MetaCatholic

The story of Richard Colling (HT HIggaion) is another worrying development in the growth of “biblical” insanity. To summarise briefly : Colling is an evolutionary biologist and a Christian (Church of the Nazarene). His book exploring evolution as a mechanism of creation has been effectively banned in his university, and he has been prevented from teaching his introductory biology class, because evolution is held to be godless and unbiblical. (I shall resist asking the very English and Oxbridge snob question of whether anything can call itself a university in the States: all sorts of English HE colleges are now suffering delusions of grandeur too.)

His church has not been particularly noted in the past for obscurantism, so this episode would seem to suggest that the problem of a nonsensical misreading of the Bible as a scientific textbook is growing and spreading. I can’t help putting this alongside the growth of other things like the so-called complementarian backlash against the equality of women. There is an attempt to create a seamless robe by wilfully treating scripture as a blueprint for all knowledge and cultural configuration.

This conversion of the Bible into an almanac, encyclopaedia and lawbook, all rolled into one is at its most distorted not because it misreads the genres and cultural locations of scripture (which it does) but because it confuses trust in God with trust in the (thus misconstrued) Bible. “You can trust God because the Bible says so” is putting the cart before the horse.

You would not imagine from this paranoid circling of the cultural wagons that one of the words most frequently addressed to people in Scripture’s pages is “Fear not!” The ideas that God created the world with deceiving geological evidence built into it, or that Satan has a specially gifted ministry of fossil design and placement are both patently ludicrous.

Real trust in God should inspire a total and open-ended commitment to truthful searching, and a lack of fear in approaching any evidence there may be of anything. You cannot, it seems to me, claim to follow the one who is portrayed as saying “I am the Truth” and then not embrace truth wherever it is to be found.