Thinking Christian

I’ll be on an airplane this evening, so I won’t see Expelled until sometime later this weekend. But I’ll be eager to read the reports tomorrow morning.

Here is what I hope not to see on the ID/Christian blogs: “We’re right! They’re idiots!” Panda’s Thumb has been saying that kind of thing all along from its anti-ID perspective, and other media are tending to pick up that theme.

I’m calling on ID and Christian bloggers to watch the film with careful discernment. I don’t know how well the film will prove its intended point and I don’t know how well its dramatic construction will be. I do know this: if we love the way it’s presented (or not), and if we agree with most of what it says (or not), we do not have to take a unidimensional, black/white stance that says it’s all good or all bad. We can be watching for points where we can agree strongly, while staying alert for possible weak points or errors.

I hope to see thoughtful responses in the blogs. I hope also to see gracious ones as well, no matter how you good or bad you think the film proves to be.

Two articles of mine posted on other websites today:

On BreakPoint.com: Handling a Hot Topic (how Christians ought to engage in controversies like the one over Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed).

And on the website for the Center for a Just Society, the first of two articles on the whether there was some connection between Darwinism and Nazism, as the movie claims. This first one looks at Richard Dawkins’s to the matter in his review of the movie Expelled. The second one, to be published around Monday, acknowledges that no legitimate philosophical link can be drawn from Darwinism to Hitler’s ethics. There’s another question, though: was there an historical connection regardless?

I must refer you also to Richard Weikart’s expert article on that topic, published yesterday.

Roger Moore asks,

What is Ben Stein afraid of?

That’s his headline for a column in today’s Orlando Sentinel.

It’s funny, really. Ben Stein knew going into this that there would be controversy, antagonism, even ridicule. That’s what Expelled is about. Does Moore think he just suddenly, at this late date, discovered there might be some opposition out there? When he signed up for this was he acting like someone controlled by fear?

Moore said the press conference call last week was “over-controlled.” I have no experience with other press conference calls. I do know that if all callers had been able to speak, it would have been nothing but noise and a complete waste of time. Could they have invited a handful of reporters to speak? I don’t know. Maybe. Would P.Z. Myers have been a good choice as an impartial representative of the press? You can answer that as well as I.

Moore links to Ned Potter’s ABC Science and Society report on the press conference. Potter links to the invitation Myers received for the press conference–the Panda’s Thumb version, that is, the one that completely misrepresents the invitation. Potter also links to Myers’s version of the call. Nice, balanced coverage represented there.

What is Ben Stein afraid of? He’s not afraid of the controversy, that’s for sure. Unbalanced reporting like this has characterized this debate for years, and he knew it going in.

Inside Higher Ed has a “Quick Take” today on PZ Myers jumping in uninvited on a conference call last week. Scroll down the page for the paragraph beginning:

A tightly managed conference call with Ben Stein and producers of the upcoming documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” became the scene of yet another clash between proponents of intelligent design and defenders of evolutionary theory….

It’s a well balanced summary of the event. “Tightly managed” could have all kinds of connotations. The call was set up so that all participants would be muted except the interviewees and the moderator. Questions were taken by email. As one of very many participants on the call, I took it to mean that the interviewees would be permitted to speak without dozens of interruptions coming after each sentence. It would have been nothing but noise were it not “tightly managed.”

The report closes by calling Ben Stein’s academic qualifications into question. No surprise there–he’s calling academia into question.

Blogspotted by Panda’s Thumb! I’m so excited! What more could a blogger ask?

Here’s what they said:

Today we sat in on a conference call with the Expelled frauds. PZ has his story up, and others will probably follow. However, some people, including the producers of Expelled, have already taken to accuse us of crashing their call, much like the lies about PZ crashing the Expelled screening.This is false. We got an explicit invitation yesterday from Expelled‘s media relations firm to participate, note to whom the invitation is addressed.

Seriously, now: I didn’t accuse anybody of sneaking in to listen. As far as I know the film’s producers wanted them to be there. But the call was designed for attendees to be muted, to let the interviewees and the moderator speak. Questions were taken by email. There were a lot of people on the call and it would have been impossible to proceed any other way.

