why it’s important to know your geography

A fundamentalist acquaintance of mine (an Australian, but a deep-dyed, literal-word, Darwin denyin’ fundamentalist of the kind I thought mostly only grew in the American South) linked recently to this article. She thought the writer had some good points to make (he does, actually; he points out that if you want someone to accept Jesus as their savior in order avoid damnation, you need to convince them of the damnation part first) but she was also appalled at his geography. The relevant quote is “I was in Australia recently ministering; Australia is a small island off the coast of New Zealand. ” She attributed this idiocy to his being American, because “everyone knows” Americans aren’t goo at geography. Maybe not, but most of us aren’t quite that bad. I’d be tempted to blame it on his being an evangelist, but that’s not really fair either.

I don’t know if my acquaintance saw the bigger issue in this preacher’s stupidity; I’m sure he himself doesn’t see it. But I don’t think I’m unique in that I will probably never be persuaded to change my view on any major issue by someone who has already given me serious reason to doubt his intelligence. St. Augustine, whose faith and intelligence were both unquestionable wrote:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

All of which, ironically, is also exactly why I could accept any faith that denied the clear evidence that Darwin was right.

There are lots of caveats and possibilities that can never be disproven, such as the claim that fossils and stratigraphic layers were put there deliberately as part of a grand design – but in that case, assuming that if we were given brains in order to use them, we were intended to deduce exactly what those fossils imply. Just as an authors puts backstory in a work of fiction that never really happened in the readers’ world, if the backstory is put in by an Author, then even if it’s fictional we still need to understand it in order to understand our world. I don’t happen to believe this is the case – but it can’t be disproven. Another possibility is that the story of Genesis was meant to be a simplified parable for earlier understandings, with some details left out or mistaken (such as the sun and moon coming after plants), and that we’ve just been adding complexity and rigor to our understanding ever since. If you believe that the Bible (even if Divinely inspired) was humanly written and is not inerrant Word, then simple misunderstandings are possible and this one can’t be disproven either.

An idea that I personally like better is that a Great Mover set the laws of our universe in order and let them play out as they must. As Henry Ward Beecher, the foremost preacher of his day and father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, phrased it “Design by wholesale is grander than design by retail”. Certainly the idea of all the matter in the universe coming into being as a great and soundless explosion; the great glowing gas clouds coalescing into stars who settle into their orbit according to laws they must obey, the gradual formation of planets,, then life coming into being (as is now thought) nearly as soon on Earth (and elsewhere? we don’t know) as it possibly could, evolving through changes from single cell to huge predator to complexities we still don’t understand even when they’re in ourselves, is grander than anything else we’ve yet imagined.