Just to clarify,
following my last post about religion and science: I believe in evolution as a
fact, and natural selection as the most likely theory to explain its process. I
prefer the label “
Mendelian” to “Darwinian” as the guy who worked out how
genetics operated doesn’t get enough respect.
To follow that up, I
find the continued battle between supporters of Intelligent Design and
Darwinians intensely tedious. As a theatre critic, I can only see bad drama.
The most interesting work in this area comes from scientists who are also
Christians, trying to explain natural selection to other Christians. If we can
all pretend that this is what I am doing, I’ll feel less guilty about adding to
the pile of bad writing on the topic.
My instinct is to side
with the atheists-who-support-natural-selection. They share my worldview. Equally,
my instinct is against Christian fundamentalists. Not only do they maintain a
stubborn resistance to the inevitable rise of science as an ontological
arbiter, they go out of their way to read The Bible in a manner that is
contrary to The Bible’s purpose.
I thought I would
start off with a little gift to the atheist debater. The next time the whole Genesis versus Natural Selection row
begins, don’t simply throw alternative scripture at them. It doesn’t work:
their belief is in God as Author, not Darwin as Philosopher.
Instead, deconstruct
the ground of Creationism. Without Genesis,
the argument falls apart.
First of all, read the
damn thing. Read right up until Adam and Eve get thrown out of Eden. And here’s
the first surprise: there are two creation myths.
The early books of the
Old Testament (from this point inwards, to be called The Torah) are a
compilation. That’s obvious enough – look at the different styles, and
diversity of books. But within
Genesis,
there has been editing. Two distinct traditions (
P and J, theory fans) have
been put together. They had different creation myths.
It gets better. The
two myths have very different agenda. One is the classic: God makes the world,
has a snooze. The other gets into that Adam’n’Eve reverse burlesque. The first
is closer to the fundamentalist’s idea (“this is how the world was made,
sunshine. Now can we talk about something more important, like how much of your
income belongs to the church?”). The second is an attempt to understand why the
world is a bit crap.
It’s nice and easy to
use this titbit as a diamond cut. You know: “if The Bible is literally true,
which one of these versions is the right one?”
Resist that
temptation, oh my brethren. Claims about truth are what make this argument so
complicated.
Being a
post-modernist, I have no qualms about my next trick. In the magic of
contemporary dance, there’s a strategy employed by the best choreographers. The
first ten minutes or so – the introduction – are used to give the audience a
taste of what the work is going to be all about.
This technique is more
common than just the magic of contemporary dance. Novelists do it: here’s the
hero, or anti-hero. Playwrights do it (Rob Drummond sets up the tone and drama
of Quiz Show in the first scene, by
having a generic quiz show go subtly wrong).
The most well known
use of this technique is foreshadowing, or Chekov’s Gun. That’s a slightly more
obvious version. And doesn’t classical composition have something called a
Prelude, to sketch out the musical territory?
I might be using the
wrong word, but I think that this part of The Bible is programmatic. In the
first chapters, the reader is being introduced to the best way to read and
understand the whole narrative. In other words, the conscious choice by the
editors to include two versions of creation attempts to encourage the reader to
interpret.
Approaching both myths
seriously presents a series of choices. If they are both true, then the
question becomes: what does truth mean? If the stories are competing, then the
only solution is for the readers to work it out for themselves.
This isn’t just an
abdication of responsibility on the part of the editors – throwing their hands
up in despair at which version is true and deciding to let the reader decide.
It is a deliberate insistence that truth is not simple, and that only through
dialogue (in this case, between two stories) can truth emerge.
The creation myths of Genesis are a bit like a caveat at the
start of The Bible saying: WORK IT OUT FOR YOURSELF. INTERPRET, THINK,
CONSIDER.
A couple of hundred
years later, another bunch of editors go the same route. Only this time, they
put in four versions of the same story.
It’s just a bit much
to insist that The Bible is literally true when its editors recognised the
problems of the unreliable narrator over two thousand years before the modern
literary critic.
(Although Ovid did say
the same thing about Odysseus…)
I don’t see this trick
as really undermining scriptural authority. It just encourages literalists to
show the text the respect it deserves.
