what’s different in this culture.

I provide my fingerprints for an American Homeland Security database, not to mention having my shoes checked for concealed explosives and the latptop on which I’m writing this examined in case it’s a detonator. The process is quick and I’m soon through customs, but you know what? If I were a terrorist I wouldn’t even think of flying into America now. I’d fly to Mexico then sneak in across the border into Texas, the way loads of illegal immigrants do who are currently the focus of a Dubya initiative to do something popular before the mid-term elections, at which the Republicans look set to take a pounding. Even this is threatening to backfire – where would the economy of Texas be without its illegals?

Andy, my wonderful host and old friend, takes me to a local American diner, “Ruby Tuesday”. I fancy a visit to its amazing salad bar (choice of 18 dressings); I order a veggie burger to go with it then wish I hadn’t because this is an American burger, 3 times the size of what you might get in England, tastes like it might be home made, interestingly herb-and-spicy. I leave most of my fries and I’ve still eaten too much. I wash it all down with a white chocolate/cold coffee smoothie. Don’t think you get those in England but hey, I’m going to check. Service quick and gracious, the waiter talks as though he really does, from the bottom of his heart, long that we both have a nice day and if there were anything else he could provide for us it would make his day. If anyone spoke like that to you in England you’d think he was a ham actor; in America it might still be the way he’s been trained, but it feels sincere. Weird.

Andy talks about his church in Ellicott City, Maryland, where he’s been pastor for well over twenty years. Talks of its mission teams going to help with relief work in Louisiana after the hurricanes; talks of the food store their folks support, and about the confirmation service this Sunday coming – about 45 confirmands. I mention creationism. He responds like it’s something other people were getting excited about at the time of the Dover judgement last fall, but not now, and not in the culture he knows, it’s just not an issue. He does some teaching at a Washington seminary, and it’s not an issue there either; what IS an issue is homosexuality, so no change there either side of the Atlantic, but the battle lines are drawn up just a little differently here from how I suspect they will be in the South.

Andy speaks about an ageing ministry – too many within a sniff of retirement – and reports some denominational decline. Of course, the fundies would say, that’s because his Church doesn’t preach the true Gospel. I think that’s a slur on one of the finest preachers I know but I guarantee there’ll be no true Gospel preaching this Sunday morning. That’s because the Snake’s preaching, and will I be having an incidental dig at creationists, just to illustrate a valid hermeneutical point of course? Can a duck swim. Besides, I genuinely want to gauge the reaction.

This is affluent East coast America, not wild about Bush, and not unduly concerned if at all with the number of dinosaurs that might have been accommodated on the Ark.

Inerrancy problems

2006-05-26T07:45:00.000Z

There were no human witnesses to events of days 1 - 5 of Genesis 1’s Creation Week. Same goes for all creation myths of course, but it only becomes problematic if you try to anchor your philosophy on the literal truth of these narratives.

So how do we know, for example, that God created his firmament on Day 2 but left the separation of water from land until Day 3, leaving him plenty to do as he then had to create all the plants and decide where to put them? Might it not have been more sensible to separate the land from the water on Day 2, giving it time to dry out overnight? How do we know that other couples were not created to enjoy life in Eden as well as Adam and Eve, which would be a natural enough reading of Genesis 1.27 taken in isolation from ch. 2? (It also sidesteps the perennially recurring question of who Cain’s wife was - typical creationist answer: one of his sisters, dummy. You have a problem with that?)

The answer of course is that God knew what he did when, and dictated a summary to the writer of Genesis, whom creationists identify as Moses. For creationism to work, it’s essential that Moses’ audio-scribing skills were infallible, although can be no check, in the nature of the case. The transmission must be totally reliable. We must know the Bible is a book we can trust in every respect; on history, geography, biology, physics, the lot.

Any internal contradiction or factual error that can be shown to exist in the Bible skittles this. To a fundamentalist, the Bible can no more be slightly fallible than a man can be slightly dead, or a balloon slightly pricked. Fundamentalism is an all-or-nothing, high-anxiety world view and unsurprisingly the apologetic struggle between fundamentalists and their critics to prove or disprove inerrancy is intense. It only takes one prick to pop the balloon.

An enormous database of alleged Biblical errors is maintained here and continues to grow as readers identify new ones. It must be said that many of these are trivial and could indeed result from copying errors, which does not violate the dogma of inerrancy in the original manuscripts. The unavailability of any original manuscripts might be seen as an escape hatch for the fundies, but they are welcome to it: they’re in plenty of trouble as it is. Many contradictions remain which are far from trivial and cannot be waved away as textual glitches. Fundies have their work trying to reoncile them but note the assumption: an apparent error cannot actually be one. They know without having to look that the Bible is inerrant; the task is to dispel any contrary impression.

The "Skeptics' Annotated Bible" (link above) also collects verses which display God’s fondness for slaughter, prompting the question: do we want this book to be held up as holy from cover to cover? I much prefer to think that the ancient Hebrews were a bloodthirsty lot, in common with other nations, and projected their militaristic ambitions onto the God they believed would fight for them. Christians and Jews alike should want to distance themselves from such a primitive deity; it’s when Christian fundamentalists on the one hand or Zionists on the other revere him that we get trouble.

So far as I’m concerned, John 19.14 & 31 make it clear that Jesus was crucified one day BEFORE the Feast of the Passover, in contradiction of the Synoptics according to all of whom he met his death ON the feast day. But I’ve used this one before, so let’s look at something else: the problem of "big numbers". This one interests me because it played its part in breaking down the nineteenth century literalist consensus. John Colenso, later to become bishop of Natal and something of a folk hero in South Africa, started out as a mathematician and was troubled to discover that some of the sums in the Pentateuch don’t add up. These books are inaccurate, he concluded, and can’t be literally true. Colenso’s rebellious thinking (he also challenged the doctrine of everlasting punishment, and refused to insist that polygamous men converted to Christianity should renounce all but one of their wives, since this would be to condemn the others to destitution) gave the Anglican communion a headache. The bishop of Capetown tried to excommunicate Colenso, but he carried on his pastoral work regardless. The first ever Lambeth Conference was convened in 1867 to resolve the issues he had raised. The hymn "The Church’s One Foundation" was written at the time in defiance of what was thought to be his apostasy.

Colenso had calculated that if 600,000 able-bodied men and their families had escaped from Pharaoh (Exodus 12. 37), it would have involved the movement of 2,000,000 people at dead of night. There would also have been the sick, the infirm and more than 200 mothers in the throes of childbirth. That would be comparable to the total evacuation of a city the size of Philadelphia. Not even the most disciplined army in the world today could achieve anything like that.

He also noted that if the part about the slaughter of passover lambs was taken literally, 1250 animals would have had to be killed every 60 seconds and each priest would have had to sprinkle the fresh blood of 333 lambs per minute for two hours. The task would have been impossible.

More recently David Fouts, a theology professor in Tennessee, has published a paper defending what he calls a "hyperbolic interpretation" of such number problems as these:

Judges 12:6 states that for mispronouncing "Shibboleth" 42,000 Ephraimites were slain at the river Jordan, a number that exceeds the census total for that tribe in either Numbers 1 (40,500) or Numbers 26 (32,500). Even allowing for an increase of the Ephraimite warrior population after the conquest does not alleviate the problem of the enormity of the number of those slain.

1 Kings 20:30 asserts that after Israel had killed 100,000 Syrian foot soldiers at a nearby battle, 27,000 more into the city of Aphek where a wall fell on them, apparently killing them as well. One would think that this wall or its remains would be somewhat comparable to the Great Wall of China to be so calamitous in its collapse and that it would have been at least partially unearthed by now. If there is some other signicance to the large numbers, however, the size of the wall may not matter.

One of the most perplexing problems involving large numbers is the different numbers in the 2 Samuel 24 (1.3 million) and 1 Chronicles 21 (1.57 million) accounts of the census ordered by David. Like the censuses of the book of Numbers, the totals are entirely too large.

Fouts’ worries are fuelled by conservative attitudes to scripture; he’s a supernaturalist and doesn’t like Colenso’s "mocking attitude". But he is a thorough and honest scholar too, that’s to say I can live with his conclusions though I doubt a fundamentalist could:

Scripture is similar to other annalistic inscriptional literature in that the historical narratives of the OT often employ figurative language in the near environment of the large numbers, a fact that may support the thesis that the large numbers themselves are hyperbolic. It appears that all enumerated preexilic censuses in the OT may employ hyperbolic numbers.....

The large numbers have often been a stumbling block for accepting the Biblical accounts as legitimate records of history. If the numbers are simply reflective of a rhetorical device common in ancient Near Eastern literature, however, one may no longer question the integrity of the record by use of this argument. The large numbers are often simply figures of speech employed to magnify King Yahweh, King David, or others in a theologically based historiographical narrative.

All I wish to do is press home a point of logic, granted that Fouts is correct. The use of hyperbolic numbers is a literary device, whose effect is to overlay the facts of history, which we cannot now retrieve. In other words, in the kinds of passage Fouts has examined, the Bible does not tell the literal truth even though the presence of statistics may convey the appearance of matter-of-fact prose. Something else is going on in the chronicling.

At this point we have abandoned the view of Scripture as directly dictated by God, substituting for it a naturalistic explanation for the nature of the text. It’s the way it is because human writers, consciously or instinctively, have decided to embroider the plain facts in a manner not intended to deceive but to convey theological rather than factual truth. It’s called creativity, which doesn’t preclude inspiration, indeed may be seen as dependent on it: but it does preclude inerrancy in the usual bone-headed fundamentalist sense. The way is paved for seeing other passages of scripture, for example the opening chapters of Genesis as a kind of writing other than objective chronicle; as imaginative literature. Once that point is conceded, I’m home and dry. Which means creationists won’t concede it, of course, I’m not that daft.

Someone round here is deluded, and it isn't me

2006-05-25T18:00:00.000Z

I’ve been looking through some e-mail correspondence with creationists, undertaken before I realised how quite how impervious they are to rational argument. I can't say I wasn't warned, you'll get nowhere with these guys, they said; and they were right, but I've had to learn for myself. The term "psychotic" - detached from reality, unable to recognise its own delusions, liable to project its own weaknesses onto those who criticise it (typically: "evolutionists have an agenda, creationists seek only the objective truth") without seeing the irony - has proved useful in trying to understand them. One correspondent provides a couple of excellent examples of the syndrome.

Neo-Darwinism is all you have left but it stands before a precipice and many of us believe that the scientific community will have to face up to the truth about evolution within about 15 years.

Yeah, right. So Darwinian theory is that close to collapse ... and when it does, science will embrace a theory that says 6,000 years ago, roughly, a geocentric universe was formed, without form and void, its principal component being water. Dimensions not given. Source of energy to prevent said water freezing also not given. A firmament, or dome-like expanse, of unspecified construction was then made to "separate waters from waters". Tricky, given the spherical nature of the earth but maybe it was flat back then. No sooner had other waters then been separated from land, than, despite the resulting climatic chaos, plants were found growing everywhere, in soil which normally takes centuries to form, limestone made from the shells of dead molluscs although no living ones had yet been created, but hey. Then, a sun was created, around which presumably the earth is now in orbit, although what it was in orbit around prior to this is not clear. Ooh, and some stars. Tiddly little things aren’t they, and you could see them all at once, even the ones thousands of light years away.

Yes, I can just see that happening. Scientists are such intelligent people, they only need to have their Darwinian blinkers taken off and they’ll see the truth. Roll over Daniel Dennett. I shall ask the scientists of my acquaintance how likely they think it is. Including the lovely Christian lady I had dinner with recently, who teaches biology and had absolutely no idea that evolution ought to be a problem for her, was staggered when I started quoting Henry Morris, didn’t know people still thought like that - I bet she’ll be surprised.

Fifteen years and Darwin will be done for, he reckons. Let’s hope creationism’s dead and buried long before that. I know which grave I'd prefer to dance on; not that Darwinism has to be true; my pitch is that creationism cannot possibly be, because truth makes sense and the Bible isn't stupid. Mind you, the Rapture could happen before either of them keels over. Should have happened in ’88 but someone forgot to tell God (Remember Eighty Eight Reasons Why Jesus will come in 1988, a best seller in America?)

And from the same correspondent, this little gem, in reply to my challenge about Rowan Williams’ "category mistake" comment

I would hardly expect a biblical opinion to come from the liberal wing of Anglicanism (Episcopalianism) which Dr Williams clearly represents! But if the Dr had to face Jesus tomorrow, would he seriously tell him to His face that Creationism should not be seen as an "alternative theory to evolution"? (Because, that is, biblical creation is merely an allegory whereas evolution is "good science" - which is presumably what Dr Williams meant – that is, if the quote is accurate [it's near enough - Snake]). I do not think that the archbishop would dare make such a comment in such company.

My correspondent doesn’t know what an allegory is and no contemporary interpreter of Genesis uses the tool, to my knowledge. It got shoved in the back of a drawer and forgotten back in the Middle Ages. But that little error pales into insignificance beside the quite breathtaking chutzpah of the rest. First, Rowan Williams is a "liberal" - not a terribly accurate designation - and THEREFORE cannot be expected to venture a Biblical opinion. The weight of prejudice behind that would sink the QE2. So "liberal" scholarship is never Biblical other than by accident?

Second, it is assumed that, face to face with Jesus, Rowan Williams would shrivel into a corner, pleading for mercy and repenting of his error; that there is no defensible case, that evolution will be revealed on that last day as heresy - oh please! Why should Dr Williams not dare to state the facts of the matter? Let me speak for myself, I’ll face Jesus and tell him how I combated the creationist menace in His name and hope that compensates in His eyes for some of the other things I really should be ashamed of, but I am in danger of slipping into point-scoring now. What disgusts me is the suggestion - frequently encountered in creationist literature - that "sceptics" (we're all lumped together in the creationist's mind) don't mean what they say, they lack integrity, it's some kind of trendy pose. What Williams says publicly he doesn't truly believe, and couldn't possibly say to Jesus. Knowing just a little bit about Rowan through the friend of a friend, I'd say this: if Rowan Williams doesn't have integrity, nor does anyone else on the face of this planet.

Had my correspondent been interested in rational debate, rather than casting aspersions at one whose briefcase he is unworthy to carry - and I do not claim to be any worthier - he might have attempted to analyse the concept of a category mistake. This would have entailed refuting the view that it is inappropriate to put scientific documents alongside the book of Genesis as though they are any more comparable than Jane Austen and the local bus timetable - both valuable in their way, but useless in the one case for telling me when I can next get a bus to Middlesbrough and in the other for providing satire on early nineteenth century bourgeois society. That’s what a category error looks like. Williams, as fine a Biblical scholar and theologian as Britain has produced in a generation, knows this. My correspondent either does not or has no interest in discussing the matter; yet he presumes to know how Christ will judge Rowan Williams.

Finally, I am accused of nursing "hatred" in my heart, and I need to reflect on this because I am obviously very angry, with which I deal by indulging my sarcasm: but by whom, or by what am I so incensed? And is anger the same as hatred?

I hate stupidity, especially when it is paraded as truth and presented in the name of Christ. I hate it because it makes God look stupid and weakens the Church’s witness. I get angry when intelligent people - my correspondent is one such, I try not to waste my time targeting the obvious morons out there - are wilfully stupid and won’t listen to reason. Sometimes that spills over into anger at them, but this is wrong and I try to rein back. The "psychosis" insight helps here - you don’t get mad at psychotics because they can’t recognise their own delusions. There may be nothing you can do to help them, until they admit they need help. But sometimes they can be a danger to others, and those others need to be protected, as I seek to protect God’s people from creationism - yes, yes, I’m angry all right. But do I hate creationists, as opposed to their ludicrous ideas? May God forgive me if I do. I feel desperately sorry for them. I long for their deliverance.

Come, let us reason together, says the Lord. When that starts happening we may see some progress. But only on the basis that one of us round here needs help, and I’m not the one who’s psychotic. I can offer a process through which the matter could be settled once and for all if anyone’s interested, but I’m not holding my breath. There’s too much at stake for creationists: they can’t possibly be wrong. There were dinosaurs on the ark. Crocodiles were created vegetarians. The earth was made first then the sun, 6,000 years ago, ish. If you can’t see it, you can’t see it.

Happy Birthday dear Noah

2006-05-24T22:33:00.000Z

... and happy birthday to me. Spent some of it with my son, whom I begat 25 years ago; not like Noah, who waited half a millenium before he got round to any begetting, so far as the Bible can tell us. He would appear to have started building the Ark early in his sixth century and completed it round about his 600th birthday.

