Category: Rants

Initial Conditions

Note: this is Part 6 of a series of posts on Christianity and evolution. Read the introduction, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5 for background.

6. The most powerful argument Creationists use is the aesthetic: who wants to have a monkey for an uncle? I shall present some illustrative images and metaphors that I believe show that the idea of evolution is beautiful and portrays the faithfulness and love of the invisible God in the visible world.

Allow me to indulge in a brief Socratic dialogue here:

Do you believe that God created you?

Assuming you said yes — these posts are probably of little interest if you said no — then tell me, exactly how did She do so, and how long did it take?

Now tell me, during the 9 months of your creation, was there any single event that you can point to and say was “miraculous” or outside the ordinary laws of nature? Of course not.

God created you — let me repeat that: God created you — by entirely “natural” processes. That does not make your creation any less of a divine miracle! God’s immanence in the natural world, His “holding everything together”, makes every quantum interaction a miracle! It was by God’s faithfulness and love, clearly shown in the visible world, that you were created.

Note for Biblical literalists: Psalm 139 clearly states that there are knitting needles involved in the formation of the human body, so you’d better put that on the Kansas curriculum.

YEC’s will try to tell you that a universe suddenly springing into being fully formed is more miraculous than one being formed over billions of years. Why? Why should God care about the passage of time? Every instant of the history of the universe is present to Her experience, and He holds every particle and wave and interaction together.

And the fact that it all took place according to the pre-determined “laws” of nature makes it more miraculous, to my mind. It is as if God picked up a pack of cards one day, carefully hefted it, and then flung it into the air at just the right height and with just the right momentum for the cards to drift down and down and land lightly in a magnificent card house. And the card house turns out to be a pretty nice place for us ex-monkeys to live in.

Scientists call this the “anthropic principle“. It’s the idea that there are a great many arbitrary characteristics of the universe we live in that seem to combine to make it a pretty nice universe for us to live in. It’s really a tautology: if the universe were unfit for us to live in, we wouldn’t be around to remark on the fact. But it’s yet another instance of God’s faithfulness being shown in the cosmos.

As for the monkey thing, I’m not sure why monkeys get such a bad rap. Humans left to their own devices seem to be just as apt to chatter wildly and fling feces — I’m speaking metaphorically here: the capability of the human race for nastiness far outweighs any mere animal’s. The thing that is supposed to separate us from the animals is the capability to rise above that, rarely though it is exercised. It is the consciousness of good and evil that enables both the vilest evil in our species, as well as the search to know God.

So instead of worrying about being descended from a monkey (more properly, the common ancestor of both primates and hominids), try to be at least as nice as they are, and perhaps even strive for that extra portion of grace that is the gift of God to our peculiar species.

Truth & Beauty

Note: this is Part 5 of a series of posts on Christianity and evolution. Read the introduction, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 for background.

5. The Intelligent Design movement is a rather lame attempt by YEC’s at a bait-and-switch. The problem is, their stuff lacks even the sophisitication of some of the more thoughtful Creationist models — it’s self-evidently fallacious, and is simply the old “God of the Gaps” horse dragged out to be flogged yet again.

There is a highly charged debate going on in government and education in the US right now over the school of thought known as “Intelligent Design”. This movement purports to be different from the Special Young Earth Creationist movement — indeed, not all its proponents claim to be Christian — and yet, its modus operandi seems eerily similar. ID people claim that the theory of biological evolution should not be taught in public school, or at least, ID should be taught along with it as an equally valid scientific theory.

But ID is far from a valid scientific theory. It is, in fact, a giant cop-out. As we saw previously, science is all about observing the universe, and then trying to understand and model it accurately enough to make accurate predictions about how it works. ID, on the other hand, goes something like this: we observe a structure or phenomenon in nature that seems too complicated or diffucult to have arisen through natural processes, so therefore it must have arisen through supernatural intervention.

