One of the fascinating things about Alpha course discussions is that they so frequently end up at the question of origins; no surprise, after all, as this is the dominating question: its answer tells us who we are.
In a recent Alpha course that I attended we spent our final meeting with, yet again, someone making reference to origins: "Did God create, or did we evolve?"
The sub-text was: "Whose explanation of who we are really counts?" That is: do we listen to the naturalists, or do we listen to the Bible? People normally don't see a common ground, because unreflective common sense is a good guide on this; there is no ground between doctrinaire naturalist fairy tales and the revelation of God. Paul reminds us quite pointedly of this and it is a modern day theologically ignorant conceit to think otherwise.
In the answer though, this question is usually interpreted as being: "Do we have to accept the Bible's fairy story?" But this misses the point; it is really a question of basic ontology: who we are is set by where we came from, "So tell me where we came from."
The credibility of any answer is measured by another implied question: "Is your basic ontology grounded: does it refer meaningfully to the world we are in, or does it float off in some deracinated fictive talk-fest?" Or, in other words: "Is your spirituality meaningfully connected with the life that I confront, or is it meaninglessly off in a different world to the one that constrains my life?"
That much is obvious, I would have thought, but the answer that comes back is usually obfuscating fluff as both being right (how can two things equally explain a concretely delineated origin when they are ontologically contradictory, and without overlapping explanatory connections?)
At my most recent Alpha group, we got into a tangle straight away when one person asked about the basis for belief in God. The answer was to be found for another person in contemplating the creation. And this is where it unravelled. Someone batted that back with "what about evolution?" Then we got into the old half-baked tail spin of what the Bible is and is not, and how we can, do and/or should read Genesis 1, etc. Certainly not as a credible account of events because...well...it's 'poetry' or 'picture language' or because of 'its genre', or it depends on 'how you read it' (of course). All reader response gunk. No one suggested that one might seek what the author's intent might have been, or what the literary signals were as to how to read it...nothing so objective was entertained, or how it is referenced throughout the Bible...why do scholarship, when you can play Prejudice? that great game that grown-ups love.
And so we are left with Christianity being rooted, not in love-acts of the creator that are brought to us in real-world terms, terms that we can make sense of and have meaning in the real world we live and move in; no, we have an image of what we don't know, that is subservient to naturalist dogma which itself serves to unseat the notion of a personal creator; furthermore, one that has a basic ontology that is incoherently materialist (or spooky spiritualist); not one to which person-hood, relationship and love are basic!
