Why I do what I do
I come down hard — sometimes very hard — on fallacies like Young Earth Creationism (YEC) and Intelligent Design (ID) (of the sort for which Michael Behe, for example, is a proponent). In the case of YEC, I openly equate the viewpoint with, essentially, idolatry. In the case of ID, which I don’t discuss as much, I am simply open about how I think it is in error, and misguided besides.
Actually, both viewpoints are misguided, especially in what could be called their unspoken aim. Don’t get me wrong: I both understand and applaud the attempt to reconcile, by various means, the belief that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God with the discoveries made by various branches of the broad field of studies called science. I take issue with the method of reconciliation (especially with the YEC method, which tends to be less of an attempt to reconcile as it does an attempt to demonize dissenting opinions), to be sure, but I can sympathize with the intent behind the method, and with the faith that informs it.
But in both ID and YEC, there is something with which I cannot sympathize. Dr Denis O. Lamoureux, whom I was fortunate enough to take classes in this area of Theology from, calls it “crypto-positivism.” I actually don’t entirely agree with that label, but I do agree that it’s crypto-something, in that it’s an unspoken and not-necessarily realized attempt on the part of proponents of YEC and ID. And the thing being attempted, essentially, is to prove God exists.
Think about it, for just a short while.
Ultimately, what’s the underlying motivation behind attempting to prove that e.g. the eye could not have evolved by purely random/unguided means? What’s the motivation behind attempting to prove that the story of Noah is amply supported by geological evidence? Ultimately, I think the motive is to somehow prove, beyond doubt and by empirical means, that God — and then specifically the Judeo-Christian God, in the case of most strains of YEC and a few strains of ID — actually exists.
And I think that misses the point entirely.
That is to say, I don’t think the point is to prove that God exists by empirical means, or even to prove that He must have intervened in creation in specific, identifiable ways. God’s existence is, first and foremost, an article of faith, and then one which comes with certain requirements attached to it. In essence, then, the underlying motive of YEC and ID is rather like an attempt to prove, beyond doubt, that rock is the best musical genre.
And indeed, rock may well be the best musical genre. But for fans of rock, concrete proof that rock is the best is, at best, superfluous and unnecessary. And for people who have no appreciation for music in the first place, concrete proof is, at best, meaningless, because they still just hear noise. It may be the best noise, but even the best noise is still just…noise.
There’s also an additional concern at work here, that of weak faith. As an evolutionary creationist, I’m used to hearing the charge that my faith is somehow weak or compromised…and maybe it is. I concede the possibility of my being wrong.
But equally, I’m not the one attempting to prove that God exists, even implicitly.
This is something I genuinely wonder. I would at least hope that proponents of ID and YEC are not so seriously misled as to think that even their best arguments will do much to move the hearts of most people who are set against believing in a creator God. And if so, I wonder for whose benefit they truly labour? Do they pursue their own version of the curse of Sisyphus, or are they working to provide empirical evidence for God because their own faith is not strong enough to endure in the absence thereof? That is to say, is the faith of e.g. a Young Earther strong enough to survive being shown incontrovertible evidence that the Earth is, in plain point of fact, far older than 6,000 to 10,000 years?
And here’s the rub: that’s not a spurious question.
YEC (and to a lesser degree, ID) establish what is called a false dichotomy; they work from the assumption that science and religion are in conflict to some degree, and propose that the degree to which there exists such a conflict is the degree to which science/scientists are incorrect/lying/deceived by the Devil/doing Satan’s work/etc. That’s fine if in fact it is true that a conflict exists. But there’s two issues that emerge from proceeding in this fashion, two questions that emerge:
- Does a conflict actually exist?
- If in fact a conflict exists, which side is actually in error?
These questions can be considered together or separately; I will proceed more according to the latter paradigm than the former. And to get the pedantic stuff out of the way first, I will say that the answer to the first question is an unqualified “no.” (This actually removes the need to answer the second question.)
But let’s assume for a minute that a conflict does exist. Working under that assumption, let’s look at the second question. Which side is actually in error? For a proponent of YEC or ID, the usual assertion is that it is science and scientists that are in error. God’s Word, such individuals will assert (this is especially common among Young Earthers), cannot be in error.
