Richard Dawkins is Right

I've no idea how many schools really teach creationism, or want to. Richard Dawkins is, if nothing else, a relentless self-publicist so would probably campaign against it even if no schools were teaching it at all. When I was at St Agatha's School for the Slightly Unbalanced Children of Gentlefolk back around 1980, anyone trying to teach Creationism as a form of science would have been laughed out of court before they'd got as far as explaining how all the fossils were planted by the Dark One / were the skeletons of animals that died in the Flood. Someone did apparently manage to introduce a Creationist to a Christian Union meeting, but his theories regarding the speed of light slowing down were generally greeted with derision and rotten vegetables. Even the Christian Union at St Aggie's were a scary bunch.

It strikes me that if the churches of this country really want to get to grips with the Creation stories, they should do their best to stop the teaching of Creationism in churches. I know it's against Free Speech, but then we don't allow preachers to encourage the stoning of adulterers or claim that the wine in the New Testament was miraculously unfermented grape juice either, do we?

Actually - I've just quickly called Drayton Parslow. Turns out that he does claim that about the grape juice. But he says stoning is definitely illegal. Worryingly, he didn't say "wrong". Just "illegal".

But still, the reason teaching Creationism is wrong is because it does such an injustice to the Bible. Here in Genesis 1 we have a big story about an ordered Universe - a predictable Universe. A place where things work in line with rules. The light and the dark are separated, the lights are put in place, the sea is sea and the air is air and the animals walk and the fish swim and people are part of it. And it's all good. And God isn't a two-bit Babylonian god, making the earth out of bits of leftover other Gods. He's an ex-nihilo creator of order out of chaos. And if you think that last sentence was oxymoronic, you're right. And I don't care.

Then in Genesis 2-3 we have another big story - a dream of how things could be, where death isn't and God is just up the road and the man and the woman can live quiet lives doing useful things and then because humans are stupid and want their own way, things go wrong.

And in Genesis 4 we get that whole farmer and the rancher can be friends thing for the first time in history - the nomad against the pastoralist, the vegetarian against the meat-eater - Cain and Abel. But hatred has slunk in by now and things go wrong and we're into the world of blood feud - but also the world of technology and music and creativity.

And an understanding of genre means you can rend so much meaning out of these. There's wondering about the texts underlying - there's the pervasive "Younger versus Older Brother" motif that goes all the way through Genesis to the New Testament discussion of Jews and Gentiles depending how you read it. There's that stunning prophecy - especially on this day of Our Lady of Walsingham -

"And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

So why, with this great and fascinating patchwork of myth and beauty, prophecy and folklore, national beginnings and deep psychology - why would any fool reduce Gen 1 to being mere science, and Gen 2-4 to history? For goodness' sake - get a grip. Read scientific truth out of scientific things, and read moral and psychological and religious truth out of Genesis. And then struggle with it, because this isn't simple stuff and there's a lot of symbol and imagery in there - and you know how slippy they are. I hate to say Dawkins is right - and I'm sure, as I say, that he's just drama queening it up for polemic effect - but when he says we shouldn't teach Creationism in schools, he's right. But I'd go further. We shouldn't allow the teaching of Creationism in churches. We'd shouldn't allow it in RE - except for humorous and satirical reasons. We don't allow the theory of the Lost Tribes of Israel in history, we don't allow flat-earthers to give advice in Geography, and we don't teach the principles of alchemy in Chemistry. We mention them as being wrong, and move on. So with Creationism -  it's bad science and it's bad religion. And it's a dreadful way of approaching literature.