Faith and politics part 4: Covid conspiracy crisis

 

Covid control conspiracy crisis

The majority of the world population when faced with Covid had grown up with every advancing medical science. Just a hundred years ago before antibiotics, when so many conditions could not be ‘cured’ only nursed people would be astonished to look forward to hospitals and medicine today. Meanwhile science and technology opened up so many things that we (at least in the richest countries) could barely imagine living without. 

I don’t like the idea of dividing populations into generations (I am a late Gen x-er apparently), the post war generations, baby boomers, whilst fearful of the abuse of science (nuclear bombs) largely saw science as positive and hopeful, that it will in time have all the answers. In the move away from religion was there a trend to see science as the new faith?

Well in the new millennium doubt came into the faith in science. We started to wonder more often whether what can be done should be done.  Not that the question was never asked before, but the voices got louder. At the same time we face the limits of science and medicine – antibiotic resistance, few answers for the dementia that more people live long enough to develop – and the implications of our previous technologies on the climate.

So now we move on from the proclamations that ‘God is dead’ to ‘Science is playing God’ and adverts that used to see someone in a lab coat as reassuring to a mindset that scientists are playing with fire and not to be trusted.

Enter a pandemic and a time when there is a need to follow guidance, and listen to the science. 2020 populations are used to deciding for themselves, and whilst most of us may follow the guidance as our choice to care for the community and limit the spread etc, others rebel against anything. This is magnified in the USA where the faith related anti-science was already more widespread, and then the vaccines…

Faith and politics part 3 : Flat earth and other theories

 

Flat Earthers and beyond

Yes this view is making a comeback - despite the earth as a globe being proposed centuries before Christ –an idea proposed by Pythagoras (6^th century BC) and affirmed by Plato (4^th century BC) and Aristotle suggested empirical evidence. Whilst around 240 BC the Greek Eratosthenes made a very accurate estimate of the circumference of the earth, by comparing shadows in different cities.

I confess that I was surprised about how early this understanding was, in my imagination it was a medieval insight linked to Copernicus – but it seems his addition was about the planets circling around the sun rather than Earth being the centre of the universe. The globe earth was well established among the learned and through the Middle Ages the churches and emerging universities took a globe world as a given fact.

It was in the 19^th century that stories arose that claimed the middle Ages European view was of a flat earth. And it was linked to the development of the myth of conflict between faith and science. In Britain Samuel Rowbotham (1816–1885) published theories of a flat earth and was a charismatic speaker. Others took up the baton in the years that followed. Things subsided although in 1956 The International Flat Earth Research Society was formed, in the face of the space race and images from orbit the claims of conspiracy and deception began.  In was under new leadership in the 1970s that the membership of the society grew to several thousand. Decline in the 1990s has been followed by another resurrection in the internet age with youtube channels focused on flat earth theories – fed by and feeding into to the rise of both anti science and anti government worldviews.

Of course the number of those committed to the flat earth viewpoint will still be small, more widely though the rate of conspiracy believers seem to be higher, with QAnon as a movement that seemingly binds together a wide range of different groups that were once seen as extreme. And when a former president makes unsubstantiated claims of massive voter fraud, and followers storm Congress, then this conspiracy becomes widely accepted and encouraged by key right wing communicators, and invites people into other conspiracies – especially in the uncertainty of covid times.  

Faith and politics part2 : Creationism to covid anti-vaxxers

 

So what does it matter if a small group of people spend their lives gathering donations to promote unworkable theories of how the laws of physics and biology can fit their need to prove a 6 day creation?   If it was just about that I would live and let live – people are free to believe and interpret their faith however they wish to – until it becomes harmful to others.

The climate in the American Bible Belt has become very literal in its expression of faith, here they have campaigns seeking to teach creationism in science classes, or even to have evolution taken out, here is the heart of Christian home school curricula that reduce science and claim that poetic language in various parts of the Bible are claims to scientific fact. 

The same people who promote creationism as the only valid Christian view of the beginnings of life, are part of the Moral Majority, the Religious Right – the process by which evangelical Christians have been recruited into co-dependency with the Republican party.   A journey that has led many of them to see Donald Trump as almost messianic, despite much in his lifestyle that would be condemned by their moral values. Meanwhile any Democrat is evil, despite Biden being in church much more often than Trump ever would – but then Biden is Catholic and many of them don’t consider catholics as part of their faith.

The attack on Evolution has morphed into a general anti science stance, enforcing the idea that scientists are trying to edit out God, and that science and faith are incompatible.  Science goes back to prechristian thinkers, whilst a lot of mathematics and astronomy was advanced by Islamic scholars whilst Christendom was said to be in the ‘Dark Ages’.   Time moved on and much of scientific study for centuries was linked to the monasteries – this people set aside from regular labour in the fields, more educated, scribes of the ancient Greek texts preserved by the Islamic scholars, and the desire to seek out more understanding of God’s creation – the world around them.  The idea that science is at war with faith is relatively recent, and yes Darwin’s theory was a landmark in that, though Darwin was a man of Christian faith.

So parts of the church responded by proclaiming that evolution and the geology of an ancient earth could not be true, leading them to cling more and more to a literal view of the earliest stories of the Bible.  They became sceptical of science, whilst happy to benefit from uncontroversial aspects -computers, internet, medical progress. This contradictory mindset has been ripe for those rebelling against the science of these Covid times – the anti vaxxers who protest against even others getting the jab; the anti maskers who complain that their rights are being infringed; the church leaders who see requests to avoid gathering in crowds as persecution from the atheist scientist cabal.

