I'm Glad You Asked!
by Steve Hays
Contents
1. Epistemology:
(i)
God-Talk
(ii)
Divine Silence
(iii)
Coherence of Theism:
(a)
Divine Attributes
(b)
Trinity
(c)
Incarnation
(iv)
Freudian faith
2. Bible Criticism:
(i)
Miracles
(ii)
Mythology
(iii)
Contradictions
3. Science:
(i)
Creation
(ii)
Flood
(iii)
Physicalism
4. Ethics:
(i)
Problem of Evil
(ii)
Hell
(iii)
Holy War
(iv)
Original Sin
(v)
Predestination
(vi)
Euthyphro Dilemma
(vii)
Crimes of Christianity
(viii)
Christian Chauvinism
Preface
In Why I Believe, I presented a personal and positive case for my
Christian faith. This essay is a sequel to that one, for here I field the major
objections to Christian faith—some traditional, others of more modern vintage.
But as before, I'm confining myself to the answers I favor, even though that
does not exhaust all the good answers.
Interested readers are still encouraged to check out the bibliographies
in the complementary essay.
I. Epistemology
1. God-Talk
Both inside and outside the Church
there is often felt to be a peculiar difficulty with religious language. This apparent problem has both an epistemic
and ontological dimension. At the epistemic level, it is felt that if our
knowledge derives from experience in general, and sensory perception in
particular, and if God is not a sensible object, then whatever we may say or
think or believe about God is a figurative extension of mundane concepts.
At the ontological level, it is
felt that if God is in a class by himself and apart from the creative order,
then all our statements about God are vitiated by a systematic equivocation
inasmuch as there is no longer any common ground between the human subject and
divine object of knowledge.
What are we to say to these
considerations? Regarding the epistemic issue, the first thing to be said is
that this assumes a particular theory of knowledge. So if this is a problem, it is not a problem
peculiar to religious epistemology, but goes back to the ancient debates
between empiricism and rationalism, nominalism and realism. If you are a
Thomist, then this is a problem generated by your chosen theory of
knowledge. But if, say, you are an
Augustinian, then you don't believe that all knowledge derives from the senses.
Abstract objects are objects of knowledge without being perceived by the
senses—at least on an Augustinian theory of knowledge.
This does not, therefore,
constitute a direct objection to God-talk.
If such an objection is to be raised, it necessitates a preliminary and
independent argument for radical empiricism. And this debate has been going on
for 2500 years. So it seems unlikely that the critic of God-talk will be
successful in mounting a compelling case on epistemic grounds alone.
In addition, a good case can be
made for the view that human discourse is pervasively and incurably
metaphorical.[1] So even if God-talk were figurative, that
would not be distinctive to religious discourse, but would, rather, apply with
equal force to ordinary language—as well as scientific nomenclature, which is
refined from concrete usage.
Our knowledge of the sensible
world is analogical, for the human mind does not enjoy direct access to the
sensible world. Sense-data are a highly processed form of information that has
undergone repeated encoding in order to reach our consciousness.
So, if anything, the venerable via negativa has the relation exactly
backwards. The natural world is a material manifestation, in finite form, of
God’s impalpable attributes (cf. Ps 19:1-7; Acts 14:17; Rom 1:18ff.; Eph
3:9-10). Metaphor is deeply embedded in human language inasmuch as nature is
figural of God. So God-talk is the only kind of talk there is. Strictly
speaking, God is the only object of literal predication whereas all mundane
phenomena, as property-instances of divine properties, are objects of
analogical predication.[2]
But even if we waive the epistemic
objection, it may be felt that the ontological issue is, in any event, more
fundamental. The real nub of the problem, it would be said, lies with the
ontological wall separating subject and object. If God is wholly sui generis, then what is our shared
frame of reference for knowing or saying anything about him? Aren't we reduced, not only to analogy, but
the utter negation of our mental and mundane categories?
One of the problems with this
objection is it equivocates over the conditions of equivocation. What, exactly,
is the relevant point of similarity to form a sound analogy? A fork and fingers can both be used to
consume food, yet they don't have a lot in common in terms of their
constitution or configuration. The same thing could be said about doing math in
your head, counting on your fingers, using an abacus or a computer. The same thing could also be said about
telling time by a sundial, hourglass, atomic clock, analogue or digital watch.
So the ontological objection has pretty fuzzy boundaries.
And this points up another
issue. It is a category mistake to
equate analogy and metaphor. All
metaphors are analogies, but all analogies are not metaphors. Forks and fingers are analogous, but their
relation is not figurative. Even if God
were only known by his effects, an effect need not resemble its cause. What a Turner painting resembles is not the
painter, but a Venetian sunset. Yet a Turner painting reveals a great deal
about the painter.
A deeper issue is the relation
between divine and mundane properties. According to the Augustinian tradition,
to which Calvinism is heir, God is not merely the Maker of the world, but the
exemplar of the world. On this view, time and space are limits which instance
the illimitable being of God. Finite
reason and natural design instance infinite reason. Natural examples of the one-over-many
instance the supernatural symmetry of God's Trinitarian being. So such a position posits an internal
relation between our knowledge of God and our knowledge of the world.[3]
Let us apply these considerations
to a couple of classic attacks on religious epistemology. Kant erected a phenomenal/noumenal wall and
proceeded to put God on the noumenal side of the barrier. But Kant confounds a
general theory of knowledge with a special theory of perception. Even if there
were a radical hiatus between appearance and reality, that would be irrelevant
to the status of God as an object of knowledge, for God is not a sensible
object to begin with— just as you can know what the number five is without
having a mental picture of the number five. Numbers are not that sort of
object. You know by knowing the definition.[4]
Again, even if you bought into
Kantian assumptions, the narrative history of God’s creative, redemptive and
retributive deeds tracks at the phenomenal rather than noumenal level. The Exodus, Crucifixion, Resurrection and
great assize are public, sensible events; their historicity and significance
doesn’t turn on the topology of space, hyperfine structure of matter,
Copernican Revolution, ontological status of phenomenal qualia or suchlike. You don’t need to be a direct realist to
fully affirm whatever the Bible says about God, man and history.
Turning to Hume, his basic
objection is that if we only know God by his effects, then we must proportion
cause and effect and not overdraw the evidence. He also assumes that an
argument from design is an argument from analogy, which is, in turn, an
argument from experience.
But it is hard to take this
objection seriously. A poet is greater than the poem, a painter than the
painting. The Last Supper does not exhaust the imagination of Da Vinci. For one thing, the creative act is as much an
act of omission as commission, of choosing what to put in and what to leave
out, of not doing as well as doing. The range of possible variations is, in
principle, nothing short of infinite.
Hume’s objection is directed
against a Paley-style watchmaker argument.
In Paley’s classic illustration,
In
crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how
the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for all I knew to
the contrary it had lain there forever. But suppose I found a watch on the
ground. I should hardly think of the answer I gave before.
