A recent story in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Bedrock of a Faith is Jolted”, tells an all-too-familiar story about the dislocation that results when science falsifies a faith’s core beliefs.
If you’re thinking “not another story about Genesis and evolution,” you really couldn’t be more wrong.
The faith in question is the Latter Day Saints, a.k.a., the Mormons. The particular belief being falsified is the teaching that “millions of . . . Native Americans [are] descended from a lost tribe of Israel that reached the New World more than 2,000 years ago.” The Book of Mormon, which Mormons believe “restored the church to God’s original vision and left the rest of Christianity in a state of apostasy,” teaches that “a tribe of Jews” sailed “from Jerusalem to the New World in 600 BC and split into two main warring factions.” This teaching has been used as a “prime conversion tool in Central and South America.”
As the LA Times headline suggests, science tells a very different story about the peopling of the Americas. Both archeology and genetics tell us that the Native Americans (or First Nations, as they’re called in Canada) are the descendants of people who came to the Americas from Northeast Asia during the last Ice Age. Both their mitochondrial (maternal) DNA and Y (paternal) DNA link them to people living today in the Altay region on the Siberian-Mongolian border. (The tantalizing outliers are the native peoples living around the Great Lakes. Their DNA suggest the possibility that their ancestors may have come from northwest Europe, not the Middle East, approximately 10,000, not 2600, years ago. However, people with similiar DNA mutations have recently been found living in the area around Lake Baikal in Siberia. Occam’s razor, baby.)
While plenty of questions about the “how” and “when” of human settlement in the New World remain, the “where from” is as settled as scientific questions outside of physics (there’s a reason Stephen Jay Gould coined the expression “physics envy”) get. Or to put it differently, science has effectively falsified the idea that Native Americans/First Nations are descended from Iron Age Semites. (I am but I’m neither a Native American nor a Mormon.)
The Mormon response to this science was summarized by William Saletan of Slate as
1) DNA evidence is being twisted by enemies of the church. 2) Maybe the folks who came from the lost tribe were few, and their DNA was “swamped” by immigrants from Asia. Try falsifying that! 3) “The Book of Mormon will never be proved or disproved by science.” 4) We’re “willing to live in ambiguity.”
Mollie Ziegler at Get Religion doesn’t disagree with Saletan’s synopsis but, instead, asks why the Los Angeles Times is covering it now. The story isn’t new — the LDS “even put up a site for media specifically dealing with DNA and the Book of Mormon.”
At the risk of answering a rhetorical question and seeming even more obtuse than usual, I’d say the answer is obvious: to the LA Times and the rest of the prestige media, the Mormon-DNA story is a corollary to the Kitzmiller v. Dover Intelligent Design case and other stories about the “conflict” between religion and science, a corollary that, frankly, many small “o” orthodox Christians don’t discourage. It’s yet another “example” of the “bind” that religious believers find themselves in as science undermines the “cores” of their various belief systems.
Two things: first, that sound you hear is the sound of my back breaking in two as I bend over backwards to be fair and non-snarky. Second, as you may have guessed by my use of scare-quotes in the previous paragraph, I think that the corollary being described sucks for air and I do wish that both the media and orthodox Christians would stop making connections where there are none.
That’s right, none. There’s a world of difference between “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” or “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,’” and saying that the aboriginal Americans were descended from Iron Age Semites. The last statement is scientifically fasifiable. The first two aren’t because, among other reasons, God’s activity cannot be scientifically proven or disproven and, almost as important, pace what you may have been told, there is no agreed-upon interpretation of the above-cited passages from Genesis, at least beyond a basic theological and metaphysical level. (As Alister McGrath argued in The Twilight of Atheism, much of the perceived conflict between Genesis and science is, in reality, a conflict between an — historically speaking — idiosyncratic reading of Genesis and some scientists.)
This difference between the respective truth claims is why it chaps my E3b ass when Mormon spokesmen say stuff like “the truth is, the Book of Mormon will never be proved or disproved by science.” Sure it will and, from where I’m sitting, it just was. (The back pain got to be too much.) Genetics and archeology leave Latter Day Saints in a position much closer to Native Americans and other aboriginal people who, when confronted with the evidence, say something like “the creation stories of Native Americans do not involve migrations across the Bering land bridge” and then stick their fingers in their ears and hum, than to orthodox Christianity.
Such a response doesn’t even warrant the description fideism, at least not as understood by the Church Fathers, Pascal or Kierkegaard. Instead of insisting that there are limits to what reason can tell us, it’s a wholesale flight from reason altogether. Instead of, like Tertulian, saying that “the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd,” it’s being indifferent to whether something is absurd or not because someone told you that you had no choice but to believe it. (If you’re tempted to draw comparisons to Catholicism, don’t bother — you’ll only be demonstrating your ignorance of Catholic thought.)
I’m hardly an expert on Mormonism but I do know a thing or six about the Christian tradition and, while Christianity holds faith and reason in a creative tension, it doesn’t advocate this kind of flight from reason. The “absurdity” that Christians believe may turn reason on its head — Chesterton’s definition of paradox — to get our attention but it doesn’t require us to ignore the evidence; it “merely” asks us to transcend our preconceptions about what is possible, especially when it comes to the God and what St. Paul called the “mystery of our redemption,” which, last time I checked, had nothing to say about Native Americans or how they got they got here.