Whatever this is, it’s not science. Science is all about the quest to understand how things work; never will it simply throw up its hands and give up. And ID depends entirely on the subjective judgement of its participants. Who are they to say whether or not a structure is “natural” or not?

What ID is, in fact, is the old “God of the Gaps” idea. Although the Christian idea of a God whose faithfulness was reflected in the regularity of the laws of nature was fundamental to the scientific revolution, there were always those who sought to minimize God’s importance in everyday life. These Deists saw the laws of nature as sufficient unto themselves without God’s intervention, and thus pushed God back to the place of a distant creator or “first cause”. Anything that science didn’t yet understand — the “gaps” in knowledge — was, however, attributed to God.

This is a self-defeating position, however, because scientific knowledge always increases. If God is only responsible for the gaps in scientific knowledge, sooner or later She will get written out of the picture altogether. This was perfectly acceptable for some people, of course.

So it is with ID. As scientific knowledge increases, the examples that ID uses to defend its position will eventually be understood, rendering the ID position untenable.

Into the Labyrinth

Note: this is Part 4 of a series of posts on Christianity and evolution. Read the introduction, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 for background.

4. The various creationist models, from strict Young Earth Creationism to re-creationism et al, are all fallacious, and some are pernicious and heretical. We’ll take a side trip to Noah’s Flood here as well.

Young Earth Creationists would have us believe that they are the only ones who believe in the literal meaning of the Bible. Not only is this claim impossible, but it would be false even if it were possible.

It is impossible to understand the literal meaning of the Genesis unless you are a native speaker of 2nd-millennium BC Hebrew. If you are not, then any attempt to understand it requires interpretation. Therefore, it is impossible to understand the plain literal meaning of the Bible without interpretation.

In addition, Young Earth Creationists are lying when they claim to interpret Genesis literally. If they actually adhered to the literal meaning of the words, they would assert the following:

  • That light and a diurnal cycle of days and nights existed prior to the creation of the sun, moon and stars, which were created in order to provide light and a diurnal cycle.
  • That the sky is a solid object. The word translated “firmament” or “expanse” literally denotes a solid object.
  • That the universe was created in 6 days, and also that the universe was created in 1 day, which Genesis 2:4 plainly states.
  • That plants were created before animals or humans, and also that humans were created before there were plants.

No YEC adherent will assert these things, but come up with all kinds of mental backflips to explain them. Those backflips constitute interpretation, and a tacit admission that one cannot read Genesis 1 literally.

So if YEC theory does not consist of a literal reading, what does it consist of? There is actually a continuum of views on the subject. The most extreme view is that the universe was created in 6 24-hour periods starting October 22, 4004 BC. All physical evidence to the contrary (ice cores, the geological record, light from distant stars) was simply created in situ by God. (YEC adherents will begin by arguing that no such evidence exists; when faced with overwhelming evidence they fall back on this “appearance of age” line).

This poses a fundamental problem. If we cannot trust the evidence of our senses with respect to temporal sequence, then we do not know if we really have free will. If God could have created the universe in 4004 BC looking like it was created 16 billion years ago, then She could perfectly well have created it 5 minutes ago, implanting the necessary memories into our brains to make us think that our past exercises of free will were genuine. Romans 1:20 states that God’s invisible qualities are made know in the visible world. Young Earth Creationists, therefore, must believe that God is a liar. This is heresy.

This problem, and the overwhelming evidence for the age of the earth, has caused people to interpret Genesis 1 in ways that allow for the evident long period of time. For some, there is a 16-billion-year gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, and the rest of the chapter occurred in 4004 BC. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much physical warrent for this theory.

Others interpret the “days” of Genesis 1 as taking long periods of time. II Peter 3 states that God takes a different view of time than we do, so the events in Genesis 1 could well have taken place over long periods. Viewed this way, Genesis 1 seems to match up rather well with the scientific account. In fact, astronomer Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe has an intriguing theory that Genesis 1 depicts the creation of the universe from the viewpoint of someone standing on the surface of the planet. It actually works quite well, and avoids the contradictions I mention above.

