Failing the Test

New Life that Emerged during the "Cambrian Explosion"

Credit: D. W. Miller

If biblical literalists are going to make a persuasive case against evolution to those who accept the truth of evolution, there are certain minimum requirements that they need to meet including:  First, they have to demonstrate that they understand the process itself.  Second, they have to stay abreast of recent findings in evolutionary biology.  Third, they must show a willingness to consider the points made by "the other side" in the debate.  Finally, they should always be aware of the huge danger involved in using God to fill in the gaps in scientific knowledge.  The whole point of science is to fill in those gaps without recourse to supernatural explanations.  Forcing God into the gaps is only asking for failure

A recent posting at the Christian Post entitled, "Technology Proves Darwin's Evolution Theory is Flawed," demonstrates the importance of sticking to arguments that meet the above requirements.  It begins by violating the first requirement with a frivolous and ignorant argument, namely that evolution must be false because the author has trouble logging unto websites. He reasons, "...if evolution were true, then we are to believe a whole series of complex sequences managed to get everything right---repeatedly."  He can't get through complex sequences to log onto some sites, therefore evolutionary theory is wrong.

The comparison is silly, and therein lies the problem.  Logging onto a website has nothing whatsoever to do with biological evolution.  For one thing, evolution doesn't "get everything right."  In fact, evolution requires failure, repeated failure—the failure of species and of individual representatives of species to reproduce where others are successful.  And the evolutionary record is resplendent with species or branches of species that were successful but then failed, Neanderthals being the example that comes most readily to mind.  For another thing, evolution works over vast spans of time with vast numbers of species, not the tiny fraction of a moment of time one person spends trying to get onto a website.  It involves complex biological processes working over those spans.  The posting's comparison is important only because it demonstrates that the author does not understand biological evolution.  His arguments are persuasive only to others as ignorant as he is, which in the long run is hugely self-defeating as more and more people leave the ranks of the literalists.

Another argument put forward in the posting against evolution is the "Cambrian explosion," a period of time that saw the emergence of a large number of new species and the rapid expansion of life on the planet.  The author cites Stephen Meyer's new book, Darwin's Doubt (HarperOne, 2013), to make his case.  It turns out that Meyer is intimately connected with the intelligent design movement, and his book has met with intense rebuttal by those who actually work in the field of paleontology, such as Dr. Donal Prothero (here).  The thing is that science can account for the Cambrian explosion as an evolutionary phenomenon.  The explosion took place over tens of millions of years, plenty of time for evolution to work.  There are links to species already in existence before the explosion.  There are a number of theories as to why it took place, none of which require divine intervention.  The posting in the Christian Post does not consider any of this and is apparently ignorant of the essentially evolutionary nature of the phenomenon.

The posting ends by asserting that "the Word" caused the Cambrian explosion.  It is what provides the information necessary for the explosion to take place.  God fills the gap in scientific knowledge.  In fact, this gap has already closed; God is not necessary to explain it.  It is in this way that biblical literalists and a narrowly constructed creationism fails the test of putting forward cogent rebuttals of evolution.  It is in this way that the literalists give comfort to their enemy, those who reject the existence of God at all.  It is in this way that they fail the test...inevitably.

Liberal Christians & the Bible

Liberal Christians aren’t liberal in spite of the Bible, but because of it. They don’t pursue justice for LGBT people because they haven’t read Scripture, but precisely because they have. And in the arc of the narrative of God’s interaction with humanity, liberal Christians find a radical expansiveness, an urgent desire to broaden the embrace of God’s hospitality to include those whom the religious big shots are always kicking to the sidelines.

Derek Penwell,
"The Problem With Assuming Liberal Christians Hate the Bible"

Huffington Post, July 1, 2013

God & Evolution: Indirectly or Not At All?

When it comes to opinion polls, wording is everything.  In a news posting entitled, "Belief in Evolution Up Since 2004,"YouGov reported on the findings of a poll it recently conducted investigating American beliefs about God's role (or lack of a role) in evolution.  Those results show that some 21% of those polled agreed with the statement that, "Human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, and God did not directly guide this process."  The alternative responses are: "Human begins evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, but God guided this process" (25%); "God created human beings in their present form within the last ten thousand years" (37%); and "not sure" (17%).  Readers can see the full results of the poll (here).

The YouGov posting goes on to note that when compared with similar polls conducted by CBS in 2004 and 2008 this most recent poll shows an increase in those who believe that "human beings evolved without guidance from God" from 13% in 2004 to 15% in 2008 to 21% in 2013.

