[the "oxymoron" post will come after this, I think I need to do some foundational thinking about presuppositions to make a mature post of that.]
[Usual caveat about "myth". But I think this article is aimed at
all creationists, not just the scientific creationist set.]
The creationist Matrix
In The Matrix movie trilogy, humans were plugged into a vast electro-neural network that manipulated and massaged their sensory inputs to make them believe that they were living in the real world, when actually they were simply functioning as organic power sources for machine life. In the same way, myths require an interpretive matrix of presuppositions before they can be believed effectively. The atheistic evolutionary myth does not make sense to Christians because we do not subscribe to its prerequisite matrix, etc. So what is the creationist matrix of presuppositions?
1. Projecting personal fancies onto objective theological preferences.
This is really the key underlying assumption behind creationism: that God thinks the way we think. To be fair, this occurs on both sides of the debate, and is often left unexamined by either side. However, I will be completely frank that my agenda is to examine creationism, and so it is up to others (or perhaps me at a later time) to examine evolutionism in the light of personal projection. Creationism is predicated on the idea that because we view such-and-such a thing as being good, and its opposite as being bad (in an absolute sense) God must think the same way too. This often happens at an extremely deep level of subconscious justification.
There are two key concepts in creationism which are coloured by this presupposition: perfection, and Scriptural revelation (which will be explored in the next point). The creationist concept of perfection is heavily coloured by personal whims and fancies. For example, creationism often projects a personal bias that carnivorism and animal death is cruel: therefore they cannot have been a part of a perfect world. But Scripture never reveals God saying anywhere that they are results of the Fall, and creationism works just fine with them: they are merely reasons to disagree with the opposition. God glories in carnivores as a part of His majestic creation, compares Himself to carnivores (specifically, the image of the conquering lion), and never expresses condemnation against them. And since animal death has no moral content, how can it be said to be "bad"? Another example is how the antediluvian world is always projected as being green, lush, and warm. But is this preference for such physical characteristics of the universe infer-rable from Scripture? Again, no.
The creationist argument can also be stated as such: "Since the world is in decay now, the world must have been different when it was perfect". However, upon closer scrutiny, the argument often evaporates to something along these lines:
"If I were God, and I were to allow animal death before the Fall, that would make me cruel.
Therefore, for God to allow animal death before the Fall would make Him cruel.
Since God is not cruel, there could not have been animal death before the Fall."
wherein the second line is a fallacy of unprovable, inappropriate analogy. How do you know what "cruel" is defined as to God? In at least one instant in the Old Testament (1 Kings 14, quoted above) God is portrayed as granting a peaceful death to a child as the result of the child having been found blameless in God's sight. That would be cruelty by any creationist projection of cruelty, and yet God did it. God's morality can be ambiguous, not because of any ambiguity in God Himself but because of the extremely limited scope of human knowledge.
It should be noted that personal projection of cruelty is the main driving force behind the argument of theodicy, or the question of how a good omnipotent God's actions can allow the existence of evil. By using the same form of argument to bolster their points, they indirectly lend weight to theodicy, so that it is necessary to bring in the idea of free will and to begin a whole new controversy on divine predestination against human free will. Whereas theodicy can be rejected right from the start as an illegitimate projection of human values on God ... which would also, unfortunately, take the sting out of many YEC arguments against old-earth creation/evolution.
[A far more interesting avenue of exploration is the presupposition that in a material universe it is possible for some arrangement of matter (i.e. pre-Fall) to be described as "perfect" where others (i.e. post-Fall) are described as "imperfect" based on differences in matter distribution and properties alone, and how the creationist idea of "perfect" is really reading Aristotelian ideal "perfection" into Hebrew ANE "very good". But I don't consider myself qualified to swim so deep.]
2. Common-sense hermeneutics
This stems from the projection of our communicative styles, skills and goals on God. We talk straight-forwardly (as much as language allows) when communicating with each other, and we assume that the other person is being literal unless otherwise indicated. When we project these properties of our communication upon the word of God, we arrive at common-sense hermeneutics. According to this style of interpretation, if Scripture has a sense which is plain and obvious to us, it must be the right sense. The actual justification for this is that if I said something which has a plain and obvious sense to you, you assume that that sense was precisely what I meant. But this suffers from the same problem of illegitimate analogy that the above point had: how do you know God talks the way we talk? After all, God's definitive "Word" ... was a God-man, His death, and His resurrection.
Common-sense hermeneutics also sometimes assumes that we are the intended recipients of the Bible and therefore that it was written for our modern paradigms. I have no problem with the first assumption, but the second is yet another case of illegitimate analogy. The first assumption, that we are on the "cc" list if the Bible is God's email to mankind, leads to the second - that God would have written with our paradigm in mind. When I write an email and cc it to you, I naturally make sure you can understand it, even if I am not directly addressing it to you. But again, do we know that God does this? After all, God's definitive "Word" came not as a cosmopolitan, global person, but as a Jew at home with and comfortable in His culture (or how much / little of it agreed with God's standards).
Note that I said "sometimes" assumes in the above passage. To be fair, sometimes common-sense hermeneutics is applied with explicit priority given to understanding how the Jew-of-the-day would have understood it. When this happens, however, it happens with suspicious inconsistency: creationists love expounding on what "evening and morning" would have meant to the Jew, but why not the "firmament" (a solid dome above a flat earth, not outer space!) or the "waters" of Genesis 1:2 (objectification of chaos, not a large primeval outer-space ball of H2O!)? It is clear that we are dealing with a myth here, which never falsifies itself, and thus picks and chooses at what supports it.
