Why 'Theology is a Simple Muddle'

Blessed are the peacemakers, which is why I am writing this essay, in the hope of reconciling the irreconcilable, and to bring harmony where it has not hitherto been heard. My goal is to provide a rational basis for a concordat between fundamentalist Christians, on the one hand, and neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins, on the other. My hope is to put an end forever to all the senseless bickering that has gone on for so long on both sides of this question; and my technique for achieving my quest is to use common sense to explain to both parties that the other fellow's point of view should be taken seriously, because both points of view in this perennial metaphysical battle contain a truth, and because neither one of them, taken alone, contains the whole truth.

[William Jennings Bryan] believed it was wrong for an elite outside of a community to come into that community and to commandeer the education of the children for its own purposes and to promote its own agenda; he believed that human beings had a fundamental right to imagine the world as they saw fit, and to teach their children to imagine it in the same way.

Our cognitive elite says, "How terrible! The Dayton farmers refuse to accept modern science." But why should anyone be morally obliged to accept modern science? How important on a man's list of values is being right about the theory of the development of species? If you are a biologist, it might matter to you passionately; but if you are a farmer trying to raise your kids to be good people, it will matter far more to you what their basic metaphors about the universe will be.

This is the end of the essay.....

If human freedom and dignity mean anything, they should mean allowing people to live in a world of preferred imaginings over living in one in which an elite had imposed their own imagination-or perhaps even worse, their own lack of imagination.

That is why I am willing to forgive my Southern Baptist Church for tossing me out on my ear. They were right to reject the reconciliation thesis. They were right to have no interest in the god of the philosopher, but to care only about the living God that amply filled their own imagination. They were right to insist that we live in a world created by a loving father who looks after us and who cares about us more than anything in creation. Not correct, mind you, but right. For right refers properly to an action; and an act of imagination is far more an action than it is a thought.

Leave the Christian fundamentalists alone. Don't take their children away from them for refusing to let them be taught Darwin's theory of evolution, as Daniel Dennett has suggested-I hope, in jest. We desperately need to get back to the good old American tradition of imagining the world in all sorts of exotic and crazy ways. We need desperately to re-enchant the world that diehard materialists are robbed of so much meaning by making people feel intellectually guilty because they sometimes catch themselves thinking that they are really thinking, as opposed to merely firing off synapses along neural pathways.

On the other hand, my advice to the Christian fundamentalists is: Keep Adam and Eve, but get rid of creationism. It betrays your cause in the worst possible way, because it violated one of the basic rules of survival, which is, Never play by another man's rules. If faith and imagination comes first in your life, then science must come somewhere else in the hierarchy, assuming that it appears at all.

Those who believe that other people must believe in science, and raise their children to believe in science, are mere fanatics, wishing to impose their own imagination on the world. If the happiness of man depended on a knowledge of Darwin's theory of evolution, it would be different. But human beings did remarkably well without it for quite a long time-whether we do as well with it, only time will tell.

This is a dangerous world in which to propagate a doctrine of cosmic nihilism, which, unfortunately, is what the modern interpretation of Darwin comes down to, especially in the hands of evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins. Indeed, it is almost beginning to appear as if Darwin's great work is no longer being treated by some of its more enthusiastic defenders as a scientific theory, but simply as a weapon in the culture war between those who wish to eradicate Christianity and all religion, like Dawkins, and those who want to resist the imposition on their children of the doctrine of cosmic nihilism under the guise of a biology lesson. How much better off both sides would be if they had the intellectual honesty to declare, as Darwin did, "my theology is a muddle," and that our science will always remain hopelessly hypothetical.

My goal is to provide a rational basis for a concordat between fundamentalist Christians, on the one hand, and neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins, on the other. My hope is to put an end forever to all the senseless bickering that has gone on for so long on both sides of this question; and my technique for achieving my quest is to use common sense to explain to both parties that the other fellow's point of view should be taken seriously, because both points of view in this perennial metaphysical battle contain a truth, and because neither one of them, taken alone, contains the whole truth.

The author's use of the politically correct term-"put and end to all the senseless bickering"-reveals more of a lack of understanding on the part of the author than his argument is actually "common sense".

The fact is, this is an important debate(what the author alls, "bickering").

Why is it important?

Firstly, because it determines how one approaches Holy Writ, and it's reliability. This debate is not in a vacuum, there are consequences to one's belief.

If one believes in slow creationism, ie-Christian evolution, then one has to allegorize all of Genesis 1-3. If Adam is an allegory, then Jesus is confused or a liar, for Jesus recognized Adam as the first human specially created by God, and based His argument for proper marriage when questioned on the topic by Pharisees, on the real man and woman, Adam and Eve. If humans evolved from hominids, then Jesus is confused or lying, both of which discount Jesus as Divine.

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