[asa] How not to criticise creationists

Sorry for a long post but here are two recent reviews of an anti-creationist book, one eulogising it in the RNCSE and one in Anvil and Anglican journal. The two are slightly different!

Michael

The Creationist Debate: The Encounter Between the Bible and the Historical Mind
by Arthur McCalla
London: T&T Clark International, 2006. 288 pages

Reviewed by J David Pleins

Originally published in RNCSE 27 (1-2): 42-43. The version on the web might differ slightly from the print publication.
It is a curious war story.

Where other authors might see in the centuries from Galileo to Phillip Johnson a war between religion and science, McCalla carefully recounts the real battle: the struggle between reactionary religion and a belief that seeks understanding.

The first volleys were thrown in the Renaissance and the Reformation. McCalla identifies the challenge of Galileo's day as not simply the telescope, but the shift in consciousness away from seeing nature and the Bible as realms of symbol toward the Reformation's "plain sense" view of Scripture and the world. This is McCalla's thesis in a nutshell: Mechanical-mindedness about nature, when coupled with historical-mindedness about the Bible, necessitates a new view of both God and Nature.

Despite the hankering to unlock nature's mechanics, creationists have not been able to give up their addiction to "purposiveness". John Ray saw purposes in the wind and male nipples. It was jarring to move away from such purposiveness to a world view dominated by extinction, imperfection, and lack of providential planning. Major steps were taken when Hooke and Steno unlocked the fossils: "Mother Nature had become a woman with a past," McCalla writes. It would be a while before the earth's deep time would be comprehended. In the meantime, Thomas Burnet constructed a fiery engine for the earth's geology within the confines of a biblical chronology. Christian historical consciousness worked overtime on the biblical clock, even as global explorers encountered civilizations with calendars far more ancient than the Bible's.

The historical bug bit hard in the Age of Exploration as Erasmus, Valla, Cappel, Simon, La Peyrère, and a host of others began to look at the Bible as any other document, one marred by textual corruptions and betraying an ancient mentality. Removing Moses from the pantheon of biblical authors brought a new consciousness about the foundations of Christianity itself. As the Bible became a local map of the Jewish landscape, its usefulness for navigating history's broad waters was diminished forever. With Matthew Tindal, Thomas Paine, and the rise of Deism in the 18th century, it would not take much to treat the Bible as just one more fanciful collection of ancient anecdotes. As deep time came into view with the unwrapping of the primary and secondary rocks, biblical frames were put to further tests. Then, as Cuvier sequenced the animal strata, the biblical picture was undone completely. Entire worlds long forgotten were discovered in the Book of Nature that gleaned neither a jot nor a tittle in sacred scripture. The Bible had no frame for this new historical horizon. The cosmic shakeup wrenched hearts like Tennyson's (McCalla gives us ample extracts) and stirred John Ruskin to exclaim, "If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses."

Charles Darwin, of course, was a creature of his time, searching for design and worrying about the Bible's frame. He was also a creature of his time in following a new tributary, letting science and not the Bible dictate what he discovered. Neither male nipples,the misery of the world, nor the basis of human morality was designed by God, as far as Darwin could tell.

The conservative Christian reaction to all this was predictable, if not instructive. They were bothered by the science but perhaps more so by the moral wilderness created by evolutionary secularism. Liberal Christians, for their part, went so far as to re-invent the Fall of Man and the concept of the eternal soul, weathering the theological storm for a time. But by the end of the 19th century, as even the human mind was seen by many to be a product of evolution, theology of the liberal sort could not constrain science's profound shift in human historical consciousness.

The 20th century became one long century of conservative Christian "special pleading". To be sure, fundamentalists were not entirely literalistic about Genesis 1, at least at the start. Key figures like Bernard Ramm insisted that while Darwin's mechanism was wrong, still the Bible and a kind of evolution could be blended. Yet louder voices like those of Billy Sunday, Dwight Moody, William Bell Riley, and Gresham Machen prevailed against any belief in evolution. The Scopes trial was one skirmish on this anti-evolutionary revivalist battlefield. For a time, conservative Christians continued to accept an old fossil earth alongside their anti-evolutionism, but the plain reading of Genesis 1 encouraged Whit-comb and Morris in the 1960s to champion literalism with a vengeance. The rise of "intelligent design" has reinforced this anti-Darwinian tendency, as in the name of microbiology and information theory, its proponents seek to revive Paley's design view while clashing swords with secular scientists and liberal religionists.

