This is an interesting article about the difficulties of teaching evolution in high schools today. It seems like a completely unfamiliar environment from me. Not only did I not grow up in Missouri, but I graduated from high school during the Clinton years, before half of the country apparently decided to lose their minds and think that evolution is false. Teaching high school age students is hard enough, I can’t imagine also having to deal with this kind of thing.
Half of Americans believe that evolution is false. Just let that roll around in your brain for a minute.
It’s an unbelievable statistic. Is this simply a religious fad? For the most part, religious groups didn’t have a problem with evolution for almost all of the twentieth century. Even the Catholic Church supports the teaching of evolution. Why is it that these evangelical, protestant groups have a problem with evolution? And why just evolution? Why are they not protesting tectonic plate theory, carbon dating, geological science or mineralogy? Why do they still cling to discredited dates made up by an Irish bishop in 1654? It just seems like a strange, nonsensical place to decide, “This far, no further.”
Sunday, September 14, 2008
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4 comments:
Any real religious fundamentalist worth her salt does rail against things such as tectonic theory and carbon dating.
I'm not poking fun. If you go to a lot of Christian bookstores you'll find a whole subsection of literature debunking those kinds of things.
Why is it that these evangelical, protestant groups have a problem with evolution?
It's an epistemological problem. They believe that the Bible is the only sure source of religious truth, and in order to have certainty about what they believe, they must be certain that the Bible is 100% true. Take away the 100% truth of the Bible, and their whole epistemology collapses.
At the same time, there are many other kinds of Christians who don't have that epistemological problem -- who are able to maintain a robust belief in Christianity without having any problem whatsoever with evolution. And not just "liberal" Christians, either. You can be a quite orthodox, traditional Christian without being a "literalist" about the creation story. (I count myself as one such.) As great a Christian theologian as St Augustine had a non-literalist view of Genesis, and his contemporary, the great Biblical scholar and translator St Jerome, once remarked that "Moses [i.e. the author of Genesis] recounted the creation of the world in the manner of a popular poet" -- that is, not literally but figuratively and symbolically.
To be fair, though, it has to be said that evolution has been used as a weapon to attack religion in general and Christianity in particular. But there is nothing in evolution, as true as it is, that "proves" that there is no God. If some conservative Christians react to such attacks by rejecting science and looking to the Bible for scientific truth as well as theological truth, I find that unsurprising even though I think it is wrong-headed.
Chris,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I agree, I don't think there is anything in evolution that should preclude a believer from accepting both ideas. I have no problem with religious people who try to hew to their beliefs. What still baffles me is more the biblical literalists who insist on the falseness of evolution, but ignore things like the mixed fiber fabrics and how god feels about shellfish. It seems to me like if you're going to be literal about one thing, don't you have to be literal about all of it?
Perhaps that's a trite observation. I don't know a whole lot about evangelical beliefs -- Jesus remade the law anew in a new covenant with god, correct? Does that explain why the dietary laws and things about how oxen should be divided aren't followed? If that is so, then why is Leveticus in the Christian bible? It's all rather opaque to me.
What I find surprising, though, is the pride of place they put something as extrabiblical as Ussher's chronology. From where I'm standing it seems like the literalist interpretation is inherintly incoherent.
Aaron,
I don't think it is "a trite observation." True, it is one that has often been made before, but if it raises questions that have never been adequately answered it deserves to be raised again from time to time.
The answer, of course, is that no one -- not even the most "fundamental" of fundamentalists -- is consistently literalist. Every believer believes some things in the Bible to be "literally" true and other things to be "symbolically" true. The question, then, is how we decide how to interpret different parts of the Bible.
I am sure that you don't want your comments box to turn into a short course on Biblical theology, so I won't attempt to answer that question here in any detail. But I will say this much: when it comes to understanding how the Bible is used and understood in classical, orthodox Christianity, the question you ask at the end -- why is Leviticus in the Christian Bible? -- is very, very close to the heart of the matter. If you understand why Leviticus (and the rest of the Jewish Scriptures) is included in the Christian Bible, that clarifies a great deal about how those Jewish Scriptures are to be understood by Christians.
Jesus Himself gives us the answer:
You search the Scriptures; for in them you think you have eternal life: it is they that bear witness about me ... if you had believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.
(Jesus is speaking, of course, of the Jewish Scriptures; at the time He spoke these words the "New Testament" did not yet exist.)
The primary purpose of the Scriptures (both Old Testament and New) is not to provide scientific truth, nor to give a thorough and detailed history of the world, nor even (primarily) to provide moral truth, but to show us Jesus and to declare Him to be the Messiah promised to the Jews. That is the interpretive "key" to the Old Testament Scriptures. People who let a "literalist" approach to everything distract them from that central message are missing that interpretive key, and turning the Scriptures away from their intended purpose.
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