One S. Joshua Swamidass, a professor in the Laboratory and Genomic Medicine Division at Washington University in St. Louis, offers his thoughts on Rubio and the Age-Of-Earth Question in Friday’s Wall Street Journal:
- First, the age of the Earth and the rejection of evolution aren’t core Christian beliefs …
- [Second], there is simply no controversy in the scientific world about the age of the Earth or evolution. Evidence points to a billion-year-old planet.
- The evidence for evolution is just as strong …
- The evolution debate is not a scientific controversy, but a theological controversy about a non-central Christian doctrine …
- Republicans have a clear path through the minefield of how-old-is-the-Earth gotcha questions. Let’s leave science curriculums to scientists.
- As for Democrats: Please ditch the “war on science” talking point. It only pushes Americans apart, into their respective corners ….
I don’t have any particular problem with points 2-4 and 6, but I do have some comments about 1 and 5.
- 1. I thought Swamidass should have said “the
ageyouth of the Earth and the rejection of evolution aren’t core Christian beliefs.” But I guess he’s right that the age, young or old, isn’t core (whatever “core” means). For the sake of symmetry, then, I suggest he should have said “the age of the Earth andthe rejection ofa position opposed or supportive of evolution aren’t core Christian beliefs. Now: just what the heck is a “core Christian belief”? I would hope that every Christian Church or sect would fully practice all of its beliefs, without trying to concoct a least-common-denomination mish-mash, acceptable to one and all. The Unitarian Universalists already claimed that mish-mash anyway, and bless ’em as they fully practice whatever’s left. It should be a mercifully short service. - 5. Is that what this is all about? Getting Republicans out of a bind? Even the Creepy-Crawly in Chief, the man who can leg press a GE locomotive, has a better reason than that:
Whatever a core Christian belief is, it may depend on which way the wind is blowing in Canterbury.
Wesley J. Smith, whose regular beat is bioethics from the standpoint of “human exceptionalism” (what Peter Singer would call “speciesism”), “happened to be in London when the Church of England voted to reject female bishops. The verdict came as quite a surprise.”
But I was astonished when, the day after the vote, the Archbishop of Canterbury not only bemoaned the failure in his farewell speech to the General Synod, but also insisted that the Church had betrayed its responsibility to reflect the sensibilities and values of the general culture: “Whatever the motivation for voting yesterday,” Williams sternly lectured his flock, “whatever the theological principle on which people acted or spoke,” dissenters had to understand that their objection to woman bishops “is not intelligible to wider society. Worse than that, it seems as if we are willfully blind to some of the trends and priorities of wider society.”
Whatever his settled views of the matter, the unfortunate suggestion in these remarks is that the Church of England has the duty to be of as well as in society, rather than in, but not of it – a breathtaking assertion for a major Christian leader that turns the traditional and proper role of faith on its head.
He goes on to suggest that maybe Rowan Williams is right: given its role as an established church, maybe the Church of England does need to abandon aspects of the Christian faith that have become unintelligible to the wider society.
That makes Smith, and me, grateful for our First Amendment’s religion clause, which has been quite successful in preventing the establishment of a national church in any historic sense. (The possibility of a corrupt civil religion is another topic, perhaps for another day.)
Smith concludes:
Here’s a further irony: Statues honoring Christian martyrs—including Martin Luther King—have been installed above the main entrance to Westminster Abbey. But what Christian was ever martyred for adhering to mainstream cultural values?
It is amazing that Rowan Williams, a widely respected scholar of Church history, would urge the church toward such a blatantly conformist course. Under his theory of fitting in, for example, should early Christians have attended the wildly popular gladiator games in order to prove they were not “blind” to the values of their culture? Rather than seeming aloof and intolerant, should they have participated in pagan feasts and consumed meat dedicated to idols? Heck, maybe they should have gone through the motions of emperor worship—such as famously required by Pliny the Younger and approved by Trajan—to avoid martyrdom.
I mean, dying rather than lighting incense to a statue? How “not intelligible to wider society.”
Kudos to Smith for wrapping it up and tying it with a bow.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 