201. confutation

Yesterday was Darwin’s birthday, so I watched an HBO documentary called Questioning Darwin, a look at the Creationist movement in the United States and its fierce opposition to the theory of evolution by natural selection. It’s basically a dissection of everything I was taught as a child about myself, the origin of life, and my purpose on Earth.

First, some quotes from Creationists in the film:

• “We believe in Creation, because of our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and God’s word, the holy Bible.”
• “If the theory of evolution is a fact, the Bible must be false, so we’re all stupid ignoramuses.”
• “I do not believe that we’re some sort of highly evolved primate.”
• “The Bible says we are created a little lower than angels, which is much more noble and majestic than the explanation that evolution gives for who we are.”
• “I don’t know how someone could observe humans and miss the dignity that’s put there by God alone.”
• “To put man down as just an animal, that we’re no different than a dog, is preposterous. God made us in His image, and so to say that man is an animal, and God created man in his own image… does one come back and say God is nothing more than an animal?”
• “If we are just a product of this random mutation process, where does morality come from? Where does hope come from? Where does love come from?”
• “If that’s the way the world works, then you believe in a God that doesn’t intervene. That takes away any possibility of miracles, any possibility of answered prayer, any possibility of the resurrection.”
• “To think I have no communication with God would be so devastating. I can’t even imagine adopting such a view just to make peace with Darwin.”
• “I can’t imagine life without knowing that God has a plan, and that that plan is not just for the here-and-now, but that plan includes a hope and a future, and a future way beyond whatever we’ll face here on Earth but a future with Him in heaven.”

What I hear in these voices is fear, thinly masked by certainty in a belief that promises to deliver both answers and purpose. These are people terrified by an existence that’s marked by uncertainty and danger. In a way, they’re right to be afraid, irrational as that fear is.

The beginning of my journey to atheism was indeed in finally accepting the theory of evolution by natural selection. I’m not sure when that happened, exactly—somewhere in the years after graduating from Northwestern College. The more I considered the fossil and genetic evidence that all life on Earth is related, and for the age of the universe and the Earth itself, the less likely it seemed that it was designed. For a while I flirted with the idea of theistic evolution, that God put everything in motion. Then something Julia Sweeney says in Letting Go of God stuck with me:

Intelligent design gets everything backwards. It’s like saying that our hands are miraculous because they fit so perfectly into our gloves: “Look at that! Four fingers and a thumb! That can’t have been an accident!’

Fact is, far from “fearfully and wonderfully made,” we more seem to be haphazardly assembled.

This view of a naturalistic universe had real implications for the beliefs my parents had handed me as a child, beliefs that mirrored the sentiments offered by the quotations above. How could a loving God allow such a world to exist? If I, a being made in the image of God, wanted to prevent suffering, how could an all-powerful being then not banish it completely?

At one point, several individuals talk about surviving substance abuse and how their addiction turned to Christianity. This is a popular talking point: without God we’re just animals, slaves to our darker impulses and passions—that we’ll tear ourselves apart. I don’t know how many presentations I sat through growing up: of “recovering sinners” warning us how bad it was on the outside, and that our only hope for overcoming sin and temptation was Jesus.

A fellow from Answers in Genesis sums it up at one point: “When asked what is the primary reason I believe evolution is incompatible with Biblical Christianity, I can sum it up in one word: death. Whether we’re young or old, death is inevitable.”

In the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham last week, this issue also came up. Ham said something to the effect of: “Bill Nye can’t tell us what happens after we die.” And that’s true. We don’t know. I don’t know. Yet somehow this becomes a talking point for Creationists to insert a Gospel pitch of salvation through Jesus Christ. You cannot talk to a Creationist who won’t do this at some point.

Their response to the news that we’re essentially alone in an amoral and indifferent universe is to try to shut their eyes tight and stop their ears. For them, if evolution is true, that means that life is pointless, aimless, meaningless. I love how Julia Sweeney puts it in Letting Go of God: “What’s going to stop me from rushing out and murdering people?”

For me, accepting evolution was liberating. For years, I agonized over the struggle between my “earthly” desires and my supposed divine purpose on Earth. The news that I’m an animal, with the same origins and subject to the same needs and forces as other creature on this planet, was a relief. It meant there’s nothing wrong with me, the opposite of what Christianity taught.

It’s futile to argue with Creationists. Their arguments are based on emotion, and apparently fear of death and spontaneously becoming murderers or kleptomaniacs. Or gay. Thus, they can easily dismiss threatening, rational evidence in favor of the Bible.

Darwin wrote: “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity, more humble and I believe truer to consider him created from animals.”

68. blinding

I’m living in an age
That calls darkness light
Though my language is dead
Still the shapes fill my head

I’m living in an age
Whose name I don’t know
Though the fear keeps me moving
Still my heart beats so slow
– Arcade Fire, “My body is a cage” (from Neon Bible)

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Yesterday afternoon I came across an article on the Huffington Post by David Lose entitled “Adam, Eve & the Bible.” He starts out by comparing the Biblical story to the legend of George Washington chopping down a cherry tree or Paul Revere warning the colonists (or the British, depending on whose history you listen to), then launching into discussion on Scriptural authority, problems with the Bible read as a historical or scientific text, and fundamentalist insecurity about the veracity of the Bible and of truth in religious belief.

