Creationism vs Evolutionism

ADDENDUM 1/10/2016: After writing this post, I have found the term "scientism" in use by an author by the last name of Dodds in an article that will be appearing in 14.2 (Spring 2016) of the English edition of the journal Nova et Vetera (which I copy-edited). He uses the term in basically the same sense in which I use it in this post, but I will not include his actual wording here, so as to avoid any possible issues of plagiarism prior to the publication of his article. Whether Dodds has picked it up from elsewhere in his usage, I do not know, but I am guessing not, as he says "would best be termed as ..." without citing anyone else. The timing does not work for him to have read this blog before writing his article originally for an earlier symposium, and in any event, the development of the term is fairly simply to do and the likely path for anybody seeking to describe the expansion of "science" to a philosophical position. I simply take it as street cred that I did it the same as a scholar who is publishing.


Main Post
So, this post is naturally a loaded issue and a heated topic. I am going to address the debate between "literal 6-day creationism" and "evolution." I put them in quotes because particularly the second is one on which I think there is a lot of different thinking and the quotes there pertain mainly to what the other side thinks of them (seeing any acceptance of theories of evolution in the material cosmos and the physical organism of humans as strict materialism and a rejection of the Genesis account of creation). The issue can be roughly summed up by saying that there are those who think that God created the world in its present shape in six literal 24-hour days with no process of evolution on any level, whether physical or psychological. The "evolutionist" side has more variation in it, but the parameters of the debate as a debate are really, in my mind, set by the creationist side, which is sort of the point of this post.

My basic thesis is that another camp, whose constituency is drawn entirely from the evolutionist side, has already won the battle, although not any actual intellectual debate. Simply put, they have convinced the "literal creationist" side to buy their way of thinking without that side realizing it. Fortunately, that other camp largely does not realize that it has won the battle either, so there is a chance to turn the tide in the overall war (maybe, although I think many 6-day creationists will have great difficulty grasping the position enough to do it, both because of a certain entrenchedness and because it is a nuanced position to get that requires a bit of specific philosophical training).

So, to describe that camp, I am going to introduce a new term for what I think is a more core conceptual position, one about which I think both sides are likely unconscious, which makes it all the more powerful, operating behind the scenes, so to speak.  I call this ideology "scientism" and those who follow it, "scientismists." I can't really call them scientists, even though many of them are—the system of thought is defined by something other than scientific method itself. A physical ("hard") scientist is simply one who comes up with a hypothesis and tests it using empirically verifiable experiments and research. "Scientism," on the other hand, believes that all truth is defined by material fact. To quote C. S. Lewis's essay "Myth Become Fact," according to the tradiontal Christian (which I think would be opposed to this "scientism") there are truths that transcend fact, truths that are expressed in myth (here myth is not opposed to fact, and transcendence means myth taking fact up into itself, but still as properly fact, made possible by the one place that myth became fact, Jesus Christ in the Incarnation ... myth is not untrue, it is truth beyond the realm of mere physical historical fact ... and there is only one really, fully true myth, the Trinity). Scientism basically denies this. Another name for "scientism" could be "materialism" (the philosophical/metaphysical position that the only reality is physical reality ... not the crass hedonistic consumerism sometimes meant by "materialism"). But there is a further sub(but key)-tenet, particularly in this context, that I mean by "scientism."

That tenet is that, for scientism, not only is truth defined by fact, but fact is defined by extension. To be more precise here, physicality or "body" is defined by extension. By extension, I mean extension in three dimensions. This was a radically new idea introduced by the father of Modern philosophy/thought, Renee Descartes. Descartes broke reality down into two categories: res cogitens (thinking reality = mind; for religious folk/Christian, spirit) and res extensa (extended reality = body). He has rightly been criticized by everyone for this dualism, and the argument against it is called the "ghost in the machine" argument. For him, this counter-argument says, mind is a ghost in the machine of body, simply operating it somehow, as if by magic. No concrete positive mechanism is described for how it does so. In short, Descartes does not take account of "soul."

