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the basic problem for creationists is the decision to take the biblical account "literally"---i put the quotation marks around it because, frankly, i dont understand how 6,000 years is a "literal" interpretation of the story of the creation taking a week (with a day off at the end).
each day=1,000 years?
where does that come from?
maybe there are more recent versions of the king james translation of the bible that have footnotes defining a day that i haven't seen.
speaking of translation---the king james version is a 17th century invention, a collective translation project---was god speaking through the translation team? i have never understood this. people talk about the various author-functions assigned to the texts included in the king james bible as being divinely inspired, but they ignore the king james translation team itself. were they also agents of god?
what about the books of the old testament that they edited out?
had there been a mistake in the order of the divinely inspired book that they caught?
are the editors of updated versions of the king james bible all also divinely inspired?
how can one make claims about "literal interpretation" without thinking about the versions of the text?
unless the assumption is that translations are transparent.
anyway, let's think about this for a minute:
this god character is infinite, so is atemporal.
so for god-activities, time as we understand it would not obtain---(another way: if finitude means anything, it means time-bound)---so the notion of days....um.....well, if there is no time then there can be no temporal cycles (you know, sun rise, sun set) and if there are no temporal cycles then there are no cycles to be named and if there are no cycles to be named, then there are no days. no nights.
unless in order to preserve a literal interpretation, folk who believe are willing to imagine that god is finite so the creation story can make sense in a literal manner. but this creates all kinds of other trouble. for example, this move would trivialize the incarnation.
you could say that god, who is infinite, gets to be finite if he wants to--but that isn't really true.
does the infinite include the finite?
who the hell knows?
it may be that infinite and finite are little more than semantic inversions of each other.
but we do know that this relationship was a real problem for many christian theologians, particularly augustine, who frankly i have far more respect for as a thinker than i have for anyone whom i have encountered who runs out literal readings of the bible and creationist claims based on that. augustine was at least worried about consistency: enough to recognize where it wasnt.
read his stuff on the origin of time.
from all this:
(a) this literal interpretation business is not a majority position within christianity. it is pretty much the exclusive purview of fundamentalist protestants in the united states.
most denominations argue, at one level or another, that the creation story is an allegory.
to my mind, it cant be anything else.
seriously.
(b) the obvious premise for creationist arguments has nothing to do with modern science: it is rooted in assumptions about and a particular reading of the bible. so the arguments are not about science, as no particular interaction with the contents of scientific arguments is required for the position to be internally coherent (on its own grounds).
aside: even if you do interpret the bible literally, what is the problem with the creation story as a allegory? what possible basis could there be for imagining that god would have only one way of communicating, woudl use only one form--that god could not be allegorical or ironic or generate fiction and documentary? where does this one-dimensional god who speaks in a one-dimensional voice come from?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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