At The American Conservative, Paul Gottfried has a pretty bad day in a piece on how media bias against “God” is helping Rick Perry. Contra Gottfried, Perry’s advocacy of teaching Creationism along with evolution in schools is fair game, and attacking it is not ludicrous.
Sure, it’s probably true that most journalists could no more give a coherent account of evolution than Perry could. Sure, it’s true that opposing creationism is a liberal litmus test. But it’s equally true that supporting Creationism is a litmus test for certain members of the Republican base.
There’s actually quite a lot of equivocation about what might be meant by “teaching Creationism.” I can’t decide whether and when to capitalize creationism, for instance. “Teaching” is equivocal, too.
Teaching: I doubt that Perry means “mentioning the fact that some people reject evolution because they find it incompatible with their interpretation of the first three chapters of Genesis, and then briefly describing that interpretation.” But I suppose he might.
Such “teaching” might seem like a fairly harmless digression from the science curriculum – as harmless as, for instance, starting class on Monday with “how ’bout that Colts game yesterday!” “We hire you to teach biology” is not an adequate response to how the classroom works as a teacher tries to mix in just enough digression and humor to keep students alert and engaged.
But I’ve been in the position of defending a science teacher who was commanded by his Superintendant, in effect, to “wipe that look off your face””
“Stop injecting this creationist stuff.”
“What creationist stuff?”
“Don’t get insolent with me! You know what I mean!”
In the course of defending him, I found what sneering parodies his evolutionist colleagues were getting away with as they “mentioned the fact that some people reject evolution because they find it incompatible with their interpretation of the first three chapters of Genesis.” My client’s occasional barbs at evolution were tame in comparison, and did not detract from his award-winning teaching.
Were I a Creationist parent, I’d rather my views be ignored than tendentiously put on a continuum right next to flat earth and geocentrism (which is the most memorable example of evolutionist buffoonery I found).
My client’s treatment was shameful, and it cost his school corporation a first rate teacher as he chose to leave for a friendlier district rather than live in terrorem under a ban his imperious superintendant refused to define. Allowing a creationist to be entertaining and provocative, so long as he competently teaches the curriculum as well, is quite a bit different that commanding an evolutionist to teach what he or she fervently rejects.
But as I learned from seasoned religious freedom legal colleagues, a court challenge would have been futile, because there’s a “creationism distortion factor” in the courts as surely as an “abortion distortion factor” in our laws since 1973: “Creationists” lose. Period. And my client was as frank a “Creationist” as they come.
I suspect Perry means sustained and respectful examination of Henry Morris books for a few weeks (especially if a friend of his holds the copyright, but I digress), and to that possibility I now turn.
Creationism: “Creationism” is as equivocal as “teaching.” 33 years ago, I called myself a creationist, thinking it meant merely one who believed God created the world (or the cosmos, or ….). This is the common patrimony of all Christians since the Council of Nicea, which enshrined it in the Nicene Creed.
I was unaware that “Creationist” was a term of art, denoting that God accomplished (if that’s the right word, which I very much doubt) all this in 6 days of 24 hours each roughly 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. I cannot recall ever having believed that, even as a child, or having been taught it (though it appeared in the zany marginal notes of my Scofield Reference Bible). When I learned that “term of art” meaning, I dropped the label.
(These days, it’s the evolutionists who are trying to broaden the term again, branding Intelligent Design Theory as “Creationism Lite,” but I digress, I think.)
Notably, “Creationism” (the term of art) seems to have essentially no scientific plausibility. I don’t think anyone, studying the scientific evidence without recourse to Genesis would ever arrive at its conclusions. Those who deconstruct the scientific evidence with recourse to young earth interpretation of Genesis come up with a Rube Goldberg scientific theory, full of ad hoc eddies and backwaters.
At least motion is relative, and one can describe orbits through geocentric formulae (though the elegance of heliocentric formulae proved persuasive). Geocentrism even feels phenomenally like what’s happening, as does “the sun rises” and “the sun sets.” Creationism lacks even phenomenal justification. If elegance is a valid test of a theory, Creationism gets an “F” while geocentrism gets a “D-minus.”
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Rick Perry.
But this time, I wasn’t really digressing. Gottfried’s detour and frolic into the presumed scientific illiteracy of journalists who mock creationism is a nice change of subject to the ad hominem. Liberal journalists aren’t running for President. Rick Perry is. And when he sings the Creationist “fair’s fair”/”equal time” tune, it’s not a “dog whistle” because it’s audible to one and all.
