h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Quincy,

I've been keeping taps of all the conversations regarding the University Project that I'm involved in. I was insanely interested in the reasons why Josh cannot talk about creation without talking about evolution. I wasn't involved in that particular conversation, but I was suprised that noone tok you up on it. I knwo Hoovooloo is extremely busy at the mo, as am I, but I for one would love you to contribute.

I was just sad to see that you seemed offended, as I'm sure that was not anyones intention.

Can you tell me here the reasons for Josh's inability to not talk about evolution? I'm dead keen to know...

All the beast,

Ste

Sure. It's as simple as anything. You don't even have to have read Thomas Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ though it wouldn't hurt.

Until Darwinian (and other -- Darwin just got more and better publicity than Lamarck) evolutionary theory burst on the scene, there was a "science" called "natural philosophy" that had been around since the Enlightenment. Natural philosophy consisted primarily in cataloguing things, making lists of all known beetles and what have you. There was NO CONCEPT of "where they came from" because that was GIVEN: they were made by God, and had always been there, and if they had not been discovered yet, that didn't change anything.

Mendelaev did much that sort of Natural Philosophy with the Periodic Table of Elements. He was able to postulate things that were still undiscovered, because he catalogued the things that had been discovered, and there was a pattern, so he could say with certainty that such-and-such an element must exist, even though we have yet to find it. This was all consistent with an INTENTIONALLY Created universe, in which God did the creation, and things all made neat, orderly sense. (The question of Intentionality comes up a lot, in Creationist discussions.)

The scientific paradigm, and I'm using the word "paradigm" like Thomas Kuhn did, not the trashy corporate "think outside the box" way, that preceded the Darwinian Scientific Revolution was ahistoric. They just didn't THINK in historicist terms. (This is a little tricky to grasp, because we have NO ability to think in ahistorical terms, which was Kuhn's point. We have to look at the documents of Natural Philosophers before the Darwinian Revolution, and try to see them through their world-view, as purely descriptive of a static universe in which all that is, always has been, and always will be... isn't there a Christian prayer that goes like that?)

So, the Biblical Creation story wasn't in question, ever, so no one needed to argue FOR it, because no one had threatened it. It's there. It is Revealed Truth, and we all KNOW that. It's like the sun rising in the East. No one has ever needed to come up with an argument for it not rising in the West, because no one has proposed that it COULD.

Along came this Revolution. It had been "in the air" so to speak, across numerous disciplines, for a while. Darwin and Herbert Spencer were almost contemporaries (I think), and Spencer's theories are now called "Social Darwinism", but he was writing about Man's (sic) socially competetive nature INDEPENDENTLY of Darwin. There were transitions to historicist thinking taking place in fields where no one had ever considered historicism, including the study of Art History, or cultural anthropology, all of which "evolved" as fields of study (see, I can't even talk about it without using historicist, evolutionary language) around the time of Darwin.

In the US (and I really don't know about the reaction in Europe or England), Protestants immediately formed two columns in response to Darwin's theory of Evolution: those who condemned it as being contrary to the Revealed Truth, and those who embraced it as "okay, God's even cooler than we realized, and did THIS, which is really proof of intentional design, but yes, it does make some of the Genesis story have to be interpreted as allegorical".

Column 1 could only use the Revealed Word to argue their side, and were accused of tautological arguments (which is right, of course, because conservative and fundamentalist US Protestants have always proven the Truth of their Scripture with itself.)

Column 2 started saying "well, okay so 'a day' in Genesis doesn't have to mean a HUMAN day, it could mean a GOD day, and that could be geological eons long." Pretty soon, they started doing historicist analyses of Scripture itself, discussing what the Bible meant to the Jews, to whom it had been revealed, about three thousand years previously. (They got that wrong, of course, not being Jewish, or living 3000-plus years ago).

Column 1 believe the Bible is not subject to interpretation. They also believe they aren't interpreting the Bible when they make that assertion. Historical Biblical analysis? This was really shocking stuff! The only way they could argue with the Liberal Protestants, to say nothing of the Godless Scientists, was to launch a campaign to discredit them. The Darwinian Revolution is when Science stepped out of God's grace and became "Secularist", because that was something no one liked to admit to being, and even if they couldn't prove Darwin wrong, they COULD point out that by going against Revealed Truth, the theory was "secular", and that, in those days, was pretty damnable.

But ultimately, the only ammunition Column 1 had, without resorting to tautologies (though if you pick their arguments apart, they are all pretty much tautologies at the ground level), was the Theory of Evolution itself. So they spent a LOT of time rebutting this or that aspect of it. If they ran across anything that seemed to support the old paradigm of Natural Philosophy, they jumped on it and waved it around as "proof", thereby, in their own way, becoming historicist. You can't MAKE an argument FOR the old paradigm in the new one. You have to base it on the new paradigm, because that's the nature of Scientific Revolutions. That would be why Josh said Creationism is new. It IS. There was no need for it except in opposition to Darwinism.

The compromise of the Liberal Protestants was to accept the science, and say "Yeah, God did that!" That was not Biblical Literalism. Column 1 are still Biblical Literalists. "Creationism" is not about teaching that the Bible is true -- the conservative Protestants assume its literal Truth -- so much as it is about teaching that this newfangled Evolutionary Theory is False, and why.

There you go. Now, all I'd have to do is re-word that slightly, and that would be my contribution to the University Project .

Incidentally, how do you pronounce "Ste"?

Quincy

It's "stee", as in the first syllable of "Steven" .

Perhaps we could give it a title of "The History of Creationist Thought" as an entry. We already have one for the evolution side, it would be perfect for balance. If you get it into an entry format (or I could do it for you, if I have any time), with some minor tweaking (mostly GuideML-based) then it would be ready for submittal to Hoovooloo and the University Project. I am personally dead excited with this potential entry, it lays the bare bones Creationist movement out for all to see.

I now feel suitably enlightened Quincy, thanks . If you want me to edit it or GuideML it, give me a shout...

All the best,

Ste