CREATIONISM - SOME THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS
1. Theology is the study of what God may be supposed to be like; to pursue this study does not necessarily require one to believe that any god exists; it is strictly an as if exercise. Of course believers may feel under some sort of pressure to pursue this study; non-believers are merely at liberty to pursue it - but strictly on the as if basis. There are atheist professors of theology.
1.1 It is commonly supposed that the Natural Universe owes its existence to a prior act of creation.
1.2 A public authority in Kansas has just ruled that the theory of evolution (allegedly incompatible with the idea of creation - especially incompatible with the Genesis creation stories) cannot be taught in schools under its jurisdiction. Bible-based Creationism is now, reportedly, the officially endorsed option in Kansas. The purpose of this article is to examine this ruling theologically i.e. on an as if God Exists basis.
2. ON CREATIONISM
2.1 This doctrine is an attempted solution to the perceived problem of existence - why is there anything whatever why is there not ubiquitous nothingness?
It is supposed that all things (the Natural Universe, NU) are the products of a prior Creator.
2.2 It is important here to note a major First Principle; that you cannot bring something into existence merely by defining it - let alone merely by talking about it. To define the Creator as the author of the NU, and ipso facto to define the NU as the Creation, does not prove that it is actually true that there is such a being as the Creator and that the NU is indeed His Creation.
2.3 It should be noted that whatsoever we (think we) have discovered .... it is never logically impossible to assert that "it is so because the Creator willed it and made it so" but it is never possible actually to prove that assertion to be true. That assertion is accepted or questioned, as the case may be, for reasons that owe nothing to hard evidence (very few of the world's believers care two hoots about evidence) and everything to mindset, to habit, to upbringing, to wishful thinking ... to anything whatever other than evidence. The assertion is thus strictly unfalsifiable.
2.4 There are many and various accretions to perceptions of the Creator and of the Creation that, logically, are not entailed by a claim as to the reality of Creator and Creation :
2.4.1 The Creator is not necessarily extant but could have expired in the act of creation.
2.4.2 The Creator, as such, has/had no necessary attributes - especially none reminiscent of human attributes - other than a propensity to create the totality of other things which we call the natural universe (NU) and, necessarily, the requisite superhuman knowledge and intelligence to enable the creation job to be done.
2.4.3 The Creator, as such, has not necessarily generated a perfect creation or indeed a creation perfect in any particular; imperfect things often work well enough to go on working for a short, or long, while.
2.4.4 The Creator is not necessarily taking any further interest in the Creation (writers do not usually spend much time reading their own books!).
2.4.5 The Creation does not necessarily please the Creator (Conan Doyle got fed up with Sherlock Holmes; Sullivan tried to distance himself from the Savoy Operas which bored him; Beethoven was displeased with his early piano concerto, Opus 19).
You may object that these analogies are trite (they are) but the fact remains that creationists resort to trite analogy to illustrate a point they consider, analogy or no, to be valid - e.g Paley and the watch. Analogy is explanatory in the sense of illustrative; it is not explanatory is the sense of corroborative.
3 CREATION STORIES
3.1 The doctrine of creationism does not, of itself entail the truth of any existing creation story. Moreover, creation, if it truly occurred, could logically have proceeded in ways quite different from traditional creation stories; it is logically possible that we might yet write a new, perhaps even true, creation story.
3.2 Many of the more vocal creationists simply disregard the point made in the preceding paragraph and assume, uncritically, that creationism entails believing the Book of Genesis. It does not.
3.3 While this article is primarily concerned with a priori consideration of the creation doctrine set out in 2.1 (a priori means by way of detached prior thought rather than by reference to empirical data) ..... it remains necessary to assess the Genesis stories that are so revered by the more vocal creationists. Fortunately, considering the value of brevity, it is remarkably easy to do this.
3.3.1 The great strength of the Bible is the cultural momentum it has acquired by the very fact of its having been believed, unchallenged by empirical data and inference therefrom, for so long by so many people. It is famously famous.The great thing about the Bible is that, like Mt Everest, "it is there".
That the Bible does contain much that is acceptable to all reasonable people has, of course, augmented that momentum. But it has to be said that, at least among English speakers, the marvellous prose passages in the King James version are compelling in a way that the flat modern translations cannot hope to be.
3.3.2 The weakness of the Bible, as information, is partly that it does so very little to anticipate the well attested data we now have as to the scale, complexity and antiquity of the NU. Additionally, and more damaging to the factual credibility of the Bible, the Genesis creation story presents an account of the living world that makes no mention of micro organisms ..... yet these are far more numerous than macro organisms and, what is more, quite fundamental to the functioning of macro life.
