The Just-So Stories Purporting to Comfort Unbelief

Miasmic Swamps and Wilting Reeds

When Christians seek acceptance from Unbelief and unbelievers, the slope is likely to turn very slippery very quickly.  One such way to gain the "respect" of Unbelief is to adopt some version or other of the "day-age" theory of the world's existence.  This is an attempt to make the first three chapters of Genesis "conform" to secularist evolutionary theories.  Basically, the objective is to get more time into the Genesis account so that a long, evolutionary process can be accommodated.

So, the text in Genesis 1 & 2 tells us that God created the heavens and the earth, right up to the crown of His creation, Adam and Eve, in six literal 24 hour days.  That's what the text actually says.  Moreover, somewhat embarrassing for those who want to accommodate a multi-billion year evolutionary process into the text, is the Hebrew style employed in the description.  The text employs a literary form which is quite distinct: it uses what Hebrew grammarians refer to as  historical narrative--a sequence of imperfect verbs, coupled with a sequence of waw-consecutive-conjunction--employed whenever the Old Testament is describing a sequence of actual historical events.

Why would we not accept this at "face value"?  Well, science allegedly tells us something different.
  Science has theorised, speculated, that the creation and life came into existence randomly, by brute chance.   There is nothing wrong with theorising, per se.  Science cannot proceed without it.  According to the heuristic scientific method, theories are then to be tested by carefully controlled and repeated experimentation, which will either, over time, confirm or dismantle the theory.

Try replicating the creation of the heavens and the earth out of nothing.  It just cannot be done.  Science has no form to confirm or deny the creation of all things out of nothing in the space of six twenty-four hour days.  Such a quest would be equivalent to an automotive mechanic attempting to conduct a repair upon a bruised rose flower.  In other words, it is not fit for purpose.

Despite this, there have been plenty of folk eager to speculate away and dress their fancies up as if they were clothed in scientific rigour and certainty.  But the bottom line always remains: in the end, something came out of nothing, and if it is to have done so via brute chance, it allegedly needs billions and billions of years to warrant to justify or produce the extensive complexity and just-so conditions for life on this planet.  Moreover, say the cosmologists, it's too much to expect to believe that this world, with all its glorious profusion of life and life forms, just happened, by brute chance.  There must be an infinite number of parallel universes to "justify" the One in which we live having come into existence randomly.  So, Stephen Hawking's latest desperate speculations.  When faced with the enormous complexity of even the most "simple" cells and required to explain how they exist, the stock-standard answer is, "More time please", needed in every which way.  Billions and billions of years--and counting.

Science is left up the creek without a paddle, but with a cluster of wild speculations, which, if truth be told, look more and more weird and unbelievable with each passing literal twenty-four hour day.  We are told that an increasing number of scientists are finding the theory of evolution scientifically embarrassing.  The end result is to treat evolution-speculation as one treats an embarrassing relative--the less said about it the better.

Every so often, however, gung ho, card carrying evolutionists come out of the closet.  One such was the famous evolutionary scholar, Stephen Jay Gould:

Gould has no problems in seeing science as one among several narrative forms describing the world, but he also recognizes that narrative is not a neutral medium, and may have its own agenda, allowing the intrusion of what he sees as 'unconscious literary assumptions' into his 'just-so stories'.

Astute scientists understand that political and cultural bias must impact their ideas, and they strive to recognise these inevitable influences.  But we usually fail to acknowledge another source of error that might be called literary bias.  So much of science proceeds by telling stories--and we are especially vulnerable to constraints of this medium because we so rarely recognise what we are doing.  We think we are reading nature by applying rules of logic and laws of matter to our observations.  But we are often telling stories--in the good sense, but stories nonetheless.

[Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism Versus Irony 1700-1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.24.]

The account of the evolutionary development of life becomes a just-so story, a narrative, a fabrication as to how it could, might, may well have, or possibly happened.  But the imaginary story becomes the controlling narrative to which all else must be made to fit.  Except that it doesn't fit.  Whereupon, the evolutionists keep telling "a good story" anyway.  Evolutionists have come to resemble an ancient primitive sage of an illiterate people sitting around a campfire spinning myths and yarns.

Christians are foolish to attempt to gain the respect of this Academy.  They end up genuflecting to a pagan altar.  But herein lies the crunchy bit.  If Christians must make the Bible conform to the fabricated speculations of Unbelief, falsely garbed as science, why stop just at cosmology.  Why not postulate (or declare emphatically) that the Tower of Babel, Noah's flood, the existence of Abraham and Joshua's storming of Jericho are all alike just-so biblical stories to get across a wider, deeper point.  If the historical narrative of Genesis 1&2 can be thus dismissed in genuflection to pagan speculations, why not the Exodus?

And what about the Bible's ethical teaching.  "Science" today declares that the unborn child is not a human being.  Why would we impinge the Bible upon science.  If we accept the authority of pagan speculative "scientific" narratives when it comes to the beginning of the creation, why wouldn't we accept the "authoritative" testimony of science on the non-humanness of the unborn child?  And what about homosexuality?  And gender identity?  And on and on we danced into the night.

So whose just-so story are we going to accept?  The just-so revelation and narrative of the Living God, or the just-so stories of the pseudo-scientific unbelievers?  Who would want to lean upon the wilting reeds of pagan men in the Day of Judgement.  Not us.