The Spectre of Fundamentalism
 Regular Network Norwich and Norfolk columnist James Knight writes about his concern over the increase of creationist fundamentalism.
I’m taking a break from my series on Hell to talk about another kind of ‘hell’ – fundamentalism – something that has been getting me down for a while – the nonsense of anti-science Christianity. I never thought I'd see the day, but I was shocked to notice that Richard Dawkins actually made an appearance on Revelation TV...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDmlMTG7QBQ
I wasn’t impressed at all; to me it was the worst of both worlds; a very naive creationist who thinks that it's either evolution or Christianity, and a philosophically poor atheist who said (in the first few minutes) that the creationists are more reasonable because they see the real dichotomy between Christianity and evolution, and that it's actually the theistic evolutionists who are most irrational (yes amazingly Dawkins said that).
That Richard Dawkins can fail to conceptualise a Christianity which involves evolution shows him up for the limited thinker he really is! The nonsense of this YouTube video doesn't fill me with much hope regarding the future of sensible faith-based thinking. If anything, I fear fundamentalism is on the rise in the UK.
NEWSFLASH: The "Richard Dawkins actually made an appearance on Revelation TV..." link I gave now takes us to a message saying the YouTube clip has been removed due to 'Copyright' restrictions! Could it be that Revelation TV was so embarrassed by Howard the creationist's performance that they had it removed under a false pretext? Mind you Tricky Dicky was similarly embarrassing so for all I know the atheists may have sought its removal from YouTube too.
Oh, and JUST IN: One wonders whether what Howard refers to as the 'Creationist Intellectuals' will step up and accept Richard Dawkins’ offer to have a debate with them on Revelation TV!
On a less frivolous note; I just wanted to say a bit about church life in the UK – the surrounding culture means that I'm having a bit of a struggle when I look at church life at the moment. I echo the sentiments that church is the people of Christ, not the bricks and mortar, so in that sense I am in regular contact with The Body because I frequently socialise with Christians. But I find my radar is up against leaders trying to control others, homogeneity, fundamentalism, hellfire preachers, etc, and I’m afraid I am endowed with (Blessed? Cursed?) an acute perception of it which makes these things easily noticeable.
 Something is happening to the church scene in the UK, and unless I find a solution to satisfy my own hopes, I can see myself cutting quite a solitary figure in the immediate future. I suppose the Church of England is going to continue to dwindle in numbers in the UK, with the real future of Christian growth taken on by EPC Christianity (that’s Evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic). Given the positions EPCs hold, that suggests to me a furtherance of the many things I dislike: creationism, patriarchalism, fideism, right-brained animation, and degrees of fundamentalism. If that is to be the only kind of Christianity that successfully propagates itself in the UK then it seems my own personal frustrations in church being unable to engage in deep theoretics are likely to increase, and I have a few equally solitary friends who feel the same.
The natural state of affairs of EPC church is to embellish basic Christianity with what I find to be quite stultifying anti-intellectual swooning-based piety – and they compound the problem by spiritually mandating this methodology, hoping to make the church congregation homogenous carbon copies of the Pastors. I think I have a twofold problem. Firstly, if my experience is anything to go by, then your average even moderate EPC church won't be very interested in the sort of work/thinking in which I engage daily, particularly if that work suggests a review of the status quo mindset and a search for the grand answers to the nature of reality!
Often when one challenges extremism one gets really ignorant and stupid responses back. Secondly, (and this is a corollary of my first point) if one has a need for a Christian social outlet that caters for the deep interest and fulfilment in thinking and theorising then one will have difficulty finding that in the sort of churches that are growing in the UK – which, unless one is lucky enough to find an in-between state, generally reduces one’s options to small, elderly congregations that are analytically healthy but stagnant in growth or outreach, or EPC churches which have all the decorative components, but often lack an intellectual insight.
Are we going to be brave and honest and admit that there are numerous church leaders who week by week deliver appallingly mundane sermons on spiritual church-based stuff, expecting that enthusiastic cacophonies of delivery make very banal repetitions more interesting, appended with unremitting clauses that all but spiritually mandate their views about science and philosophy – what I call in shorthand “My way or the wrong way” Christianity.