Now Hume would say that this
inference is fallacious because it is an argument from analogy, and the analogy
derives from our prior knowledge of man-made artifacts. But is that a fair
criticism?
To begin with, Paley’s distinction
between a rock and a watch is somewhat artificial, for the same object can be
both a natural object and a human artifact.
A rock can be turned into a timepiece.
For example, a rock, with suitable markings, can be converted into a
starchart. Let’s rewrite Paley’s
illustration with this in mind,
In
crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone. The stone bare a pitted surface. I made a rubbing and took it home. Although the distribution pattern was
apparently random, and I couldn’t tell if the indentations were man-made or
owing to erosion, yet I found, on further comparison, that they charted the
first magnitude stars of the northern hemisphere.
Now we would all attribute this
correspondence to design, even though the markings were indistinguishable from
the effects of natural weathering. And yet this is not an argument from analogy
or experience. The evidence of design is
not inferred from other rocks, or the tooling, or the position of the stars or
pattern of dots, both of which are asymmetrical, but in their studied relation.
But if Hume has misrepresented the
teleological argument, then that invalidates his efforts to discredit the
argument by invoking invidious analogies and disanalogies, as well as appealing
to the limits of induction. It should be further noted that Christian apologetics
was never prized on general revelation alone, but on the coordination of
general and special revelation—like the aforesaid match between the stars and
the starchart.
Hume, however, has a fallback, for
he parades a whole host of fantastic variations on the faith. Unless a
Christian chases down every decoy, he's failed to rout out the competition. But
one of the problems with this stalling tactic is that it cuts both ways. It cuts against Hume as well as a
Christian. For every belief held by
Hume, a Christian could just as well propose a host of hypothetical
alternatives. It keeps you from checkmating me and vice versa. The price for never losing is never winning.
But if there’s no closing move, why bother with the opening gambit?
A believer is under no obligation
to run down every rabbit trail and bag every hypothetical hare. Why rebut
objections that the unbeliever doesn’t believe in himself, but only trots out
to delay defeat? There is, as William James would say, a distinction between
bare possibilities and live possibilities. In honest dialogue, both sides
should confine themselves to what they really believe or believe to be
realistic options.
2. Divine Silence
The objection here is that if God
existed, he would make his existence more evident so that everyone would
believe in him. This objection has been
kicking around for some time, but there is now a burgeoning literature on the
subject. By way of reply:
i) At one level, this is an
argument from experience. It amounts to
saying that many folks are unbelievers because they have had no experience of
God’s presence. But this argument cuts
both ways. What about all the folks who
believe in God because they have felt the grace of God in their lives?
Now, the argument from religious
experience has been widely criticized by unbelieving philosophers. But by the same token, believing philosophers
could attack the argument from religious inexperience or irreligious
experience. So this whole line of
objection seems at least to be a wash.
Moreover, experience and
inexperience do not enjoy epistemic parity.
Experience is a positive form of evidence whereas inexperience is
neutral on the existence of the object in question.
This objection also makes certain
assumptions about what it would mean for God to be evident. Is the unbeliever saying that if there were a
God, he should be as evident to me as a tree I see outside my kitchen window?
On this assumption, to be evident
is to be evident to the senses. And it
is true that, as a rule, God is inevident in that respect—leaving theophanies
to one side. But is that a reasonable
criterion? If God were a sensible object, then perhaps he ought to be evident
to the senses. But seeing as that is not the doctrine of God, it is hardly
inconsistent with the existence of God that he should be inevident to the
senses.
Let us take a different
comparison. How do I know that you are a
person? Your body is evident to the
senses, yet personality and corporeality are rather different things, for a
corpse is not a person. What makes you a
person—call it what you will, your mind, soul, consciousness—is inevident to
the senses. So my knowledge of other
persons is indirect, being mediated by words and gestures, sign language and
facial expressions. Person-to-person communication may be at several removes
from the immediacy of the personal subject—by books and letters, phone calls and
email, art and music. If the existence of God is inevident in this intermediate
sense, then that is not distinctive to God as an object of knowledge, but is a
general feature of our knowledge of other persons.
The Bible itself speaks of a
hidden aspect of God (Deut 29:29, especially in relation to sin, to
life-crises, and unanswered prayer (Job 13:24; Ps 10:1,11; 13:1; 27:9; 30:7;
44:24; 55:1; 88:14; 89:46; 102:2; 104:29; 143:7; Isa 45:15; 58:7). So one reason the Bible gives for the
apparent absence of God in our experience is that God withdraws his presence as
a chastisement or judgment on sin.
The objection assumes that if
there were a God, he would be generally evident. But the Bible regards that as
a false expectation. For one consequence of the Fall is the general silence of
God.
Now an unbeliever may object that
this reply is question-begging. If we
already knew that God were real, then this explanation would have its proper
place; but when the very question of his existence is at issue, it is
tendentious to offer a religious explanation.
But whether or not that is a valid
criticism depends on both the nature of the initial objection and the purpose
of the explanation. If the initial objection is that the inevidence of God is
inconsistent with the existence of God, then it is valid to point out that the
alleged inconsistency rests on a tendentious assumption. So the critic needs to justify his assumption.
Again, the purpose of the explanation is not to offer positive evidence for the
existence of God, or warrant our faith in God, but merely to counter the claim
of an inconsistent relation between the existence and evidence of God.
The Bible would attribute
unbelief, not to inevidence, but ill-will. The reprobate and unregenerate fear
the judgment of God, and therefore suppress and supplant their knowledge of
God.
An unbeliever would, of course,
regard this claim as question-begging.
Again, though, it is a valid reply to the charge of inconsistency. Moreover, it is a commonplace of the human
experience that men will often resist an unwelcome truth. This applies in many
walks of life. So it is not as though the Christian apologist were trumping up
a special condition to justify his faith. And it must be said that the way in
which many unbelievers have tried to squelch Christian expression and dissent
confirms the charge.
In addition, the allegation of a Deus absconditus is, itself, a
question-begging assumption, for many Christians would say that God has, in
fact, left his fingerprints all over the natural world. And that is more than bare assertion, for
Christian philosophers and theologians have turned this raw data into a broad
range of theistic arguments. To be sure, the cogency of the theistic proofs is
a bone of contention, both inside and outside the church. But the immediate point is that, in the face
of philosophical theology and apologetics, the thesis of a Deus absconditus cannot be posited as an unquestioned datum—on
which to hoist further conclusions.
What is more, God has broken his
silence in the canon of Scripture. For the Christian, the allegation of divine
silence is question-begging because it disregards the witness of Scripture. To be sure, this appeal assumes the
revelatory status of Scripture, but Christians have advanced various arguments
for that proposition as well. So the
allegation of a hidden God must come to terms with Scripture and arguments for
its inspiration.
It may be objected that God has
not made himself known to everyone in his word, for his word is not accessible
to everyone. Yet this assumes that if
there were a God, he would make himself equally evident to everyone under the
sun. But why assume such a thing?