McCalla's is a well-told tale. Invariably, however, even in such a comprehensive book there will be chapters left to tell. As biblical "higher criticism" developed in the 19th century, archaeological adventurers discovered Assyrian and Babylonian creation myths that paralleled the Bible, underscoring the mythic character of Genesis. Liberal Christians have found something powerful in religion's mythic side and this story deserves telling. Also, given the press coverage of William Ryan and Walter Pitman's book Noah's Flood, I am surprised that McCalla overlooks more recent attempts to put Genesis on a secularized historical basis. The Bible's legends may have compelling historical origins worth considering. Lastly, the world of modern Christian evolutionists goes untouched, omitting discussion of such figures as Teilhard de Chardin, John Polkinghorne, John Haught, Arthur Peacocke, and Kenneth Miller. There are religionists who remain committed to combining Darwin and religious belief in a non-rejectionist fashion. Their story deserves to be heard alongside "intelligent design" reactionism.

These are really minor criticisms. McCalla's book is well worth adding to your collection. No one has brought all the key players under one roof and done so this crisply.

Author's Address
J David Pleins
Department of Religious Studies
Santa Clara University
Santa Clara CA 95053
jpleins@scu.edu

J David Pleins is Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University and the author of When the Great Abyss Opened (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Arthur McCalla

The Creationist Debate:The Encounter between the ninle and the Modern Mind
Continuum International, 2006, xiv 222pp

£19.99 ISBN 0 8264 8002 0

Here is a book that seems to be full of promise as it puts the whole Creationist Debate into its historical context, and considers the theological, scientific and philosophical issues surrounding the question of evolution, which has come to the fore in recent years. It is a clear and well-written book and describes the history of science, especially of geology and its vast ages, evolution and human antiquity, all in historical context and leads up to the rise of biblical criticism and Fundamentalism. The book concludes with two chapters on Creationism. The concept of the book is excellent as it seeks to understand Creationism by considering it in the history of Christian thought. This is something I have been striving to do since I first came across Creationism in 1971, when no one in Britain had heard of it!

            However, the volume is so badly flawed that is simply misleading. The flaws are both of interpretation and factuality, and the latter are too numerous to mention. He claims (p139) that Gosse wrote Omphalos in 1857 to counter The Origin of Species written in 1859 - a clear case of pro-chronism! His grasp of science is very poor as is shown by his confusion on radiometric age-dating claiming it began with Carbon 14 dating in 1950 whereas it began with Uranium-Lead in 1907 (p137). He consistently does not understand things geological and has read good historians of geology like Rudwick in a very slapdash way. He is simply inaccurate when he describes the work of the early geologists Smith, Sedgwick, Buckland, Lyell and Murchison, as he is on Darwin himself.

            For interpretation he reckons that the essence of a liberal Christian is to accept geological time and its implications for Genesis (p83, 118). He is blissfully unaware that Adam Sedgwick was an Evangelical (as conservative as Francis Close) and Buckland and Conybeare were definitely not Broad Church. Many of the early British geologists were Evangelical - an inconvenient fact. Despite reading Livingstone's Darwin's Forgotten Defenders(Eerdmans 1987) he can't cope with evangelicals accepting Darwin's evolution, as some (H.B.Tristram) did from 1858 (note the date) and later Warfield to mention only two. His chapters on The Bible in America and Fundamentalism are unhelpful and prejudicial.

            When it comes to Young Earth Creationism it is clear that he has never read The Genesis Flood (published in 1961) as he claims that it is like Gosse's Prochronism in Omphalos. McCalla understands "creationism" no better than the history of science and fails to grasp either the origin or beliefs of Intelligent Design.

            The whole book gives the impression of a rushed and superficial job by one who knows little science and only slightly more about the history of Christian thought, but who knows how to write a marketable book. Here lies the rub; the reaction to creationism in all its forms has created a demand for "explanation". Far too often, these are superficial works based on little research. How this book got published by a reputable publisher I do not know, but anti-creationsim like creationism finds a ready market. It might help his RAE but not the reader.

Michael Roberts,

Vicar of Cockerham, Glasson and Winmarleigh, (Blackburn)

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Received on Fri Dec 21 17:17:06 2007