David MacMillan: Understanding Creationism VIII

David MacMillan continues his series of posts on being a former young-earth creationist.  This part is personal history about his change of heart and, reading it, it gives me hope about others.  He writes:

All the while, I still maintained that even if evolution could work, it wasn’t fact, because the planet wasn’t old enough. Granted, I could see how the planet could be billions of years old – flood geology was wearing a little thin – but I was still constrained by religious belief to a 6,000-year-old universe. I think I really did know the truth at this point, deep down, but I didn’t feel like I could admit it.

Then I started learning about the history of creationism, and that’s where things started to crack. I learned that the age of the earth had never been a dividing issue in Christianity, not until Morris and Whitcomb plagiarized flood geology from the Seventh Day Adventists in the 1960s. I realized that not even the church fathers saw Genesis 1 as speaking of six actual days. Martin Luther was one of the only six-day creationists in church history, and he also believed geocentrism for the same reasons, so that wasn’t very encouraging. I began to see how there might be problems with the “historical-grammatical” approach to interpreting Genesis. If the creationist leaders were so far wrong about science, why should I expect their treatment of the Bible to be reliable?

This is an area that most young earth creationists don't know much about: the history of their own views.    Whitcomb and Morris' book is a near retread of the work of George MacReady Price and the views derive in large part from the works of Ellen White, the Seventh Day Adventist that lived in the late 1800s.  As Joshua Moritz wrote:

White and her Seventh Day Adventist followers harbored no doubts about the correct reading of the early chapters of Genesis because in a trancelike vision White was ‘‘carried back to the creation’’ by God himself, ‘‘and was shown that the first week, in which God performed the work of creation in six [24 hour] days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week.’’ White likewise saw that during Noah’s flood, God created all the various geological layers of sediment and fossils by burying the organic debris and causing ‘‘a powerful wind to pass over the Earth...in some instances carrying away the tops of mountains like mighty avalanches...burying the dead bodies with trees, stones, and earth.’’ Thus, from the divine dreams of Ellen White young earth creationism was born and, ironically, it was conceived in stark opposition to the reigning biblical literalism of the day.

MacMillan closes with some very important tactics to remember, the first one at which I fail miserably.  He writes that we should be patient, but I find that hard to do as I encounter stubborn refusal on the part of creationists to address the evidence with any degree of honesty or integrity (for example, the recent posts on David Menton's human origins AiG article).

He writes that we are to know our enemy and that is not the person we are speaking with but the creationist viewpoint, itself.  This is also true...to a point.  The problem here (and it relates to the previous paragraph) is that even if you can show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the YEC viewpoint is full of holes, the same viewpoint continues to be pressed by its purveyors (e.g. Ken Ham, John Morris). 

If I teach that all cats are red and you show me, categorically, that, no, some cats are red, some cats are blue and some cats are green, and yet I continue to teach that all cats are red, at some point, it becomes a lie.  It doesn't matter how sincere I am or that I tie it to a personal religious belief.  It is still a lie.  David Menton, when faced with mountains of evidence that did not fit his worldview, had two options: to adjust his worldview, or to try to twist the evidence to say things that it did not. He chose the latter. That is part-and-parcel of young earth creationism.

The Meaning of “Biblical Literalism”

Todd Wood points us to an article by Joshua Moritz on The Search For Adam Revisited: Evolution, Biblical Literalism, and the Question of Human Uniqueness that shows up in the journal Theology and Science. It appears to be open-access and I had no trouble securing a copy. Although the focus is on the idea of how to interpret the creation narratives in a literal, yet textually faithful fashion, Moritz, in quite concise language, points out the glaring origin of modern young-earth creationism and how different it was from the understanding of biblical literalism of the day:

Even more recently, such as at the time of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial (1925), the actual face of biblical literalism was quite different than one might expect—especially if one has in mind young earth creationism with its insistence upon a 10,000 year old recently-created earth and its focus on ‘‘flood geology’’. Around the time of the Scopes trial in the early twentieth century, there is no record of any biblical literalists within normative Christianity who interpreted the Bible as claiming a recent creation in six 24-hour days or that Noah’s flood had anything to do with how one should interpret the record of global stratigraphy. Indeed, literalists at that time saw Noah’s flood as a local phenomenon and ‘‘even the most literalistic Bible believers accepted the antiquity of life on Earth as revealed in the paleontological record.’’ The one exception to this general rule was the Seventh Day Adventists—a sect of Millerites who, after 1844 (and disillusioned by Christ’s failure to return), regrouped under the leadership and supernatural visions of the teenage prophetess Ellen G. White—a charismatic young woman ‘‘whose pronouncements Adventists placed on par with the Bible’’. White and her Seventh Day Adventist followers harbored no doubts about the correct reading of the early chapters of Genesis because in a trancelike vision White was ‘‘carried back to the creation’’ by God himself, ‘‘and was shown that the first week, in which God performed the work of creation in six [24 hour] days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week.’’ White likewise saw that during Noah’s flood, God created all the various geological layers of sediment and fossils by burying the organic debris and causing ‘‘a powerful wind to pass over the Earth...in some instances carrying away the tops of mountains like mighty avalanches...burying the dead bodies with trees, stones, and earth.’’ Thus, from the divine dreams of Ellen White young earth creationism was born and, ironically, it was conceived in stark opposition to the reigning biblical literalism of the day.

Most young earth creationists that I know are, I believe, unaware of this information. How, or if it would change their Christian walk is unclear. It is instructive to read Ron Numbers' The Creationists to see how dominant the Adventists were in the formation of modern-day young earth creationism.

The article is a good expose on how the scriptures would read if we really did read them literally, which is quite differently than our modern understanding of them is. He reiterates the position that is held by Paul Marston and others, that there is absolutely nothing in the passages that indicates that Adam and Eve are the only people around during the account in Genesis.

Although the paper is largely devoid of scientific observations, he ends by reminding those of us that tend to think too highly of the scientific endeavor that it is not the be all and end all that we think that it is:

While the doctrine of creation demands that Christians take science seriously, a large part of taking science seriously is to understand that science, as such, is not (and never has been) in the business of making unalterable pronouncements about the nature of reality. Because there is so much terrain in both science and theology that remains unexplored we must press onward in faith, sobered by a good dose of epistemic humility, and taking care in the meantime to not greatly exaggerate the reports of Adam’s death.

That said, if all the evidence points in one direction, how long do we ignore it?

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