This letter wasn't really sent to Zaphod Beeblebrox, but to a tutor in a Christian school. Nor did I write it. It was composed by a pal.
Dear Zaphod,
Having been a Christian for many years - this being against all odds given my family lineage – and now well into my maturity, it never ceases to amaze me that Christians are often oblivious to the Evil One’s machinations. Sometimes his intrigues are subtle, on other occasions far less so. (In my extensive travels and working life overseas I have on several occasions witnessed first-hand his unambiguous malevolence.) One thing I can tell you is that whenever a man thinks he has steeled himself sufficiently against his wiles or, arguably worse still, ignores his influence, that is when the man is most vulnerable to his influence. For us Christians it often doesn’t begin or end with any overt signalling that he is present or even operating; it is his secretive, secondary layer of attack which charms a man to a parlous falsehood. Falsehoods are always dangerous; it’s just a matter of degree. (Don’t forget Paul recognised him as “the god of this age” and the “unseen ruler of this world”!) Let me illustrate my point through analogy.
A man borrows a car from a friend and within a few metres of moving off he realises the brakes are deficient. He returns the vehicle to his friend as he understands that continuing his journey will be hazardous, if not fatal. However, let’s imagine that the car has solid braking and so the man drives on. After some time it begins to rain and on approaching a bend in the road, he eases up on the throttle to compensate for the turn and poor weather conditions. What he doesn’t realise is that his tyres are perilously bald and no matter whether he brakes (which would be entirely inappropriate once in the arc of a corner and given the wet road) or not, he is destined to accident.
My point is obvious: A man can believe he has compassed the entire terrain but has submerged something of clear importance, relegating it to a stumbling block status.
Let me be bold. Contrary to the oft-repeated misconception, creation is a salvation issue. Get the Creator even a little wrong here, and everything comes asunder, including all that our unique soteriological arguments’ purpose.
It is oddly naïve to believe that error, even if conceived in ignorance, attracts no further casualty against truth. Error, particularly one so integral to God’s primary office of Creator, can affect nothing and be contained to itself. Error, like disease, grows and spreads and ignoring it by, well, turning one’s back to it, makes the Evil One extremely satisfied as his work is already near completion. C.S. Lewis, somewhere in his Screwtape Letters I believe, alludes to this zero-sum outcome.
You claimed in your mail that you “have no problem with a young-earth interpretation of Genesis [or an old-earth]”, as though truth somehow depends on your particular state of mind and hermeneutical preference and not on what actually happened. Well before I completed my Philosophy degree I was aware of the ubiquity of post-modernal epistemology in our media and political environment. What I was not prepared for was its controlling influence in the Church and, more parochially, its effect on university Christian groups’ thinking when I was an undergraduate. Far more than an occasional meme is the eisegetical defence “I have no problem with God’s creating in 6 days [but I prefer to believe that God did it over eons].” Textual considerations are set aside and, though it is not recognised, a priority is given to feelings or personal indulgence as the controlling “epistemic”, rather than God’s Word, revealed to us by His Spirit, undergirded by His written word.
Your belief – and it is merely a belief, not knowledge according to His revelation – that both a young world and an ancient world can be accommodated is an egregious error. First, it falls foul of the Law of non-Contradiction. That is to say, one thing cannot be another mutually exclusive thing. Second, it is claiming that God’s revelation about what and how he created is nugatory. That is, the Holy Spirit, despite textual statements to the contrary, has not only failed to impart unambiguous and accurate information about God’s creative works, but he has serially misled men like myself who read the Bible and conclude that it is unequivocal God created quickly and the world, for both textual and scientific reasons, screams young, young, young. (Again, the Law of non-Contradiction applies: either I am wrong and you’re right or its contrary is true.)
The yardstick must be independent from the things being measured. The only yardstick we have concerning the beginning is God’s Word, not our relativistic measuring tools. Zaphod, you are not at liberty to take Exodus 31:17 any way your feelings dictate (after all, what verses can you point to that unambiguously tell us that the world is old?). It’s neither biblical nor according to a Christian epistemology to do so. I fear, and know, that teaching young people that the creation toledoth is not a toledoth (Genesis 2:3) is a serious dereliction of your duty to instruct the young.
I can recognise when a man does engage with an argument. I don’t think you really have with mine. That’s disappointing as I don’t converse with people on such important matters in order to hear myself talk. You’ve relegated Creation to a bin of the unimportant; I on the other hand have argued that the issue cannot be separated from salvation. The substance, the nuts and bolts, of the topic form a whole.
The issue you’ve brushed aside is that you, without any explanation, hold God could have taken eons to bring the whole creation to its completion. What you didn’t address is the purpose for God’s taking such an enormous amount of time when he could have done it far more quickly, as intelligent beings tend to aim toward. There is a point at which God’s taking eons becomes God’s not being there and time obfuscates or even erases God’s actions and footprint. God and Time become indistinguishable to the extent that God’s presence is invisible. Do you really think that young people don’t go on to reason to this conclusion given the vagueness and two-bob-each-way stand you’ve claimed is a logical possibility?
Over my working life I’ve worked in factories, picked fruit, taught in seriously prestigious schools, taught in underground schools where the pupils belong to violent street gangs, worked with murderers and other psychopathic patients…but I think working in cocoon environments, like Chatterhouse, insulate you from what people really are about, what they go on to become and, far more importantly, what they believe about the world.
Screwtape instructed his nephew with the following advice: “[R]emember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. [It’s the] cumulative effect to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing…Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” Encourage a man (or, in your case, a Chatterhouse lad) that he is at liberty to impose meaning upon a biblical text which already has its meaning well and truly contained within it, and you’ve begun to redirect his attention from the Light back to himself.
Bernard Williams, writing in his book on Descartes, stated “one false belief can be the condition of my acquiring or retaining many other false beliefs, through its logical relations to them [and one way this may occur is] in some holistic adjustment of my beliefs to produce a coherent whole, misguidedly adjust my beliefs to some false assumption, and thus make everything worse.” I suggest this is exactly what you’ve done by saying that a young earth and an old one have equal epistemic value. Claiming God took ages to bring the Creation to this present state comes with much unwanted baggage and some terribly uncomfortable conclusions directly related to soteriological concerns.
Here’s a neat historical summary of what the Church did believe, contrary to people like Hugh Ross, John Dickson and a plethora of other heterodox have claimed.
