Why
Fundamentalists Cling to Genesis 1:1
Believers and nonbelievers alike often come to this site to ridicule and/or condemn writers they disagree with. If the scoffers on both extremes of the spectrum hang around long enough, they can see that among us there is a solid core of commenters who cordially accept other views than our own. We do try to reach out to the confused, and we often recommend our own viewpoints. We just don’t insist that everyone else should adopt them. We acknowledge that the important thing is for each of us to find a place to stand on solid philosophical and psychological ground, a place that provides a perspective for viewing the physical and social universe that makes sense to the viewer.To me a literal interpretation of Genesis makes no sense at all. The world looks all jumbled and surreal if I view it from there. However, I do not believe that people who see the world comfortably from that spot should be dragged away from it—only that they should be prevented from forcing our legal and educational systems to operate from their literalist perspective.This short essay illustrates my thinking. It is expanded and edited from a comment I posted to another blog, The Sensuous Curmudgeon.Retired Prof
Milton W. Howard, pastor of Kitchens Creek Baptist Church in Ball, LA, avers “The person who denies that ‘In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth’ must deny everything else in the Word of God. . . .”
This is the pithiest and most
straightforward expression I have seen of why the scientific study of origins
(tagged as “evolutionism,” “scientism,” “naturalism,” or “Darwinism”) terrifies
fundamentalists so much. Genesis 1:1 is their fixed landmark, their homing
beacon. It organizes existence for them.
While attending a [non-ACOG]
religious college I had a few dates with a fundamentalist. When she found out I
was skeptical about the existence of her god, the first question she asked was “How
do you explain that tree over there?” The next one was “How can you ever love
anybody?” It was about that time when we each began to find other people more
attractive.
Mr. Howard’s foundational
scripture serves the function Wallace Stevens claimed for a physical artifact:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
Having been lost in the woods
occasionally, I know the terror of having no bearings. Once when a snowstorm
hid distant landmarks and made my immediate surroundings unrecognizable, I got
completely turned around. I had to trust my compass to point me back toward my
hunting companions. The route led across thin ice on a pond choked with button-brush.
It was either struggle straight across and dread falling through, or veer off
course and risk wandering for hours through terrain that had become grotesquely
unfamiliar. I finally spied my friends in their blaze orange coats and made my
way over to them. They seemed to be facing the wrong way. I said, “I don’t know
where I am.”
One of them said, “You’re right
here, at the beaver dam deer stand.”
I said, “I know that, but I still
can’t recognize it. It’s like I’ve never been here before.” They led me to the river
channel where we had left our canoe. Immediately the slovenly
wilderness
surrounded that spot and everything made sense again.
So it’s not hard for me to see
how fundamentalists would fear to abandon a comforting fixed reference point—the
TRUTH of Genesis 1:1—considering that life in general can be way more bewildering
than a river bottom in a snowstorm.
Anyone with more than casual interest in this topic would do well to investigate the beliefs and teachings of Maimonides and Nahmanides, two Jewish rabbis from medieval times. Knowing their teachings and opinions on the topic of creation puts our modern day debates into perspective. We are participating in an ages old tradition in that the same topic, and the same arguments have been discussed throughout much of history. Maimonides, the Aristotellian, believed that you cannot prove either side by logic. At best, you can only tip the scales lightly toward one side or the other. Nahmanides appeared in his commentary to be informed by science.
ReplyDeleteFor those to whom these names are unfamiliar, it is well worthwhile to take five minutes or a half hour of your time to investigate.
BB
"I don't have an issue with what you do in the church, but I am going to be up in your face if you knock on my classroom and tell me they have got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday School class. Because that's when we're going to fight."
ReplyDeleteNeil Tyson DeGrasse
Physicist and Cosmologist.
Works just fine for me. Let the churches teach what it wants to the people who want that kind of teaching and fluffy view of all that we now have access to exploring and discovering.
I'm very comfortable with being the current end product of a very long run of human evolution. I'm comfortable being born from stardust and going back to it.
As DeGrasse has noted, the only reason we exist is because some very old star had the courtesy to explode and puke it's guts into the universe. Every atom in our bodies came from the heart of exploding stars.
