Creationism

The Bible Is the Inerrant Word of God

Creationism is one doctrine of fundamentalist religion. It is based upon the belief—and hence the assertion—that the Bible is the word of God revealed to humankind through a number of human conveyors (writers) under divine inspiration.

In fundamentalist religions, Scriptures are thought to be completely without error, and become the absolute authority for all beliefs and the standards for moral behavior. They also lead those who believe in their validity as the inerrant messages from God to assert that the Creator is providential by nature, i.e., good and sustaining, and that the laws of the natural world, while in the normal course of events are immutable, are subject to change (either temporarily or permanently) at the will of the Creator who first set them in operation. Orthodoxy and conservatism seem to be natural out-growths of religions of a revealed nature.

There is nothing new about creationism. It is as old as our Judeo Christian-Islamic traditions themselves, and can be found in other religious traditions. The doctrine is the foundation for the cosmology that goes with the Old Testament version of creation and, as such, was part of Christian church dogma for centuries. Galileo risked being burned at the stake for contradicting the Old Testament version of creation, and many progressive thinkers from his time forward incurred the wrath of the Roman Catholic Church for similarly questioning dogmas and/or making assertions contrary to them. The medieval Inquisitors were indefatigable, arbiters of orthodoxy for the Church at the time when the Church not only had the role of spiritual leader, but also that of religious policeman and could enforce its dicta with the full force of law, and did so.

If you had lived in the European Middle Ages, the largest portion of what constituted your cosmic view of the world, including the causality and creation of the universe, would come from your religion. This also would be so for many scholars, writers, intellectuals, etc. of your day. You and they, as well as your friends and family, would all simply accept what, from time immemorial, had been accepted as truth. You would accept that this truth imparted by the Scriptures contained a prescription for government (one God in heaven and one monarch on Earth), and a system of personal belief that covered every facet of public and private life and intellectual activity. You would not have a thought uttered or a deed done that was not under the rubric of religion: all was part and parcel of your reality. Nor would you consider any of the doctrines of your religion oppressive or intrusive, as they were simply truth as far as you were concerned.

A problem arose only when a system of thought, developed independently of the Church, presented ideas that were contrary to the Church's dogma. By then very rich and powerful, the Roman Catholic Church, upon finding itself about to go on the defensive, used its major energies to maintain its authority at whatever the cost. Through various countries in Europe during the 12th through 17th centuries, inquisitions occurred—a relentless hounding of suspected heretics, often accompanied by tortures. Excommunication of communicants who strayed from orthodoxy—a practice of all truly fundamentalist religions—was threatened and in many instances carried out.

Consider now the organization of the Roman Empire, a structural system found in one form or another in all Western governments and religions from the Middle Ages until the 18th century. (Even today it exists in the Moslem world, as well as a quiet echoing of it in the British Monarchy.) An organizational diagram of the Empire would show God in heaven with Christ at his right hand. Beneath them would be the Emperor, Christ's Vice Gerent on Earth. The Praetorian Prefects would be shown in a box lower and off to the side—the administrators who attend to the affairs of this world, such as collecting taxes. The Patriarchs, (the Pope is the Patriarch of Rome), would be on the other side, supervising the Bishops, who in turn would be the overseers of the Priests who, in turn, would be shown as shepherds tending their human flocks, collecting the tithes, and preparing for the next world. At every step of the way and on every level of society the authority of the Emperor would find itself expressed through numerous officers of the Church and the State. When the Roman Empire fell to the Ottoman Turks, the Pope in Rome assumed the Imperial status with the same effect.

During the latter part of this period on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the colonies of Great Britain were moving toward nation status. At the same time, the intellectual climate of the Western World was giving birth to the concepts of the rights of men, individual freedom and liberty, and popular democratic government. Many religious groups sought sanctuary in this New World—as the composer Dvorak and others called it—fleeing religious persecution in England and continental Europe, or like many Quakers, escaping confiscatory tithing and the penalties associated with non-conformance. The groups were too numerous to mention, but come they did to these shores. It, therefore, should have been no surprise that, when the new nation's government was put together, a list of constraints on government called the Bill of Rights was included in the new Constitution.

This Bill of rights included the prohibition of a state religion.