Certainly, there is no
inconsistency at this point for the Calvinist.
Special revelation parallels special election and special
redemption. Although the public nature
of special revelation will incidentally take in a wider audience, its primary
target is the elect. The uneven evidence of God is not an issue of divine
existence, but divine intent.
3. Coherence of Theism:
i) Trinity
It is commonplace for unbelievers
to attack the Trinity as incoherent. And even many believers treat the Trinity
as a grand a paradox. And perhaps that
is so. But remember that the Bible never presents the Trinity as a paradox.
Paradox does not figure in the revealed datum or orthodox definition of the
Trinity. Although the Trinity is an
object of faith, believing it to be a paradox is not an object of faith and
dogma.
Rather, that is a subjective
impression on the part of some readers. And their impression is formed on the
basis of preconceptions that they bring to the teaching of Scripture. They come to the Biblical witness with a
preconception of the one-over-many relation. And the paradox is generated by a
particular preconception. It is often rather simplistic, and takes the form of
one or another of two opposing level-confusions.
On the one hand, it may operate
with an overly abstract model of the one-over-many by reducing numbered objects
(1x; 3y) or numerical relations (1x=3y) to sheer numbers (1=3). But the
Trinitarian “equation” doesn’t operate at that level of generality. “One God in three persons” is not reducible
to “the number one equals the number three.” Rather, the relation is more like
saying that A and B are the same with respect to C.
On the other hand, it may operate
with an overly-concrete model of the one-over-many relation by reducing
numbered objects to concrete particulars.
We use numbers to count discrete units.
One unit of x doesn’t equal three units of x. And this is true enough when dealing with
spatially discrete objects, like a loaf
of bread. But the members of the Trinity
have no physical boundaries. They cannot
be divided and subdivided into parts less than the whole.
In addition, it is a mistake to
press adjectives like "same" and "different" into relations
of strict identity and absolute alterity. We use these words more loosely. Am I
the same man I was ten years ago? In some respects, yes; in others—no. But it is
possible for two objects to sustain a point-by-point correspondence without
reducing one to the other. For example,
a symmetry sustains an internal one-over-many relation. Of particular interest
are enatiomorphic symmetries, such as we find in tessellation, strict
counterpoint and crystallography. This type of symmetry sets up a relation that
is both equipollent and irreducible.
Although A sustains a closed, one-one correspondence to B, A is not
reducible to B. One-to-one is not the
same thing as one-of-one.
ii) Divine Attributes
Unbelievers not only allege that
the Trinity is incoherent, but that the divine attributes are incoherent,
either in isolation or conjunction.
They’ll parade paradoxes of omnipotence.
They’ll say that omniscience is incompatible with an aspatiotemporal
mode of existence. Or they’ll say that benevolence and omnipotence are
incompatible with evil.
(a) Omniscience
Before we delve into divine
omniscience, it is useful to begin with a definition. The Christian is not interested in defending
some abstract attribute or definition, but only in defending the revealed
perfections of God in Scripture. As a working definition, I would submit that
for God to know everything is for God to know everything that is true, and to
believe no falsehoods. The ontological identity of God and truth is a fixture
of Johannine theology.
For example, it is sometimes said
that God cannot be omniscient because he cannot know what it feels like to
taste an ice cream cone or break out in a cold sweat. But bare sensation has no truth-value. To be hot or cold or feel fearful is without
truth-value. It is either true or false
to predicate fear of something, to
say that something is fearful or induces
fear in the subject, but fear itself is neither true nor false, and so is not a
proper object of knowledge.
Another objection to divine
omniscience is that God cannot know what a free agent will do. If we define freedom in libertarian terms,
then I would concede the point. But,
from a Reformed standpoint, this objection does not pose an impediment to God's
knowledge seeing as a Calvinist would deny that sort of freedom to finite
agents.
Still another objection is that if
God exists outside of time and space, then there are things a spatiotemporal
agent can know to which God is not privy.
How can God know the color red? How can God know what time it is?
Now these objections rest on some
unexamined assumptions. Take a red
apple. When I perceive a red apple, do I
perceive the red property as it inheres in the apple, or do I perceive the red
property-instance in my mind? The apple is a material object, but is my mental
impression a material object? The apple
occupies space, but my mental image does not.
So the way in which I sense a red apple is indirect and immaterial. Although there is a physical and external
object, as well as a physical process by which that stimulus is presented to
the mind, the universal is not necessarily, or of itself, a physical object,
but rather, a symbol or simulation or optical illusion. The process is roughly as follows:
sensible>sensation>perception>conception.
Now, if even in the case of
sensory processing, the immediate object of knowledge is a concept of the
object, then I don't see why, in the case of God, a sensible object cannot be
an object of knowledge. There are
differences, to be sure. God knows the object without recourse to any sensory
input. Indeed, the object only exists in time and space because God
instantiated the object according to his prior concept.
Now, not everyone would agree with
this epistemology. But, if so, the issue is not distinctive to religious
epistemology, but turns on your general theory of knowledge. And it is incumbent on a critic of
omniscience to make a separate case for his epistemic assumptions before he is
in any position to launch an attack on omniscience from that front.
With regard to time, it is felt
that a timeless God doesn't know what time it is. He may know the sequence, but cannot know how
far we are into the sequence of unfolding events. However, this way of framing
the question conceals a certain bias. For by casting the question in terms of
now and then, past, present and future, we already assume the A-theory of time.
So before we can adequately discuss God's relation to time, we need to settle
on a theory of time.
Is time like an ever-rolling
stream? That's the popular, common-sense
view. But what is commonsensical can
turn nonsensical in a flash as soon as we ask a few simple questions. Remember
Augustine's famous digression on the subject of time in the Confessions? If you don't ask, I know;
if you ask, I don't know. What is the
present? Is it only a common surface between an unreal past and unrealized
future? A wall without depth or duration?
That’s the A-theory.
Or is time more like a motion
picture? We talk of timeframes, as if time were a series of snapshots on a strip of
film. Is the timeline a sequence without
succession? Is the passage of time an illusion, like flickering images on a
silver screen? Is all of time already in the can? Is all the footage on the
reel—from the opening shot to the closing shot? That’s the B-theory.
We seem to be faced with a
paradox. If tense is real, then that seems to render time illusory by reducing
the momentary present to a vanishing borderline between what was and what will
be—in which case nothing ever is, but
only was or will be. But if time is
real, then that seems to render tense illusory, for a future moment or past
instant is just as real as the present—but within its own timeframe.