One might wonder why the Lord did not entrust this gigantic construction job to a younger man, or even to Noah earlier in his life; though Noah was to live another three and half centuries after the Flood, so he clearly had a strong constitution and might be considered still in his prime.

Noah is one of several characters in Genesis who survived into their 900’s. Methusaleh (969 years old when he died) was famously the oldest of all, followed by Jared (962), Noah (950), Seth (912), Kenan (910) and Enosh (905) the latter not to be confused with Enoch, who did not die at all but was taken into heaven at the tender age of 365.

The precision of these numbers suggests that some kind of chronological scheme is in the writer’s mind, although scholarly enquiry as to its nature remains speculative. Other Middle Eastern cultures indulged in similar flights of fancy about ancestral figures, some of whom are said to have lived for tens of thousands of years. Common to such legends and the Genesis accounts is the idea that "these human beings of the unimaginably remote past were of a quite different order of vitality and durability from the puny men and women of the present age" (Oxford Bible Commentary). None of which will impress a fundamentalist, for whom the figures are accurate, revealed and beyond dispute. If the Bible says that Noah was 600 when he finished the Ark ...

In fundamentalist eyes, I’m a lousy uniformitarian. Few men today live beyond 100, by which time even they are physically clapped out, with no prospect of entering or re-entering the begetting stakes. So, I assume, it must have always been in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, and the Bible does not provide evidence in that way. But fundamentalists denounce this as faithless; since the Bible reveals God’s truth to us, it follows that men did indeed live for centuries, but without losing their vigour. Noah could build the Ark having passed his 500th birthday because he still had the strength of a thirty-year old. It just goes to show how catastrophic the Fall was that we age so quickly now.

There will be no meeting of minds on this issue; you either realise the fundamentalist position is daft or you don’t. I would merely ask this question of those who maintain that Noah did live to be 950; while I accept that the Bible may see long years as a blessing, would you really want as many of them as that? Would you not get bored out of your skull? Would not the years, the decades, whole centuries, get mixed up in your memory, out of which whole tracts of time would fall into the void? Would your brain not accumulate more information than it could possibly process and start to crash?

Here once again, literalism stands in the way of sensible interpretation. The passages about ancient, incredibly long-lived patriarchs, may have some message for us along the lines of: years ago, men were close to God and he rewarded them with his gracious gift of longevity, whereas today people are fickle, rebellious, remote from God and don’t live for more than a fraction of the time. It’s nostalgic and hardly profound but it’s not absurd. Taking the figures literally makes it so: we might not want to die particularly, but living to be nine hundred? Call that a blessing? More like a punishment. If this is a miracle it’s one we desperately want not to be true.

Have human beings evolved from creationists?

2006-05-23T19:27:00.000Z

I’m in danger of losing it here. The reason: I have downloaded a file called "Genesis Unplugged" from the Creation Research website and I just don’t, I can’t, they’re not, I’m sorry I need a stiff drink.

It’s a series of questions based on a video which one is supposed to have watched first, but it’s not hard to get the gist. Here are some of the - scarcely believable - questions posed by Creation Research, followed by my answers, which needless to say are not the ones they are looking for.

What books did Moses write?

None. That’s what Biblical scholars say. In effect it’s what Creation Research believes. It thinks God wrote the Bible and any human "authors" were mere amanuenses, incapable of thinking for themselves, making any creative or editorial decisions, or - of course - any errors. They qualify their concept of "authorship" so much it ceases to mean anything.

Did Moses write anything about evolution?

About as much as he wrote on differential calculus and for the same reason.

Does the 7 day week come from:
(a) Politics? (b) Astronomy? (c) Religion?

The moon takes 28 days to orbit the earth. Divide it into 4 and you’ve got a 7-day week. It’s convenient, we've developed rhythms around it. There is nothing "sacred" that says we have to divide our time into weeks of any specific length. Please.

Could the 6 days of Creation be any length of time, or were they six ordinary days such as you and I know them?

The writer of Genesis understands them as ordinary days. But the story is a legend so the matter is of little importance.

If the police force can be persuaded to work a 10 day week, followed by 4 days off, what do you predict their attitude would eventually be to:
(a) Abortion? (b) Euthanasia? (c) Infanticide?

No, they are serious. Trust me, they mean it.

What is God's attitude to capital punishment?

They want you to say "in favour" on the basis of Genesis 9 vs 6, as though attitudes have to be stuck in a 4000 year old culture. How DARE they presume to pronounce on the mind of God on the basis of one text? Do they actually understand what blasphemy is?

Does the Bible teach that there should be legal penalties for performing an abortion?

And suppose it does? Why are they so obsessed with this issue? Theologians understand that the Bible is one resource among several on the basis of which we make Christian judgements. Human reason is another one, which creationists themselves try to use continually, only they have not been taught how and I doubt anyone could put that right, they would have to start too far back. I am unhappy about abortion on demand - in effect the situation in the UK - but that is very different from wanting to penalise all women irrespective of circumstances.

Do fisherman have the right to remove seals from their fishing grounds?

Oh come on, it’s obvious. Look up Genesis 1: 27-8, which - er - makes no mention of the issue. It had never occurred to me that Genesis might be relevant to this question (there could be a reason for this oversight on my part, don’t you think) or that, if it be considered relevant, that all people reading it will apply it in the same way.

The USA was built on the belief that "All men were created with certain inalienable rights". Can a democracy function, if evolution is taught as a fact in the educational institutions?

No, no, please, I’ll confess! The question should be: can a democracy function if creationists are regarded as sane people. Go on, download Genesis Unplugged for yourselves. Prima facie evidence that my current description of them as psychotic is too mild by a factor of umpteen. These people are BARKING! Ooww-ooww!!!

How does evolution undermine God's definition of sin?

You don’t have God’s definition, for one thing; you have a number of human definitions. Blasphemy again. Secondly, evolution undermines nothing but stupidity. I was brought up with a powerful sense of sin; also to believe that "God made the world, Darwin showed us His methods" - theistic evolution in other words, the only sane position for Christians to hold, as thankfully the majority in Britan do. From somewhere deep in childhood, the influence perhaps of two devout Christian parents, I have acquired a deep respect for truth, no matter what its source, and for clear thinking no matter where it leads: I regard these as at least Gospel-compatible if not Christian principles. And it partly explains my fury at creationism, which respects nothing but its own idolatrous and insane take on the Bible.

What reason does Paul give for male leadership in the church? Is his reason based on culture?
Is it the slightest use my saying that Pauline authorship of the Pastorals is debatable? Thought not, though maybe it’s beside the point. Answer to the first question: a very silly and very sexist one so yes, quite obviously it’s based on patriarchal culture. You mean there are people who don’t realise this?

Would you accept Paul's reasoning if you believed in evolution?

What the blazes has evolution got to do with church order? They’re coming to take me away, ha ha, they’re coming to take me away. Oh, sorry. I think the question means: would I be a male chauvinist if it wasn’t for Darwin? No, actually. Feminism pre-dates Darwin by a generation at least.

According to the Theory of evolution, should man or woman be the head of the house?

I read this question aloud to my wife. Words failed us both. Let me try to find some: er, there are people who still regard "headship of the house" as a meaningful concept? There are people who having the concept feel that gender rather than competence, aptitude or circumstances is relevant to it? and who feel that the social mores of one particular Middle Eastern society fix for all time the way in which all communities must function? There are people who feel that any of this is even slightly connected with Darwin? Come back to us when you’ve had some proper education, will you. I have no idea who is the head of most of the households I visit and would not dream of asking.

Is ‘falling in love’ the Bible's basis for marriage (Matthew 19:4-7)?

Bang head on brick for ten minutes, it’s so nice when it stops. No it isn’t. The concept of "falling in love" did not exist in Bible times and there have been some interesting debates in educated circles about when it actually emerged: the early medieval period perhaps? C S Lewis’ "The Allegory of Love" was a key text at one time. My sense is that - partly due to our "no deferred gratification" culture, which I deplore as much as any creationist only I know better than to blame it on Darwin - the construct of "falling in love" is on the wane again. But this is by the by. The question is silly and deserves a far sillier answer than I have given it here.

According to one science magazine, modern married couples divorce after about 3 years because that's the longest time two gorillas can tolerate each other. What assumption about the history of life are they making?

Oh come on, that’s too easy a shot. What assumption is the questioner making about surveys in magazines, and the candour of people surveyed? Is creationist "research" habitually carried out at such depth?

Why has evolution had such a devastating effect on people's confidence in the Bible over the past 100 years?

Aha, an almost unloaded question with a hint of truth to it. Evolutionary theory has done a great deal to undermine confidence in, note, certain aspects of Biblical teaching as traditionally held. But that traditional understanding had to change, and tragically couldn’t change fast enough. The 19th century Church couldn’t cope and the casualties were many. In the 20th century it got its act together, came up with theistic evolution and the issue went away, until creationists started forcing it again.

The unasked question is: will the Church survive the damage now being inflicted on it by creationists heretically presuming to speak in its name? I hope so. I love the Bible, more I believe than most fundamentalists do, because I am not blind to its real nature: they worship an idea of the Bible rather than the real thing and can't recognise its depths, its complexities, its frailties.

How could the Antichrist use the theory of evolution to promote lawlessness?

George Bush could order the invasion of Iraq having lied through his teeth about the connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, that’s the Antichrist bit. (Bear in mind that the Antichrist will masquerade as one deeply religious, it’s not so implausible.) Acording to a modified theory of evolution, widely held by the American Right: Western democracy always drives out other forms of government, even when these might be more culturally appropriate, on the basis of the survival of the richest, sorry, fittest.

Why did God give us clothes?

Feathers and scales fell off, suits of armour were too heavy ... no, come on, give me a clue. You want me to say: cos God dressed up Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, don’t you. This is a "just so" story, or aetiological legend if you prefer.

How has evolution helped promote the increase in pornography?

Talk about an own goal! Pornography is an absolute gift to capitalism, because sex sells; America, the most bullishly capitalist nation on earth is also the most porn-soaked (the Internet, born in the USA, runs on porn as we all know), and it’s only in America that creationists get taken seriously. I am not attempting to correlate belief in creationism with an enthusiasm for porn, but the converse IS true at least in my experience: evolutionism is associated with the Left, which at its worst is no more than equivocal about porn and can be deeply puritanical because porn exploits women, and the Left is feminist or should be; whereas the more creationist-sympathetic Right exploits it enhusiastically for commercial purposes. You won’t find tits and bums in the tabloid Mirror or the heavyweight Guardian and Independent, Britain’s left of centre dailies; but you’ll find plenty in the Sun, run by Murdoch, who also owns Fox. Geddit? The evolution/pornography connection simply isn’t there. The capitalism/pornography connection quite manifestly is, and creationism - even if it shuns porn - loves capitalism, which promotes porn. Truth is, creationists aren’t interested in exploring the roots of pornography. They are only interested in finding something nasty and blaming it on evolution, but their list of social evils has some very revealing inclusions and omissions. A subject for another time.

Is the order of events in Genesis the same as the order of events in the theory of Evolution? If not, how do they differ?

Oh Lord, they’re fundies and they don’t even read their Bibles properly. The order of events in Genesis 1, or the order of events in Genesis 2, do they mean? They do realise the order is different ... oh, no they don’t. That would imply contradiction. Error, even ... I am aware of frenetic attempts to harmonise Genesis 1 & 2 but even if there were convincing, both are obviously wrong, which doesn’t matter because Genesis is not in competition with a proper scientific account, such as evolution at least attempts to provide. Evolution could be wrong as well; creationism however CANNOT POSSIBLY be right. The word "right" may only be defined in such a way as to categorically rule this out. "Right" is not something that creationism can be.

Hitler, Stalin and Mao all accepted some form of evolutionism. What result did this have on their attitude to their fellow man?

This is simply ad hominem, or if you prefer, snide. A good theory is not discredited because evil men misinterpret it. I daresay Hitler and co believed in quantum physics as well. Certainly these butchers claimed support from evolution as they understood it, but the theory did not make them butchers in the first place. Anyone can play this game. Jimmy Swaggart was/is, I am sure, a good creationist.

What is the Gospel?

It has to do with God’s truth, for a start. Therefore precious little to do with creationism. Now I’m getting nasty but hey, I’m sincere, and the facts are with me.

Were Adam and Eve originally vegetarians?

I’d have said vegans. In a world without death, which young-earthers say was the case in pre-Fall Eden, there would also be no need for reproduction (otherwise the earth would get over-crowded rather fast), thus mammals would not provide milk, nor birds lay eggs. Dairy products are certainly not mentioned in Genesis 1.29.

Now there is a massive problem here: in the first creation story (in which human beings are created "male and female", with no suggestion there was only a single couple, or that men and women were made at different times) creatures are told to be fruitful and multiply. So there WAS reproduction - but no death? Talk about unsustainable. Creationists will have thought of this one and come up with a silly answer. How do I know in advance it will be silly? Because of the silliness of the question. What did two imaginary people eat? Imaginary food of course.

When was man first allowed to eat meat?

Miss, Miss! Please miss, I know! It was after the Flood when God said to Noah it’s all right to eat animals now.

Is any explanation provided for God giving this alleged permission, having previously withheld it? Do creationist answers ever explain anything? Is the Pope a Protestant?

The question of when early human beings became carnivores, having presumably learned to master fire (since we can’t eat or digest our meat raw) is quite interesting and has implications for the development of language and community life. Hunters, it is said, need to bond, to communicate with each other quickly and precisely, in a way that agrarian farmers don’t. Needless to say, creationism will have no comment to make on this since it thinks man was created as a skilled language user and ignores anthropology as a discipline for obvious reasons.

What do Luke 16:31 and John 5:46-47 have to say about the effect of the theory of evolution on people hearing the gospel?

You didn’t know the theory of evolution was mentioned in the Bible, did you. Well of course it isn’t. What IS mentioned is the denial of "Moses and the Prophets", as in these two verses. Creationist logic: Evolutionists deny the literal account of creation in Genesis 1 - 3 (which Jesus will have assumed was by Moses having no basis for assuming otherwise), therefore they can’t believe in Jesus, who said that Moses and the Prophets testify to him. Ergo, evolutionists aren’t Christians even if they say they are.

Here’s the truth. Theistic evolutionists deny the literal account of creation in Genesis 1 -3 for the excellent reason that it cannot be read literally by people who a] understand modern science and b] know what the word "literally" means. Because they also want to affirm God as Creator, they take the view that the early chapters of Genesis are stories - a particular kind of literature, to be interpreted in a particular way. But get this: most Christians come to faith because of what they see in Jesus, not because of how some people interpret Genesis 1 - 11.

Creationists insist that these chapters are essential to faith, and major on them so much they produce, in true psychotic fashion, exactly the opposite effect to the one they imagine they do. They drive people away from the Gospel. They parade their prejudices; they do not glorify Christ. They tell us nothing about Jesus - and I can testify here: my study of creationism has sent me to parts of the Bible I did not know as well as I might, especially though not exclusively in the Old Testament. That’s been a learning experience, and I am grateful. Have I learned one new thing about my Lord and Saviour? Not a blithering sausage.

How would you "rebuild the foundations" of the truth of Creation?
(a) If you are a church leader?

I am one, in a modest way: and you’re looking at it.

Scoffing at wilful ignorance

2006-05-23T07:57:00.000Z

There are certain Bible texts that creationists can be relied on to hurl at their opponents, of which this is among the most frequently unleashed:

"in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and indulging their own lusts and saying, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!’ They deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water, through which the world of that time was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the godless."

2 Peter 3. 3-7

Earlier (ch 2. vv 4 & 5) we have been told that "God did not spare .... the ancient world, even though he saved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood on a world of the ungodly ..." so there is no doubt that this writer thought in terms of Noah’s flood as a world-wide catastrophe. In creationist eyes that settles the matter, for Peter (if it was he: this epistle’s authorship is disputed but we can let that pass) wrote only as God directed him and could have made no error. The Flood happened, QED. Anyone who questions this comes under the heading of "scoffer", and clearly the term refers to modern sceptics who question the historical accuracy of Genesis.

It’s a good principle of Biblical interpretation that writers are always speaking to their own generation, taking no thought for what might be read into their words centuries later. Thus Peter would have had more urgent things to do than compose a prophecy which would not be fulfilled for nearly two millennia, and by "scoffers" he doubtless had a particular group of people in mind who were in evidence at the time he wrote. Notice too that their scoffing is motivated by the desire to "indulge their own lusts", free from fear that a dreadful judgement awaited them. The writer’s concern is to hearten his Christian readers by reminding them that judgement does indeed await, and woe betide the scoffers then. In God’s own time it will come, but in fire rather than water: think not so much Noah, more Sodom and Gomorrah.

