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The Agnostic Minister

December 5th, 2007 · 1 Comment

Andrew Sullivan notices a moment I’d missed in the recent Republican debate, in which Mike Huckabee is asked to clarify his views on evolution: At the first debate, he’d been one of three candidates to indicate he disbelieved in the theory. Huckabee rather unconvincingly tries to reframe his original response as really being about whether he believes in God or not. (So, the other candidates were declaring themselves atheists?) Pressed on whether he specifically believes in a literal six-day creation that occurred 6,000 years ago or some more metaphorical reading (that might admit evolution as the “means” of creation, say), Huckabee tries to dodge with “I don’t know, I wasn’t there.” Of course, he wasn’t there for any of the events described in the bible. Really, though, are we meant to believe that an ordained Southern Baptist minister just has no view on whether the creation story is literal or metaphorical? Because aside from being significant in itself, the answer implicates one’s whole approach to biblical interpretation.

Tags: Religion


       

 

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Tom // Dec 5, 2007 at 3:17 pm

    Huckabee had a pretty decent answer to this at the YouTube debate. He said explicitly that he considers parts of the bible to be metaphorical (I think he used the word “obviously”). It was kind of great, since a number of his idiot competitors had just hemmed and hawed over whether or not the Bible should be taken literally.

    I’m no Huckabee fan, but I do admire him for having actually taken fifteen minutes to think of answers that are slightly less moronic than those of the rest of the field. His death penalty answer was still pretty lame, though.