1 of 1 members found this review helpful.
“The first and foremost thing to establish about Andrew Parker’s new book on the Genesis creation story is what it is not. It is not a repudiation of evolution theory. And perhaps just as importantly, it is not any sort of proof of the existence of God. As I’ve written before in other places, I do not think that will or can ever be proved, and I think that is purposefully so. Parker is not setting about trying to prove or repudiate anything so drastic. Rather, he asks us to reconsider, in a scientific light, what was once seen as a crude and rather fictional tale. Parker’s basic thesis: “When [Genesis 1] is taken literally, it is left in the wake of an advancing science. But when it is read figuratively…it becomes a great unknown in the way it keeps pace with modern science.”
When I first saw the title of the book The Genesis Enigma at the bookstore, I was excited. A book about how science and the Genesis account agree? I had already recently written a short article on how the Genesis creation account is more scientifically accurate than any other mythic creation account, as it rejects the central tenet of pagan religions: the deification of nature. Yet as I began to read, I became more and more skeptical. Andrew Parker is a scientist, an evolutionist, even, so a book favorable toward religion from such a man is an interesting thing. But it seemed at first that he was stretching things too much in order to fit his idea: sure, there are some parallels between Genesis and the history of the universe -- but other things are out of order, and some are missing entirely. This fact is something I have been aware of for a long time, and is why I -- and some other Christian thinkers, such as C.S. Lewis -- began to consider the Genesis creation as mythic (in the old sense, not in the newer one). As I continued to read, however, these reservations began to be eroded by the facts of the book. Firstly, that Parker was a scientist, with an established career no less, before he became interested in religious ideas, which removed the idea of bias (you can't discount science if you know the science intimately first, and only subsequently compare it to religion).
Secondly, one of Parker's ideas as a scientist began to change the way I think. Sure, there are discrepancies in the Genesis account, and its scientific accuracy is thus questionable, at least in terms of what we presently know. However, Parker urges the reader to start out with a frame of mind stripped of the last 2,500+ years of scientific progress, equipped only by what common sense and guesswork can provide. In other words, with the frame of mind that the Genesis writer would have had. “Michelangelo painted the creation story,” Parker writes, “as one would expect someone without scientific knowledge to represent it -- using the human form. That way everyone could identify with it. But the writer of Genesis opted instead for a cryptic, more abstract description.” God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. This is the historical root of the idea of the Big Bang Theory, first proposed by Catholic priest Georges Lemaître. From here, the Genesis writer continues on, making a few blunders; but Parker's argument holds that it is not the presence of the mistakes we should note, but the amazing accuracy that the account has despite them. One would expect an occasional mythic creation account to get one or two points right, sheerly by accident. But, the book argues, it is inconceivable, when we consider the absence of our two plus millennia of scientific knowledge, that an Israelite desert wanderer could just happen to get so much correct, even if his language is vague and inexact.
This is the basic gist of Andrew Parker's creation chronology:
“Let there be light,” corresponds with the Big Bang itself. As science shows, energy (“light” to the ancient’s terminology) was the first thing to exist in the universe, and from this energy was formed matter. At first glance, the preceding mention of Heaven and Earth's creation in the first verse seems to skew this chronology, but this problem disappears with closer thought. For one thing, a later verse depicts the creation of the Heavens (ancient terminology for the skies and outer space). Add to this the description of Earth as “without form” (without shape) and “void” (without matter), and it becomes clear that Earth, while present in God’s mind, has not yet been created. The same verse in which we see creation of light mentions also day and night, implying the creation of the sun. Again, this seems to be skewed by the fact that the sun and moon seem to be created later on in verses 14-19, but this is countered by the fact that the Genesis writer -- whatever else he was ignorant of -- surely understood, by simple observation, that the presence of the sun means day, while its absence means night. No, Parker has an alternate and much more scientifically interesting explanation for the second mention of “Let there be lights.”
Following the creation of light and the sun, the Genesis writer describes a separation between waters to form the sky. The lower waters are obviously seas, and the upper -- above the sky -- can be read as clouds. As Parker explains, this reflects the scientific order, as the formation of water from hydrogen and oxygen, and the evaporation and precipitation caused by the high heat and subsequent cooling of the earth’s surface, occurred early in history, well before the emergence of life. It is also notable that Genesis has dry land appear before the emergence of life, despite the fact that sea life is the first to be created. This, too, reflects a scientific history of the earth. (The one curious thing about Genesis here is that the creation of the earth itself seems to have been left out. It obviously occurred sometime between the light and the sky, but when is never said.)