The sad truth is, my friends, the way the church has shaped itself means that for a great many people, to be Christian one must find oneself conforming to the ideas, thoughts and belief systems of past Christians, good and bad. Instead what I think people should do (because they owe it to themselves and to those unborn in the future) is set the mind on an exploratory endeavour whereby one filters out the good ideas from the bad – and much of that involves looking for two things – 1) where people have muddied the gospel for self-serving purposes or for controlling others, and 2) where people have added superfluous interpretations and made doctrines out of them.
Both these warnings ought to come with a serious reminder; any information, whether good or bad or correct or incorrect, is very easily passed down from parent to child, church elder to congregation member, peer to peer, and so on, without very much critical analysis or philosophical questioning. Most people do not spend much time subjecting knowledge or information to serious scrutiny – they prefer to be led and influenced by those who claim to know best. Sadly those who claim to know best are often the most influential in fundamentalist Christianity, because those who claim to know best are often the most loquacious, loudest and most domineering in the particular group, or church, or town, or village, or (heaven forbid!) city or country.
Consequently once one peels off the layers, one finds that most people are a patchwork of sound-bytes and snippets of knowledge that are like unconnected dots awaiting connection to form a pictorial whole – they’ve no idea how to formulate a coherent rationale with which to weed out the nonsense/fundamentalism from the good, because their ideas are only stored as sound-bytes and snippets of knowledge – they are not connected to the corresponding interpretative components that bring either clarity, elaboration or falsification.
In the pub on Friday night one member of the group blurted out that while Jesus loves him, He only likes me because I subscribe to evolution. He then suggested rhetorically (and dismissively); would I have preferred it if God had waited until the time of Darwin before giving us the Bible? Most creationists can only see in black and white – but it seems some of the more facile ‘brothers’ can only see in black!!
My main worry is that if the only proliferation of churches in the UK are EPC churches, then that would suggest an imminent rise in creationist fundamentalism in the foreseeable future too. Has the ghost of Galileo taught us nothing (see here and here for further warnings)?
The views carried here are those of the author, not of Network Norwich and Norfolk, and are intended to stimulate constructive debate between website users. We welcome your thoughts and comments, posted below, upon the ideas expressed here. You can also contact the author direct at james.knight@norfolk.gov.uk
James is a Christian writer and local government officer based in Norwich. You can access his current collections of columns here
Meanwhile, if you want to find out more about Christianity, visit: www.rejesus.co.uk
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| | | Andrew Holland | 27/05/2011 15:51 | Dear James
Thank you for your responses to my comments of 8-4-2011. I am not going to respond in full because I think my time can be better spent than in arguing with someone who is very fixed on his views and who is himself brainwashed by his atheistic mentors. I am not belittling you or being critical of your intellect or knowledge, but it is unfortunately true that mere scientific knowledge and acuteness of intellect does not necessarily lead one to the truth, as much of what is stated as truth is merely someone’s interpretation of the available facts. And it seems that we will have to agree to disagree on those conclusions.
Some points I will comment on.
<<..even if I don't mention the sequencing of the genome, the comprehensive studies of the phylogenetic tree and taxonomy (both of which give comprehensive evidence, and if denied make God look like a deceiver who tricked the world into thinking we are ancestrally related to every other species in a perfectly studied family tree), you must be picked up on failing to realise that 'species' isn't an absolute term, it's a human construct based on how we view the biological world.>>
I seem to remember that the evolutionary tree constructed by Darwin, which is still published in some textbooks, has been completely undermined by the study of DNA. As far as I can see it, the phylogenetic tree and taxonomy are basically attempts to classify organisms into groups according to their DNA, and mathematical models have been invented to try and explain these classifications. In other words, from a starting point of assuming evolution is true, models have been built up to try and explain the “root” from which each “node” has descended from, and the length of time it took. These are all based on an assumption which has not yet been proved. In my opinion, this “tree” has no more validity for explaining origins than Darwin’s tree. Which leaves me with the belief that God does not lie or deceive, but has told us clearly when and how the universe came into existence, and how each “kind” of animal was created to reproduce its own “kind”. A comment on “species” – a human construct – so the fact that humans and apes are the same species is not absolute! Too true!
<<Scientific Laws: The laws of physics are the laws that drive evolution, so evolution cannot go against them anymore than rainfall can go against being driven by gravity.>>
Can you explain to me any physical scientific law which drives evolution? To compare evolution with gravity is ridiculous. One is demonstrable and observable, the other is mere hypothesis. I must have had better teachers than you!
