The slow and painful death of biblical literalism

2006.02.24 — Culture | Religion | by Derek Jensen

The rise of intelligent design theory in the last few years has gotten religious fundamentalists in a daze. In some ways, it is antithetical to the biblical literalism that they have embraced for the last hundred and fifty years. And yet, it is a tantalizing fruit that offers the promise of having your God and eating Him too. As a result, the desire many conservatives have to shoehorn Christian teaching into public school is allowing intelligent design to slowly kill biblical literalism.

By tying themselves to the stone of biblical literalism (that is, what the King James Version says is literal, historical fact), fundamentalists have suffered extensive humiliation at the hands of a rival faction known as "scientists." Scientists have repeatedly and rather callously demonstrated that the earth is far older than the 6,000 years literalists have estimated and that for a long time it was chock full of dinosaurs.

They would crow about the occasional mistake by scientists (Piltdown Man? Har har!), but only at the cost of discreetly ignoring the glaring illogic of their own (a few thousand year ago a flood covered the entire world and killed every living thing except what was on one boat? Where did the Chinese empire come from? And kangaroos?).

Now intelligent design gives them an out that offers the best of both worlds: God literally created the universe in six epochal stages near the end of which He personally supervised the evolution of all living creatures over millions of years out of primordial mud in His image.

This is good for religion in general because it depicts a sensible and consistent worldview that is less likely to drive away people who reject literalism for being incompatible with modern geology and paleontology.

And scientists and secular humanists should regard this as a step in the right direction. For one thing, it aligns Christian fundamentalist time with scientific time (and Vatican time), and that alone would stop my mother from harrumphing whenever the Discovery Channel uses the phrase "millions of years ago."

For another thing, thinkers such as Robert Wright have pointed out that evolution actually does seem to have a directionality that points to higher purpose in that it reliably produces more complex organisms from less complex ones.

It doesn't matter much, as Wright acknowledges, that evolution doesn't technically need a guiding hand to produce complex organisms from less complex ones or intelligence from instinct. What matters is that, with intellligent design, the fundamental mechanisms of empirical science are recognized and validated and that bible stories cross over from literal perfect history to metaphorical wisdom (biblical inerrancy intact, just not literal).

God then becomes that unknowable entity that created the universe (or created the phenomenon that generated the universe), whatever force or mystery that might be. And those traditions of wisdom that describe natural law and virtuous philosophy are necessarily the word of God, being as they articulate (tho in imperfect human speech) the foundational reality of the universe He created. Thou shalt not kill, not because of His say so, but because the immutable laws of nature have demonstrated time and time again that killing is a terrible act that tears the fabric of society, the enlightened fact of which prompted Moses to write it down. The divinity of Jesus remains a question for Christian scholars to ponder.

I am probably misstating non-fundamentalist Judeo-Christian concepts here by coming very close to creating a "clockwork universe" in which God is merely a clock-winder or even just a metaphor, but I'll leave it to others to demonstrate the participation of God in the universe in historical times. However, this was common belief before the backlash against Darwin led to modern fundamentalism; so much so that it is this view and not the traditional Christian view that most founding fathers of America held.

Regardless, intelligent design is still not the same as science. There is no measurement, no experiment, no proof, and no disproof. It remains an article of faith and not empirical observation, so it's not appropriate for public school curriculums or official textbooks. If we all can agree to that, then Christians can get along with scientists just fine.

The Catholic Church, of course, has rejected the ideas of intelligent design, at least inasmuch as they pretend to be science. The Vatican leaves the door open to pure evolution as science and merely explains that God created all life from nothing, without detailing precisely how. This is, of course, not a literal reading of the bible, which does detail more or less precisely how humans were created. But then, the Catholic Church learned the hard way from Galileo that taking a position that can be disproven by science is embarrassing. Biblical literalists are still in denial, stuck in an infantile form of faith that clings to the most literal reading possible—despite clear scientific evidence proving it wrong—except when it is socially inconvenient (surely a rich man can get into heaven; that was just a metaphor, right?).

Of course, intelligent design supporters may want to pretend that they are in Galileo's position themselves, their ideas rejected by the community. But actually they are in the old Church's position, denying scientific empiricalism. But at least they have progressed as far as the 15th century.

f e e d b a c k

Respond to this page by your e-mail client. Please be sure to mention the title of the article.

s i d e b a r