And now we come to the hermeneutical problem, the question of how one interprets a text or makes sense of the world.
Take for example the film, The God’s Must Be Crazy. To one group (the bushmen), the glass bottle is seen as a gift from the gods, even if its an evil gift. To them, the bottle did not so much bring out their worst qualities, but rather exercised an evil power over them that made them behave unnaturally. (Thus, to get rid of the bottle was to get rid of the evil that it had brought into the community.) On the other hand, to ‘modern man’, the bottle is merely a by-product from a consumer good. To them, the bottle has no divine power, does not influence how they act. The pilot that drops it out the airplane’s window in the beginning of the film gets rid of it not because it is evil, but because it is worthless.
Here, in a sense, we have two different hermeneutics (that of the bushmen and that of ‘modern man’) interacting with a single text (the coke bottle). Both communities make sense of the bottle in a way that is informed by their interaction with it. They both are forced, in a certain sense, to make sense of this object in their world. The pilot tosses it out his window because it’s worthless. And isn’t it? Isn’t it just a product of consumption, but not even that, a container for the product which is to be consumed? But the bushmen call it evil, and it makes us watching the movie laugh a bit, but wasn’t it? Didn’t its presence turn the community against itself?
To both sets of questions the answer is obviously “yes” and “no,” but that gets things a bit off-track. What is important here, is that here you have as much of an “objective” text as you can get: a glass bottle. And yet! And yet there is interpretation, both communities understand this bottle in two very different ways, what that bottle means is utterly different for those two groups. Neither one of them consciously looked at that bottle with a “method” or a “theory” in mind. But that’s not to say there isn’t a theory, a hermeneutic, it just means we’ve so internalized most of our perspectives that we don’t go around every day having to figure out what each little thing we interact with “really means.”
And that’s both good and bad. On one hand, it’s simply life, it’s just how we go about the day, and there’s not much changing that. You couldn’t really get on with living if you had to stop and examine your unconscious perspective at every turn. On the other, its some of these deeply internalized perspectives that get us into trouble, that make it hard to recognize our racism, or be able to see a Big Mac in a different light than just a quick meal, or to rethink what beauty really is. And this is why theologians, pastors, philosophers, artists, protestors, neighbors, and co-workers sometimes take up the task of getting us to look critically at some of our unexamined perspectives, our internalized hermeneutics.
And because there always is a hermeneutic, because we are ever and always (and for the most part subconsciously) interpreting the world, the question we finally arrive at is whether or not our hermeneutics are an attempt to see the world as God does. (Which is NOT to say, to have some grand objective perspective.)
So now, if we take the analogy from The God’s Must Be Crazy into Kentucky’s Creation Museum, the light on those shiny displays begins to look a bit different.
One of the most interesting things about the Creation Museum is that it wanted to say there are different (read: 2) ways to look at the physical “objective” world, but only one way to look at the Bible. As noted in the previous post, the two ways to make sense of the world are through God’s Word or through human reason. But doesn’t that sound like saying there are two ways to interpret a Coke bottle and only one way to interpret Shakespeare?
What they then went on to try to show was that human reason will lead you to evolution while scripture will lead you to modern evangelical creationism. So, a few things about that.
First, I guess we are left to conclude that all those godless scientist and philosophers (and let’s be honest, even supposedly “Christian” ones) before Darwin (read: for the majority of human history) just didn’t know how to use human reason properly, or weren’t using it at all, seeing that human reason didn’t even conceive of evolution till the 1800s. What was Thales using when he said the universe was made of water? Or Galileo when he said the sun was at the center of our solar system? Ouija boards? Chicken bones?
Second, but with the first, it’s funny how, for thousands of years, the Jewish people have had Genesis and have yet to come to the conclusion of the creationist. Being Christian seems pretty irrelevant here, right? It’s not as if there is a single mention of Christ in the theory, he’s pretty unimportant at this point I guess (funny, he wasn’t for John...). But lets give the theory a chance, maybe you need Jesus to really understand what Genesis actually means. I guess that would explain why the Catholics didn’t get it right for 1500 years? But Luther even missed the point. And Calvin. And Wesley. Well, I’m glad we finally have real Christians in the year 2000 that can actually hear the Good Word for what it is.
So where does this reading of the Bible come from (besides from Jesus, obviously)? While I don’t want to go into the whole convoluted history (oh, and is there ever one!), I do want to point out a little contradiction at the heart of it all. Namely, while modern evangelical creationism wants to completely denounce human reason as a starting point for thinking about the world, and concomitantly, denounce the godless human sciences that human reason has spawned, it is holding up science as the yardstick by which to judge the truthfulness of the Bible. Let me try to make that clearer.
You would be amazed at the science this place put on display. There were so many displays, TVs, graphs, and words long enough to rival the German language, that anyone who wasn’t completely skeptical or didn’t have a background in science would have been pretty convinced if merely for the sake of being unable to refute it. Example: “Humans have come in contact with lots of animals , like crocodiles and coelacanths, but they aren’t buried with humans.” Of course, coelacanths...those um, yeah, sure, that’s a good point...I think...what the eff is a coelacanth? I won’t even go into the floating forests...
I guess that was a bit beside the point, though it kind of goes back to my point in the previous post about having to appear “valid,” which is a concept that matters very much here. For the creationist, the Genesis account has to be read as a scientific account to be true, for it to be a valid text. The only way for Genesis to be meaningful is for it to be scientific at heart. Any other reading would leave you having to rely on the godless evolutionary scientists for an account of how the universe came into existence. Or so the claim goes.
So I hope the contradiction has become clear: Creationism denounces science while saying that the truth of Genesis lies its scientific reading. Reading Genesis as an a scientific account is not then, the rejection of human reason, it is the unwitting idolization of it, or at least, of our current social and epistemological perspective and what we mean by “truth.”
When did scripture become more a story about us and less a story about God?
And while creationists may not want to say that scientific creationism is all that the Genesis story is, the tenacity with which creationism is defended and propagated in conservative evangelical circles makes it difficult for me to see how the scientific reading is not, at the end of the day, what they hold to be the most important, the most in need of defending and vocalizing. If the beauty of the Genesis story and the mysteries it reveal about God are not wholly lost or disregarded in scientific creationism, they are definitely in need of renewed emphasis.
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