Fire, Corn, and Creationism

At the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May 2018, the Episcopalian Bishop Michael Curry sermonized on the power of love and fire. On the latter subject, he invoked the writings of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

[According to Teilhard] the discovery or invention or harnessing of fire was one of the great scientific and technological discoveries in all of human history. Fire to a great extent made human civilization possible. Fire made it possible to cook food and to provide sanitary ways of eating which reduced the spread of disease in its time. Fire made it possible to heat warm environments and thereby made human migration around the world a possibility, even into colder climates. Fire made it possible, there was no Bronze Age without fire, no Iron Age without fire, no industrial revolution without fire.

Fire was indeed a great biocultural development in human evolution, for the apes have neither sufficient brains nor sufficient thumbs to create and control it. The direct ancestors of humans were doing it hundreds of thousands of years ago; we know this because they left us the remains of their hearths.

The Greeks, who knew nothing of prehistoric archaeology, at least knew where fire came from. It was given to people  by Prometheus, against the wishes of Zeus, who punished him for the deed in a classically Zeusian way: by chaining him to a rock and having an eagle peck out his liver on a daily basis.

Ha! Those silly Greeks! But did you ever wonder what the Bible says about where fire came from?

The answer is easy. Nothing. Fire was such an obvious part of being human that the Bible doesn’t even have an origin myth about it.  It was just always there with people. They didn’t have to discover it, or learn to control it. The Book of Jubilees, which expands on Genesis and figures prominently among the Dead Sea Scrolls, has a detail that Genesis doesn’t. After getting expelled from Eden, Adam and Eve make “an offering of frankincense, galbanum, and myrrh, and spices,” which implies the control of fire, since God generally doesn’t take raw offerings, only roasted offerings. If we go just with canonical books of the Bible, the first offerings are those of Cain and Abel.

            The problem is that there is no learning curve. Neither Adam and Eve, nor their children, apparently have to experiment with fire, or are even given fire. One day they are just using it. Perhaps they simply cadged it from the cherubim brandishing the flaming sword at the entrance to the Garden of Eden; or perhaps they just ate from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of How to Make Fire – but if so, the Bible doesn’t say.

The anti-intellectualism of the biblical literalist has tended to be focused on biological narratives, specifically denying that our species is descended from ape ancestors over last few million years. But the battleground of archaeology is even more problematic for a 21^st century believer in the inerrancy of the Bible, but one rarely confronts it because of the blinding light of Darwin and biology.

 Consider the economic prehistory of the human species. The early 1860s saw the publication of two important English works on the subject: Charles Lyell’s The Antiquity of Man (1863) and John Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times (1865). Between them, they cemented a significantly non-biblical story about human ancestry: namely, that the earliest state of humanity was a long time of living off the land, without agriculture, as contemporary hunter-gatherers (whom they regarded as “savages”) did.

Now, of course, the discovery and spread of food production is one of the most fundamental issues in archaeology. Humans began to transform animals and plants from wild to domesticated forms, by controlling their breeding, starting around 12,000 or so years ago, thus ensuring a stable supply of food. The problem faced by scholars in the mid-19^th century is this:

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. (Genesis 2:15)

According to the Bible, there was never any hunting and gathering. People were farming from day one; or rather, from Day 6. And the disparity between archaeology and the biblical text created a problem for anyone wanting to understand contemporary foragers in places like Australia and South Africa and America in the 19^th century. If farming was invented and learned, then contemporary foragers were just people who hadn’t learned it.  If, on the other hand, farming was there from the beginning, then they were degenerates who had abandoned that God-given knowledge. So which was it – were living foragers primordial or devolved? Lyell and Lubbock settled the matter: Hunting-and-gathering was how our ancestors long ago made a living off the land, and only subsequently was agriculture eventually developed. The alternative idea is not only anti-empirical, but also a bit racist.

                Moreover, agriculture arose in different parts of the world, using different available wild resources: In one place wheat; in another, rice.  And that leads to an important and incontrovertible conclusion from modern archaeology: God did not make corn.

