User:Mkmcconn/Creationist

A dead-ended essay on doctrine, uncertainty, and truth.

Prolegomena

The Calvinist is commanded to believe. Part of what he is required to believe, is that he ought to doubt the soundness of his own beliefs.

1 Corinthians 8
2 If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.

On one level the Calvinist says presumptively, "I do not believe as I ought to", because he believes in total depravity.

That is, the Calvinist believes that people, despite their best intentions, not only make mistakes but also deceive themselves. This is because even their intentions are not what they should be, and this distortion that enters into thought is on the one hand wilfully chosen, and on the other hand is a surrender of their freedom to know the truth. Just below the surface, people know what the truth is, because they are constantly confronted with it; but they hide the truth from themselves, by subtleties which they are all-too-willing to believe. The Calvinist believes himself to be like other people, and like others, a guilty victim of self-deception.

But, let's assume for the sake of making the point, that only Calvinists are afflicted with this problem of total depravity. I'm sure that this will be permitted to me, by everyone: by Calvinists because they believe it to be true of themselves, and by others because they like to think it true of Calvinists (that Calvinists are perverse). Certainly, history is full of examples that will prove the point that Calvinists are depraved, and so, we are on very solid ground to speak this way.

As I started to say, an important implication of the doctrine of total depravity for the Calvinist, is the doubtfulness of his own knowledge, wisdom, and righteousness. Here, I'm speaking in particular about the doubtfulness of his powers of intellection. Calvinists call this "the noetic effects of sin". This means that the Calvinist's mind is not trustworthy. The deliverances of his reason are not declared immune to doubt; and most disturbingly, this applies even to the interpretation of Scripture.

A practical effect of this doctrine, is that the Calvinist is more than usually inclined to develop rules by which to test his interpretation of the facts. The thoughts that pop into the fevered brain are not given automatic credibility: instead, they are tested. These rules are especially rigorously applied to those propositions of new ideas about God, because it is precisely on the subject of who God is and the duty owed to God by his creatures, that the imagination is least to be trusted.

One example of these rules, by which the Calvinist tests his own thinking for self-betrayal, is called "the analogy of faith". The Analogy of Faith supposes the integral nature of all truth. In seeking to believe the truth, belief is predicted to be capable of reflecting this integrity of truth. If a particular point of uncertainty can be decided by comparison to accepted belief on another point, then the probability of the truth of both beliefs is commended by analogy. In other words, there are normative beliefs (things considered more clear) which serve as the norm for helping to decide doubtful beliefs (things not as certainly believed). This is the reason that Reformed churches adopt creeds. These are collections of normative beliefs, which help to decide doubtful beliefs.

[Note: It is because Calvinism is chiefly concerned with godliness, that the Noetic Effects of Sin become important. The resulting investments in epistemology and the philosophy of science, no matter how intensely these have been investigated at times, are merely a byproduct. Calvinism is not a philosophy of science, any more than it is a theory of politics; but it has produced these byproducts. Also, these byproducts have never been regarded as an unmixed blessing.]

Creation: God is a given

There are few articles of his faith in which the Calvinist invests more significance, than the doctrine of Creation. This is one of those normative beliefs just mentioned; creation of all things by the Holy Trinity is considered to be one thing that is very clear.

The Calvinist cannot imagine that divine acts only operate in the internal economy of the world as a way of making up for lack of sufficient explanation in naturalistic terms. God is not the explanation for what physics cannot explain. This is a persistent myth of philosophical naturalism, that the arena in which God appears to operate is always shrinking. The Calvinist has to think for a moment, just to understand what in the world the naturalist must be thinking, because it makes no sense. The arena of God's activity always seems to expand, for the Calvinist. It never shrinks, because we are always learning much more about everything, and everything that we know about how created things work expands our knowledge of God's activity. There is no room in a Calvinist's thinking, for a God whose activity is only evident where naturalistic causes seem to insufficiently account for things.

Literally, what I have just said is false. I said "there is no room in his thinking" for this grave theological mistake. But, in fact, there is practically no resistance against this error, because the Calvinist is prone to think perversely about God; and this is one of those fatal self-delusions, against which he is constantly warning himself. But, when he is in his right mind, the Calvinist presupposes that the Creator is unceasingly active, and stands in relation to everything else as origin, sustainer, governor and provider.

