The Creationist Debate, Second Edition

The Encounter between the Bible and the Historical Mind

Arthur McCalla

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781623568528
• eBook ISBN:
  9781623561109
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

Whereas scholarly study of Creationism usually places it in the context of religion and the history or philosophy of science, The Creationist Debate, here revised and completely updated in its second edition, has been written in the conviction that creationism is ultimately about the status of the Bible in the modern world. Creationism as a modern ideology exists in order to defend the authority of the Bible as a repository of transhistorical truth from the challenges of any and all historical sciences. It belongs to and is inseparable from Protestant Fundamentalists' desire to resubject the modern world to the authority of the inerrant Bible. Intelligent Design creationism, to the extent that it distinguishes itself from reactionary biblicism, is a program advocating a supernaturalist, providentialist understanding of the world. Accordingly, The Creationist Debate situates Creationism and Intelligent Design in relation to the rise, from the early modern period onwards, of historical thinking in various scientific and scholarly disciplines (including theories of the earth, chronology, civil history, geology, biblical criticism, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology) in their complex relationship to the status of the Bible as an historical authority. It argues that the debate over Creationism is at bottom a debate over how to interpret the biblical text rather than over how to interpret the world.

1

The Two Books

The metaphor of the “Two Books”—the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature—has been central to debates over the investigation of the natural world in the West. This chapter begins by showing how nature came to be figured as a book, and then examines the rival interpretive strategies used to read the Two Books in the Renaissance and early modern period.

The first millennium of Christianity knew only one Book. The Bible, as the Word of God, was the authoritative source of religious knowledge, and indeed, of all knowledge on the matters of which it spoke. And yet, Christians of these centuries viewed the literal sense of the Bible as merely the first of several layers of meanings; beyond the literal lay allegory, tropology, and anagogy. The allegorical meaning of a passage signified deeper, spiritual truths of the Christian religion; the tropological meaning was its moral sense, or its signification for how to live a Christian life; and the anagogical pointed to the divine promises concerning the eschatological realm of judgment, heaven, and hell. Allegory, tropology, analogy, plus the literal constituted the quadriga, or four-fold method of interpretation. Applied to Jerusalem, for example, the literal meaning points to the historical city itself, the allegorical refers to the Christian Church, the tropological to the human soul, and the analogical to the heavenly New Jerusalem of Revelation. The interpretive principle implicit in the quadriga is that while all that scripture narrates really did happen, scripture is truly understood only when spiritual readings supplement its literal meaning. Closely related to the quadriga is the practice of typology. A typological interpretation identifies a person or an event from the Old Testament as pointing to one in the New Testament. For example, the crossing of the Red Sea prefigures Christ’s baptism, while the drawing up to heaven of Elijah prefigures his ascension. The quadriga and typology together allowed the Christian Church to claim that it alone truly understood the Old Testament. A merely literal interpretation, or a Jewish interpretation that refuses to see Jesus as its hidden content, remains at the level of the letter; only those with the experience of Christ can read its spiritual meanings.¹ Armed with the quadriga and typology, Christian interpreters transformed the Hebrew Bible into the Old Testament and subordinated historically specific elements of the Bible to eternal spiritual truths applicable to Christian readers of later centuries.

Christians of the patristic and early medieval periods did not have a Book of Nature because nature could not be read. That is, prior to the twelfth century, the natural world was regarded as a catalogue of objects that possess no intrinsic meaning of their own and that are not discernibly related to each other in any systematic way. Investigating the natural world for its own sake would therefore be at best pointless, and at worst idolatrous, because its objects are meaningless in themselves.² The idea of a book of nature emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as nature came to be seen as a coherent entity whose objects are systematically related to each other as well as to transcendent spiritual truths. The theological argument developed by scholastic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure that knowledge of nature provides rationally persuasive knowledge of the divine attributes independently of revelation contributed importantly to the new view of the natural world as a coherent entity. Now possessed of both intelligibility (internal coherence) and meaning (as symbols of spiritual truths), the natural world could be figured as readable—as, that is, a book. In this way, the Book of Nature took its place as a locus of divine revelation alongside and as a supplement to the Book of Scripture. The study of the natural world—or exegesis of the Book of Nature—was no longer pointless or impious, but, as with exegesis of the Book of Scripture, both a means of religious knowledge and a pious act in itself.³