That is spiritual to me. Creation myths are just that...myths which may have a purpose of course, but the purpose is not the science of where we came from and how the universe came so far to be.
To think that Bronze Age Priests in the Babylonian captivity (Not any real Moses as Judaism readily admits now) had the story of the origin of all things so neatly packaged in six days which present creation all out of the order it actually came to be is beyond ignorant.
The Bible is the most OVERSTUDIED book on the planet and the origin of more silly ideas about what really happened, when and how.
Don't give me pat answers meant to squelch questions and bring certainty to an uncertain world. I've been there and done that, and it got me absolutely nowhere fast. I'm not some uneducated and totally clueless stone or bronze age doofus sitting around a campfire bedazzled by blazing stars in a heaven I imagine peopled by gods.
ReplyDeletePeople imagine that way back there humans actually conversed with gods and got the real scoop on things so they could pass it down to us and all we have to do is accept it because it's so old it just has to be true. When you think that way, even Paul Bunyun becomes real. The world would still be flat. Witchcraft would actually exist. On and on the madness would go.
Retired Prof wrote:
ReplyDelete"If the scoffers on both extremes of the spectrum hang around long enough, they can see that among us there is a solid core of commenters who cordially accept other views than our own."
I'm all for cordiality, in fact I would certainly demand it, too.
But you don't have to "accept other views".
If another view is wrong in your opinion, you don't accept it, you argue against it (cordially of course).
Incidentally, for some people, the very fact that their position is being argued against may be uncomfortable enough that it feels like a personal attack.
(That's not to say that a lot of comments often seem to contain vitriol.)
But pointing out the flaws in someone else's views is not the problem, that's basically how human beings managed to reach the level of understanding we have so far...
The Jews were just incredible record keepers. They had a criss-crossed network of documentation providing support for each individual component of that network. The Torah is not a stand-alone work which lives and dies on its own. There are the Talmuds both Babylonian and Jerusalem, Mishnah, Kaballa, the writings of the noted historian Josephus, and other prominent works. For there to be a Babylonian Talmud, or collection of opinions of the law, then the law would need to have come into being prior to the Talmud. Another feature of the Torah is its complex geneologies, which function as another checkpoint.
ReplyDeleteWe've been told that the Jewish religion, their God, some of their holy days, and names of some of their months came from Canaan. There are striking similarities, admittedly. However, there is another factor to consider.
There were people who were contemporaries of, and even related to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob before the period of Egyptian slavery. During the interval of time when Israel multiplied, becoming the size of a nation, these other individuals presumably were doing that same thing, multiplying in numbers. And, from the book of Joshua, we learn that the Israelites were commanded not to attack the Canaanite nations which were these other peoples' offspring.
The individuals who were close to the patriarchs, and were undoubtedly influenced by them, most likely to the extent of sharing their customs were: Lot (who spawned the Moabites and Ammonites) Esau (father of the Edomites), Ishmael (who had twelve sons, and is considered to be father of the Arab nations), and the sons of Abraham by Keturah, his second wife. The ancestral relationship of these Canaanites to the Hebrews could very well have caused more than casual similarities in their belief systems. It is even possible that some of the beliefs spread to other Canaanite nations
Phrased in a different manner, it is possible that what we are observing is a parallel development amongst nations which shared the same starting point (Israel and certain of the Canaanites) as opposed to one nation (Israel) borrowing and refining its God, its culture and belief system from the Canaanites.
This is probably going to be an unpopular theory here, (note the stylistic usage of understatement!) but at the very least, it is plausible, does raise reasonable doubt, and needs to be factored into the greater debate.
BB
The Jews were just incredible record keepers. They had a criss-crossed network of documentation providing support for each individual component of that network. The Torah is not a stand-alone work which lives and dies on its own. There are the Talmuds both Babylonian and Jerusalem, Mishnah, Kaballa, the writings of the noted historian Josephus, and other prominent works. For there to be a Babylonian Talmud, or collection of opinions of the law, then the law would need to have come into being prior to the Talmud. Another feature of the Torah is its complex geneologies, which function as another checkpoint.
