The Tragedy of Creationists at Christmas
Much of my family is Christian, in varying degrees. My mum's parents have a church in Wales and run a charitable organisation supporting preachers around the world. My uncle, my mum's sister's husband, is has just taken a job as pastor of a church, and before that he was an itinerant preacher spending a lot of his time travelling around the world, with four months out of the last few years in the USA.
Now, they are all lovely people, and Christmases are not fraught. They don't drink, so my mum hides the wine until they leave (except for the bottles I use when making the Christmas dinner - I won't make gravy without red wine for anyone!) but that's not a terrible hardship. But everyone gets along fine, and the only person who brings up politics is, occasionally, my mum's sister who likes to bait me about some liberal thing or other - or occasionally going all birther about Obama - but I'm very good at laughing some gentle disagreement and changing the subject. There's no need to argue about politics on Christmas day, especially since my mum simply can't abide that kind of thing.
So we get by. But browsing the tubes for Christmas presents this year, I've been struck by another issue.
People are getting hold of Blu-Ray players or PS3s and hi def TVs, and the best things out on Blu-Ray at the moment are nature documentaries. Frankly, say what you want about the BBC, but productions like
Planet Earth or
Life are, frankly, stunning pieces of documentary work. But how can I give something like that to a seven day creationist who believes the world is six thousand years old, new Blu-Ray player or not? It's not just that the carefully observed, wonderfully photographed footage stands as testament to the falsity of their beliefs, but the narrative constructed during the documentaries, even if evolution is not the main focus, must and does make mention of the process at some point. How else would a documentary maker truly explain the whys and wherefores, after all?
It's not
that big a deal. I'll just get them something else, even if I'm limited on other sides by certain other cultural tics. But this particular limitation strikes me as especially tragic and reminds me why creationism isn't just a quirk of religious belief like transubstantiation or fasting on Fridays, but is a form of enforced cultural and, I'd argue, spiritual poverty.
The things you have to avoid in order to stay a creationist are, ironically, part of creation. Should you hold that God created the heavens and the Earth, the Natural History Museum in London or the Smithsonian Institute in DC are
creation museums, and far better ones than the actual "Creation Museum" erected by Ken Ham in Kentucky. The Hubble Space Telescope peers deep into the depths of creation - into the heavens, which the Psalmist specifically states to be a declaration of the glory of God - and uncovers mysteries and marvels which are not only scientifically fascinating but also beautiful. When biologists unravel the secrets of DNA they must, by definition, be looking at God's handiwork. The complex, elegant, fascinatingly
functional process of evolution which gives us polar bears and beetles and palm trees and lizards and, ultimately, us simply exists. There's no getting around it, it surrounds us, it's written all over our chromosomes, it's left its footprints in the construction of our bodies. But in order to maintain a creationist viewpoint you have to look away from this.
The heavens declare the glory of the Lord, but if you look too closely you'll get an idea of God that's bigger and more complex than you want Him to be... so look away. We are God's handiwork, but any suggestion that said handiwork might not be the product of actual hands, divine or otherwise, must be ignored and suppressed. Only the smallest, most limited interpretation is kosher, so the fullness and richness of life must be kept under wraps.
In many ways, I'd argue that Creationism is a particular kind of blasphemy. In the book of Job (a theologically interesting piece if you're a "biblical literalist") God contends with Job
"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone- while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?
Job 38:4-7
The upshot of God's rebukes to Job here are not specifically about the stars or the ground or the fish or the other things He uses as examples of His Godness. After all, Job never claimed to have been there when God laid the foundations of the Earth, or that the particular mix of aggregate to sand wouldn't provide very good drainage for all the rivers. God here slaps Job with a brief rundown of creation specifically in order to say "Hey, Kid. I'm God, you're not. You do not get to define where and how I carry out my business. If I want to do something I will do it my way, and it is not up to you to dictate terms to me, to tell me something is unfair, or unreasonable, or incomprehensible."
When a creationist looks at a nature documentary and says "that cannot be true", or at a photo taken by Hubble and says "that cannot be three billion years old", he or she is stumbling against the evidence that must necessarily be put there by God. "This interferes with what I previously believed!" they exclaim. But, Paul says in 1 Corinthians
* that the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men, and, albeit in a different context, takes issue with the "Jews and Greeks" who declare they know what God was going to do and it wasn't Jesus. The creationist who declares that a "literal" seven day creation must have taken place looks at the heavens and the Earth and declares it a lie, and a falsehood, because they know from their theology what God must have done. God looks back at them from the genome and says "who are you, to tell me what I can and cannot do when I lay the foundations of the world?"
So the creationist sets themselves up pridefully to dictate to God the method of creation, and stick their fingers in their ears when the evidence of the world tells them they are wrong, creating a bubble which I politely help them to maintain by keeping them from being exposed to the works of David Attenbrough or Carl Sagan - or, you could say, from the works of God as described in wonder and awe by David Attenbrough and Carl Sagan.
Which is all a roundabout way of explaining, reasoning, understanding my way through the process by which the kind of closed-up thinking of creationists, and other religious dogmas of its kind, contributes to the corrosion of Christmas, just like it corrodes everything else.
* Some people may point out that the chapter in Corinthians in question declaring that God will destroy the wisdom of the wise and frustrate the intelligence of the intelligent, and take this as meaning that science is all a bum rap. But I'm not sure you can get away with that. For a start, Paul is specifically talking about theological "wisdom" in Corinthians; his comments are addressed to those who dispute the incarnation and the resurrection. Secondly, God plainly does not frustrate the intelligence of scientists these days. The laws of radioactive decay we use to date rocks back billions of years are the same laws that keep nuclear power stations chugging away providing electricity to millions year after year, and the same laws that detonated nuclear explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The GPS in your car works according to the same relativistic laws as the Hubble telescope. And any fool can look at the eyeball and see that the retina's in backwards. If God were planning to frustrate scientists, your cell phone and your heart transplant would fail. Since they do not, one can only conclude that He is leaving scientists alone at the moment.
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