This is the tenth in a series of posts describing my transition from young earth creationist to theistic evolutionist. In the first post, I described how Alan Roxburgh's 5-phase description of paradigm change describes this transition well, and I have been using his framework to shape this discussion. See the introduction for a list of all the posts in this series.
This is a continuation of the previous post. In it, I described how the motivation for young earth creationism (YEC) does not come from an rigorous and thorough examination of the scientific evidence, but instead arises from a belief that the Bible plainly teaches that creation is young.
From as early as I can remember, I was taught the “fact” that the Bible, when read correctly, plainly shows how (and when) God created the universe. I was taught that Satan invented the idea that the universe is millions of years old, and anyone that accepts the idea of evolution rejects the God of the Bible.
As I said in my last post: In all my years as a YEC, I had assumed that scientists that call themselves young earth creationists were YECs because they had examined the evidence and determined that it agreed with what the Bible says. I was shocked to learn that in reality, the opposite was actually true; YEC scientists believe the evidence points to a young universe because that is what they believe the Bible teaches.
In retrospect, this seem extremely naive. I'm a little embarrassed. It seems pretty simple and obvious to me now. I guess this kind of naiveté comes from being raised in a particular way, and rarely being exposed to ideas that disagree with what one is being taught. This kind of childhood indoctrination is a significant barrier to overcome.
So, at this point I had quite a few questions to answer: Would I reject all of modern science because of what the Bible teaches? Was the evidence for an old earth more important than what the Bible teaches? How do YECs read the Bible? Is that the right way to read the Bible? Does the Bible really teach that the universe is young?
So how do young earth creationists read the Bible? It was obvious to me that a literal interpretation is important, but there is more to it than that. Answers in Genesis president & CEO Ken Ham gives us a clue:
“Let’s be honest – if one just reads God’s Word, without any outside influences whatsoever, one would never get the idea anywhere of millions of years. This idea, which contradicts Scripture, comes from outside of it.” [source]
Ham is suggesting that we read the Bible without considering anything outside the Bible. He and other YECs state that we should read the clear meaning of the Bible, taking it word-for-word, and interpret it without outside influences. They are fond of labeling their reading as the “literal, straight-forward interpretation” or as “Biblical fact” calling all others “anti-Biblical”. They openly equate a literal interpretation with the true interpretation.
This interpretation starts with the principle that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and as such, is completely free from error in every detail. The words of the Bible are treated as if they have been dictated word-for-word directly from the Holy Spirit, and as a result should be interpreted literally without any consideration for the historical context, genre, or human authors and audience.
The intent is to arrive at an interpretation that is free from outside influences and arrives at a single meaning for the text. This is a noble motive; it provides a seemingly self consistent framework for coming up with only one meaning, supposedly the meaning that the Holy Spirit intended.
Unfortunately, this fundamentalist approach makes the typical modernist assumption that one can read the Bible without subjectivity. This, of course, is completely false; Although one may attempt to rid oneself of all possible biases, we each approach the Bible from within our own cultural contexts.
To me, it seems the ultimate in foolishness to ignore the fact that these words came to us through thousands of years of history, from a people with a different language, culture, history, values, and scientific world view. It seems that the first step in understanding these ancient texts is to determine (as best as one can) the meaning intended by the original author.
Howard VanTill, in a great book called The Fourth Day, quotes this passage from Berkhof's Principles of Biblical Interpretation:
[In interpreting the Bible, one] "must place himself on the standpoint of the author, and seek to enter into his very soul, until he, as it were, lives in his life and thinks his thoughts. This means that he will have to guard carefully against the rather common mistake of transferring the author to the present day and making him speak the language of the twentieth century.”
-Berkhof, Principles of Biblical Interpretation, p.115 (originally seen in VanTill, The Fourth Day, p.18)
Young earth creationists, in applying their fundamentalist interpretation, make this very mistake. This failure to place the text in its original context results in several difficulties which arise when trying to understand the Bible as a whole.
One serious difficulty which arises from a literal interpretation is that it leaves the reader impotent to deal with the contradictions and discrepancies that exist throughout the Bible. Literalists must resort to explanations that push the limits of our credulity, and in many cases they must break their own rules, dismissing the straightforward meaning of the text in favor of a flimsy cop-out.
The greatest of these difficulties, however, is that a literal interpretation completely ignores the historical and human character of biblical revelation. As I discussed in a previous post, I was quickly beginning to see the nature of God's interaction with His creation as primarily that of delegation. God seems to act primarily in the world through his creation. This is especially true for the Bible, which was produced by over 40 different human authors in a huge range of cultures, languages and geographical locations, and with an equally wide range of genres and purposes.
To ignore the historical context of the Bible is to ignore the method through which God communicated these words, and any interpretation which does not take the original author's intended meaning into account cannot be a correct interpretation. Let me try to make this clear: My ascent out of atheism relied heavily on reshaping my view of God's action in creation and in my own life. Any interpretation which refuses to incorporate this view of God's involvement in history (and in the Bible) is completely invalid and utterly useless in helping me understand the God in which I have placed my faith.
So, it had become obvious to me that young earth creationism was wrong for three main reasons: First, its evidence for a young age of the earth had proven completely inadequate. Second, because of the independent evidence from widely disparate scientific disciplines, it required a sweeping rejection of the entirety of modern science. Finally, (and most importantly) the refusal to consider the contexts of the author when interpreting the Bible made it impotent to deal with issues arising from God's pervasive use of humanity in producing scripture.
At this point, the idea that Genesis might not necessarily be a historical narrative (while still containing divinely inspired truth) had been introduced to me several times. Now that I understood how and why YECs interpret the Bible and how this interpretation fails, I was ready to take a closer look at the cultural and literary aspects of the creation story.
I'll close this post with the words of three Christians (all from vastly different time periods) whose comments are applicable to this post:
“In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”
-Augustine, in De Genesi ad litteram, 415AD. [source]
“Men today do not, perhaps, burn the Bible, nor does the Roman Catholic Church any longer put it on the Index, as it once did. But men destroy it in the form of exegesis: they destroy it in the way they deal with it. They destroy it by not reading it as written in normal, literary form, by ignoring its historical-grammatical exegesis, by changing the Bible's own perspective of itself as propositional revelation in space and time, in history.”
-Francis Schaeffer, in Death in the City pp. 77 1969. [source]
"The tragedy of young-earth creationism is that it takes a relatively recent and extreme view of Genesis, applies to it an unjustified scientific gloss, and then asks sincere and well-meaning seekers to swallow this whole, despite the massive discordance with decades of scientific evidence from multiple disciplines. Is it any wonder that many sadly turn away from faith concluding that they cannot believe in a God who asks for an abandonment of logic and reason?”
-Francis S. Collins, in Faith and the Human Genome, 2002. [source]
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