The scoffers of 2 Peter are the same bunch as in the letter of Jude, which it resembles and may be influenced by the same source. Here they are also described as devoid of the Spirit and causing divisions: at which point it is very tempting to turn the tables on creationism and point out that since it is their dogmatism, their pseudoscience and their wilful ignorance that has wrought so much division among Christians over the issue of literalism, they are the scoffers of whom the apostle wrote. For creationists DO scoff: at mainstream science, mainstream Biblical scholarship, mainstream Christianity. They are the false teachers against whom we are warned elsewhere in the New Testament. Creationism’s opponents are just as likely to be Christians like me, hopefully not devoid of the Spirit, as atheists having a laugh.

Tempting - but cheap. If 2 Peter isn’t about the critics of modern fundamentalism, it isn’t about modern fundamentalism either: one can’t have it both ways. I must leave the Bible to vindicate other people’s prejudices, and fall back on worthier methods of justifying my own, entirely sound, judgements. It would be nice if creationists were to admit that "sceptics" are no less concerned for the truth than they profess to be themselves; they are not motivated by lustful self-indulgence but a desire for honest scholarship. But this is war, they can’t be expected to give their enemies a good press.

What though about those references to Noah’s Flood as literal history: can I explain these away? That is not the Snake's way, any more than I would explain away the six "days" of creation as lasting for far longer than 24 hours. The Bible says day, it means day in the usual sense. Peter speaks of a world wide flood and that’s what he means. But must he have been right? Am I bound to believe him?

Theology is done by weighing a range of considerations, of which scripture is one. Fundamentalists may speak about using the Bible and nothing but; in practice they rely on - aaagh! - human reason just as much as any rotten "liberal", to understand and interpret what each verse means. They will reason away like crazy to justify their interpretations against others - even, sometimes, those of other fundamentalists. The rest of us accept that other factors come into play, of which the most relevant here is the limited knowledge of the Bible’s writers compared to ours. (This argument comes up frequently in discussions about homosexuality, which simply was not understood in the days of Leviticus.)

Question: did Peter have the remotest idea how big the earth is? how many races of people existed to whom even the term "Gentile" hardly applies, since they were completely unaware of any covenant by which they might or might not be embraced? Did he know how many kinds of animals exist that might have needed a passage on the Ark, and the immense distances they would have had to cross to obtain it? It’s because we know these things now that attempts to prove the Ark was a practical proposition, and the Flood a global event, come across as so ludicrous. Conclusion: Peter was mistaken about the Flood’s extent, understandably enough in the light of his limited geographical and other knowledge.

BUT - and creationists miss this - the mistake is incidental to his main point. He does not need to establish to our satisfaction that every last square inch of land was submerged, all life annihilated except the living cargo of the Ark. He reminds us of the story as it has come down to us, drawing from it the awesome lesson: God will come in judgement that will overwhelm us. Another instance of divine wrath is supplied by a verse I left out earlier, so here it is now:

"by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction and made them an example of what is coming to the ungodly" (ch2 v6)

and there is no suggestion this was any more than a purely local firestorm. Global or local, and for that matter historical fact or legend, Noah’s flood stands as an awful warning to those who imagine God can be mocked. Peter is wrong about history, as anyone would have been at the time; that does not invalidate his message. Creationists had better find themselves another rock to throw.

Joshua's long day

2006-05-22T09:38:00.000Z

According to the book of Joshua, chapter 10

"Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and He said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.... So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."

I’m quoting from the King James Version, the only translation recognised as "inspired" by many creationists. One American preacher is alleged to have said "well, it was good enough for Jesus" ... which one hopes is apocryphal.

This is a long recognised problem for literalists. It came up at the Scopes trial, when Darrow (defending evolution) caused the staggeringly inept Bryan (representing the creationist view, although he was not a young-earther) some embarrassment over it:

DARROW: The Bible says Joshua commanded the sun to stand still for the purpose of lengthening the day, doesn't it, and you believe it?
BRYAN: I do.
DARROW: Do you believe at that time the entire sun went around the earth?
BRYAN: No, I believe that the earth goes around the sun.
DARROW: Do you believe that the men who wrote it thought that the day could be lengthened or that the sun could be stopped?
BRYAN: I don't know what they thought.
DARROW: You don't know?
BRYAN: I think they wrote the fact without expressing their own thoughts.

Darrow held that Joshua’s "long day" assumes a geocentric solar system, and that in any case the story of an enormous heavenly body being required to stand still in the midst of heaven, simply to facilitate a local military campaign on behalf of one side, is an obviously partisan fantasy. But of course if this miracle did not take place, fundamentalism is in trouble; so it must be defended as literal fact and one can rely on there being an "answer" to the problem on creationist websites, even though it is not directly relevant to their cause.

Answersingenesis' page on this denies geocentrism: "The Bible uses the language of appearance and observation", which is fair enough - I have no doubt the Bible does assume geocentrism, but this is not the passage to prove it. It is AIG’s follow-on argument that makes the jaw drop: "the mention of the moon also standing still seems to confirm both the divine authorship of the account and the fact that it is the Earth which moves. Since all Joshua needed was extra sunlight, and most ancients believed the sun moves, not the Earth, a human author of a fictitious account would only have needed to refer to the sun stopping." Attempting to unravel the logic of this defeats me.

AIG suggests three possible explanations

1. Some form of refraction (bending) of the light from the sun and the moon. According to this view, God miraculously caused the sunlight and moonlight to continue in Canaan for ‘about a whole day’

Such an event is not inconceivable, says AIG, in the light of what happened in the reign of Hezekiah when the shadow on Ahaz’s sundial retreated ten degrees (2 Kings 20:11). So one implausible event is quoted to prove the plausibility of another.

2. A wobble in the direction of the Earth’s axis of rotation. This involves a precession of the axis of the Earth, wobbling slowly so as to trace an ‘s’-shaped or circular path in the sky. Such an event could have made it appear to an observer that the sun and the moon were standing still, but need not have involved any actual slowing of the rotation of the Earth.

or, the most obvious one:

3. A slowing of the earth’s rotation.

According to this view, God caused the rotation of the Earth to slow down so that it made one full revolution in about 48 hours rather than 24. Simultaneously God stopped the cataclysmic effects that would have naturally occurred, such as monstrous tidal waves. Some people have objected to this on the erroneous assumption that, if the Earth slowed down, people and loose objects would fly off into space. In fact, the apparent centrifugal force (tending to throw things off the Earth) is only about one-three-hundredth of the gravitational force. If the Earth stopped rotating (whether suddenly or not), this outward ‘force’ would cease and we would actually be held more firmly by gravity.

This scenario need only imply that God slowed the rotation of the atmosphere, oceans, and Earth simultaneously to prevent any tidal-wave effect, and any heat build-up inside the Earth due to friction from still-rotating liquid layers of the earth’s core. And after the long day was over, the whole process would need to start up again.

What is so hilarious about all this is AIG’s use of contemporary scientific knowledge to make sense of a story rooted in a pre-scientific worldview. It’s a story that can only be told on certain cosmological assumptions; one these collapse, it makes no sense as history or science. The reasons for its telling are not far to seek; it reinforces Israel’s belief in a God who could and would do anything to make sure that his people prevail. It's a piece of morale-boosting propaganda raising more questions than it answers, notably: if God could fix it for Joshua on that occasion, how come he didn't fix it for his people throughout their history?

In its own terms, AIG’s conclusion is sound enough:

There is not one logical, scientific reason to claim that, given a God powerful enough to create a universe in six days, Joshua’s long day ‘could not have happened’. Those who balk at this account are almost invariably those who have already rejected 6-day creation through compromise with evolution’s fictitious long ages, and have thus rejected the authority of the Bible.

However, such a claim is vulnerable to the charge that a God who behaved in such a cavalier fashion with respect to normal experience might easily do so again on a whim, which renders scientific endeavour impossible. Scientists have to work on the assumption that reality will behave itself and act consistently - the dreaded "materialist" position. Creationists resist this insofar as they need to defend Biblical miracles; when these are not under discussion they can be as materialist as the next man.

As for rejecting "the authority of the Bible", the charge holds only on the basis that fundamentalists are allowed to define the phrase. It is not only possible to discount the supernatural tall tales of the Bible while still acknowledging its supreme place as a source of spiritual insight and guide to conduct; most theologians do.

A humble claim

2006-05-20T13:04:00.000Z

I know I’m right about creationism. It’s silly, it’s heretical, it’s manifestly false. But don’t go calling me arrogant. I am a mere learner compared to Henry Morris, may he rest in prejudice. I quote from the foreword to his son John’s book "The Young Earth":

"The facts of science oppose evolution, and most people see this, once these facts are shown to them. There is no evidence whatever - past, present or possible - that vertical evolution of one kind of organism into a more complex kind or organism has ever occurred or ever can occur." [emphasis added]

I was going to say that at least my arrogance stops short of pronouncing on what cannot possibly happen in the future, but honesty forbids: I have publicly said more than once that the Second Coming will not happen in anyone’s lifetime, which might seem to be on a par with Morris’ breathaking claim. But Morris faces far more difficulties (or did until he died) because if I’m wrong, and the Second Coming does happen in my lifetime, there will be no mistaking it and I shall have to throw myself on Christ’s mercy. If Morris is wrong the world won’t end, but the whole fundamentalist edifice will collapse about its then defenders’ ears.

There will never be any evidence for evolution - ponder the implications of that. What Morris actually means is something different. His claim translates as: we creationists have decided that evolution can’t happen. Therefore, anything which its supporters put forward as evidence for evolution we will interpret in some other way. No matter how many knots we have to tie ourselves in while we do this. Our theory is true and we will duff up the facts until they beg for pardon and line up with it, as good little facts should.

That Richard Lewontin quote

2006-05-19T12:58:00.000Z

Here’s a quotation I’ve come across a few times. Creationists use it to prove that evolutionary scientists are ideologically compromised. It’s from a review of Carl Sagan’s posthumously published book, Billions and Billions, and the writer is the geneticist Richard Lewontin of Harvard. So it's not as if he's particularly intelligent, then.

"Evolutionists ... have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door"

That’s strongly put, but I don’t see why Christians should find it threatening. I take Lewontin to be saying: the moment we concede a role for the supernatural in scientific enquiry, however small, the process becomes fatally contaminated. It may be tempting to reach for supernatural explanations, which may seem more plausible, but the temptation must be resisted even when the materialist explanation honestly arrived at seems crazy. And that’s true. God is not in the little bits of the world that don’t make sense unless he is part of the equation; to say this leaves you nowhere to run when someone comes up with a better equation. God is in the whole fabric of the universe or he is nowhere.

Here’s a typical creationist reaction. First, Lewontin is supposed to have "let this slip", as though it’s some kind of guilty secret. Then:

Just as we thought all along! You must find a way—organic evolution—to rid yourself of that "Divine Foot in the door." Nice to see you finally admit it. Well, once again, gentlemen, I have news for you. God’s foot is in the door, whether you like it or not—all your attempts to prevent it notwithstanding. And there is nothing you can say or do to stop it, because neither He, nor we, will be going "quietly into the night." Not now. Not ever. Yes, the attack is on. But we are at the vanguard of that attack. You are losing the battle—and you will lose the war! Truth always triumphs over error.

(from a report posted at ApologeticsPress.org)

Psychosis again. "Truth will always triumph over error", indeed. The possibilty that mainstream science might actually be the truth, and creationism a load of manure, never crosses this poor writer’s mind.

Whose are the burning pants?

2006-05-19T09:00:00.000Z

In 1994, Australian geologist Ian Plimer published "Telling Lies for God", a scathing attack on creationism. It sounded interesting but proved to be out of print; my copy was kindly sent to me by the author himself (damn, didn’t ask him to sign it) and I’ve enjoyed it hugely. AnswersinGenesis took issue with him, ever so slightly; I believe there was a lawsuit at some point, but that’s history. Its website features a huge, point-by-point "rebuttal" of Plimer. Promised myself and indeed Ian that I would work through it. I had my secretary print off a hard copy so that I could more easily compare it with the book. It runs to 60 pages. Wow, he did upset them, didn’t he.

Perhaps only an anti-creationist anorak such as yours truly would even consider setting himself such a task, but I’m using it partly to test my view of creationism as psychotic. Have any of Plimer’s substantial charges against creationism really been rebutted? I’m going to guess they fault him on details and small factual errors - the John Mackay style that I experienced in Clitheroe - but don’t address the main points at all. Let’s see. Suffering as I do from high blood pressure I will have to take the AIG document in small bites [!] but I’ve made a start and will post on this from time to time.

Provocatively, Plimer calls creationism a "cult"; I prefer to speak of a sectarian mentality, but Plimer writes out of his Australian experience where the situation may be more polarised than in Britain. AIG objects to the word of course, but then declares "Creationism is simply the historic, evangelical, orthodox view of the Church, which has become more and more unpopular". For an article seeking to refute the charge of lying, to come out with this one early in the proceedings is pretty rich. Creationism depends on the notion of a "literal" reading of Genesis in a sense of the word which did not exist until modern times; it also seeks to defend the Bible on the basis of up-to-the-minute science so by definition it cannot be a historic doctrine. It has a history, part of the fundamentalist movement which is essentially a modernist reaction to the despised Enlightenment. To call the Protestant Reformers "creationists", for example, is simply anachronistic. Besides, what exactly are AIG’s credentials in declaring the content of evangelical orthodoxy? The evangelicals I know and the evangelical groups I have contacted are extremely wary about associating themselves with YE creationism, many of them saying, or words to this effect: this is not a core doctrine, and evangelicals are free to affirm it or not. The Church in its wider sense (which AIG regards as apostate, and the feeling is mutual) disowns creationism entirely. So much for it being "orthodox".

The other point I’ll pick up in this post is the earth’s flatness. Plimer says "flat earthism is a basic concept of biblical cosmology", offering a range of quotations to justify this, one might have thought, fairly uncontroversial assertion. AIG’s "rebuttal" runs to a few lines, referring the reader - assuming he has got this far, there cannot be so many as dogged as me, surely? - to the "clear-cut arguments in our literature, showing that flat-earthism was never biblical, nor was it widely held by Church fathers". Plimer is then accused of not knowing his Hebrew: well, excuse me, I don’t know Hebrew either but like Plimer I can look it up and my understanding is as follows. The "firmament" created on Day 2 need not necessarily have been solid, and the Hebrew word can mean "expanse". But the root meaning is "dome", and domes are solid: if the Genesis firmament is - heaven forbid! - a metaphorical one, the basis of comparison is still with a solid hemisphere, and that assumes a flat earth (see my early posting "Mummy mummy what’s a firmament").

What creationists won't acknowledge, of course, is that they have an axe to grind. They NEED the Bible not to have taught a flat earth, so they must find alternative interpretations for verses that seem clearly to point that way. For the rest of humanity nothing is assumed, it is not a matter of "scepticism", but of weighing the evidence. I am free to conclude either that the Bible teaches a flat earth or that it doesn't, nothing is at stake for me given my view of Scripture; but for creationists, everything is at stake, so they know in advance what the Bible can and cannot possibly say.

Plimer offers a number of killer arguments for Biblical flat-earthism which AIG ignores. Maybe its refutation of them is to be found in their literature, but if they are so devastating it would have been pertinent to reproduce them here. This much I know: NOWHERE in Scripture are we taught that the earth is a globe. The shape it isn’t - flat - is one issue, but might not the word of God, if its purpose is to convey some rudimentary science, have instructed us as to the shape it is?

More to come. I feel my blood pressure rising and I’m only on page 6. Another 54 to go.

Twinkle twinkle little star though you're not that little really

2006-05-19T06:49:00.000Z

Young earthers have more than battle on their hands: it’s not only Darwin they have to discredit. Other sciences as well as biology are also part of the conspiracy to prove that Genesis 1 isn’t literally true, therefore the whole Bible is worthless. No, I don’t think it follows either, but creationists do.

Standard, sane cosmology estimates the age of the universe in billions of years, which clearly contradicts the young earthers. It also creates a problem when interpreting Genesis; on the fourth day of creation stars were made, it being implied they could be seen instantly. Now, you and I know that stars are huge and distant; that light has a finite speed and thus even the nearest star, created on day 4, would not have been seen on earth for more than four years. We would still not be able to see the distant reaches of the universe even today. The human scribes of Genesis 1 could not have been expected to know any of this and presumably took the commonsense, pre-scientific view that stars are tiny, relatively close by and in any case that light needs to time to get from A to B. But for creationists as for fundamentalists in general, the Bible was not written by human scribes but by God, who must have got the science right.

