I was just reading a recent news story about how a creationist organization used a combination of deception and litigation to extort $110,000 from the California Science Center and its insurers—a reminder once again that creationism isn’t just a harmless delusion. There is one thing we can all agree with the creationists on, though. Evolutionary biology is far too sophisticated and elegant to have been invented by the crude and barbaric deity imagined by the writers of Genesis.
One of the drawbacks of inventing a God out of your own imagination is that the resulting God can’t do anything that you couldn’t imagine. Unless you know something about evolution, and unless you understand what makes it such an awesome system for generating innovative and well-adapted life forms, you can’t really invent a Creator who would be willing and able to successfully design and build a working evolutionary system. The primitive sheep and goat herders of ancient Palestine, naturally enough, knew nothing about evolution, so inevitably the gods they invented were similarly incapable of inventing such a thing.
A real Creator, on the other hand, would have to understand quite a lot about biological, chemical, and physical principles, in order to create them. Assuming He wanted do do a perfect job, or even just a pretty good one, He’d be sure to see the advantages of equipping His creatures with the ability to adapt and innovate, especially in a changing and hostile environment. This gives us pretty good test of whether or not a particular religion’s God is a real God or merely a myth invented by primitive and superstitious men: since evolution was absent from the imaginations of primitive men, imaginary gods will also be incapable of creating it, whereas a real God would do a better job.
In a way, therefore, creationists are among the greatest supporters of skepticism. They’re an interesting phenomenon, because it’s the strongest believers who assure us most emphatically that any world created by Jehovah would necessarily fail to contain anything as advanced as evolution. This isn’t atheists trying to denigrate God by insisting He is limited to a primitive and ignorant worldview. This is the believers themselves who, based on their Biblical knowledge and faith, insist that their God is fundamentally incompatible with a successfully engineered evolutionary system.
The big debate, of course, is over whether or not the world itself is as evolution-challenged as the primitive imaginations of early believers would suggest. But there’s no debate over Jehovah’s inability to create evolution. The creationists themselves, based on their knowledge of the Bible and their faith in God, are absolutely certain that there is no possibility that God, on His own, could have imagined evolution and successfully implemented it in His creation. Otherwise, how could they be so convinced He didn’t, when there’s enough material evidence to convince both atheists and believers that evolution is true?
This, of course, brings theistic evolutionists into the picture, but theistic evolution is outside the point I’m trying to make. The point is that creationism gives us a Biblical God who is more consistent with what a mythical deity would be than He is with what a real God would be. The more strongly committed you are to the idea of God as described in the Bible, the more certain you are that the Bible must be true, the less you are willing to believe that God could be more than what primitive men could imagine Him as being. Ergo, the God of the Bible is a myth.
This isn’t a particularly rigorous disproof of God, but I think it’s a telling one, because there’s a direct correlation between how strongly you believe in the Bible and how strong the consistency is between the characteristics of God and the characteristics of a man-made myth. And when a thing is less likely to be true the more strongly you believe in it, that’s a bad sign.
I’m glad you pointed out how CSC was extorted by the Creationists. I couldn’t believe that story. Why should CSC have given them any money. It’s just mind blowing. We need to get to the point where everyone understands that creationism is not science.
Good line.
When people make up their own explanations for whatever phenomena, they usually come up with something analogous to stuff from their everyday lives. Thus God as sort of a giant sheepherding Grandpa with all the magical powers you wish you had, getting mad at the same stuff you do.
I take an opposite view, actually. If I were designing life, I’d find a way better system than evolution. Evolution is cruel, clumsy, wasteful, and unimaginably slow. Adaptation over time is an awesome thing, especially in a variable environment, so I’d want some kind of system for change and speciation. But, completely random mutations? Prioritizing the gene over the organism or the species? Takes thousands of years to get anything done? The primary selection mechanism is death? I’d be ashamed to put my name on it.
Evolution has an abstract beauty and elegance as a scientific theory. As the intentional product of an intelligent mind, it’s either a horror show or a display of crippling incompetence. It’s entirely inconsistent with any prominent definition of God.
Sure, but even so, if you think evolution is bad, the Genesis version of “intelligent design” is even worse. Granted, change over millions of years is slow, but it beats static creation, which cannot improve no matter how long you give it. All the cruelty, clumsiness, and death is still there (as the fossil record shows), and there’s no built-in remedy for it. Extinction still happens, but there’s no way to recover from it, nor any way to expand into new ecological niches when environmental changes occur.
Maybe you’re right, maybe from our modern and scientifically-enlightened perspective we could imagine an even more elegant system than evolution (since we are, after all, intelligent designers). But even if we could, conservative Christian creationism is still way too far on the wrong end of the spectrum to be anything more than a myth.
Oh, totally. I mean, in theory, an omniscient, omnipotent God could design life so perfectly that it was already ideally adapted for its ecological niche and wouldn’t need to evolve. It’s just that this clearly isn’t what happened. Also, it turns out that environmental conditions change over time, so something that was ideally adapted 100 million years ago would probably need to change to survive now.
Robert B @ # 3: If I were designing life, I’d find a way better system than evolution. Evolution is cruel, clumsy, wasteful, and unimaginably slow.
Quite so. Down with Darwin – Lamarck for God!
The god of “The primitive sheep and goat herders of ancient Palestine” was probably more like Baal or the YHWH of the Enochic stories.
The understanding of the God of the Torah, and subsequent HB literature, is more likely from scribal and priestly circles, and influenced by Zoroastrian ideas. Still pre-scientific, so ignorant in comparison to modern knowledge, but not for the time.
In reality, many Christians love the idea of ‘old sources’ for the Hebrew Bible, because somehow they correlate antiquity with historicity, so these ‘stories’ were compiled in some sort of Solomonic Enlightenment. But more likely, the majority of this material was redacted pretty late BCE, and tells us *only* about the social circles and conflicts it was compiled in rather than any ancient history.
Robert B.:
Strictly speaking, the primary selection filter is the ability or inability to reproduce. But yeah, being dead is usually a pretty insurmountable barrier to successful reproduction.
Duncan Deacon:
Nice argument, but I can imagine a possible creationist comeback, to whit:
“Of course God could have used evolution, but he tells us in the bible that he used special creation instead.”
Of course, that requires that the creationist concede that evolution is a workable mechanism for the creation of the diversity and complexity of life, which most of them are exceedingly loathe to do, but I can imagine a small minority (Kurt Wise, perhaps, given that he seems to accept that the scientific evidence supports evolution but still rejects it as a matter of faith) being able to give this reply.
Also, I think that creationists of a millennialist bent could consistently take issue with:
If the universe is a short-term project, just a few thousand years old and destined to be wound up in the relatively near future when Jesus returns to usher in a spiffy new age of love and genocide, then why would God bother with a creative mechanism that yields most of its results only in the much longer term?
On the other hand, I suppose you could also cite the “End Times” mentality as further evidence for the parochial, unimaginative, divinity-limiting approach that you’re highlighting.
At a certain point that argument begins to backfire (like the argument that the devil buried all the fossils in order to deceive people). Creationists do say exactly that, but it really bugs them to have to concede that God deliberately created an inferior creation for no particularly good reason. From such seeds future ex-Christians are grown. 😉