DISCLAIMER: This is cross posted in the diaries on Daily Kos and MyDD.
I am a pretty religious Catholic who believes in Jesus Christ. But I can treat the Bible as something less than the absolute truth. Indeed, I believe it is one large allegory preaching to primative and medieval man values and morals.
There are some fantastic stories in the Bible that as a kid I was skeptical about.
I mean, come on, the Red Sea just parting for Moses? Yeah, that doesn’t wash. The entire planet flooded, and only Noah and his ark full of humans and animals surviving? Unlikely, as we would have evidence of it in the worldwide fossil record.
The world created in just 6 days? I rather believe William Jennings Bryan’s theory in the Scopes Monkey trial that a day back in biblical times could have lasted millions of years.
But, while I am willing to accept the Bible as a book of stories which are ficitional, exxagerated, or only half true, there are others who treat it as the literal word of God, which is the absolute truth and cannot be questioned.
They constantly struggle to bend and twist new scientific discovery and fact so that it fits with the word of God, even though it is quite obvious the Book of Genesis is a story that cannot possibly be taken literally. Am I to believe that the only two humans on Earth were Adam and Eve. That’s it. And they had two sons, Cain and Abel. Yep…those were the only humans on Earth because God created them first. Yep. Huh. Well…then who did Cain and Abel marry? Apes? Yes, look right here, the book says they had wives. Hmmmm. Well I digress.
To those who believe in the absolute truth of Creationism, the Darwin theory is heresy of the worst kind. For years, they have struggled to implement a return to Creationism through the Intelligent Design Theory. But we will return to that in a second.
So frantic to disprove science and to confirm the Bible stories they and generations of their ancestors were raised with, they will resort to lying themselves. Consider this recent article in the New York Times:
Hundreds of miles away, leaders of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools notched another victory. A religious advocacy group based in Greensboro, N.C., the council has been pressing a 12-year campaign to get school boards across the country to accept its Bible curriculum.
The council calls its course a nonsectarian historical and literary survey class within constitutional guidelines requiring the separation of church and state.
But a growing chorus of critics says the course, taught by local teachers trained by the council, conceals a religious agenda. The critics say it ignores evolution in favor of creationism and gives credence to dubious assertions that the Constitution is based on the Scriptures, and that “documented research through NASA” backs the biblical account of the sun standing still.
In the latest salvo, the Texas Freedom Network, an advocacy group for religious freedom, has called a news conference for Monday to release a study that finds the national council’s course to be “an error-riddled Bible curriculum that attempts to persuade students and teachers to adopt views that are held primarily within conservative Protestant circles.”
….
The course’s broad statements about the Bible being the blueprint for the nation are askew, said Mr. Haynes of the Freedom Forum, part of a nonpartisan ecumenical group promoting the Bible Literacy Project textbook. “If the Bible is a blueprint for the Constitution,” he said, “I guess they haven’t read it,” referring to the Constitution.
Some of the claims made in the national council’s curriculum are laughable, said Mark A. Chancey, professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who spent seven weeks studying the syllabus for the freedom network. Mr. Chancey said he found it “riddled with errors” of facts, dates, definitions and incorrect spellings. It cites supposed NASA findings to suggest that the earth stopped twice in its orbit, in support of the literal truth of the biblical text that the sun stood still in Joshua and II Kings.
“When the type of urban legend that normally circulates by e-mail ends up in a textbook, that’s a problem,” Mr. Chancey said.
Indeed. And that is not an urban legend, Mr. Chancey. It is a lie. A lie made up by supporters of this course and believers in the literal truth of the Bible to use modern science to confirm biblical allegories. There has never been a NASA study confirming that the Earth stood still. And while our nation is most definitely influenced by Judeo-Christian principles, and our fouding documents reflect that, the Constitution of the United States did not use the Bible as a blueprint. Unless of course, the true believers concede that the Bible condoned slavery and the inequality of women. I was not aware that Jesus Christ advocated a democratic republic as the best form of government. Further, it would seem that God is not so big on this Freedom of Speech and the Free Exercise of Religion. It would seem to me that God sends you to hell if you don’t follow his religion.
These are lies meant to prove that the Bible is the truth and the light, and nothing else matters. We are not to question the Bible ever, as it is the word of God, and as such we must question everything else.
Which brings me, finally, to Intelligent Design (ID). The theory is not scientifically proven, for it cannot be scientifically proven. How do you prove that God exists? You cannot. Instead, the theory attempts to burrow holes in Natural Selection. A wingnut friend of mine discussed this recently, and he says that the explosion in life during the Pre-Cambrian period cannot be explained by Darwinism since evolution depends upon the slow modificiation of the fittest species over millenia to better adapt them to their environment. He says to me, “what say you to that?” I say, “I don’t know.” He says, “That’s right, because God is the answer. He caused that explosion of life.”
The problem with ID is that it is not science. It does not seek to prove anything. It does not seek to explain anything. As such it isn’t a scientific theory and it isn’t an alternative to natural selection or any other scientific theory. Science always seeks to discover “how.” ID does not seek to discovery “how.” It wants to tell us “why.”
As a scientist, your primary task is observing. If you are observing the universe, it appears the same, no matter if it was designed by God or not. Empirical scientific theories seek to explain how the universe appears to us. These theories, and the scientists who formulate them, have no business positing why the world appears this way. They have no business telling us that, given the complexity of life and how unlikely it is that it therefore must be designed by a higher being. For that is the business of metaphysics. ID is a metaphysical theory. Not a scientific one explaining the orgins of life.
Science does have some metaphysical assumptions, not the least of which is that the universe follows laws, i.e. the Laws of Physics. But Science leaves open the question of whether those laws were designed. That is a metaphysical question. Believing the universe or some part of it was designed or not does not help us understand how it works. If a scientist ever answers an empirical question with the answer “because God made it that way” then that person has left the realm of science and entered the realm of metaphysics. Of course scientists have metaphysical beliefs but those beliefs are irrelevant to strictly scientific explanations. Science is open to both theists and atheists alike.
If we grant that the universe is possibly or even probably the result of intelligent design, what is the next step? We cannot ask God how he designed it. So we give up on understanding. We give up on knowlege. And perhaps that is what the absolute believers want us to do. Obviously, the more science learns and advances, the more allegorical the Bible becomes. If we stop science, the Bible is restored to its role as the Truth.
The point that absolute believers have to get into their heads is that science is not the enemy of God. Science does not seek to disprove the word of the Lord. Science seeks to explain the world. To tell us how it works. If you believe, then God can always be the reason why, but never how, for then you shut the door to all knowledge.