The other end of the spectrum is where Genesis is interpreted as being a poetic and figurative account of creation that conforms to the contemporary ancient Near Eastern scientific model in the physical realm, but introduces startling new truth in the area of God’s relationship to creation and humankind. This is where I stand, obviously.

There are two other main passages in Genesis that are significant in this debate. In Genesis 3 we find the familiar story of the Fall of Mankind. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden, are tempted by a serpent, and eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge of good and evil, and are cast out of paradise into a world of toil, pain and death. The reason YEC adherents would have you believe this a literal historical account is that St. Paul makes a comparison between Adam, through whom sin entered the world, and Christ, through whom sin was defeated. This is an important point. However, consider this question: is St. Paul’s message strengthened or weakened if we interpret the Adam of Genesis as one literal person, or as symbolic of every person who has ever lived. (“Adam” in Hebrew means “the man”, and “Eve” means “the living one”).

And spiritual truths are revealed in stories and parables all over the Bible. For instance, we are told that the second greatest commandment is to love one’s neighbor. The prototypical neighbor is the Good Samaritan, who is in fact a “fictional” character. Daniel had visions of fabulous statues and beasts, all of which were figurative and symbolic in nature, but which we interpret as presenting theological truth.

In fact, from my research on metaphor and figurative language, I believe that metaphorical and figurative language is in fact a better way to communicate truth about God and spiritual things than plain literal language. And, of course, the Bible is full of poetry.

The second point is the story of the Great Flood that “covered the earth”. Unsurprisingly, the story in Genesis is copied from a Babylonian source, The Epic of Gilgamesh. There are in fact a great many cultures around the world that tell stories of a great flood, from which only a few are saved. So there is obviously a historical basis for the story — we must not interpret it figuratively as we can Genesis 1.

In the YEC account, the Biblical story of the flood says that the earth was covered with water at least 15 cubits (about 30 feet) higher than Mt. Everest. There are a couple of problems with this theory.

Firstly, where did all the water go? The volume of water necessary to flood the earth to a height of 30,000 feet is many times that of the oceans. Where did it go? YEC’ers will come up with all kinds of crazy theories, none of which have any Biblical or physical basis whatsoever.

Second, the Biblical account is kind of confusing when it comes to the exact events. The Hebrew text in question reads “and the waters rose 15 cubits, and covered the mountains”.

It is true that the text also says that the world was covered in water. But Luke 2:1 says that the Emperor Augustus ordered a census of all civilization. I’m sure the Han Emperor of China was impressed. When a writer says that something affected the whole world, that means the entirety of the world that she knew about. So when a Mesopotamian writer says that his entire world was covered in water, all we can interpret from that statement is that Mesopotamia was covered in water. And in fact we see in the archeological record vast inundations in the 3rd millennium BC in Mesopotamia. If it was rainy enough there to cover the entire flood plain, it quite well could have been rainy enough in other parts of the world for great floods there as well, and thus the plethora of stories.

So here we find a situation where a straightforward reading of the Bible lines up quite tidily with the physical and cultural record, and yet the YEC movement would promote their own far-fetched and convoluted interpretation as truth.

Young Earth Creationism makes me sad. It’s as if there were a group of people today who insisted on the geocentric model of the solar system, based on their intepretation of Psalm 50. These people are simply confusing the issue; they are so much energy on trivialities and wrong-headedness when there is still so much sin and suffering in the world.

Stay tuned for Part 5, in which I describe how the Big Bang and evolution fill me with wonder at the marvelous character and attributes of God.

Not One Point or Iota

They’ve been throwing a controversy and no one invited me!

Seems there’s been a huge debate lately over a new translation released by Zondervan called the TNIV: Today’s New International Version. Seems that the publishers of the NIV decided to update the now-venerable NIV — which they do every few years anyhow — by making it “gender-inclusive”. By this they mean that where the original language uses a masculine word like “αυτος” (he), “ανηρ” (man) or “αδελφος” (brother) in a generic fashion to refer to people of either sex, the translation uses “them”, “person” or “brother and sister” to indicate the genericity of the referent.