Putting this another way, God is a "given". His existence and activity are presupposed as "the case", "always and necessarily". Faith is a starting point for Christian thinking, rather than an end-point to be proven. This is not to say that Calvinists do not believe that facts can be shown and arguments presented, which offer compelling reasons for believing; but it is saying that these evidences will only be perceived as compelling after unbelief is made untenable by a change of heart. Put crassly, the Calvinist believes because he wants to; and he attributes his wanting to believe to God, who had first granted him this change of heart. He accounts for his belief this way, because he is commanded to believe it.

Created things: a functionally complete economy

Some intellectual-historians have tied the history of the Reformed movement very closely to the development of "science" in the modern sense. They point out the historical reasons for this. Calvinism is an Augustinian movement, with influences from the Occamist wing of the humanist renaissance in the Medieval universities, strongly embued in its later development with Thomistic scholasticism, Jansenist rationalism, Ramist methods of proof and argumentation, Baconian empiricism, and Scottish common-sense realism. These influences and more were added willy-nilly to Reformed culture, mixed into the strong broth of its commitment to the sovereignty and transcendence of God, thinned by a nascent antipathy toward imaginative interpretation of the Scriptures, to form a distinctively hard-minded approach to religion and life. It is false to say that the Reformed churches produced modern culture and the secular, desacralized mind; however, there was no closer analogy to that mind, in the religious world of the 17th century, than in the Reformed churches. It was for this reason (and their lack of a hierarchy by which scientific heresy was expunged in other churches) that the Reformed more quickly accomodated Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, than other Protestant or Catholic traditions.

[Note: However, historians now show that it was not the purer Calvinists, but the theologically muddled (and hierarchical) Anglicans who stand out at the advance of science in a more-or-less modern sense.]

What this adds up to in the end, is a tendency to see created things as an internally complete economy. God is not an additional cause operating within the internal economy of creaturely things. Instead, God is the origin of things, the guarantor of meaning and purpose, the ruler of all creaturely causality, who implicitly causes all things to work toward the fulfillment of his purposes. Nature is God's to guide continually. All things operate according to their nature, and yet things do not have this nature from themselves, it is given them by the arbitrary decision of God.

This view rejects, on the one hand, pantheist-like notions, which tie actions of created things directly to the actions of God with only a nominal difference, if any at all, between them. Also rejected are deistic notions, which views the internal economy as complete unto itself. It is "complete", but it is completely dependent.

Therefore, it is very common for Calvinists interested in science (ancient and modern) to speak in terms of "role" and "purpose", even when speaking of inanimate things. They do not mean by this that there is some ghostly personality present in bears, birds, bugs or boulders; what they mean is that God's will is the ultimate reference point of all existence. The highest cause of things is volitional rather than mechanical. The chief purpose of rare miracles and the even rarer disclosure of angels and demons, is to train the believer to think this way, to view every event in which they participate as an intensely personal environment, full of meaning with which we are constantly confronted, but of which we are only slightly aware. This "personalism" in Calvinism vacillates between supporting voluntarist explanations of purpose, and rationalist explanations of mathematical structure. But even when Calvinists have attempted to revive scholastic conceptualism and metaphysics, as the Italian Turretin did, it is spoken with accents of Calvinist experimentalism and empiricism. Or, when Jonathan Edwards constructed a realistic view of the mind of God displayed in the order of nature (philosophical idealism), this is tempered by a revulsion against the fatalism of impersonal forces.

So, Calvinists have made a contribution to the legitimation of science. At historically important moments, they have given positive and enduring answers to the questions, "is knowledge of nature possible?", "is science beneficial?", "how should science be done?", "how should science be regulated?". Not the whole, but an important part of the Calvinist answers to these questions, influenced the general progress of science as a careful accumulation of enough facts that the arrangement of details provides an explanation of the creaturely economy of causes and effects.

[Note: It is a common apologetical myth among Calvinists, that modern science was invented by the Puritans. By "puritan" they mean a party of theologically rigorous Calvinists in the late 16th century into the late 17th century, especially in England, Scotland, and Holland. By means of this myth, they intend to legitimate their own theological perspective and to canonize as the true and orthodox "Science", their own theological perspective in the venerable name of their forebears. It is not difficult to see the falsity of this interpretation of history. Nevertheless, it is obviously true that Calvinist theology has had its role to play in the development of Western thought, including science (but certainly not Calvinism alone, and not even Calvinism moreso than other strands). The myth that the Bible and Protestant theology produced western science is as bigoted, shallow, wrongheaded and self-serving as the contrary, free-thought myth, that the normative relation between Christianity and science has been one of constant conflict]

How things go wrong and get right again

This whole scheme of things goes horribly wrong, when the Creature/Creator distinction is ignored (the Calvinist revision of the Roman Catholic idea of Nature/Grace). When the mechanics of creation are identified with the movements of God, instead of distinguished from one another, this transgression is answered with a devastating penalty. Theology and science become legislative over one another: a conflict between the two fields of knowledge wrestling for jurisdiction. The transgression can occur from either side, either from theology or from science, and the resulting conflict will be exactly the same in either case. It is the penalty of idolatry.

