The provinces

People in London may call Cambridge the provinces, but it's hard to beat Devon for a bit of "blimey, do people still say/do that sort of thing?". This morning at church an amiable old man preached against evolution -- not in a ranty sort of way, just urging us to respect the bible's date of 6000ish years. He seemed a sweet chap so afterwards I thanked him for his sermon (which also included some good stuff on faith) and said that, as it happened, myself I'd never seen a problem with the difference in the bible's dates and the scientists' dates, because of the bit in Psalms (quoted in the New Testament by Peter) about a thousand ages in God's sight being like a day, suggesting that time in the bible isn't always about counting the movements of the earth relative to the sun. But then I felt guilty because I had opened up the topic for my dad, who is less tactful than me, to have an argument with the poor man in the manner of an enthusiastic dog bouncing a small reserved boy.

This sort of thing, it's odd and sad to relate, seems to be a product of the enlightenment, and the bible literalists and the evangelical scientists are very closely related. It was a great thing when people got down to applying logic and observation to their understanding of the world, and we learn things in one lesson of school science now which were someone's life work. But maybe that has made us over-confident about how easy everything is going to be to understand. Want to know more about how God made the earth? Why not add up all the numbers involved to make a total! Then also everything has to be true or false, 1 or 0, and if the bible says a day it means 24 hours and if you say otherwise you're calling God a LIAR. In the middle ages we would have known, if we were educated, that there were four ways to understand anything, especially scripture. The literal was the first, then there were the three spiritual ways, which I think were moral, allegorical, and anagogical. I can never do the anagogical, which I suppose means that I am a bit ignorant in medieval terms, in the same way that we would tut tut about adults who didn't know about the circulation of blood taking oxygen to the body, or some such. I think it's brilliant to know, for example, how a tree works, but it's a shame we couldn't have hung on to some of the good things about the old style of knowledge when we got the new stuff.

I count myself immensely lucky to have been brought up by my parents both as a Christian and to challenge things I am told. Actually we can be very pub-bore-ish when we get started -- we spent the whole of the Christmas day before last trying to estimate how likely it is that if 13 people sit down to dinner one will be dead within a year, and my mother has done small surveys on the number of times that alpacas chew the cud. But they have never objected to, but rather welcomed, challenges to anything they think they is true -- this goes as much for scientific beliefs as for Christian ones, and I suppose therefore I shouldn't feel too guilty for letting my dad loose on the preacher, because my dad at least will have found their discussion invigorating.