What I wrote above may seem a bit incoherent to some people, to some who are not religious at all and to some who are. It's those religious people who the irreligious think all religious people are like, that is, biblical literalists and fundamentalists, who would find my insistence problematic. For my part, after my hyper-fundamentalist upbringing, I marvel at what a wonderful thing it is to grasp that faith and reason go hand-in-hand. It's wonderful to grasp that the two creation narratives found at the very beginning of Genesis, which, while complementary in certain aspects, are irreconcilable. It's great to comprehend that these narratives, which echo other Near Eastern sources in some ways and differ from these sources significantly in others, were never intended to explain how things came into being. Instead, these texts deal with the why of existence, but do not seek to do so exhaustively. When one considers the first of these two texts, which comprises the whole of the first chapter and the first four verses of the second, it is a very poetic take on creation. If one attends to reading it closely, it clearly has what might be called an evolutionary structure. The second narrative is earthier, quite literally. It lacks the cosmic dimensions of the first narrative, taking more an existential viewpoint.
I will be so bold as to assert that to read these texts in a literal way (i.e., as explaining the how rather than dealing exclusively with the why) is to forfeit the rather rich revelatory value they possess. It makes no sense from the standpoint of reason and faith cannot smash the two accounts together to make them a seamless whole, just as the three synpotic Gospels cannot be completely harmonized and the Synoptics cannot be harmonized with the Johannine account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Nazareth. The ancient Jewish redactors (i.e., those put Genesis together in the form in which we possess it) did their best to make these two divergent stories complementary. At least in my view, they did a pretty remarkable job.
Taken in Hog Canyon, a box canyon located on Morris Ranch in Dinosaur National Monument
In his book On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, written all the way back in the early fifth century, St. Augustine lamented that all Christians were tarred with the same brush as those who read the creation narratives in Genesis literally. He grasped that they were not to be read or understood as scientifically verifiable accounts of how the earth came to be and to be populated. My first step towards becoming Catholic was encountering John Henry Newman's Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. What this showed me was that faith and reason are not only compatible but have an symbiotic relationship. Hence, I believe in God, I believe in Jesus Christ, belong to the Church he founded, celebrate the sacraments, read Scripture, etc. and grasp that human beings, like the rest of life on our uniquely situated planet, are the product- though not exclusively- of evolution. In terms of the overall age of the earth, homo sapiens are a fairly new and late-breaking phenomenon. Human culture dates back maybe 10,000 years and history, the beginning of which was marked by human beings chronicling events, is younger than that by a few thousand years. The Hebrew Bible (i.e., the Old Testament) stands as a remarkable chronicle of a single people over the span of about 1,000 years or so.
Our traditio for this mid-summer Friday, the first of August, is a song that was on our family playlist during our trip. It's a song we all sang along to- The Proclaimers singing "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)." This is song rife with the requisite Celtic spirit.
Indeed! Faith **and** reason: and addressing "why," not "what." :)
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for highlighting the complimentary aspects - - - that's something to think about.