Now a number of leading conservative personalities have voiciferously come out against this translation. In a recent Focus on the Family (ptui) interview with Wayne Grudem, the following charges were made (taken from Stan Gundry’s response on the B-TRANS list):

  • Tampering with Scripture, including, ironically, Revelation 22:18-19.
  • Culture is influencing translation.
  • The Slippery Slope: translating “πατηρ” as “parent” might lead to referring to God as “parent” instead of “father”, and to referring to Jesus as female.
  • They’ve taken a lot of masculinity out of the Bible — it’s not as much a man’s Bible any more.

Mark D. Roberts has written an extensive and balanced overview of the controversy; well worth reading. I’m just going to rant a bit from the perspective that I think the TNIV is a Good Thing. I’ll try to make it entertaining, at least.

Let’s look at the charges:

Tampering with Scripture, including, ironically, Revelation 22:18-19.

This charge is simply false on the face of it, and absurd upon further reflection. The TNIV has not changed one word, or iota or pointing, of Scripture. Note the very deliberate use of Greek in my examples above. Scripture was written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and we have very good texts in those original languages, that we are fairly sure come pretty darn close to the original. Now the writers of the TNIV did not retroactively reach back through time and modify all the copies of Scripture we have in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, nor did they mount commando raids on the publishers of the current scholarly editions of the text, to change instances of “αυτος” to “αυτος και αυτη”, “ανηρ” to “ανηρ και γυνη” and “αδελφος” to “αδελφος και αδελφη”! The words of Scripture remain unchanged on library and office shelves and pews all over the world.

What the TNIV people have done is to add words in their English translation for which there is no word-for-word correspondence in the original languages. Shocking! The Focus-On-The-Family (ptui) types would have us read “essentially literal” translations, where there’s no such flim-flammery going on. OK, let’s look at a couple of verses in the New Testament. Revelation 22:18-19, say. Let’s see what a word-for-word translation would look like:

Μαρτυρῶ ἐγὼ παντὶ Ï„á¿· ἀκούοντι τοὺς λόγους τῆς προφητείας τοῦ βιβλίου τούτου: ἐάν τις ἐπιθῇ ἐπ’ αὐτά, ἐπιθήσει ὁ θεὸς ἐπ’ αὐτὸν Ï„á½°Ï‚ πληγὰς Ï„á½°Ï‚ γεγραμμένας ἐν Ï„á¿· βιβλίῳ τούτῳ: καὶ ἐάν τις ἀφέλῃ ἀπὸ τῶν λόγων τοῦ βιβλίου τῆς προφητείας ταύτης, ἀφελεῖ ὁ θεὸς τὸ μέρος αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ τοῦ ξύλου τῆς ζωῆς καὶ ἐκ τῆς πόλεως τῆς ἁγίας, τῶν γεγραμμένων ἐν Ï„á¿· βιβλίῳ τούτῳ.

Witness I all the hearing the words the prophecy the book this: if any add to them, add the God to him the plagues the written in the book this; and if any delete from the words the book the prophecy this, delete the God the part his from the tree the life and from the city the holy, the written in the book this.

This is a direct, word-for-word translation from the original Greek. You can sort of make some sense out of it, but it’s not very clear, for a number of reasons. First, Greek often uses a different word order than English. I suppose that switching words around doesn’t add to or take away from Scripture, so let’s try that:

I witness all the hearing the words the prophecy the this book: if any add to them, God add to him the plagues the written in the this book; and if any delete from the words the prophecy the this book, God delete the his part from the life the tree and from the holy the city, the written in the this book.