P.Z. Myers crashed the call by interrupting. Not by listening, but by speaking. And he knows it. I could get nasty with PT for calling me a liar, when the facts are so clearly and obviously otherwise. But I’ll leave it at this, for now.

Comments will be closed on this post, mostly for reasons stated like those stated here, and also because they’re not such a fun group to play with. Experience with my previous post showed that some of that crowd are just not very observant of the discussion policies here.

Update 8:45 pm: regarding accusations from Panda’s Thumb that this is a lie, please see here.

At this moment there is a telephone conference call underway with Ben Stein and the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. It is an invitation-only conference. The call was interrupted by someone representing himself as P.Z. Myers, a Minnesota scientist and strident opponent of religion and of Intelligent Design. This person broke in and interrupted the call and accused the movie-makers of lying. This was about 40 minutes into a 60 minute conference. Others on the call included producers Mark Mathis, Logan Craft, and Walt Ruloff.

Just last week Myers also tried to crash an invitation-only screening of the film in Minneapolis. He claims he went to an open RSVP website to get himself signed up to come. That claim is undermined in that the screening was quite clearly by invitation, “RSVP” means “please respond to this invitation,” and he knew he was not invited.

He has apparently just now done it again.

But clearly the ruckus he and others have raised is far off the real point, which is the content of the film.

Expelled producer Mark Mathis said near the end:

“If this debate were really just about scientific ideas–when was the last time you heard about people getting together to have a passionate exchange about gravity or entropy? But you do get it with this one. The biggest part of this argument is about a worldview. If you acknowledge that design can be discovered scientifically, then the whole worldview of atheism crashes down around you. So they defend evolution with incredible vigor. And on the flip side, people ask, “Why is this being suppressed? Why do they have such a stranglehold on the science departments?”

“Even just now on the phone P.Z. went to the Holocaust footage and misrepresented what has been said about it–which we just explained again a few moments before on this phone call….

“But the core content of the film is that there are scientists being persecuted, and it needs to stop.”

I have not seen the film, but I have noticed, as the producers and Ben Stein noted, that all the controversy in the blogosphere has been over peripheral issues: who got invited into a showing, for example. The complaints haven’t been about the substance. It’s not that ID antagonists have not had opportunity to see it. Richard Dawkins was admitted to the same showing that P.Z. Myers was excluded from. (The producers maintain that they knew he was entering, by the way.) Last week in Nashville, they say, they took initiative to call ID antagonist Michael Shermer and ask him to attend a screening.

This, by the way, demonstrates it wasn’t some kind of paranoia that led them to exclude P.Z. Myers. Frankly, in view of the way Myers speaks about his opponents on his blog, I would be inclined not to invite him in to a private discussion too. That same angry tone was evident in the person on the phone just now. It makes perfectly good sense that they would have admitted Dawkins and not Myers–for Dawkins, for all his anti-religious rhetoric, at least maintains a much more courteous tone.

Paul Lauer, the moderator, handled it graciously in my opinion, given that the call had been crashed. I wonder how the caller got on the conference with voice capabilities–everyone else on the call except the moderator and interviewees was muted (press questions were taken by email).

I’m more interested now than ever to see the film.

Note on comments, added at 6:05 pm. I’ve already deleted one obscenity posted here. This is not Pharyngula, and this blog has discussion standards. This is the weekend, and I do not intend to babysit commenters. I’m going to close comments intermittently as needed when I’m not available to keep an eye on it. I’ll close them completely if needed.

See also Barry Carey on this topic.

An “aesthetic argument for evolution”–I hope it’s obvious to you, just by looking at it that this is self-contradictory. When arguing from some fact to a worldview, one ought to be pointing toward a worldview that can accommodate the fact.

Richard Dawkins apparently takes an aesthetic argument as valid, yet as reported by Matt and Dana Higgins, he almost simultaneously supplies the material for his own refutation. They report from a lecture he gave in Austin,

[Dawkins says] “Evolution is more elegant than creationism.” In terms of evolution vs. creationism/intelligent design, he primarily argued from a point of aesthetics. His highly complex theories are preferable to the plain statement: “God did it.” Like saying that a couture dress is prettier than a dress made out of the living room curtains. Fans of “Gone With the Wind” may prefer the curtains. A matter of preference….