Problem, which used to be resolved through the declaration that when God made the stars on day 4, he created their light already reaching the earth. I remember laughing out loud when I read that in a creationist book while reading up for an essay during my theology degree, back in the 1970’s. If there is one experience that determined me at some point in my life to deal with all this codswallop, it was that moment of hilarity; which makes me rather disappointed to discover that creationists don’t use this argument any more. Frankly, I don’t see that it’s any more ridiculous than all the other proposed solutions to the problem of apparent age; my current favourite anomaly (I’ve been gardening a lot recently) is humus. Present in soil, it consists of decomposed organic matter; plants need it to thrive and was thus, one assumes, kicking around on Day 3 of creation when plants were made - so where had the decomposed organic matter come from ...???

Creationist arguments tend to outstay what welcome they may have ever enjoyed. You can still read on websites that there should be much more dust on the moon than there is if the universe is as old as scientists say, that the earth’s rotation should be much slower and its population much greater; plus if I read one more reference to Robert Gentry’s polonium haloes and how these prove a young universe I shall scream. In the eyes of all normal people these arguments have been put forward, considered and demolished but creationists don’t give up easily. However, on the "light created in transit" argument, they have. As a useful article in the Free Dictionary puts it

"as the idea relies on a supernatural conspiracy to create the appearance of a material reality that is different from actual reality, it is an epistemologically impossible to refute idea.... one bizarre implication ... would be that supernovae that occur in the distant universe would have had to have been manufactured optical effects at the time of creation. In other words, in this idea distant supernovae never really happened even though we see them."

However, the alternative theories are considerably more technical, and needless to say unacceptable to mainstream science. Creationists seem to be pushing two at present, although with a certain tentativeness that suggests even they realise they’ve got their work cut out on this one. Naturally, they do all they can to try and rubbish the Big Bang theory, where their arguments take the familiar form: here’s a scientific theory that presents certain difficulties, therefore it’s completely wrong, therefore the Bible is the only possible alternative.

But if not the Big Bang, then what? Step forward Russell Humphreys, whose name is likely to come up sooner rather than later in any creationist account of cosmology. He has proposed an unashamedly supernaturalist theory - don’t tell me that’s a problem for you? To quote the Free Dictionary again

Humphreys refers to Isaiah 40:22, Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in. To Humphreys, this is an indication that God side-stepped the laws of physics, to drag spacetime out of its own black hole and force the universe to expand, in what Humphreys calls a "white hole cosmology".

So that’s going to play well among mainstream astronomers. The alternative is the view that the speed of light may have been higher at the time of creation than it is now. I believe that Big Bang theory itself requires this, certainly in the early moments after the primal singularity when it is calculated that the universe must have been expanding faster than the speed of light. Other, sensible, physicists have speculated that c may have varied over time. But the huge levels of increase in light-speed required to bully the universe into making sense on a creationist interpretation generate all sorts of other problems to which only creationists are convinced they have answers.

Houston, or rather Kansas, we have a problem. The universe keeps on looking like it’s older than it says in Genesis, but since we know that can’t be true we will have to keep on searching for facts to fit the theory - just like we always accuse evolutionists of doing ...

Mull thoughts from back home

2006-05-17T14:03:00.000Z

Spent a few days on the Isle of Mull earlier in the month. As ever we hit lucky with the weather (our fourth trip and we haven't had a truly foul day yet) and left wondering why we don't just sell up and move there NOW. Yeah yeah, think practicalities. And very long winters.

This is Croig bay, west of Dervaig; little there now to show it was once the main harbour for cattle being shipped in from the Outer Hebrides on their way to the mainland.

This time I was struck by the many antiquities on the island. Here is a fine group of standing stones dating from the Bronze Age. The general consensus in the guide books is that Mull's first inhabitants settled here around 9,000 BC.

Except they can't have done so far as a YE creationist is concerned. They would have to have migrated here from around Ararat after the Flood, which would not have given them that long. And given the inhospitability of the climate for much of the year, why should they have done so?

Mull is a magnet for geologists, whose studies are readily available in Mull's bookshops (both of them ... well it's not quite that bad, but the whole island has a population of little more than 3,000 - and it's a damn sight bigger than Manhattan!) These assume a 4.5 billion year old earth as a matter of course. It's not some wild conspiracy: neh, the earth is old so there's no God. It's just the scientific consensus. A YE creationist would have a hard time on Mull: the whole culture screams deep antiquity, archaeological and geological, and he can't hear it.

Psychosis at Clitheroe

2006-05-17T10:22:00.000Z

Would there have been, perhaps a hundred people at the Clitheroe Community Church on Tuesday, May 16th for the visit of leading Australian creationist John Mackay? The hall looked comfortably full, but let’s see this in proportion: on the one hand, gathering a hundred people for a weeknight church meeting for any purpose is achievement enough. On the other hand, this is a small Lancashire town, one of the stops on a highly publicised visit, and the venue was, come again? I could be catty and guess the proportion of those who were there because it was their church and they’d have turned up if the occasion had been Joe Bloggs’ slides of his holiday in Telford but even so: the time to worry is when John starts filling the Blackpool Winter Gardens. On this showing British creationists are still very small fry.

The evening confirmed one thing for me: it’s on theology and literary understanding that I need to tackle John and his fellow psychotics. The man is a scientist and, naturally enough, plays to his strengths. His presentation was smooth, well illustrated and easy on the ear. But like the rest of his kind he hasn’t the faintest clue what kind of writing Genesis actually is, nor any awareness that the God he wants us to believe in is a vindictive monster. We were even dangled over the pit at one point - believe in evolution and you’re in danger of hell, a view attributed to Jesus - was that him weeping at the back? Once he strayed beyond what would seem to be his field of competence (it isn’t mine so I must give him the benefit of the doubt) the logical sleights of hand and theological howlers came thick and fast. Not that the largely sympathetic audience seemed to care; John raised a tittter or two with the sort of unhilarious jokes that only come off if you’re among friends - e.g. slide of woman with dog, to illustrate a point being made about dog-breeding: the dog, said John, is the one on the left. The response to that and others in similar vein warned me this might not be the arena in which to raise questions about the post-exilic dating of Genesis 1 (which would rule out Moses as its author, or rather scribe: creationism cannot acknowledge any human initiative in the composing of Scripture). But if John knows there is such a thing as Biblical scholarship he hides it well.

John’s co-presenter, Diane, sought to discredit evolutionary theory, making some perfectly valid points about the difference between evolution and adaptation, as though that will send Dawkins back to the drawing board. She provided what was for me the evening’s highlight: an explanation of why Adam and Eve, at the time of their respective creation (Adam from the dust of the ground, Eve from his rib) needed different sets of chromosomes. Now that really is hilarious; modern science being read back into an ancient supernatural story as though the two forms of discourse are entirely continuous and compatible. It’s methodologically up the spout even if the Adam and Eve story is literally true. (Anyone who thinks it even could be should try describing, in detail, the surgical procedures God used to the create the Mother of all mankind.) I cannot imagine a more telling example of creationism as a "category error", the charge levelled against it by Rowan Williams; was Diane aware of this? Does she have any idea what the Archbishop meant? But that’s psychosis for you: insulated from reality as it is, it cannot handle or really understand a direct challenge to its picture of the world. But for Diane the Bible is either factually true or a "fairy story". She will know all about fairy stories, having been theologically asleep herself for the last 200 years.

The creationist conspiracy theory was a continual background hum. From the perspective of not the largest church in not the most populous town in East Lancashire, John, and Diane presumed to declare the whole non-creationist Church apostate and the whole of mainstream science culture mesmerised by the diabolical Darwin. The easy swipes at the BBC, with its constant "preaching" of evolutionism, Steve Jones and Ian Plimer went down well but there was no proper attempt to represent the view of the overwhelming majority of educated people in this country, only to dismiss it; creationists fondly imagine that they are the only ones with integrity, thus fail to appreciate the painful irony of someone like Diane reminding us that we are to love the Lord with all our minds. Just like she does?

Plimer, a theist, is no more the Australian Richard Dawkins than Mackay is the Australian Karl Barth but creationists make no distinction between their Christian critics and militant atheists of the Dawkins type - we’re all sceptics who (and I find this a particularly insidious attempt to claim the argument by redefining terms) "don’t believe in creation". Excuse me, I believe in divine creation. I will not be told by deviants like Mackay and co that I have to believe in it on the basis of stupid theology and pseudoscience.

John’s talk presented details of alleged evidences for evolution being discredited as nothing more than proofs of adaptation. He showed that "kinds" (that remarkably scientific term) preserve their forms over many generations, even using data from old-earthers to support his case, which seemed a little inconsistent. It seemed to me that on his chosen battleground he scored a number of hits, and if it is true that biology textbooks are still using unsound examples to prove Darwinism, then shame indeed on evolutionists for not keeping their research up to date. If nothing else, the the current upsurge in creationist activity should make them tighten up their act. On the other hand, John quoted various authorities whose credentials might in themselves be suspect; I recognised few names but when there was one I did - Michael Denton, a known maverick in this field - it made me wonder about the rest.

I was waiting for the leap to "therefore the Bible is true" but could hardly believe how crudely John made it, with no attempt AT ALL to explain how creationism could begin to be any sort of scientific theory. Nor did he persuade me that he had shaken Darwinism to its core: a few examples of sloppy research are hardly enough to prompt a rethink of its basic principles. He would have us believe that evolutionists are dishonest people with an agenda that ignores the facts - another classic example of how psychotics perceive in others the truth about themselves, and never spot the irony.

Steve Jones ("he had a go at George Bush and that was about as scientific as he got" said Diane) scored one hit early on in his Royal Society lecture - I’ve only listened to the first few minutes, an omission I must now correct - when he showed that creationism ignores all other stories except the one [or two!] in Genesis. In other words, the only sacred text on view in creationism is the Bible; it is that which science must seek to prove. The idea that this approach, which would leave any scientist from outside the Jewish/Christian/Islamic world view scratching his head, utterly invalidates creationism as science appeared not to have occurred to John and Diane.

John used the decline in human longevity since the days of Noah to support a wonderfully fanciful argument about degradation and "de-volution". Things have gone from bad to worse folks, we don’t live as long as we used to. Pause for thought: life expectancy has increased since - to take a date not entirely at random - 1859, at least in the degenerate and Darwin-worshipping West - perhaps God is trying to tell us something through this! No, of course not, but the point illustrates the pathetic level at which John seeks to do his apologetics. He even made a point - of persssssonal interessssst - about snakes losing their legs over time to illustrate his degradation thesis, but hang on: in the environments where they live now legs would be a nuisance to snakes so they have adapted to manage without them - who says legs are always a good idea? Oh, sorry, we’re back in Genesis - the snake lost its legs as a punishment for tempting Eve. Category errors again.

Likewise - another sleight of hand here - everything bad in nature results from the Fall, so we mustn’t blame God for Iraq. Loud "Amens" around where I was sitting, but it’s time to love the Lord with all our minds, people: don’t even think of blaming God for what’s happened in Iraq. Try asking him instead how he justifies introducing malaria, cancer, osteoarthritis, renal colic, and a few other nasties. If these are a result of Adam and Eve’s rebellion, someone Up There has no sense of proportion.

There were impressive table-fuls of resources on display (impressive in terms of quantity at any rate - sorry, that’s cheap: although the resources themselves were not, particularly). I confined myself to John Morris’ book The Young Earth and a DVD of Mackay in debate with a proper scientist and theologian, Britain’s own John Polkinghorne. I was quite surprised to see this on sale since the two will be most unequally matched intellectually and the only way Mackay will have been able to hold is own is through vastly superior debating skills. I don't know whether he possesses them but here’s my guess/prediction: Polkinghorne wipes the floor with him and Mackay has absolutely no idea. When I've watched the disk I will post my verdict here.

I’ve plenty to be getting on with. More soon

Even the BBC gets it wrong sometimes ....

2006-05-04T10:21:00.000Z

Creationist theories about how the world was made are to be debated in GCSE science lessons in mainstream secondary schools in England.

The subject has been included in a new syllabus for biology produced by the OCR exam board, due out in September....

.... The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which oversees the development of the national curriculum, in effect guiding exam boards, said discussions of "intelligent design" or "creationism" could take place in science classes. (my emphasis)

Thus says the BBC, on a web page dated 10 March.

I couldn’t believe this and wrote an "oh surely not" sort of e-mail to OCR.

I hereby reproduce, in full, the reply from John Noel, Qualifications Manager, Maths and Science Qualification Team for the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA examinations board. It includes some of the material included in the BBC’s item, but in such a way as to eliminate certain misinterpretations which could have been read into it (by panicky people like me, for example).

Panic over.

Dear Rev. Snake,

It is actually all a bad dream! The recent media interest in our new ‘Gateway’ GCSE Science specifications, for first teaching from September 2006, has centred on the learning outcome:

Explain that the fossil record has been interpreted differently over time (e.g. creationist interpretation).

This statement occurs in an ‘Item’ entitled ‘survival of the fittest’ which covers natural selection and evolution in detail, including the work of Lamarck and Darwin. The evidence from the fossil record, from examples of natural selection occurring today and from genetics is considered. However, the specification aims to set the development of important scientific ideas in context, so for example it includes the reasons why natural selection met with an initially hostile response. The statement above should be considered in this light – it relates clearly to an historical perspective.

In response to the concerns raised, OCR has issued the following statement:

"Candidates need to understand the social and historical context to scientific ideas both pre and post Darwin. Candidates are asked to discuss why the opponents of Darwinism thought the way they did and how scientific controversies can arise from different ways of interpreting empirical evidence. Creationism and 'intelligent design' are not regarded by OCR as scientific theories. They are beliefs that do not lie within scientific understanding."

There is therefore no scientific controversy here; in these new science courses, no questions will be set on creationism as a theory or on ‘intelligent design’ and no credit will be available to candidates giving such answers to questions about the fossil record, except where presenting an historical perspective.

The interaction between science and belief is worthy of consideration in science lessons. However, this is not a requirement of the specification.

I hope these comments have been helpful.

Yours sincerely
John Noel

Two stories, not one

2006-05-03T11:37:00.000Z

I was taught at college that Genesis provides not one creation story but two:

Genesis 2:4-25

Mainstream Biblical scholarship maintains that the creation story found in Genesis 2 is the earlier of the two Genesis accounts. Filled with ancient and rich imagery, it is believed that the basic story once circulated among the early nomadic Hebrews, told perhaps around simple, intimate campfire settings, answering questions about life and the origins of humankind. It is known as the "Yahwist" account from its use of the name Yahweh to refer to God.
Genesis 1:1-2:3
Most Biblical scholars believe that the Genesis 1 account can be attributed to the so-called "priestly" writer(s)/editor(s) (known in academic circles as "P") responsible for a fair portion of the Pentateuch. Dating to roughly the Exilic and early post-Exilic period of Hebrew history, the account sets forth creation on a cosmic scale.

Wikipedia

My own translation makes this "official" with a section heading at ch 2v 4b: "Another account of creation". This is an important early clue as to the kind of literature the Bible actually is, and creates problems for literalists. But it ruffles fundamentalist feathers, so one finds apologists like J P Holding arguing against the consensus and in favour of a seamless narrative from chapter 1 through 4.

This could be a matter of "pay your money and make your choice". If you can’t see that a story [Genesis 1] in which the creation of human beings, male and female, follows that of plants and animals, contradicts another one [Genesis 2.4b ff] where a single male human is created, followed by plants, animals and finally a woman, I don’t know how to persuade you. To which a fundamentalist might reply that if I can’t see Genesis as God’s inerrant word transcribed by Moses, so that any apparent contradictions are ONLY apparent, there’s no hope for me. It’s partly a question of what you want to believe.

But only partly, and here I set a challenge. Try to write a single continuous narrative covering the events of Genesis 1 and 2, without absurdity or contradiction. I don’t think it can be done, and I say this having tried. On Day 6, in Genesis 1, God creates male and female human beings. There is no mention of a single couple, nor for that matter a "Fall." Human beings are blessed and instructed to be fruitful and multiply; which surely presumes the fact of death, enabling one generation to make room for the next. However, the account of the Fall in chs 2 - 3 won’t work unless there is indeed a single couple who bring sin into the world through their disobedience; for which the punishment would appear to be death, previously unknown (certainly a young-earther would read it that way). Adam and Eve are not told to multiply and may not necessarily have had sex until after the Fall (although 2.24 could be seen as implying otherwise).

