Today’s New York Times features a well-balanced article about the differing perspectives of two different groups of rafters floating through the Grand Canyon. One group was a “young earth” creationist tour, the other a tour organized by evolution apologists.
I was pleased to see an article in the Times that presented “fair and balanced” reporting of the different views in play. The YEC (young earth creationist) folks didn’t come across as backwoods yahoos or right wing nutcases, but rather were presented as sincere religious believers who were trying to make sense of their faith. I’m glad for that.
Yet, I ultimately found the article depressing for what it says about the evangelical subculture’s relationship to both the Bible and science.
I’ve written before about some reasons why I think YEC is mistaken (see here and here). What depresses me is how pervasive and tenacious it is within our evangelical churches, schools and organizations.
Promotion of YEC is one of the major reasons I don’t feel comfortable sending my kids to any of our local Christian schools (the other being cost). I’d prefer for them to learn the few snippets of evolution they’ll hear about in our town’s public schools, which I can easily supplement and correct with truth from scripture and ideas about intelligent design, than to be burdened with the false belief that all Christians who take the Bible seriously hold the YEC view.
Promotion of YEC is also one of the major reasons I no longer feel fully comfortable in mainstream evangelical churches. If our local spiritual leaders simply toe the YEC line, I wonder what other lines they’re throwing out to me. Have they really thought carefully about eschatology, the realtionship of Christian faith to politics and culture, the problems of pain and evil, and other tough questions, or are we mostly hearing a party line on those things as well? My heart hungers for an evangelical fellowship that isn’t afraid to explore tough questions like these without easy, predefined answers.
In many ways I wish we evangelicals were more like the Catholic church on questions of the relationship of faith and science. Maybe it’s because of the Catholic Church’s long and painful history on this front, but there is a willingness within Catholicism to recognize that, although all truth is God’s Truth, science and revelation to some extent address different concerns, and there will always be some degree of mystery in exactly how they relate. I wish it were easier to be evangelical in theology but catholic — both big “C” and small “c” — in outlook.
4 replies on “The Grand Canyon and the Creation – Evolution Debate”
David,
Great post. I’ve been very busy and I’m sorry I haven’t been around more and kept up our correspondence.
It’s intersting how disagreement with a group on a single issue important to us affects the way we view all other issues held by the group. I think, for example, that abortion works this way with lots of Christians and the Democratic party: if they can’t see their way clear on abortion, then Democrats’ other views or good faith must be questioned in general.
It strikes me too that you really don’t just disagree with your evangelical brothers on the issue of creation, but you think that they are not approaching the issue with authenticity and rigor.
To use your words, they seem to you to be “simply toe[ing] the YEC line.” In fact, you see this as some evidence that they have not in general “thought carefully about eschatology, the realtionship of Christian faith to politics and culture, the problems of pain and evil.” They are “afraid to explore tough questions like these without easy, predefined answers.”
Wow! I think understand your grounds for disagreeing with young earth creation. But I do not understand your grounds for thinking that evangelical churches are approaching this issue with such an inauthentic bent or merely believe this out of fear of approaching difficult issues.
I would guess that you think the argument is so clear against young earth creation that only bad faith could account for believing it. But this is not my experience with YEC people.
Yet unless YEC beliefs proves something strong about the inauthenticity or lack of rigor of evangelicals, I cannot see why it would affect your decision about education so strongly. Surely, there are many issues in which public school curricula toe the line in an inauthentic and unrigorous matter. If both Christian and public schools err, it seems like a choice between two kinds of error is the choice we face.
I would have thought that one would prefer the error of YEC to the errors of secularism and the values of the public education system. But I can see why if you think that YEC can only be believed by those exhibitng strong character flaws that it might make it enough to go the other way. Again, I just haven’t personally seen the evidence that YEC beliefs correlate with inauthenticity in the way you have.
In any case, I wonder how different the Roman Catholic church really is in its general view of faith and science. It strikes me that the difference between the Roman Catholic church and the Evangelical church in the case of evolution hinges on scriptural interpretation rather than a different view of faith and science. Roman Catholics have rejected the traditional interpretation of the Bible (amusingly given the general polemics in this area), whereas evangelical maintain it.
But where Roman Catholics think that revealed truth is contrary to science, they do not hesitate to affirm revealed truth over contrary scientific claims. For example, Roman Catholics are willing to maintain that transubstantiation occurs despite far more direct conflicts with science than young-earth creation. Where science conflicts with what they regard as revealed truth, they hold that faith wins out. Similarly, evangelicals who believe that the Bible clearly reveals young earth creation hold that there revelation wins out.
Theologically speaking, the view of science and faith is the same. Science is given respect in its areas of expertise, but where it seems to be in conflict with revelation, then it is rejected. In other words, to really compare Roman Catholics and Evangelicals on the view of science and faith, you need to find an instance where both groups are committed dogmatically to something that contradicts a scientific claim. Evolution is not a good comparison, because Roman Catholics are not dogmatically committed on the issue.
Thanks for the engaging post; we need to catch up on other matters we’ve discussed.
Pensans, thanks for stopping by! My experience with YEC people and my observations of their leadership, I guess, makes me a bit less sanguine about YEC than you.
The YEC leadership (particularly Answers in Genesis), in my view, purposefully distorts the issue by making it something fundamental to orthodox faith. Their favorite line of argument is that “compromise” on the age of the earth leads directly to compromise on the credibility of Christ’s claims and the basis for the gospel (specifically the doctrine of the atonement). So many conservative evangelical theologians have pointed out the error in this thinking that I can only conclude the YEC leadership is willfully divisive in continuing to make such arguments.