Later in the same talk he reportedly said,

Since there is no God and no moral reality, there is no morality that should be held by all persons at all times…. In “The God Delusion,” he strongly argues that morality evolves and changes with society (”the moral zeitgeist”).

So: apparently there is a strong enough argument for aesthetic realism/objectivity that we ought to take it as evidence on which to base our whole worldview. “Evolution is more elegant” is an objective fact, not a subjective opinion. But there is no moral reality. “Child abuse is wrong” is a subjective belief, not an objective fact. (Dawkins happens to agree with that subjective opinion, but that doesn’t make it objective in his mind.)

Does anybody see something being turned upside down there?

Ironically, this showed up (via Uncommon Descent) just minutes after I wrote this.

For those of us who have debated whether morality is objective, this blog post takes it to another level: beauty is objective, too. One reader, responding to Gene Veith’s post on Aesthetics & American Idol, writes,

“Learning to subjectively like what is objectively good at first bounced off of my 3am quick-read blog-scan. But then I realized that this exact thing happened to me and I shall anecdote-ize it thus:

“When first I approached Milton’s Paradise Lost I knew that I ’should’ treasure it as a sublime and beautiful epic of written art. But i could only (at first) force myself to appreciate it from the outside, like looking at an utterly alien thing that all others considered beautiful. You look at it sideways, squint a bit, trying to see what they see… but it is unutterably alien. Perhaps you see an angle here or there that has a symmetrical form that is pleasing, a curve here, a line there… but the whole is so beyond your current vantage point that the beauty is lost by your own unelevated perspective.

“Then, after forcing yourself to merely ‘mentally ascribe’ the designation of beauty to the form, you slowly achieve the ability to connect the slivers of recognizable traits of beauty that you CAN see from your current state.

“This is achieved in literature by reading more…. “

More at Apprehending Beauty — Cranach: The Blog of Veith

Something amazing happened yesterday. The controversy around Premise Media’s upcoming movie Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed became the hottest topic in the blogosphere. According to BlogPulse, a service of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, the issue held the number one slot throughout the day on Monday, March 24th (http://www.blogpulse.com). There were also over 800 results on Technorati (www.technorati.com).

“It is amazing to see the reaction of PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins and their cohorts when one of them is simply expelled from a movie. Yet these men applaud when professors throughout the nation are fired from their jobs and permanently excluded from their profession for mentioning Intelligent Design,” said producer Mark Mathis. Mathis was at the event that has raised this controversy.

[From EXPELLED Controversy Top Issue in Blogosphere]

Nothing unexpected here. Last September I wrote:

Come next winter the Intelligent Design debate is going to have a bomb ignited under it. The film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, featuring Ben Stein, is set for release in February. If the film comes anywhere near the level of the interview Rob Crowther did with producer Walt Ruloff, it’s going to hit our culture hard.

The release date was pushed back, but the interest level is about what we all should have expected. And reactions by P.Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins are about what we should have foreseen as well.

Media reports on Intelligent Design, with their frequent misunderstandings and distortions, can make a person cringe. Unfortunately, there are times when ID defenders and creationists can make you cringe, too. There are plenty of good ways to stand in sympathy with Intelligent Design, to support creationism (not the same topic, but closely enough related to be included in the same post), or to attack evolutionary theory. There are also some not-so-good ways.

Here are the three most serious mistakes to avoid:

1. Speaking Of What We Do Not Know
As an undergrad at Michigan State, I was for a time involved in the controversy on “scientific creationism,” which was drawing a lot of attention in Christian circles at the time. The discussion hinged around whether the fossils, rocks, and stars really pointed to an ancient earth, and whether Genesis 1 and 2 really demanded a young-earth interpretation. I came to a very freeing realization at the time: this is a very complex subject. Much of it is really for specialists. And I was a music major! Sure, I could read evolutionists’ opinions or creationists’ opinions, but could I form a knowledgeable opinion on the science? As for Genesis 1 and 2, even that was a matter of discussion among strongly principled Christian scholars. How literal is it to be taken? It has much of the characteristics of poetry–is it meant to be (at least somewhat) figurative?