<<they’re called atavisms!>>
They are called atavisms by evolutionists, because they think it will be an argument in favour of evolution. If you happen to believe in Biblical creation, they are another example of mutations. Nobody has ever been able to prove that mutations are beneficial, as it seems that they constitute a loss of information. So no help for evolution there!
<<I can't say fairer than that - go get your best man - the best in the world if you like -and watch how he gets on trying to argue for his creationist case against cold hard facts and non-brainwashed reasoning.>>
I sense a touch of arrogance! So you think you could silence the arguments of creations scientists? I think not! You haven’t silenced mine! You did not have much to say about irreducible complexity, except to accuse me of ignorance. Let me suggest to you something. Contact Revelation TV and ask for a debate with one of their contacts. It would be interesting to see how you fair live on television. However it works out, I cannot see you or any creation scientist backing down, and I don’t suppose it would change any viewers’ minds either, but I am sure that those who believe God’s account of creation would be encouraged in their belief.
| | | | James Knight | 06/06/2011 21:31 | Hi again Andrew,
>>I am not going to respond in full because I think my time can be better spent than in arguing with someone who is very fixed on his views and who is himself brainwashed by his atheistic mentors.<<
You can't grasp the simple fact that evolution doesn't equal atheism, and that most Christians accept evolution, can you!!.
>>I seem to remember that the evolutionary tree constructed by Darwin, which is still published in some textbooks, has been completely undermined by the study of DNA. <<
You remember wrongly!
>>As far as I can see it, the phylogenetic tree and taxonomy are basically attempts to classify organisms into groups according to their DNA, and mathematical models have been invented to try and explain these classifications. In other words, from a starting point of assuming evolution is true, models have been built up to try and explain the “root” from which each “node” has descended from, and the length of time it took. These are all based on an assumption which has not yet been proved. In my opinion, this “tree” has no more validity for explaining origins than Darwin’s tree. Which leaves me with the belief that God does not lie or deceive, but has told us clearly when and how the universe came into existence, and how each “kind” of animal was created to reproduce its own “kind”. A comment on “species” – a human construct – so the fact that humans and apes are the same species is not absolute! Too true!<<
This is just more evidence that you don't even understand the basics.
>>Can you explain to me any physical scientific law which drives evolution? To compare evolution with gravity is ridiculous. One is demonstrable and observable, the other is mere hypothesis. I must have had better teachers than you!<<
Like I said, you don't even know the basics - why don't you study spacetime, gravity and thermodynamics and then some basic biology - and you'll begin to understand how evolution is driven.
>>Nobody has ever been able to prove that mutations are beneficial, as it seems that they constitute a loss of information. So no help for evolution there!<<
Firstly, your assumption that mutations have to be beneficial to be passed on is just typical creationist ignorance! I won't even bother talking about the "constitutes a loss of information" because I've never met a creationist who understands the first thing about 'information' so I don't expect you do either (see my discussion with Andrew Halloway and observe the mess he makes of my challenges to his knowledge of information).
Ok, this'll probably go in one ear and out the other, but some mutations are neither harmful or beneficial, and they can end up being passed down. As long as it doesn't lessen the chance of survival, it can still be passed on, and may turn out to be beneficial or harmful at some future time. Even mutations that lessen the chance of survival are frequently passed on. Most mutations have no effect on the overall evolvability of the organism - they often occur in sequences of junk DNA that do not code for anything, yet other times they cause a gene to lose a specific function or gain a function. Sometimes they're advantageous, sometimes deadly. And sometimes the mutation serves to speed up or slow down the pace of mutations in a certain region of the genome - this can be advantageous during a period of rapid climate change, for example. Also mutations in different genes occur at different rates, so in some genes, more mutations can be tolerated than in other genes. You need to ditch this spurious idea about mutations needing to be beneficial - it is making you look foolish.
>>I sense a touch of arrogance! So you think you could silence the arguments of creations scientists? I think not!<<
Yes, most people with even a basic education in science could.
.>You haven’t silenced mine! You did not have much to say about irreducible complexity,<<
Look Andrew, I haven't elaborated on irreducible complexity because I know you don't understand it properly (again see the conversation I had with Andrew Halloway and the mess of it he makes when discussing it with me). I'm a very busy man, working on writing many rich and stimulating books and projects, and I am not very inclined to waste time debating with creationists who are quite happy to remain ignorant on subjects most of the world (Christian and non-Christian) accept and embrace.
