quasi-radical theology

[johncomic]

Since I was raised Fundamentalist Baptist, I think about God and The Bible a lot. Yeah, even still.

Anyhoo, lately I got thinkin about the account of creation in Genesis, which tells us, among other things, that plants were created before there was a sun. Genesis also suggests that originally there was no rain, and that Noah's Flood was the first time it ever rained. (Don't quote me on that one, I've based this on a couple of verses in chapters two and seven. But the plants-sun thing is unequivocably there.)

We all know that plants couldn't possibly survive without sunlight. We also know that it had to rain, as long as there was water on Earth. The reason we know these things is because we thoroughly understand the natural processes underlying them. So we know that the account in Genesis can't possibly be literally true.

But it occurs to me that what this actually means is that we understand the natural processes [natural law, physical law] and we know that they were the same all along, back to the beginning of time. Trouble is, we don't know this: we believe it.

The constancy of natural law is one of the axioms of science, and it's easy to see why. If natural law can fluctuate inexplicably, science becomes impossible. An explanation of how things work now, says nothing about how they used to work or how they will work in the future. There is no enduring truth in scientific discovery if “physical constants” aren't.

So, here are two [by no means the only two] starting points for a position of knowledge:

- The Bible is the literal inspired inerrant Word of God.

- Natural laws are constant throughout space and time.

For either of those statements, you can find people who believe them. In both cases, some people will be able to provide “evidence” to support the statement. But neither of them can be conclusively proven beyond doubt. In that sense, each of them is an axiom - an article of faith. And an entire belief system can be derived from either one.

So, in a way, saying that “Genesis can't possibly be true” is actually saying that “Genesis conflicts with my personal belief system”. The issue isn't science versus religion, it's a clash between two differing “theologies”.

Comments

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

Still, I think it would be intriguing if there actually was something to the whole “strange attractor of natural law” idea... like, natural law does vary, but there's a kind of “science beneath science” that explains how it varies. So our current pocket of apparent constancy is a special case, kinda like how Newtonian physics is a special case of Einsteinian physics at very low speeds... what we now know as natural law would be a kind of “Newtonian natural law” as a subset of “Einsteinian natural meta-law”...

I dunno, I think that'd be kinda cool. I wonder if anyone has seriously looked into such an idea.