Of course Gervaise is right that the Old Testament is substantially false as a record of fact, and even the historical books are full of errors. That bothered me quite a bit as I found out over the years just how extensively wrong the history is, but the things he makes fun of, like Noah's ark, either convert you to atheism on the spot as a child or in time stop feeling like questions of fact. That effect of a story losing the sense of facticity without undermining the worldview it helped build is a curious thing. Whatever the explanation, it is why tackling an adult Christian over Noah's ark is so futile; he has stopped believing that its truth value and relevance to his faith are connected to its facticity.
Most Christians are comfortable with assessing Biblical stories as myths, though many will refuse to use that word, since it implies affiliation with liberal theology and even outright spiritual disbelief. Instead the emphasis is on its true or inner meaning, that is, its mythical essence. Even the ones who feel obliged to defend its factual truth are, so to speak, fighting outside their borders; they can lose any number of scientific or engineering arguments without losing anything they really care about. A story that once supported a worldview has long since come to take its support from that worldview. Children in non-liberal churches are still taught the stories as written, which is a rather dishonest way of implying their factual truth and one I resent in hindsight, even if it is a little funny to think of a Sunday School teacher trying to present ideas about fact, truth, and myth to six-year-olds. It also cannot be over-emphasized how much contemporary Christians are ignorant, and disregarding, of the Old Testament, other than the chief Sunday School stories.
In none of his errors does Gervaise differ from the rest of the new atheist movement, but I want to point out something extraordinary he says in the Telegraph article:
I don't care if there are 50 per cent atheists or 75 per cent atheists in the world. I've got no problem with God being the most the popular thing in the world, with churches being filled, worship, no problem at all. People who believe in God that don't impinge on me, I don't care about. When it starts infringing on people and taking people's rights away that's a battle that's not going to be won by satirists or comedians. That's going to be won by governments saying: 'Ok you can worship what you like, but you are going to teach that evolution is the truth. You're going to tell them about matter and anti-matter and particle collision. Then you're going to say: Some people believe in the myth of Arthur and Santa Claus.' Religion is going to be lumped in with that. [emphasis added]He is utterly incoherent in all the things I linked to, so it might be too much to expect him to mean what he seems to say, but then Sam Harris infamously wrote in Letter to a Christian Nation, "The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live." (Harris's defense.) Perhaps then Gervaise does mean it when he says that some other person teaching that evolution is false infringes on his rights. What a radical, what a totalitarian idea! This sick worldview, which is certainly Harris's if not Gervaise's, is why the new atheism must be resisted. As much as I love the discoveries of science, and even though I am not a believer, I would rather live among backwoods Pentacostals than grant the existence of a right over others' thoughts and words. Thank God for the First Amendment.
No comments:
Post a Comment