I will conclude my series on the World Open in the next day or two, but I would not want readers to think that I have converted this into a chess blog. So let’s go back to our more traditional fare by pondering this pamphlet, by philosopher Mary Midgley. It is called, “Intelligent Design Theory and Other Ideological Problems,” and was published in 2007.
I will not attempt a full review of the pamphlet (which at forty-three, large print, pages can be read pretty quickly). It is a strange mixture of good points and bad points. Midgley is quite good when she is addressing the substance of the arguments made by people like Michael Behe and William Dembski, but she is far less convincing when she is discussing the history of religion. She is also pretty unfair to the intelligent design folks in several respects, but I will not address that here.
Here is a claim about the history of religion for which she really ought to have provided some evidence:
At this same time, during the late eighteenth century, historians studying the Bible itself began to put it into its historical context and thus to get a much better grasp of its meaning. It became easier to see its various books–which of course were written at different times and for very different purposes–as expressing insights that are often indeed of timeless importance, but phrasing them in language appropriate to their own day. It became clear that the modern distinction between factual history and myth or legend simply did not exist for the Biblical writers–nor indeed did it for most other people until a few centuries ago. The men who wrote the biblical books wanted to convey serious, timeless truths about God’s relation to humanity, and they did so in the way that came naturally to them, often by telling stories. But the meaning of these stories lies far deeper than their mere factual details. They were never intended as literal records of fact. Forcing them into the mould of factual records often distorts their meaning, obscuring their central imaginative message.
This is all very implausible on its face. The distinction between fact and myth is not complicated, and I doubt there was ever a time when people could not distinguish between what really happened and what someone just made up. Midgley provides neither evidence nor reference in support of this claim.
Moreover, her blunt statements about the intent of the Biblical writers seem very unlikely. Such timeless truths as the stories in Genesis convey are not like the lessons taught by Aesop’s fables. We are not talking about useful, abstract principles that a fictional story can help dramatize. The nature of God’s relation to humanity is a matter of fact, not of abstract principle, and these are facts you had better get right lest you incur God’s wrath.
So, for example, it seems reasonable to suppose that a primary purpose of Genesis 1, with its emphasis on God personally creating everything Himself, was to rebut the commonly held pantheistic views of the time, according to which natural objects like the Sun or Moon could be objects of veneration. For the story to serve that purpose, however, it had better be true that God really did create everything. A fictional story is not useful for establishing the facts of God’s relation to humanity.
The Biblical stories in Genesis began as an oral tradition. Preserving this tradition was central to the Jews of the time, who were constantly being expelled from one land after another. Over time these stories were written down and anthologized, and through sheer repetition became sacred and unquestioned. It is clear that a major purpose of these stories was etiological, which is to say they served to explain the origins of many of the tribal traditions. Fictional stories, again, cannot serve this purpose. (The book The Seven Pillars of Creation, by Old Testament scholar William Brown, is a good reference for these points.)
Midgley is building up to a more general argument that the YEC of modern Christian fundamentalists is just a recent aberration from a much richer tradition. This is a notion that is very common among academic commentators on creationism, but it is entirely mistaken. The attitude seems to be that YEC’s are so foolish on so many subjects, and their literature is so cringe-inducing on anything related to science, that anything they say must be wrong simply because they say it.
Now, there is certainly much to be said against YEC hermeneutics. In one regard, though, I regard their approach as far more respectful of Christian tradition than anything Midgley is offering. The creation stories in Genesis read like straightforward history, and were understood as such by virtually everyone who read them right up to modern times. That they were also understood to have many layers of meaning and to have a significance beyond their factual claims does not change or diminish those facts. Today, in possession of better information than what they had at the time, we recognize that the ancients were wrong about almost everything.
Confronted with this, we can either respect the literature of the ancients as an honorable but mistaken attempt to make sense of their times, or we can pretend that they chose to convey their intent through elaborate ciphers that fooled most of their readers throughout history. Is it really the creationists who are being disrespectful of tradition? Or is it the revisionists, who would have us believe the Biblical writers had deep, timeless insights into the relationship between God and man, but could not distinguish fact from myth, and were incapable of expressing themselves through anything other than wholly invented stories.
Well, we are over a thousand words and I still have not arrived at the main purpose of this post. That is why I just ran back to the top and added “Part One” to the title. You see, the reason I am calling attention to Midgley’s pamphlet is that it was the subject of a recent, largely critical, review by philosopher Nicholas Everitt. He is the author of the book The Non-Existence of God. Everitt challenged Midgley on precisely the points I have been highlighting here. Glenn Branch, in turn, has challenged Everitt. But I think Glenn is being a bit unfair to Everitt, and that Everitt actually has the better end of the argument.
That’s all rather vague, I know, so just take it as a teaser for Part Two!