What do Flat Earthers, scientists, and the Bible have in common?

 

In a recent online conversation about biblical views on creation, I was struck by an interesting and almost paradoxical truth. And the truth  is this: There is a strange point of agreement between current thinking in science, the Flat Earthers, and the text of the Old Testament - And the connected truth is that none of these viewpoints see the Sun as the centre of the universe.

OK, perhaps it seems like a false point of agreement. After all, the Bible and Flat Earthers talk about a Sun and Moon that go around the earth, whereas science talks about a solar system where the Earth goes around the Sun. However, I think there is a deeper sense of agreement to be found, particularly between the Genesis account of creation and our modern scientific understanding. Genesis does not discuss a centre of the universe as such, rather it simply describes the Moon, stars and Sun as lights in the sky. It has no point to make about absolute position, only the position relative to the ground we walk on, relative to the viewpoint of the human observer.

In addition, it makes no comment about the Earth being specifically flat. this is partly because Hebrew has no language to speak of a ‘planet’ Earth: It simply speaks of the ground beneath us and the sky above. But it is also because the specific notion of 'flatness' is absent from the description.

As we read the text of Genesis 1, we might interpret the ground as being flat or level, because that is a traditional interpretation. The language of flatness was available to the writer, but that language is not used in Genesis 1. In fact, we are far more likely today to use idioms like ‘get my feet back on level ground’ or ‘lying flat on the ground’ than the scribes of the Bible ever did.

Genesis speaks of waters above and below, and it speaks of expanses, vaults or as some translations suggest, perhaps a dome, but nothing flat. It is only when we are battling between a universe with the Earth as its centre, and a universe with the Sun at its centre, that the text of Genesis feels out of place.

There is a tendency these days to seek conflict, even when that conflict does not exist. It is easy to forget, when people argue about the disagreements between science and religion, that we no longer live in a world where scientists see the Sun as the centre of our universe. That was only a brief and passing step along the way to where we are today. 

Now we know that our Sun is just another star, like all the other stars in the sky; like all the other lights that fill our night sky. Yes, we have moved from the Sun moving around the earth to the earth moving around the Sun, but in the vastness of the universe, that is a minor detail. Once we take on a universe where the earth beneath our feet is like the earth of any other terrestrial planet, spinning around any other star, in any other galaxy, that conflict should begin to dissipate.

We stand on ground like that of any other rock at any distance from the centre of the universe and at any moment since the big bang. In this light that view of a universe in Genesis 1, seen by humans standing on the ground with their eyes fixed upon the mysterious lights in the sky, seems as true now as it did, thousands of years ago when Genesis 1 was first written down.

Evolution is not Science.

Ok let's begin with a couple of warnings or perhaps reassurances depending on where you’ve come from to arrive here;

1. Science is great - this is neither an anti science nor an anti evolution article.

2. This is not an article that pits science against religion, though it does engage with the conversation between science and theology.

This article is primarily about clarification and definition; gosh, that sounds exciting doesn’t it? Hey, but wait a minute, on this occasion the clarification and the definition may just mess with your head.

So let's get to the main and possibly controversial point of this article - Evolution is not science.

‘How can this be’ I hear you cry? Well, science is a methodology or a collection of connected processes. The Oxford dictionary defines science as "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment." The key words in there for clarifying the limits of the discipline of science are "systematic study" and "observation and experiment." Evolution is a process that is inherent within the way that living organisms have developed on this planet. Science has been instrumental in discovering and analysing this process, scientific processes have allowed us to observe, collect information, compare and of course scientists had the privilege of naming the process of evolution. So evolution's association with the world of science is entirely reasonable. However evolution itself is not science, the clarification should be that it is a process that was discovered and subsequently named by science. This may seem like a pedantic clarification, but it’s essential for understanding the position of science in our culture.

If evolution is as most scientific studies suggest, then it is something that was inherently part of the universe before the process of scientific study ever existed. Let’s be fair, this is true really of all scientific discoveries, but for evolution there are a number of reasons why this is even more significant.

·    Firstly evolution has gained a deep cultural association with arguments in the 21^st century between extreme viewpoints about religion, theology, science and atheism. So understanding what we are arguing about is essential.

·       Secondly, unlike say a galaxy, a fish or penicillin, evolution is not a thing, it is a process.

