Our Own Creation

Doubtless, visitors to the Giant's Causeway are also regaled with the legend of Finn McCool. Moreover, they always will have been. I know, I know. But even so.

This whole carry-on recalls the insistence on the invented language of Ulster-Scots, complete with the self-confessed neologism that is "Ullans", whenever Irish is used; apparently, no one seems to realise that Irish is by no stretch of the imagination a peculiarly Catholic or Nationalist language historically speaking, any more than Catholicism and Nationalism have been synonymous during most of the, still fairly brief, period in which the latter has existed.

No, if one lot gets to have its mythology, Finn McCool, in relation to a major tourist attraction, than some way must be found to include the other lot's mythology, Young Earth Creationism, as well. Except that few, if any, people with their age in double figures believe that Finn McCool ever existed in actual fact.

Now, don't get me wrong. The Young Earth Creationist position is more scientific, not that that is saying anything, than are the effusions of Richard Dawkins, the logic of whose position is that the natural-scientific method itself is just another "meme". The YECs do at least really believe in science, in principle, at all. Whereas Dawkins's position, which is bad enough philosophy, is even worse, if any, science. Theirs, on the other hand, is merely bad science, and of course worse theology.

Again, though, don't get me wrong. Science arose out of the uniquely Christian rejection of humanity's otherwise universal concepts of eternalism, that the universe has always existed and always will; animism, that the universe is a living thing, an animal; pantheism, that the universe is itself the ultimate reality, God; cyclicism, that everything which happens has already happened in exactly the same form, and will happen again in exactly the same form, an infinite number of times; and astrology, that events on earth are controlled by the movements of celestial bodies within an eternalistic, animistic, pantheistic and cyclicistic universe.

Science cannot prove that these closely interrelated things are not the case; it simply has to presuppose their falseness, first established in thirteenth-century Paris when their Aristotelian expression was condemned at the Sorbonne specifically by ecclesial authority, and specifically by reference to the Biblical Revelation.

That is why science as we now understand the term never originated anywhere other than in Medieval Europe. And it is why science did not last, or flower as it might have done, in the Islamic world: whereas Christianity sees the rationally investigable order in the universe as reflecting and expressing the rationality of the Creator, the Qur’an repeatedly depicts the will of Allah as capricious.

But creationism is scientism. Scientism is the belief that the only objectively true knowledge is that derived from the application of the natural-scientific method. It is ruinous of science, since that method can only function on certain presuppositions which it cannot prove, but rather must (and, historically, happily did) accept on higher authority. Creationism is a form of scientism, which has accepted the scientistic argument and then applied it to the Book of Genesis.

Creationists may seem to be the polar opposites of Stephen Hawking, Peter Atkins and Richard Dawkins. But, in fact, they are all of a piece. I would not teach the works of Dawkins - wholly incompetent in the field that he has long chosen to colonise - in schools. Nor would I teach creationism. For exactly the same reasons in both cases.

That is one of the many reasons why I am not, and have never been, New Labour. New Labour was and is happy to teach Dawkinsian scientism to its own children and creationist scientism to other people's, at public expense all round. I am not happy with the teaching of either of them to anybody. What says, for example, Oliver Kamm about New Labour's, and specifically his hero Tony Blair's, enthusiastic use of public money in order to teach creationism?

Nor am I happy with the assumption that teenagers are so thick that they can be fobbed off with "the fossil record": of course, the fact that two species inhabited the same place at different times and resembled each other does not prove anything at all, still less that the later one was descended from the earlier one. With teaching like that, it is no wonder that, once you take out the Don't Knows and adjust accordingly, the creationist proportion of the British population is comparable to the creationist proportion of the American population, and growing.

There is really only one thing about evolution that truly interests the popular mind. That is the common ancestor of Man and the great apes. No such ancestor has ever been found, and children should be taught that fact, for fact it is. And as long as fact it remains, it further remains perfectly legitimate to believe that, whatever might have gone on or be going on among plants and animals, the first man was created directly from inanimate matter, and the first woman from out of the first man, exactly as the Bible teaches.

Why not? If that was what happened, then science, which is purely descriptive, would just have to deal with it. And it has produced no reason whatever to disbelieve it; no other particular species from which we are demonstrably descended. Likewise, since the emergence of the first living cell from inanimate matter remains wholly incapable of repetition, then there is no scientific reason whatever not to believe that that, too, was a direct act of creation. Who can show that this is scientifically impossible? Who can say what really happened instead?