Aside: In all of the three classic languages of the Judeo-Christian tradition—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin— there are two different words for "soul" and "spirit." In Hebrew, nephesh=soul and ruach=spirit; in Greek psyche=soul (from which we get the word "psychology") and pneuma=spirit; in Latin, anima=soul (from which we get "animal" and "animated") and spiritus=spirit. A spirit is immaterial by definition, a completely other order of reality apart from the physical. A soul, on the other hand, is defined by the physical universe because it is the life-force that animates a body. The medieval scholastic philosophers spoke of three kinds of soul: the vegetative (in plants), whose principle is simply growth; the sensate (in animals), whose principle is sensation of things like color and pain or pleasure; and the rational (in humans), whose principle is thought, based in self-reflexivity. Anything that can die has a soul. A machine can be turned on and off as the same machine by supplying or removing electricity. But once a living thing dies (like a tree), it cannot be reanimated as the same living thing (the Christian doctrine of the resurrection is obviously an exception, and that is one of the points of it). The conflation of the soul and spirit in Christianity has happened over the years because of the belief that the destiny of the soul (heaven or hell) hinges on that of the spirit (I do not think this is necessarily a negative thing, although I do think the lack of knowledge and understanding of the concepts and the development is). There is a longstanding debates ove whether, in humans the soul and spirit are the same "thing" (human soul=a spirit functioning in a bodily dimension, the "bi-partite"position, which I buy, although only if I must restrict myself to the language of "parts," which I think the Tradition of the Church does not dictate, and in fact goes against, but addressing that would be another post altogether) ...  or,on the other hand, spirit and soul are two separate substances (the "tripartite" position) ... just as there were debates in medieval philosophy over whether the human progressed through these three types of soul, leaving the previous behind upon the attainment of the next, or simply added the next to the previous, retaining both, eventually all three. But Christians have traditionally believed in a distinct order called soul, meaning at the very least that something if animating a body in a manner of being intimately wed to it (rather than, say, the properly miraculous way in which a purely spiritual being like an angel could impact the material world): Apollinarius's thought, for instance, was condemned as heresy for denying that there was a human soul in Christ, simply the spirit of the Logos.

To Return to the Main Argument: Descartes's concept of body as defined by extension in three dimensions was new. In the ancient world of Hebraic and Christian thought, body was defined as being a mode of relation. It is not that they did not have any concept of extension (they generally called it "measure," in "weight, number, and measure"); but "body" was not defined by that. It was defined by its capability for relation. You related to nature by, say, tilling the ground. Spouses relate to each other through physical conjugal acts. You relate to God though physical actions of cult, like sacrifice and obedience. "Death" is also not defined solely by material separation of body and soul: the original couple in the Garden of Eden do not materially die when they eat the fruit, but their relations begin the disintegration that will culminate in death ... they have already begun to die—the relation of both to nature (man to the ground/nature and woman to the serpent), the relation between man and woman, the relation of humanity to God in being expelled from the Garden, all of these have had decay enter into them.

The way this plays out with "scientism" in relation to "creationism" (literal six days) is that the former has convinced the latter to accept Descartes reduction of physicality by accepting its application to the aspect of time. Some materialist philosophers subsequent to Descartes have spent a great deal of time and energy discussing time as a fourth dimension through which reality is extended. For instance, the 20th-century materialist, J. J. Smart, tried to solve the materialist problem of "identity through time" by his concept of "time slices" (in his defense of the "B-theory of time"). Once it was discovered that bodies undergo a complete change of material over time, somebody asked him something like "if materialism is true, how can you say I am the same person I was x number of years ago, since I have progressively but completely changed out my material?" Smart said this looks at only three dimensions, and not the fourth, time. He said that what you call yourself right now, your matter extended in three dimensions, is only a "time slice" of your true entire materialist identity.

The main point here is that the important thing to a literal 6-day creationist concerning the time of creation is its exact extension, six literal 24-hour periods. This is the great message God intended to convey in giving the account of creation in Genesis 1 ... a divine work log. The only alternative reading of what is really going on for literal six-day creationist reading is that it might see the limited time span as a greater showing of the power of God, which, to me, smells strongly of a heavy unconscious impact of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, in addition to Descartes.

The "scientismists" have already, at least for the present, won the battle for the minds of the literal 6-day creationists, but unfortunately the latter do not realize it. Fortunately, neither do the former, from what I can tell.

Possible Time Functioning in Hebraic Thought and the Hebrew Bible.
If I am going to say all this, I should try to offer an alternate conception of time in the Bible, especially in the creation accounts. I use the plural there because there seem to be two different accounts in Genesis 1 and 2. I'm not going to go into the whole debate over separate sources and authors, or the reply that one author can be examining the same event under two different aspects, circling back around for the second aspect, so to speak. But that response involves seriously taking account of the differences that some say suggest that they are originally two separate accounts. So, I am going to examine an instance of what seems to be a disagreement in chronology, in the order of creative acts. In Genesis 1, the animals were created before the humans. In Genesis 2:18-19, man has been created first and the animals are created in response to the observation that "it is not good for man to be alone."