Gottfried may be right that in this polarized political climate, Perry’s conscious identification with Protestant fundamentalists by saying “let’s teach creationism along with evolution” may work to his political advantage, but that’s not because the position is both rational and defiant in the face of unjust criticism. The criticism is just, even if most journalists are personally unqualified to level (rather than channel) it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 
I’ve never had any particular beef with the sort of Creationism that suggests God set the rules and wound up the clock and let things go, eventually leading to a ball of dust congealing into earth and a stew of nutrients evolving into humans. I don’t guess that’s the way it happened, but at that far of a remove, I don’t have a lot of better explanations either. And, in any event, it doesn’t make a lot of practical difference to how we learn about the universe either.
I thought of that as “Deism” at one time, but have a vague notion that that label isn’t exactly correct.
I think Deism is the right word, but maybe I’m missing some nuance.
That’s not just less than I believe, but quite different than I believe. It is, however, the default position of much of the country, including much of the Evangelical world as a practical Monday-through-Friday matter.
Evangelicals would insist that God intervenes miraculously from time to time, but lack (in my experience during my adult life) much sense that “in Him we live, and move, and have our being” (the Apostle Paul’s appropriation of something first said of, I believe, Zeus).
This is closely related to the Sacramental Ontology I blogged about less than a week ago, though that coinage was from an Evangelical or Reformed source.
Thanks to your brother, I guess, that you now have another blog follower. Or perhaps he should be cursed for pushing me toward a source of yet more compelling fodder for rumination.
I find myself on the side of creationists (in the 6 days of 24 hours each ilk) at least as a co-belligerant if not as a believer in a literal Genesis.
I would be better described as an anti-evolutionist. Darwinian evolution as I understand it had huge problems for society and huge challenges to any Christian who unquestioningly accepts such irrationalities as the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, a bodily resurrection, a new resurrection body, the ability of God to recreate me out of dust and ashes. A few of my creationist friends, and here in the Baptist belt I have many creationist friends, wonder why, if I “believe all that other stuff,” I can’t be like them, a young-earth creationist.
I try to explain to them that I believe no less than I do in a creation ex nihilo. I tell them that I probably go way beyond them in believing that God is “still creating,” as the Small Catechism and the works of the Holy Spirit make clear.
I explain to them that there is much to marvel at in the first two chapters of Genesis even if you’re not a young-earther: things like days that begin at sunset instead of at sunrise, like God making greater and lesser lights instead of the sun and the moon and the stars, lest they become his chosens’ new objects of worship, like his creating things that are “good, very good,” but you know all that stuff better than do. And my creationist friends say again, “Well, if you believe all that stuff, then why can’t you believe that God did it all in six days?”
I believe that entropy is the greatest evidence of a creator, especially one who still creates and who eventually will re-create. The dust of entropy eventually will swallow the Darwinists. Long live the dust.
I wonder about the first woman, the first man, the entry of sin into the world and its continuation (I understand that you, being Orthodox, do not accept the general Augustinian understanding of original sin; I’m no intellectual, but it makes sense to me) through thousands of generation. I wonder about the cosmic element of sin, how it pervades the whole of creation. I have, I believe, a healthy eschatology.
And yet, as disdainful as I am of Darwinism, my rational mind (as much as any redeemed sinner can have a rational mind) cannot accept what the archeological evidence makes pretty clear did not happen.
I also cannot brook condescending elites who tease, hector and do their best to discredit seemingly intelligent, good and moral people who happen to worship God and be (shudder) young-earthers. For a wealth of reasons, I don’t see him being my man, or Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann being my women. I also don’t see holy-underwear-wearing and dead-baptizing John Hunstman or Mitt Romney being my favorite nominee, but it isn’t their “strange religion” that will keep them from getting a hearing from me. And I have NO respect for the bigots who tear these people down for their superstitious religion. (Your brother will tell you that I’m a First Amendment absolutist — read “journalist” — who hates it when anyone’s right to believe or speak is denigrated or squelched.)
So I guess I will remain ever the amiable contrarian, who can’t bring himself to believe that crazy creationist but will defend their right to be crazy and “allow” them to be fully human and fully heard and even believed in other areas even if I can’t buy the young earth stuff.
Thanks for stimulating my thinking.
John Hudson
Troutville, Va.
Since you mention my brother, you must be referring to a Lutheran Small Catechism. We had a “smaller” (I think was the name) Westminster Catechism when I was a Calvinist, but I’ve forgotten the details of it, and have never been closely familiar with Lutheran Catechisms.
Even just in the text of Genesis, I see signs that the days of Creation weren’t 24 hours. Was it the 3rd or the 4th day that the sun and moon were created? Goodness! What could “day” have meant before that?
Hang in there. You may expand the minds of some young-earth creationists that are currently trapped in a system where everything they hold sacred seems at risk if they abandon that ship.