NPR even aired a story on August 9th about evangelicals questioning the existence of the Biblical famous first couple (leave it to NPR to find evangelicals willing to admit to that on record). According to Scripture, all of humanity descended from one literal man and one literal woman in the Garden of Eden. However, as Dennis Venema, a professor at Trinity University, is quoted in the article, “that would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years.” There is too much genetic variation in the human genome today for that to be true. It’s even more ludicrous if you ascribe, as evangelicals do, to a “young earth” theory (i.e., that the earth is 6 to 10,000 thousand years old).

I was taught Young Earth Creationism growing up and believed it for a long time—until I heard and was convinced by Richard Dawkins. Evolution was touted as thought rebellion against God, a rejection of Biblical teaching on the origins of the universe, the earth and man. In 5th grade, my Sunday school teacher at the time was a colleague of Australian creationist Ken Ham (whose famous one-liner response to evolution is “How do you know? Were you there? Do you know someone who was?”) and had arranged for him to come to my church to do a seminar on Creationism. I had flashbacks recently after seeing a video of school children at his Creation Museum, who were about my age when I saw Ken Ham. When asked how they knew Creationism was true, most of the kids stumbled back with canned-like responses such as, “Because it’s in the Bible” or “My parents told me,” reflecting a lack of intellectual and critical foundation in Christian fundamentalist thought.

One curious aspect of the article was when Venema was later quoted as saying, “There is nothing to be alarmed about. It’s actually an opportunity to have an increasingly accurate understanding of the world — and from a Christian perspective, that’s an increasingly accurate understanding of how God brought us into existence.”

This seems like an odd thing to say, partly because of the weight Evangelicals place on the reliability of the Bible, but also since the Genesis story was a point of departure for me from Christianity. For me, the similarities between the Biblical creation story and early Mesopotamian accounts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh were too close for comfort, so it’s likely that in forming his creation story, the author of Genesis drew from that or even earlier legends to write his own, with Yahweh at its center.

The Bible hangs upon the premise that humanity fell from grace as a result of Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God, leading to Christ being enfleshed in order to take our place to suffer God’s wrath. The theology of the Apostle Paul, which forms the bedrock of theology in both the Roman Catholic and Protestant faiths, is built on this premise. (That alone could take up a whole post, but I’m trying to keep this as close to 1,000 words as possible.)

I can see how there might not be much to worry about if the first few chapters of Genesis are a metaphor for the creation of the world—or, as David Lose put it, “The story of Eden is the history of humanity writ small.” The Bible was written by a Bronze-age people that didn’t have or expect solid scientific evidence. Lose writes that the Bible “is a collection of testimony, confessions of faith made by persons so gripped by their experiences of God they had to share them using whatever literary and cultural devices were at hand.” Why should we saddle an ancient text with modern expectations?

It would be one thing if this were just personal belief. However, from this story of Adam and Eve sprang an institution that is responsible for the torture, oppression, abuse and slaughter of millions based on an imperialist theology and eschatology (the same could be said too for Islam, or any other belief system). It had better be more than a story since billions of people have based and are basing their lives on it, and millions have led lives of misery for the sake of “Christ and his kingdom.” And, as my last article discusses, a radical, conservative interpretation of God and the Bible is currently being used to shape political policy, with tangible effects. So if it’s just myth, somebody has a lot of explaining to do.

At this point I’m asking myself, “Self, why are you making a big deal of this? So what if it’s true or not? Even if it’s not true in the literal sense, it’s still true psychologically, in the way that other stories are ‘true’.” After all, what’s wrong with a God creating the universe (or setting evolution in motion and letting it play out), or even Jesus dying for our sins?

Because as nice as those stories are, inherent to belief in religion is a certain amount of willful blindfolding that must be done in order to maintain that belief. You must be willing to accept certain precepts on faith alone, such as the claim that Jesus was the Son of God—or that God even exists—in the face of a lack of evidence or even to the contrary. It’s likely that there was a man in Judea in the 1st century C.E. named Yeshua; that he taught some really radical things; and that the Jewish religious leaders had him executed, but no genuine proof he truly performed miracles or physically rose from the dead. His followers certainly believed he was who he claimed to be—though as Robert Parsig writes (as quoted by Dawkins), “when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”

I consider myself a naturalist and a secular humanist. While I acknowledge the possibility and likelihood of a “god,” that which is “true” must be quantifiable by what we see and observe in the known world and universe. Science tells us that humanity could not have sprung from two original humans on the basis of the genome, so if the story of Adam and Eve is a myth, the rest of the Bible probably is too. What science is showing us through its evidential work is that humanity probably evolved over millions of years, gradually developing the tools and skills for survival, including language and consciousness.

So I would put it to you, dear reader: Where do we draw the line between artifice and delusion? Is a belief in a transcendent reality (and a transcendent deity) incompatible with the pursuit of reason and rationality? And if not, does it matter which system of belief you follow so long as it brings you closer to that “inner spark of divine light”?

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References

Arcade Fire (2007). My body is a cage. On Neon Bible [CD] Durham: Merge.
Hagerty, B. (9 August 2011) Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve.
Lose, D. (17 August 2011) Adam, Eve & the Bible.