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.