Doubletake: The Age of What?!?

I stumbled upon quite an interesting article last night that I thought I’d share with you all. It kind of follows on from my previous post: “The Age of What?!?“

First though, my previous post was a diatribe against those who criticise Christianity from a point of ignorance, however before I get to the interesting article I read, I’d like to turn the camera back on Christians who themselves talk from a point of ignorance.

Augustine, in his The Literal Meaning of Genesis, (Volume 1, Chapter 19) wrote the following:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although ‘they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.’

You see, Augustine’s dismay was when a Christian expounded not lies, but utter foolishness, and staunchly held to those beliefs, even going so far as dragging scripture into it. Let’s take the story of creation for example. Assuming that it is a genuine, historical retelling of how everything came to be, it is still not necessary to proclaim from that that the world was created in 6 days (that is, 144 hours, as God rested on the 7th), and that the world is a few thousand years old, and so therefore either Adam rode around bareback on a T-Rex, or God put dinosaur fossils on the earth to test our faith. But wait. Am I suggesting that we should conform our beliefs to what everyone else thinks is realistic? Well, no. What I suggest is that the story of creation was written for a specific purpose, and in another language, and the Hebrew word yom, which for simplicity sake is translated as ‘day’, can equally (and perhaps, better) be translated to mean ‘an unspecified duration of time’, or, a ‘period’.

Nothing I say is unprovoked, and so you may be wondering why I’ve gotten onto this. Well, when I first became a Christian I heard lots of random ‘facts’ that ‘undeniably vindicate’ the Bible (as if the Bible even needed vindication in the first place). One of which was that the skull of a giant had been found in the foothills of the Judean mountains with a stone lodged into it’s forehead. Goliath’s skull had been found! I remembered this last night, as yesterday I had taught the children at my church the story of David and Goliath, so I decided to Google it. What I found was a mixture of foolishness, and deep groans the like of which I’m letting out now. The first link quoted the article from the find:

Diggers in Israel believe they’ve made a giant discovery. For they’re convinced they’ve come across Goliath’s skull! And what’s more, they say, the stone from David’s slingshot is still embedded in the forehead. Archaeologist Dr. Richard Martin says: “We found the skull in the Valley of Elah, in the foothills of the Judean Mountains, where David’s battle with Goliath took place. The skull is huge and clearly belongs to a man of enormous stature.” Tests show that the skull is between 2,900 and 3,000 years old – about the right time for the biblical battle. Dr. Martin says: “This is the archaeological find of the year.”

Well, this immediately made me curious, as the Biblical account claims that David made off with the skull, not that he left it on the battlefield. So I continued to look (mainly for a photo, though at this time I would have doubted its legitimacy anyway). What I found though was a well-researched groan. Seems that article was actually from a publication called ‘The World Weekly News’. Now, you may have heard of this publication, and it’s top articles like the one on how Hilary Clinton adopted an alien baby. Yes, that’s right, it was from a tabloid newspaper, the kind that Will Smith got his tips from in Men In Black.

What’s worse though, is that some Christians were at one stage going nuts over this ‘discovery’, proclaiming it to unbelievers, and doing more harm than good to their cause. Oh dear.

But anyway, all this self-evaluating is making me feel uncomfortable! Let’s continue from where ‘The Age of What?!?’ left off. The article I found that had actually done it’s research led me to another interesting article. A book review on The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, by David Berlinsky, Ph.D. (Princeton), author of numerous books, professor of mathematics and philosophy, and an unbashful agnostic.

Now, lest there be any misinformation, let me be clear when I say I have not read the book (I would hate to be caught not doing my research in the same post that I condemn such). I’m trying to track down the book locally (at $90US new on Amazon, I’ll keep looking), but the book review made some very well written points. Before I begin however, it may be prudent to quote Berlinksy, lest you think of him as just another Christian trying to put back together the pieces of a faith that had been quelled by skepticism. In his preface, Berlinksy bluntly dismisses the various theories to account for how the universe began (i.e. God) as  “splendid artifacts of the human imagination.” Such an unlikely apologist for belief in God!

I like what Philip Johnson (as quoted in Berlinsky’s book) calls: ‘methodological naturalism’; where, he says, “modern science has eliminated a priori any answers that include design or a divine hand, thereby rigging the game and predetermining the outcome.” …Wow. It’s so obvious, yet so well put. What this means, is that Athiests such as Dawkin’s and Dennett do not come to the conclusion that there is no God from their research. Instead, and wait for it, they start at the presupposition that there is no God, and work from there (a different look on the Hermeneutical Spiral). Others of course are at least honest about this, such as C. F. von Weizsacker, who is quoted as saying “Is there a God who has among other things created the universe? It is not by its conclusions but by its methodological starting point that modern science excludes creation. Our methodology would not be honest if this fact were denied…”

But why, you may ask, if this is all the case, why do the Dawkins’ and the Dennett’s of the world seem to stand so tall? Why hasn’t anyone knocked them down a peg? Well, it’s quite simple really.

Their contempt and indignation for those who deign to propose concepts of intelligent design is unbridled. To such as those “who feed like leeches on irrational beliefs,” are “offensive little swarms of insects,” and amount to “intellectual viruses,” the only recourse is to “take care of them by spraying biological knowledge.”

In other words: they shut their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears. Such a shame though. For if for easiness sake, we stop where we stand and stubbornly proclaim what is in front of our noses as all that there is, then we stop ourselves from ever stepping beyond where we are.

My favourite part of the review though is the second to last paragraph.

To a committed Darwinist like Daniel Dennett, “contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that natural selection…has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.” However, most biologists know better. According to Berlinsky, “the facts are what they have always been: unforthcoming. And the theory is what it always was: unpersuasive.” A Nobel laureate in biology once remarked to Berlinsky, “Darwin? That’s just the party line.”

~ by Mono on January 5, 2009.