Unless you subscribe to naïve
realism, every side must admit an element of illusion into its theory of
perception. Just as we don't directly perceive space, we don't directly perceive
time. Our sense of time's "passage" is partly inferred from space
(i.e., locomotion). But whether the movement is actual or only apparent, like a
motion picture or stroboscopic effect, is not a direct datum of experience. And
even the awareness of our own "successive" mental states owes more to
memory and anticipation than a direct deliverance or immediate presentation of
time and tense—like the difference between direct perception or introspection
and visual persistence. We enjoy immediate access to our own mental states, but
not to the passage of time, for even on the A-theory, consciousness is bounded
by the specious present.
Now, if we assume the B-theory of
time, then knowing the sequence is all there is to know, for time and tense are
a given totality. So, on such a view, asking if God knows the time is
misplaced.
But which theory is true? It is
arguable that the Biblical doctrine of creation throws some weight behind the
B-theory. For Gen 1 tells us that the
timeline began with God's creative fiat, in which case the Creator falls outside
the timeline. And if that is so, then
creation is a temporal effect of a timeless act. And in that event, the effect
is fully enfolded and unfolded in this singular and indivisible fiat—like a
short story or novel or real of film. The writer or filmmaker exists outside
the timeline of the writing or film footage, and the writing or film is finished
from first to last.
Incidentally, this is the best way
of construing the relation between divine immanence and transcendence. God is
“present” or “active” within the world, not by acting in or on the world, but
by enacting the world. He not only sets the ball in motion but brings everything
into being.
More generally, the Bible has some
things to say about the priority of the eternal to the temporal (Ps 90:2,4;
102:25-27; 1 Cor 2:7; 2 Tim 1:9; Tit 1:2; Jas 1:17; Jude 25). It may be
objected that words like "before" imply an antemundane timeline. But this overlooks the fact that such words
are literally spatial-markers, and only applied to the divisions of time by
figurative extension. We're back on the river. The future lies ahead, the past
lies behind, and I paddle my way through time, like a rowboat or riverboat on
the current of the stream. But this is poetry and picture-language.
The fact that we apply a spatial
grid to our common conception of time raises the question of what would be left
of the sequence were we to strip away this picturesque metaphor. Is last month really more distant in time than last week? Or am I
allowing myself to be bewitched by a spatial simile? The real sequence would be
teleological rather than strictly linear or causal—more akin to a storybook
sequence or film footage.
It is often said that our concept
of eternity is privative and negative.
But I would turn this around. If time and space are limits, then
eternity implies an indivisible, unsurpassable plenity of being. To say that
God preexisted the world literally means that there is never a time when God
did not exist, for time was given in creation, and God subsists apart from the
world.
The notion of a negation carries
an unduly prejudicial connotation. Even
a photographic negative, although lacking the depth, color, scale and
orientation of the original, is descriptive of the original; while the
developed footage, although a double negation, being at two removes from the
original, is even more descriptive of the original.
(b) Omnipotence
In fielding the paradoxes of
omnipotence it is, again, important to keep in mind that what we’re concerned
with defending is not some test-tube definition, cooked up in a philosophy lab,
but the revealed attributes of God.
The textbook case is the stone
paradox, viz., "Can God make a rock so big that he can’t lift it?"
But it is hard to know how seriously to take this question. For it conjures up the anthropomorphic image
of a sweaty, muscle-bound Atlas having to huff and puff and heave a boulder
uphill. Since this is not the Biblical
view of God, the question is as silly as it is irrelevant—on par with asking if
God can turn green with envy. To the
extent that the question can even be retranslated into a coherent proposition,
the answer is that God doesn’t make things happen by acting on a medium, but by enacting
a medium. And it is not God, but the finite medium, which is subject to
spatiotemporal limits.
A further problem with the
question is that it conceals a contradiction. The basic form of the question
is: Can God do something God can’t to? If God is omnipotent, then is he able to
do something he is unable to do? Stripped down to the bare essentials, the question
does not amount to a coherent proposition.
And as such, it poses a pseudo-task. All we have here is a verbal trick:
If God can do anything, then he can even do something he can’t do; but, if not,
then he can’t to everything. This is just a game with words, pushing words
around—like moving blocks on a scrabble board. But words are not the same as
concepts.
A final question is whether the
existence of evil is compatible with divine omnipotence and benevolence. I’ll address that issue under the section on
ethics.
iii) Incarnation
It is often alleged that the
Incarnation is incoherent. How is a
divine mode of subsistence compatible with a human mode of subsistence? How can
Christ be mortal and immortal, omniscient and ignorant, omnipotent and
impotent, &c.?
Before we broach this question, we
need to lay down a few markers. If the
critic is alleging a contradiction, then the critic shoulders the burden of
proof. In addition, most harmonizations
will be underdetermined by Scripture inasmuch as the Bible does not spell out
the nature of the relation. It says that
Christ enjoys a full complement of divine and human attributes, but does not
reveal a detailed model of how they interface. Hence, the main thing is to
avoid reductive harmonies (e.g., the docetic, Kenotic, Arian, Apollonarian,
Nestorian, Monophysite, & monothelite heresies).[5]
The Bible employs a literary
metaphor to depict God’s economic relations (Gen 1:3; Ps 33:6; 139:16). And a
divine Incarnation would be a special case and limiting case of God’s economic
relations. Indeed, the Logos—yet another
literary metaphor—is an economic title for the Incarnate Son (Jn 1:1-4).
So let us explore the explanatory
power of this metaphor. It is often said
that all creative writing is autobiographical inasmuch as the author projects
something of himself into the characters.
And there are cases in which the author writes himself into his own
story as the main character, and tells the story from the first person point of
view. Dante is a classic case in point.
Now, the writer exists outside his
storybook world, outside its spatiotemporal framework. He has his own set of attributes, his own
mode of subsistence. Likewise, his literary alter-ego has all the attributes
proper to a storybook character situated in a storybook world. And yet there’s
a sense in which the author reincarnates himself in his autobiographical
character. This figure has the same
mental traits and character traits as the author, the same memories, the same
know-how. The author can even vest his literary alter-ego with the power to
rewrite the story from within.
This is a metaphor, but more than
a metaphor. For just as a storybook
character was once a figment of the writer’s imagination, we were fictions in
the mind of God. And just as a creative writer objectifies his idea in time and
space, our Creator objectified his idea in time and space.
There is, of course, a point at
which the analogy would seem to break down.
For the storybook character is unreal. He is not alive. He knows
nothing, feels nothing. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that the dream
of artificial intelligence were to come true. Suppose that a writer could, in
fact, invest his characters with consciousness—like the old myth of Pygmalion.
And even if this is humanly unattainable, the analogy holds at the divine
level, for God does invest his imaginary characters with consciousness.
4. Freudian Faith
Freud and Feuerbach attributed
faith in God to a mental projection of our inner feelings. By way of reply:
i) This analysis is a
half-truth. The Bible treats idolatry as
a mental projection. The fallen imagination is an idol-making factory. Because
the sinner is apprehensive about the judgment of God, he substitutes surrogate
gods whom he can buy off by human sacrifice and other petty bribes.
ii) This analysis can backfire by
explaining unbelief as well as belief.