ReplyDeleteWe've been told that the Jewish religion, their God, some of their holy days, and names of some of their months came from Canaan. There are striking similarities, admittedly. However, there is another factor to consider.
There were people who were contemporaries of, and even related to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob before the period of Egyptian slavery. During the interval of time when Israel multiplied, becoming the size of a nation, these other individuals presumably were doing that same thing, multiplying in numbers. And, from the book of Joshua, we learn that the Israelites were commanded not to attack the Canaanite nations which were these other peoples' offspring.
The individuals who were close to the patriarchs, and were undoubtedly influenced by them, most likely to the extent of sharing their customs were: Lot (who spawned the Moabites and Ammonites) Esau (father of the Edomites), Ishmael (who had twelve sons, and is considered to be father of the Arab nations), and the sons of Abraham by Keturah, his second wife. The ancestral relationship of these Canaanites to the Hebrews could very well have caused more than casual similarities in their belief systems. It is even possible that some of the beliefs spread to other Canaanite nations
Phrased in a different manner, it is possible that what we are observing is a parallel development amongst nations which shared the same starting point (Israel and certain of the Canaanites) as opposed to one nation (Israel) borrowing and refining its God, its culture and belief system from the Canaanites.
This is probably going to be an unpopular theory here, (note the stylistic usage of understatement!) but at the very least, it is plausible, does raise reasonable doubt, and needs to be factored into the greater debate.
BB
"As DeGrasse has noted, the only reason we exist is because some very old star had the courtesy to explode and puke it's guts into the universe. Every atom in our bodies came from the heart of exploding stars."
ReplyDeleteno, the truth is we are made from the dust of the earth, the same material the stars are made of....of course, the Adversary can put a twist on it and gullible people like Neil Tyson DeGrasse fall for it...
I wonder where Mr. DeGrassee thinks that material came from originally?...before that particular star was made?
"The ancestral relationship of these Canaanites to the Hebrews could very well have caused more than casual similarities in their belief systems. It is even possible that some of the beliefs spread to other Canaanite nations"
ReplyDeleteexcellent point BB....and since God was working with Israel and not the others, Israel had the truth and the others were simply corruptions of the truth, but were still similar enough to give the scoffers enough ammo to use in their efforts to do things "their own way" instead of God's way.
Michael,
ReplyDeleteGood comment. After I submitted that piece, I thought, "Damn, I should have written 'accept the people who hold other views.'" Of course we should accept their views only if they demonstrate in cordial argument that those views are worthwhile.
My Comment:
ReplyDeleteThe reasoning in the book of Genesis and other early scriptural writings cannot be taken literally and applied to the scientific writings of today any more than one person’s life experiences can be used to judge the normal experiences of all human beings.
It should be noted that everything defined as knowledge is the intellectual product of human minds. We can say we know a lot about the universe and the origin of human life, but all we really know is that we have an awareness of our existence and the capability of communicating what goes on in our mind that is associated with this awareness.
The bible is a book about the origin of this awareness and the problems humanity has experienced due to this awareness. Human reasoning assumes there is a purpose for its existence and recognizes that the human mind is deficient, but strives to achieve a conceived perfection.
All religion presumes there is a greater intelligence with the power to control the universe in the same manner every human mind has to control their little world. The problems in human life are the product of a lack of harmonious unity in seeking the wholeness that our human life is designed to achieve. At least this is my personal view of the biblical story.
A. Boocher
anon said:
ReplyDelete"no, the truth is we are made from the dust of the earth, the same material the stars are made of....of course, the Adversary can put a twist on it and gullible people like Neil Tyson DeGrasse fall for it...
I wonder where Mr. DeGrassee thinks that material came from originally?...before that particular star was made?"
That is the most ignorant statement made on this site in a long time...
Why don't you ask Mr. Degrasse where that material came from. He'd give you an answer you'd probably not comprehend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-LXUHJmzzc
LOL@ 11:17! Mr. Degrassee? And Dennis' incredulous response. I just blew my coffee all over the coffee table laughing uncontrollably. My cat assumed that I was having some sort of attack, and came in with a very curious and concerned look on his face. His whiskers were twitching!
