Hanna Rosin, in The New York Times:
A brightly painted sign in the state park explained that 450 million years ago these ancient creatures lived at the bottom of a warm, shallow sea during the Ordovician period. But none of these geologists believed it. As young-earth creationists, they think the earth is about 8,000 years old, give or take a few thousand years. That’s about the amount of time conventional geology says it can take to form one inch of limestone.
Creationist ideas about geology tend to appeal to overly zealous amateurs, but this was a gathering of elites, with an impressive wall of diplomas among them (Harvard, U.C.L.A., the Universities of Virginia, Washington and Rhode Island). They had spent years studying the geologic timetable, but they remained nevertheless deeply committed to a different version of history. John Whitmore, a geologist from nearby Cedarville University who organized the field trip, stood in the middle of the fossil bed and summarized it for his son.
“Dad, how’d these fossils get here?” asked Jess, 7, looking up from his own Ziploc bag full of specimens.
Whitmore, who was wearing a suede cowboy hat, answered in a cowboy manner — laconic but certain.
“From the flood,” he said.
I was still thinking about Paul Davies op-ed piece and yesterday's post when I came across the article above. The two seem to go hand in hand.
They highlight the fundamental (no pun intended) problem we face, as human beings, in the current age. After spending a very long time evolving as a social species with a very special and useful kind of intelligence, we got sucked into a backwater.
Some of us learned how to manipulate the rest of us, and invented the idea of kings, dictatorship, organized religious propaganda systems, and authority by force. In the process they created wealth and poverty, power and slavery, orthodoxy and ignorance.
They imposed this way of thinking on the rest of us for about 12,000 years. That's a very short time, in the history of the human race, but it's long enough that some of us got very confused.
Paul Davies' accusation that science appeals to a set of laws external to the universe is a symptom of this confusion. The word "law" evokes the legal model, of morality and of knowledge. That model is based on the idea of law that developed in the dictatorial governments of kings.
In the legal model, a law is a rule that is imposed, from the outside, by an authority. In science, a law is a pattern that is consistently observed in nature. Davies was, I suspect, misled by the use of the word to apply the wrong model.
He was probably encouraged in this mistake by his knowledge that some notable scientists, such as Isaac Newton, have made the same assumption. It's true that Newton did make that assumption—that natural laws are decreed by God, in much the same way the laws of the Medes and the Persians were decreed by Xerxes.
But Newton believed this, not because he was a scientist, but because he was a theologian. He never managed to separate the two.
What modern science has done, quite inadvertently, is remind us of the older, traditional, wisdom model that is natural to humans, and predates the legal model of our rulers. In trying to understand the natural world, we have found, time and time again, that orthodoxy stood in the way—whether it was the medieval Church insisting that the sun moved around the earth, or a Southern Baptist pastor insisting that evolution can't be true, whatever the evidence.
In the process, we have been reminded of a much older, and more natural, way of thinking and being—the way of looking at the world which led to the control of fire, the discovery of art, the use of tools.
But reclaiming this heritage is not an easy task after 12,000 years of indoctrination, designed to make us into fit slaves for a king.
During those 12,000 years, the meaning of "truth" was largely redefined to mean, not that which happens to be the case, but that which fits the officially endorsed worldview. Galileo famously couldn't get a certain bishop to look through his telescope, because the bishop felt that the exercise would be beside the point. He already knew what conclusion was authorized.
The great strength of the wisdom model, and of modern science, is the ability to look through the telescope, to count your wife's teeth, to go to the evidence to discover what it tells you, rather than to look for proof of what you already know.
Which brings us to those young-earth geologists, who are missing the point on two counts.
First of all, if they think they are doing science, they are simply mistaken. Science means going where the evidence takes you, not simply searching for ways to interpret the evidence to fit the orthodox view.
Scientists often come to the evidence with a specific theory in mind—that's not the issue. The distinction is that a scientist comes to the evidence to find out whether the theory is right or not. And if the evidence does not support the theory, the scientist changes the theory.
The alternative—to be fully committed to the theory no matter what the evidence says, to know in advance, based on the orthodox view, what the evidence must show—is not science, but apologetics.
The odd thing is that I learned this in church. The practice of going to scripture merely to look for evidence to support the theology you already embraced was called "proof-texting" or, sometimes, "eisegesis" and was generally frowned upon, even in the fundamentalist church I knew as an adolescent.
These "scientists" could take that lesson to heart, for had they spent a little more time and effort studying their bibles, they would have noticed that the "waters of the deep" and the waters that poured through from the "windows of the sky" were not H2O, but the mythological and philosophical waters referred to in the first chapters of Genesis—a symbol of the nothingness before creation.
The story of the flood is not the story of a large amount of water covering our little planet, but the story of Yahweh undoing all of creation and starting over again.
Had they taken the trouble to allow the literary evidence in the Bible to shape their theology, rather than reading an ancient text through the lens of contemporary science, they would never have expected to find evidence of a physical flood in the first place, nor would they have thought that Genesis had any intention of conveying information about the age of the earth, or the theory of evolution.
Instead, they have first allowed a preconceived orthodoxy to control their interpretation of an ancient text, and then allowed that faulty interpretation to control their "scientific" investigation.
But we should not be too hard on them.
They, like Davies, are caught as we all are, in a time of recovery from a 12,000 year detour in human history.
The dictators will not win. We will recover our heritage.
But it will take time.
Meanwhile, we must find ways to struggle toward truth while remaining kind to each other.