Perhaps the atheist is projecting his negative father-fixation. Indeed, a good many infidels fit this psychological
profile.
iii) This analysis is too
indiscriminate. On the one hand, it assigns faith to a variety of different and
divergent motives. Faith is the result
of hope or fear or guilt or pride or vengeance, &c. On the other hand,
believers come from a broad range of social backgrounds. Believers represent a
wide variety of temperamental types, with varying intellectual aptitudes. Some
believers were raised in the faith while others came to the faith from an
irreligious upbringing. Some switch from one church to another. Some drifted from the faith and returned
while others leave and never look back. Some family members remain in the faith
while others turn from the faith. Some lose their faith in college while others
find their faith in college. Some lose their faith after a personal tragedy
while others find their faith after a personal tragedy. Converts give different
reasons for their pilgrimage. When a theory is so flexible that it can
accommodate contrary lines of evidence, it amounts to a disguised description
under the guise of an efficient explanation.
iv) Projective theories have an
armchair quality to them. They don’t
seem to be based on a wide sampling of case-studies or personal acquaintance
with Christians from various walks of life. How many churches did Freud attend?
How many devout believers did he know? How many did he interview? How many did
he observe up close over the course of a lifetime—from the sandbox and the
lecture hall to the dinner table and the deathbed?
The reason an atheist finds a
projective theory plausible is because he comes to the subject of faith as an
outsider rather than an insider. And by
the same token, the theory has an air of unreality to the believer because it
does not comport with his own experience. It is a theory of faith that is
wholly out-of-touch with faith. It reads like a love poem by a poet who had
never fallen in love.
The only field theory that
accounts for the diversity of data is not one based on nature or nurture, but
sin and grace. That factor is the only common denominator and differential
dynamic that can cut across so many parallel, convergent and divergent lines of
evidence.
II. Bible Criticism
1. Miracles
Hume’s objection to miracles
shares a criterion in common with his objection to natural theology—namely, the
principle of proportionality. An extraordinary report demands extraordinary
evidence.
By defining a miracle as a
“violation” or “transgression” of natural law, Hume makes it sound as if God
were a squatter or house-burgler, whereas, from the Scriptural standpoint, God
is the homeowner. The Creator doesn’t “break into” his own house. Rather, the
world was designed as a divine billboard. For a Christian, every “natural”
event is an act of God.
This is also why the definition of
a miracle as an “improbable” event is question-begging. A miracle would be a
work of personal agency. It is not a random event. It is not a throw of the
dice. There are no odds either for or against the occurrence of a miracle. And even on statistical grounds, the
evidentiary value of a word (prophecy) and sign (miracle) in tandem (Isa
35:5-6; Mt 11:4-5) is far higher than either in separation.
But to judge Scripture on
Scriptural grounds, the reason why folks don’t ordinarily rise from the dead is
the same reason they die in the first place.
It is not owing to natural causes, but God’s judgment on Adam’s sin. The
impediment is not natural law, but moral law. So the claim that the Second
Adam rose from the dead is perfectly consistent with the ordinary state of
affairs inasmuch Christ reverses the curse and begins to restore the primordial
norm.
And this brings us to another
problem. Why assume that we must begin with a definition of the event rather
than the very event itself? Definitions
are ordinarily descriptive, not prescriptive.
We begin with the phenomena and then set about to classify them. But
Hume is using his grid to as a fine-mesh filter to screen out miracles in
advance of observation. Yet you could establish a miraculous event qua event before you establish a miraculous
event qua miraculous. While a miracle
assumes the prior existence of God,
it doesn’t assume a prior belief in
God. That confounds the orders of being and knowing. If Hume were an Egyptian,
would he say to himself, “I won’t believe my own eyes unless I can attribute
the plague of hail to freak atmospheric conditions!” Methinks he would stuff
his scruples and dive for cover or run for dear life!
It is also illogical to say that I
need an unusual amount of evidence for an unusual event. How could there be more evidence for a rare event than for a commonplace event? One reason we believe that
snow leopards are rare is the rarity of their sightings. It is unclear how Hume
would establish any out-of-the ordinary event. Moreover, how many inductive
instances to I need? The only evidence I need of a four-leaf clover is a
four-leaf clover. One will do—no more, no less.
Hume discounts the testimony to
miraculous incidents on the grounds that the witness pool is recruited from the
backward and barbarous peoples. One
can’t help but sense a suppressed circularity in this objection: Why don’t you
believe in miraculous reports? Because
the reporters are ignorant and barbarous! How do you know they are ignorant and
barbarous? Because they believe in miracles!
At most, all Hume’s argument amounts to is that dumb people believe dumb
things. But that is hardly argument for the proposition that any particular
witness is dumb.
In addition, the general character
of a witness is not only irrelevant to a specific claim, but may be all the
more impressive when out-of-character. Even liars only lie when they have a
motive to lie, and not when it runs counter to their own interests. And it is
not as if the Apostles and prophets were rewarded for their testimony with a
tickertape parade.
Hume tries to play off the
miracles of one sect against another. However, most major religions don’t stake
their dogma on miraculous attestation.
But even if they did, the Bible doesn’t deny the power of witchcraft
(e.g. Exod 7-8). And there is no reason why a living faith should have to duel
a forgotten faith. Killing it once is quite sufficient. One hardly needs to
disinter the remains and have another go at them. For if the “gods” of a long dead
faith were unable to defend or resuscitate it (Judges
2. Mythology
Critics of the Bible discredit the
claims of Scripture on the basis of comparative mythology. The unargued
assumption is if mythology is false, and if there are parallels between the
Bible and mythology, then that falsifies the Bible.
To say that pagan mythology is
false is an ambiguous charge. Does it mean that that never happened, or that nothing like that ever happens?
There is quite a difference. In a
novel, none of the incidents may be historical, and yet they are true to
life. So even if mythology were wholly
fictitious, it might still be lifelike in certain key respects.
Indeed, one of the problems with
this dismissive approach is that it fails to explain anything. For it fails to explain why pagans believed
in magic and evil spirits and paranormal events. Was there something in their
experience which gave rise and substance to these beliefs?
There is, of course, a stock
explanation, or what purports to be an explanation, which attributes such
credulity to ignorance. But even if this enjoys a measure of truth, it suffers
from the circular limitation of any tautology: it's true when it's true, and
not when it's not. Even if it holds true for the uneducated masses, it doesn't
apply to the educated classes. And the fact is that illiterate peasants don't
write mythology, for they don't know how to read and write. So, by definition, the record of mythology
comes down to us by the hand of the educated classes.
Another problem with this elitist
criterion is that there's a sense in which a man of letters is at least as
gullible and superstitious as a peasant, for a man of letters gets his information
second-hand whereas a peasant is an amateur scientist who lives off the land,
relies on his eyes and ears, survives and prospers by dint of his direct and
accurate observation of the natural world.