This was a double-edged deal, however, for it also forbade any inhibition of the free practice of religion. Imagine: no tyranny of state imposed religion, AND freedom to practice whatever religion one pleased. Remembering that the ancient functions of religion were three in number—to provide a cosmology, prescribe for government, and prescribe for a personal belief system—it jumps off the page at us that the American Constitution withdrew a function in saying that this new nation would NOT use religion as a prescription for government. Something new under the sun! While effectively prohibiting religion as the source for a prescription for government, at the same time the Constitution reinforced the use of religion for developing a personal belief system and left open to individuals the question of developing a cosmology.

In the middle decades of the 16th century, science was making great strides in Europe, and although not so named, so was social science at a very basic level. The idea that societal situations could change for the better had been in development since the mid-sixteenth century. Then, in the mid-eighteenth century, when the ideas of the intervening two hundred years began coming together, René Descartes laid the essential groundwork for the concept of "progress" when he asserted that human reason is supreme and the laws of nature are immutable: (It is interesting to note that Descartes himself was not a modern man; he believed that he was living at the end of the life span of the Earth.)

Scientific thought, in the form of the scientific method as such, was not actually responsible for the down fall of religion as the producer of a cosmological belief system. As a matter of fact, when the issue became prominent, many of the leading scientists of the Western world were on the side of creationism and the Bible. There was one science, however, that did not intend to but actually did more than any other, challenge the Bible as the absolute and only authority for understanding the universe's creation. This was geology—the study of the Earth itself.

Backing up a bit, we need to note that, according to one episcopal study of Old Testament Scripture, creation occurred in the year 4004 B.C. Of course, the Bible does not cite this date, but an early bishop calculated it to be so and many people believed it. To those for whom the Bible was the inviolate, absolute word of God, deviations (at least not large ones) could not be tolerated. As the year 4004 B.C. doesn't have to stand the test of being Biblical, the year for the creation doesn't have to be 4004 B.C. exactly; the date merely has to conform to some system of numbering the generations of "begats" found in the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament. The first figures that came in on the age of the Earth came from the geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875), who estimated that it took some 200 million years for the oceans to get as salty as they were at that time, assuming that they started as fresh water. Next came the discovery of fossils; and the questions of "What are they?" and "Where did they come from?" followed by, "What do they mean?" and "Incidentally, how old are they?"

The 19th century saw the battle joined: the absolutism of the Bible versus the then-known data of science. The eminent French anatomist, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), who was also an ardent creationist, reasoned that, as one flood—the Biblical one—could inundate the whole world at one time and kill all but a chosen few humans and animals, there could be other such floods as well, although the Bible does not mention them. He thought that each flood would result in a stratum or two of fossils, and then there would be another creation, followed by another flood, and more potential fossils, ad infinitum. The hypothesis was called "catastrophism," and more than a few people subscribed to it. (It is to be wondered how Cuvier, who evidently studied the Scriptures and interpreted them literally, could have overlooked the Bible's report—only a few chapters after the creation story and immediately following the flood story, in Genesis 9—that God, after stopping his world-destructive flood, created the first rainbow as a pact with humans that he would never again destroy the world by water.)

Descartes' notion of the immutability of the laws of nature found expression in Francis Hutton's concept of "uniformitarianism." This notion was that things have been going on in nature more or less the same way from the beginning, e.g., moisture in clouds was becoming rain and falling to Earth because of gravity in the first days of the Earth's history as it does now. In other words, all chemical and physical reactions were the same in the beginning as at that time and, therefore, we should be able to project these processes back in time to see what happened in the beginning.

What was the result? Lyell's geology undermined the inerrantism of the Old Testament Scriptures, and Descartes' and Hutton's views undermined the concept of Providential Nature. One could wade through the evidence for and against creationism, or for and against geology, paleontology, and ultimately, evolution but the details of those arguments would be irrelevant on all sides. The fact was that religion as a branch of philosophy dealing with creation (cosmology) had been overthrown by a new cosmology that had grown out of science, that is, out of verifiable facts.

