More on KJV Origin of Species

Even though he seems to think that I'm a secularist, I want to give Ian Monroe's King James Version of The Origin of Species another mention. I had some money to spend, so I bought a copy. A nice novelty purchase and I imagine I'll pull it out every once in a while for some enlightened humour.

As Ian points out in the foreword, the book isn't designed to be read. The redaction is so extensive that it can't be read. That, of course, is the point. The message is clear: If the Bible is your standard for what goes and doesn't go in science, you're left with something that's completely indecipherable and utterly nonsensical. More sinister overtones are also in there somewhere: There are people who actively redact and censor science because it, in their opinion, doesn't accord with the Bible. They sit on education boards in Texas and run faith schools in London.

The book also raises questions of language. How do we speak religiously and how do we speak scientifically, and how do these two modes of speech relate? Can religion and science communicate without redaction and censorship happening - not only of science by religion, but also the other way around? Can they help trampling all over each other? Can we ever hope for mutually enriching communication? The book asks these questions starkly.

Specifically, I think the question of origin of religious language is asked most seriously. Darwin proposed a (very persuasive and successful) explanation about the origin of species, of life in the natural world. But just like some religious people, fundamentalists specifically, reject Darwin's findings for the idea of special creation of each individual species, they also reject what Biblical scholarship has found (and, really, the tradition has always known) about the origin of the Bible for a sort of Biblical special creation. Like the birds in the air and fish in the sea that just popped into existence, so the Bible just popped into existence. For me the KJV Origin raises the question of the origin of the Bible in a very vivid way. Why do we presume that the Bible simply appeared ex nihilo, like a fax from Heaven? Why do we presume that that the Bible is different from life? Just like Darwin discovered the evolutionary origin of life by looking at life itself, so the "evolutionary" origin of the Bible has been discovered by looking at the Bible itself, in addition to extra-Biblical archeological and historical data. By evolutionary, I mean that the Bible is quite human and was composed, edited, redacted and canonised over centuries. That's not the whole story, as is the case with biology too, but it is certainly a very important part of the story. The Bible is not simply given.

Most Christians consider the canon closed. It is fully evolved, you could say. But our understanding of it isn't. It evolves too. The belief, though, of some is that their doctrine is set in stone. I should elaborate more in another post, but it's a peculiar belief of some more fundamentalistic Christians that their doctrine has its direct origin with God, via the Bible. This makes them blind to the fact that their doctrine is in reality their interpretation. God didn't come up with it. They did. The message of KJV Origin can be said to be that doctrine should evolve too. Because it does so already. The fundamentalists just don't know it or want to know it. Just like scientific language, religious language evolves. It is wrong, then, to censor Origin of Species because of doctrine.

This was, by the way, my first purchase from Lulu. I am, then, somewhat of a late comer to the self-publishing revolution. I'm happy to support it though. It's the future.

Buy the book here.

Oh, my original post about the book is here.