Actually, the real correlation is
not between ignorance and belief but quite the reverse, between ignorance and
unbelief. What I find credible or
incredible has a whole lot to do with the measure of my personal
experience. If nothing out of the
ordinary has ever happened to me, then I find the report of an extraordinary event
less believable than if I've had some brush with the paranormal. For a
psychologist, the abnormal is normal, and for an exorcist, the paranormal is
normal. So some men don't believe the Bible because the world of the Bible
doesn't resemble the world they see out the window, whereas other men do
believe the Bible because the world of the Bible does resemble the world they
see out the window. It's like the old saying about the face at the bottom of
the well.
In fact, this can become a
self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't pray
because I don't believe in prayer, and I don't believe in prayer because I
don't pray!
For some, the objection takes a
more philosophical form. Especially for
those approaching every truth-claim from a scientific standpoint, you often get
the argument that they don't believe in the supernatural because nature is all
there is. But that's a rather prejudicial stance to strike, even on its own
grounds. Science is supposed to be a
descriptive rather than prescriptive discipline, based on observation rather
than stipulation, discovery rather than definition. To insist, in advance of
the facts, that every event must be confinable to naturalistic parameters is
not knowledge, but secular superstition. From the assumptions of empirical science,
the only way of knowing what is knowable is by investigation.
The Bible has its own analysis of
mythology. It identifies mythology with
idolatry. Fallen man is a
mythmaker. His strategy is to suppress
and supplant the knowledge of God with surrogate deities and proxy pieties
(e.g., Jn 3:20-21; Rom 1:18ff.). And lying in the background is the Devil, who
has many front-organizations and aliases (Rev 12-13).
So what we read in Genesis is not
a myth of origins, but the origins of myth. Genesis can account alike for piety
and idolatry, miracle and magic. For the account of creation unveils the origin
of all our cultural universals, as God ordains the social institutions that
recur in art and literature, religion and drama; while the account of the Fall
unveils the origin of their debasement, as apostate men and angels bow before
the creature rather than the Creator of all.
The popularity of the occult,
ufology and the SF genre go to show that science does not extinguish the mythic
impulse. Indeed, evolution repristinates a number of stock mythical motifs,
viz., Everyman, the quest, rites of passage.
In the Darwinian creation myth, the “hero” comes down from the
safe-haven of the trees (fall from innocence).
By passing through various ordeals (survival of the fittest) he attains
enlightenment (higher brain functions) and achieves apotheosis (monkey to man).
The popularity of evolution owes much its popularity to this folkloric appeal.
It’s just variation on Puss-n-Boots and the domestication of Enkidu.[6]
Sometimes the parallel is said to
be more precise, in terms of genealogical dependence. But the only case I've
seen where there's a persuasive parallel is the Flood account. Yet since, according to Scripture, both the
Babylonians and the Jews were descendents of Noah (Gen 10), the fact that
Mesopotamian literature possesses a parallel account of the Flood is hardly
prejudicial to the historicity or independence of the Biblical account, for
their synoptic outlook is easily attributable to factual rather than literary
dependence. They share a common source in a shared historical event.[7]
Since real life has a cyclical
character, the stereotypical pattern of many literary themes needs no special
explanation. Art imitates life. Cultural universals derive from the universality
of human nature and experience in the natural world. God made mankind a racial unit with natural
needs and a normal life-cycle. There are patterns in biography as well as
history. Great men often exemplify the trials and traits of the epic hero (e.g.
quest, ordeal, rites of passage). To classify common literary themes as
mythical only pushes the question back a step, for it fails to account for the
origin of the “mythic” category itself. So there’s a danger of substituting a
disguised description for an efficient explanation.
Since Genesis records the historic
origin of our archetypal institutions, mythical and literary parallels, such as
they are, cast no prejudice on the veracity of Scripture. In the nature of the case, certain formative
events in Genesis and Exodus acquire a thematic status. And the cultural diffusion of such themes
makes all the more sense if the human race radiated out from a common point of
origin—as the sons of Noah repopulate the earth, both by land and sea (Gen
10-11).
Because some giant animals have
become extinct in historic times (e.g., Irish Elk), we should not exclude the
possibility that “mythical" animals in Scripture (e.g., Rahab? Leviathan?)
are stylized versions of once living beasts. For example, the dragon-motif is
quite widespread in world mythology. Sometimes mythopoetic imagery is used for
decorative, polemical or ironic effect. In Ps 104, Yahweh is pictured in the
regalia of a storm-God, yet this is no more descriptive than the personification
of the waters (v7).
At the same time, there are
disanalogies as well as analogies. For there is a subversive element in
Biblical typology that breaks with conventional associations. Images of descent
carry a classically negative connotation, yet Yahweh’s descent on
The history of Scripture is
remarkably restrained in comparison with pagan mythology. If the Bible writers felt free to make up
fantastic incidents, it is odd that they passed up so many tempting
opportunities to indulge their over-heated imagination. For example, Mark records the empty tomb, and
the other Gospels record some Easter appearances of Christ, but none of the
canonical Gospels record the actual moment of the Resurrection, or have Christ
appearing to Pilate or Caiaphas and saying, "I told you so!"
Moreover, the miracles of
Scripture have always some moral or meaningful purpose to them, in manifesting
the mercy and judgment of God, or advancing his redemptive designs. This is
quite different from the frivolous entertainment value of magical or supernatural
incidents in so much mythology.
And beyond their historic origin
is their prehistoric origin. We live in a sacramental universe. In the Fourth Gospel, sensible events are a
form of heavenly sign-language—a visible pointer to the invisible God. The
reason why so many natural metaphors are religious metaphors around the world
is that God has established a code language linking the inward and outward,
moral and material, visible and invisible, sensible and spiritual realms.[9]
We must also make allowance for
the role of dead metaphors. Based on
bare etymology, one could conclude that Holy Week (Ash Wednesday,
Maundy-Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday) was a pagan rather than Christian
festival; but allusions to Wodin, Thor, Freya and Saturn are purely
conventional. Likewise, I can identify a
chemical substance as “spirits of turpentine” without endorsing its alchemical
background, just as I can “fumigate” a house without trading on necromantic
associations.
Folklorists tend to read a lot of
symbolism into mythology (e.g., Sisyphus, Prometheus, Midas, Narcissus, Psyche,
Phaeton, Pygmalion, Tantalus). But is that the way an old bard and his audience
took the tale, or was it just a great campfire story? Hard to tell at a distance.
3. Contradictions
It is commonplace for unbelievers
to say that Scripture is riddled with contradictions. But this assumes that you know a
contradiction when you see one. Yet when you study a writing from the past, you
need to know something about the conventions and compositional methods of that
time and place, viz., idioms, round numbers, hyperbole, editorial asides,
paraphrastic citations, narrative compression, thematic sequencing, calendrical
variants,, audience adaptation, eye-level descriptions, &c. We can’t just jump
from the 21C to the 1C or the 2nd
The best way of recovering the
reportorial techniques of the Bible is to study the way in which the same writer records the same event:
(a)
Oath of Abraham's servant (Gen 24:3-8; par. 37-41).
