To complete my recent series on the Jehovah’s Witnesses
and their governing organ, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, what could
be more appropriate for this blog than a couple of articles taken from the
March 2014 Awake! Magazine containing
instructions from the Watchtower telling JWs how they should think about creation.
Please find below photos of the articles concerned, and very revealing they are
too.
The Watchtower tells JWs what to believe on creation (Click to enlarge).
Here are my comments:
ONE) Notice that
the WT articles disparagingly refer to “creationists and fundamentalists” as
if the WT and their followers aren't creationists and fundamentalists themselves! The WT are every bit as fundamentalist, as
say, Answers in Genesis and more: In
fact, I would refer to them as fundamentalist++! The reason for the “plus plus”
is that the WT and their followers constitute a cult in as much as the WT
claims to have exclusive rights to the autocratic theocratic management of Christian
observance. They carry out this management using the spiritual and psychological duress
common to cults (See my first post of this series). As a rule you will
find that fundamentalists are unable to see themselves reflected in other fundamentalist
cultures and will completely disown these cultures as wilfully in error. They
can do this without seeing the irony because they have a complete and unself-critical
conviction that their brand of fundamentalism is set apart from all them others because,
needless to say, they claim to have The Absolute Truth.
TWO) Notice that
the WT accepts the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth. Is this a good
thing or bad thing? Probably a bad thing because this will put them in an
advantaged position as compared to the crackpot science of YECs
like AiG: JWs can smugly and plausibly claim that they are not anti-science! So
anybody of a fundamentalist frame of mind can become a JW and perhaps feel a bit better
about it. After all, it seems that the YECs are in an eccentric minority even
in America: As YEC Ken Ham of AiG has recently admitted in one of his blog
posts, old-Earth Christians have a position
regarding Genesis [that] is the norm and not the exception among Christian
academia today. So the WT can claim to be on the side of the broad swathe
of academia in contradiction to dime store pundits like Ken Ham.
THREE) But the
WT is not happy about evolution and only allows variation within “kinds”. Well,
admittedly evolution’s power, when it is badly sold as a something-for-nothing
process that “poofs” organized structures out of a huge sea of pure randomness is not
only counter intuitive, but is actually wrong, so it's not surprising if the WT achieve some traction here. In fact, we find that like many
of the writers on the “Intelligent Design” website Uncommon Descent the WT's reasons for rejecting evolution are dualist. Quoting from the Awake! article:
The theory of evolution is also embraced by many who
claim to accept the Bible as the word of God. They believe that God produced the
first burst of life on earth but then simply monitored, and perhaps steered,
the process of evolution. That however, is not what the Bible says….According
to the Bible, Jehovah God created all the basic kinds…..”
The foregoing is
based on an implicit and false dichotomy between the actions of God and the processes of
the natural order. These views of the WT are comparable to the views expressed
by Uncommon Descent’s V J Torley. (See here)
***
Regarding
creation, on the whole the JWs look a lot better (unfortunately!) than the panicked
anti-science YEC fundamentalists who gained some ground during the 1960s when Christianity
on both sides of the Atlantic started to face some strong intellectual
challenges and a sense of alienation and marginalization set in. It is probably not
a coincidence that the JWs date their restoration of “The Truth” back to the late
nineteenth century long before the age of the Earth was noticeably on the agenda
amongst Christians; in fact the
original early 20 century fundamentalists did not by and large believe in a
6000 year old Earth.* In the late nineteenth century when the JWs were forming end time prophecy
seemed to be the hot issue and not creation. However, it is interesting to note
that the WT’s specialism on date fixing was something they “caught” from Adventist
Jonas Wendell. Perhaps it is significant that today’s fundamentalist YECs also “caught”
their views from an Adventist: George McCready Price.
Footnote:
* According to
Wiki the Watchtower’s founder Charles Taze Russell’s production “The Photo Drama of Creation”:
….purports that the seven creative 'days' in the Book
of Genesis equal 49,000 years, based on Russell's belief that each creative day
lasts 7,000 years. It further claims that 48,000 years had already passed, such
that the final thousand years were "near at hand".
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