EXILED IN [HIS] REFLECTIONS

One of the more common reptiles on the east coast of Australia is the blue-tongue lizard. Despite its ubiquity, this rather beautiful and familiar animal has an identity crisis. A central component of this problem is that the blue-tongue frequently thinks he’s a snake. Growing up to 30 cm in length, if disturbed it will hiss, and if this defensive act occurs in long grass where its body and legs are obscured, a surprised and inexperienced person may mistake its thick, triangular head for that of the deadly death adder’s. Sadly, this confluence of circumstances has on the odd occasion contributed to its meeting a premature death by a solid whack from a man’s spade or axe.

It’s the opposite with Mark Baddeley and his incoherent “theology” drawn from his expurgated, postmodern Bible. Mark, unlike our venerated reptile, is a snake who thinks he’s a lizard. I suppose I shouldn’t be too harsh with Mark because, give him his dues, he’s done some of the requisite homework that makes him close to an expert on the creationism case for a young earth (he was one after all…or so he says). You can see the evidence for his comprehensive grasp of the subject in his first statement. Mark believes that creationists hold to an 8,000 year old earth. That’s a mere 33 per cent out - not too far off the money!

Though it is often quite difficult to extract from his sermons what he actually believes – I sometimes think he holds to very little – it would be fair to say Mark supports the following four propositions about the earth and its biological and geological history:

(i) The earth is extremely ancient

(ii) What happened over this long age bears no relationship to the putative chronological sequence of Genesis 1

(iii) There was no universal flood and in any case the geological record cannot be reconciled with such a catastrophe

(iv) God’s biological creative efforts were spread out over millions, if not billions, of years

Despite the Bible’s making clear and lengthy statements to the contrary, Mark’s primary justification for his position is that final knowledge about these issues can only come from science. I don’t necessarily object to his reliance on science per se (and by ‘science’ I mean knowledge in its broadest sense), but Mark’s use of science here is limited to the circularly utilized and defined data which appear to only support the long-age view. Mark’s a priori commitment to an old age earth means he will not acknowledge the myriad of evidence that can only be explained by a young earth. There are enormous numbers of young earth scientists throughout the world who have multiple postgraduate degrees in science and who work in their specialized areas, routinely publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals. Mark’s silence says more about his unchristian lack of respect for his Christian brothers than the correctness of his case.

But perhaps the most disquieting aspect to Mark’s poor scholarship is his belief that theology (i.e. the Bible) is not the relevant analytical tool to decide whether or not the above 4 propositions have any historical truth value. Mark not only draws a line and says “God, you must remain on that side of the line, for now we humans in our scientific enterprise must drive the quest for truth”, he also is claiming, rather perplexingly, that the Bible does not clearly address their historicity.

Before I address my concerns I want to quote Oxford’s Oriel Professor of Hebrew, James Barr: ‘Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that: (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience (b) the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story (c) Noah’s flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark. Or, to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the "days" of creation to be long eras of time, the figures of years not to be chronological, and the flood to be a merely local Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by any such professors, as far as I know.’

Barr’s words sound like those of a typical creationist fundy, though one who is both articulate and educated. Interestingly, the theologically liberal Barr has written a book attacking the fundamentalist approach to the Bible; yet he can recognize on language grounds alone that the Genesis chapters cannot be manipulated to return Mark’s liberal de-historicised version. Ironically, Barr accepts that Genesis is pushing the historical line but rejects it on “scientific” grounds, and so in this respect the very liberal Barr is less liberal than Mark!

The one common thread of all 4 of Mark’s propositions is ‘Time’ (note the capitalization of this word, something I’ll return to shortly), and certainly ‘time’ is something the Bible considers an extremely important commodity. In fact, one would be hard pressed to indicate another culture that was more concerned with ‘time’ than the Jewish one. One can identify a subtle hint to its importance in the following Gospel incident.

Toward the end of Matthew’s gospel Jesus and the disciples are walking in the countryside and feeling hungry. Matthew writes that,

‘[S]eeing a fig tree by the road, he came to it and found nothing on it but leaves, and said to it, “Let no fruit grow on you ever again.” And the fig tree withered away.’

“What’s your point?” asks the atheist, to which the Christian responds, “Can’t you see that that’s a miracle?”
“Not really,” replies the atheist. “It could have died 6 weeks or 6 months later. The text tells you nothing about how long it took and so there really is nothing saliently miraculous about this incident. All trees eventually die.”

The atheist has a point. Not mentioning how much time passed between Christ’s words and the tree dying raises immediate doubt that the event was miraculous. If the disciples had passed by the same tree, say, 5 years later, would the writer have been justified following up with, ‘And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, “How did the fig tree wither away so soon?”?

Thus, it seems quite sensible that increasing the amount of time cannot serve as the conduit for the miraculous to reveal itself. Quite the opposite: slashing time is the agency by which miracles are discerned. A person slowly regaining their eyesight over a ten-year period hardly warrants an exclamation of “It’s a miracle!” However, it would be clear that a miracle had occurred when, for example, a person was diagnosed blind one moment and the very next he was able to see.

I would suggest that brief moments of time, particularly as they approach instantaneity, are the most visible means by which the hand of God is recognised working in nature, extraordinarily. Natural laws, as they are metaphysical, can’t be seen and thus it could never be apodictically demonstrated whether Jesus in any one particular case actually held the apposite natural law(s) in abeyance. However, these laws can be accelerated, either forwardly or in reverse, and this conspicuously reveals itself when time is reduced. Then we can discern when a miracle has occurred. Without this compression of time a phenomenon can be explained away merely as the natural outworking of regular, chemico-physical laws.

So now I have a confession to make as I’ve purposely misled. I omitted one word from Matthew’s record. The final line should have read, ‘And immediately the fig tree withered away.’ The addition of this one adverb now sends an unequivocal statement that a miraculous intervention had just occurred. Big things come in small packages, and a lone adverb is certainly a modest box - yet what significance!

Quite naturally I would assume that Mark has no quarrel with Jesus’ instantaneous, and hence miraculous, killing of the tree; so this makes Mark’s attitude all the more peculiar when it comes to understanding Genesis 1. According to Mark’s cataracted hermeneutic, the inclusion of tens of temporal limiting words and phrases (i.e. ‘an evening and a morning’, ‘day 1’, ‘2nd day’ etc) merely signifies atemporal beauty. Mark, the aesthete, ignores the information that points to God’s immediate and miraculous involvement. Ideas have consequences, and Mark’s belief in long ages, when they are plainly not in the text, brings with it some rather unpleasant religious ramifications.

Once Hesiod’s and Homer’s gods were sent packing, the Greeks recognized time as a key explanatory constituent for change within their various cosmogonic accounts. The Stoics, Platonists, Aristotelians and Epicureans incorporated vast ages into their systems and through these eons it was supposed that the one and the many could be manifested. Though differing slightly, ‘Time’ in each of these pagan philosophies was a co-equal to, or surrogate for, God. ‘Time’, as Mark’s religious outlook has it, purposes exactly the same by setting up another “god” or power to perform the work of God. Inserting this demiurge-like principle between God and the creation, after all, must contribute something. By partially buying into the evolutionary myth, Mark’s theology, somehow, has long ages allowing the extraordinary to take place. Just how this miracle of life actually occurs in Mark’s philosophy, and how God’s majesty or presence is specifically demonstrated by these purported excessive eons of time, are never quite explained. As Socrates might have said, an unexamined philosophy is not worth espousing.