Thinking Christian

Book Review

In this, my fourth and final post on Francisco Ayala’s book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, I wish to examine very briefly his views on knowledge as related to science and religion. I am addressing the same primary audience that he does in his book: believers in God. For the sake of brevity, and because Ayala seems also to have accepted them himself, I am going to work on the basis of two starting assumptions: there is a God, and he has revealed himself through the Scriptures. I ask readers who contest those assumptions to recognize that this is not the place for me to defend them. This is a blog, not a book, and to do the job properly would run very long. Even as it is, my treatment here can only be an introduction to issues of religious versus scientific knowledge, but I trust it will at least open up some good discussion.

Fences Around Religious Knowledge
Ayala devotes an entire chapter to showing there need be no contradiction between revealed religion–Christianity, to be specific–and evolutionary theory. Clearly he respects Scripture. He would like Christians to understand that Darwin has been a gift to religion as well as science. If it is a gift in the Ayala takes it to be, however, it comes to us as a horse once did to Troy with dozens of armed men hidden inside. The problem is most clearly expressed on page 172 (emphasis added):

The scope of science is the world of nature, the reality that is observed, directly or indirectly, by our senses. Science advances explanations concerning the natural world, explanations that are subject to the possibility of corroboration or rejection by observation or experiment. Outside that world, science has no authority, no statements to make, no business whatsoever taking one position or another. Science has nothing decisive to say about values, whether economic, aesthetic, or moral; nothing to say about the meaning of life or its purpose; nothing to say about religious beliefs (except in the case of beliefs that transcend the proper scope of religion and make assertions about the natural world that contradict scientific knowledge; such statements cannot be true).

When there is a conflict of knowledge or opinion between science and religion, science always wins; religion’s statements “cannot be true.”

Now, is this necessarily so? Why would it be? One could muster several plausible reasons, I suppose: science is evidence-based, its conclusions are open to public challenge and revision, it follows a near-universally trusted method for determining what is true, and its results have been wildly successful in helping us understand and control nature.

Why Would This Necessarily Be?
Let us, however, recall the assumption we have made for present purposes, and that Ayala seems to hold: that there is a God who has revealed himself through the Scriptures (an assumption that I hold to be quite true, but again, it is not my purpose this time to defend it). This God is revealed as the omniscient and omnipotent Creator, faithful and reliable, certainly able and eager to reveal himself to humans. He speaks with complete authority: he knows what is true. He cannot lie. Therefore what he speaks through the Scriptures is true, and if I may paraphrase, when science makes assertions about the natural world that contradict Scriptural knowledge, such statements cannot be true.

Given our assumptions, why would that conclusion not follow? Why would Ayala (who appears to have respect for God and Scripture) say just the opposite? We can never trust any Christian beliefs except as science allows, he says. It’s tantamount to saying we can only trust God as far as science allows; but who forced God aside and enthroned science in his place?

Religious knowledge has its obvious difficulties. Agreement is hard to find, and from a human perspective there is no universal method for testing religious truth. Let us not overstate the problem, however. Ayala is not speaking of comparative religion, or the conflicts of belief between Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and secularists. He speaks as one who believes in a Christian conception of God, to others who believe in the same God.

Interpretation: It’s for Both Science and Scripture
Ayala takes the position that the Bible just isn’t intended to speak to the same questions as science. It’s not a book on natural history or cosmology. Therefore if science contradicts the apparent teaching of theology on these subjects, then theology can gracefully bow aside and say, “A thousand pardons; I didn’t mean to be intruding on your territory.” This opens up the matter of interpretation: how literally (for example) are we to take the Genesis creation account? That’s a valid question. But interpretation is a valid question for science as well. How do we interpret nature and its evidences? Theologians have been wrong; scientists have been wrong too. Scientific knowledge is fluid, sometimes adjusting in minor ways, sometimes completely being overturned. A few years ago it was scientific knowledge that stomach ulcers were caused by stress; now it’s scientific knowledge that about 90% of them are caused by H. Pylori bacteria, and most of the rest by certain medications. Why then should “assertions [by religion] about the natural world that contradict scientific knowledge” necessarily be false?

Historic Christian theology teaches that God has spoken through nature, through an internal witness in human hearts (conscience, for example), and most clearly and unambiguously through Scripture. Psalm 19 expresses all three of these sources of revelation. Some theologians point out that God has written two books: the Bible and the book of nature. Both “books” may be understood correctly or incorrectly; both need to be interpreted. For a Christian, then, there is more than ample room for discussion about interpretation: Are the early chapters of Genesis intended to be taken literally or figuratively? Great question! Let’s work on it. The book of nature is open to similar discussion. Properly understood and interpreted, the two sources of knowledge must agree.

Necessary Agreement
If God is indeed God, the Creator of all, who speaks only truth, there is no need to ask which source of knowledge trumps the other, for in the end there can be no contradiction between them. Apparent contradictions are signals that our understanding or interpretation from one or both of these perspectives is wrong, and that we have more work to do. They do not automatically signal that science is right and that Scripturally-based knowledge is wrong. That view of knowledge is no gift at all.

Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, by Francisco Ayala. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2007. 256 pages. Amazon price $24.95.

Posted by Tom Gilson under Origins and Science & Thinking Christianly | 8 Comments »

University of California, Irvine biologist Francisco Ayala writes in his book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion (pages 174-175),

Scientific knowledge cannot contradict religious beliefs, because science has nothing definitive to say for or against religious inspiration, religious inspiration, religious realities, or religious values. There are Christian believers, however, who see the theory of evolution as contrary to the creation narrative of the book of Genesis. These believers are entitled, of course, to hold such convictions based on their interpretation of Scripture. But Genesis is a book of religious revelations and of religious teachings, not a treatise of astronomy or biology.

I will have some points of serious disagreements with this to express, but first I must put it in a context of some appreciation. Ayala strongly disagrees with scientists (of whom he names Dawkins, Futuyma, and Provine) who conclude that science has disproved religion. He quite rightly notes on page 173,

Scientists and philosophers who assert that science excludes the validity of any knowledge outside science make a “category mistake,” confuse the method and scope of science with its metaphysical implications.

Quite right indeed, and thank you, Dr. Ayala, for that. Scientists ought to recognize the limits of their art. I only wish I could feel as comfortable with Ayala’s views on religion. Several chapters earlier (page 42) he had complained of a kind of “conceptual schizophrenia” by which some people explain some aspects of reality in natural terms and some in supernatural. I think that in the first paragraph quoted here, he exhibits a different kind of conceptual schizophrenia.

The problem is that he speaks of religious realities as if they have nothing to do with realities of the natural world. How many kinds of reality are there, though? In some religious systems there is room for this dichotomy. Some Gnostic religions–of which modern-day Christian Science is one–deny the actual reality of the material world. For them, religious reality is the “real” reality, and what science is working with is illusion. Some Buddhists similarly speak of the physical world as “Maya,” illusion. Other historic forms of belief have accepted physical reality as real but an expression of evil or fault; this is found in Platonism and many common versions of Gnosticism. Folk religions or tribal religions have commonly viewed the natural world and the supernatural world as inseparably, personally tied together–the spirits of the trees and rivers, and ideas of the sort.

Only in relatively modern times have we split the world into two opposing realities in which the material was more real than the spiritual, or in which there could be spiritual realities that were stood in no relevant relationship to physical realities. This splitting has been well documented by Francis Schaeffer in The God Who Is There, and more recently by Nancy Pearcey in Total Truth. The daily world of economics, science, politics, the news, medicine, and so on occupy a “lower story” of reality, which is taken to be solid and genuine, while religious truths, values, morals, and so on, sit in a solidly walled off, “upper story” of private belief which need have no concourse whatever with the lower.

Ayala speaks of “religion.” I will speak of Christianity instead. The Christian faith cannot be relegated to an upper story with no relation to facts of science, history, and so on. Christianity claims that God has acted in nature and in history. Some of the “religious realities” of Christianity impinge on scientific realities. What, for example, does science say about visions? Is it possible to have a testable, reliable vision of a future event? In parts of the world where Islam dominates, many Muslims are turning to faith in Jesus Christ; and it is commonplace for that to take place by means of a vision of Jesus Christ. This happens so frequently (I am reliably told) that converted former Muslims are as likely to say, “tell me about your vision,” as they are to say, “tell me how you decided to follow Christ.”

There is a religious reality–a specifically Christian reality–involved here that could, in principle, stand in genuine contradiction to science.

Ayala says that Genesis is a book of “religious revelations and of religious teachings, not a treatise of astronomy or biology.” Well, of course it’s not a scientific treatise in the sense of conveying deep detail about natural processes. But it does speak to events that it claims actually to have happened in the cosmos and in the world. To show that with a minimum of biological and geological controversy, let’s move forward in Genesis a few chapters. Genesis 12 says that there lived a couple named Abraham and Sara, who in their very old age had a son named Isaac, who had a son named Jacob, who had twelve sons, one of whom became a regent of Egypt. It says there were seven years of bumper crops in that part of the world, followed by seven years of famine. These teachings have incredible religious importance to those who understand them in the context of God’s working in the world. Which “reality” do they belong to? Orthodox Christianity is committed to the full historicity of these narratives. It is conceivable that science could contradict them, however. Maybe some ancient record in the rocks or sediment would tend to deny there was any famine in Egypt. Perhaps archaeology might show that the whole story is utterly implausible (it hasn’t, by the way; quite the opposite in fact).

And Genesis says that God created the natural order. It does not say that he created it in such a way that his fingerprints in it are unambiguously clear to every observer. But it does show that there is no bifurcation between natural realities and religious ones.

When Ayala says that scientific knowledge cannot contradict religious beliefs, he is partly right, but for the wrong reason. He takes this to be true because science and religion have nothing to do with each other; but in fact they do, for religious beliefs may very well be statements about human and natural history. On the other hand, if the religion one has in mind in a statement like that is one that expresses real truth about reality (as I’m convinced Christianity does), then science and religion properly understood and interpreted certainly cannot contradict; for reality is a unity.

