I was just reading Jerry Coyne’s blog Why Evolution Is True, and came across this posting in refutation of a strange commentary on the BioLogos web site. Essentially, Kenton Sparks is arguing that the reason God’s perfect earth has nasty things in it is because of original sin, that it was the fault of man for ruining it. And likewise, the scriptures needs redemption just as man does, because it’s “a casualty of the fallen cosmos”. His comparison is to a beautiful painting that is crumpled by someone. Is it Renoir’s fault that the painting is flawed? Of course not, he made it perfect. It was the man’s fault.
It’s a weak argument. Renoir doesn’t have the power to forever protect the painting from harm. As soon as the painting is finished and sold or put up for viewing or what have you it is no longer in the control of it’s creator. Not so the earth. An all-powerful God is at all times capable of keeping his creation safe, and thus the only justification for damage occurring to it is that this same God consciously allowed it to happen. Or, imagining for a moment that this was the case, why wouldn’t a loving God fix things when he saw them broken? He plays this active role in our lives, so why isn’t he concerned about his creation? Or is he merely taking the attitude of a petulant child and harumphing about how if we’re going to sin then we deserve it?
Also, I have to say that I find it astonishingly amusing when someone argues that scripture contains flaws, and then tries to find explanation of those flaws in flawed scripture. That’s the overwhelming theme of the article. He uses the example of the Sermon on the Mount to show that Jesus was correcting inconsistencies with the Old Testament, but what about the inconsistencies within the New Testament? Who’s coming along to fix those and tell us how to REALLY earn eternal salvation? Why does God, with his excrutiatingly difficult rulebook, need to change the rules? Why is it that moral goodness is relative to the times?
This, my dear reader, is typical of the cherrypicking of the Bible by the faithful. You take the bits you really like and focus on them, and you ignore the bits that don’t fit your world view. When someone points out something that doesn’t fit with what you say, you dismiss it by saying things like “Well, that part had to be taken in context of the times.” So how can one hope to interpret this book of yours? If it’s truly a source of God’s thoughts and he allows them to be controlled by the signs of the times, then isn’t morality necessarily fluid?
The painful truth is that this book of theirs is badly written. This makes sense; it was written by many people after years of oral history, and then censored and altered heavily by more people throughout the past 2000 years. It is an amalgamation of a bunch of standard myths that were common at the time. Yes, there are wise thoughts in it. There are wise thoughts in a lot of things, but that hardly makes them the word of God. I’ve heard Sex Pistols songs that had deep universal truths in them, but Johnny Rotten is not the second coming.
Articles like this are futile attempts to look past the deep flaws in the Christian faith. And similar arguments can be found for all faiths, this is hardly unique amongst Christians. When Muslims found within their book references to three goddesses (Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat) and thus pooping all over the idea of a monotheism, they blamed the Devil. The Mormons had the Official Declaration – 2 as a means to get around their racial discrimination issues. It seems like whenever there’s a conflict, someone is there to nail a complaint up to the church door with their interpretation of what’s what.
Why is there evil in the world? My answer is because we see things as evil and good. This is because we are a social animal. Evil and good, or more accurately, moral interpretations of events, helped and continue to help us survive as a species. The acts that we attribute to evil are acts that damage the herd, and because the herd gives us safety in an unsafe world, we try to avoid people who do a lot of evil things. Evil isn’t a trait or a learned behavior, it’s an interpretation. That’s why we can say that killing is wrong, but killing the bastard who raped your daughter isn’t; that violence is wrong, but fighting the Nazis wasn’t; that stealing is wrong, but using military might to gain access to the resources of foreign powers is the cost of doing business. We interpret all of these things and more, much like the books we’re given, in ways that hopefully benefit us as individuals and as a species, and that’s the result of natural selection.
Jim