The casualties of these periods of warfare are very real, and painfully remembered. But, this state of warfare is not normal. On the other hand, it may not be possible that the conflicts could have been avoided. At least, they cannot be avoided by the Calvinist, who believes that the tendency to make idols is never completely overcome. The way to survive the wars of idolatry, is to learn how to repent, and this is not easy for the Calvinist to do. It is hard to tell the difference between God and an idol, once the heart has been tricked into making the two seem to be the same thing. But it's in anticipation of hard cases such as this, that confidence in the mercy of God is so important to him. Otherwise, knowledge of his own capacity for self-deception would leave him without a reasonable hope.

Creationism defined

Notes on the problem of defining creationism.

• Modern Physics and Ancient Faith , 2003, Stephen M. Barr, ISBN 0-268-03471-0
• Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective , 1999, Ed.: David N. Livingsone, D.G. Hart, Mark A. Noll, ISBN 0-19-511557-0
• Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism, 1997, Joel A. Carpenter, ISBN 0-19-505790-2
• The Creationists , 1992, Ronald L. Numbers, ISBN 0-520-08393-8

Is Creationism a hypothesis?

• Matters extrinsic to science, intrinsic to creationism

Is Creationism a doctrine?

• Matters extrinsic to theology, intrinsic to creationism

Creationism as apologetics

Christian believers in creation address the issue one way internally, as an issue of faith, and another way outwardly, as a matter of apologetics. It seems to me that this is crucial to understand, because those who believe that creation should be taught in the same way outwardly and inwardly are of a few specific theological stripes.

Biblicism: the Bible as data

On the one hand, there are those who believe that the right way to believe in God is as an explanation of phenomena. Against the naturalist's set of facts, the biblicist has a different set of facts to contradict him. The debate between them is over alleged facts, among which God is not accounted for as far as the naturalist is concerned, and for the source of which the Bible is not credible. "This is why you arrive at your conclusion", the biblicist says, "because you do not have all the facts. A different way of interpreting your data arises, when your limited grasp of the details is expanded into the context of a wider collection of details. Chiefly, the existence of God, which you prejudicially exclude, makes many things fall into place! Secondly, if you accepted for a fact the Biblical account of the flood, and the genealogies of ancient mankind, you would be forced to reconcile fact with fact. You reject the evidence, not because it isn't there, but because it's too hard for you to reconcile given your assumptions of what constitutes factual material."

In the pulpits of Biblicism, the meaning of creation is taught internally in the faith community in exactly the same way that it is presented outwardly to those who do not believe. The Bible is a collection of data. It is primarily an explanation of nature revealed by the divine Expert.

Modernism: the Bible discredited as data

Secondly, there are those whose historical tradition is within Biblicism, who understand the Bible to be primarily an explanation of nature, a collection of data; but, who having reasonably applied uniform criteria of validation have concluded that the Bible does not provide reliable data - far from it, it is downright mistaken at many points. Nevertheless, if this is forgiven, the Bible can be reinterpreted as a record of people's experiences of God in the past, from which we can gather insights useful in a modern context for informing our own experience of God. God does not appear in the realm of phenomena. He/she/it is noumenal, ground of all being; a limiting concept to the philosophers, standing behind the implied imperative of the moralist, but the exact opposite of "dogma" and "data". Any attempt to reconcile the Bible with data will be frustrated, for the Bible is not a reliable source of facts, but a testimony to a kind of experience. Is God the creator? "As a Christian, I acknowledge God in those Biblical terms". Do you mean that God created the world, this world? "Do not dogmatically impose past criteria of truth, in a way that obscures our modern responsibility to reinterpret the experience of God in a sense meaningful for our times".

In the pulputs of Modernism, the meaning of creation is taught internally in the same way that it is presented outwardly. Creation is discredited as a fact, but religion persists because it must, providing furniture for the comfort of human beings whose orientation to the cosmos requires accomodation to the nature of their mind - which, for convenience sake, we will call a "spiritual" dimension of personality. This is a domain separate from science, and irrelevant to it.