Renaissance symbolic exegesis

The concept of the Book of Nature, in which natural things are at once symbols and intelligible objects in their own right, blossomed in the Renaissance into an entire worldview. Renaissance philosophers, mages, and poets such as Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Paracelsus, John Dee, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip Sidney interpreted the biblical creation story to mean that God had created the cosmos by instantiating in corporeal substances the ideas or forms preexisting in the divine mind. Further, the physical things thereby created mirrored not only the ideas in the divine mind, which served as their archetypes, but also the divine mind itself since ideas in God’s mind participate in the divine essence. The divine author was considered to have stamped some fragment of his image on created things in the form of traces or signatures; moreover, because natural objects are thereby linked to other natural objects and to spiritual forces through their divinely imprinted signature, the cosmos becomes a network of correspondences (or similitudes or sympathies) among physical creation and the spiritual hierarchies. The doubleness of natural things—they at once truly exist in themselves and are signs of a higher spiritual reality—calls for a symbolic exegesis: that is, in order to understand fully a natural object, one must grasp its place in the system of correspondences that underlies and unifies the divinely-imprinted Book of Nature. Just as the quadriga and typology interpreted the Book of Scripture symbolically, so deciphering the Book of Nature also required a symbolic interpretation.⁴

Renaissance natural philosophers located both the legitimizing warrant and the challenge of their task in the first chapters of Genesis. Adam, they thought, had been able to name the creatures in the Garden of Eden according to their true essences because the language spoken before the Fall mirrored the nature of things themselves. The possibility of recovering Adam’s true knowledge of the Book of Nature therefore depended on the Adamic language having survived the Fall and the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel in some corrupted or veiled, but still recoverable form. Renaissance natural philosophers identified the symbolic language of things, or the objects on which God had stamped traces of his essence, as the only traces of the Adamic language still extant. They sought to recover the Adamic knowledge by reading the Book of Nature by means of a symbolic exegesis of the double nature of natural things.⁵

Various Renaissance practices, notably Ficino’s magia and Paracelsan medicine, are practical applications of symbolic exegesis of the Book of Nature. In Ficino’s spiritual magic, the operator reads nature by recognizing the correspondences that link things to each other and to entities at higher levels of the cosmos. He then manipulates these correspondences in order to ward off melancholy or execute some other beneficial end.⁶ In the sixteenth century, Paracelsus similarly exploited the hidden correspondences among things in his art of reading signs—the ars signata—that links fallen humanity with Adam in the Garden. Every natural object—that is, every page in the Book of Nature—carries a “signature,” or the divine imprint that marks its essential nature. Adam could give all creatures their proper names because as an adept of the ars signata, he could see beneath the mere appearances of natural things and grasp their real natures. The art of reading signs, however, was not an immediate intuition or direct spiritual understanding; it was a technique for reading the true names of things from those signs that God had imprinted on each natural thing at creation—a technique that, given his unfallen nature as imago dei, Adam was able to use correctly. Paracelsus was confident that it remains possible for us, even after the Fall, to practice the ars signata because a divinely implanted light of nature (lumen naturae) enables us to overcome our corrupt state and correctly interpret the signs that God stamped on things. Paracelsian medicine is a particular application of the ars signata in which the sage identifies hidden correspondences between afflicted organs of the patient and the specific minerals, plants, animals, and planets that correspond to them by reading the divine signatures of things. He then prescribes an appropriate remedy, such as healing a kidney ailment by drinking a brew made from the kidney-shaped leaves of a plant whose signature marks it as being in occult sympathy with the kidney.⁷

Renaissance readers of the Book of Nature endeavored to place a given plant or animal within the complex web of correspondences that God had established for it. This accounts for the striking difference between a Renaissance herbal or bestiary and a modern botany or zoology textbook. Taxonomic or morphological description (corresponding to the literal level of biblical interpretation) was only a minor aspect of the symbolic exegesis of a plant or animal. For example, Conrad Gesner’s account of the peacock in his History of Animals (1551–58) includes, in addition to its appearance and habits, the network of correspondences linking it with stars, planets, minerals, plants, and coins, the sympathies and affinities that link it with other birds and animals, the meaning of its name in various languages, its proverbial associations, and what it symbolizes to pagans and to Christians.⁸ This same Renaissance conception of animals as symbols in the divine language of nature permitted Edward Topsell to justify his Historie of Four-Footed Beastes (1607) with the claim that a history of animals is superior to an account of human actions because it reveals

that Chronicle which was made by God himselfe, every living beast being a word, every kind being a sentence, and al of them togither a large history, containing admirable knowledge & larning, which was, which is, and which shall continue, (if not for ever) yet to the worlds end.⁹

The turn to “plain sense”

Symbolic exegesis of both the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture was challenged and largely overthrown by a new approach to the interpretation of texts developed by humanists and Protestant reformers. Humanist scholars, themselves part of the Renaissance, recovered and studied ancient texts in the hope of returning to the pristine origins of ancient learning and eloquence. Their criterion in seeking to establish accurate texts of classical writers was the intention of the original author. Through attention to changes in the meaning and usage of words over time and across cultures and through the patient collation and comparison of manuscripts, they labored to disentangle the original words of Plato, Livy, and others from textual corruptions and the opinions of generations of editors and commentators. Erasmus, the greatest of the humanist scholars, applied these philological techniques to the text of the Bible in the hope of recovering the pristine text that the Latin translation often distorted. Whether applied to the classical texts or to the Bible itself, humanist scholarship discouraged allegorical interpretation as likely to distort the intention of the original author.¹⁰