The problem is that, as reported in a CBS news posting concerning its 2004 poll, the wording for the statement about God's not guiding evolution is, "Humans evolved, God did not guide [the] process."  The YouGov statement is wordier but still comparable were it not for the word, "directly".  In the CBS poll God is not involved at all.  In the YouGov poll God is not directly involved.  That leaves the possibility that God is indirectly involved in at least a couple of possible ways.  It is possible that God set the process of evolution going but since then has not been involved.  It is also possible that in one guise or another God indirectly encourages the emergence of a more godly humanity but does not directly influence the course of events because that would violate human freedom.  Now, both of these possibilities leave room for debate, but that is precisely the problem.  The YouGov wording is too open ended.  It requires interpretation.  And there is no way of knowing how many individuals who believe that God is involved with evolution indirectly decided to affirm the statement that, "Human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, and God did not directly guide this process" and how many decided that the second response, "Human begins evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, but God guided this process," better fit their views.  Some respondents who do not believe that God is involved in evolution at all, on the other hand, might also have a problem with the wording of the first YouGov statement.  It leaves open the possibility that God might be indirectly involved when they believe that God is not involved at all.  Such a person might chose "not sure" rather than leave even a slight possibility of divine involvement in evolution.

There is little doubt that the number of Americans who reject divine involvement in evolution is growing.  There is every reason to doubt on the basis of the YouGov poll that it has grown by 8% in nine years.  It would not be particularly surprising if it has, but we don't know that it has based on this data.  And while this may be a minor point, statistical data such as this is always open to interpretation and should never be taken as certain even without the added inconsistency of wording in this particular case.  As the texts on survey methods remind us, questionnaires don't reveal what people think. What they do reveal is how a particular group of respondents answered a particular question on a particular day.

The Roots of Religion

All religions are inextricably bound to the social, spiritual, and cultural milieux from which they arose and in which they developed.  It is not prophets who create religions   Prophets are, above all, reformers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices of their communities, providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality.  Indeed, it is most often the prophet's successors who take upon themselves the responsibility of refashioning their master's words and deeds into unified, easily comprehensible religious systems.

Reza Aslan

No god but God (Random House Trade Paperback edition, 2011)

page 17

(Not) Learning from the Past

The idea that we should learn from the mistakes of the past so that we don't repeat them in the present and future is a "nice idea."  Sometimes it even works.  Sometimes.  More often than not, however, we prefer to see in the past "lessons" that confirm our particular set of prejudices.  Ideologues happily accuse historians of making up facts when the historian's version of the past does not comport with their own.  Or, they will dismiss the historian's rendering of the past as "just your opinion."

A popular variation on these ways to dismiss any actual lessons the past might teach is to make up quotations by historical figures that "prove" one's pet dogma. Take, for example, a posting at CNN entitled, "Jefferson: The face of the modern gun debate: How the third president is our Rorschach test on guns."  The posting quotes Saul Cornell, a professor at Fordham University, as stating, ""There are definitely ways you can make Jefferson be a spokesman for Occupy Wall Street or the NRA, but to do so is to take him out of his own time and put him into a debate that is quite alien in his time."  Interestingly enough, the examples of false or misinterpreted quotations attributed to Jefferson cited in the posting all tend to support the gun lobby folks rather than their opponents.  In any event, the invention of fake quotations is just one way we avoid learning what the past might actually teach us while allowing us to invent a past convenient to our own ideological agendas.

The problem with learning from the past, in sum, is that it more often than not doesn't teach us the lessons we want to learn.

The Issue for Our Times

The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.

Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn Dodgers

Quoted (here)

American Theological Orientations

Source: PPRI/Brookings Economic Values Survey, 2013

The Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institute have just released their 2013 Economic Values Survey, which includes a major section on religious orientation in the U.S. today.  The survey found that among Americans irrespective of religious affiliation, 38% are theologically conservative, 28% moderate, 19% progressive, and 15% are nonreligious.

There is, of course, a good deal of variation in these percentages among the various religious groups.  Evangelical whites are the most conservative (80%), as would be expected.  Among mainline white Protestants, conservatives number 36% and among white Catholics they are 29%.  Interestingly, some 28% of white Catholics are progressive.  Only one category among religious believers showed a plurality of theological liberals, that being "non-Christian" religious Americans of whom 43% are liberal and only 7% conservative.  This group includes Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and members of other "non-Christian" groups.

One other trend described in the report has to do with age.  Younger generations show a greater percentage of liberals and nonreligious while the older generations show higher proportions of conservatives and moderates.