I settled on this: I don’t know about the age of the earth. I am not qualified to settle the issue, even in my own mind. I’m thoroughly convinced (on other grounds) that God was intimately involved in whatever happened. I’m firmly convinced (also on independent grounds) that humans are uniquely made in God’s image, that we were created to be in fellowship with Him, that we went wrong in some way that Genesis 2 and 3 accurately portray even if some of it is figurative, and that Jesus Christ is the way back to a right relationship with God. The rest is complex and I need to study more before I decide.

I’ve done a whole lot of study since then. I know a whole lot more than I did then, and I have convictions now about some things I suspended judgment on earlier. But I’m still not a biologist or paleontologist. I could wish that I could study all the books and papers, and form my own independent conclusions on every aspect of the ID controversy, but it’s not possible. So I try to speak to topics on which I’ve done my homework.

Too often ID supporters, creationists, or Christians in general will dismiss evolution for reasons that are just wrong. Too often, it’s because all they’ve read is what ID supporters and creationists have written about it. You can’t understand ID by reading what Richard Dawkins or P.Z. Myers say about it, and you can’t understand evolution by reading what the Discovery Institute says about it. You have to read what each position’s supporters say. Otherwise you’re not ready to take a stand.

I am not saying you can’t have an opinion where you haven’t done your homework. I’m also not saying that what you know about God from other sources–revelation, apologetics, faith in general–has to be put on hold on account of this one topic. I am saying that we allought to admit what we don’t know, especially when the topic is as complex as this one.

ID skeptics aren’t asking my opinion, but the way they often misread and/or distort ID’s claims, it’s clear to me that many (not all, but many) of them have also not done their homework. (’Nuff said.)

2. Speaking Without Respect and Courtesy
ID supporters and creationists take note: evolution is not stupid, and evolutionists are not idiots. Evolution supporters also take note: ID and creationism are not stupid, and their supporters are not idiots. Ravi Zacharias said it well: “To the extent that you can make your opponent’s position look ridiculous, to that extent you probably do not understand it.” He could have added (and knowing how he speaks, I’m sure somewhere he has), to the extent you make it your business to make your opponent ridiculous, to that extent you’re defeating any purpose you have of being persuasive.

I’ve gotten myself embroiled today in a discussion about ID and religion on Panda’s Thumb. As of this afternoon, there are several commenters who have engaged me in this discussion respectfully, on a substantive level. There’s one commenter whose tone has not been so pleasant. Guess which ones I’m more likely to listen to? In fact, I’m not responding to or even reading anything further by that commenter.

Aristotle said rhetoric–including persuasion–involves logos, ethos, and pathos. Logos is the word, the logic, the force of the argument. By itself it produces little persuasive effect, and does little good. Ethos is roughly credibility, that which causes the person to believe that the person has a right relationship to the topic, by virtue of study, experience, trustworthiness, and so on. Pathos has to do with the person’s relationship to the audience. The audience is always asking, though usually not consciously: Does this person understand me? Does his/her view of the topic have any relevance to me? Should I care about what this person cares about? All three of Aristotle’s factors are vital to effective communication.

And need I remind us of Christ’s example and command to love even our enemies, and to treat others as we would have them treat us?

3. Not Speaking of What We Do Know
I don’t want to be misunderstood as advocating a timid stance. That’s not what humility is about. We ought to speak clearly what we understand clearly, and present our convictions as convictions–things of which we are convinced. What we don’t understand clearly, for that matter, we can still feel free to discuss openly.

Tying The Three Together
For those who are Christians, Colossians 4:6 summarizes it best:

Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.

It’s being gracious, and knowing, and from that stance, speaking and answering.
And Applying The Principles
There’s a movie coming out soon, Expelled, which is going to be very favorable to ID, and will certainly raise the volume of this debate. ID sympathizers, let’s not make the mistake of acting triumphalistic over it, or speaking as the whole question is settled for good–even if the movie really succeeds in making its case.
As the volume of debate raises, let’s raise the tone along with it.