Doesn’t make it much better, does it? A further problem is all the “the”s. It seems Greek likes using “the” in places where in English it would be redundant, like with names (“the God”, “the Gordon”) and adjectives (“the city the holy”). I guess taking out redundancies might not quite constitute modifying Scripture TOO much, maybe:

I witness all hearing the words the prophecy this book: if any add to them, God add to him the plagues written in this book; and if any delete from the words the prophecy this book, God delete his part from the life tree and from the holy city, the written in this book.

Well, maybe a little better, but not a whole lot. We’ve come up against the major problem with translating Greek to English. Greek is a highly inflectional language, which means that it uses little bitty changes in individual words to convey what in English would require adding extra words. So let’s risk our place in Heaven, and add some English words where no Greek words existed. For example, the words I’ve transated “the” in the passage, are actually inflected for cases that require English prepositions to fully transmit their meaning:

I witness to all thosehearing the words of the prophecy in this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues written in this book; and if anyone deletes from the words of the prophecy in this book, God will delete his part from the life tree and from the holy city, the ones written about in this book.

Now we’re getting somewhere. We’ve suddenly discovered the relationships between all the people and things, and the whole sentence is now correct English. Which version is a better translation? I don’t think you’ll find anyone on any side of the debate who would argue that removing and adding words isn’t essential to good translation. Which leads us to a dilemma: according to the very text we’re translating, we will be damned for all eternity if we do this. Literally.

This could be a problem.

So why do we have so many translations? The Bible has been translated into many different languages throughout the history of the church. We have dozens of English translations, and there are huge organizations devoted to translating the Bible into every single language on the face of the planet! How do we resolve this contradiction? Ironically, the Greek original helps us. The Greek word “λογος” doesn’t mean precisely the same thing as the English word “word”. For most purposes they overlap well enough, but the Greek word also includes a sense of “idea”, of “rationality” that the English word lacks. So we could translate Revelation 22:18-19 “If anyone deletes from the ideas…”. This is the principle by which we justify translations of the Bible. When we translate, we are not mechanically encoding individual words, we are trying to convey the ideas of the original text in the grammar, idioms and accustomed forms of the target language. Thus Revelation 22:18 looks like this in French:

Je le déclare à quiconque entend les paroles de la prophétie de ce livre: Si quelqu’un y ajoute quelque chose, Dieu le frappera des fléaux décrits dans ce livre; et si quelqu’un retranche quelque chose des paroles du livre de cette prophétie, Dieu retranchera sa part de l’arbre de la vie et de la ville sainte, décrits dans ce livre.

in Kiswahili:

Namwonya kila mtu asikiaye maneno ya unabii yaliyomo katika kitabu hiki: mtu ye yote akiyaongezea cho chote, Mungu atamwongezea maafa yaliyoandikwa katika kitabu hiki. Na kama mtu ye yote akipunguza cho chote katika maneno ya unabii yaliyomo katika kitabu hiki, Mungu atamnyang’anya sehemu yake katika mti wa uzima na katika mji mtakatifu, ambayo yameelezwa katika kitabu hiki.

in Russian:

И я также свидетельствую всякому слышащему слова пророчества книги сей: если кто приложит что к ним, на того наложит Бог язвы, о которых написано в книге сей; и если кто отнимет что от слов книги пророчества сего, у того отнимет Бог участие в книге жизни и в святом граде и в том, что написано в книге сей.

All of these translations involved a whole lot of adding and deleting and moving words around. Yet we don’t object to them. So what are the opponents of the TNIV objecting to?

Culture influences translation.

This charge is also absurd. I completed an entire Master’s degree dedicated to the idea that Bible Translation should be profoundly influenced by culture, for language is inseparable from culture. If it were not, we should be satisfied with the very first translation of the Bible into English:

And I witnesse to ech man herynge the wordis of prophesie of this book, if ony man schal putte to these thingis, God schal putte on hym the veniauncis writun in this book. And if ony man do awei of the wordis of the book of this prophesie, God schal take awei the part of hym fro the book of lijf, and fro the hooli citee, and fro these thingis that ben writun in this book.