(b)
Prayer of Abraham's servant (Gen 24:12-24; par. 42-49).
(c)
Pharaoh's dream (Gen 41:1-7,18-24)
(d) Résumé of the wilderness wandering (Num 33:1-49; Deut
8-10:11; 29:1-8).
(e)
Decree of Cyrus (Ezra 1:1-4; par. 6:1-5).
(f)
Resurrection/Ascension (Lk
(g)
Conversion of Paul (Acts 9:1-30; par. 22:3-21; par. 26:4-20).
(h)
Conversion of Cornelius (Acts 10; par. 11:1-18; par. 15:7-9).
If we study our parallel accounts
with a modicum of critical sympathy, we can see that the historians of
Scripture were dutifully pedantic in all they say and summarize. They stick
with a rigid outline, sometimes saying more, sometimes less, but pedantically
faithful to the sense and substance of the speeches and events—with precious
little stylistic variance. The whole thing has the formulaic quality of a
well-rehearsed memory, using much the same words in much the same place, over
and over again—like a workhorse doing the rounds. What comes across is the
incurious absence of imagination, the utter lack of originality, the stubborn
stenographic tenacity, the dull disinclination to break with routine. The Bible writers are only too happy to repeat
themselves. They would be perfect in the witness box, ideal as court
reporters—dreadful as screenwriters, aweful as novelists. This must all be
terribly disappointing to the critic who had hoped to find in Scripture a
creative license untrammeled by the facts.
Another popular target of the charge
are the Passion and Easter narratives. but this objection overlooks the
technical challenge of presenting simultaneous events in a sequential
narrative. In the Passion and Easter
narratives you have a number of different people in different places doing
things at more or less the same time.
Yet a narrative is a linear medium, and so it is not possible, as a
practical matter, to position all these players in their real time relations.
This is a choice that every
historian must face. Does his block his
material by time or space? Usually, a historian jumps back and forth, tracing
out the timeline of one place for a little ways, then going back and tracing
out another, then returning to pick up where he left off. He can either be
continuous in time or space: if he’s continuous in time, he’s discontinuous in
space and vice versa. To equate a narrative sequence with a historical sequence
confuses a medium of communication with a series of events. In reporting
parallel action, some dislocation is inevitable—for the presentation must be
broken down into separate scenes. To treat this as a contradiction commits a
category mistake. The blunders belong to the critic and not the
Evangelist.
Most of the other discrepancies in
Scripture involve names and numbers. I suspect that most all of these
attributable to transcriptional errors. Numbers are especially susceptible to
miscopying. In addition, written Hebrew, with its unpointed
script, invites the interchange or transposition (metathesis) of consonants.
Imagine how much damage a dyslexic scribe might do! And once a mistake is made,
a later scribe may further compound the error by emending the text. Let us also
recall that a scribe might have to copy a faded MS in bad lighting—this was
pre-Edison, remember!. And this was, as well, in the days before corrective
lenses! Textual criticism has also shown that the differences between
Samuel-Kings and Chronicles are largely owing to a variant Vorlage.
III. Science
Before we can properly review the
scientific evidence, we need to review our philosophy of science, and that, in
turn, goes back to our underlying epistemology.
Does my perception of the world resemble the world?
A dog or cat is a consummate
realist. Fido believes that furry face
staring back at him in the mirror is the real deal. But I don’t regard canine or feline
epistemology as the best available theory of knowledge—unless you’re planning
to catch rats or hunt chipmunks.
Like man’s best friend, many
people treat the percipient as though he were a camera obscura—with a
pair of holes bored into the front-end of the box to admit images, another pair
drilled on either side to admit sounds, and so on. On this view, there is no filtering
process. The light that passes through
the opening and casts a shadow on the backside is a scaled down replica of the
image that bounced off the sensible object. So there is a close, family resemblance
between the input and readout.
But on a more scientific analysis,
the observer or observable world is more like an enigma machine. Light bouncing
off the sensible object encodes the secondary properties in the form of
electromagnetic information, and when that strikes the eye, the data stream is
reencoded as electrochemical information.
What reaches consciousness is not a miniature image of the sensible
object, but a cryptogram. It bears no more resemblance to the original than a
music score is a facsimile of sound. A music score is code language. The relation between notes and tones is
conventional.
But even our scientific analysis
is more than a little illusory. When we
try to break down the various steps involved sensory processing, we are having
to describe the input in terms of the readout, as if we could retrace the process. We talk about the tree, and the light from
the tree, and the eye, and the optic nerve, and neural pathways and synapses
and so on. And this is described as if
we were on the outside, seeing the info feed in, when—in fact—our mind is on
the receiving end, and the readout is more like a little film projector. Our
perception of the external world is an optical illusion, like the silver
screen.
That doesn’t mean that the
external world is an illusion. But it
lies at several removes from immediate awareness. At an ontological level,
there is a public world; but at an epistemic level, there is only a private
world of my mind and your mind.
At this point, someone might ask,
then how do you know that there even is an external world? Maybe it’s just that
projector running in your head! And, at a philosophical level, there is no
knock down argument against this objection.
But, at a theological level, there
is. For the Creator of the world enjoys an intersubjectival knowledge of the
world. And by virtue of revelation, we
may tap into a God’s-eye view of the world. For propositions, as abstract
information, are identical at either end of the transmission process—unless
they come out as gibberish (garbage in/garbage out). If you understand what you
read, then it was not garbled in transmission. It still must be encoded in a
sensible medium, but the readout is the same as the input. Otherwise, it would
be unintelligible.
At the level of basic
epistemology, science can never disprove the Bible because divine revelation is
our only clear window onto the world.
Otherwise, we perceive the world through the stained-glass solipsism of
our inescapable subjectivity.
I will go on to discuss some
scientific objections to the Bible, but always with this caveat in my back
pocket. For even if we were unable to field specific objections, the world of
the naked eye, of the microscope and telescope and other such like, is a hall
of mirrors, and left to our own devices, may as well be a trick mirror.
1. Creation
For some professing believers,
there is no conflict between science and Scripture because they constantly
revise their reading of Scripture with a view to the latest scientific
theory. For a couple of reasons, I won’t
go that route. To begin with, if the Bible is divine revelation, then it enjoys
an independent and superior source of information. That being so, why would we
try to square it with another and lesser source of information? Isn’t the
Creator of the world the world authority on how the world was made? Isn’t that
the natural point of departure?
Of course, there are even people
in the church who deny the inspiration of Scripture on factual matters. But in
that event, there is nothing to harmonize—for, on their view,
As to my second reason, when we
interpret a document from the past, we need to turn back the clock and clear
our minds of all modern assumptions. The very last thing we want is to be
up-to-date. Rather, the objective is to be out-of-date—to assume the viewpoint
of the original writer and his implied audience—to see how the world would look
through his eyes. No one reads Dante with the Commedia in one hand and a
textbook on modern astronomy in the other.
