When I criticized that Ron Numbers article, I should have mentioned there were lots of other peculiar little comments that I didn’t bother to address. Jason Rosenhouse fills in the gaps. One of the things Numbers tried to argue was that creationists are pro-science because they pay lip service to science…but Jason squashes that idea.
Referring to creationists as anti-science is not meant as a description of how they see themselves. It is meant as a description of what they are. Just as the Devil can cite scripture for his purposes, so too can creationists use scientific sounding jargon in making their case. The fact remains that in both word and deed their actions drip with contempt for science and scientists. It is terribly naive for Numbers to pretend otherwise.
I haven’t read the Numbers article but I’m curious if he said they were pro-science or if he said they admired science. I’ve used that argument myself. Of course they hate science and are terrified by it, but they admire its power like all other modern people. They fight hard to convince themselves and others that their religion is true in the same way science is true. Because they believe, like all the rest of us, that something can only really be true if it’s scientifically accurate.
Creationists, in my experience, do admire ‘Science’ with a capital ‘S’, which is to the say the burnished myth of ‘Science’ as the source of ‘Truth’. Within Christianity, this trope proceeds from an early 19th century amplification and distortion by certain American Protestant sects of the ‘priesthood of the believer’, wherein every believer is deemed capable of interpreting scripture for themselves.
This should be distinguished from science with a small ‘s’, which is to say with science as it is actually practiced. I’m not sure that creationists as a whole actually hate THIS science as much as they ignore it in favor of their misunderstanding of ‘Science’. I do NOT believe that on the main they wish to make their religion ‘true’ in the same sense that science is ‘true’. They do not, for example, actually submit their deeply-cherished beliefs to the test. Instead, they routinely interpret/cherry-pick/distort scientific data in light of their preconceived notions, which is to say, the ‘Truth’ that must be true. They choose to ignore or misunderstand how science is practiced, to ignore that we do not offer ‘Truth’ with a capital ‘T’, precisely because science as practiced would force them to abandon their apologetic commitment.
Ironically, it was in reading Numbers that I first became aware of some of these subtleties. I suspect that his comments, intended to accompany a television program that I have yet to see, glossed over something like the distinction I made between ‘Science’ as myth and ‘science’ as actually practiced. I reserve judgement until I get to see the program.
Scott Hatfield
How is that a distortion? Everyone is quite capapble of reading and making a decision on what they think a text means. Seems to me these folks where on the correct track. Now I’m sure they make some mistakes but no more than anyone else who relies on another to tell them what something means.
I hink ‘priesthood of the believer’ is the only revelant way religion can actually be practiced.
This may not be a perfect term for creos’ conception of and praise for science, but “Scientism” comes close. They believe in an abstract “science” that must bend to their “Truth,” and, heedless of the evidence, they will call something like ID “science”.
They have all of the belief in science, but lack science’s skepticism, IOW. This is why they think that science is a religion (it’s not just name-calling), for they cannot imagine science to be as it in fact is, rather they think that it is some version of their own misapprehensions of Science as Truth.
Depending on the definition of “anti-science”, one might be able to say that creos/IDists are not anti-science. But of course we generally base the judgment of anti-science on results and methods, not on rhetoric, thus in the common sense of what “anti-science” means, they are anti-science.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm
“I hink ‘priesthood of the believer’ is the only revelant way religion can actually be practiced.”
I dunno…at least the Catholic Church doesn’t insist evolution is a lie
It does ignore the science of human biology: repoduction/devlopement in many ways.
They would like to own conception.
well, sure. I’m not a huge fan of the catholic church. I was just wondering if it might sometimes be better to have religion by committee than an ‘anything goes anything you want to think’ style individuated religion.
All these charlies seem to think God squirts supernatural jellygoop into cells at the Moment of Conception. At least the catholics seem to be okay with the idea that God started doing this silly thing at some undetermined point a few million years ago, because we became too un-chimplike.
Of course, it IS ratzi doing the disastrous condom thing in Africa. Hmm.
I suspect the confusion on whether or not the Creationists are pro-science results from common public confusion on exactly what science is. To many people, science is nothing more or less than what you do when you draw inferences from experiences. Take a homeopathic pill: if you get better, then you have performed a test. That’s science. Pray to Jesus. If something happens which seems to be a response, that’s scientific too. Make up your own mind. Try it for yourself and see.
