Creationism Is not a Monolith
Jun 7th, 2009 by Micah Tillman | 9 Comments |
But, then again, nothing is. Evidently. At least, the only time you ever hear the word used, it is to deny that something is it.
Anyway.
Got into an interesting discussion with some fellow congregants today about creationism. Evidently, some of them had met someone who didn’t believe dinosaurs actually existed.
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I, eavesdropping, thought they were saying that all creationists were like that. So I joined the discussion, to spread my wealth of knowledge.
And, evidently, what I had to say was news to everybody. So, if it was news to my well-educated fellow congregants, it might be news to you too.
So, here goes.
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There are four variants of creationism:
- Deistic Evolutionism (God created the universe 13.7 billion years ago, and then let things evolve from there on their own)
- Theistic Evolutionism (God created the universe 13.7 billion years ago, and guided the evolutionary process from there on)
- Progressive Creationism (God created the universe 13.7 billion years ago, and then everything in it over a long space of time after that)
- Young-Earth Creationism (God created the universe and everything in it over the course of roughly six days, roughly 10,000 years ago)
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Deistic Evolutionism (I may be the only one who uses the term) is indistinguishable from the usual atheistic approach. It just provides an explanation for how everything got started (which the atheistic approach can’t).
Whether this should be called a variant of “creationism” is debatable.
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Theistic Evolutionism is the majority (if not unanimous) opinion amongst liberal/progressive Christians. It tries to expand God’s role as Creator, by making God at least a guide to the process of (inorganic/organic) evolution.
Furthermore, it tries to take advantage of the explanatory power of the God Hypothesis to account for the purposiveness and efficiency of various individual developments, as well as of the overall process.
It is also debatable whether this should be called a variant of “creationism.”
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Progressive Creationism (also known as “Day-Age” or “Old Earth” Creationism) is the minority opinion amongst conservative Christians.
It tries to provide a scientific theory of the development of the universe and life, without appealing to the logically- and scientifically-problematic assumption of evolution in the biological realm. The evidence, it argues, is in favor of an “old” earth and universe, but against evolution. In fact, the evidence is in favor of a creative hand being at work over the ages.
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Young-Earth Creationism is the majority opinion amongst conservative Christians. It holds that Genesis 1 should be read as an historical account of God’s creative activity, and that scientific theories can be/have been developed to explain the extra-biblical evidence in a way that is consistent with such a reading of Genesis 1.
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The Progressive Creationists are best represented by Reasons to Believe.
The Young-Earth Creationists are best represented by Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research.
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Now, given what my fellow congregants said, there is at least one person who holds to the omphalos (“Apparent Age”) view.
If there are others, they are in the vast minority.
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For any of you coming from more evolutionist-type-backgrounds who are interested in looking into the more strongly creationist variants of creationism, I would strongly suggest starting your explorations of creationism with Reasons to Believe. I have been pretty much uniformly impressed by them, their podcasts, and their books.
For more of my thoughts on the issue of creationism, see this post-series.
What would you call someone who is coming to believe that God created the world in a literal six days (somewhere more than 10,000 years ago but less than the countless billions the atheistic evolutionists require) and that he created a limited number of species which have since experienced micro-evolution, resulting in the varied types of animals we see today (i.e. canines)?
That would fall under the Young-Earth model. (Answers in Genesis et al.)
All four creationist positions are fine with what we call “micro-evolution” (i.e., changes through breeding/mutation that could lead at most to division of a species into two or more sub-species).
Where they differ is on the issue of “macro-evolution” (i.e., changes through breeding/mutation that lead members of one species to give rise not to members of the same species or of a subspecies, but to members of a different species altogether). Positions 1 and 2 believe in it, positions 3 and 4 don’t.
If anyone cares, I happen to suspect you can separate the idea that God created everything in six literal days from the idea that this happened a given number of years ago. Therefore, to believe in six literal days of creation doesn’t necessarily tie you to the “Young-Earth” position on the age of the earth.
(The Progressive Creationists, for instance, tend to believe in a literal Adam and Eve, in a literal Garden of Eden, even though they would place this much further back in time [50,000 to 100,000 years] than the Young-Earth model would.)
Therefore, if it turned out that God created everything in six literal days, but that He did so 100,000 years ago, rather than 10,000 years ago, I wouldn’t be surprised. I believe in the disjunct of positions 3 and 4. One or the other, or some combination of the two, is true, IMO.
