Creation Stories, Mormons, and Beer

There are two creation stories in the book of genesis alone, and one further hint in the Book of Wisdom from a female goddess figure the author was playing with. There are also at least ten different covenants with the Jewish people, some of whom were associated with Israel, and two of which come from the bottom up; that most lack consideration is irrelevant, since common law had not been uncovered then.

The creation stories made me think of the Mormons, who from time to time I am intrigued by. Anthony Kenny identified seven creation narratives in a lovely little book he wrote a while ago which has a title—From Empedocles to Wittgenstein-- and a bottle-green jacket that automatically makes people reading it feel clever. I think that the Mormon one is representative of an eighth.

As an aside, I can’t help being reminded of my grand-dad, whose Donegal Gaelic couldn’t accommodate ‘okey dokey’ as a form of affirmation when he was alive. Instead, he said ‘okely dolkeley’, which is close enough to 'Empedocles' to make me smile.

Anyway, the Mormons. They were chased across the states in the Mormon wars which most people have forgotten before they ended up in Utah, and, even more than the Nation of Islam, and modernist Catholicism, I think them an authentically American religion.

Like America, though, they contain multitudes of strands from the classical world, that in whispered rumours and obscure texts somehow survived intellectual destruction. When Kenny wrote of seven creation traditions after the bible—those of Genesis, Moses, Augustine, Duns Scotus, Avicenna, Aquinas and Descartes—I found myself wondering if an American Gnostic variation involving the manufacture of life on earth by Platonic demiurges who nevertheless have to organize according to pre-existing paradigms of rules shouldn’t be added to the mix.

Before you think it, I know that Kenny created that particular line as a way of referring to the creation questions set out in the Timaeus, but they have a general application.

Mormon creationism is an odd creature, since it seems to hold to a combination of externally-generated and somewhat alien influences, derived from beings that had evolved through wisdom to godhood. This builds on Platonic metempsychosis, very tenuously. To that it adds what I am fairly sure is a prophetic and pseudo-Islamic version of revelation, that makes me think its founder must have been familiar with Islam. In the mid-nineteenth century, the story of Mohammed was not that well known, and it certainly seems to prefigure the stories of the Book of Mormon; perhaps a devotee was to be found in Missouri at just the right time.

The borrowing from the Tanakh’s defence-manual (because the old testament is a magnificent defence of the Jewish people against Hellenism and Mesopotamian influences resting on liturgy, prophesy, history, family and ritual) of the idea of a chosen, hunted people who survive in America is just icing on the cake.

I mean no offence to you if, in writing, I appear to be doubting your faith. I am inspired by the example of the Pope, though, who has acknowledged the intellectual and symbolic roots of Catholicism honestly by saying that the virgin-born crucified gods and resurrection stories of prophets that peopled the imagination of the Mediterranean basin were echoes in time of Christ that could not be wiped from history. I am sure that my church would have tried if the game was worth the effort in the past.

If American intellectual history were understood as a constant breaking-down of European and Hellenistic forms that somehow survived European states and then reformed in a sort of Judeo-Christian broth, people would be able to take American creationism much less as a form of Protestant fundamentalism and then much less of a bogeyman.

I think half the energy of atheists in the secular world in the past few years has been invested in taking on precisely this creationist straw-man, rather than looking into various creation stories for ways to neutralize arguments.

Creationists, similarly, mostly or wholly motivated by a biblical imperative, have to follow the dictates of their conscience because their historical memory has short-circuited and they cannot see that dispute about evolution should only result in that which can be proven or logically shown being taught.

Evolution in the context of science can be taught. Science is not ‘true’ in a religious sense; to be real, it has to be skeptical and to follow ‘best fit’ explanations. Evolution in the sense of a series of random mutations which produce things that survive if they are so adapted, is demonstrable and dispute is a matter of how it happened.

Intelligent design, however, is a metaphysical proposition. If I found a watch in a field, it would be an indication that something had evolved that could leave a watch behind, not that the watch evolved itself, and the same applies to human beings. To prove that. scientists should show believers that what believers believe is belief, not fact, and not all one belief either, whereas science is fact; but how do we enthrone facts?

If that creation debate were neutralized or left to faith, with the science lessons confined to what we know and what we do not know discussed elsewhere, then intelligent coalitions of people of goodwill who believed in community and morality, however founded, could proceed along with science.

Science could proceed with more humility. Perhaps, if you are in the debate, asking yourself which of your contentions you can really verify, and which you can falsify, you could move toward such a position. It would require of people a certain amount of humility and an understanding of limitation, however.

Right, that’s evolution sorted. The basic flaw in my argument is that those who do believe in intelligent design are either determined not to understand science or fundamentalists, and wouldn't want to read a word I wrote.

Ah well.

I love train journeys. Now, I'm off to see my mum and to have a very cold beer.