11/12/2011

Yes, Virginia, God Did Make Fossils (at least once)

One of the main problems that Peter Enns has with Al Mohler's position relates to the earth's "appearance of age."

Now, I don't want to come down on any side of how old the earth is or any of that. But there is at least one aspect to Enns's critique of Mohler that deserves some comment. Mohler says that the reason scientists believe in an old earth is because all the evidence points in that direction, and that's fine. In other words, scientists are making accurate measurements of the earth's age. God very recently made an earth that "passes all the tests" that you might apply to an earth to find out how old it is. Enns says that the problem with this position is that the earth doesn't just have the appearance of age, it has the appearance of having gone through the aging process. The earth, Enns writes, "shows evidence of millions upon millions upon millions of years of evolution, judging by the wealth of evidence at hand (e.g., fossils, geological records, human genome)." And if we chalk all this up to to God's having created it to look like it went through those processes, it raises the question "Why would God do such a thing? Why would he load the cosmos with all this evidence and then expect his intelligent creatures, made in his image, to stop short of drawing some conclusions from that evidence?"

In short, Enns encourages Mohler to move away from "ad hoc" arguments. Mohler has a commitment to a young earth based on his understanding of the scriptures, and he is therefore walling off part of his intellectual life from real evidence. He can create an ad hoc argument against any evidence that might purport to be proof of human evolution, an ancient earth, etc. Enns's solution is to go back to the scriptures and see if perhaps there is another way to understand them so that the various parts of human science (biblical hermeneutics, biology, geology, etc.) can be harmonized.

So what about the resurrection, the parting of the Red Sea, and other things decidedly ruled out of court by scientific forms of reasoning? To those, Enns has a ready answer because he apparently believes in the resurrection. He believes in the resurrection, despite scientific bias against any kind of reanimation, because it is a miracle and not, therefore, accessible to scientific scrutiny in the way that the age of the earth is. He writes, elsewhere, "science cannot tell us one way or the other about the resurrection or any other miracle: miracles leave no scientifically verifiable evidence. Miracles can only be accepted by faith, not determined by the kinds of evidence relevant to the sciences."

So, in short, things that the bible claims are miracles are okay to believe because, however improbable, a person of faith has no need to disbelieve them in order to be part of the mainstream of human science. But things that the bible treats as true, but are simply part of a primitive understanding of the cosmos, or are part of a mythological cosmogony, can be safely set aside and interpreted only for their "message" or what they tell us about the human condition.

Well, I'm not sure what kind of God would make fossils, but that's the kind of God Christians have. In Jesus's first public miracle, he does something very simple, but very profound. He makes "good" wine. He has some of the staff at a wedding fill up a bunch of large jugs with water, and he miraculously turns them into wine. After tasting the wine Jesus made, the wedding coordinator turns to the bridegroom and comments that he must be amazingly well off to serve the bad wine first and then bring out the amazing wine once everyone was buzzing and wouldn't be able to distinguish the difference.

What is "good wine?" It is older wine. And every little droplet of wine, if you look at it under a microscope, is going to have a few yeast organisms in their dormant state. Even well filtered wine, which they almost certainly didn't have in first century Palestine, would have been filtered simply by settling the particulates to the bottom and then siphoning off the top. This would no doubt leave lots of evidence of yeast organisms. Wine itself is simply the aged juice of grapes in which all the sugar has been converted to alcohol by the digestive action of the yeast animals.

And so Jesus made fossils, right there on the spot. They weren't very old fossils, relative to a T.Rex tooth, but they were at least 10 year old fossils - dormant yeast floating in a bath of good wine.

This was a miracle, yes, and the bible presents it as a miracle, and so it escapes Enns's filter for what can or can't be falsified by science. But I think it is clear that Enns's miracle filter is ad hoc too. Jesus' making wine from water is a miracle, but God's making something from nothing isn't? How old does something that didn't even exist at t=0 look when it is created and then exists at t=2 seconds?

Many of the commentators on Enns's blog are pointing out that scientists aren't any happier to accept claims about resurrection of the dead (without which Christianity is just an expensive superstition) than they are to accept a young earth. Enns wants to hold onto the resurrection because he is a Christian. But he wants to reject the idea of a young earth and a literal Adam and Even for at least several reasons. It would be unsportsmanlike to try and guess which of the reasons are more important for Enns, but science seems to be a huge one. Apparently, population genomics looks at the current human genome and extrapolates back about how much genetic diversity there must have been in order to get people with the variety they have now. I don't fully understand the claim, but they say that if the human race is just 6000 years old and goes back to just two people, then the rate of mutation would have to have been crazy to have the current genetic diversity in the human genome. And so Enns begins to teach that maybe the Genesis 1-11 stories are just as much myths as the rest of the ancient world's stories are. He never believed the Babylonian myths were true, so why believe the Israelite myths? I totally understand this move, but what Enns gives up is tremendous. Far from a little squabble about the age of the earth, this "solution" to a scientific problem becomes a huge shot in the middle of theology proper. "Theology proper" means the study of God.