Here, Parker says, is where the odds for accurate guesswork begin to become really low; for the next stages in the Genesis account were not known to be accurate until after Darwin. Genesis next describes the creation of plant life, which Parker equates with cyanobacteria: among the first life to evolve from a single-celled organism, these photosynthetic cells are found integrated into plant cells and are known as chloroplasts. From here, the second “let there be light” is a bit trickier. Again, day and night, and hence the sun’s presence, has already been mentioned. Parker’s idea is that these words hint toward the evolution of vision, the sense which let the light into life’s perception, and allowed living creatures to become aware for the first time of day and night and the stars. The idea of signs is also mentioned here, a concept which is both useless and irrelevant unless vision is present. This interpretation would, admittedly, be very loose and shaky were it not for the fact that it interlocks perfectly, in a scientifically historical way, with the rest of the Genesis account.
Immediately after these references to light, day and night, and signs, Genesis says “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures…” This corresponds to the Cambrian explosion, which was brought on, recent science tells us, by the evolution of the eye. The first life did live in the sea, and most of it evolved there. Interestingly, Parker points out, Genesis does not say that God forms or presents the animals, but that He commands the waters to bring them forth, which Parker says “is to summon a process that will lead to the diversity of animals.” A similar expression in Genesis is “Let [life] increase on the earth.” (NIV translation.) All this hints toward evolution.
The main problem with this argument is that birds are created alongside marine life, instead of after land life; yet Genesis afterwards is correct again, in having land-dwelling beasts, and then humanity, appearing last of all. In summary, the Genesis author recorded scientific facts he could not possibly have known from observation, and that scientists did not know until relatively modern times: that the universe was created in a single moment, that energy was the first material thing that existed, that the sun (day and night) preceded formation of the earth, that the formation of seas preceded the rise of life, that the first life was plantlike, that the first animal life originated in the seas, that the rise of vision precipitated the explosion of variety in life, and that sea life preceded life on land. The presence of birds in the wrong place does throw some doubt upon this theory, but in light of all the precise placement of so many other things, which science itself has only recently discovered, this single error is forgivable.
So far, so good. However, several of the author’s comments and proclivities raise questions. Firstly, who is the book’s intended audience? Despite the fact that Barnes & Noble categorizes the book in its Christianity section, there is nothing specifically Christian about it. Perhaps religious people in general? Yet at many points Parker belittles the religious mindset, seeing that side of the science vs. religion debate as clearly wrongheaded, making such comments as, “Collectively, Walcott’s Burgess fossils…would appear as a nail in God’s coffin,” and seeming content to pigeonhole any believers who have at all thought about the subject of natural history as young earth creationists. This is an extremely simplistic viewpoint.
Parker even bizarrely suggests that a literal interpretation of Genesis is behind environmental devastation. He makes this statement without at all showing where the connection lies -- right after emphasizing the importance of sound observations. Of course, he ignores the fact that the rise of applied science coincides perfectly with the increase in natural exploitation -- not a religious observation, but an environmental one. Again, Parker relies on a skewed and stereotypical view of religion when he invokes the “God of the gaps” idea, as if humanity’s religious pursuits amount to nothing more than assigning God or a god to everything we couldn’t understand. In a short review of early philosophical poles, Parker treats the natural philosophy of Plato and Epicurus as their central and most important concerns. He misrepresents C.S. Lewis, concluding that we cannot ever know what God is; but ignores Lewis’ vehement insistence that we can know (a much more important question) who God is. Perhaps the biggest blunder is his attempt to equate God with energy. As we know energy is a material thing, this is patently ridiculous; or if not, then it at least flies in the face of something most religions have ever said: that this, this world, this material arena we call the universe, is not all there is.
A problem, too, is the book’s lack of focus. It is certainly not a book on religion; there is less religion in it than science, and there is even less science in it than scientific history. Large parts are devoted to profiles of early scientists, usually of the nineteenth century. Are these intended to be for human interest? As I’ve said elsewhere, if I needed such human interest pieces to keep my attention, then I would never have picked up the book in the first place. This is clearly a case of an idea being better than its execution. The core thesis of Parker’s book is intriguing, if a little shoddily executed, but given all the extraneous and, honestly, boring material he heaps on, Enigma could have easily been half its current size, if not less.
In the end, though it has some pretty original and insightful ideas, The Genesis Enigma suffers greatly from a lack of focus, a superfluity of tangents, half-baked thoughts on religion, and a failure to draw appropriate and relevant conclusions. Andrew Parker states a few times in its pages that he hopes the book will help bridge the gap between the two sides in the debate between science and religion: an admirable goal, but one that cannot be achieved by turning religion into science, or forcing religion to operate by science’s rules. That is not to say that religion is, or should be, free of rational thought or inquiry, but rather to say that that inquiry is by its nature of and about a separate realm than concerns the realm of science. This Andrew Parker seems to fail to realize. Again, there are some really good and insightful ideas in Enigma’s pages; but given the slough one has to wander through to get to them, it may be wiser to seek them in other sources. ”
Michael wrote this review Saturday, October 24 2009.
(
reply |
permalink )
