Baraminology

 You may have noticed the release of this movie Expelled, this Ben Stein-fronted propaganda film about how creationists and intelligent design painters are being run out of town, forced to find positions with right-wing billionaires, and have their intellect and taste in wine derided by elitist science-type people who think they're smarter than everybody. Now despite the fact that Ben Stein is an interesting cultural phenomenon--an actor who markets himself as a laughable pompous stuffed shirt with an Ivy League drawl who in reality is a laughable pompous stuffed shirt with an Ivy League drawl--I have no desire to see this. I've had friends who were Velikovsky adherents, hollow-earthers, Kirlian photographers, professional astrologers, UFO adherents of every flavor, I refuse to allow Republicans into their scientist-disdaining, gap-examining party. My friends are at least fun to be around. If I could be assured that Ben Stein would show off a Dean Drive in the second part of the movie, or mention metachlorians, I might go. As it is, no.

However, my brother sent me a URL to Expelled Exposed, a site that debunks the movie, which led me to the site of The Palaeontological Association of America, where the editor of their journal, Richard Sternberg, inserted an Intelligent Design article in their publication--after first resigning. And from the Association's narrative of the incident I was led to a group Sternberg associated himself with--and found myself an the island of Laputa. 

Baraminology is an earnest attempt to codify in science-like terms an actual 'creation science'. complete with Venn diagrams, Greek solecisms, and acronyms. And in so doing, these doctors of thinkology are writing papers on what the pre-Fall functions of microbes could have been. (They must have been beneficial!) And working out a calculus of the array of living things on the planet without bringing in all that evolution stuff.

The result is, despite my snarky noun substitution really rather wonderful.

It was Eric Auerbach in his book Mimesis that first made me aware of how sparse and spare Biblical prose is. Although we've been taught that these are complete stories, and been supplied all sorts of visualizations that seem to make up half the art in the world, when you look at it, you'll see that they're only the spines of stories--not even a complete skeleton. Everything there is vital: a careless reading will lead you astray, but large amounts of what we want from a good story is not there. (Auerbach points out that this is peculiar to the Bible, and not just an antique thing: Homer has none of this skeletal quality.) It's a nice observation, and went a long way to my appreciation of the Bible as art.

However, if for some reason best known to themselves, a bunch of people want to use this as a design manual for the world, and as a scientific report on the mechanisms of the universe, it will throw you into the deep end of the pool and break for lunch.

This is an opportunity as well as a challenge, but it leads one, as it is leading the baraminologists, in an entirely different direction from scientific research--towards the midrash, a place in discourse phase space near and dear to my heart.

One of the saddest thing about Christian theology is that the imaginative speculation that is its body has almost never been allowed to wander where it will: the spectre of hierarchy, dogma, and various curved metal instruments have always stood in the way. At nearly every theological round table, somebody begins the discourse by putting an AK-47 on the table:: get too creative, have too much fun, exercise your mind a bit too freely, and you're burned as a heretic. Judaism, on the other hand, with no authoritative hierarchy,speculation about what the Torah really meant in this one sentence was exposed to extensive, exhaustive--and wild--speculation. And since nobody was in a position, for most of non-legendary Jewish history, to put a curved metal instrument to anybody else, no corner is left unexplored. Christians, who have grown up hearing one and only one interpretation of the Bible verses, are unprepared for this imaginative freedom.

I come to the midrash by one of the few non-Jewish routes--from studying at the feet of the legendary ascended master Roy Thomas. Roy, as the first vicar of Marvel Comics' Stan Lee on earth, learned pretty early on that, if you created a new character while you were writing for Mighty Marvel, you got zip. nada. bupkis. He was also in attendance as such amazing people as Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Stan himself, were creating thousands of characters like God realizing the six days were almost up. Roy became the master of rationalizing what was becoming the Marvel Universe. Instead of following suit, he took this titanic fount of characters, alien races,demons, dark dimensions, Hungarian mad scientists (Stan had a thing for guys named Zoltan) and, by reading closely, was able to thread together various bits of business already lying around and not only turn them into stories, but make the whole background more coherent--and that was a comic-book excitement heretofore unseen. We all followed, and followed eagerly, after Roy, fans and pros alike.

I ended up becoming the de facto regular writer in the latter days of one of Roy's most delightful creations, the book What If? Doing alternative histories of the Marvel characters, and doing it right, demanded a close reading of the characters' story, changing one aspect, and then reasoning out what would change and what would not. It was a midrash. And like the midrash, it offered the opportunity to shed light on the character of the figure (character, as Aristotle put it [loosely], is what the actors would be doing if they were doing something else than the plot.)

Frankly, when I saw what these baraminolgists were doing in thinking about microbes before the fall--was midrash. Of course, it was a strange version: it's kind of like having Robert Heinlein and E.E. 'Doc' Smith rewriting the Talmud from scratch. It's rather awe-inspiring, to tell you the truth.

Honestly, I think that a great deal of good can come out of it: when one of the Laputans can actually contemplate whether the six days of creation may actually not be one right after the other, there's a wonderful thunder on the horizon. It reminds me irresistibly of a joke by Steven Wright (my absolute favorite comedian):

I went down to the convenience store, and I saw the guy locking up. I said, "What's going on? The sign says 'Open 24 Hours'!" And the guy snorted and said, "Not in a row...!"

When you start applying the principles championed by not just Roy Thomas but Steven Wright to Christian doctrine, there may be hope for us yet.

(Oh, and Cain married his sister.)

(Named Candy.)

(Don't forget to tip the waitstaff. And try the veal.)