I have seen a bad translation this passage that reads "God had created the animals ...," probably in a poor attempt to normalize the Genesis 2 account to that of Genesis 1. As far as I can tell, the verbs simply do not support that reading. "And God said" is in the "narrative" tense (vav-consecutive imperfect; see below for some of the significance of the use of this verb). "I will create" is in the imperfect (also see below on this). "And God formed" is the next verb. I can see nothing in the grammar at all to indicate that this is to be anything other than a simple vav-consecutive-imperfect showing the next action in sequence. I have not double-checked Waltke and O'Connor (the unofficial authority on syntax in biblical Hebrew), but there would have to be something VERY unusual or rare in the syntax to make that verb in that tense mean even contemporaneous action, let alone prior action.

I will discuss where I think this goes in a minute, but first a I want to give a primer on verb tenses in Hebrew as a segue. This relates to what will come on the issue of time and sequence because in Greek, Latin, and the major modern languages, verb tense is primarily about time (although Greek's difference between the imperfect, the perfect, and the aorist as past tenses is a bit different, and actually a little more like Hebrew in what they do relate beyond simply time-aspect, but that goes too far afield for here, which is about Hebrew). Hebrew is different. It has only four tenses, two primary and two derivative (as far as morphology). The two primary tenses, the perfect and imperfect, have to do with completion (perfect=completed and imperfect=incomplete, therefore the imperfect will often be used as a future tense, in our language, but could also be used in a sense at least analogous to the way Greek uses its imperfect tense).

The two derivative tenses are each formed by affixing the letter vav to the front of the two primary tenses. The vav-converted-perfect is a tricky one and used in a much wider variety of ways. The vav-consecutive-imperfect, however, is precisely what it says, "consecutive," and is sometimes referred to as the "narrative tense" (it is used for narratives, one action following another). They don't think about time in the way that we do; they think about completion and the relation (like "body" and "death" above) of events to each other expressed by sequence.

My theory of what this means for time and the order of creation is that the "time" aspect does not convey what we think of as sequence (with an emphasis on historical "facticity" and scientifically "accurate" description of the order of events). What the sequence (in the form of the narrative tense) relates is different aspects of the relationship between man and animals. In Gen 1 the point is that creation follows a sequence in which the last is the highest. Man is above animals just as animals are above plants, and the sequence mirrors that. In Gen 2, the point is whether or not animals can be a proper and full companion for man. So, they are created in response to the observation that it is not good for man to be alone, as a sort of "first attempt" to find a "helpmate suitable to him." 


There is a “material discrepancy," as far as I can tell, between the orders of creative acts (man and animals) in Gen 1 and Gen 2. But the question is whether or not the modern scientific definition of “materiality” by which that “discrepancy” is defined, and which was begun in its primal pr "proto" form by Descartes, is adequate to discussing the reality of creation of the physical world. I believe that it is not; but I also do not believe that that means that we have to jettison or abandon any concept at all of historicity or factuality in the accounts relating of the event.

As a sideline of background, or maybe fleshing this whole exposition out, Gen 2:18-19 is, from what I can tell, much more central to the reading of chapters 1-2 as an account of creation than I think most non-Hebrew readers and those not studied in Jewish interpretation can realize ... and I don't think many scholars who are focused on discussions of sources take account of it either.  As far as I can tell, it is the next occurrence of the verb "and he said" (he being God/the LORD) after Gen 1 ("he commanded," concerning the trees, is a different verb). This is a very important verb in Jewish interpretation of Gen 1. They emphasize that it appears exactly ten times in Gen 1 and they match this with the Ten Commandments, in Greek, the "Decalogue," the ten words. Ten words of God in creation and ten words of commandment when the Law is given = the giving of the Law is a further creation. In Genesis, God created a cosmos; in Exodus ,God created a special people for himself by making them special by giving them the Mosaic Law (in Jewish interpretation at least as early as the return from the Babylonian Exile, creation was not actually thought to be truly complete until the building of the Temple by Solomon).

There is a lot more I could add here about how the important factor in "6 days" is not a scientific accuracy of "day," but rather the number 6 (what is called the "framework theory" of Gen 1: that matching rulers and realms were created on matching days: 1 and 4; 2 and 5; and 3 and 6), or about how "day" (Hebrew=yom) is generally a "kairos" time term ("special" or "loaded" time of feasts and liturgical seasons, as in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement) rather than a "chronos" one (chronological clock time). But any exposition further than the brief parentheticals I just gave would be pretty substantial chunks to add here, and I think it might be overload and distract (but if you want more on that second thing I mentioned just now, you can read my "Story Time: Narrative as Kairotic Chronology" on this blog ... the main topic Harry Potter, but at one point, I talk about the terms used in Gen 1). I have discussed the instance of Gen 2:18-19 and the order of the creation events of man and animals here because of the possible charge of internal inconsistency that might be used as ammunition by a scientismist, who might say, "you creationists say that you do not accept the fact that your biblical account contradicts empirical scientific findings as sufficient reason to drop your claims, but your biblical witness cannot even agree with itself either."