How do we come to this conclusion? Look again at the statements that started this essay. Creationism is based upon the assumption of the absolute authority of the Scriptures and Providential Nature. Science is based upon human reason and the assumption of the immutability of the laws of nature. Providential Nature, in a temporary suspension of certain natural laws, creates catastrophes, like the Biblical flood in the Book of Genesis, or conversely, provides a salvation as in the provision of food (manna) in the desert to a group of tens of thousands of slaves and their families escaping 400 years of slavery under the pharaohs of Egypt. Such suspensions of natural law in the Old Testament are said to occur as a response to immoral human behavior, as in the case of the world flood, or as a response to specific human need, as in the case of the hungry escapees. The immutable laws of nature, as understood by scientists, however, are not suspended under any circumstances; they produce all the places of Earth, including the Grand Canyon and all its fossils of creatures that once lived there, and the northern polar region and the fossils of tropical plants frozen for thousands of years beneath its icy Arctic Ocean. We can tell how old these various parts of the Earth are because the clocks that tell us—Uranium 238, Carbon14, et al—have been here from the beginning.

Although modern evolutionary thought does not depend upon Charles Darwin's concept of evolution for its validity, (having largely superseded it by working out evolution's details and processes and proceeding with more refined concepts), Darwin does deserve the credit for focusing our attention on the idea, despite the fact that a lot of serious mischief was caused by the misapplication of his erroneous thoughts. (For instance, not being aware of genetics and germinal continuity, which had not yet been discovered, Darwin thought that the blood played a great part in heredity. And because of a misunderstanding of the idea, survival of the fittest social darwinism may have been the basis for oppressive, exploitive, cut-throat capitalism, as well as the root for the thinking that led to the holocaust of Hitler's time.)

The modern techniques of genetic analysis and radioactive dating provide precise measurement of the phenomenon under examination. As DNA, the basis of modern genetics, is found in ancient fossils, it doesn't take a great leap of intuition to see the relationships of fossils to living species.

Modern genetics can be likened to the weather. In the aggregate, weather is what is happening outdoors right now. Although we do not know in precise and exact detail what is happening now, no aspect of the weather poses a mystery for meteorologists. Climate is the history of weather; using modern chemical, geological, and biological techniques, ancient climatic patterns can be analyzed. When we use genetics as an analog to the weather, then evolution is like climate: It is the history of genetics. We don't know in precise and exact detail what is happening now as DNA works through out all living things on the planet but, as in the case of weather, no part of the genetic process poses a mystery to geneticists. Modern molecular biology and modern molecular genetics, together with geology, chemistry, and physics, are providing clearer and clearer pictures of the past life of the planet.

Through the use of satellites, precise measurements of continental drift are now possible, providing explanations of the uplift of mountain ranges, the formation of undersea ridges, and the geographical isolation of plants and animals over the millions of years of Earth history. The study of nuclear physics gives insights into stellar processes and the results are providing clues for the magnificent goal of scientists, the Grand Unifying Theory of the Universe. So exact and precise are these measurements that they can be used to fashion the chronology of the first few minutes in the life of the universe.

The evidence for Earth history and evolution is so compelling that it completely dispels the validity of the cosmology suggested by creationism. Whereas God as revealed in the Scriptures is the compelling principle of creationism, genetics and evolution are the compelling principles of modern biology. To deny evolution in modern scientific cosmology is equivalent to denying God in the ancient religious cosmology. As religious cosmology makes up the greater portion of our human history, we cannot ignore it, but since modern scientific cosmology is so much more useful in understanding the operation of life on Earth and the creation of the universe, it compels our attention. Since scientific cosmology, including evolution, is based upon the supremacy of human reason and the immutable laws of nature, it is not dogma. However, it is subject to refutation as it must be to conform to the canons of scientific reason.

Apologists for creationism try to adapt the Scriptures to the discoveries of science and avow the seven days of creation as a metaphor for the longer time period of geological time. In reality, there is a simple explanation for why the Old Testament cites seven days for creation. The older, Babylonian story of the creation which predates the Bible and which certain portions of the Old Testament imitates, had creation occurring in seven days. The two accounts are identical in the order and precedence in which things are created, and in having the resting period of the creator occur on the seventh day. The two accounts differ only in the method of creation. In the Babylonian account, there is a set of gods for each day of creation; they create the same things on the same day as the Bible, but there are more gods. One must ask, "If the Bible is the word of God, is the Babylonian account the word of the gods?" Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share the same account of the creation as they all use the same Old Testament.

Creationism is a religious tenet—a tenet of faith. Fundamentalists believe that it is not subject to question once the premises of the absolute authority of Scriptures and Providential Nature are accepted. Creationism appeals to religious authority, and it has its properties as arguments by definition. With creationism there can be no appeal to independent thought as absolutism cannot be appealed. Contrarily, evolution is constantly under revision as new and better information is brought to bear. It is living and growing dynamic thought, subject to revision with new information as was Darwinism almost from the beginning. Religion, in the history of thought, is worthy of our respect as the conventional cosmology of the youth of our civilization.