But how is it that, in order to balance or counteract the teaching of an Irish Republican historiography and of a broader Gaelic-Irish culture, by no means necessarily the same thing, Northern Ireland stands on the cusp of the teaching of Young Earth Creationism? The body that has been most active in bringing about the concession to that position by the National Trust in respect of the Giant's Causeway has been the Caleb Foundation.

That Foundation has the closest possible ties indeed to the Democratic Unionist Party. However, its Council of Reference features no minister of any of Northern Ireland's three largest Protestant denominations: the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, the Church of Ireland, and the Methodist Church in Ireland. Yet none could exactly be described as liberal in Northern Ireland, and the first two, at least, contain no shortage of clergy who would fall into the Conservative Evangelical camp as generally defined. Clerics of all three have routinely held, and still do routinely hold, offices high and low in the Orange Order and in the Royal Black Institution.

Yet Caleb's Council of Reference stretches from the very old guard Calvinistic (Evangelical Presbyterians, Reformed Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists) to the Pentecostal (Elim, Church of the Nazarene, plus the roots of such things in the entire sanctification still strongly affirmed by the Independent Methodists) and to those who maintain the theology of pre-Pentecostal fundamentalism alongside the outward forms of the popular Calvinism of yesteryear (the Free Presbyterians), without anyone in the vein of the Presbyterian the Reverend Stephen Dickinson, or the Anglican and Irish language enthusiast the Reverend Dr Eric Culbertson, or the Methodist the late Reverend Robert Bradford MP.

Caleb cannot, then, claim to be upholding the tradition of James Ussher, whose calculations of the date of creation are by far the least interesting thing about him, and a full biography of whom was quite recently published by Professor Alan Ford of Nottingham, who previously had the questionable pleasure of lecturing me at Durham on the Reformation.

Caleb, with immediate access to the very top of the main Unionist party, has no ties even to Protestants and Unionists as hardline as Mr Dickinson, or as Dr Culbertson who has tried in his time to become an anti-Agreement UUP MP when not organising services in Irish, or as the late Mr Bradford who was murdered by the IRA in 1981. Caleb, with immediate access to the very top of the main Unionist party, has no ties to the denominations being banished by Sinn Féin from their historic role in Northern Ireland's schools as the dry run for that party's banishment of the Catholic Church from schools throughout the Island. Caleb has no such links. And nor has the DUP.

For what we see in Northern Ireland is the carve-up between a bizarre fundamentalist sect and a Marxist guerrilla organisation, the archetype of the "centre ground" politics of which we are all supposed to approve, but which is in fact a carve-up between that sect's old allies on the 1980s Radical Right and those guerrillas' old allies on the 1970s sectarian Left, not least on the basis of support for the European Union through which those guerrillas legislate for us alongside the Far Right, the Far Left, and Dutch ultra-Calvinists who will not have women as candidates but who campaign for Sir David Attenborough's documentaries to be edited in order to remove any reference to evolution before they may be shown on Dutch television.

In coalition with Sinn Féin sits, for example, Nelson McCausland, a British Israelite and Young Earth Creationist who is an enthusiast for Ulster-Scots and for the chaining up of children's swings on the Sabbath. As Minister of Culture, he demanded creationism in the museums. He is now Minister of Social Development. Far from an isolated figure, he is hotly tipped for Westminster, where the creationist (and, tellingly, pro-homoeopathy) activist  David Simpson already sits, legislating for you and for me.

In order to counterbalance Gaelic mythology and Republican mythologised history, is British Israelitism, Robert Bradford's position but consistently condemned by Ian Paisley, also soon to be purveyed, first at National Trust properties, then in museums, and then in schools, all at the expense of taxpayers throughout the United Kingdom? Gaelic mythology, like the Irish language, is all well and good, and indeed historically both a Protestant and a Unionist interest, again like the language. But one would no more wish to teach either mythologised Republican history or British Israelitism than either Young Earth Creationism or the effusions of Richard Dawkins.

Remember, though, that one must never, ever, ever criticise "the Northern Ireland peace process". Like criticising the EU, to do so would be to prove that one were not on "the centre ground". And that would never do. Would it?

We have only ourselves to blame.