And to be fair, I will concede the point: God’s Word cannot be in error. But it’s not enough to say that much, because when we’re arguing origins we’re not just talking about God’s Word as a static thing; we’re talking about competing interpretations of God’s Word (that is: Scripture). And interpretation, unlike God’s Word, is not inerrant and infallible. Being a human enterprise, interpretation can be (and often is) brutally, glaringly, and staggeringly incorrect.
So we come back to the second question: which side is in error? Is science always in error? Or can the interpretation of Scripture that “the other side” is using perhaps be in error, instead?
I link, above, to an account by Glenn Morton. He’s not exactly an unknown to proponents of, especially, YEC, especially since he was one himself once. Indeed, he published over 20 articles for a journal called Creation Research Society Quarterly (website here). You can still find Morton’s work on the CRSQ website, in fact.
If you look up references to Morton within the YEC community now, however, you won’t find him mentioned in a positive light. In a fit of Christian charity, for example, Answers in Genesis describes him as a “renegade former young-earth creationist (now theistic evolutionist).” Morton himself lists some of the many things he has been called and/or accused of due to his change of viewpoint:
Here is a list of what young-earthers have called me in response to my data: ‘an apostate,’(Humphreys) ‘a heretic’(Jim Bell although he later apologised like the gentleman he is) ‘a compromiser’(Henry Morris) “absurd”, “naive”, “compromising”, “abysmally ignorant”, “sloppy”, “reckless disregard”, “extremely inaccurate”, “misleading”, “tomfoolery” and “intentionally deceitful”(John Woodmorappe) ‘like your father, Satan’ (Carl R. Froede — I am proud to have this one because Jesus was once said to have been of Satan also.) ‘your loyality and commitment to Jesus Christ is shaky or just not truly genuine’ (John Baumgardner 12-24-99 [Merry Christmas]) “[I] have secretly entertained suspicions of a Trojan horse roaming behind the lines…” Royal Truman 12-28-99
Morton tells his story of how his viewpoint was converted, which I note that at least one author on AIG dismisses as being fairly typical. I’m not interested, as much, in discussing the specifics of Morton’s conversion, save to note that while it may be fairly typical, it was rooted every step of the way in truth. He was not converted by brainwashing, but by evidence that he himself processed, analyzed, interpreted, and studied over the course of many years, while working in the seismic department at Atlantic Richfield.
Here’s the part of Morton’s story, though, that I do want to focus on: where he ended up once he realized that the truth of the weight of evidence against the Young Earth viewpoint was simply too great.
…being through with creationism, I very nearly became through with Christianity. I was on the very verge of becoming an atheist. During that time, I re-read a book I had reviewed prior to its publication. It was Alan Hayward’s Creation/Evolution. Even though I had reviewed it 1984 prior to its publication in 1985, I hadn’t been ready for the views he expressed. He presented a wonderful Days of Proclamation view which pulled me back from the edge of atheism. Although I believe Alan applied it to the earth in an unworkable fashion, his view had the power to unite the data with the Scripture, if it was applied differently. That is what I have done with my views. Without that I would now be an atheist.
This is where my concern rests. Remember that question I posed previously? Is the faith of e.g. a Young Earther strong enough to survive being shown incontrovertible evidence that the Earth is, in plain point of fact, far older than 6,000 to 10,000 years? Such evidence exists, and then in copious quantity. Do proponents of YEC have enough faith to emerge as believers after breaking out of their hermetically sealed information bubbles and seeking out, honestly, full exposure to all the evidence against their views? Do proponents of ID have enough faith to do likewise?
It’s not a spurious question. There’s one other part of Morton’s article I want to highlight, which illustrates what I’m getting at:
…eventually, by 1994 I was through with young-earth creationism. Nothing that young-earth creationists had taught me about geology turned out to be true. I took a poll of my ICR graduate friends who have worked in the oil industry. I asked them one question.
“From your oil industry experience, did any fact that you were taught at ICR, which challenged current geological thinking, turn out in the long run to be true? ,”
That is a very simple question. One man, Steve Robertson, who worked for Shell grew real silent on the phone, sighed and softly said ‘No!’ A very close friend that I had hired at Arco, after hearing the question, exclaimed, “Wait a minute. There has to be one!” But he could not name one. I can not name one. No one else could either. One man I could not reach, to ask that question, had a crisis of faith about two years after coming into the oil industry. I do not know what his spiritual state is now but he was in bad shape the last time I talked to him.