ReplyDeleteMr. Degrassee! Next thing you know, someone will call him 'Ol Gassy' and the NAACP will want to shut us down.
Anonymous 6:46, it is indeed fascinating to consider the implications, isn't it? Oral tradition has been a very powerful force in many cultures. (a modern example might be the legends behind the African American tale of "Stagger Lee"). We don't know what the sons of Keturah might have shared in theirs, but we are told that there were some very major impacts in the lives particularly of Esau and Lot. Esau might have been one of the Bible's "bad boys" like Samson. But, like Samson, he believed in the God of the Old Testament. His grieving over missing out on the primary blessing of his father, and his tearful request for at least some sort of blessing proves that. This is impactful enough that Yahweh or El would have made it into the oral traditions of the Edomites.
ReplyDeleteIf, indeed, Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by flaming sulphur bombs, and if Lot's wife was actually turned into the pillar of salt that apparently still existed during the time of Josephus, again, Yahweh or El would have become part of the oral traditions of the Moabites and the Ammonites.
These nations, with their pantheons of gods and goddesses would often add one of the gods from an enemy nation that had shown itself to be victorious in battle, and they would worship that god "just in case", hoping for similar victory. Surely a "war god" would have made the cut!
Having lived in Southern California for a large portion of my life, I had the opportunity to discuss some of these topics with Arabic people. Muslims believe that their god Allah is the God of Abraham, just as Christians believe that YHWH was the God of Abraham. So, clearly, there was some impact on Ishmael during his youth spent as part of Abraham's family, a tradition that has endured for centuries.
I'm deliberately expressing this all as hypothetical or speculative while also using human reasoning because I know that some of the people who read this do not trust any histories or documents produced by select theocratic nations, or by a major religion, such as Judaism, Islam, or Catholicism. Instead, they cite mythologies from non-YHWH based theocracies in their counter argument, but are oral traditions and records produced by "pagan" theocracies any more reliable? At best, they provide an alternative explanation to some of the sources Christians, observant Jews, and Muslims trust. Not disproof or proof.
BB
Maybe I'm forgetting something important, but I know of no other argued historical moment that has NO contemporary account, no close-to-contemporary account, and just a smidgen of evidence either way.
ReplyDeleteHad our concept of God come from the Chinese, people would be dissecting and debating their various dynasties, and searching for Jewish influences.
ReplyDeleteI'm convinced that if there were a huge earthquake somewhere, and suddenly the ark of the covenant and original ten commandment stones were exposed, people would be working feverishly to prove that they were a fraud, even if anyone attempting to move or touch them suddenly dropped dead. To some, exterrestrials would be more welcome than God.
well Dennis, I watched the video and it seems that your buddy Neil and I are in agreement....the core ingredients of a star are also the core ingredients of humans...
ReplyDeleteguess God was right after all :-)
"guess God was right after all"
ReplyDeleteThe mother of all unfalsifiable statements?
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/animals-born-space-hard-time-200022830.html
ReplyDeleteExplain how evilution could possibly be responsible for such complexity?
Head Usher, I'm not saying this to one-up you--just to furnish another example. My own favorite unfalsifiable statement goes, "God always answers prayers. Sometimes the answer is No."
ReplyDeleteAnonymous asks "how evilution could possibly be responsible for such complexity"
ReplyDeleteWell, anon, tell us how the creator did it. When we are trying to get to know someone, we pay close attention not only to their words, but also to their accomplishments.
So. What mechanisms did the creator--or intelligent designer, or whoever--use to get little magnetic crystals into jellyfish cells and hook them up to the nervous system? Why didn't this individual--or committee, whatever--design the jellyfish so it could orient itself at any stage of its life, without in infancy going through a training period affected by gravity? Or else why didn't the maker(s) design it to operate no matter how it was oriented, like the Stihl company did my intelligently designed chain saw?
Creationists have a habit of just throwing up their hands and saying, "I don't understand it. Therefore it's a miracle. End of discussion."