It is realized that many branches of Christianity and Judaism no longer see as conflicting the Old Testament Scriptures and the concepts of evolution and immutable natural laws. These groups, for many decades now, have stated their view that Old Testament Scriptures, written by inspired humans, are still valid. They are not meant to be part of a scientific treatise on the creation, but a guide for how humans are to relate to the Creator and other humans. They realize that even the Bible's ethical teachings are evolutionary in nature, moving from the law of a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye, to the provision of areas of sanctuary for murderers from revenge seekers, to the preaching of prophets like Micah whose major message, stated as a question, was "What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" They also note that Old Testament Scriptures mention, in writings of a period later than that of the Torah, that God neither slumbers nor sleeps—that, in being of the spiritual dimension not physical, the Creator does not require sleep and rest after producing, as the Old Testament creation story depicts him.

The New Testament Scriptures of the Christian's Bible reiterate that God was the creator of the universe (although no time is given), and indicate that the immutable laws of the universe continue to operate only because the creator permits them to do so. Once in a very great while, in this thinking, when the Creator sees fit, he may suspend a law temporarily, but most Christians do not expect to see such an act in their lifetimes. The evolutionary nature of prescribed ethical behavior can be seen in the fact that the New Testament Scriptures indicate that the motives for actions are equal to the acts themselves, and that each person must be ruled by the desire to love (i.e., to seek the highest good of) others at all times. These Scriptures include the admonition that all followers of God's ways are to forego judging others, leaving all judgments to God's justice and mercy, thus relinquishing the possibility of belief in catastrophism. Some of these New Testament teachings are but restatements of Old Testament statements that were not so widely known.

Religion as a prescription of government was rejected by the proponents of the Bill of Rights. People who want government to act on behalf of religion are asking the nation to violate its basic trust to the citizens sovereign, the We the People who own this government. Religion as a personal belief system has a lot to commend it. The more denominations the better as, competitively, religious groups are much nicer to each other when there are many than when one has a monopoly of power. Plurality and separation of church and state are the answers to oppressive religion.

In the United States, popular democracy states that the authority for government is the people. The Constitution of the United States says that the government shall not establish a state religion, but that religion may be freely professed. As the government can do nothing to establish the practice of religion, religion is rightly and properly banned from the public schools and in all other government, activity. It is not a matter of individual choice.

The proscription against religion is simple and complete. The United States can in no way promote religion. The nation is NOT, as is commonly asserted, a Christian nation. A lot of Christians live in the United States and they come in many sorts, but a lot of Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, Unitarian Universalists, etc. live here as well. Saying that we are a Christian nation because a lot of Christians live here is akin to saying that we are a feminine nation because so many women live here, or a childish nation as we have so many children here.

Fundamentalist religions are evangelical. They represent a minority viewpoint. They proselyte, persuade, and recruit. They are intolerant of the views of others very often, and they lack compassion in many, many instances. (We can make this latter statement because so many of them are willing to satanize their opponents and consign to hell those with whom they disagree, although the Scriptures they say they so ardently espouse, forbid such behavior.) These people were encouraged to action in the United States by the base and crass manipulations of Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, who used and abused them in their attempts to divide the nation in order to win elections. These presidents knew full well they were espousing minority religious issues for political purposes—a political divide-and-conquer scheme. Creationism, spoken school prayer, and the abortion controversy are three of these religio-political issues. These presidents also used racism and their view of patriotism to the same end.

It was cynical to raise the expectations of minority religionists falsely for base, partisan, political issues that would divide the nation for crass political purposes and in contradiction to our national polity. Add the national debt to the political mischiefness of these presidents and we have rancor, greed, spitefulness, and sectarianism rampant in the land when we should be having more tranquility, felicity, and serenity than we have had before. These presidents produced scarcity when we should have had abundance. They produced discord by using religion for base and crass purposes when they should have promoted national harmony. should glory in their differences instead of being contentious over them. We need to put our "redeemer" presidents and the political mischief they caused behind us. We must get on with being a popular democracy that ensures domestic tranquility with liberty and justice for all, including the freedom to profess personal religious belief, including creationism.

...Ted Sudia and Audrey Dixon...

© Copyright 1993
Institute for domestic Tranquility