Sunshine Coast Hinterland Times

Retired Anglican priest, biblical scholar and academic, Ray Baraclough explores the sensitive issue of intelligent design or creationism.

Ray’s recent book – Why? -how to explain life’s tragic experiences - traces the ‘who and ‘what’ of earthly calamity including diseases such as epilepsy.

THESE DAYS certain streams of Christianity try to confine accounts of the universe – its existence and its ongoing life – to a single category called Intelligent Design or Creationism.

But as the evangelical biblical scholar, Professor Frank Andersen once commented on the biblical creation story, “Which one? There are about forty of them.”

We ought to be aware that the biblical storytellers were drawing on concepts available in their own historical time. Naturally, new information about the universe that would only be revealed centuries after their own time was outside their comprehension.

For example, it’s not surprising that a number of biblical writings assert that God is the one who directly causes earthquakes to occur. It was a common belief in the ancient world. It was not until the nineteenth century that awareness of the movement of tectonic plates and of subterranean earth slippage explained why earthquakes actually happened.

Given the information that we now possess, how does one respond to the question: What kind of intelligent design do earthquakes serve? The question is especially pressing when earthquakes cause death or serious injury to thousands upon thousands of human beings.

We need to appreciate too that ancient writers would have had no awareness of evolution as an explanation for life in the universe.

So to expect them to provide a rebuttal of evolution is to ignore this historical reality. While we know planet earth exists, people come to contradictory conclusions about its origin from the same evidence.

On the one hand, the fact that the earth exists as it does can be regarded as a deliberate and ingenious creative masterpiece. But, why did God also arrange the expendability of species?

You may, on the other hand, regard the creation of earth as a remarkable and quite fortuitous result of the random dispersement of huge fragments of matter that become planets. If so, what is the overarching story of intention for that activity?

If God is able to create an earth, why, then, have not many other earth-like planets been created? And if Adam and Eve are seen as mucking it all up, could not God have given humans a miss in subsequent creations?

For example, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his story entitled The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, sketches a human society unblemished by any fall but living peacefully and cooperatively through natural processes.

Many people have written about the randomness and unpredictability of earthly design. As the biologist Jacques Monod once put it, life evolves not only through necessity—the universal workings of natural law—but also through chance, the unpredictable intervention of countless accidents.

“Chance has reared its head many times in our planet’s history,  dramatically so in the many mass extinctions that wiped out millions of species and, in doing so, created room for new life-forms to evolve.”

If both natural change and random events shape our universe, believers have to grapple with the issue of whether anything is random for God? Good old Calvinists will answer in terms of predestination which gives a tidy but not a wholesome answer. Who wants their family and other humans, as well as other living creatures, to suffer through a divinely predetermined earthquake?

And if there is no transcending story beyond natural causes, is deep despair the final anguished outcome of a devastating earthquake or tsunami for the lucky survivors?

These are difficult questions.

To add a lighter touch. I understand that medieval rabbis discussed what God could possibly be doing on the sabbath – other than observing it. One delightful suggestion was that it gave God time to work his way through the convoluted business of arranging arranged Jewish marriages.

But to return to the role of stories in this debate about creation. Those who are religious need to acknowledge publicly the diversity of explanations within the Bible.

I have claimed there is no one set story, and they must also acknowledge that their explanations must take into account contemporary scientific data about the cosmos. My words may well raise a wry smile when I say that evolutionary processes are here to stay.

Those in the fundamentalist camp who reject the evolutionary process must publicly explain why their God, amongst other acts, intelligently designs the death of living species, including humans, through causing earthquakes. Christian, Islamic and Jewish fundamentalists face the same challenge for in this regard they share the same belief.

Non-fundamentalist believers in a creating God have the challenge of explaining how they blend their choice of explanatory stories from the variety of biblical stories along with the main stream core of evolutionary explanation.

Those who believe that evolution completely ‘carries the field’ still have to grapple, especially in the face of tragic experiences, with finding meaning that goes deeper than natural processes and random events.

I think particularly of the anguish that the believer Charles Darwin experienced over the death of his ten year old daughter Annie.

I have no solution to either of these latter two challenges. Any sensitive and discerning contribution is welcome.

Readers who would like to discuss Ray’s challenging questions can do so on the Hinterland Times website www.hinterlandtimes.com.au.