Christian literalism has contributed to situations where people are told what to believe, taught to fear science and to expect persecution from the big bad world. Leading to a context where to some it is seen as Christian to defy the scientific advice about covid. - leading to huge variations in state % of vaccinations. Okay no authority or country has had a perfect response to the pandemic, we all have to consider what is best at any point in this journey, and I am sure that hindsight will judge the flaws. However where vast parts of a population have already been conditioned to see science as bad, as anti-christian, then the ability of any authority to seek co-operation in protecting lives and limiting the spread of illness is neutered. This is what we see in the extreme parts of American evangelicalism, running churches that ban the wearing of masks, and prophesy about Trump– until he said he was vaccinated and boosted, when new theories grow.

So yes our view of Genesis may be a private faith matter, however the militant young earth creationists do affect others lives, and in Covid that has become very clear.

Faith and politics part 1 - The passion and fears of creationism

 

I am a Christian, a minister in the church, and I have a scientific mindset (from school I went to University for a degree in Biochemistry and Microbiology).   It is not for me to comment on anyone else’s relationship with God, but I do feel able to comment on what others say about God and how it relates to my encounter/view of God.

How did it all begin? The Bible gives 2 versions of creation – the first based on 6 day creation and where God proclaims all to be good, the second giving a story of the first man and woman breaking God’s command and giving a reason for the challenges of human life – working for a living out of the soil. 

Scholars who look at the texts, and the use of language in the Hebrew, including the words used for God (Yahweh vs Elohim), see that there are different voices in parts of the Old Testament – coming from competing traditions.

Since Darwin raised the theory of evolution parts of the church have reacted by insisting that these early parts of the Bible must be taken as literal truth. This was not the case for generations before that. Not to say that people didn’t take Genesis at face value, but there was no insistence that it had to be literal and many took it as a lesson in matters of faith.

Today there are those for whom the literal truth of Genesis is crucial to their faith, and billions are spent on producing resources (including visitor attractions) to proclaim this ‘truth’.   They seek to defend their position by claiming science backs them up, and in doing so they tie themselves up in ever tighter scientific knots.  They defend the young earth theory of 6000 years, in the face of geological and fossil records that date our world much older – in billions of years. Some will allow for a day being a thousand years but that only doubles the brief time.  

I recall as a teenager going into my biology class with a book debunking evolution and asked to sit out that lesson – and was in the prep cupboard.  I did do the reading for the exam however. I didn’t come from a strict creationist church but had absorbed a particular book that led me to these actions.  I wish I could go back to Mrs Evans and explain why that view was something I let go shortly afterwards.

The struggle for young earth creationists (YECs) is to make science fit a poetic/fable view from a book of theology. So yes all things created in 6 days, with dinosaurs arriving the same day as humans, and trying to merge in a different story about Adam and Eve. But then Cain kills Abel and is banished to wander the earth with a mark on him that he should not be killed – by whom? Who else is out there when they are the first children of Adam and Eve?

Then we come to Noah – how to defend a story as a global flood rather than a local event that passed down in tribal memories? YECs have to theorise how the earth can be drowned up to Everest when there is not enough water on the planet to do that, but their main focus is about how to justify the ability of the Ark to carry all the different animals. This amounts to reducing the massive number of species to a smaller number of ‘kinds’. But then they say that in the less than 6000 years those kinds can expand into many species, basically requiring an evolution at a massive speed that has never claimed by evolution.   (See here for a youtubechannel by a Primatologist)

Why do some Christians feel the need to insist on one specific understanding of the first 11 chapters of the Bible? And in parts of America to demand that creationism is taught in science, whereas in UK I have not heard of that, whilst creation may be part of the RE curriculum.

My impression is that those who seek to defend a literal 6 day creation and Noah’s flood are people whose faith in the Bible as a whole has become entrenched in the concept that every word of it is God breathed, by which they mean a form of automatic writing with God directing every word and all punctuation. They often (for English speakers) see the King James Version of the Bible as the first so most perfect English translation, despite it being neither the first in English, nor the most accurate. Many manuscripts have been discovered since KJV and the translation had political leanings to defend the status of the monarchy, it was also using a dated language even when new.

For those who see every word of the Bible as God dictated, the status of the New Testament and the stories and words of Jesus need the Genesis accounts to be literal truth too.  If one were to be not literal truth then the other would also fall, if creation was not 6 days then Jesus could not be their salvation.

 This seems to be the core reason for their desire to argue for a singular intepretation of the first Biblical chapters and the absolute fear of any other truth.  They have based the core of their faith on a word by word truth of the Bible, and in the young earth theories fall, then so does the basis of their faith.  They must therefore defend creationism with all they have.

This deep commitment to a single view of the scriptures, and a fear of any other point of view leads them to see only creationists as valid Christians, and the need to expend a lot of money to try and convert others to YEC and their ‘true faith’.  Even so it would be a matter for themselves, except that it has powerful impacts on politics within a powerful nation, that is for another post.

This is not the faith I find in my Bible, I find fables that speak of God’s ways, I find people trying to understand their relationship with their God, and through that I hear the voice of God, not through dictation, but through the experiences of other God followers.