posted
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."
So said Pastor Ray Mummert of the ongoing CrEvo debate in Dover, PA.
This is something I have noticed in the CrEvo debate that greatly disturbs me. The creationists are fond of quoting verses from the Bible to support their position like:
"Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ." Colossians 2:8, KJV
"For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness." 1 Corinthians 3:19
"And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." 1 Corinthians 2:4-5, KJV
"For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe." 1 Corinthians 1:19-21, KJV
"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teaches, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables." 2 Timothy 4:3-4, KJV
I have also heard phrases along the lines of:
"You may have science, but it is always changing. I have the Holy Word of God, and it is today as it was when it was first written, untampered by men."
"Science is so often wrong -- I would rather have faith that one thing is always true than have to constantly change my views."
Now, whether or not these verses and are correctly interpreted and the nature of the quotes themselves are true is irrelevant.
I want to know why this rampant anti-intellectualism exists in the YEC community. I would like to know why the YECs distrust science and 'worldy knowledge' so much.
Yes, I will even stake that the Bible is unchanged. Why not? Solid as a rock, right? But since when did unchanging mean infallible?
If it was unchanging and correct, that would be one thing. But unchanging and wrong in aspects...well, why is that something to brag about?
This matter is not unique to the CrEvo debate, either.
Just last week, millions of Americans felt that they were more qualified to pass a medical diagnosis on Terri Schiavo than the doctors who had examined her, because they had faith and beliefs of some sort or the other.
The doctors might say she was as good as dead, but the public had seen the movies and she was obviously just a bit brain-damaged. I mean, look, she smiled!
Where does this stem from?
I'm not suggesting we trust science and take it as infallible.
I am attempting to recognize a growing trend -- a revival, if you will -- in distrust and plain old dismissal of expert opinions that disagree with our own, for a multitude of reasons.
It is rather disconcerting, especially from a historical perspective. A rather definitive link can be drawn from this situation to the Islamic empire at the end of the Abbasid Dynasty, when the leaders declared that humans were to frail to question the will of Allah and the stunning Arab scientific and philosophical progress came to a screeching halt and switched gears to 'reverse'.
The Arabian nations still have not recovered from this damage; I have met native citizens of the Islamic Theocracies that believe that 'dinosaurs' are Western conspiracies and that the Sun goes around the Earth -- because that is what they believe their Holy Book says.
My point is not to say the Bible, or any other Holy Book is wrong. It is simply that so many of the people in these cases use Holy Books as support, that the example must be brought up.
Posts: 515 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
I think you've actually answered your own question within your post. The creationist community generally, and the Young Earthers in particular, distrust science and "worldly widsom" because they believe that their scriptures tell them that they must do so.
You also must take into consideration that there is a long history of anti-intellectualism in the United States that encompasses much more than just the creationists or biblical literalists. I mean, one whole side of my family, at least in my mother's generation, basically distrusts and dislikes anyone who has any more than a high school education.
The question that bothers me more is this: Why do so many participants on both sides of the evolution/creationism debate seem moved to constantly characterize the other side as being either stupid or evil? The whole debate is actually of great interest to me as someone who is very interested in the anthropology and sociology of belief systems, so I've read quite a lot on both sides of the controversy. And, time after time, I've run into creationists who are absolutely positive that all creationists are engaged in a conspiracy to spread the ideas of godless evolutionary theory as well as proponents of evolutionary theory who seem to think that the only reason that anyone accepts creationism is that they are congenitally stupid. Well, while I come down on the side of evolutionary theory personally - it just makes more sense to me, besides the fact that way more than the preponderance of the evidence tilts in that direction as far as I can see - I know some very bright people who see the evidence differently than I do and so accept some form of creationism. I don't agree with them, but I'm not willing to call them stupid, either, because they demonstrably are not stupid. They've put a lot of time and thought into their positions and have come to their conclusions honestly, not just because they think their religious beliefs require them to do so. I also know some positively non-religious folks who don't believe in evolutionary theory for a minute. It isn't just a matter of religion.
I'm also interested in the folks who seem to think that just because they happen to believe something that makes it, be definition, the truth. Or perhaps I should say, The Truth. I'm reading an interesting book right now, Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths: A Critical Inquiry, by Vine Deloria, Jr. Mr. Deloria is a Native American of some note, having written a number of other books, including Custer Died For Your Sins and God Is Red. According to the author's blurb on the flyleaf of the book I'm reading now, he was once "named on of the eleven greatest religious thinkers of the twentieth century" by Time magazine.
As far as I can see right now (and I'm only about a hundred pages into the book at the moment), Mr. Deloria is convinced that neither evolutionary theory or creationism are accurate versions of how the world works and how we came to be here. In fact, he seems to think that the two theories are essentially the same thing, only different in that one uses secular, scientific terminology and the other uses religious terminology. I don't quite get that, but that's neither here nor there, I suppose. But he does advocate very strongly that the paradigm of uniformitarianism must be replaced by a return to catastrophism. And in this advocacy, he has resorted in his text to quoting scientists and then ridiculing them as unreliable but then taking the position that the reader should just take his word that what he believes is true because he believes it to be true. He's spent a lot of time in the book making a case that science is not nearly as objective as it claims to be (something that is probably true to an extent but not nearly to the extent that he believes), all the while expecting his readers to overlook the fact that he has yet, in nearly one hundred pages, shown that the beliefs he is advocating are anything more than his subjective opinion. The point is, he expects everyone else to believe what he does, just because he believes it. And I run into a lot of that in reading about the evolution/creationsim controversy. And it isn't all on the side of the creationists.
Posts: 2454 | Registered: Jan 2003
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