                People made corn. In particular, people of Mesoamerica made corn over the course of a few thousand years, from a grass called teosinte, which is still capable of hybridizing with corn. We have their learning curve, in the form of dated ancient cobs. The learning curve for food production is critical, since the Bible directly implies that there shouldn’t be one. Moreover, all the evidence for early corn is in Mesoamerica; there was no corn in the Garden of Eden. (And of course, wherever the King James Version says “corn,” you should read “grain” – because what the Bible says and what the Bible means are often not the same. And while you’re at it, where you encounter the word “unicorns” in the King James, you might want to read “wild oxen”.)

                 With both the creationists and evolutionists transfixed on Darwin, perhaps the scholarly community might take a step back from apes and DNA, and try attacking biblical literalism/inerrancy on a different battlefield. Make the creationist explain fire and corn. Any explanation will necessarily be unbiblical, at the very least, in addition to being inaccurate.

Then you can share a bowl of popcorn with your new friend.

An early "Darwin Day" essay

On February 4, evangelist Ken Ham will debate television personality Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) on the subject of creationism, at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.  It will be streamed live, and should attract considerable attention among those with an interest in the decline of modern civilization.

A public debate between non-experts is theater, not scholarship.  The debate is predicated on a critical misrepresentation, as if Creationism/Evolution mapped cleanly on to Religion/Science.  But it doesn’t.  Evolution is compatible with many theologies. 

Certainly creationism is religious, and evolution is scientific.  But aside from a bit of old revisionist  history, the judgment of modern historians and anthropologists alike is that science and religion can, and do, coexist peacefully for most people.  The reason is that science is a fairly narrow intellectual domain, consisting of a series of methods for establishing reliable knowledge about the natural world; while religion broadly encompasses social, experiential, and moral domains. 

Religion is so fundamentally an aspect of the human condition that, as scholars have realized for many decades, most people integrate religious beliefs and attitudes seamlessly into their daily lives.  The ancient Greeks had no word for it.  It’s not that they weren’t religious, it’s just that they didn’t separate and label it, as we do. 

Ritual behaviors extend beyond religion.  As football fans are well aware - with commercials for Bud Light invoking the old Stevie Wonder song “Superstition” – religious beliefs and attitudes hardly end at the outer side of the church door.  And as anyone who as ever shouted “stupid computer!” and smacked the side of their monitor knows, the attribution of sentient properties to inanimate objects – loosely called “animism” – is not limited to the formally demarcated religious domain.

Creationists today are a diverse lot.  Ken Ham represents “young-earth creationism”, rejecting not simply anthropology and biology, but geology and astrophysics as well.  That position existed back in 1925, when John T. Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in Tennessee, and William Jennings Bryan held center stage as the nation’s leading spokesman for creationism.  But young-earth creationism was too dumb even for Bryan, who made it clear during the infamous trial that he accepted the great antiquity of the heavens and the earth.  He was an “old-earth” creationist.

A more recent version of creationism - “intelligent design”  - preaches neither an old cosmos nor a young cosmos, but presents simply a theology of negativity, whose adherents are united solely in their opposition to the naturalistic explanation of human origins provided by modern science.

But the modern conflict is complicated by two other factors. 

First, the cultural prominence of evangelical atheists, who would cast themselves not simply against creationism, but against religion more generally.  These people, however, imagine that religion is as narrow as science is – simply a set of alternative and false narratives about nature.  But these people do no favors for science, for its authority on natural matters does not extend to the cultural, ethical, spiritual, or esthetic domains.

Second, the mistake of lumping anti-vaccinators, climate-change deniers, and creationists into a single “anti-science” bin.  Nobody is “anti-science” – that person exists only in the mind of a paranoiac.  After all, Republican resistance to anthropogenic climate change is about business and money, not about theology.

Creationism is a poor representation of religion, whose basis is not merely an alternative narrative of our origins, but lies in the construction of a complex and very human social, emotional, and moral universe.  And atheism is a poor representation of science, whose methods were developed to study natural processes and make no sense when extended beyond nature – if indeed there is anything beyond nature, which science doesn’t, and can’t, know.

There are individual exceptions, of course, but Judaism holds that the Torah must be interpreted properly for every generation, and that only a poltroon would take it at face value.  The Catholic Church accepts the descent of the human species from earlier nonhuman species.  That leaves Biblical literalist creationism as a sectarian theological dispute within Protestantism.

It’s time to separate science from atheism, and religion from Biblical literalism.   The atheists and the literalists can slug it out, but the rest of us will continue trying to make decent intellectual sense of the things in our lives that science does explain and the things it doesn’t.