The English language has, unsurprisingly, changed since the time of John Wycliffe. Not only in spelling, but in the meaning of words like “put” and “vengeance”. In translations all around the world, the literal text is adapted to various cultures. In lowland Papua New Guinea, which never sees snow, our souls become white as a cockatoo. In West Africa, leopards, not wolves, seek to devour the flocks of the church. In fact, a literal translation into English would talk about our bowels far more often than our hearts. Culture always influences translation, subject to the desire to accurately convey the meaning of the original.

So if there’s an obvious reason to produce new translations as culture changes, why object?

The Slippery Slope: translating “πατηρ” as “parent” might lead to referring to God as “parent” instead of “father”, and to referring to Jesus as female.

First of all, I have no problem with “God the Parent”. There are many places in the Bible where God is depicted with feminine mothering qualities. If you’ve read some of my other rants, you’ll notice that I tend to alternate between male and female pronouns when referring to the Deity. That is because I believe that God contains all good qualities, male and female. Not to put too fine a point on it, if you object to referring to God as female, then you must believe that the essential characteristics of females are evil, because if they were good, God would partake of them in infinite measure, and thus in equal measure to the male. Unfortunately, I think I may be on to something here.

As for the second, it’s ridiculous to anyone who’s ever studied (or even thought about) how translation works. No translation changes words from masculine to neuter or feminine where the referent is obviously male! The changes are made when a masculine noun or pronoun is used to refer to both male and female people in general. This is pretty much the first rule you learn in translation school: concrete referents must be translated literally. Jesus was male. Nuff said.

(That is not to say that portraying Jesus as female in some contexts might not have some artistic value, but translation is not art in that sense).

So we come to the last, and key, objection:

They’ve taken a lot of masculinity out of the Bible — it’s not as much a man’s Bible any more.

I think this is the root of the problem. Opponents of the TNIV are simply clinging to an archaic, oppressive patriarchy. It is true that until recently it was considered standard usage to use masculine expressions to refer to gender-indefinite referents, but this is changing in current English usage. Why? Because many people feel that women should be equally represented in language as in life, law and theological status. How can this be anything but a good thing?

Let’s look at Revelation 22:18-19 again. The TNIV’s opponents would claim that altering the masculine pronouns would somehow change or diminish the meaning of the text. Let’s look at the TNIV’s translation:

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If any one of you adds anything to them, God will add to you the plagues described in this scroll. And if any one of you takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from you your share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll.

Far from diminishing or detracting from the meaning of the text, the TNIV has gone a step further than just making the pronoun indefinite. They have turned an impersonal statement into a personal challenge, making the impact of the verse stronger.[*] What does this say about the motives of the TNIV’s translators? That perhaps they read the Bible with great care and are deeply committed to ever more clearly transmitting its meaning to new generations of people? Ya think?

So to those drooling, slack-jawed, mumbling, dewlapped, wrinkled, combed-over, liver-spotted, woman-fearing and I have no doubt, limp-dicked defenders of the patriarchy, I say shame on you! How dare you try to keep the Bible and the Faith the province of your little boys’ club? You’ve lorded it over half of humanity for long enough, justifying centuries of priviledge and oppression by quoting Scripture, of all things. Well here’s some scripture for ya, in the original (and in a translation of small words, lest your tiny fossilized brains burst into bitty shards from the shock):

Οὐκ ἔνι Ἰουδαῖος οὐδὲ Ελλην, οὐκ ἔνι δοῦλος οὐδὲ ἐλεύθερος, οὐκ ἔνι ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ: πάντες γὰρ ὑμεῖς εἷς ἐστε ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ.

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

 

 

 

 

[*] Update and footnote: Craig Blomberg, in his review of the TNIV, notes that this kind of thing: changing from third person to second, adding words, changing genders to be more general, etc., goes on all the time in the New Testament text itself, where the NT translates Hebrew verses from the Old Testament into Greek.