>>I am sure that those who believe God’s account of creation would be encouraged in their belief.<<
Another example of the fundamentalist mindset where 'My words = God's words" is expressed. Hopeless really! Sorry, but I detest self-induced ignorance - particularly when it is used to impugn the faith of Christians who see the world through a lens of truth not crackpot-based nonsense!
James
| | | | James Knight | 06/06/2011 21:43 | To all those interested in spreading the gospel - in one of the books I am writing I have done extensive research that gives conclusive evidence that mainstream Christianity has a positive effect on its surroundings, and that fundamentalist creationism actually retards spreading the gospel, puts people off Christianity, causes many to leave their church, and gives a huge helping hand to atheism.
In memetic terms religious fundamentalism is a disease that needs eradicating - and this bad influence is an indictment to which creationists are subjected with my profound regret and displeasure.
| | | | tjnihon | 10/06/2011 08:44 | James,
I was actually encouraged by your post here. I think you are on to something here. You say it is only the Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Charismatic churches that are growing. Have you ever thought about why that may be? Give it some thought. Do ya think their faith in God's Word might have anything to do with it?
I do. When you reject the plain meaning of the text and start playing claiming the real meaning is found in abstract flowery symbolic concepts, you got nothin' left brother! My feeling is that most people will think that you have destroyed the foundation of God's Word. And, so it follows then that if you do this from page one of the Bible, then what can you trust? The Bible loses it's appeal and authority and then the battle is over. But that is just my opinion.
I think it is going to be hard, but why don't you and your like-minded friends just start your own church, make up your own doctrine, and see how it goes?
| | |  | tjnihon | 10/06/2011 12:15 | James said:
“I'm getting fed up with it, and rest assured I will be bringing out a book which will help take Christianity to higher levels, and give hope for the future, while hopefully the fundamentalists are exposed more and more for the dishonest or wilfully uneducated people they are!”
Those are the only 2 options? All fundamentalists are either dishonest or willfully uneducated, eh? A bit judgmental aren’t we, James? That is a totally unfair accusation and as a Christian, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Ridicule, condescension, judgmental statements, put downs, accusations – OK, we get the picture. You just don’t like people who actually take the Bible at face value as God’s Word and trust Him even if we don’t have all the answers. Many of us simply have more faith in God than evolution by chance and the ideas, assumptions, and conclusions of fallible scientists whose scientific conclusions are predetermined by a worldview that prevents them from considering the role of a Creator in the origin of life.
I’m sure you are aware that there have been many instances in the past when most archeologists doubted the historicity of the Bible because they couldn’t find any evidence of a particular biblical event or city. They ridiculed the Bible until many years later evidence was found. There is something to say for faith in the truth and historicity of God’s Word even if we don’t have all the evidence to support it right now. We have to realize that God’s Word is truth, unchangeable truth, trustworthy in all respects. We take the truth of God’s Word as an apriori axiom, just like evolutionists take naturalism as their apriori axiom. Why would you want to take a scientific theory that was born out of such an unbiblical worldview and try and fit it into Scripture, even to the point of denying Jesus’ word’s himself and the clear teaching of Paul about Adam and Eve?
I just don’t believe that God intended us to change the clear meaning of His Word to make it fit with the ideas of modern day evolutionists. If so, He didn’t do a very good job writing the Bible did He? In fact, He could be accused of misleading people for most of the earth’s history. Only now in these last days have we come to the true meaning of Genesis thanks to Charles Darwin and other evolutionist.
You obviously are using the ideas of evolutionists, who didn’t see what happened, to interpret the Word of the God who did see what happened. Kind of an embarrassing hermeneutic to employ, don’t you think?
QUESTION: How do you know when to accept the biblical record as history and when to deny it, spiritualize it, and look for some abstract symbolism in it? What are the standards that you use to make that decision? Please share that with us all. Thanks.
| | | | tjnihon | 10/06/2011 12:26 | One more post James. This post makes a distinction between operational science and origins science and shows why we can't equate the two.
James,
I noticed in your responses that you make the bold claim that evolution is one of the best attested scientific facts in the world. Actually, that just shows how much you have been brainwashed by modern day evolutionary teaching. You are one of those evolutionists who sticks your head in the sand and says “there is no controversy. Evolution is a fact.” Take a look at www.dissentfromdarwin.org/ and crev.info for a reality check.
Sir, there are tons of things that evolution cannot explain – first life, beneficial mutations, evolution of sex, self-consciousness, missing fossils, irreducibly complex systems, etc. No one saw evolution happen in the past. No one has ever seen macro-evolution in action. No one can devise an experiment and repeat it over and over again showing that evolution happens.
