Opaque Lucidity

More On Before

I've received a number of e-mails over the past few days about my "Giant Dunce Cap" post. Instead of responding to everyone individually, I will do so here. I would ask that you go back, read my post, then read Travis' excellent refutation in the comments section. His post is the longest and most detailed of the messages I received, so my response is tailored to some of his points.

While I will admit that the title of my post was not exactly in good taste, I do not back away from the fact that I believe people who believe Genesis literally are suffering from a certain delusion. Why do I have a problem with fundamentalists? Oh, now there's a story...

It all started when I was 18 and in boot camp. Many of the men there were devout Christians (none of us was familiar with the term 'fundamentalist' then), as much as I was a devout Catholic. To them, however, Catholicism was NOT Christianity; it was a sort of cult or something more akin to Mormonism. These guys, to a man, knew so little about church history that they didn't even know how the term "Protestant" came into being. To them, Christianity had existed since the time of Christ and Catholicism was some offshoot of that. They did not want to believe, regardless of historical fact, that Catholicism WAS Christianity for the first 1500 years after the birth of Christ. This is why the term "Catholic" was not in common use; it was synonymous with Christianity. The form of the Mass, as it is celebrated today, can be traced back to the Council of Nicene in the fourth century AD.

I realize that not everyone who considers himself a fundamentalist is ignorant. I have close friends who fall into that category and a few of them are brilliant. However, I can not buy into the supposition that anyone who believes in a 6K year old Earth arrives at that conclusion by any other means than faith in the book of Genesis as historical fact. It can be argued that the science behind a New Earth started with a conclusion and worked backwards. For example, consider the theory needed to explain why the light from stars more than 6,000 light-years away reaches our planet today. Russell Humphreys wrote a book entitled "Starlight and Time" in which he argues that gravitational time compression (my term) is responsible. In essence, the universe is billions of years old, but at one time in the past a day on Earth was like billions of years to distant parts of the universe. Another theory holds that the speed of light has changed over the course of time. If this is so, then our instruments today would be able to measure the slowdown because it would have to be exponential in nature. Another idea is that the light we see today was already on the way the instant the universe was created. If this is true, then God must have created a false record of events which never occurred so as to explain things like background radiation.

Another issue I have with a young Earth is the book of Genesis itself. It is believed that the book was Genesis was in existence by the fifth century BC. Fragments of the book exist from the first century AD and the Vatican has at least two complete copies from the fourth century. Some of the texts are in Hebrew, but more are in Greek. The Greek texts, although written within five hundred years of one another, show variations in wording, enough to effect the meaning of some phrases. Assuming this is true, let's look at how many times the Bible has been translated in the last five centuries. If the Bible is divinely inspired, then were all the translations as well? Once again, you have to go solely on faith; there is no way to know the mind of God and how He wants the Bible interpreted.

As a general rule, I agree with most fundamentalists politically. Their stance on pro-life issues, something that is very important to me and how I vote, is almost identical to mine. But I draw the line at science because there ARE ways to observe erosion and animal adaptation. We can recreate the conditions necessary for the creation of fossils. While evolution is not a cold, hard fact of biology, there is more evidence of it than, say, evidence that man and dinosaurs lived at the same time.

I believe part of the problem is the growing divide between fundamentalists and the scientific community. I can't speak for anyone, but it seems as if many believe acceptance of some scientific theories with regard to the creation of the universe today might lead to an acceptance of something like genetic manipulation or cloning tomorrow. It doesn't have to be that way. There was a time when the Catholic Church persecuted men like Galileo for their theories. However, it later embraced the science of the Jesuits in fields like astronomy even though they ran counter to traditional church teachings. In 1996, Pope John Paul II repeated the message of Pope Pius XII in saying that a belief in evolution is not inimical to Christianity. This conclusion was not arrived at lightly, but was the result of years of prayer and study at the highest levels of the Church. I think Protestant faiths could learn a lot by this example.