My last post was the first half of a response to the oft over-simplified debate between Theistic Creationists and Atheistic Evolutionists. The purpose was to illustrate that these views are only mutually exclusive if the Creation story is taken literally. Also, it was to present an argument that scripture need not be taken literally in order to be meaningful.
In my last post, I expressed a great deal of sympathy with Mr. Nye. I still find his argument far more compelling than Mr. Ham's, by which I mean he presented a more reasonable worldview. However, something did surprise me about Mr. Ham's argument. He touched on something at the beginning that could have improved his argument - at least, for me - but then lost it to his insistence on the literal interpretation of scripture. He started by talking about the nature of truth and how we develop our view of reality. For Mr. Ham, scripture is his primary influence.
I'd like to take a moment here to say something about myth. Today, the connotation of "myth" is equivalent with false. Can you think of a time when you heard someone refer to something as a "myth" when it didn't mean "bullshit"? In many ways this is a good thing: Storytelling holds a powerful sway over humans. It's critical for our survival in that it's usually the first way we learn something. For as long as humans possessed language, there have been stories to illustrate the consequences of actions. Stories help us avoid poor decision making. Because stories possess such power, it is possible for unscrupulous persons to use them for sinister purposes. History is full of just such villains; therefore, our modern skepticism about "myth" has done us a service in depriving these tyrants of such undeserved power.
But this freedom also has drawbacks. For one, the world has become much more complicated. So much of our day to day lives depend upon the expertise of people other than ourselves. We have many modern marvels which make life quite convenient as well as safe; but these marvels each operate from a very specialized knowledge base - meaning, outside the realm of common knowledge. We refer to those who hold such specialized knowledge as professionals. Even the knowledge of our laws - to which we are all accountable - has become specialized. The Ten Commandments may have been stringent, but at least they were simple. Human survival today depends much more critically on quantifiable expertise than on those truths which are communicable through narrative. When those of religious persuasions lament the modern world, I submit that this is what they find so troubling...and I find it hard to disagree.
So when I refer to scripture as "myth", understand I do not mean it in a pejorative sense. I simply mean its truths are narrative truths rather than the quantifiable ones to which we are so accustomed in this modern world. Where Mr. Ham makes his mistake - and it is not a disingenuous one - is that he doesn't make the necessary distinction between the two types of truth. In attempting to restore the importance of narrative truth upon society, he tries to use a narrative truth to supplant the quantifiable truths discovered by scientists over the centuries. This approach unnecessarily destroys the balance between science and religion, pitting one side against the other rather than acknowledging that each speaks to something entirely different from the other.
If scripture is myth what is the narrative truth behind it? No single person is capable of answering this question in its entirety. We've been trying to answer it for thousands of years and, I suspect, we will continue do so for thousands more. What seems clear - to me, at least - is that scripture does not aim to teach us about our physical origins, but our existential origins. Not: "How did the world come into being," but; "What does it mean to be part of it?" The Young Earth Creationists believe scripture does both because they are blinded by the prejudices of modern society which states that only quantifiable truths matter. What a bizarre irony that their rejection of modern thought in favor of scripture is actually due to the same prejudice of which they aim to cure evolutionary science!
In my previous post, I mentioned Christ's parables and suggested that Genesis is a parable too. God made Adam and Eve. God told them not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They did...and this changed everything. What are we to make of this story? Surely not that all humans came from these two individuals, but that somehow this symbolic act represents something about human nature. Consider this debate about which I've been writing. It is fundamentally an argument about knowledge as well as it is an argument about good and evil insofar as both men are concerned with the potential harm caused by the other's view. For Mr. Ham, it's a matter of saving souls. For Mr. Nye, it's a matter of saving rational thought.
Scripture cannot speak to the scientific details of our world any more than science can speak to ethics or philosophical questions of meaning. This is not to say scripture is factually incorrect or that science is bad. It's only to say that each seeks something altogether unique. The truly remarkable thing is that our reality is so vast and complex that limiting one's view to either what can be confirmed by the senses or read in a single book among multitudes, is not only to do injustice to oneself, but is to be guilty of a most profound ingratitude for this Universe which you have the privilege of inhabiting.
In my third post on this subject, I will be writing about why evolution does not disprove the existence of God.
No comments:
Post a Comment