Hi Micah,
Good post. Personally I’m closest to the “theistic evolution” position, but I think the “theistic” part of the title is a little silly. We don’t talk about “theistic general relativity” or “theistic quantum electrodynamics”. Both of these theories had a lot of opposition from Evangelcals when they came out, but they have matured to the point that Evangelicals generally no longer try to demonize them.
By the way, your link to your older “this-post-series” is mangled–it gives the dreaded “404″ error if you try to use it.
– Vance
Thanks Vance! I fixed the link. (Dunno what happened there, but I messed it up somehow :-)
That’s a very interesting analogy with relativity. Perhaps the difference is the idea of ongoing intervention or influence?
I still want to talk about the horror of redefining words (like “marriage”), but that’s in another of your links, and I probably won’t get to that this week.
Meanwhile, I reject the Omphalos view as a cousin of Solipsism. If God created the earth with apparent age ca. 4004 BC (at 10 a.m. on a brisk October day, the 28th to be specific), then why not with apparent age yesterday, with satellites flying through the air, and memories of humans who think they launched the satellites. (So my college sparring partner in religious debate was wont to tell me.) But if that, then maybe even my memories of those humans are themselves apparent.
“My name is Gene, and I am a conservative Christian.”
“Hi, Gene.”
“But I don’t think that Adam had a belly button. Adam was a unique individual in a wonderful story. In that story, many details are underdetermined. About his person, we can only speculate: 5′? brown-skinned? large nose prefiguring his Hebrew descendants? We are a part of the same story.”
“Heretic! Is the story true, according to the correspondence theory of truth?”
“Yes, in the multiverse.”
“???”
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Many conservative Christians believe in theistic evolution. One interesting solution to the day-age theory is found in Jewish physicist Gerald Schroeder’s book, Genesis and the Big Bang. There he does the math to show that 6 days of creation precisely map to the 13.5 billion years of creation using the time dilation equation of special relativity. He did a good job of presenting it here at Messiah College a few years ago. I see that he has a Google video on that.
Hi Micah,
With regards to your suggestion of why we have “theistic evolution”, but not “theistic general relativity”:
“Perhaps the difference is the idea of ongoing intervention or influence?”
I think you are right, people want to stick the “theistic” in front because they are not comfortable with God being completely out of the equation (like your “deistic evolutionist” category). Unfortunately, I think the notion of God being actively involved in the evolutionary process usually results in a God-in-the-Gaps sort of approach that rolls out God to explain current areas of weakness in evolutionary theory (e.g., biogenesis, origins of photosynthesis, speciation). This approach will always be on the defensive.
We are comfortable with God not being actively involved the wave function of electrons around a nucleus, or even micro-evolution with bacteria developing resistance to an antibiotic, but straight capital “E” Evolution is perceived as being inherently atheistic. This perception is championed by some scientists / philosophers that try to use the ascendancy of evolution as another death of God argument. It is true that evolution claims to take away the last tangible miracle of God in our lives – the wonders of life, but do we really expect God to allow himself to be provable via science?
I guess I’m going to have to resort to calling myself a Christian who happens to think the theory of evolution is the best explanation of how life developed–not very catchy. For me God’s involvement in the general case of nature is neither benign neglect (deist) or active mechanistic nudging (theistic) – I guess special revelation is the closest I can come to—God acts in this world to make a difference in our lives…
– Vance
Dr. Chase–
Given that I am the founder of the Self-Appointed Language Critics Club (SALCC), I look forward to your thoughts on the horror of redefining words.
(I wonder if we should put an apostrophe in our club’s name, and if so, where. I’ll have to talk to the Board at our next meeting.)
I really like the point about apparent age and solipsism.
To avoid that, you’d have to say it was a one-time deal, I guess.
Or, maybe you could say that God wanted to start the beginning “in the middle,” with everything in full swing. But we’re in the middle (i.e., we’re don’t appear to be the first humans), so we don’t have to worry about whether we’re actually at the beginning.
I don’t know about that, though. My tea hasn’t fully kicked in yet.
I never considered the multiverse solution to the question. *laughs* Could you even say, perhaps, that (a) there is some world of which the “story” is true, (b) that world the real world, and thus (c) if it isn’t true or our world, then ours is a possible world?
I haven’t kept up with possible worlds theory, though I just learned about “centered worlds” from listening to Oxford’s John Locke Lecture Series through iTunes. (The name “David Lewis” got thrown around a lot, while Husserl and Heidegger were mentioned once each, and postmodernism not at all! Tillman needs to reeducate himself on analytic philosophy, it seems!)