As to lay YEC people and YEC pastors, I suppose attitudes vary. I’ve personally been accused of being “divisive” simply for suggesting that various evangelical views be presented intstead of only the YEC view; I know of at least one local church in which the Pastor’s job was threatened by a YEC contingent because he wouldn’t commit to a YEC-only position; I’ve attended and heard of Sunday School classes in which YEC is presented as the only legitimate alternative (sometimes on pain of jeapordizing one’s salvation); and, though some YEC folks I know tolerate my views as long as I keep them quiet, none have ever really engaged them. I’d have to say that my personal experience with YEC within the context of the local church makes it feel to me somewhat cultish. It scares me.
Re primary education: yes, any parent’s choice has to be more complex than putting lists of errors on a scale. In many ways its a visceral thing for me, since this is one of my hot buttons. I’m blessed in that our local public schools are very solid and there are many other believers in our town who participate in and work at the public schools.
Re: the Catholic position — interesting comment about transubstantion, I hadn’t really thought of that. But I’m not sure it’s a great example. The Catholic catechism says the bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood “in a way surpassing understanding” (Art. III, Sec. 1333.) I don’t think Catholic theology would conceive of the transubstantiation as an empirically verifiable event. This wouldn’t present a conflict even if the bread and wine still look like bread and wine under a microscope. It’s a different category of understanding altogether.
YEC’ers present some interesting comparisons here. One the one hand, they claim their beliefs are “scientific” and empirically verifiable — as with their arguments concerning the stratification of the Grand Canyon. On the other hand, when the evidence mounts against their empirical claims, they fall back on arguments like the “appearance of age” or supposed changes in fundamental constants such as the speed of light or the rate of atomic decay. In this latter respect, they resemble Buddhists who believe perception is merely illusion.
My reference to the Catholic position is more broadly to the Catholic attitude towards science. I don’t think that more relaxed attitude stems primarily from a lack of seriousness about scripture, notwithstanding my differences as a protestant with Catholic theology on that score. I think it reflects a more mature and rich experience wrestling with faith / science issues.
Dear David, with respect to divisiveness, it is still impossible for me to judge. From my perspective (which is considerably less engaged on these issues than yours), both you and the YEC leadership seem to be saying that YEC is something that cannot be compromised on.
You reject Christian schools and churches that embrace it; you describe them as “cultish” and “willfully divisive,” and you say that YECers say similar things about those that reject YEC. From my perspective, the result is as you wrote in another post: surely “the delight of Satan and the grieving of God’s Holy Spirit.”
While I am sure that you are more familiar with these issues than me, I trust I do no damage in encouraging you to continue to exercise great patience with your brothers in this regard. I might even suggest that some of your language (especially insofar as it seemed to be making sweeping judgments about evangelical institutions and leaders generally) went somewhat further than maximal charity for the motives of others would recommend. If you like, I would like to covenant with you to pray for unity and wisdom on this issue in the church.
With respect to Roman Catholicism, you are right that the Roman position is that outwardly the host and wine retain their original accidents – e.g. the appearance, smell, taste and texture of bread and wine – despite miraculous inward alteration of the substance – ie. a real essential transformation into flesh and blood. Thus, it is not an empirically verifiable event. But that is really to my point. You provocatively compare YECers to Buddhists for denying the centrality of empirical evidence in the face of their dogmatic judgments about YEC.
“How can they believe in YEC in the face of all the empirical evidence to the contrary?,” you say. If they respond that such evidence merely constitutes an outward “appearance of age,” then you say they are treating perception like Buddhists as illusions. But in the case of Roman Catholics, you seem to adopt a different attitude. “How can they believe in alteration of the substance of the host and wine when there is so much empirical evidence that they remain unaffected?” When they respond by saying that the outward evidence is not relevant to the miraculous event of God’s recreation of the inward substance of the bread as flesh, you accommodate their ignoring of perception “as a different category of understanding altogether.”
Now if Roman Catholics can ignore the empirical evidence that bread and wine remain because of their contrary dogmatic belief in God’s recreation of the elements, why can’t evangelicals ignore emprical evidence that the earth is aged because of their dogmatic belief in God’s recent creation?
I think that the real differences you are referring to between evangelical Christians and Roman Catholic theology arises from the point of comparison. You are comparing Roman Catholic theologians with popular opinions and movements in evangelicalism. The voice in the pew is always less nuanced than the academic perspective. But rereading your posts on related issues you cited several evangelical theologians whose positions seem as mature in this area as one might like. Perhaps if you compare theologian with theologian, you will find less difference.
Please keep challenging us with great posts on these subjects!
Thanks,
Pensans
Pensans,
As always, you make some great points and offer some helpful corrections. On the issue of divisiveness, you’re right, I need to ease up on the gas a bit. On the other hand, I don’t accuse those who hold the YEC position of rejecting the authority of scripture or denying basic Christian doctrines. I don’t think calling a spade a spade is necessarily a bad thing, but IMHO debate crosses the line into divisiveness when false accusations of heresy start flying around, and that’s how the YEC crowd, in my experience, plays the game.
On the transubstantiation question — I thought you wouldn’t let me off the hook so easyily on that one. I still think, though, that it’s apples to oranges. Conservative Christians who reject YEC don’t deny the possibility of miracles. Recognizing that the miraculous might sometimes be unexplainable in light of physical laws is fundamentally different than arguing that natural processes explainable by natural laws have only “apparently” occurred. In fact, if we allow for the “apparency” position, we ultimately undermine any ability to recognize God in the miraculous — perhaps a miracle only “apparently” occured, or the “miracle” is simply a manifestation of the changeability of basic natural laws. (I should be clear that I don’t think transubstantiation is a Biblical concept, but that’s another issue).