I’ve got a butt-load of reading to do tonight (hoping to fit in some Spe Salvi on top of everything else), so post-writing time is limited. For the time being, I’ll point you all to this fascinating Wikipedia article on Creationism. It (and its Wikipedia neighbors) bring up a few points that are often missed in the whole cultural controversy between evolution v. creation (there is no such controversy among scientists). Here’s a few I found interesting:
- Fundamentalist Christianity seems to be unique in its broad, sustained and intense opposition to biological evolution and natural selection. While Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism have their own creation myths, they seem to have theologies or hermeneutics that allow for Darwin to have a seat somewhere within (though not necessarily in a very comfortable chair).
- The root article lists at least six different types of Christian creationism, including Gap Creationism (preserving the literal truth of Genesis by inserting a time ‘gap’ somewhere), Progressive Creationism (i.e. evolution with not-so-random mutations), Theistic Evolution (suspiciously like ID) and our old friend, Young Earth Creationism.
- The U.S. is unique in this controversy. According to one poll, some two-thirds of the members of one of the world’s most advanced scientific powers believe that humans were created by God presto! some time within the past 10,000 years.
- Young Earth Creationism was the prevailing view in the West before the 18th century. (And before Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus, everyone thought the sun and the planets revolved around the earth.)
All of these creationisms represent some attempt by believers to accommodate Christian belief and modern science (yes, even that last one), though some definitely lead to more cognitive dissonance than others. Having felt that dissonance acutely at one point in my life, my heart goes out to those who suffer like I once did.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Rich // Dec 5, 2007 at 9:58 pm
This reminds me of an interview I heard last year on NPR’s Diane Rehm show, whose guest was Francis Collins, the longtime director of the Human Genome project, a leading researcher in medical genetics, and a self-professed Evangelical Christian. You can hear the archived program here:
http://www.wamu.org/audio/dr/06/07/r2060725-10891.asx
I’ve taken the trouble to transcribe one part of the interview that I found especially interesting, which follows:
“The evidence for evolution is absolutely overwhelming. Those who would deny that should sit with me some day and go through the
DNA evidence of our relatedness to other species.
“If I look at our genome, and compare it with that of the chimpanzee, they are 98.8% the same. Now some might argue “well, God simply used some good ideas in a slightly different way over and over again in multiple acts of special creation”, but the data doesn’t support that. For instance, chimpanzees have two more chromosomes than humans do. When you look closely to see what’s going on there, those two chromosomes have fused together to make one of ours, and when you look at the DNA sequence at that fusion point, it has a remarkable character; it has the type of sequence that one sees at what’s called the telomere, the tip of the
chromosome; no other chromosome has that in the middle. It’s clearly the signature of two chromosomes having come together, and
when you look at the chimp and you look at the human,it’s inescapable to conclude that we are descended from a common primate ancestor.
“We humans have pseudo-genes; genes that have lost their function. They’ve acquired some sort of major flaw, and in some instances those are genes which are located in the same place in the chimpanzee, or even in the dog or in the horse, yet in us they havestopped working.
“What’s going on? Would God have put those there just to confuse us or mislead us, when in fact we are completely different, special acts of creation? That sounds like a trickster god, not the God I worship.
“So, I don’t think by the study of DNA, or for that matter the fossil record, one can any longer deny the reality of evolution.
But that’s not a problem for me as a believer. If God decided to use that mechanism of creation, that’s incredibly elegant; that’s incredibly awe-inspiring.”
2 Elaine // Dec 6, 2007 at 8:27 am
But, you see, that is the trouble (sorry for the term, but it is the closest one I can think of this early in the morning) with some creationists: they really do believe that any evidence of evolution is a test of faith set by God.
I don’t understand the mindset that would believe in a god who would lie (because false evidence is a lie) in order to test someone’s faith, but apparently some people need to believe in that sort of god…a trickster god, as Collins labels it in the transcript…because they are so wed to the idea that belief in god and belief in evolution are mutually exclusive. But they are out there. During the two months that I spent at BYU, there were people in the historical geology class I took who openly argued with the professor (if I remember correctly a couple of returned missionaries actually called him to repentance) when he explained why the idea that fossils were put in the ground to test people’s faith was just so much foolishness.
3 John // Dec 6, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Rich, thanks for the powerful quote. And the evidence builds as you move from discipline ot discipline, and study to study: plate tectonics, paleontology, mitochondrial DNA, molecular biology, paleomagnetism, etc., etc.
Hmmm…the notion of a trickster god is actually a little more appealing than the strict, son-sacrificing, control-obsessed version. At least a trickster god might have a sense of humor!
If I were god, I think I’d mess with some people’s heads–just the ones who took themselves too seriously. But I’d forgive them and let them in on the joke in the end.
4 Rich // Dec 7, 2007 at 7:28 am
Hmm, xJane’s got me addicted to Sinfest!
This one’s relevant
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