A New York Times article last week told of Marcus R. Ross, a young scholar—a teacher at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University—who just received his Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island.
Dr. Ross wrote his dissertation about mosasaurs, marine reptiles which he says became extinct about sixty-five million years ago.
Meanwhile, he argues, in other venues, that the earth is at most ten thousand years old. Presumably a Ph.D. from a respected institution gives him a certain amount of authority when he makes these claims.
Dr. Ross also argues that the "theory" of Intelligent Design is a better explanation for Cambrian explosion of species on this planet—about 500 million years ago--than evolution.
You might expect me to wax on about how absurd it is for a person who believes that the earth is ten thousand years old "because that's what the Bible says" to be arguing that Intelligent Design—another religious view in the guise of science—does a better job of explaining something that happened, on earth, 500 million years ago.
But that is not what I find interesting about Dr. Ross.
What I find fascinating is the failure of creationists and fundamentalists to really care about understanding the book they hold in such high esteem.
One of the reasons I am not a fundamentalist any more is that I had, and still have, more respect for ancient texts than that.
It is not even necessary to consider the Bible a "holy" book in order to care that your interpretation of it has some connection to what the original writers and readers of the texts understood.
Creationism fails because it is unscientific, but it also fails because it is too scientific. It comes from reading texts written in ancient times with the same literary conventions one would apply to a modern science text, while completely ignoring the conventions and world-view of the people who wrote the text in the first place.
Not all Christians—not even a majority—are this callous toward the texts at the center of their tradition. In fact, most intelligent Christians understand that a text must tell us how it is to be interpreted, not the other way around. (I mean that in both senses.)
People like Dr. Ross, on the other hand, are fascinating, not because they let the Bible overrule their science, but because they let their scientific world-view lead them to misinterpret their Bible, and then have to tie themselves in intellectual knots to deal with a theology that contradicts their science.
Fascinating—and exhausting.
At least, that's what I think today.