Science, which consists of highly developed methods for avoiding self-deception, is confused with rank empiricism. Thus, the Creationists are of course pro-science. So are the New Agers. Religious truths can be proven by their experiences. My local paper had a letter to the editor once in which the writer stated that Paul had proven Christianity true “scientifically” — he saw Jesus with his own eyes while on the road to Damascus. Science will always show truth. Praise the Lord.
What they are against is the nit-picky, pettifogging insistence on demonstrating everything to a high level of certainty against critics and alternate theories — having to provide a mechanism, experimental replicability, ontological conservatism, theoretical productivity, predictive success, et. No, they’ve done the science well enough. We’re just looking for an excuse.
good grief. Neither do all who subscribe to the ‘priesthood of the believer’. In fact the majority of such people that I know don’t. And I know more than a few Catholic creationists.
Your missing the point, it’s about not needing a hierarchy to connect to God. And why would it be better to have an authoritarian brand of religion when one can decide for themselves? What if you disagree with this religion aren’t you already being a ‘want you think’ cafeteria believer anyway.
And it’s not an anything goes type of religion. It’s making up your mind for yourself what a particualr item means.
Creationist, IDers and their ilk aren’t interested in science. They’re interested in scienceiness.
Chance wonders in what sense the ‘priesthood of the believer’ has been distorted. I don’t want to bore (or worse, irritate) readers of this blog with theology, but (gulp) here goes, if only because I want to demonstrate why I am skeptical that the author of ‘The Creationists’ (Ronald Numbers) is in some way undercutting the cause of science as a reader of this thread might infer.
Chance, it should be obvious that one can uncouple the notion of a privileged caste of priests from the idea that believers should read the Bible for themselves. That is, after all, the Catholic Church’s teaching today, if not in the past.
However, the theological legitimacy of that ‘priesthood’ is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the pretzel logic pursued by many Protestant sects in the 19th century here in America, which goes something like this:
1) The Bible is a complex text spanning many authors, languages and cultures, which seemingly would require considerable education and thought to properly interpret…
2) However, believers, regardless of their intellect/education, must (rather than ‘should’) act as their own “priests” and interpret the Bible for themselves….
3) Since God is presumed not to be malicious, then He must have inspired the Bible in such a way that all believers should be able to interpret it for themselves without any special education…
4) Therefore, a straightforward, literal reading of the text should provide the intended meaning in virtually every case! (Corollary: since it is presumed to have a straightforward, literal meaning, then it can be applied by anyone in a very literal way toward every sort of item experienced, including the most mundane)
Now, this is not to imply that Christians of all stripes both before and after 19th Century America haven’t interpreted scripture literally, often leading to conflicts wtih data from the natural world. But it is true that this fundamentalism, a uniquely American theological movement, owes much of its intellectual character to the requirement (which historically is not the orthodox position) that reality be squared with contemporary literal understandings of the Bible.
Seventh-Day Adventism, from this perspective, is just one of many American sects that exaggerate this or that aspect of scripture as interpreted literally. SDA led George McCready Price to develop the ‘Flood geology’ that inspired the late Henry Morris, usually considered the ‘godfather’ of ‘creation science’ in America.
Now, as a former Adventist himself, Ron Numbers is uniquely qualified to speak to the influence of early fundamentalists on both SDA and the ‘creation science’ movement. My memory of his books is that he lays a lot of this out in much greater detail than I have set down here. Indeed, Numbers’ reputation is based upon the scholarship with which he establishes the historical context of creationism in this country. It would be very strange for someone to stake out this position, write books about it and then essentially cast it into doubt with a few throwaway remarks to promote a TV broadcast.
Therefore, I suspect that Numbers is being taken out of context, with his views on different senses of the word ‘science’ experiencing an unfortunate conflation, in the same way that a Biblical literalist might falsely conflate that literalism with orthodoxy.
Scott Hatfield
Scott as you might expect I find you thinking wrong headed. The problem I have with it is it presumes knowledge on the part of a particular type of priest who really doesn’t have that knowledge at all but is rather just following what essentially amounts to orders.
It also seriously undermines Protestant scholarship that has in many cases shown Catholic thought to be rather specious. And yet the Catholic dogma persists and the priests still teach it.
The problem with this is it presumes the priests from the get go had more intellect/education than the congregation. I doubt this has ever been true. Once people could read it for themselves they began to see the holes in the ‘priests’ case. None of what you wrote is an argument against people reading and being their own priests.
And it simply doesn’t include the education all religions provide their members. Heck, even the majority of catholic priests lack a grounding in most matters bible. They know catholic doctrine well but I see more scholarship on the other side.