Besides that, I think you are making a critical mistake in equating evolutionary science with the normal every day science that we do in the laboratory. Evolution cannot be repeated and verified like normal operational science that uses the scientific method. It is unpredictable. Because it is in the realm of historical science,(if you can call something “science” that cannot use the scientific method,) it is not nearly as reliable as normal science. It is nothing more than a hypothesis built on improvable assumptions such as uniformitarianism.
Here is a better explanation of it on creation.com
This fails to note the distinction between normal (operational) science, and origins or historical science.10 Normal (operational) science deals only with repeatable observable processes in the present, while origins science helps us to make educated guesses about origins in the past.
Operational science has indeed been very successful in understanding the world, and has led to many improvements in the quality of life, e.g. putting men on the moon and curing diseases. As explained above, because creation finished at the end of Day 6, biblical creationists would try to find natural laws for every aspect of operation science, and would not invoke a miracle to explain any repeating event in nature in the present.
In contrast, evolution is a speculation about the unobservable and unrepeatable past. Thus it comes under origins science. Rather than observation, origins science uses the principles of causality (everything that has a beginning has a cause11) and analogy (e.g. we observe that intelligence is needed to generate complex coded information in the present, so we can reasonably assume the same for the past). And because there was no material intelligent designer for life, it is legitimate to invoke a non-material designer for life. Creationists invoke the miraculous only for origins science, and as shown, this does not mean they will invoke it for operational science.
The difference between operational and origins science is important for seeing through silly assertions such as the following by Levitt (as quoted by Lerner):
‘… evolution is as thoroughly established as the picture of the solar system due to Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.’
However, we can observe the motion of the planets, but no-one has ever observed an information-increasing change of one type of organism to another.
To explain further: the laws that govern the operation of a computer are not those that made the computer in the first place. This kind of anti-creationist propaganda is like saying that if we concede that a computer had an intelligent designer, then we might not analyse a computer’s workings in terms of natural laws of electron motion through semiconductors, and might think there are little intelligent beings pushing electrons around instead. Similarly, believing that the genetic code was originally designed does not preclude us from believing that it works entirely by the laws of chemistry involving DNA, RNA, proteins, etc. Conversely, the fact that the coding machinery works according to reproducible laws of chemistry does not prove that the laws of chemistry were sufficient to build such a system from a primordial soup.
| | | | tjnihon | 27/06/2011 13:14 | "Ah now we're getting warmer - you can't help but match up evolution with atheism can you? Perhaps you would like to know that out of the 2 billion Christians worldwide, around 1.8 billion favour evolution, while some are uninterested, leaving only a few million anti-science fundamentalists as the embarrassing minority."
TJ: Now I get it. For you, a person is a mainstream Christian if he believes in evolution. Very interesting criteria for determining what is mainstream and what isn't.
I was wondering how you came up with your ideas of who is mainstream and who isn't. Mainstream does not really mean anything. Truth is what is important. My standard is not "What is mainstream according to James Knight?", but what is truth according to God's Word.
Oh, that's right. To avoid this obvious problem, you just play the "interpretation" card and that makes any interpretation OK, even one that doesn't fit the meaning of the text.
| | | | tjnihon | 14/11/2011 07:09 | James says: "Believing the Bible as it is written? That smacks of the all too pervasive view that interpretation doesn’t have a bearing on this – you’re part of the “What I say the Bible says” brigade."
TJ: And James, you are not a part of this brigade? If not, then I guess your view of creation is not accurate then, right? Do you believe that your interpretation is accurate? Seems like it? How is that different from the fundamentalists you love to criticize? So how do you know that your interpretation is correct and the YEC interpretation is not? Or the ID interpretation is not? How do you make that judgment - what are the standards you use to make it?
James May
| | | | Andrew Holland | 12/12/2011 10:24 | Hi James
I sent you an article about a television programme showing the dissection of a sperm whale. I have not heard anything from you, so I suppose you are busy writing your books which very few people are going to read. Or is it that you have no answer to my request? I am still interested in hearing how the many complicated features of the whale exposed in the article could have possibly evolved.
| | | | James Knight | 12/12/2011 22:35 | I did respond with an email Andrew - just double check you didn't miss it, or that it didn't go straight into your junk box (oh the irony, heh).
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