Incidentally, this brings us back
to an earlier point. When professing believers partition the Bible into
inspired and uninspired portions, this does not reflect the viewpoint of the
Bible, but is an insulating strategy on the part of modern readers with divided
commitments. The creation account is of a piece with the Fall, the flood, the
patriarchal narratives, the Exodus, and so forth. To set up a buffer zone between the parts of
the Bible we accept and the parts we reject is a self-defensive and
self-deceptive exercise that betrays modern anxieties of which the original was
innocent.
To take another example, we’re
often told that the Copernican revolution either falsifies the Bible or
falsifies a literal reading of Scripture.
But the danger here is to import extraneous debates into our reading of
Scripture. Joshua never read Ptolemy, so
why assume that Joshua was operating within a Ptolemaic framework? Both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems
assume an extra-terrestrial viewpoint.
When Bible writers talk about the
earth, the “earth” in view is not a stationary globe in relation to the other
planets, but the surface of the earth.
The “earth” is the land—seen at eye-level. An observation is not a theory of the solar
system. The Bible lacks the theoretical interest of Greek astronomy.
The Galileo affair is often
introduced as a bluff. We dare you to
take sides. If, on the one hand, you say
that Galileo was wrong, then you preserve a consistent position, but only at
the cost of consigning yourself to the dustbin of lost causes. If, on the other hand, you say that Galileo
was right, then you either admit that the Bible was wrong, or admit that
exegesis is silly putty; if we can reinterpret the geocentric verses, why not
Gen 1?
To this I’d say two things. If the Bible did teach geocentrism, then that
would commit the Christian to geocentrism.
Let God be true and every man a liar (Rom 3:4)! If Galileo finds himself
on the wrong side of Scripture, then to hell with Galileo! Sure, we would pay a price for this. But that’s the cost of discipleship. You take your lumps like a man.
However, I think the bluff tries
to bully us into an artificial dilemma.
For it casts the debate in extra-Scriptural categories. Exegesis need not choose between either frame
of reference, for both fall outside the purview of Scripture.
When I read Genesis, I should put
myself in the sandals of an ancient Israelite, emancipated from
However, such anachronisms are not
limited to nominal believers. A quite common and unconscious misstep made by
scientific critics of the creation and flood accounts is first to build in
extra-Biblical assumptions, and then convict the narrative of inconsistency because
it conflicts with the various consequences of these extraneous assumptions.
What is lost sight of is that a
critic is supposed to exercise critical sympathy. In other words, a reviewer or philosopher or
historian is supposed to exercise enough detachment that he can separate his
own views from the viewpoint of the text, in order to grasp what is meant, make
sense of it on its own terms, and see how well it hangs together given the
assumptions of the author. Even if you’re reading a writer in order to attack
him, you need to be a good listener. The difference between believer and
unbeliever is that the latter will put a temporary distance between his views
and the author’s, whereas a believer will detach his views in order to make room
for the inspired viewpoint of Scripture.
As an example of this confusion,
we're told that, when measured in light-years, the scale of the universe
entails its multi-billion year age. But this inference rests on a number of
assumptions, viz., the initial size of the universe, the speed of light as a
cosmic constant, the relative rate of expansion, the ordinary emission and
transmission of starlight from its point of origin to the earth, and so
on.
Now, it should be clear that the
creation account is silent on most of these assumptions. That doesn't mean that it necessary negates
them. But it is, at best, neutral on
such assumptions. To point out, then, that Biblical cosmology is at odds with
modern cosmology only goes to show that the Biblical account is inconsistent
with certain extra-Biblical assumptions. So what? An inconsistency can be
relieved in either of two directions, so the unbeliever hasn’t gone any
distance in proving his view to be true and the view of Scripture to be false.
Running in place may create the illusion of progress, but the motion is
circular.
What the unbeliever needs to do is
to ask how the world would look assuming, if only for the sake of argument, the
editorial viewpoint of the narrative. Suppose that the world was made at an
accelerated pace—say, in six straight days. Would it look old or new? Would it
appear different than if it happened in the normal amount of time it takes to
run through the life-cycle of a star or galaxy or mountain chain?
Unbelievers often dismiss this
approach as sleight-of-hand. Yet it is
no different than trying to read Dante through Medieval eyes. In fact, it is
the unbeliever who is dealing off the bottom of the deck. On the one hand, he
wants us to interpret the Bible as literally as possible because that puts the
Bible on a collision course with science.
On the other hand, when the believer begins to ask what sort of world a
literal interpretation predicts for, what a literal reading logically entails,
then the unbeliever cries foul!
Others dismiss this explanation as
implicating God in a web of deception. But such an objection is so hidebound as
to be unintentionally comic. They think
it’s perfectly okay to say that a star is older than it looks, due to time lag,
but to say that it’s younger than it looks is downright deceptive!
Yet the objection also commits the
naturalistic fallacy. The universe is not a cosmic clock with a pair of hands
sweeping out the hours and minutes. The fact that we coopt a natural process to
clock absolute time is a secondary, man-made application of a process that
serves another purpose altogether. I can also uncap beer bottles with my teeth,
but if I split a molar in the process, that is hardly a design flaw. The fact is that things don’t look any
particular age. That’s a comparative
judgment based on experience, and past experience is hardly germane to creation
ex nihilo. The proper subject-matter
of science is ordinary providence, not extraordinary providence (creation, the
miraculous). If I’d never see a Redwood before, I’d never guess it’s age from
its appearance. Yes, I could count the rings, but that presupposes the prior
existence of seed-bearing trees.
2. Flood
Another objection is that even if
we grant the implications of creation ex
nihilo, that would only explain the cyclical appearance of nature, but not
the appearance of a linear progression from simple to complex—such as we find
in the fossil record.
To begin with, permit me to
question the premise. I may be wrong
about this, but it isn’t clear to me that the fossil record presents such a
pattern. What I’m treated to is a
bait-and-switch scam. I’m told that the fossil record presents
such a pattern, but I’m never shown
such a pattern as given in the fossil
record. Rather, I’m shown artistic
diagrams and computer animations that reconstruct
an evolutionary trajectory. These are pasted together from scattered remains
gleaned from different digs. What the
Darwinist does is to cobble together fossil remains from a variety of sites,
and then line them up according to an assumed phylogeny. But is that evidence of evolution, or is the
theory arranging the evidence?
Now this is shrewd
salesmanship. Ray Bradbury once
attributed his success as a SF writer to his picturesque prose. As he explained, you can make people believe
in anything as long as you reach them through their senses.
In fact, in my reading of evolutionary literature, there seems to be tremendous flexibility built into the way the theory is positioned in relation to the evidence. Different Darwinian writers make allowance for graduated, punctuated or