There is a way round this in terms of Adam and Eve’s punishment being not so much that they forfeited their immortality, but were created mortal and remained so having lost the chance to eat from the tree of [eternal] life through their rebellion. This I think is forced, but there is still the insurmountable problem that in re-telling the events of Genesis 2 one has to describe the creation of plants and animals which according to Genesis 1 are already there. "This is plan B, so parts of last week didn’t happen", I have to make one of the characters say in my own re-telling.

It’s this way: Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 CANNOT both be literally true. To prove me wrong, recount the events they describe as a single narrative without contradiction.

I am not holding my breath.

A chat with the man from Capernwray

2006-05-03T05:40:00.000Z

I read once of some Victorian worthy, a schoolmaster I think, who had a text on his study wall: "A soft answer turneth away wrath" (Proverbs 15.1) Dave Jackson, on the staff of Capernwray Bible College, might have taken a leaf out of his book. Not that I felt any wrath towards Dave - I reserve mine for bigoted twerps, of whom he is not one - but had I done so his eirenic manner would soon have disarmed me. At the end of a half-hour chat on the phone I didn’t even feel like thumping a bad-tempered lunatic like John Woodmorappe, author of a huge book "proving" that Noah’s boat really floated. Don’t worry, the mood soon passed. I’m not about to turn conciliatory.

Capernwray’s evangelical credentials are impeccable, and in making contact with such an establishment I figured that if creationism is indeed on the march across the UK, they would have noticed. Well, Dave hasn’t. It’s one issue among many that concern staff and students there, same as it has been for a while. A growing priority it is not. That’s a relief.

John McKay, the Australian geologist and young-earther, will be speaking at Capernwray in the course of his current tour (I shall catch up with him at some point, probably Clitheroe). That does not, Dave was quick to tell me, constitute any sort of endorsement by the college; for him, the interpretation of Genesis 1 - 3 is a "grey area", and he sees young-earth doctrine as one possibility among several that good evangelicals might accept, although he doesn’t himself. The judgement "no, he’s far too sensible" comes too easily but I wonder if Dave’s problem, from a YE point of view, is that he hasn’t spent long enough in the fundamentalist ghetto. British evangelicalism is, within limits, quite pluralistic, and Capernwray seems to reflect its diversity.

Young earthers want to force an issue that is better not forced, I said to Dave, who seemed to agree. The perception of arrogance, even though it is only a perception, on the part of those who know they’re right can damage their cause, he said: something I need to watch because I know, not so much that I’m right, as that young-earthers are definitely wrong!

Dave was a little equivocal about the Flood, wanting - of course - to affirm that it covered "the earth" just as the Bible said, while conceding my point that what the Bible’s writers understood by "the earth" may have been a much smaller area than the entire globe; yet insisting, again in line with Scripture, that all humanity bar the Ark’s passengers were wiped out. I sensed an inconsistency there which I should have explored further but I was anxious not to trespass on his patience. Maybe it’s another "grey area" for him.

Dave, a geneticist, gives evolutionary theory qualified acceptance. He has seen evidence, he says, of development by selection, but that isn’t the same thing as buying the whole Darwinian package. Young earthers, of course, believe that evolution is an atheist conspiracy: Dave resists that simple charge, agreeing that evolution can be valid science. But he did speak of its use in popular culture to reinforce "subliminal" messages about secularism, which quickly led us to Richard Dawkins, whom neither of us can stand!

Dave reckons that anxiety about school curricula is what drives creationists to raise the profile of their pet issue. Evangelicals are not alone in perceiving a danger that teaching about Christianity will be increasingly marginalised in favour of a mile-wide, inch-deep multi-cultural package; maybe so, although if the assumption behind such a judgement is that state schools should still be obliged to deliver Christian education as per the 1944 settlement, this is something I would question on several counts. But creationists are the very last people who should be making the case for religious instruction, and the more these nutters (as they are perceived) are seen as in any way representing the Church, the more they will queer the pitch for those of us who actually do represent her. Dave, ever the moderate, would not go so far, but he does know what "counter-productive" means.

He made one statement which I’m going to check out: there is, he reckons, good scientific evidence for the descent of all human beings from a single female who lived about 6,000 years ago. Hm. Genesis may not be science; indeed, Dave teaches his Capernwray students not to interpret it as such (that high pitched hum you hear is Henry Morris spinning in his grave), but there may be more authentic history behind it than woolly liberals like me are wont to countenance. Whenever I hear that some Biblical passage is vindicated by the latest scientific or archaeological discovery I suspect special pleading. Well, if Dave’s claim has any objectivity, I should be able to track down some scientists who accept it who are not, in any sense, creationists. Let’s see.

Dave thinks creationists should be respected for their sincerity. I don’t. He’s probably a nicer guy than me, but I read more into their wrong-headedness than just wilful ignorance. I’m not even sure all of them ARE sincere. Some evolutionists may have an agenda; I have no doubt at all that creationism does, and I am very wary of it.

Mummy mummy what's a firmament?

2006-04-28T12:22:00.000Z

"In the beginning": in other words, once upon a time. Genesis indicates from its first words that there follows a story, to be read as such. It provides other clues in case you miss the first one.

Looked upon as science or history however, Genesis is quite extraordinarily uninformative. Day One: God creates the heavens and the earth. It's without form and void. Dark, wet and windy. Light is created, with no source other than divine command. What is it being emitted by? Silly question. It is then separated from the darkness, and we are told that a day passes; this despite the word "day" denoting the time between one sunrise and the next - and we won't have a sun for another three, well, days.

As science this is drivel, but it gets worse. On Day Two, God creates a "firmament" which will enable him to separate "waters from waters". We now have the sky, containing a certain quantity of water, while below there is basically a vast quantity of mud; tomorrow, God will further separate it into dry land and sea. But let us return to this matter of the firmament. We are familiar with the word, less so with its meaning.

Exactly what did the biblical writers picture when they had God create "the firmament"? They must have been thinking of something like a giant version of the Astrodome. The "firmament," as the very word, containing the element "firm," implies, the underlying Hebrew denotes a solid dome of metal or crystal. The Latin noun firmamentum comes from the verb firmare , "to make firm." It is a good word to choose to translate the Hebrew raqiya, which denotes "a dome beaten out of metal sheets."
Heaven and Its Wonders, and Earth: The World the Biblical Writers Thought They Lived In Robert M. Price and Reginald Finley Sr.

So far as the writers of Genesis are concerned, argue Price and Finley, the world had a solid ceiling. Two huge problems then: first, the idea of the sky of a dome seems to confirm one's suspicion that for Bible writers the earth is indeed flat - try imagining a dome anchored on a sphere and you'll see the difficulty. Second, in two days' time the sun is going to be created; and clearly if its warmth and light are to reach the earth it must be positioned below the inner side of the firmament. Forget 93 million miles away; but then, forget also any notion you might have that the sun is much larger than the earth. Think instead in terms of this diagram, which shows the kind of mental picture of the universe which the Bible writers had.

Creationists (with a few seriously lunatic exceptions) tend to fight shy of flat-earth and geocentric cosmologies, despite evidence that these are more "Scriptural" than our modern understanding of a spherical earth orbitting a large, relatively distant sun. Apologists like J P Holding, writing for Answers In Genesis, argue that "firmament" in Genesis 1.7 and elsewhere means something like "expanse" and should not be taken literally; he accuses "skeptics" like Price and Finley of having an ulterior motive in wanting to attribute to Bible writers a clearly primitive cosmology. Holding also resists the implication of verses like Isaiah 11.12 and Revelation 7.1, with their references to the four corner of earth, that this planet of ours is in fact a disc rather than a sphere.

Apologists never acknowledge their own ulterior motives of course, and one could easily turn the tables on Holding by asking why he is so keen to interpret Scripture in the light of scientific discoveries made since it was written. Why should it surprise us to discover that ancient Hebrews, in common with other Middle Eastern peoples, did think of the earth as a disc? But even if Holding is right, it seems to me he's missed the point. According to Genesis 1, God first brings into being a formless mass of muddy water; then he performs two distinct acts of separation, one by way of the "firmament" which creates the sky, then another which creates a single landmass. Anyone seeking a detailed, scientifically credible description of these processes is whistling in the dark.

Mind boggling numbers

2006-04-27T20:17:00.000Z

Imagine yourself standing by the seashore. Fill a glass with water from the ocean, then tip it out again.

Five years later come back and fill your glass again. Question: what are the odds that it will now contain ANY of the molecules that were present before? Take into account all the adventures that might befall any molecule of water - it might have evaporated, been whisked off by currents to anywhere on the planet, it might have been absorbed into a living creature - and you’ll think: a million to one against.

And you’d be wrong, for a reason that should make you gulp, as I gulped when I was first told this. There are more molecules of water in a glass than there are glassfuls of water in the world’s oceans. So, the odds are better than evens that at least one of the molecules will have been present in your previous sample.

My formal science education ended before I ever heard of Avogadro’s number, and I’ll be honest: the only context in which I’d come across it since was in an obscure Steely Dan song called "Let George do it". (That’s "obscure" as in "never released on a proper album", though it’s available as a demo. I don’t mean "somewhat opaque in meaning" because in that sense nearly all Steely Dan songs are obscure. But I love them anyway).... to return, I looked it up. Turns out to be relevant to the glass of water puzzle.

Avogadro’s number indicates the number of molecules in a gram-molecule, or mole, of any substance. And it’s big. 6.022 x 10 to the power 23 to be exact. And how big is that? My favourite analogy is that an Avogadro’s number of Coca-Cola cans would cover the surface of the earth to a depth of 200 miles. Or try this: a modern computer, counting at the rate of 100 million numbers per second, would take almost two billion years to reach Avogadro's number.

Do not even begin to persuade me that you can get your head round this. You’re lying and we both know it. Boggle, oh mind. Be in awe. And bear in mind that when you’ve reached Avogadro's number that’s scarcely the beginning so far as the total number of molecules of all substances on earth is concerned. Then think how tiny the earth is by contrast with the whole universe. If one’s hypothetical computer had started counting at the dawn of time it would only by now have reached about seven Avagadro’s numbers; seven moles of water is barely a sip.

Creationism trivialises creation. The Bible doesn’t know about tiny things like molecules, any more than it knows about huge things like galaxies. It is as ignorant of microscopic organisms as it is of red giants; it seems to think stars are small (well, they look small, don’t they?) and has no idea that the sun is one. By scaling down creation to what we can readily comprehend, leaving out the unimaginably huge and the unimaginably minute, it reduces that very wonderment which it should be the role of truly spiritual narrative to inspire in us, and which science abundantly supplies. One of the deep ironies here is that the militant atheist Richard Dawkins speaks of nature as awesome; while oh-so-religious creationism treats it as a job that only took God a few days. That humanity’s parents are placed not in some place the size of a national park but in a mere garden, readily encompassable and managed, is part of the same reducing process.

I have to say, lest I be misunderstood: pondering the smallness of physical reality’s building blocks, as illustrated by Avogadro’s number, in no way diminishes my awe at God’s creation; quite the reverse. It is false teaching about creation that paves the way for Dawkins-like atheism. Poor man, he’s met far more creationists than is good for him.

Your God is too nasty

2006-04-25T09:19:00.000Z

Noah’s ark: a nice little story for children, right? Featuring lots of animals who would walk two by two onto this big boat, where a friendly old man with a beard would welcome them aboard and look after them while the earth got a bit wet.

Wrong. The Flood is a horror story, unpleasant enough as fiction and quite beyond the pale if taken as literal history (which creationists do, of course). The ending is nice - pretty rainbows and a promise by God never to commit such an atrocity again: from now on he would leave the atrocities to us, though he can hardly blame us for getting the idea from him in the first place. But this hardly excuses his earlier behaviour.

He gets cheesed off with human beings, whose wickedness seems to take him by surprise, and decides to wipe them all out, except for one special family. For reasons not explained, his anger extends to the rest of creation too. Nothing is to escape his campaign of watery obliteration. As everyone knows, selected "kinds" of animals and birds are invited onto the Ark so as to continue the story of life after the Flood subsides.

Never mind the utter implausibility of this for the moment. The objections are obvious, well known and shrugged off by creationists. Penguins, crocodiles, camels, kangaroos, elephants, polar bears all sharing the same space, despite the vast diversity of the environments in which they normally thrive? Predators cooped up with prey? Noah finding the right food for all the kinds on the Ark, many of which he would not have previously encountered? The seaworthiness of the boat, so huge that nothing of comparable size was launched until 1900, by which time steel was available (Noah had to make do with cypress wood)? A five-hundred year old man being commissioned to build the vessel in the first place? Well, God can do whatever he wants. But what sort of God is this?

A God who, having decided to wipe out humanity, does not avail himself of the quick and easy "smite" option. Does not call on the services of his Angel of Death, as in the Passover story. Does not turn all humans bar Noah and family into pillars of salt. Nothing so humane. Instead he organises a flood - revelling in anticipation over the decades while Noah builds his enormous ship. In time, all is ready. The animals and birds are on board, the best part of a year’s supply of food for every different "kind" is stored and preserved so that nothing will go off.

It starts to rain. It keeps on raining. The penny drops among Noah’s neighbours, (if it hadn’t done before, as they watched a whole queue of creatures plodding up the gangplank) who try to break into the Ark to escape the rising flood waters, but it is too late. They rush to higher ground and still the waters rise. Now they begin to die, some of starvation, others of exposure. Some anticipate the inevitable and throw themselves into the torrents. Animals are in a similar predicament, and across every range of high ground, herds of livestock and wild beasts are huddling together, terrified, attacking each other before every last one is engulfed. Birds fly around, panicking as the trees in which they formerly perched sink beneath the waters, eventually dying of exhuastion. And God approves, having planned this protracted onslaught down to the last elaborate detail. His "repentance", prompted it would seem not by any thoughts of remorse but by the pleasant odour of Noah’s sacrifice, only makes the original act of annihilation seem the more culpable.

Preachers who follow the Common Lectionary are no longer required to deliver sermons on Genesis 6 - 8, although 8.22 sneaks in at many a harvest festival, wrested from its context (I’ve done it myself). But you can see why this portion of Scripture has been liturgically archived. The God of the global flood is, frankly, a tyrannical bastard. Mercy, restraint, wisdom, a sense of responsibility for his actions - forget any of that. This is a fickle deity, who creates one moment and within a few generations decides to un-create, but in a particularly calculating and vindictive fashion. He should make us feel uncomfortable and not in a good way. It hardly seems to be in Christianity's, or Judaism's, interests to draw attention to this episode, but for creationists the story is central to their endeavour.

If this is their God, they are welcome to him. He isn’t mine, and if he were the only one on offer, give me atheism any time.

Did they fall, or did they rise?

2006-04-13T11:00:00.000Z

Who says that Genesis 3 is about a "Fall" anyway? That’s how it’s interpreted, and in fairness by Jews as well as Christians; though clearly Jews, whose story it was first, don’t think it has the implications for our eternal destiny that many Christians do - and that alone should give us pause. But the story has no title, no "argument" as chapter summaries used to be called: the assumption that this story tells us how human beings came to be sinners is exactly that, an assumption. If you’re wondering what else it might be about, let’s try doing something fundamentalists are always telling us to do: actually reading the Bible. In particular, note the tragic ambivalence of v7:

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

Maybe you zero in on that second clause. Nakedness has become shameful, in contrast to ch.2 v 25. Man and woman disobey God, guilt is the consequence. Agreed, but look at what else happens: their eyes are opened. They become aware - self conscious - enlightened. Even on the most hardline fundamentalist assumptions, a metaphor is being used here. Adam and Eve were not literally blind before. Now, here’s a challenge: find me an instance of this figure of speech being used pejoratively. Anywhere in world literature, that gives you plenty of scope. If eyes are opened that is categorically a good thing because awareness is better than absence of awareness almost by definition. Sight is better than blindness. Enlightement is better than ignorance. You might not like what you become aware of, but that’s different. Indeed, this is Adam and Eve’s tragedy and ours. They pass from a state of pre-conscious innocence into fully conscious self-awareness of which the immediate consequence is shame - but they then discover some basic craft skills, not previously required, and deal with the situation. They become resourceful. In this transition there is both loss and gain.