A perfectly reasonable belief. In fact the opposite of this, that a certain class of betters should lord over the meek seems very anti-Christian.
This is a big of a fallacy. There are many, many denominations that embrace the ‘priesthood of the believer’ and not many would agree with what you just typed here.
If a man can’t read and make up his own mind in regards to this issue. Teach him to read. Don’t tell him what he should believe.
But this is a digression.
“Your missing the point, it’s about not needing a hierarchy to connect to God. And why would it be better to have an authoritarian brand of religion when one can decide for themselves?”
Well, if you’re going to have all these very many people stuck with very silly ways of knowing things, at least you could in principle hope to give them ‘faith’ in evolution, whatever that means. If you have a hierarchy in place and IF you can browbeat the people at the top into not being retarded about science, maybe they’ll help pass some science on. At the very least you can say “even the pope says the world isn’t 6000 years old” or something.
Have all those people reading the book directly on the other hand, and at least a reasonable fraction are going to do the ‘sane’ thing – decide that the book means what it manifestly seems to. It really takes a fair bit of effort to work Jesus and the dying-for-sins bit into the evolutionary framework. It also takes a certain genius to come up with the sort of rationalization you need to make it all hold together. Your average Joe isn’t smart enough to be that stupid.
Good points D.
But the truth is the Catholics get credit on the evolution bit as they should but the other side of the coin is that many, many Protestant groups who believe in the ‘priesthood of the believer’ do as well.
It’s not one or the other. And dare I argue that the ‘priesthood of the believer’ has given us a much more reasoned religion for the most part than the other and it’s myriad of superstitions.
I think that Intelligent Designers using the banner of science is par for the course for modern reactionaries. They realize that they have lost the battle of ideas with the liberal secular humanists, and are trying to steal legitimacy by stealing the language used by those secular humanists.
“Science” to many people sounds so enlightened, and “religion” sounds so backwards. That’s a sign that the secularists have won. So the creationists try to turn the tables by claiming that evolution is non-scientific, or even (the biggest insult of all) a kind of religious faith.
A similar dynamic has happened in the political arena. The liberal idea of civil rights for all has succeeded so well that opponents of (for example) affirmative action claim to be motivated by civil rights concerns. They try to turn the tables by claiming that affirmative action itself is racist. (And they’ve actually been successful here.)
Similarly, opponents of anti-poverty programs claim that cutting taxes and cutting government services and letting the minimum wage stagnate for decades is actually helping the poor and the unemployed.
Chance:The problem with this is it presumes the priests from the get go had more intellect/education than the congregation. I doubt this has ever been true.
Intellect? Probably not. Education? Yes, definitely, for most of Europe from the end of the Roman era until the Renaissance. The Church had a near-monopoly on literacy during that time.
By the way, the end-point of the priesthood of the believer is someone deciding that Mark 16:18 is prescriptive. Not everyone will go that far, mind you, but eventually what had been minor and obscure scripture becomes the linchpin of somebody’s faith and practice.
jackd: Beware of misprints, too. Anyone remember that (I think) Red Dwarf episode where Lister said his family were big on something like “hop (sic) and charity”?
Fair enough. But again this doesn’t mitigate against reading it and choosing for oneself. I still don’t see an argument for the alternative.
I disagree here. These same types of things happen in the authoritarian branches. From wafers becoming flesh, magic underwear, eternal virgins and on and on. just because someone chooses to play with snakes doens’t make them any wierder than the above. At least one can see the snake.
I just think people give a free pass to the accepted wierdness of authoritarian denominations while laughing at the admitted wierdness of the others when in truth neither has anything on the other.
