Recently I had a conversation with my niece who had just made her Confirmation. She asked me about the apparent disagreement between the Bible, especially Genesis, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. I explained that if one needed to fix ones car when it was broken down one might need to consult a motor maintenance book. If when looking for such a book one mistakenly put ones hand on a cookery book one would, of course, be looking in the wrong place for information. Not that such a book would be nonsense, just that it contained the wrong sort of information for the job in question.
Society today is frequently bombarded with anti-religious propaganda falsely claiming either science and/or Protestantism as its justification. Much of this stems from a simplistic conception of what constitutes material reality; that it is composed of things with length, breadth, height and weight. The laws that describe the mechanics of the atomic nucleus are quite complex as are the laws which describe the behaviour of the atomic electron cloud which surrounds the nucleus even though each of these sets of laws are quite different. While the nature of the atomic nucleus does have an influence on the behaviour of the atom as a whole atomic physics is a different area of knowledge from nuclear physics. Similarly chemistry, the description of the interaction between atoms, is influenced by aspects of the atom. Organic (or carbon related) chemistry, bio-chemistry, biology, neurobiology, psychology and, indeed, sociology are similarly aspects of a layered reality where the various layers influence the layers immediately above and below them but are semi-autonomous in their nature rather than directly and causally dependent on each other.
In such a model of reality the possibility of a reality layer where gods, demons and angels might exist is not absurd. While proof of the existence of such a layer might not be possible precisely what constitutes ‘proof’ in any one of the above mentioned layers is often quite different to other layers.
When studying at the aggressively secular, materialistic and, indeed, anti-religious Open University I was once accused of being an advocate of ‘creationism’ simply for making reference to the Adam and Eve myth. I argued that Genesis was a religious and mythological story of creation and, as such, had little or nothing to do with either the Big Bang theory, an astrophysics theory, or Darwin’s biological theories. However my tutor was firmly ensconced in the current foundational ‘myth’ involving the notion that matter is a far simpler entity than it actually is and that all reality is ultimately describable by an hypothetical ‘physics’ far simpler than actual physics. Within the framework resulting from this foundational assumption all knowledges not encompassed by this ‘physics’ is either worthless or actually bogus.
Some time later I had a more relaxed conversation with an equally secular Irish philosophy professor. We spoke of the ideas of Michel Foucault the immensely influential French philosopher who died in 1984. I remarked that Foucault’s theory that the world began around 1720 was mischievous in that it seemed to suggest that a tabloid headline stating that “French philosopher disproves big bang theory” would in some sense be accurate. However, mischievousness aside, there is much to be said for Foucault’s analysis. This involves the idea that every society is a product of what is called an ‘episteme’, that is, an amalgam of underlying assumptions regarding the basic nature of reality, the ideas of what constitutes that reality, what constitutes normality, which knowledges are valid or permissible, what is the purpose of existence, what constitutes the ‘Good’, etc etc. The ‘world’ that came into being in or around 1720 coincided with the Enlightenment and other allied developments in human thought. And at the same time a pre-existing ‘world’ involving a different kind of being-in-the-world by humans with a very different sort of perception of the nature of reality came to an end.
Around 8 000 BCE in the Middle East and also at about that time in China and South America a similar birth/death of worlds happened but of a more profound nature. The world that ended was the world for which the forces of evolution had designed humanity, the hunter-gatherer tribal society, and the world that began involved the very first civilizations, not just a variation on this theme of human existence. Agriculture, essentially the domestication of what had been previously hunted and gathered, created a food surplus which in turn allowed for a huge increase in the range of activities in which humans could engage. The natural equality between the sexes came to an end; woman being placed under the dominion of her husband by ‘God’. Human sexuality changed as both heterosexuality and homosexuality became possible within the context of the city. And perhaps what was “lost” was an intimate communion with the spirit world from a perspective unique to each tribal society.
The point here must also be that a Foucault style analysis of anthropological and archaeological facts pertaining to the transition from tribal society to civilization especially in the Middle East circa 8 000 BCE would not, in any sense, validate the Genesis story. As a religious and mythological narrative Genesis is a source of inspiration for the spiritual life of an enormous number of human beings and as such is self validating. A Foucault inspired analysis of the transition from pre-history to history and the implications of this transition would enhance our understanding, our experience, of Genesis but no more than that.
Recently I watched a program on a Catholic television channel during which a highly qualified academic questioned the commonly accepted idea that the (Catholic) Church’s treatment of Galileo was motivated by a hatred of scientific progress and a desire to foster superstition. Copernicus had held similar views to Galileo but did not fall foul of the ecclesiastical authorities. Galileo’s crime, it was argued, was as follows. Any scientific theory is always only an approximation to the facts as they exist in reality. Galileo’s cosmology was indeed an improvement on that of Aristotle. However Galileo then pointed to certain passages in scripture, claiming that these were, in fact, statements of a scientific nature and, as his scientific theory was more factually accurate than these scriptural passages then he, Galileo, had debunked scripture. John Lennon received death threats from angry mobs centuries later over what was, essentially, a throwaway remark, an unfortunate analogy, (“the Beatles are more popular than Jesus”). Galileo, it seems, sought to undermine the foundations of his society.
The religious bigot who claims that the Bible explains everything and has the answers for everything and the atheist who claims justification for his viewpoint based on a distorted and often quite dishonest interpretation of the science of physics are well met.
Most mainstream biblical scholars agree that the prophet Abraham never existed as an historical person but that this in no way compromises the validity of Genesis. Who but an idiot would suggest that the Bhagavad-Gita is nonsense simply because the Lord Krishna of this holy book does not have a counterpart whose existence is historically validated.
A friend of mine who is a chemical engineer once explained to me over breakfast that when eggs are scrambled the proteins in the eggs “flocculate”. Now this fact might make for a good ‘in’ joke among chemistry graduates but would have no other relevance to the art of cookery.
The physical sciences comprise a number of semi-autonomous areas of knowledge and these are only a part of a larger spectrum of knowledges which comprise the total store of human understanding of the universe and of the nature of human existence within this universe.
Many in the green and ecological movement speak of the coming of a New Age. Mainstream academics frequently denounce such ideas as being aggressively anti-rational and anti-scientific. There may sometimes be an element of truth in these allegations. But quite a few scientists, especially some physicists with impeccable mainstream credentials, point to an anti-spiritual bias among mainstream scientists that has, in fact, no physical basis.

Brendan Burke MA(Phil)
13th May 2007 Cork Unitarian Church