3.3.3 We would not rate highly a purported history of twentieth century warfare that makes no mention of aircraft and of high explosives - would we?
3.3.4 Of course, if the book of Genesis were the unaided work of low-tech people, with neither telescopes nor microscopes, then the omissions to mention BOTH the sheer scale and complexity of the universe, AND the bare facts of micro life, would be understandable - indeed inevitable.
3.3.5 If the Good Book had been divinely inspired then we would have to infer either that important parts have been mislaid or that the Divine Inspirer got it wrong or is deliberately deceiving us. For very different reasons, the concept of a mistaken or deceitful Creator is unacceptable to theists and atheists alike.
3.3.6 There is a negative theological point here; IF the bible is both Divinely Inspired AND grossly misleading as to cosmology in general and the fundamentals of the living world in particular ...... THEN we would have to assume either that the Inspirer, not being deceitful, has created His universe in a plodding unimaginative way or that he has created us with sheer witlessness in respect of our powers of observation and inference. One has to wonder whether attribution of poor capabilities to the Creator might perhaps be thought blasphemous.
3.3.7 The phrase "has created His universe in a plodding unimaginative way" needs amplification ........ for it leads to positive theological perception.
Which is the more in keeping with the intelligence that a creator must necessarily have : a) that He made species after similar species ....... domestic cats, panthers, tigers, snow leopards and so on ..... separately as parallel lines that never meet and, going backwards, never have met, or b) that He made a basic cat with the capability to evolve into a wide variety of cat-like species each well adapted to the several different environments that He, evidently, has made.
Scenario a) portrays a creator who is about as dim-witted as a creator can be; scenario b) portrays a creator with at least some of the imagination and foresight that a creator would necessarily have to have.
Perhaps we can attribute to the creator that super-intelligence, which is part of His job-specification, and then to suppose that an initial act of creation might well have been to create a 'singularity' capable of evolving into the immense and awesome variety of entities and processes, both non-living and living, that any sensitive person cannot but wonder at?
3.4 In short, is it not better theology to, at least, entertain modern cosmological/evolutionary hypotheses rather than to credit the alleged creator with a manifestly flawed anthology of ancient writings (which present us with the problem, acknowledged frankly by the authors of the New English Bible - "the problem of what to translate and how to translate it"?).
OBJECTIONS TO SCIENCE-COMPATIBLE THEOLOGY
4.1 The creation story that begins with the creator initiating the Big Bang leading to organic evolution - mostly by Natural Selection predicated by God-given environments - depends heavily upon chance events and this dependence is often held to be contrary to Design - an essential feature of creation doctrine as ordinarily perceived. There are a number of ways in which this objection may be questioned.
4.1.1 An essential fact about improbable events is that they can happen and do happen. Improbable is not synonymous with impossible.
Speaking personally, but for all of us as well, the very existence of oneself flows from the chance encounter of one particular sperm with one egg ... one sperm from among the millions available on the given occasion. In my case, I am persuaded (but not entirely convinced - for lack of surviving witnesses) that the encounter from which I have sprung probably occurred on the night of April 1st 1924; had one of the other sperms made it ..... then a very different person might be writing a very different article.
4.1.2 As every planner of casinos knows, one can, and does, design situations in which improbable, chance, events are intended to happen. Great pains are (or ought to be) taken to ensure that the roulette wheels spin true and do truly come up with numbers at random from those available to come up.
There is no logical impossibility about a Creator building chance into His Creation. Given a created potential for Big Bangs to go off ....... there is no reason why there could not have been any number of BB's followed by Big Crunches until ...... once upon a (beginning of) time ..... there was, by chance, a BB that gave rise to just those nicely tuned parameters requisite for the emergence of a more or less viable universe. A sufficiently informed and intelligent Creator would have known this ....... and would have bided his time (so to speak).
4.1.3 The phrase "a more or less viable universe" is significant in view of paragraph 2.4..3 - the universe, and the fine tuning upon which it depends, do not need to be perfect. Perhaps we live in an intentionally imperfect universe - perhaps there is (recall the old popular song!) a Big Crunch Just Around the Corner and that will be what has, traditionally, been envisaged of as J-day.
4.1.4 As for the chance-dominated mechanism called Natural Selection ...... IF Natural Selection is the response of organisms to the pressures of their environments THEN it seems to be logically possible for the Creator to have rigged environments to facilitate the emergence of species congenial to Him. He has the time ....... to wait, watch and succeed.
4.5 I am not proclaiming this modern-day creation myth (which, like many a myth might turn out to be truth-bearing) as Truth; I am merely claiming that the ancients are not the only myth makers; moderns can do it too - and with more and better data to guide them.
Data-based myth-making ....... is perhaps as good a definition of science as you can get.
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