I’m really looking forward to watching that video. Thanks!
Vance–
A sound analysis, it seems to me. In response to it, I find myself asking myself:
(1) Is there a difference between gaps that are possibly-fillable by further research, and gaps that are logically-impossible to fill? (One thinks of Behe and “irreducible complexity,” for instance.)
(2) Might there be gaps which are possibly-fillable, but never will be because God, in fact, is the one “standing in the gap”?
(3) Are there any “evidences for God” that aren’t at heart instances of the God-of-the-Gaps approach? If not, then wouldn’t we just have to drop the whole “trying to prove God’s existence” project?
(4) Would people be trying to prove God’s existence if they actually experienced God? (I’ve never tried to prove my wife’s existence.) Therefore, isn’t the fact that people try to prove God’s existence evidence of the fact that their relationships with God are in pretty sad shape?
But that’s just me talking out loud to myself.
I personally find the problems with evolutionary theory more compelling than the evidence for it, and find the apparent design of things more experientially compelling than both. Therefore, I feel most comfortable in positions 3 and 4, than 1 and 2. But it’s nice to encounter Christians across the spectrum, since actuality proves possibility. It is possible to find oneself in positions that look more like 1, say, and still believe in God, if people like yourself exist.
Thanks for the thoughts!
Ah, leave it to a philosopher immediately to think of the multiverse in terms of possible worlds. I was thinking of the multiverse as a physicist would. (And not particularly being critical of it, today, since it happens to be in among physicists.) The whole multiverse is the real world, some of it beyond our perceptual ability because of limitations of the light cone and because of branching causal networks. The whole multiverse is all there is of creation outside of God. I certainly wasn’t putting “story” in quotation marks. (Other than the quotation marks that I just used that I needed to index your use of the word rather than the concept.)
Oh my! I haven’t thought about David Lewis since the 1970s when I brought his clear writings to my side to help me to understand the less clear writings of Richard Montague. Montague attempted to create a mathematical logic interpretation of natural language. (Especially in his paper “The Proper Treatment of Quantification”–PTQ to its friends.) Montague’s writings were dense. Montague died before he could finish his research project, killed by someone who didn’t like homosexuals, by the way. I see by a quick glance at Wikipedia that David Lewis has been deceased for 9 years and that he proposed a theory of “modal realism,” about which I knew nothing until a week ago.
I just returned from a Christian math conference where Walter Schultz defended a philos. of maths. that nuances Geoffrey Hellman’s modal structuralism. Schultz calls it “theistic modal structuralism,” but in fact he thinks it to be not just theistic but uniquely Christian. Unfortunately, he is only reading the first 3 pages of his 40-page paper, so I can’t comment on whether he succeeds. But it did help me to see what a modal realism might be in contrast with a modal structuralism.
I think that philosophy has fads, and fads have fans. “Fans” being a contraction of “fanatics.”
I haven’t tried to be coherent here, just stream of consciousness.
Hi Micah,
Offering some opinions regarding the questions you were asking yourself:
1. Non-fillable gaps? The initiation of the big bang comes to mind, but since time didn’t exist before it, we can’t really call it a gap…
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in spite of his position on God-in-the Gaps said: “The light per se of the creation, the light which lay formless over the formless darkness, is bound to form, to law, to the fixed, to number; but it remains in God, it remains God’s creation, and never itself becomes calculable number.” Not an unreasonable suggestion of a non-fillable gap in 1933, but less than 15 years later the uncaused light was given a number (http://meditations-on-an-eyeball.blogspot.com/2007/06/god-as-stop-gap.html)
Scientists have come up with compelling responses to Behe’s “irreducible complexity” –by finding in nature simpler (reduced) versions of his proof pieces (e.g., bacterial flagellum, and clotting sequences). I predict the rest of his career will be spent lecturing to audiences not familiar with molecular biology.
2. Potentially fillable gaps that don’t get resolved? … Physicists continue to grapple with general relativity and quantum mechanics not playing well together, but I doubt that problem will remain unresolved forever.
3. Other evidences of God? People point to the Scriptures as evidence for God, but that is about all that comes to mind. I’m convinced that God is intent on staying hidden, so I have no enthusiasm for projects of this sort.
4. Proving God’s existence. I like your point. People want to prove they are right though, I don’t expect that attribute of human nature to change soon.
– Vance