This story isn’t just about sin. It’s about what it takes to be human. "Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you got till it’s gone" sang Joni Mitchell and that’s the story of Genesis 3: two people in paradise who didn’t know it was paradise until, by dint of doing the one thing that enabled them to realise, they got themselves kicked out. Ask yourself this: would you really want Eve NOT to have eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Would you want a world in which people, like animals, don’t have moral concepts but just follow their instincts? And, pushing it further, do you really think God wanted Eve not to have eaten the forbidden fruit?

Joni Mitchell also sang "we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden", forgetting that its gates are barred by an angel with a flaming sword. On a literalist view of this I might ask if the sword ran on unleaded or diesel, if the angel’s arms didn’t ache, or why God didn’t stick up an electric fence and have done; reading the story sensibly, we can see what that angel represents. You can’t get your innocence back from the lost property office. But we don’t entirely want it back anyway: it’s called growing up.

In Stephen Sondheim’s magical Into the Woods various fairy-tale characters have a lot of growing up to do. Little Red Riding Hood is the first; delivered from the clutches of the wolf, she comes on stage for her big number. You need to see the show to get the full impact of this - and why in the name of all that’s holy haven’t you ? - but here’s a snatch:

So we wait in the dark
until someone sets us free
and we’re brought into the light
and we’re back at the start
and I know things now, many valuable things
that I hadn’t known before;
Do not put your faith in a cape and a hood,
They will not protect you the way that they should
And take extra care with strangers
Even flowers have their dangers
And though scary is exciting
Nice is different than good.
Now I know, don’t be scared
Granny was right, just be prepared...
Isn’t it nice to know a lot?
And a little bit .... not.

Little Red Riding Hood met her wolf and lost her innocence: in the garden of Eden, for wolf read snake. "Isn’t it nice to know a lot? And a little bit ... not" Adam and Eve might have said those very words to each other.

A little gem from Dr David Rosevear

2006-04-12T22:20:00.000Z

"In Adam all die. So death was not present before Adam sinned, if the Scriptures mean anything at all. This rules out evolution with its death and struggle. This also rules out day-age compromise and gap theory compromise .... If there had been struggle, death and decay before Adam, how could a just Creator see that all was good? Theistic evolution and other compromises that allow for death before Adam are a libel against the character of the Almighty."

Creation Science - Confirming that the Bible is Right, by David Rosevear. 1991, New Wine Press.

David Rosevear is no ordinary creationist twerp. He’s the head of the Portsmouth-based Creation Science Movement which claims to be the oldest creationist body not only in Britain but the world. He’s a soft target, but it’s not like I’m picking on some psychotic moron off the internet and duffing up the poor guy as though he represents the entire movement - like dismissing Roman Catholicism lock stock and barrel because of a few fornicating Popes. Rosevear IS representative, one of creationism’s rentaquotes. Featured in yesterday’s Guardian giving his response to the Royal Society lecture (of which more later). What’s more he’s PhD, FRSC, so in terms of his science - respect due.

In terms of his theology, no respect due whatever. As you can see for yourself ...

Just how many absurdities are crammed into the above quotation? Well, for a start, Dr Rosevear doesn’t know what proof-texting is or why it’s a bad idea. The proposition he wants to defend is: not one single creature died before the Fall. This is an extreme view which not even all young-earthers hold - many would say that while Adam and Eve were created immortal, elsewhere in nature death was at the very least a possibility. Spiders spun their webs for flies, kestrels hunted for mice. Small insects got trodden on. Curiosity killed the occasional cat. Dr Rosevear will have none of this; in Eden’s brief age of innocence every creature was vegetarian - every spider, kestrel, lion, crocodile, pirana fish, Venus fly trap; and of course, every ssssssssnake. Even then, these non-predatory life-forms must have been careful not to completely devour a plant, because that would have entailed its death. They were presumably only allowed to nibble. (Though one might ask, if they were all immortal, why they needed to eat at all. Could not God miraculously preserve them without the need for nourishment?) Nothing could get accidentally squashed, drowned or impaled. Had a leaf fallen from a tree in Eden it wouldn’t have rotted, because that implies corruption, of which there was none until the Fall.

However, this is what Dr Rosevear believes, so he raids the Bible for support - it’s that way round. His proof texts are Romans 5.12 ("through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin") and 1 Corinthians 15 ("for since by man came death, by Man came also the resurrection of the dead.") In neither place is Paul remotely concerned with non-human mortality. The Romans passage is part of an extended argument about the pervasiveness of sin and its dire consequences; in 1 Corinthians he’s developing an idea about Christ as the undoer of Adam’s deed. Dr Rosevear however needs a text that allows him to say nothing died before the Fall, and these appear to suit his purpose.

Then he goes for broke. Not only is this a valid interpretation; no other reading can be considered. "If the scriptures mean anything at all" they have to submit to his view of them. Dr Rosevear is more aware than some creationists of what others think about the subjects on which he pronounces; but pronounce is all he ever seems to do. Constructing logical arguments is not his bag. He has read Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 and he has decided how they should be interpreted. The different varieties of old-earthers, many of whom would share Dr Rosevear’s basic fundamentalist world view, theistic evolutionists and even young-earthers who believe that only humans were immortal before the Fall, are deemed not to have read or thought about these texts.

Dr Rosevear assumes a knowledge of God’s character that few Christians I know would be bold enough to claim. Specifically, he knows that God does not use pain, death, struggle and chance to achieve his purposes; insofar as these are features of life now, they must therefore be consequences of the Fall. He asks, rhetorically, how a just creator could pronounce the world to be "good" if Eden remotely resembled the earth as it is now. I might ask, equally rhetorically, what sort of justice is implied by God’s decision to introduce unleash death, destruction, pain and cruelty - all previously unknown - across the entire natural order because two creatures exercised the free will He himself had given them, even putting temptation in their way and turning a blind eye to the presence of a Tempter: does not this seem just a tad disproportionate?

But it’s Dr Rosevear’s assumptions that we must examine. He thinks he knows what the earth looked like at the moment of its creation, and concludes that God, in calling it good, was sound in His judgement; which would not be the case had the earth failed to match Dr Rosevear’s picture of it. This appears to make God’s judgement dependent on Dr Rosevear’s approval; if there had been death before the Fall, Dr Rosevear would say this was not a good thing, and God would have been at fault had he declared otherwise.

I cannot help thinking that it is for God to endorse Dr Rosevear’s judgement rather than vice versa, but then I don’t have a Ph.D in chemistry. As for the suggestion that anyone who dissents from Dr Rosevear’s theology is libelling the Almighty, this sounds to me like a desperate manoeuvre to foreclose any argument; but it won’t wash because Dr Rosevear’s deity is not one I have the slightest wish to encounter and if I’d caught him hanging around at my ordination I’d have shown him the door.

My sarcasm has got the better of me and I’m sorry, well sort of. There may be more able creationist intepreters of Genesis than Dr Rosevear but this is a man with a fairly high profile leaving himself wide open to ridicule far more venomous than mine, and frankly deserving it. Which I think matters for two reasons: first, we are hearing suggestions that creationism should have some kind of place, however limited, on school examination syllabuses. I invite anyone who thinks that a good idea to consider Dr Rosevear’s book (still in print and commended on his organisation’s website) he being one of Britain’s leading creationist figures don’t forget, and ask if this is the quality of thinking they wish to have inflicted on their children.

Second, if there is one thing on which Dr Rosevear and I might agree, it is the need to put up a convincing case against the likes of Richard Dawkins, for whom evolution proves there’s no God; but if he imagines himself capable of this he’s even more seriously deluded than I thought. It IS unfair to judge a movement on one book, but this particular book damns itself by its very subtitle. It is no more the business of science to "prove" or "disprove" the Bible than it is to adjudicate between the merits of Philip Pullman (boo!) and C S Lewis (hooray!). Scientists are not cheerleaders and if Dr Rosevear thinks they are, perhaps I might change my mind about respecting him even as a scientist. Richard Dawkins needn’t worry about exposing the absurdities of creationism: Dr Rosevear has done it for him.

Spring has sprung in Stokesley

2006-04-12T22:14:00.000Z

Randy's Reply

2006-04-12T07:16:00.000Z

(See "They've all got it in for me", posted April 10)

I challenged Randy to tell me how he knows that 50% of scientists believe in creationism, which is the natural reading of a statement on his site. As I suspected, that's not so:

As far as the 50% figure. I believe I read somewhere that approx. 50% of Scientists in this country believe in God.

I.e. not, except in a few cases, in creationism. Phew. But I don't think Randy knows the difference. The rest of his e-mail confirms my earlier diagnosis. I could be naughty and reproduce it here without his permission, but I think I'd better ask him first...

Ten thousand + American clergy must be wrong, then

2006-04-12T06:17:00.000Z

Americans who try to keep up with this issue will know, as few Brits will, about the Clergy Letter Project. It’s a simple declaration about the value of good science teaching, which clergy have been asked to endorse. 10,000 signatures, and counting, have been collected. The link is here but come on, you don’t always follow links, and this is important so here’s its substantive point:

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as "one theory among others" is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

Creationism sucks, then. It’s interesting to check the geographical spread of signatories too. 10,000 sounds quite a lot, but down in Mississippi there’s only 14 and in the city of Jackson just one: a Unitarian called Jacqueline Luck, who’s agreed to meet me in June. So why aren’t the rest of Jackson’s clergy on board? I think I can guess, but I will test my hypothesis in situ.

So far as creationist institutions are concerned, the clergy letter is just further proof that the Church has sold out to secularism. You don’t know whether to laugh, cry, throw rocks or throw up, but it really is an absurd and unnecessary situation. In Britain, please God, we’ll never need anything like the Clergy Letter. This simply isn’t an issue for us.

Everyone’s afraid, it’s called being human

2006-04-11T21:52:00.000Z

Fundamentalists are visibly afraid. By that I don’t imply that the rest of us aren’t afraid too, or that we’re any braver than them, or even that we’re not afraid of exactly the same things. But fundamentalists seem to put their fears on public display in a peculiarly distinctive way. They leave us in no doubt what has to be true for them.

What are they afraid of? Creationism is not like a house that might have its roof blown off; more like a big balloon that could be destroyed with a single prick. That’s an anxiety-making kind of religion to have.

Here’s the logic, as found on a thousand message boards and websites. Find yourself a creationist to correspond with and you’ll hear something like this, probably sooner rather than later. God created the world in six days, each of them 24 hours long. That’s what the Bible says and the Bible’s true. If Genesis 1 isn’t true, or if it’s only a story, then maybe the Fall narrative is only a story as well, and on that basis who knows what else might be only a story? Sodom and Gomorrah? The raising of Lazarus? When does the erosion stop? Where’s the dependable reality that will stand your full weight?

Besides, there must have been a Fall or we wouldn’t need a Redeemer, which we obviously did since God sent us his only Son for this very purpose. Without redemption we’re sunk, i.e. we’re not going to live forever because the curse of Eden took away human immortality; but Jesus undid the curse by his sacrifice on the Cross. He proved his victory over sin and mortality by rising from the dead (in the Bible, therefore true) and so will we, so long as we’re true believers. If we’re not true believers - which on a typical fundamentalist definition excludes most of humanity - we’re still going to live forever only we won’t enjoy it one bit.

God has told us this in his Word, which since it’s divine is infallible. Find one mistake in it, prove for example that all but an ark-ful of the world’s animals were not destroyed in a global flood, and the Bible’s entire credibility is shot to pieces. So Christ might not have redeemed us after all, might not have risen from the dead, and who knows - when we die it will be like falling asleep, never waking up, and never knowing we haven’t woken up. Consciousness seems biochemical, an aspect of brain function; brain stops working, end of story, surely? Well, most people want that not to be true and fundamentalism seems to guarantee that it isn’t true; but the operative word is "seems". The guarantee is illusory and spiritual adults must acknowledge that. Castles in the air provide no shelter from storms on the ground. Faith is about not being sure, but hoping for the best. For God’s best, which will not be what we imagine.

This is Holy Week, my alter ego is preparing worship for Good Friday. I’m thinking of a man facing inevitable, agonising death and wondering what that felt like. Perhaps he knew that God would raise him but there’s more than one take on that; the Christ of Gethsemane seems distinctly lacking in blessed assurance, and connects with our own experience as he rarely does elsewhere, for that very reason. I’ve struggled with this all my life and still do. Here’s Philip Larkin developing the theme of existential dread:

... the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere
And soon, nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says: No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch, or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Larkin, "Aubade", Collected Poems

I am less than charmed at having religion described as a moth-eaten pretence, but Larkin takes us to the heart of human darkness where fundamentalism cannot light the way, nor any other set of bland propositional absolutes. Yet faith is still possible. What brings me round, lifts me out of morbid preoccupation with my own extinction, are those unbidden moments of transcendent trust in Julia of Norwich’s simple statement that all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Mozart moments, Dervaig to Fionphort moments. Imprecise, beyond proof, yet grounded in Christian truth.

Only in America

2006-04-11T10:48:00.000Z

Creationism’s natural habitat is the USA. The rest of the world, by and large, accepts the evolutionary/old universe consensus. While schools in America are urged to "teach the controversy", in Britain there is no controversy to teach. In the State-funded, church-sponsored primary schools where I conduct weekly assemblies (and lead the children in prayer, Americans eat your hearts out!) the shelves are stocked with science books that assume an ancient earth and an evolutionary basis to explain how we came to be here. For Adam and Eve, see under religion. I have never seen a creationist textbook and I wouldn’t know where to look.

What does America have, that Britain doesn’t, which could begin to explain this?

This is a theme I will be pursuing throughout June, when I shall be in the States myself. For the moment I offer this thought:

America has

Fox
Talk Radio as ideology
Televangelists
Sectarian higher education (e.g. Bob Jones University)
gun ownership
major resistance to abortion law
no established Church
large and wealthy Bible belt
A President who sees his faith as an electoral asset

Britain has

the BBC, required by law to be non-partisan; regulations affect commercial stations too. Fox couldn't operate here
tightly regulated commercial radio mostly music-based
a National Health Service paid for out of taxation (and still essentially free), with private medicine a minority option
no death penalty
The Church of England - the established church, to which all British subjects technically belong. It has a distinguished tradition of academic scholarship....
a pluralistic and multi-faith society, with a strong Moslem/Hindu/Sikh presence in many inner cities
compulsory religious education in State schools (and in theory a compulsory act of collective worship - although this is rarely observed in high schools); this presumes an agreed syllabus drawn up by professional scholars - and that implies "non-fundamentalist"
advanced secularisation - the great majority of us do not attend church and those who do tend to be older, with a preponderance of women
a Prime Minister whose faith is seen as an electoral liability, so he generally keeps quiet about it (as his one-time press officer said, "we don’t do God").
no real quarrel with abortion law. We might not like it but anything's better than a return to the days of "Vera Drake"
relatively few problems over gay rights/same-sex civil partnerships (except, one has to admit, in the Church!)

In other words, creationism does well in America because cultural conditions are relatively favourable to its flourishing; and poorly in Britain because they are hostile to it. Creationism is part of an American culture of the Right - a damaging observation, because it implies that the perceived truth or otherwise of its propositions depends on the social climate. Even in America, creationism gets better reviews in Texas than New York; I wonder why?

H2O + SO3 = H2SO4 however is equally true on both sides of the Atlantic, the snake declares, acidly.

Cos that’s science, y’see.

They’ve all got it in for me

2006-04-10T23:29:00.000Z

The internet is a public space, almost entirely unregulated. Anyone is free to say anything, on a message board, on a website, on a blog. Up to a point, that’s wonderful. But there is and there can be no quality control. Any twerp can mouth off and many twerps do. There seems to be something about fundamentalism that attracts them.

But don’t take my word for it: have a look at this site.

Webmaster Randy Berg has made it look pretty, and he provides plenty of material, which to anyone unfamiliar with the way creationists set their stall out might begin to seem persuasive. Scientific amateurs like me need to keep touching base with the (so far as I can see) open and trustworthy people at http://www.talkorigins.org/ to work out how Berg is trying to bamboozle me. Sometimes it’s fairly obvious: "the fossil record offers very little evidence for evolution", he tells us - er, wasn’t the discovery of fossils a key factor in the devleopment of evolutionary theory in the first place? The usual "arguments from incredulity" abound, with Berg declaring that this or that process "could not possibly have happened", ignoring sane-science explanations of how they did.

But it’s the section on "mass media cover-up" that reveals Berg’s problem: he’s seriously paranoid.

For example, media reporters, writers and producers routinely call what evolution propagandists believe in and call "scientific," while at the same time, ignoring, censoring, and/or editing out almost everything creation scientists have to say -- (that is, if they even bother to ask their opinions) while labeling them and the facts of science (that evolutionist story telling can never overcome) as "religious nonsense."