Theology is a science too. And it has a venerable tradition of "theodicy" - which is basically trying to defend that God is good. The earth is full of terrible things like the malaria parasite and it is full of lots of suffering. The Christian response has always been to tell a story about the Gospel:

1. God made a good world including people who were in his image; capable of bad, but gloriously capable of not sinning too.
2. We broke the good world
3. God is fixing the world and this will be complete someday.

First of all, a denial of an original couple of humans, Adam and Eve, takes a big chunk out of point one. Suddenly, God created a world of Darwinistic, tooth-and-claw survival. At some point, after life evolved from non-life, and after things began to breathe air, and things began to differentiate into boys and girls instead of simply reproducing by mitosis, and started wearing silly hats, morally accountable beings came into existence. And instead of their being responsible to tend to a good world, they were somehow expected to abandon the ways of the previous generation and start helping each other. Survival of the fittest, a process that literally created them, was now to be abandoned in favor of compassion and charity. The world was broken by design.

This is a different story. I will not say it is a different "gospel" because it would sound like I'm saying Enns isn't a Christian if I put it that way. Enns believes that he is guilty before God of sin and needs Jesus to die and be raised from the dead in order for that problem to be fixed. That's great, and I'm glad for it. But at least at this point in my life, I don't see how I could be that kind of Christian. The story doesn't work for me. God made a terrible world, and then I am somehow supposed to be accountable for not going against the millions of years of forces and principles that created me.

After I read Enns's first book, Incarnation and Inspiration, I felt wounded by a friend. In a good way. I was glad to be hearing these strong critiques of things I had always believed about the bible from a "friend." Someone who was "one of us." But that book sent me on a several weeks course of heavy doubt about a lot of things. It was a miserable experience, but I was glad for it and it gave me a lot of sympathy with those for whom this whole religion business just doesn't hold up. But that subsided, and the more I thought about it, it was the story of the bible that made more sense of life than the alternatives. So much of the certainty that drove Enns's conclusions in that book (the age of the Hebrew language, etc.) I realized were being used in ways that they didn't have to be used. That he was just as much an interpreter/creator of facts as he was criticizing others for being. If there is one thing that postmodern epistemology shows us, in its own playful way, is that facts are made, they are not found. I realized, all at once, that Enns had one of the finest minds of the 19th century, as they say, and that he was repeating a process that is very familiar to anyone who has looked at the history of biblical interpretation.

My training has been in the area of theology. Its conclusions and problems are real for me in a way that the conclusions and problems of population genomics are not. Nor am I a geologist. These are all sciences - theology, geology, population genomics, etc. All of these study something based on evidences. When you're in a math class you have math problems. When you're in a genetics class, you have genetics problems. But theology is more dear to me than those other field because, as a believer in the God of Christianity, I have staked a lot on the idea that there is a good God who loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life and for this world. And far older and truer than the conclusions of a science that didn't even have access to the human genome until The Wonder Years was already cancelled, is the conclusion that it is very hard to exonerate God from blame for the evils of this world unless we first begin with a wonderful world that we humans are to blame for messing up. Remove Adam and Eve and you remove the mother and father of all the living. You remove the root of all human suffering and make it part of the original design. This is a different story. We were made to be slaves to our basest instincts. That's the "way its supposed to be" at least here on this tooth-and-claw darwinian earth. I just don't see how this is going to work. Hick's "soul making theodicy" just doesn't warm my heart, but Enns is going to need something like that.

In the end, remember this. Enns is a very smart Old Testament scholar. That is his training. As someone with training in theology, who is probably not as smart as Enns, let me assure you that his recent conclusions create a lot of theological problems. He is creating much deeper problems than he is solving. Without original sin, we are all guilty only because of our actual sins. This sweeps the leg out from under much of apostolic reasoning. It commits Enns to seeing in Paul's enthusiasm for the Adam story a mere 'playing along with' pharisaical reasoning from myths. Without original sin, the mystery of evil is even more unresolved. We can't say "you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good" in quite the same way if God intended to create the Hobbesian state of nature from the get-go.