Apart from being one of the world’s leading geneticists Steve Jones is also a brilliant writer: a great populariser of all things biological. With numerous highly acclaimed books to his name he is also a frequent guest on radio and television where his acerbic wit and eye for controversy do not go amiss. Neither is he daunted by a challenge, as when in Almost like a Whale he took it upon himself to ‘read Charles Darwin’s mind with the benefit of scientific hindsight’ and rewrite The Origin of Species.
In The Serpent’s Promise Jones takes on the even History with its accompanying theological themes. bigger challenge of the Bible, with similar intent. But there is a problem lurking in the undergrowth: not a serpent but a category error – writing of something in a way that it was never intended, then using it as a springboard to something completely different. Retelling the Bible as science is like pretending that The Wind in the Willows can be ‘upgraded’ into a textbook of natural history. In fact all that Jones is doing is using a naïve, literalist reading of the Bible as a one prism through which we view the world. It is not peg on which to hang the insights offered by various sciences to our contemporary understanding of the world, like hanging baubles on a Christmas tree.
As an example, Jones uses the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel – ‘The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David’, with its three sets of fourteen ancestors – as the basis for a consideration of where we are with the genetics of ancestry. I have no argument with Jones’s enlightening comments on genetics, but none of it has anything to do with what St Matthew intended us to understand and which Jones’s literalism completely obscures. For the biblical languages used letters for numerical denotation providing the basis for a rich symbolism found through- reveal deeper, labyrinthine levels of mystery that will out the Bible of number-forming words (hence the arcane ‘science’ of numerology). Thus, ‘Dvd’ (there
were no vowels in written Hebrew) has a numerical
value of fourteen: thrice fourteen is a theological eval-
uation that the Christ will be thrice as great as David; the three sets of fourteen also comprise six sets of
seven, so Jesus would be born in the seventh seven i.e.
the fullness of time. However one may regard this way
of thinking, it has little to do with literal genealogy.
The deficiency of Jones’s approach becomes apparent in the very first sentence. Boldly setting out on the wrong foot he declares, ‘Genesis was the world’s first biology textbook.’ It wasn’t! Its first
chapter was among the very last parts of the Bible to be written, probably in the 3rd century BCE. This chapter is a
patriarchal
follow and was
Hellenic writings on nature and cosmology, such as those of Aristotle, which provided their ‘Sitz in Leben’. As such it was intended as a stage setter for the subsequent unfolding drama of a putative Salvation
The premise of Jones’s book is that, ‘reason is a better way to understand the physical universe than is faith.’ But is it? It is certainly a different way – but better? Leaving aside that long history of pseudosciences founded on reason – craniology, ‘Rassenhygiene’, homeopathy spring to mind – it is important to remember science (and the scientific method) is but
the only one: music, poetry, drama, dance, are equally valid responses to the mystery of life. They are not comparable but help to shape the values we live by and we would be lacking in humanity without them.
The inflated claims of science – and this book is not without its overt hubris – would have us believe that it can tell us everything worth knowing: Jones calls for ‘a complete explanation of what surrounds (us).’ This is an imposssible ambition. Whatever one’s level of knowledge or understanding, we cannot escape the fact that the world remains a magical place of profound mystery. All we succeed in doing is peeling back layers – and Jones is very good at this – but only to
for ever elude us.
It is also important to remember that the Creation
Story, and the subsequent Salvation History that
follows, is exactly that – a story. It is a way of looking
at the world – also the serpent’s promise! It is a view not interested in the world as such, so much as man’s
moral nature and destiny, which lies far beyond the
remit of science. It is hardly the platform from which
to build an analytical study of nature which Jones attempts. Disagree with the Bible by all means, but don’t traduce it by pretending it is something which it is not.