The Creationist Debate

Arthur McCalla, The Creationist Debate. The Encounter between the Bible and the Historical Mind, (Bloomsbury, 2013), £19.99, pp viii – 327,ISBN:978-1-62356-852-8

The first edition of McCalla’s book was already well-known to me when I received this new edition for review. The first edition is an excellent critical study of the historical growth of creationism, an area surprisingly neglected by historical scholarship given the prominence of creationism in the pews of North America. This second edition is better still, thoroughly deserving a place alongside Ronald Numbers’ magisterial The Creationists as one of the few definitive historical studies of the phenomenon.

Beginning with the medieval metaphor of ‘the two books’, McCalla charts the historical development of scriptural exegesis and its relation to science (the earth sciences in particular) in the early modern period, setting the scene for a discussion of the great Darwin debates of the nineteenth century, the development of inerrancy and fundamentalism, and then ‘creation science’ in the twentieth century. Key moments like the Scopes trial feature prominently, along with Whitcomb and Morris’s epochal creationist text, The Genesis Flood, grounding the debate in the political and social milieu of American religious conservatism.

Noticeably more polemical in tone than Numbers, McCalla’s aim is to demonstrate that debating with creationists over the interpretation of scientific evidence misses the point. Their real agenda is to exalt the status of the Bible above all historical contingencies as a transcendent reality of its own. This is why creationism must defend its inerrantist reading of the Bible from all historical studies that threaten it, evolution for sure, but biblical criticism perhaps even more so. And this provides an explanation as to why creationism is persistently able to evade all attacks on its view of science, since science is only a secondary issue compared with the exalted creationist view of the Bible.

First published in 2006, McCalla’s new edition of 2013 expands the original treatment in several ways. There are small changes to the earlier chapters, but most notably, the treatment of intelligent design towards the end of the book is expanded considerably from the first edition, bringing the treatment up to date by covering the first decade of the twenty-first century. More material on Islamic and Vedic creationism also helps to extend the remit beyond that of the United States (but apart from this McCalla’s discussion of creationism is largely restricted to the American situation). Another new chapter presents a penetrating overview of attempts within more moderate Christianity (compared to creationism) to harmonise science and religion, making useful points of contrast and contact with the creationist situation. This chapter makes McCalla’s case all the stronger, since it brings the issues closer to home for those of us who might be tempted to take an ‘us and them’ attitude towards creationism.

This is an excellent book, and is highly recommended.

 

New book on the Bible and science

1844657256My new book has appeared – The Nature of Creation: Examining the Bible and Science. Although there have been many attempts in modern times to compare and contrast the Bible’s stories of creation with ideas from science, this has almost invariably been carried out in a non-critical way. It’s assumed that the text can be read at face value with scant regard for its historical genesis, almost as though it were a scientific report of the world’s origins. And it’s by no means just young-earth creationists who are guilty of this approach, but many who write on the Bible, especially from an interest in modern science.

What my book tries to do is to build bridges between critical biblical scholarship – which has developed far more sophisticated and historically-sensitive ways of reading the text – and modern science, using theology as the go-between. Remarkably, this has never been done before, or at least not across the whole Bible. This is significant, because there’s far more creation material in the Bible than just Genesis. In this way, I try to argue that there is scope for a whole new way of reading the Bible and science together.

Click here to see the book on the publisher’s web page (Acumen). Amazon uk is also selling the book at a very good price.

If you’re signed up to Academia.edu, you can also see my page, where you can download the Introduction.

Debating Darwin’s Doubt – he’s still doubting

new blog post by the Intelligent Design author Stephen C. Meyer, where he defends his book Debating Darwin’s Doubt against the accusation that it’s a sophisticated form of the God of the gaps approach.

Meyer’s argument is that the so-called “Cambrian explosion” of new life forms in the geological record – which gave us everyone’s favourite marine fossil, the trilobite, as well as the bizzare Burgess Shale – cannot be explained solely in terms of naturalistic science, but requires crucial input from a designing intelligence. This is what Meyer says in the post: Continue reading

Jesus the Higgs boson

I am often asked what the ‘God particle’ (i.e. the Higgs boson) has to do with God. A few months ago I wrote an article for the Diocese of Edinburgh magazine, The Edge, attempting to give a novel angle on that question, specifically within the context of a Christian confessional response. Since people have been e-mailing me from far and wide ever since, asking for a copy, I thought I’d post it on our new blog. Here it is…

‘Why is it called the God particle?’ people often ask me. The Higgs boson was predicted nearly 50 years ago by, among others, our own Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, but has leapt to the fore recently because it appears to have been discovered experimentally. This is big news in science, since the Standard Model of particle physics pretty much stands or falls on whether it exists or not, and the Standard Model is the best scientific explanation we have at the moment for why there are particles – things rather than nothing. Now there are many different particles – some of them have mass (you can weigh them) and some don’t. And this is why the Higgs boson is so important: it confers that most basic of physical properties – mass – to other particles. That, and the fact it’s been so difficult to discover, is the reason it’s earned itself the name of ‘the God particle’. It’s a moot point what it might tell us about God though.

Continue reading

A new book – The Nature of Creation: Examining the Bible and Science

Having spent much of the last two weeks trying to put the finishing touches to an obstinate book manuscript, I’ve found myself longing wistfully for my scientific days when a simple article (a thousand words and lots of pictures) would do the job of advancing research more than adequately. After all, you could be confident that, if it was a good article, it would be obsolete within a few years. A truly great article will be superseded before the year is out.
But now that I am in the humanities, I find that publishing is a very different kind of activity. One aims more for permanence than obsolescence. Or at least something that will stand the lifetime of the current scholarly paradigm. And I need more words too – a thousand words and some pictures hardly gets me anywhere.  Even 90,000 words of tightly-argued prose is barely enough. As the impossibility of expressing what I really mean gets to exasperation level I must remind myself of the truth of those ancient words of Qoheleth – no, not those that go ‘Of making many books there is no end’, nor ‘much study wearies the flesh’, but ‘The end of the matter; all has been heard’. So, for the sake of getting something out there, and since I’ve thought about little else these last two weeks, I offer the first few paragraphs of the manuscript by way of an early contribution to this blog. The book is called The Nature of Creation, by the way, from Acumen Publishing, and should be available summer 2013.

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Jacket image for The Nature of Creation
THE NATURE OF CREATION: Examining the Bible and Science, by Mark Harris

The relationship between modern science and religious belief has become one of the most debated matters of our time. It is impossible not to hold an opinion on it. While there are many who claim that science has made religious belief redundant, there are at least as many who insist that faith is alive and well.

At the same time, a flourishing academic discipline has grown up which has attempted to find a way forward by building bridges. This field – ‘science and religion’, or ‘theology and science’ – has tended to concentrate on historical discussions of how the two areas have interacted in the past, and on philosophical investigations which seek understanding of how they might mutually benefit each other now.  Continue reading