This attitude doesn't show much interest in or respect for the creator's power and cunning. Seems to me if creationists want to understand the mind of their god, they owe it to themselves to set up research programs to investigate such issues and figure out what that entity is really like.
Nor does that article in any way jibe with the notion of random happenstance or the compilation of such advances from absolutely nothing...
ReplyDeleteTo presume it is of evilution makes even less sense than to presume it is of an intelligent being.
At least the god boys have a written record to have faith in; you sons of apes Have NOTHING to show what the SOURCE of "the big bang" is, which means your theory requires MUCH MORE FAITH
BECAUSE YOU CANNOT EXPLAIN THE SOURCE OF THE "BIG BANG" yet you give it a name in some BLIND FAITHFUL WAY,
hence personifying it; hence, behold your faith in the unknown and unproven!!!
Indeed you cannot rebut this, hence you will begin the childish insults
"Indeed you cannot rebut this, hence you will begin the childish insults"
ReplyDeleteNot only can it be rebutted, it's easy. No childish insults required.
"To presume it is of evilution makes even less sense than to presume it is of an intelligent being."
You view everything through a xian lens. I used to do the same, so I know what you're going through. But since I am capable of viewing the world through various lenses now, instead of just one, I can compare and contrast them and the "sense" they make, or attempt to make, out of the world for us. So "making sense" is a relative thing.
"At least the god boys have a written record to have faith in..."
That's just the problem. You don't make any observations, because someone already "revealed" ALL the "answers" to you. End of story. You don't need to. Why waste your time making observations when you already "know" everything worth knowing? That's the whole essence of dogma.
DOG·MA noun \ˈdȯg-mə, ˈdäg-\
: a belief or set of beliefs that is accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted
And if it were up to you and other know-it-alls like you, all progress would be brought to a screeching halt because you fanatics obviously know it all already. No need to go looking for answers to unknowns because those answers can never ever be found because those are "gods secrets." All that can ever be known was already handed down from "on high" and after that, it's the end of the line, so might as well get off the train.
And that's not even getting into what a joke that "written record" is that you've decided to place your faith in for no reason. The fact you've placed your faith in the bible rather than e.g. the Q'ran or the Bhagavad-Gita is merely the result of the accident of what land you happened to be born in.
"...you sons of apes Have NOTHING to show what the SOURCE of "the big bang" is, which means your theory requires MUCH MORE FAITH BECAUSE YOU CANNOT EXPLAIN THE SOURCE OF THE "BIG BANG" yet you give it a name in some BLIND FAITHFUL WAY, hence personifying it; hence, behold your faith in the unknown and unproven!!!"
You're right about one thing. We don't know what the source of the big bang (inflation) is (yet). And scientists, as a group are intellectually honest about that. They don't claim to know what the impetus was (if there was one). They also don't claim to know what it wasn't. It could have been a big guy in the sky, but until the big guy shows up to make a credible attestation to it, science isn't willing to settle on an answer without reliable grounds. Since when did saying "We don't know" equal blind faith in the unproven?
However, just because scientists don't know, doesn't mean that you do. It's not either-or. In fact, there's an infinite number of options for what it could have been. A big guy in the sky could have been the cause of the big bang, but it could have been e.g. Allah, or Brahma, and not Yahweh, and all your blind faith in the unproven would be in vain. And there's every reason to expect that it is since you've settled on an improbable answer using an unreliable process. So, as soon as this was pointed out to you for the first time, that's when your intellectual dishonesty began. It's a good thing Yahweh never said there was anything wrong with dishonesty—Oh wait...
Fact is the theory of "big bang" does not explain the source of the bang, but merely says believe the theory for the theory's sake.
ReplyDeleteYou have no evidence of what made the bang happen, but you believe it happened, and that is faith in an unknown actuator, an unknown cause for the affect.
Hence you have faith. Faith in the unknown, in that which is not visible. You subsequently look down on those who are not of the same faith as you.
"Fact is the theory of "big bang" does not explain the source of the bang..."
ReplyDeleteTrue. Nor does it attempt to. Why, did you think it did?
"You have no evidence of what made the bang happen..."
