A theologian and humanist looks at Genesis and evolution.

[Jim__]

Robert M Price is the author. He has a PhD in theology and has been a pastor. It's not clear to me from his short biography exactly where he stands on religion now, although it says he still attends church. He wrote an article, Apex or Ex-ape, for the Jan/Feb 2010 Humanist discussing Genesis and evolution. He bases his interpretation of Genesis on the structuralism of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

While he still attends church, his interpretation of genesis is far from where I would expect most Christians to be. I am curious as to what the Christians on the board think of his interpretation. It seems to me that he accepts Genesis as a myth that discloses deep-seated psychological concerns of humanity.

A brief excerpt of his essay:

It’s no use to pretend that the theory of evolution poses no challenges to the traditional Christian conceptions at any point. Certainly it does. And responsible Christians will not simply close their eyes and hope it will go away. And as believers rethink their faith in the light of new knowledge, that faith changes, grows, and—yes—evolves.

And so, having stressed that it is foolish as well as religiously unnecessary for believers to fight against the evident truth of evolution, I would now like to demonstrate a fascinating irony, namely how Genesis itself provides the most basic clue for understanding the deep anxiety that produces fundamentalist anti-evolutionism. To do this I must dip into the work of the recently deceased and highly celebrated anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

...

And, ironically, that’s not the only place we witness it. For is not the anxiety of the fundamentalist who opposes Darwinism the same fear? For evolution would erase the impassible barrier between the human race and the other animal species. And fundamentalists are loathe to admit that we have the ape and the amoeba for our cousins. They deny the earthly origin and kinship of the human race, preferring to believe humanity a special creation of God over and above the swarming legions of animals. And the political-educational fracas we now witness is more of the Cain-and-Abel strife that the myth says results from this denial.

Seventy-seven years ago, atheist author H.P. Lovecraft wrote prophetically of the fundamentalist “future-shock” reaction to evolution. We do well to take his words to heart:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each training in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little, but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful position therein that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety
of a new dark age.

Price sees the words of Lovecraft as applying to fundamentalists. I think they apply to humanity as a whole.

[Imperialism Inc.]

1. Price is an atheist. He still attends, a very liberal, church but only because

he enjoys the ceremonial aspects of it. He works for the Center for Inquiry, or at least he did a couple years back. Trying to get fundies to adopt some kind of reasonable view of the bible and their religion is a common theme of his work. See his book The Reason Driven Life for another example. It is a response to none other than Rick Warren and his Purpose Driven Life.

[Jim__]

2. Thanks. I couldn't figure that out from his biography.

According to the blurb at the end of the article, he does teach at a seminary, the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary. Given his view of Genesis I'm kind of surprised that he teaches there.

[dmallind]

4. his knowledge is legitimate despite his personal (lack of) faith so no real stretch. NT

[dmallind]

3. He's an atheist, but one with serious theological and religious history

Went from mainstream Baptist to Charismatic to kind of weirdo new ageism to atheism while still valuing the social and ceremonial aspects of church. Serious scholar in biblical criticism. His books on the origins of the New Testament and the potential conlusion that Jesus is entirely mythical are very well-written (I prefer the "Incredible Shrinking Son of Man" to "Deconstructing Jesus" but both are valuable).

[grantcart]

5. almost a hundred years ago basic Biblical research established that

Genesis combines two seperate (Elohim and Yahweh) sources and that the scripture is valuable only on a theological and not biological or evolutionary basis.

[struggle4progress]

6. IMO, the article rambles, without any clear focus. And it is not clear to me who his audience is.

At first, he compares early parts of Genesis to evolution, with statements like "Genesis doesn’t explicitly rule out evolution by gradual mutation." Perhaps that matters, if one is regards Genesis as limiting (say) the versions of evolution that readers are "allowed" to believe, but it seems to me a dull and uninteresting exegetical approach

At one moment, he is considering theological views of the rather rightwing Francis Schaefer; in the next paragraph, he has turned to Augustine Hulsbosch; a bit later, he drops Levi-Strauss's name into the essay; then it's time for a Lovecraft quote, followed by some summary of what he thinks a few other religions think of evolution. It's all argument-by-assertion, conducted through bald statements like "It’s no use to pretend that the theory of evolution poses no challenges to the traditional Christian conceptions at any point. Certainly it does"

It's a stream-of-consciousness jumble

[Jim__]

7. I don't think he just drops Levi-Strauss' name in.

I took his interpretation of Genesis to be the gist of the essay; and his interpretation is based on the structuralism of Levi-Strauss (I am taking his word here - I have read of Levi-Strauss, I haven't actually read him). This interpretation piqued my interest. I have heard other people speak of the importance of mythology, but it never came through as clearly as this. If Genesis is mythology (I'm not proclaiming that to be so), it still retains its importance because it tells us a lot about who we are; and by understanding it (and other myths) we come to a better understanding of ourselves.

I also enjoyed reading the words of Lovecraft, especially, (w)e live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity. That expresses my beliefs better than I have been able to.

[struggle4progress]

8. I have no objection to applying any modern critical tools to religious texts: in addition

to attempts to understand the texts in their religious contexts as religious texts, I do not object at all to reading them in the light of modern anthropology or economics, nor do I object to trying to understand them as mythology or as products of the psychology of their time

A commentary is worthwhile, if it provides real insight; in particular, it should lead you in unexpected directions. A good example, of such a commentary on mythological topics, might be Francis Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients, which presents plausible but unexpected readings that after four centuries still give it a certain freshness; Robert Graves' The Greek Myths is another example, that attempts to combine poetic sensibilities with anthropological information in reading the Greek mythology. With respect to the Bible, I'd cite Fernando Belo's strange and uneven and challenging and eye-opening Materialistic Reading of the Gospel of Mark as an interesting text

It might well be the case that the ideas of Levi Strauss could shed interesting light on the Genesis creation story. You can get some idea how that analysis might work by reading this brief excerpt from The Structural Study of Myth. Price suggests he has carried out such an analysis and that he finds "the same deep-structural agenda" -- but his indications here occupy all of one paragraph, and so it is not at all clear that whether he has really carried out such an analysis or how exactly he reaches his conclusions

[Jim__]

9. Thanks for the reference to "The Structural Study of Myth."

Having read that little blurb, I will probably read the rest of the essay. I agree that Price's analysis of Genesis in the essay is very brief. But, it does go along with the excerpt from Levi-Strauss:

As soon as I read Levi-Strauss’s analysis of the Oedipus Cycle, it was immediately obvious to me that the Garden of Eden story in Genesis chapters 2-4 evidences exactly the same deep-structural agenda. To make a long story short, there is first the ominous denial of humanity’s earthborn origin. Remember, God causes all the animals, plants, and the man to emerge from the ground. All is thus far harmonious. But then he introduces human-from-human origin, as Adam gives birth to Eve, and the two defy God’s ban on sexual procreation, which eventuates in Cain’s birth. Then everything goes to hell fast. Humanity is alienated from the ground, which will yield food only with difficulty. Cain kills his brother and is exiled from the ground he had tilled, forced to be a nomad. Humans slaughter animals for their skins for the first time. Cain under his alias Tubal-Cain invents weapons of war, and Lamech uses them to kill those who insult him. And so on. In the Book of Genesis, as in the Oedipus Cycle, we witness the anxiety of a psycho-cultural shift from belief in birth from the earth to belief in birth from humans like ourselves.

I would like to see more of this analysis.

I haven't had a chance to look at the reference from Bacon yet.