Learning to Read
Last week Emmanuel City Technology College was dragged into the headlines for teaching Creationism. The school was revealed as encouraging teachers to "point out the fallibility" of evolutionary theory and "wherever possible... give the alternative Biblical explanation".
The fallout was venomous. Critics lined up to cast stones at the college and the Christian lines along which it is run. The Observer noted, for example, that the belief that "the universe was created from nothing by God" and that "humanity... has been given a unique stewardship over creation" would leave parents "in little doubt of the school's fundamentalist credentials."
A more considered approach was heard from luminaries as diverse as Professor Richard Dawkins and Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, who were at pains to point out the error of the creationist position and its harmful effects on scientific education.
The irony is that the debate has nothing to do with science and everything to do with the Bible. When the similarly bitter Galilean controversy raged in the early 17th century, the Carmelite Friar Paoli Foscarini explained that the new theory was perfectly compatible with Biblical teaching if one read the Bible properly. Fifty years earlier Calvin had developed the doctrine of accommodation which recognised that in order to make himself known to us, God speaks a language we can understand.
Christians are often nervous about this idea of cultural accommodation, appreciating that it can be used to explain away or dismiss virtually anything. But it is a tradition that is as old as the Bible. The Psalmist enthusiastically sung of God having hands, eyes and wings and behaving like a father, a shepherd and a rock, perfectly aware that God was neither an anatomically correct human, a bird or an inanimate object.
Before Darwin it was not so much our science that was wrong as our exegesis. This is not to say that the Bible should become a leaf on every intellectual wind that blows: those in a position to do so need to scrutinise advances in scientific knowledge just as the much maligned Bishop Samuel Wilberforce did in his intelligent review of The Origin of Species. It is, however, to suggest that we need to become like little children, carefully and studiously learning to read.
Nick Spencer
But it does have everything to do with science, and nothing to do with the Bible. An evidence-based approach to the world, which science is, does not need Christianity or any religion to give it the green light before it may formulate hypotheses about the world. The Bible could say anything about the world, but the point is that when the evidence tells us something else, the Bible is wrong. When the Bible says something for which there is no evidence at all, it does not have any greater likelihood of being true than if that something were said by any other text or person. The standard answer to 'The Bible says' should be 'So what?'
Date:
2010-01-17 21:07:54
Author:
David Young