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.
This looks like a bit of a straw man argument to me.
I speak from a personal perspective here because I am a YEC and I belive almost none of the things you say I believe.
Some of your charges here could be avoided simply by reading some of the better YEC theories. Others rest on simple semantic sleight-of-hand.
For example you cry hypocrisy when YEC advocates say they are literal, but are literal in the same way that you are, and not in a different way. For the sake of clarity, let me elaborate. In English the term “literal” can be used as antithetical to metaphorical (as you use it here), but it can also mean “consistent with authorial intent.” The latter meaning is the sense in which all YEC advocates (and indeed all conservative biblical scholars who consider themselves literalists, whether YEC advocates or not) use the term. I rather suspect that you would consider your own interpretation of Genesis to be “literal” in this sense, if you believe the author intended to communicate spiritual truths through metaphorical language. YEC advocates will disagree, and say that this was not the author’s intent, but that is just what the debate is all about is it not?
You can’t have a meaningful debate with a pacifist if you first define pacifism as refusing to eat meat and then calling the pacifist a hypocrite for not being a vegetarian in practice.
Likewise you will never be able to have a meantingful discussion with a creationist if you first define creationism as a sort of Amelia Bedelia literalism, then call them hypocrites for not believing anything of the sort.
See what I mean about backflips? YEC’s go through all kinds of mental gymnastics to claim they’re actually being literal.
Since when has “literal” ever meant “consistent with authorial intent”, in any domain: science, linguistics or Biblical scholarship? What if the author’s intent was to be figurative? The very idea leads to a reductio ad absurdum.
And I most certainly do not claim that my reading of Genesis 1 is literal in any way, sense or form. I believe it is figurative. I believe that the Author’s intent was that it be figurative. I believe that its figurative nature makes it more significant than if it were literal!
You see, I know these people. I grew up with them. I’ve seen how they compound semantics upon backflip upon bait-and-switch upon falsehood.
It’s like Ptolemaic astronomers piling epicycle upon epicycle. They come up with more and more complicated rationalizations while ignoring the fact that they’re working from flawed premises.
And you’re right that I will never be able to have a meaningful discussion with YEC’s, because not only do they assume their consequent, they redefine perfectly plain terms like “literal” to mean whatever makes them sound good.
I challenge you, Isaac, to present an example of a “better YEC theory” that avoids the appearance of age problem.
Again I point out that “backflips” are only backflips if one’s views actually change (as opposed to being misunderstood — often deliberately).
No YEC that I have ever met or even heard of believes that there is not figurative language in the Bible. Most would even recognize that there is figurative language in Genesis 1.1-2.4.
As for the “appearance of age problem” I point out that once again you are trying to force alien ideas into the YEC paradigm. “appearance” is an observer dependent concept and is never an objective reality. Every event has an infinite number of possible appearances. The same glass of wine can have the appearance to one taster of being 10 years old, to another taster of being 15 years old, and to still another of being freshly created. God is no more a deciever if the wine was freshly created than he is if the wine is 15 years old — in every possible case more than one person has been decieved.
I should also point out that the “appearance of age problem” is a classic example of affirming the consequent.
If YEC’s acknowledge that Genesis 1 is figurative, then what makes their interpretation more authoritative than mine?
And second, if the ice in Antarctica has layers, one for each year, and you can count 800,000 of those layers, there’s definitely an appearance of age problem. There’s no interpretation required or possible in such situations, which abound in the natural world, which clearly displays God’s invisible qualities of faithfulness and truth, not deception.
As for your glass of wine, I most certainly could tell you how old your glass was by any number of tests measuring the chemical composition of the wine.
And the appearance of age problem is most certainly not an example of affirming the consequent. As with ice cores, the distances to visible stars, and radioisotope decay ratios, these are matters that are not open to interpretation.
The Big Bang theory was resisted for a long time by scientists because they believed in an infinite universe. It was only when the evidence became overwhelming that it became the mainstream model.
See how this works? It relies on the evidence to drive the model, rather than the other way around.