In fact, it is only because of the mass media's hypocrisy, and/or ignorance of the facts, or and/or lack of courage, and HATRED of God and His Son, Jesus, that evolution is still taught at all in ANY of our public institutions.

So now you know. Evolution is an anti-Christian conspiracy. It’s fooled the Pope, it’s fooled the Archbishop of Canterbury, those two well known haters of God and Jesus. But Randy Berg knows better than them and even persuades himself that half the scientific community is on his side. I think I’d slit my throat if that were true, but my guess is he’s read somewhere that 50% of scientists believe in a creator, which is as different from supporting creationISM as astronomy is from astrology. I’ve challenged him on that detail and will publish his answer if I get one.

Meanwhile it’s Randy Berg against the world. Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me: the line might have been written just for him.

Love the sinner, hate the sin: or, Truth vs Love

2006-04-10T11:51:00.000Z

A few people know I’m here now, but "Weekend Fisher" was the first person to respond on site. Which felt a bit like something else happening for the first time. Ye-e-s! Affirmation!

I e-mailed him and promised I’d deal with one of his issues. He thinks I tend to demonize, or as I would spell it demonise (he’s American, but someone has to be), fundamentalists. Hm.

My beef is with fundamentalISM, not fundamentalISTS, and within that category the particular variety: YE creationists, who may be lovely people, but lovely people with views I believe to be mistaken, dangerous and unChristian. I hope I’m generally open-minded but this is a sticking point. Defending it is part of my current raison d'être.

Weekend Fisher wasn’t suggesting that I literally demonise creationism, but oddly enough I think that’s just about what I do. I regard its influence on the Church as malign; a source of division, a distraction from our real business. It leads to the devaluing of Scripture, tells us nothing new about Christ - notice how much creationist literature is about challenging evolutionary theory and how little it has to do with Jesus. Does creationism build up the body of Christ? Does it make us more effective disciples? Does it equip us for service to the poor and needy? Does it commend the Gospel? No, no, no, and no. Does it drive intelligent people screaming from the Church saying if that’s Christianity you can stick it? Does it give Christianity’s critics a target so big they can’t miss it? Does it make us a laughing stock? Does it make some of us think: with friends like these who needs enemies? Yes, yes, yes, and YES! Perhaps I should go into deliverance ministry. Spirit of creationism, come out of the Church! In Jesus’ name!

Well, that’s how strongly I feel. Given that, I find it hard, in attacking creationist ideas, not to give offence to those who hold them. Nor do I find anything in scripture that says it’s wrong to give offence; and yet, I find myself duty bound to extend love to my brothers and sisters (fellow Christians); neighbours, AND my enemies. I can’t see that leaves anyone out. Under whichever heading I might put creationists, there is no get out. If I’m trying to correct their ideas I must do so lovingly. On the other hand, I believe myself called to preach the word of God, in and out of season. That’s in my ordination vows. I must be faithful to the truth as I see it. How do I keep the two duties in balance?

Let me put it like this. If a man breaks into my home and attacks my wife, I have some duty of love towards him as an enemy: I must seek his good. But my primary and most urgent duty is towards my wife, on two very obvious grounds - first, she’s the woman I care about more than anyone else in the world, which is why I married her; second, she is a victim here and as such I would still go to her aid even if she were a stranger. I will love my enemy only if and when I have seen my wife out of danger; even then, he must realise that to love him and and let him have what he wants are not the same thing. Loving him must include helping him to restrain his violence and teaching him it will do no good. I am not a violent person (and as a tyical Brit - American visitors please note - do not have a gun nor the least desire to possess one) but in such circumstances I could not rule out grabbing hold of something sharp and/or heavy if that’s what it takes to protect what I must protect.

In ministry terms, my first love must be the Church - the body of Christ - and the essential truth of his Gospel (which is not the same, not even slightly, as the human doctrine of inerrancy). It is through serving the Church that I serve Him; plus, the Church houses me and pays me a salary. We’ve been through a lot together. I am under some obligation, part of which entails seeking to protect the Church from its enemies. In my perception, creationism is then the intruder seeking to harm that which it is my duty to defend, and defend it I will. That done, I will consider my duty of love towards the enemy who has threatened to destroy what I am called to protect. I will try to reason with him, give him chance to repent, try at all times to distinguish between the sinner and the sin; but I’m not going to say that a mistake isn’t a mistake, that heresy is good doctrine, that rubbish theology is the wisdom of God, just for the sake of fellowship and unity.

Creationists are trying to make a fight out of this and the Snake is fighting back, not venomously (I’ve had the operation to remove my poison sacs) but in the name of truth. Does that get the love/truth balance right? Every Christian minister has to struggle with that one.

2006-04-10T09:33:00.000Z

The hand that made us is divine

90+ minutes' drive from Stokesley but still in North Yorkshire is the village of Cowling, aka paradise. If I live so long I'll retire to a cottage my wife and I have there which is currently let out for holidays. Ten minutes walk from our front door and you could be looking at this. Ickornshaw Beck ("beck" is Yorkshire for "stream"). Picture taken last autumn on a walk where I could (figuratively of course) hear God saying to me: slow down and take this in, lad. Drink in the fine details and marvel at the intricacy of My creation.

Some say God's so wonderful he could have made this lot in a flash. And I say he cares so much he really took his time. "Thy years are glad, and sure, and slow" - from a favourite hymn, words by a woman, interestingly. It seems to be men who need God to do everything in a hurry. The earth's young, the Rapture's due any moment .... may he give us fellers some patience. And help us realise how much of His own is displayed in creation.

2006-04-10T07:17:00.000Z

Honest lawyers, buxom brunettes* and teetotal Scotsmen

Creationist theology is vulnerable on many flanks.

It requires the grandmother of all conspiracy theories to explain why the vast majority of scholars across a range of academic disciplines tell it to run away and play - geologists, cosmologists, historians, theologians, anthropologists, archaelogists, as well as biologists. They see no need to waste their time refuting nonsense.

It requires a Bible so divinely inspired that errors and contradictions are inconceivable; the fact that many observers can find some glaring ones without much trouble serves only to illustrate, to creationists, the extent of Satan’s stranglehold on contemporary culture. There’s no possibilty of these observers being correct, obviously. If the Bible says that Jesus was crucified on the day of Passover as the Synoptics tell us, despite John 19.31 which makes plain that the event took place on the day before Passover, then this is so. I don’t understand how the same event can happen on two consecutive days, but that only serves to illustrate the extent of Satan’s stranglehold on me. Jesus was crucified twice, a little known Biblical fact.

It fails to distinguish between exegesis - reading a text in order to discover and interpret its meaning - and eisegesis: reading into a text an interpretation which the commentator has already decided it must bear. Creationists are not interested in what the Bible might mean, only in proving that it means what their theories require it to mean. They are not alone in this - I have known liberals plunder the Scriptures trying to find divine sanction for homosexual activity because they know, for other reasons, that God loves gay people. This seems to me quite mistaken. The Bible says little about homosexual practice but that little is hardly favourable and I’d be surprised if it were. The theological case - which I completely endorse, by the way - for recognising and affirming same-sex relationships needs to be built up by other means, similar to those used for affirming womens’ ministry (the New Testament isn’t too struck on that either). I digress. The Bible, even though fallible, deserves respect. It is not there to feed our prejudices, or even our well grounded convictions.

Creationism cannot distinguish different literary genres, finding no problem in treating Genesis as scientifically accurate despite its complete lack of resemblance to any other scientific text you’ve ever seen.

It denies its own history as a recent reactive movement against modernist scholarship in both science and theology, claiming instead to represent "historic Christianity" while the rest of the Church is apostate. So AIG’s theological nonentities presume the right to challenge the credentials of Rowan Williams, by common (non-creationist) consent one of the finest Christian scholars in Britain. This is roughly equivalent to your local Friday night pub singer expostulating "that Barbra Streisand, what’s she know about voice projection?"

It fails to recognise the relative modernity of its own mindset. Creationists are fond of saying "Jesus regarded the Flood as a historical event/spoke of Adam and Eve as real people" as though it’s conceivable he could have done otherwise, given the culture of his day. The modern distinction between "literal" and "imaginative" or "symbolic" would have made no sense to Bible writers or indeed to Jesus, and to insist that they must have organised their thoughts using our categories is plain anachronistic. But then, fundamentalism in general lacks any notion of cognitive development, of the difference in consciousness between the present age and the first century CE. I’ve read accounts of Adam’s first day in Paradise which describe his thought processes in terms any present day American can immediately relate to. I would commend to creationists a few days’ immersion in the thought world of Chaucer, the first great poet to write in recognisably modern English. The ideas he explores in his masterpiece Troilus and Criseyde seem very foreign to us now; yet Chaucer is closer to us than the New Testament is to Chaucer.

One consideration is supremely fatal to creationism: the earth’s "apparent age" at the time of creation. According to Genesis, God created living things in a state of maturity. He did not create seeds which would grow into trees, but trees already grown; not eggs which would hatch into fledglings, but adult birds (so the chicken came first, there’s that one settled). Adam and Eve themselves were created as adults, having had no childhood in which to acquire cognitive and motor skills or learn how to speak. Six days after its creation, the earth would have looked considerably older than that; it would provide evidence of a past history that had never actually occurred. The trees in Eden would have had annual rings. Stars would have been visible in the sky, their light already reaching the earth despite its having had insufficient time to travel the light years’ immensity of space. Creationist scholars have always accepted this but don’t seem to realise just how huge a problem they then face. There is no way of telling how much older the earth looked to Adam on Day 6 than it actually was: decades? centuries? Why can we not say that it looked billions of years older? And if it looked that old, why not say it really IS that old?

Creationism has no easy way to duck the problem of "last Thursdayism", which asks how we can be sure that the earth was not created last Thursday, along with all our memories of experiences that seem to have happened before. But it gets worse, and here’s a fundamental question that I haven’t seen raised elsewhere: if creationists accept, as they do, that the earth will have looked older on the day of its creation than it actually is, why should they expect to find any evidence to prove that it is in fact "young", i.e. ten thousand years old, tops? The logic of "apparent age" suggests to me that if God created a world relatively recently but needed it to look ancient, he will have seen to it that the scientific data point to an old earth rather than a young one. This however defeats the whole creation-science enterprise, which aims to find evidence for a young earth; but if God wanted the earth to look old, there won’t be any!
More on this another time.

*buxom brunettes: in bloke jokes, they are always flat chested, by the same logic that blondes are always well stacked and stupid. Don’t ask me why. So - honest lawyers, teetotal Scotsmen, and creationist theologians, geddit?

2006-04-08T20:29:00.000Z

I'm over the moon. Literally? Of course not

Some people don’t seem able to recognise a figure of speech even when it is staring them in the face. That’s a figure of speech, by the way. Combinations of words, such as figures of speech, do not possess eyes.

I contend (see "My starting point", which I encourage all visitors to this blog to read, since it explains its raison d’etre) that Genesis 1 - 11 cannot be read literally, even if one mistakenly supposes it necessary to try. You might think you have read it literally but trust me, you haven’t. All right, don’t trust me: why should you? But do bear with me and I’ll demonstrate.
God said, "Let there be light."

Leave aside the question, which I will address at another time, of how anyone knows what God might or might not have said given that no-one was there taking notes. Leave aside the question of how his utterance actually prompted the eruption of light energy and what form its emission took. If you really can’t see that Genesis, if it were a scientific document, is vague and unhelpful at precisely the point where you would expect it to provide some data, you’re reading the wrong blog. Thanks for dropping by, but I’m talking to earthlings here. Let’s ask ourselves what it might mean for God to speak.

Has he ever spoken to me?

I believe so; and I think the kind of experiences that I’d describe in that way are broadly similar to those of other religious people. For a person to hear God speak means that they are confronted by some imperative, or perhaps some message of reassurance, that transforms their perceptions and alters their behaviour. God, as any preacher will have said many times, uses different media through which to address us: TV, newspapers, other people, books of all kinds, and indeed the Bible. The "voice of conscience" is not to be equated with divine utterance but God may none theless communicate through our social conditioning. Among the "God spoke to me" experiences I would have to list would be a TV screening of "Dr Strangelove", round about 1980. Prior to that, nuclear weapons were to worry about. Thereafter, they were to campaign against, a fact which did much to shape my priorities and commitments for the next decade. Something touched me through that movie, making me aware of human madness and evil as I had never been before, but also firing me to sign up for the protest movement which was growing rapidly in Britain at that time.

But I make no claim for God’s utterance as in any way literal. That’s true for a number of reasons. Nothing happened that I could have saved as a tape recording. I could not tell you whether God has Yorkshire accent or sounded a bit hoarse that day. Now, try to score one over me if you will, tell me that when God speaks to you he sounds like he’s from Halifax, would probably get on all right singing second tenor and tends to drop his voice at the end of a sentence; but this sounds more like psychosis than spirituality to me. You may have been "hearing things" but not in a good way. After all, if God speaks to Belgians, which cannot be ruled out even if they do seem a pretty secular bunch on the whole, a Halifax accent is not going to do much for his intelligiblity. One would assume he speaks to them in either French or Flemish, with no hint of an accent that might make him sound foreign. In other words, we always imagine God as speaking in our own language and in just the way we use it ourselves. Well, he’s ominpotent, so that’s not a problem. What is a problem is the notion that we can describe his speech in the sort of detail we would apply to anyone else’s. I would need to check this, but it seems to me the Bible rarely uses anything other than the simple, unqualified verb to indicate divine utterance. Thus says the Lord is everywhere, but not: thus gabbles the Lord, thus mumbles the Lord, thus yells the Lord, thus insinuates the Lord. Not thus says the Lord, tongue in cheek; thus says the Lord, wistfully, cryptically, defiantly.

Why should this be so? Here is an indicator that the language is indeed figurative. Take the cliché I used at the start of this message. If I said I had a problem to which the answer was staring me in the face, you’d know what I meant. You would not ask: what colour were the answer’s eyes? How long did it stare at you without blinking? Was it wearing glasses? If you did ask such questions, you would betray complete ignorance of what figurative language is. Similarly, if you told me that God spoke to you and I asked if he rolls his r’s, you’d think I was taking the mickey. Figurative usages cannot be qualified or indeed quantified; and so it is with the first recorded words of the Creator.

Let there be light, said God - but how loudly, and at what pitch? Through what medium did the sound waves travel, and what distance before the desired effect was achieved? These are questions which not only cannot be answered but shouldn’t be asked. "God said" is not a literal statement. QED. 3 verses into the Bible and creationism is in dead trouble. Actually, it’s in trouble a verse earlier, but that’s for another time.

Let Ed Babinski finish the argument. Ed is a former creationist who has now moved out of the Christian fold altogether - which is sad, but given the extreme views of the culture in which he was raised it is not surprising that his reaction to it in enlightened adulthood has also been extreme.

"My greatest fear is being stuck in heaven for eternity with a bunch of televangelists." You gotta love the guy.

Ed comes at the issue of divine speech from a comparative religion angle. His conclusion and the rhetorical question which follow it have devastating consequences for creationism’s credibility ...

In which tongue did God dictate Creation? Literalist Hebrew scholars assume that the book of Genesis contains the first recorded syllables of God's speech, "Let there be light!" (in Hebrew). Literalist Moslems insist that Arabic is the language of Allah (God), and therefore it is an insult or worse to translate their holy book, the Koran, into foreign tongues that are not the language of God. While Hindus claim that the Sanskrit syllable, "AUM," encompasses all the vibrations of Creation.

Personally, I do not pretend to know what language God used to call forth Creation. It appears that only angels were listening to God's speech at the time, and I hesitate to declare if these were Hebrew, Islamic, or Hindu angels. Therefore, I find it easiest to assume that creation by the "word" of God is merely a poetic description of how God "called" the cosmos into being. But if the description of God "speaking," and the record of His alleged "words," is poetry, what does that say about how the rest of the story in Genesis should be viewed?