YEC and ID are false. They propose false dichotomies between science and faith. But I should qualify my statements here.
ID is correct in that creation does reflect design, but is incorrect in assuming that the design can be asserted and evidenced by pointing to structures that do not have complete evolutionary explanations at this time. Design in creation is not overt; it is in-built. The evolutionary process is itself design-reflecting, as are all of its products. Things like irreducible complexity are not actual empirical “proofs” of the designer’s involvement, and to assert that they are is to assert the fallacious “God of the Gaps” model of argument.
YEC is correct in that everything was created, and then by God as revealed in the Bible, but is incorrect in assuming that the truth of creation renders the truths uncovered by scientific inquiry false by definition. The evolutionary process is itself ordained and sustained by God, as are all of its products. Things like geological evidence for the flood, and people like Adam and Eve, simply do not (and did not) exist, and the world is far older than the sum of the durations of the genealogies listed in Scripture.
And because both viewpoints are false in certain ways, a pastoral concern exists which is damningly highlighted in Morton’s account.
Man is a fallen creature, and then often a pessimistic one (I tend to be, to be sure). Because of this, when people who have grown up in the hermetically sealed information bubble that e.g. most proponents of YEC operate within manage to break free and enter into the wider world and encounter evidence that concretely undermines either the YEC or ID position, they will not tend to retain the good and correct parts of their viewpoint and their faith even as they reject the incorrect points. Like Morton almost did, like some of his colleagues almost certainly did, and like some of my friends have certainly done, they will reject both the false teaching of ID or YEC and the faith that had previously informed it.
And it’s not the evidence of science that is to blame for that loss of faith; geology, biology, and cosmology are not the things which have caused the now-lost one to stumble. The blame for their loss, and the blood of their condemnation, is on the hands of ID or YEC, and on the hands of the proponents thereof who preached a falsehood in the first place, and who set up all the necessary conditions for that loss of faith to occur.
Perhaps I should qualify that statement as well, for there are some on the opposite side of the equation who may also bear a share of the blame. JIMPITHECUS, the blogger at Science and Religion, notes:
I have long thought that if young earth creationists really got what they wanted, to have creationism taught in public schools, there would be a massive push-back in the form of science teachers exposing the young earth “evidence” for what it is and that this would lead to many people going away from the faith.
But even in these cases, the blame would not rest completely with the teachers, who in presenting real evidence (albeit accompanied, perhaps, by false conclusions drawn from it) would not have been totally in the wrong. Even in this scenario, the proponents of ID and YEC bear much of the blame for the loss of faith that would, could, and, in real life, does occur.
That’s why I do what I do. I’m not hear to undermine Scripture. I’m not here to undermine Christ. I don’t work to preach a weak faith, a kind of deism, or a variety of “weak tea” liberal theology. I work to preserve the faith of others by promoting a message that one doesn’t have to choose between having ardent faith and between accepting the plain facts of the natural world. One can have both!
One should have both.
(hat tip)
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You wrote: “…people like Adam and Eve, simply do not (and did not) exist…”
From Catholic Answers: It is equally impermissible to dismiss the story of Adam and Eve and the fall (Gen. 2–3) as a fiction. A question often raised in this context is whether the human race descended from an original pair of two human beings (a teaching known as monogenism) or a pool of early human couples (a teaching known as polygenism).
In this regard, Pope Pius XII stated: “When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now, it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the teaching authority of the Church proposed with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own” (Humani Generis 37).
The story of the creation and fall of man is a true one, even if not written entirely according to modern literary techniques. The Catechism states, “The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents” (CCC 390). (http://www.catholic.com/library/Adam_Eve_and_Evolution.asp)
Please help me out. Quite possibly you have addressed this elsewhere – if so, please point me in the right direction. Thanks.
KHdN - Kenneth Hynek (dot Net) » Blog Archive » I actually don’t know if I’ve discussed Adam and Eve in this way before (May 13, 2009, 7:46 am).
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