3. Moralization of scientific statements
One clear foundation of creationist thought is the idea that certain scientific statements are inextricably linked to certain ethical viewpoints. We have already seen an example of this above: the fact that "evolution requires death" (scientific statement) automatically implies that "evolution is cruel" (moral statement). Another famous example is how some creationists predicate that since evolution is based on survival of the fittest (scientific statement, which by the way is not entirely true and nearly always misconstrued), evolution requires us to act purely out of self-preservation instead of observing any moral values (moral statement). If man evolved from apes (scientific statement), it shows that God did not create man (moral / spiritual statement). Etc.
Of course, there are in certain cases particular
methods of scientific
research which raise ethical concerns, for example embryonic stem cell research and medical trials. Having said that, scientific
facts do not have intrinsic moral value. This is because moral value has to be assigned by a set of moral guidelines, which are philosophical constructs and not scientific constructs. A single scientific fact can be interpreted in mutiple ways from different moral perspectives. For example, to a geocentrist, the scientific statement "the Earth orbits the Sun" carries a moral value "rejection of God's word", but a heliocentrist attaches no such moral valuation to the same statement. Scientific statements are subjugated to philosophical frameworks.
Often creationists are heard to say "Such-and-such-a-statement disagrees with my moral values." What has actually happened is that the creationist is not objecting to the scientific statement itself, but to the perceived philosophical framework which is bundled to it. A good example is the tongue-twisting creationist caricature of evolution, "goo-to-you-via-the-zoo". When creationists object to it, saying that "God couldn't possibly have used that!" (moral statement), what have they actually objected to? They are really objecting to the atheistic evolutionist myth. This myth claims that since we came "from goo" and "via the zoo", therefore we don't have more value than either. So what creationists are rejecting is not the scientific concepts of goo and zoo, but the atheistic philosophy which they have subconsciously and tightly bound to these two. Whereas a TE can live with this statement because they reject the atheistic evolutionist evaluation of goo and zoo, but believe that even if God used lower materials to create humanity, the humanity is not in any way degraded for the fact.
Interestingly, the creationist movement recognizes the importance of identifying opposing, unprovable presuppositions as shown in the two articles quoted last time. But why don't they identify the same phenomenon working in their rejection of certain scientific statements: that they are not rejecting science itself (which can be retained) but the presuppositions attached?
3.1. Conflating methodology and ontology
This is a subclass of assigning ethical value to scientific statements, but it is so fundamental that it deserves a section all on its own. I am referring of course to the creationist tendency to equate methodological naturalism to ontological naturalism. In fact, it sometimes seems that creationism doesn't even recognize any difference, so that it can glibly condemn "naturalism" without taking a proper look at whether it is firing at the convenient assumption of methodological naturalism or the overarching paradigm of ontological naturalism.
There is of course a world of difference. Methodological naturalism is simply the convenient assumption that supernatural occurences cannot be studied by science. Ontological naturalism is inspired by scientism to go further and say that therefore supernatural occurences do not exist. It is clearly possible to believe methodological naturalism without making it an ontological directive: naturalism can be the consequence of God's divine order instead of atheistic, naturally-existing order. Science never excludes God, it just shows that whatever God is doing in the universe seems to be so orderly that we can make powerful and wide generalizations about it.
To be fair, this didn't start with the creationists. It really started with scientism and atheism. When scientism (only scientific facts are true and real) mixes with methodological naturalism (supernatural occurences are not scientific), ontological naturalism is the most natural
result - supernatural occurences are not true or real, which was then seized upon by atheism to claim that their science showed that the supernatural was not real. To make things worse, scientists so frequently proclaim things from a naturalistic viewpoint that their collective image has been inextricably linked with ontological naturalism due to their frequent use of methodological naturalism. This conflation was something the atheists started, and so the creationists cannot be blamed for it. But they
are at fault for perpetuating it and making it a crucial part of their fight against evolution ("science is man saying he knows better than God!"). Scientific creationism seems to be stuck with an arsenal of weapons manufactured by the enemy.
The most important consequence of this is of course the deep-seated creationist suspicion against conventional science. Since it's all done by atheists, or at least from an atheist viewpoint (since the scientists' methodological naturalism looks like ontological naturalism to them, no matter what they actually believe), how can any of it be believable? This rejection of science often comes not from concrete knowledge of the science involved but a sub-scientific rejection of the presuppositions they assume went into finding it.
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It is important in dealing with creationism to first defuse the matrix that fuels it. The flip side is true: most often we reject creationism not because of evidence for or against, but because its intrinsic presuppositions rankle against ours. Thus, as AiG and other creationist organizations recognize, the evidence isn't actually the issue. A preponderance of evidence will never convince the creationist, who due to his matrix of presuppositions will never see it as valid evidence. So it is necessary to first take a deep, critical look at those presuppositions together before any reasonable dialogue can take place.
[trailer:]
But if the evidence isn't the issue ... why is at least 90% of creationism "
evidence against evolution"?
[/trailer]
Just an observation. No different than the atheists in the open creation/evolution forum.
Many people try to complexise and religiousise Christianity and the Bible. Don't do it!
He says that their hearts have grown 'dull' and from this, obviously, nothing Jesus said would reach them to convey that He is the Messiah.