True. That's why scientists aren't in a hurry to jump to conclusions about it. That begs the question why it is that other people are in such a hurry, people who also have no evidence. Oh, that's right—those people often don't like the evidence because it so often contradicts their "beliefs."
"...but merely says believe the theory for the theory's sake."
False. The theory was first proposed in 1927 by Georges Lemaître (a Catholic priest, btw) as a solution to theoretical Einsteinian physics and accepted a few years later upon observations first made by Edwin Hubble that showed light emitted by distant stars was consistently shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (redshift) indicating the relative velocities of those stars and an expanding universe. Einstein's equations predicted a non-static universe, but he inserted an extra term to stabilize it, known as the "cosmological constant," which it is said Einstein believed was the biggest blunder of his entire career, since he could have gotten credit for first proposing an expanding universe, but missed the opportunity.
"...and that is faith in an unknown actuator, an unknown cause for the affect. Hence you have faith. Faith in the unknown, in that which is not visible."
Therefore, also false. Please note that "knowledge" and "faith" or "beliefs" though often confused, are not the same thing at all. You're a "believer." You "believe." I'm not a "believer." I don't "believe." Either I know or else I don't know. And not knowing is just as acceptable as knowing.
Science is the practice of establishing reliable knowledge through questioning, observation, and scrutiny. Things that have not been established are "unknowns" which, contrary to what you seem to be impling, presents no burgeoning crisis for anyone. Faith does not attempt to establish anything since it is pedagogical dogma that it's usually a "sin" to ever question or scrutinize. These things don't belong in the same rooms. They interfere with one another. But, when shove comes to push, any guesses as to which one has been continually ceding ground to the other?
"You subsequently look down on those who are not of the same faith as you."
You know, those who make absurd accusations are ususally the ones who are guilty of them. In this case, all of us here understand exactly why you look down on those who no longer find it reasonable to share your faith. We all did similar things during darker times in our lives as you're continuing to do now. Rather than trolling for Jesus, you could turn off Fox News and save everyone else the headache of educating you by simply googling this stuff yourself.
The "big bang theory" simply defies the logic of what is known about cause and affect,
ReplyDeleteyet evilutionists say just this once ignore the fact that explosions have a cause and look at the results of the explosion because we don't know what caused it?
Yet, what we do know is that an explosion of any kind has to have a cause; this true throughout the universe. According to WHAT WE KNOW there has to be a source of any kind of physical occurance.
Evilution apparently wants us to say that this source does not exist simply because we have no knowledge of it;
this is the same kind of logic a primitive witch doctor might use: a witch doctor may not be aware of a vaccine to cure a disease he cannot understand, so he thinks unless he can cure it, a cure must not exist.
It is just typical human arrogance based upon the notion that if it is unknown to a human it simply does not exist.
Hubble's data were based on observations taken within the Local Group which is a gravitationally bound system. The modern Big Bang Theory says that gravitationally bound systems are exempt from inflation. What that means is that the redshifts Hubble observed had nothing to do with expansion, and therefore nothing to do with any big bang.
ReplyDeleteThat is one of many reasons the Big Bang is nonsense.
Didn't show up so I'll post it again...
ReplyDelete"Hubble's data were based on observations taken within the Local Group which is a gravitationally bound system."
This statement is simply contrary to the facts.
Besides, it doesn't take an astrophysicist to realize that the longer the yardstick you use, the more accurate the measurements you can make.
The Local Group covers a diameter of 10 megalight-years and it's two most massive objects are the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. In 2009 the Hubble telescope was used by Adam Riess to find Cepheid variables in NGC 3021 (which in 1995 hosted a Type 1a supernovae explosion that was well documented, thus linking the two milemarkers together). NGC 3021 is 90 megalight-years away, on the edge of the Virgo supercluster, far beyond the Local Group.
Why won't you consider this and the many other reasons why the big bang theory is not nonsense such as the WMAP and Planck surveys? and let's not forget the most distant galaxy, and therefore the oldest object ever detected, MACS0647-JD, whose ultra-violet light (the bulk of what is emitted by young stars) has been redshifted well into the infrared portion of the spectrum.