Confessing Evangelical

Talking of creation and evolution - and if you'd watched the video linked in my previous post, you'd know we were ;-) - Conrad Gempf has started his Easter break with a couple of interesting posts (1 | 2) responding to Rowan Williams' recent comments on creationism.

Gempf opens with a confession of his misgivings about the situation in which he finds himself:

Here goes all my street cred. Here's an issue where the Archbishop of Canterbury and Jason Clark are in agreement and who do I side with? George W. Bush. Humiliation.

Gempf observes that people are rejecting Intelligent Design or Creationism as fit topics even to mention in school science lessons "because it ain't scientific. It doesn't come out of the scientific model and thus isn't a scientific theory". As Gempf scathingly notes:

If you think that, you need to hand in your Mr Science badge.

He argues that excluding the very possibility of intelligent intervention from outside the universe is like "block[ing] the building of radio telescopes because only optical telescopes are scientific":

Similarly, if you think that you can only investigate the origin of the universe by investigating through closed-loop cause and effect mechanics, then you have already decided something you have no grounds for deciding: you've decided that the origin of the universe happened in a closed-loop cause and effect mechanical way.

Now the jury's still out: that may be true. But it ain't scientific to decide it just because so much other stuff turned out that way, just because it's more reasonable. That's not what science should be; that's fashion.

While the Genesis narratives do "allow for an awful lot of stuff to happen in a closed-loop cause and effect mechanical way", there are a number of points at which a definite intervention by God is asserted: "Let there be light", "Let us make man":

If it's rational to believe in a God, then it's rational to believe in a God who really did create some stuff ex nihilo. And if it's possible that it really happened that way, then to define science in such a way that rules out mentally exploring what that might have been like is simply unscientific.

In Gempf's second post, he turns his attention to Dr Williams' comment that "It's not as if the writer of Genesis or whatever sat down and said, `Well, how am I going to explain all this...I know: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.'". As Gempf exclaims:

Excuse me? How the oak does he know that the author didn't do that? But, no, let's say that we know somehow mysteriously that that's not what the human author set out to do. What does that prove? ... If you believe in Scripture, you already believe that the writers of Scripture were doing something other, something more, than they intended to do.

Then there's the ABC's assertion that "Whatever the biblical account of creation is, it's not a theory alongside theories... If creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories, I think there's just been a jarring of categories. It's not what it's about". Gempf dismisses this argument outright:

And there I think we can not grant even the premise. Because it's very possible that that is exactly what the biblical account of creation was: a creation story/theory in reply to and to do better than other Ancient Near Eastern creation stories/theories.

If you put the author in a society that taught that it all just kinda happened, would he not raise his voice in opposition to that point of view? Put the author in a media conference with Richard Dawkins and would he wind up saying "Yeah, ok, teach your children that one. We're not really talking about the same thing, there's been a jarring of categories; no problem."?? C'mon.