·      Thirdly, and here’s where it get’s exciting, if we understand science as a process by which we observe study and experiment upon aspects of the world around us, it is essential to understand that evolution is the process being observed and studied, not the process by which it is studied. That is to say the process being studied (evolution) and the process by which it is studied are two different processes.

That in itself is enough to change the way we ought to frame many arguments, but here is the thing that we should realise when we get down to the nitty-gritty of these two processes. Evolution is a highly unscientific process. Evolution is trial and error, random; it has no observers, except the survivors who weren’t there to witness the beginning of the experiment. It makes no effort to collect data or keep records of the results or the conditions of its experiments. There are no control groups with which to make comparisons and no clear delineation between one set of experiments and the next. Evolution as a process would make very bad science.

But why is this so important? Well it’s vital when we look at how we talk about science in our culture and even how educated people talk about things like evolution. Just click on the Science and technology tab in the trending subjects column on Facebook; every time an interesting animal is spotted somewhere or an unusual event in the weather has been noticed, it’s labelled as science, when no scientific analysis is being done. This use of language permeates into arguments that say ‘you can’t deny evolution, it’s science!’ Well I have no interest in denying evolution, but it’s not science. this kind of thinking bypasses both the scientific process and the reality of what evolution actually is. It's important when people say, 'you have to believe in evolution, but you can't believe in God because evolution is science but God isn't'.

There are those who will attribute everything in the natural world to science before anything scientific has been done with it. This is actually more like bad theology than good science. It is a mixing of an unconscious belief in a human capacity to understand and control our surroundings through intellect with what we call science. If these things are science, then so are we and so is all that we do. The oddest thing about this cultural attitude is that it primarily sees the natural world as science, and us observing that world as science, but sees most human endeavour as something other than science, something different. Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’ offered no shock to the majority of the religious world in terms of evolution in general as this had been discovered by Christian botanists and was well known to many Christians at the time. The challenge that Darwin offered was that we as human being were perhaps not so special in God's creation as we also evolved from other creatures.

In reality, reading Genesis and other books of the Old Testament in the original language reveals that there has always been an understanding that human beings and other creatures of God’s creation share the same breath and the same life force. But, for Christians, as for many religions, there is thought to be a special relationship between God and humanity. In parts of Christian history that relationship has been seen in terms of a harsh and cold division between humanity and the rest of creation. In the post Darwinian world that division has been softened and the Church’s relationship with the environment has been improving. It is not as good yet as perhaps it ought to be, though we are in general heading in a better direction. However, the scary irony is that this new tendency to use of the word ‘science’ to refer to natural things as opposed to human activity is anti scientific to the point of re-establishing that false ‘special’ relationship of humanity that sets us apart from and above the rest of creation.

Evolution is not science any more than a thunderstorm is God. And God is not theology or religion any more than the sea is a fish. Until we understand that as a culture we are unlikely to be able to have a healthy conversation about any of these things together.

Genesis 1:1 - 2:3

I recently put together a worship that focussed on human interaction with God through technology; all kinds of technology, not just the modern stuff. As part of this worship, I decided to take on a task I had been wanting to do for a while; to produce my own translation of Genesis 1:1-2:3, the first of the two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis.

I am no expert in Hebrew so I relied a lot on technology to help me do this and some of my translation choices may well be questioned by those in the know, but I have a specific agenda for my translation (as all translations do) and for the most part, the controversial choices were deliberate, rather than a result of my naivety in the field.

The specific intention of this translation is to give the reader a feel for some of the peculiarities of the Hebrew language, to hear some of the grammar and sentence construction as it is delivered in the original, to retain some of the peculiar poetry of the text and perhaps most importantly to get a sense of the creation story as a fluid torrent of action rather than the stilted and coldly segmented list of actions that it often becomes in English translations.

I have attempted to leave in ambiguities or even push towards seemingly incongruent interpretations of phrases or words, which on their own work poorly in English, but in the context of the whole story begin to paint an exciting and dynamic picture - "And God saw, that's good"

In addition I have skewed the emphasis of gender, but not without rules. In Hebrew everything has a gender, whether it is a person, species or inanimate object. Our historical tendency has been to translate objects and animals as neutral (it), God as masculine (he) and ignore any references to the feminine except in humans. This is not wrong, but it misses the way that the Hebrew language often pairs masculine and feminine in a way that helps create movement, drama and tension within the very grammar of the text. For example Adam the person from chapter 2-3 is also the name for the human race in chapter 1. Adam is masculine and singular, and yet God is heard to make 'them' male and female, this is in part because adam, the species is male in reflection of the female earth, adamah. Yet in verse Gen:1:26 we hear God making adam - in God's likeness, here God is the masculine and the image is feminine. My translation seeks to draw the feminine to our attention wherever possible and allow the masculine to go unnoticed except when it has a specific purpose to play. In particular, I have tried to avoid calling God 'he' as God is not human and therefore to translate as he is inconsistent with the traditional treatment of other non human nouns. This is intended partly as a counterbalance to other translations but also as a way of drawing out those hidden gender relationships within the grammar.