There are no surprises here.  From a liberal-progressive perspective, there is hope in the figures for the Gen-X and Millennial generations.  Millennials in particular show just 17% being theologically conservative and 61% moderate or liberal.  One would hope that these figures foreshadow the decline of the Christian hard right and its influence in American politics as well as religion.  Along those same lines, the report shows one of the fastest growing ethnicities in the U.S., Hispanics, as already being markedly less theologically conservative (28%) and more liberal (23%) than other white Americans (40% and 18% respectively) or black Americans (49% and 14% respectively).  In terms of American theological orientations, the general trend is away from conservative and toward moderate and liberal.

However, as an editorial posting entitled, "Religious Progressives Predicted To Outnumber Conservatives, Survey Finds," notes, a significant part of this trend away from religious conservatism is toward "non-religion".  That posting also argues that progressive Christianity will never have the kind of unity and power that the Religious Right has exhibited in recent decades.  The religious left is too diverse and disinclined to exercise political power for that.  Honestly, that is not a bad thing.  A good deal of the hard right's power has been based on fear, and one would trust that a more moderate to left-leaning religiosity would be less fearful and more inclined to promoting a more Christ-like compassion for and acceptance of the Other.  Amen.

The Really Real

The Kingdom is something that enters into this world, or, as Jesus puts it, “is close at hand.” Don’t project it into another world…. The Kingdom is the Really Real. When the Really Real happens, when the true self emerges, you have a taste of what Jesus says it’s all about. When that can happen in terms of structures or groups, when you have a free group of people who love the truth more than themselves, then you have a taste of the Kingdom descending to earth.

 Richard Rohr

Source: Jesus' Plan for a New World

From: inward/outward

God's Resilient Purpose

In his commentary, Genesis (John Knox, 1982), Walter Brueggemann observes that the "Joseph Narrative" (chapters 37-50) in Genesis and Jeremiah 18 reflect a similar perspective on God's plans for the Hebrew people.  He writes,  "In neither the Joseph narrative nor the Jeremiah passage is it an immutable plan which is always and everywhere the same.  Rather, we are dealing with Yahweh's intent for his people to which Yahweh may be faithful in a variety of ways.  No more than the narrator in our text does Jeremiah doubt that Yahweh has a resilient purpose for his people." (p. 376).

A universe where there is no God and a cosmos where God runs the whole show both seem to be unworkable propositions, as best we can tell from our senses, with our minds, and with our hearts.  They are both empty of purpose and meaning.  What makes most sense is something somewhere in the middle ground between No God and All God.  God must be Present but not in such a way as to impinge on human freedom—something like the process of evolution which runs by a set of rules, has direction, and encourages diversity and experimentation.  Freedom within boundaries.  Freedom within a resilient purpose!  Jesus of Nazareth is our ultimate experience as Christians with God's resilient purpose for humanity.  He was God's creative, resilient response to our continued intransigence as a race, and in the Spirit God continues to work with and around us toward the one goal of the Kingdom, which is God's ultimate resilient purpose.  Amen.

North Country Theology

The North Country (in blue)

Modern, Newtonian Christian theology begins with God and proceeds systematically from the divine to the mundane.  The human condition is an important downstream concern, but one that is somewhat distant from the headwaters of the Trinitarian Deity.  Modern theology is a book theology, a professional theology.

Postmodern theology begins with where the theologian is and proceeds from the human condition toward God. Place and people matter a good deal, and it is these things that determine the scope, direction, themes, and content of the theological enterprise.  Modern theology starts with God and works its way to humanity; postmodern theology starts with humanity and works back toward God.  In this mode, theology is black, feminine, Asian, tribal, African, and even Korean and Karen.  Postmodern theology is diverse and local.  It thinks a good deal about culture.

So, here is a fact:  54.3% of Lewis County, NY, falls under the category of "Forested/Wild."  And another fact: some 72% of the county's residents live in rural areas.  Many of those living in rural areas live in or near "Forested/Wild." Lewis County, as a part of New York's North Country, is also cold and snowy even in these days of global warming.  Summer comes late and is relatively cool.

These facts imply a theology.  North Country Theology.  The symbol of this theology is a sound, the sound of the loon haunting the darkening evenings of lakes and forest.  The Spirit blows across the lakes and forest in several guises from gentle almost motionless morning breezes to water lashing, tree bending storms.  It is a creation theology, a natural theology, a biological theology, an environmental theology.  It works from the "second book" of divine revelation, God's Creation.  It is not, so far as I know, a theology that has been written up, and I'm sure there aren't any seminary courses on it; but it already exists in places like Lewis County in the lives of faithful Christians who experience God in the "Forested/Wild."  North Country Theology.