Honest Doubt Part 13 - A Post-Mortem

This looks in more detail at ideas critical of a certain type of Christian Orthodoxy - Charles Darwin and geologist Charles Lyell, whose discoveries undermined the creation stories of the Old Testament.

The emerging tradition of 'biblical criticism', which began in Germany, started to strip away the supernatural elements of God.

George Eliot translated the work of the German critics, and began to believe, as the German philosopher and atheist Ludwig Feuerbach suggested, that God may be a human construct - a creation of the human mind.

Perhaps the problem here is that some sciences had not yet come into being - we have at this point no anthropology to show us how religious language works. Nevertheless, it must have been clear to Lyell and Darwin that the Genesis account of creation was not based on empirical studies. The two accounts in chapters 1 and 2 aren't an attempt to look at the geological and fossil evidence and provide a "best fit" of the information available, the method of producing these accounts is totally different.

We are reading here poems, stories that come from the human imagination - or more, that come from the depths of the human unconscious, perhaps telling us deep truths about ourselves, but certainly not some proto-scientific explanation.

Similarly did Eliot not realise that the language of the prophets, of parables and religious tales was not history? We have here a different kind of language, it isn't an attempt to look at the historical evidence and provide some "best fit" of the sources. There is no "well X said that this happened, and Y said that this happened" and then attempting to weight up the evidence and provide a probable fit, we don't see any of that.

Now - of course - this is a very strange experience because no one generally had really at this point actually thought about what sort of language we have in the Bible, and what the significance of that was. To say religious language is highly subjective, has come from ecstatic religious experiences, or the reflection on symbol and psychic-legends, that it is about a way of life, about moral values, ways to experience God, techniques to let God speak and so on  - no one had really thought about that much before.

Yet what seems to happen is the conversation is almost over before it begins. Very soon the debate about what religion really means is replaced by a gap between those who believe and those who don't, and no one much seems to want to engage with the other.