The Protestant Reformers followed the humanists in rejecting the allegorical interpretation of the one text that mattered to them—the Bible. From Martin Luther onward, the Reformers insisted that the Bible alone should be the source of Christian beliefs, morality, and even social and political order. No other authority, such as that of Catholic tradition or the Pope, would be tolerated. For a thousand years, the Catholic Church had fused the authority of the Bible with the authority of its own interpretive tradition by surrounding the text of the Old and New Testaments in the standard Bible of the medieval Church, the Glossa Ordinaria, with the notes and commentaries of the Church Fathers that guided how one was to understand the biblical texts. Luther printed Bibles in which the biblical text appeared alone, liberated from the interpretive framework laid over it by the Fathers.¹¹ By means of this revolutionary act, the Protestant Reformers truly thought they were recovering the pristine text of the Bible after centuries of accretion and distortion. But more fundamental than the recovered text was the interpretive principle they applied to it. If the Bible alone was to be the sole authority for Christian belief and life, then every sentence in it must have a single, clear meaning intended by the apostles and prophets and that is understandable to every reader without the aid of a special class of privileged interpreters. Consequently, the Reformers abandoned the quadriga with its multiple levels of meaning in favor of a single plain, literal reading of scripture.¹²

We must not, however, exaggerate the literal-mindedness of the Protestant Reformers. They rejected allegorical interpretation but retained typology, believing every bit as much as Catholics that the Old Testament points to Christ. Furthermore, the New Testament itself offers examples of nonliteral interpretation—Jesus spoke in parables, the Gospels present Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, and Paul himself interpreted the Old Testament figuratively, as in his allegorical reading of Sarah and Hagar in the fourth chapter of Galatians. The Reformers, then, rejected what they considered fanciful allegorizing, rather than all spiritual interpretation whatsoever. Protestant literalism is better thought of as asserting that biblical passages have a single, clear, fixed meaning that is usually, but not always, the literal one. The reformers sought the “plain sense” of scripture.¹³

Protestant plain-sense interpretation of the Bible meant that only passages that at a common-sense level carry moral or theological teachings could be read for a moral or theological message. All others biblical passages must have some other primary referent. As a result, many biblical passages, and above all, the narrative sections of Genesis and Exodus, were now construed as conveying cosmological or historical knowledge. The narratives of the Flood or of the 40 years in the wilderness, which for patristic and medieval interpreters contained spiritual meanings in addition to their literal sense, now were to be understood as, and only as, true accounts of things that had happened in the distant past. Moses himself, from having been a character in the narrative of the Exodus and a type prefiguring Christian truth, became “the sacred historian,” the historical author of a factual account of the first ages of the earth.¹⁴

The starkness of Protestant plain-sense interpretation was mitigated by the theory of accommodation. According to this theory, which went back to Augustine’s On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, the authors of scripture had adapted, or accommodated, their words to the intelligence and experience of their original audience. Accommodationism allowed Protestants, to whom allegorical interpretation was forbidden, to reconcile truths discovered by reason with the Bible. In the account of the Flood, for example, Moses was thought to have accurately described what had happened, but in place of a true explanation of the physical mechanisms that had produced it, he offered only a simple story that could be understood by his unlearned audience.¹⁵ Science, to anticipate, will “unaccommodate” the biblical language. John Calvin himself, discussing the Mosaic account of creation in his Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, called Genesis, explicitly linked the plain sense of scripture, accommodationism, and science:

Moses wrote in a popular style things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand; but astronomers investigate with great labour whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend. Nevertheless, this study is not to be reprobated, nor this science to be condemned, because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them. For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God . . . . Nor did Moses truly wish to withdraw us from this pursuit in omitting such things as are peculiar to the art; but because he was ordained a teacher as well of the unlearned and rude as of the learned, he could not otherwise fulfil his office than by descending to this grosser method of instruction.¹⁶

The plain-sense interpretive principle transformed the reading not only of the Book of Scripture, but also of the Book of Nature. A new generation of naturalists denied the doubleness of natural objects. Animals, plants, stones, celestial bodies were physical objects rather than veiled symbols whose true meaning lay beyond themselves. God was still the au...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Prologue
• 1 The Two Books
• 2 Earth History
• 3 Chronology
• 4 Universal Histories
• 5 The Birth of Deep Time
• 6 “Creation’s Final Law”
• 7 Biblical Criticism
• 8 Evolution and Design
• 9 Prehistoric Humans
• 10 The Bible in America
• 11 Fundamentalism
• 12 Young-Earth Creationism
• 13 Creation Science
• 14 Intelligent Design
• 15 Harmonization in Historical Perspective
• Epilogue
• Follow the Debate
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index