I do not know that the urge to campaign against nuclear weapons that came over me as I watched Strangelove was the voice of God. As will be clear from other postings, when I reckon I know something I damn well say so. This is different. One tests revelatory convictions, as they seem, against the counsel of Christian friends, against the Church’s teaching, against Scripture, against experience and common sense. On those criteria - what with the Church issuing anti-nuclear statements all across the spectrum, friends doing civil disobedience and the small matter of the Beatitudes, it seemed plausible that the divine Spirit had got through to me. But my existential certainty was not empirical or analytical knowledge and I hope I did not confuse the two (that would have been arrogant!). I had to allow for the possibility that God had spoken to other Christians who believed in deterrence, the balance of terror, mutual assured destruction and so forth, mistaken though I believed them to be. Religious experience is like this though. Consuming, transfiguring, passionate, yes: but it does not guarantee accurate information or flawless logic. Too often in religion the claim "God told me this" or "I know because it has been revealed" is an attempt to protect a weak position from the onslaughts of rational critique. If your source of information is divine, that saves any need for consultation, but unfortunately other Christians can "know" the exact opposite of what you also "know". So it’s not knowledge at all, but conviction. Faith, of a kind.

In such a context it’s important to be clear, dogmatic if you will, about what we cannot know, however strongly we may believe it. No-one can know that light came into existence because of some words uttered by God. Besides, the logic of literal and figurative language forms, as I’ve illustrated, forces us to identify ALL "God said" statements as non-literal.

2006-04-07T17:26:00.000Z

The Boss

As they say, dogs have owners, cats have staff. Say hello to Maisie, and don't forget to curtsey

2006-04-07T13:23:00.000Z

A missing link? Whatever will they say at AIG?

Yesterday's Guardian led with a story about the discovery of a new fossilsed transitional form between fish and land animals. I could practically write the debunk on AIG [Answersingenesis] myself. (I have this incredible site - that's incredible as in, you can't believe a word of it - saved as one of my internet favourites. I'm sure its owners would be pleased; however I have renamed it Codswallop in Genesis.) It is a creationist article of faith that there are no transitional forms, cos that would imply evolution happening, oh horrors. So this allegedly transitional form will turn out to be something else.

Let me guess: AIG will attack the personal credentials of the scientists who discovered this creature. They will claim that it's a distinct species, although they might need to be a bit careful they don't identify it as an actual "kind", because that might mean it would have qualified for a place on the Ark, which has been calculated to have just enough space for the kinds we already know about. It follows there can't be any more to discover. They will point to the Guardian story as further evidence of the liberal conspiracy to discredit Biblical science and quite possibly attach some significance to the timing of the announcement, just before Holy Week. It's bad enough having to fend off a flaky Gospel of Judas and all the publicity about the Da Vinci Code film without these damned evolutionists prating on about transitional forms. Yes indeedy, Satan is tightening his grip on our culture. Roll on the rapture. I can guarantee that AIG will not accept this discovery as genuine.

OK, let's see how long they take to come up with an answer. Watch this space.

2006-04-07T12:09:00.000Z

They mean it. They really mean it. And here's me with my high blood pressure ...

2006-04-07T10:21:00.000Z

Some thoughts about arrogance

Creationists know they're right. So do I. The difference is I can prove it. Trouble is they think they can too. And we'll never agree what constitutes "proof".

People who know they're right and express themselves forcefully, especially in the face of wilful ignorance, may be perceived as "arrogant". I've decided that's a risk I'll have to take, for two reasons. First, I have evidence - it will be featuring on the blog - that creationists take no notice whatever of measured argument. Calling them names is more likely to force some sort of response, and typically they will show themselves up while making it. Second, anyone who challenges a creationist article of faith is liable to get called arrogant no matter how conciliatory their tone. Might as well resign oneself to the inevitable.

I might tell you that Stephen Sondheim is a greater artist than Andrew Lloyd Webber in the way that Switzerland is more mountainous than Holland. While this may strike you as mere opinion, it is the opinion of one with quite impeccable taste and aesthetic discernment, so any disagreement on your part can be discounted. Hearing that, you would call me arrogant, and you'd be right (although so would I, to express the judgement ...)

But then, I might simply tell you that Switzerland is more moutainous than Holland; and to call me arrogant then would be - tell me where you've heard this phrase recently - a category mistake. (You remember - the Archbishop of Canterbury thus described creationism). I would not be making any sort of value judgement as to the superiority of otherwise of a particular kind of territory. I'd be giving you a fact. Holland is flat. Switzerland isn't. Get over it. That might be petulant - but arrogant? Arrogance confuses opinion with fact, and there is no confusion here.

Young earth creationism is a mistake, and that's a fact too. Entire scientific disciplines - not just biology - presume a universe billions, not thousands of years old. Huge bodies of scholarship would become worthless on a creationist premise. Yet there is no controversy within those disciplines, no spread of opinion within the scientific community. Only among creationists, with an acknowledged theological rather than scientific agenda does it appear there might be an alternative paradigm. And until I have identified and made contact with an exception to the rule, I shall continue to maintain that ALL creationists are religious fundamentalists first and scientists second.

I don't think that's arrogant. I think this is: a bumper sticker which declares

Darwin's dead; Jesus isn't. Darwin's a Creationist now!

Words fail me for the moment. I may think of a suitable riposte later.

2006-04-07T10:16:00.000Z

A feathering of snow in late March over Bilsdale, a few miles south of Stokesley

2006-04-07T08:05:00.000Z

I’m not literally a talking snake

... but you knew that. You know that snakes can’t talk. They have neither the anatomy for producing speech, nor the mental capacity to engage in dialogue. It would also be unusual for a legless reptile to become a Methodist minister, though we may have had among us one or two snakes in the grass.

The compilers of Genesis also knew that snakes can’t talk; and they knew that those reading, or listening to, the story of Adam and Eve would also know.

But they tell us of a snake that could talk. So what’s going on?

Typical fundamentalist answer: if the Bible says this particular snake could talk, it could.

Fine ... so how come it knew Hebrew? And please do not interject that we don’t know that at this early stage in human history, pre-Flood, pre-Babel, Hebrew was the language of Adam and Eve. Scripture records them speaking this tongue, by which we therefore can be certain that Hebrew was indeed the original language of humanity. We have a verbatim report of their conversation, although probably summarised.

There are only two possible answers to my question: either the snake already knew Hebrew because God granted it the capability (this has been suggested to me by a creationist correspondent) or - which in view of its character I regard as more probable - it learned the language by eavesdropping on Adam and Eve’s conversation, painstakingly mastering the grammatical constructions it would need to carry out its cunning plan of temptation.

Either way, the character of God is called into question. If, as seems to be the case, mankind’s fall into sin was brought about through Eve’s succumbing to reptilian temptation, it seems most remiss of Him to provide the snake with an unusual capacity for speech. If the snake was surreptitiously learning Hebrew, one would have expected God to know about this and at the very least to give Eve some kind of tip-off; if it knew Hebrew all along, one must ask if God, knowing - as He must - all about the serpent’s devious nature did not actually intend that the forbidden fruit should be eaten. Which would vindicate the premise of this blog: that the snake was instrumental in Adam’s and Eve’s becoming truly human. Part of the divine plan.

What calls this interpretation into question, of course, is that God later rebukes the snake and, it would seem, punishes the creature by depriving it of the legs which it had formerly possessed. This is a natural reading of Genesis 3:14, which also condemns the snake to eat dust all the days of its life. The snake must have quickly found ways to circumvent this curse however, since dust rarely contains sufficient nutrients to sustain life. Seriously - for a moment - the storyteller clearly does not mean us to approve of the snake’s actions; yet it is difficult to see how without them there would be any human story to tell, and how God himself can shrug off all blame for the way in which the animal behaved.

Creationists are not stupid. I will rephrase that. Not all creationists are completely stupid; in the case of the educated variety, their stupidity is selective. They can see that the logic of my entirely legitimate interpretation causes problems, and which they attempt to as it were wriggle out of (sorry!) by identifying the snake as Satan. Not a real creature at all, but a malign spirit masquerading as another creature in the garden. One might question its choice of disguise - a nice licky Border collie would surely have melted Eve’s heart in a moment, far sooner than anything cold-blooded and potentially poisonous, legless or otherwise - but people say there is no arguing with success*: the ploy worked and Eve was duly suckered.

This solves one problem: the mastery of Hebrew would not have caused any difficulties for an intelligent spirit. But it creates two others. Firstly, fundamentalism insists on a literal reading of the text, which plainly does NOT identify the snake as, well, anything other than a snake. Later commentators have read that interpretation into the text, but the moment fundamentalism allows the symbolic imagination so much as a foot in its door, the game is up. Whatever next - the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" is allegorical? The "days" of creation might have been a bit longer than 24 hours? No, no. Literal is literal. A snake is a snake.

Secondly, the unimpeded, un-monitored presence of Satan - if it was he - in the garden raises again the question: why did God allow it? Did he not know what the old devil was up to? Did he not brief Adam and Eve to watch out for his trickery? On any literal reading of Genesis 3 God has a good deal to answer for and no obvious defence beyond his being God. And it won’t do to reply "God can do whatever he wants"; if he is to be just in all his ways, that would seem to rule out many options that must be regarded as unjust on any reasonable definition.

So let’s re-wind. Genesis 3 tells us of a snake that could talk; we know that snakes can’t. So, a sensible conclusion? Aha! We are being told a story here. This didn’t actually happen. Truth and meaning are being conveyed to us through the medium of imaginative fiction. Let’s understand the kind of writing Genesis actually is and then interpret it as best we can.

More, much more of this, later. I have a service to prepare for now.

* "You can't argue with success" indeed. This is a ridiculous statement, which equates popularity with quality. Andrew Lloyd Webber is a far more successful show composer than Stephen Sondheim, some of whose shows have bombed on Broadway. Which of them is the genius? I rest my case

2006-04-06T21:11:00.000Z

Someone's having a laugh - I think ...
I first came across the theory of Intelligent Falling on a bulletin board, shorn of any attribution. For anyone who hasn't read the article that started the mischief, it's here.

I assume you weren't fooled, once you saw the context. The Onion wasn't even trying to pass it off as anything other than satire. But others have been suckered. One guy fulminated "look at the crazy stuff these fundamentalists are coming out with now! They believe it! You couldn't make it up!" Sorry, but someone did; and the clues aren't too subtle. The spokesman for the theory is identified as one "Gabriel Burdett, with degrees in education, applied Scripture and physics from the Oral Roberts University?" Or what about "there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by secular gravity alone, including such mysteries as how angels fly, how Jesus ascended into heaven, and how Satan fell when cast out of Paradise"?

The Onion was itself pinching, sorry developing, an idea that had appeared in a cartoon strip earlier in the year - see above. Meanwhile, the "intelligent falling" idea became an internet in-joke, with some re-workings so ingenious and poker-faced you almost wonder if it's being taken seriously. It merits an entry in Wikipedia. One Joshua Rosenau almost persuaded me he didn't have tongue in cheek when he wrote "I believe that angels push the planets around, and control the falling of objects toward one another. If this is true, there's no reason to teach our children the unBiblical falsehood that the earth moves around the sun. If the Pusher wanted the sun to move, there's no reason that it couldn't. " It was only his profile that reassured me: "progressive politics, neat biology, and whackings of whackos". Phew, so he's sane after all; but do check out the link above. The site is too big, too laboured, too badly designed, to be merely ironic. It's in absolute earnest, and quite barking: the pitch is that Copernicus got it wrong. The universe really does revolve round us. Time for the medication, fellers.

I'm heartened that so many appreciated "Intelligent Falling" as a clever piss-take. It's hard to imagine a similar attempt from the creationist side making a fraction of the impact; but that's saying something about the social uses of humour, which is typically targeted by the dominant culture against minorities - the supposedly stupid Irish, effeminate homosexuals, tight-fisted, whisky-slugging Scots. It's how in-crowds draw boundaries between themselves and threateningly different outsiders. But it's worrying that the target is thought big and possibly dangerous enough to be worth attacking. If satirists are treating creationism as fair game that means two things; first that their audience will know enough about it to get the joke - and second that it's a force to be reckoned with. That needs to change.

2006-04-06T13:26:00.000Z

The river Leven at Stokesley in autumn

2006-04-06T12:17:00.000Z

OK, I chose my name, set up the blog.

Then I googled on "talking snake" and straightaway found

http://www.landoverbaptist.org/talkingsnake.html

which might have made me choose another one. Then again, it might not. Sorry, I just lurve Landover Baptist. I know, I know, they are very naughty and I suspect not on the side of the angels. But they make me laugh and their satire (as here) is often very well targeted. Look, if you don't have a reasonably broad mind don't follow the link, and if you do, don't say I didn't warn you. This is the snake trying NOT to lead you into temptation.

My starting point

2006-04-06T11:17:00.000Z

I've created this blog initially as the record of a project. I am exploring a thesis about "young earth" creationism with the hope of writing a book about it. Any comments welcome. I may quote you - spread the word!

This summarises how far I've got. There's a ton of background material behind this, which I will be posting in weeks to come. But for starters:

"The Creationist Heresy" - outline of a book

I don't know how the universe began, assuming that it had a beginning. I wasn't there. Mainstream scientists reckon there was a big bang, around fifteen billion years ago, an explosion of energy from an infinitesimally small point of singularity, from which not only all matter burst into existence but the very dimensions of space and time were generated. They could be right, or a more sophisticated theory might take its place in the future. What triggered the Big Bang is a moot point, but the idea that there was one stands to reason in the light of the discovery that the universe is expanding.

Likewise, it seems reasonable enough that complex life-forms have gradually evolved from simpler ones, as evolutionary scientists seek to demonstrate. I am not competent to judge the detailed arguments, or any objections to the Darwinian theory, but I do know this: the world was not created a mere ten thousand or so years ago in six days. Life on earth did not begin before the sun was made. The first human beings were not created as mature adults, instantly able to reason and use language; nor did they sacrifice their immortality by disobeying a divine command at the instigation of a talking snake. They were mortal all along, and they had parents, as all creatures do, these being by definition not quite human - but getting there. I do not express an opinion here. Assuming that we live in an intelligible universe, I am stating what has to be the case.

I write as a Christian, well aware that many others who also profess to hold Christian beliefs would see it differently. They believe that one can and must read the opening chapters of Genesis as literal history and accurate science. They are however wrong, as I can demonstrate, and the starkness of my language is deliberate. This is not a question to which there is more than one side. Between "young earth" creationists and those who understand what sort of literature Genesis actually is there is nothing to discuss. The matter has been settled for some time; those who can't see it are flogging a dead horse. It is not a question of whether creationism could have any validity as science. While I suspect this and will give grounds for my suspicions – such as the vast body of scholarship, geological and cosmological as well as relating to evolutionary theory, which assumes and builds on an “old universe” model - I do not claim to be an expert. What I am competent to say is that as theology it is worse than worthless - harmful, in fact, although frequently if unintentionally hilarious.

My case is not so much that evolutionary theory must be true as that a literal reading of Genesis is not even possible, never mind necessary: making the attempt leads to farcical conclusions. It will not take me long to show this. 1 will then proceed to explore the mindset of the many professed Christians who will not accept any statement that seems at odds with the text of Scripture; they "know they're right" in advance of whatever may be said to them. Creationists are deaf to all criticism and continue to trot out arguments long after they have been discredited, to quote "authorities" to whom only they defer. There is no reasoning with them; theirs is not a reasonable position. Many however are intelligent and in other respects educated people. The interesting question then is what draws them to embrace a point of view which others can recognise as extreme and absurd. I have theories about this which I hope to develop with insights from anthropology and behavioural science.

I shall try to distinguish between people who may have many admirable qualities but happen to hold creationist views, and those views as such. These I shall argue, more contentiously perhaps, are heretical on various counts. Creationism takes a second order issue and tries to make it central. It is divisive. It is manifestly an ideological viewpoint, associated with a "Moral Majority" type agenda rather than with dispassionate scholarship. It brings the Church into disrepute, offering a soft target to its enemies. It distracts from the real work of the Kingdom. It brings no glory to God. It explains nothing - it's a very dull, unilluminating doctrine in practice. Most importantly, it's false.

I do not want to deny that creationists are Christians, even though they are fond of excommunicating their opponents, because there is much more to a person's Christianity or lack of it than the doctrines to which he or she gives intellectual assent. However, to the extent that they affirm creationism they have become something other and less than Christian. They are a threat and an embarrassment to the Church, which has already begun to distance itself from them. I write in hopes of seeing that process gather momentum.

There are limits to what can be tolerated under the heading of "Christian" belief. Last century we came to understand that racism and Christianity are incompatible. We must now recognise that creationism and Christianity, similarly, don't mix. Interestingly, creationists already recognise this in their frequently expressed view that anyone who refuses to interpret the early chapters of Genesis literally cannot be one of the faithful. That is true; their mistake is identifying their own beliefs as Christian. The boot is on the other foot. Literalism, in this context at least, is the real heresy.