Genesis 1:1-2:3

1:1      In beginning, God created the skywaters and the earth

1:2      And the earth she was shapeless, empty and dark over the face of the deep

            And the breath of God, she fluttered over the face of the waters

1:3      And God said - be light, and light be

1:4      And God saw because the light was good

            And God separated between the light and the dark

1:5      And God called day towards the light and night towards the darkness

            And it was evening, and it was morning: Day one

1:6      And God said - be an open space between the waters

            And be separated choosing waters from waters

1:7      And God made the open space

            And chose the waters which were from beneath to the open space

            And chose the waters which were from above to the open space

            And it’s so.

1:8      And God called skywaters to the open space

            And it was evening, and it was morning: Second day

1:9      And God said - gather the waters from beneath the skywaters to one place

            And the dry land she will be seen

            And it's so.

1:10    And God called the earth to the dry land

            And to the gathered waters, called sea

1:11    And God said - sprout she the earth,

            Grass, seed sowing plants, produce trees bearing produce of their kind

            Which carry their seed on the earth

            And it’s so

1:12    And the earth she send out grass,

            Plants sowing seed of their kind and trees making produce

            Which carry the seed of their kind

            And God saw, that’s good

1:13    And it was evening, and it was morning: Third Day

1:14    And God said - be lights in the open space of the skywaters

            To separate between the day and the night

            And they were a sign for occasions, days and years

1:15    And the lights be in the open space of the skywaters

            To be light upon the earth

            And it’s so

1:16    And God made two great lights;

            The greater light for representing the day

            The lesser light for representing the night

            And the stars

1:17    And God gave them to the open space of the skywaters

            To cause light upon the earth

1:18    And to represent day and night

            And to separate between light and darkness

            And God saw, that’s good

1:19    And it was evening and it was morning: Fourth Day

1:20    And God said - the waters swarm with swarming things

            Living life forces

            And a flock fly over the earth

            Over the face of the open space of the skywaters

1:21    And God created the great sea monsters

            And each of she living, moving, life forces of their kind which swarm the waters

            And each winged flock of its kind

            And God saw, that’s good

1:22    And God welcomed them

            And said - produce and be many

            And fill the waters in the seas

            And the flocks were many above the earth

1:23    And it was evening, and it was morning: Fifth day

1:24    And God said - the earth send out living life forces of her kind,

            Beasts and crawlies and life on earth of each kind

            And it’s so

1:25    And God made life on earth of each kind

            And animals of each kind

            And crawlies of the womanearth of each kind

            And God saw, that’s good.

1:26    And God said - let us make man in our image, as our feminine reflection

            And they control, with fish, the sea

            And with flock, the skywaters

            And with the animals and with all the earth

            And with all the crawling crawlies on the earth

1:27    And God made the man in the image;

            In the image of God, created him;

            Male and female, created them

1:28    And God welcomed them

            And God said to them - produce and be many and fill the earth

            And bind and control with fish, the sea

            And with flock, the skywaters

            And with all the living crawlies on the earth

1:29    And God said - hey! I give to yous all plantlife to sow seed

            Which is on the face of all the earth

            And all the treelife which contains tree produce to sow seed,

            For yous it is for eating

1:30    And for all life of the earth

            And for all the flock of the skywaters

            And for all the crawlies on the earth

            Which contain the living life force;

            all green plantlife for eating

            And it’s so

1:31    And God saw all that was made.

            And hey, it’s very good

            And it was evening and it was morning: Sixth day

2:1      And the skywaters and the earth

            And all their gathered multitudes were complete.

2:2      And in the seventh day God completed the work that was done

            And in the seventh day, rested from all the work that was done

2:3      And God welcomed the seventh day and set it apart

            Because in it was rest from all the work of creating

            Which God had done