Orthodoxy: The Bible as revelation

My contention is that for most of the history of Christianity, until the Enlightenment, the Bible was not understood in the terms described above.

The Scriptures are believed, accepted as God's word, despite uncertainty about what they mean as touching every issue, simply on the basis that their source is God. The Bible is primarily an explanation of God, by which faith is informed. In contrast, the purpose of the Scriptures is not to provide an enlarged pool of "data" for deriving a more complete explanatory picture of natural phenomena, nor yet is it given to be understood as a record of insight into religious possibilities. It will serve one purpose for those who believe it, and it will be presented differently to those who do not.

The Modernist will almost certainly think that I'm trying to escape the implications of modern science, just as the Biblicist will think that I'm saying that the Bible isn't to be trusted in the statements that it makes about issues touching science or history; but that is not what I'm saying. In Christian parlance, which even Christians seem to be disinterested in now, I am only orthodox; and, I am not alone (which is an important reason for being orthodox).

Here's Augustine, for example:

Wherefore, when it is asked what we ought to believe in matters of religion, the answer is not to be sought in the exploration of the nature of things [rerum natura], after the manner of those whom the Greeks called "physicists."

Augustine must not have been a Bible believer, is what must be concluded by moderns, because he implies that a mastery of orthodoxy may nevertheless leave a Christian ignorant of "Physics".

Nor should we be dismayed if Christians are ignorant about the properties and the number of the basic elements of nature, or about the motion, order, and deviations of the stars, the map of the heavens, the kinds and nature of animals, plants, stones, springs, rivers, and mountains; about the divisions of space and time, about the signs of impending storms, and the myriad other things which these "physicists" have come to understand, or think they have. For even these men, gifted with such superior insight, with their ardor in study and their abundant leisure, exploring some of these matters by human conjecture and others through historical inquiry, have not yet learned everything there is to know. For that matter, many of the things they are so proud to have discovered are more often matters of opinion than of verified knowledge.

Some are telling us that these are the very things that Bible Belief dictates for the world. But, not according to Augustine. The Biblicist will likely be distracted anyway, by the statements Augustine makes about the "probable" nature of the physicist's knowledge, as though it were his point to criticize the uncertainty of natural knowledge. That is not his point. If the Christian is ignorant of things the Physicist justifiably holds as probable, then Augustine is only denying that Physicist's knowledge is proprietary to Christianity: for the Christian holds knowledge of things of which he may be certain, and concerning which the Physicist thinks, at best, only probable or cannot discover at all.

But, where is the inspired Expert of Nature view, here? Isn't the Bible a handbook of the same sort of facts that the "physicist" studies, which the Christian should master in order to assert them against the ignorant and prejudiced views of the unbelieving scientist? Obviously not according to Augustine.

For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator, who is the one and the true God. Further, the Christian believes that nothing exists save God himself and what comes from him; and he believes that God is triune, i.e., the Father, and the Son begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeding from the same Father, but one and the same Spirit of the Father and the Son.

There are things of which we are certain, and other things of which we cannot be as confident. In order to be able to say, as I have at the beginning, "I know that I do not know", I need to have this basic certainty. This is not some kind of brain puzzle. It's a matter of learning the truth about God who has acted in history, and about ourselves. So, if you ask me what I think about Genesis 1, I will honestly tell you that it seems to be saying that God created the heavens and the earth in six 24 hour days. But I do not know that this is what it is saying. I am neither certain that this is what the author meant, nor of whether the author understood as fully as he thought he did what the Holy Spirit was indicating as he was prompted to write. I have other ideas of what it might mean, which I feel free to entertain. But to believe that God did not create the space and time world, I am not free to believe. When I crossed the line into belief in Christ, the way back to doubt about creation simply dissolved like a bad dream; but when I came over, I did not enter certainty about how to understand what the Bible is saying in everything that it says. Some things I know, because God has let me know. Other things I learn little by little, by halting steps and exploration. But this doesn't mean that the things of God are divorced from facts. The idea is ridiculous for a Christian to accept: the God of the Incarnation, divorced from fact? pure gnosticism and hatred of God disguised as religion.

I think that this is how Christians have usually thought of these things. Something new happened very lately, that broke the continuum between certainty and knowledge, between the things of God, and the things of man, and decreed them divorced from one another entirely. In reaction, some have thought that the right answer is to bring certainty down into the things that we learn by investigation. Both are novel. Both are a transgression, and a kind of idolatry.