I’ll add in my own two cents here. Literacy doesn’t mean you will learn anything. The modern Catholics priests are “literate” as well, but are also hamstringed by their own church in as much that the only way they can “research” their own theology is to either buy a book from outside scholars or 1) Get permission to look, 2) Have the exact title of the book they want to look in, and 3) be able to tell the people running the Vatican Library which chapter(s) the information is in. This is a bit like having someone tell you that you can’t even sit down at the computer and start typing search terms into Google, unless they 1) tell you you can use it, 2) already know the web page you need and 3) know the exact URL. In other words, you can’t use Google at all. You can’t walk into the Vatican Library and tell them, “I want all information on X.”, either. There is no index, no dewy decimal system, not search system and even the people running the library, if caught actually reading anything, are immediately replaced. All they are allowed to know is the book titles and on which shelf they are located. This stretches back for maybe 50% of the life of the Church? Part of the time prior to that it wasn’t uncommon for them to collect works and burn them, due to those works supposedly distracting from the Bible. I am sure the IDiots at many schools in the US can write letters, read the Bible and pamplets quite well, but that doesn’t stop them from walking out on anything that they distrust or only buying books written by right wing appologists. Put simply, you can teach a chimp to read quite a bit too, but don’t expect them to conduct science experiments. Organized religion, in the sense that the Catholics, and virtually every sect since, are organized, have as a fundimental tenent the idea that their Bible trumps everything else. Reading too much outside that or questioning it, without eventually coming to the conclusing that the Bible is right and the thing that led you to question is wrong, is *bad* according to such organizations. And you have to remember, for most of church history there was no genetics, no evolution, no thermodynamics or heliocentrism, etc. Almost nothing in the world was either understood well enough to cause a contradiction or fell outside of accepted interpretations. It is ludicrous to try to claim that early pre-Protestant Christians wouldn’t have had as much or *worse* of a reaction to nearly everything we know to be true today, or that the immediate reaction to any of it from the church wouldn’t have been to circle the wagons and start pressuring every king they had under their belts to massacre all the evil people coming to them with these strange anti-God ideas.
The truth is, the religious today are able to break free of the intransigent, self deluded and inflexible sects for two reasons only. First, their militant branches and what power over nobility to raise more forces had its back broken, and second, people discovered that without armed soldiers and kings, the churches where left with things, like excommunication, which only have teeth for those that believe in them in the first place. They claim power they lost ages ago, and because they have none, they can’t force people to abide by some limited, simplistic and strict interpretation any more.
Now, for my next trick I would like to quote something written using words that only have “no” direct English translation and multiple connetations… Well, OK, I don’t know near enough languages to do that, but the point stands. The Bible was written in more than a half dozen, with in some cases “critical” words being ones where the Latin version was a) no where near and exact match and b) had additional connetations that didn’t fit the original intent. And now we have it in English, after going through probably 5-6 “more” languages in some cases. The idea that some God made sure it was accurate, when it doesn’t even correctly match the original meanings of words in Coptic or Hebrew in some places, is totally rediculous. What? Instead of telling the Hebrews, “Use this word and make is mean *specifically* this…”, he just let them use any old word and didn’t get around to “fixing” it until modern English came around? lol Give me a break. As someone pointed out, most modern priests probably know “less” about it that the ones from 2000 years ago. Worse, I probably wouldn’t need to even start with my toes when counting the number of people fully versed in the history. And worse still, most of them are, as near as I can tell, borderline Agnostic at best, or outright disbelievers. And that is among those “recognized” as experts, not the ones that have, on their own, read much of the same material and reached similar conclusions.
Churches like the Catholics survive mostly intact by intentionally limiting what their priests learn, not by allowing them to learn anything they want, then allowing questioning of their Dogma based on that knowledge.
Chance:
I’m not Catholic myself so I feel no need to defend their theology. As a matter of fact, however, prior to the Reformation the vast majority of Catholics WERE illiterate. If you implied otherwise, Chance, you’re misinformed. Similarly, the Catholic Church does not discourage believers from reading the Bible for themselves. I’ve got a copy of the Chicago diocese’s catechism from 1958 (!) and while I find a lot of its dogma amusing or repulsive, I note with approval that the catechism repeatedly urges Catholic believers to read the Bible for themselves. So, again, if anyone was under the impression that it is still a teaching of the Church to discourage Bible study among the laity, they were mistaken.
Similarly, I’m a Methodist and I know darn well many Christians don’t subscribe to the distortion I described.
However, creationism DOES have its roots in Christianity, particularly fundamentalism, which does at its core presume a literal understanding of the text because that would be the most accessible understanding to the majority of its members.
At any rate, the purpose of my post was to provide some possible context for Numbers’ remarks, not to get into some theological dispute. For the record, folks, Numbers isn’t a believer, so if anyone imagined that by quibbling with my post they were somehow carrying water for a shared theological point of view, well….rotsa ruck.
SH
I ws talking about intellect not literacy, as mentioned in my prior post I said don’t tell a man what to believe teach him to read.
But this is kinda done with a wink. If one comes to a different conclusion than the dogma it won’t be welcome.
As for the rest we agree more than we don’t so i think this is a good a place as any to end the thread.
And Kagehi, some good points in all of that.