(Other interesting things that would be too much to include and expound here would be:

I think the recurrence of a planning verb in Gen 2 ("I will make a helpmate suitable to him") is also reminiscent of the decision to "create man in our own image" in Gen 1 (both are first person imperfects - in Gen 1, the fact that it is plural usually dictates a "cohortative" meaning). It may even be consciously intentional parallelism to unite the two accounts (and thus why I say Gen 2:18-19 might be so important), but that gets into a whole discussion of authorship.
and ...
I also think the the mist covering the face of the earth is reminiscent of the Spirit hovering over the face of the deep, but I am guessing I probably got that form a commentary, even though I can't remember that right now.)
 
Summary: The basic point of this post is that I find it disheartening that scientism has basically won the fight for the minds of many believers in creation. Fortunately I don't think they realize it, so there is hope. And also, that does not mean they [scientismists] have won the battle for the hearts, souls, and spirits. They [creationists] are devout and virtuous people.

But it does also distract from some very real debates between a belief in creation (when one understands the texts better) and radical evolutionism. For instance, in the Catholic faith, you are not free to believe that the human spirit is simply a further evolution of animal soul. Certain things in human psychology may be further versions of, or at least similarities too, animal psyche, but the spirit cannot be an evolution of it; it is of a completely different order. And you cannot believe that the animal soul (or rational soul simply as an evolution of animal soul) is all there is in us. Another issue that the creationism debate eclipses is that the teaching is that there was literally one original couple, our parents, who were the first spiritual-bodily persons and whose actions impacted our spiritual state radically, but much scientific research now claims to be showing disparate, independent strands of development in the evolution of our biological being, and much work needs to be done in finding out where those two things (science and Revelation) intersect (and for the grammar nazis, my use of "literally" is accurate there, in opposition to seeing the "couple" as "figurative language" ... don't mess with a Jedi copy-editor who chose metaphor theory as one of his four questions in his PhD comps and read all 400 pages of Paul Ricoeur's Rule of Metaphor and can kill you with the Jedi mind trick of boring you to death with discussions of PR's criticism of the "tropological" approach to examining figurative language).

I will end by saying that I think that there is an aspect in the thinking of the biblical author of historical reality, that these things really happened in some form or another. But primeval history is a different genre than contemporary history and involves different literary devices. For instance, it is widely agreed that the "two trees" in the Garden is a mashal, a riddle ... they believe a real distinct event took place, but a riddle is used for some reason to mask its material nature in the text.

Aside: My personal theory on that mashal is that the point of the riddle is to hide the answer forever, not to be solved - knowledge is experiential and to have a concept in your head of that event by which evil entered the world is to have a form of that thing in you, and you don't want that. Others say it is a circumlocution for the couple having sex before they were allowed to, that God said to wait for that highest goodness until he allowed, a circumlocution based in the use of "to know" for sex, as in Gen 4:1, "the man knew his wife and she conceived and bore a son," and on the effect that the eating had of "uncovering their nakedness," which is a circumlocution for sex in the prohibitions of incest in Lev 18 (Gen 2 ends with the statement that the couple was naked and not ashamed, and after the eating, Adam says they hid because they were naked and basically ashamed of it). I actually wrote the sex interpretation in a paper once (although I was by no means the first to posit it), but I no longer think it is accurate, on the grounds that, if these two chapters are to be seen as a unified whole, whether as the combination of two sources by one author or as the fresh writing of a whole account, it does not make sense with the divine command being given to be fruitful and multiple in Gen 1 without any mention of contingency upon a further specific allowance by God, but I also think so on other grounds, but that would add great length to this already lengthy post.

Epilogue: I think this error in reducing physical reality to being defined by extension is also behind confusion on the doctrine of purgatory. For long times the language was of years and days in purgatory, and this led sometimes, particularly after the rise of modern scientific thinking, to a certain legalism and casuistry. Then, in recent times, based in some statements in Catholic magisterial circles, people began to say purgatory is not a time thing. I think this erroneously perceived need comes from the same materialist reduction of time. I say that purgatory must be time-bound, otherwise it would be an eternal state, which is not the teaching of the Church. The problem was, once the modern preoccupation with extension turned the language of days and years into legalism and casuistry, some saw the use of time terms as erroneous, rather than seeing the true problem of an erroneous thinking about time itself. The extension issue turned it into a focus a scientific "accuracy" about material duration.