I’ve just finished watching the first of the new Channel 4 series The Bible: a History. Tonight’s episode was presented by the novelist Howard Jacobsen – a non-religious Jew – on Creation. It will be interesting to see how different each episode is; if tonight’s is any guide, they will be quite individual, for rather than a documentary, I think tonight’s opener was best described as a televisual essay.
In fact, it was a rather languid and well-padded one, with a fair amount of repeated footage, some Hubble, some beach, Jacobsen wandering along various streets, a lot of Jerusalem, and a fair bit of what looked to me like sunrise over the Golan Heights and Lake Galilee.
Jacobsen’s essay had a fairly simple thesis. Between the atheist and fundamentalist certainties was a poetic and mythic reading of the text which stirred the soul. It was compatible with religious believing and atheist doubting, as long as both were prepared to celebrate the mystery of life in the mythic literary qualities of the text.
Along the way he illustrated what he saw as both fundamentalisms with clips of John Piper and Richard Dawkins, and snippets of interviews with A C Grayling, and the minister of Westminster Chapel, Greg Haslam. Reasonable religion was represented by John Polkinghorne and Jonathan Sacks, and reasonable non-religion by Mary Midgely and Jacobsen himself as the voice of the author, bookending his essay in conversation with Sacks. Mary Midgely had the best line of the show, which in some ways precisely encapsulated Jacobsen’s argument. He suggested to her that the new atheism, in its black-and-white certainties, was just like religion; she responded, “Oh yes, but not as nutritious.”
There were some problems along the way. In conversations with an archaeologist and a scholar at the Shrine of the Book, his narrative implied that it was only (very) recent archaeology that had suggested the Genesis account didn’t go back to Moses. There was no recognition of what a long process of scholarship (mainly by those who believed in the Creator God) was part of this story. On the other side of the fence, as it were, was little recognition of the role of so many believers – not least Church of England clergy – in the development of natural science. In that sense, the essay almost tempted you to believe that Jacobsen was essaying a novel thesis, rather than a variation of some ideas that have a long pedigree.
It wasn’t a bad programme, and certainly not as bad as I feared it might be, but it was not only very languid – a half-hour essay filled out to take up an hour-long slot – it could have drawn on rather more material, and told a more subtly accurate picture. I assume that its attempts to be poetic in both language and imagery (which were a little overwrought at times) was an attempt to match its style to its thesis, that poetry and myth has its own truthiness, without asking rather boring questions about whether such things actually happened.
Somewhere in that elegant literary thesis, one rather important question got lost – the idea that it might be important to ask whether there actually is any meaning and purpose in the universe other than the ones we inscribe upon it. Are we the only ones capable of art, or is there a Great Artist, whose work of art we yet might be.
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Good summary, thankyou. I thought it was pretty decent, and at least allowed space for a range of voices, rather than picking on the simplistic fundy vs new atheist argument. Like you I felt it left some questions unanswered: it’s all very well to be inspired by texts which speak of meaning, purpose, etc., but is this a human attempt to impose reason on nonsense, or is there actually something to it?
Thanks for the summary. Interestingly, although John Piper (not really a “fundamentalist” at all in the anti-intellectual sense that some US Christians are) was presented as a raving-fundamentalist-literal-six-day-creationist, in fact his church does not teach that as essential. There’s an interesting article on what they believe about creation here. Perhaps too extreme for some, but not as extreme as you might have expected from the quote
http://is.gd/71mwu
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