Posted by Tom Gilson under Origins and Science & Thinking Christianly | 1 Comment »

Book Review

In his book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, Francisco Ayala suggests that evolution supplies the answer to a serious theological conundrum. I alluded to this in my first post on this book: Things that Seem Wrong About the World:

When I was studying theology in Salamanca Darwin was a much-welcomed friend. The theory of evolution provided the solution to the remaining component of the problem of evil. As floods and drought were a necessary consequence of the fabric of the physical world, predators and parasites, dysfunctions and diseases were a consequence of the evolution of life. They were not a result of deficient or malevolent design: the features of organisms were not designed by the creator.

Related to that is evolution’s explanation for imperfections in nature (pages 22-23):

If functional design manifests an Intelligent Designer, why should not deficiencies indicate that the Designer is less than omniscient, or less than omnipotent? … We know that some deficiencies are not just imperfections, but are outright dysfunctional, jeopardizing the very function the organ or part is supposed to serve…. Even if the dysfunctions, cruelties, and sadism of the living world were rare, which they are not, they would still need to be attributed to the Designer if the Designer had designed the living world.

He returns to a similar theme later in the book (p. 154):

One difficulty with attributing the design of organisms to the Creator is that imperfections and defects pervade the living world…. Defective design would seem incompatible with an omnipotent Intelligent Designer.

But does evolution really solve that problem for Christianity? Phillip Johnson has a timely word on this topic in the current issue of Touchstone. He says,

Another motive for adhering to theological naturalism is a desire to protect God from having to take responsibility for all the nasty things in nature. It is all very well to give God credit for designing the beautiful things, but what God would have designed the mosquito? I fail to see, however, how theological naturalism protects God from responsibility for everything that exists. Granted that God created by natural laws, should he not have designed the laws of nature so that mosquitoes would not come into existence?

Ayala’s solution is no solution. He posits something like a deistic God in relation to natural history (I don’t know where he stands on God’s intervention in salvation history). This God kicked off a world and let it run. Some of it ended up looking nice and fine, but much of it’s a mess; an especially, painfully obvious mess in this month of a devastating cyclone and a horrible earthquake in Asia. And not just that; there have been terrifically damaging tornadoes and floods near my own home, and even worse to the west. I was near enough to see the smoke of a major brush fire earlier today, near Orlando where I’m visiting for a few days; it’s one of many threatening homes in Florida this week.

God cannot get off the hook for these things the way Ayala says he can. He would have us believe God has just let things be this way. Maybe God couldn’t do any better–he doesn’t know how to fix the mess he has made. Or maybe God feels that getting his hands dirty by touching his creation just isn’t very nice. Or is God is letting natural law and chance run their course, because he’s just dying with curiosity to see how it will come out in the end? Which is it? What kind of God does Ayala suppose this Creator is? Which of those options absolves God of responsibility for evil?

There is a solution to the problem of evil, but this is not it. We’ve discussed it at length before (this Google search may be the best guide to those links I can provide you, or you can explore further here). If I were to try to outline it in brief, I would run the risk of doing as much violence to the real answer as Ayala has done with his facile resorting to an evolutionary solution. (Any easy, brief answer to the problem of evil is guaranteed to be wrong.) I own up to having a purely critical purpose in mind for this post: to show that if evolution is supposed to be a gift to religion, in the sense of solving a certain theological problem, it fails to do so. We have better solutions than that, and thank God that we do.

Ayala wants to bridge a perceived gulf between science and religion. That’s a noble goal, and it certainly ought to be achievable, provided that we interpret both revelation and nature accurately; for if Christianity is true then its truths must be consonant with truths of nature, and vice versa. The bridge Ayala has tried to build here, however, won’t bear the required weight.

Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, by Francisco Ayala. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2007. 256 pages. Amazon price $24.95.

Posted by Tom Gilson under Origins and Science & Thinking Christianly | 13 Comments »

Book Review

Francisco Ayala wants us to understand and appreciate what he considers to be Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion. As the author of the book by that name, he certainly has a claim to knowledge on the issues: having trained as a seminarian in Spain, he is now an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine.* He chaired the committee that produced the booklet, Science, Evolution, and Creationism for the National Academy of Sciences/Institutes of Health.

Why a biologist would consider Darwin a gift to science is not hard to imagine. Not assuming his readers understand evolutionary theory, though, Ayala devotes several chapters to an overview and argument for evolution and against Intelligent Design theory. As an introduction to the topic from a mainstream science perspective, this book would be hard to beat. Ayala knows his topic, and he writes well.

Things That Seem Wrong About the World
But that’s familiar ground for most readers of this blog. My interest was in how he saw Darwin as a gift to religion. He introduces his primary reasons early in the book, beginning with this on page 5:

When I was studying theology in Salamanca Darwin was a much-welcomed friend. The theory of evolution provided the solution to the remaining component of the problem of evil. As floods and drought were a necessary consequence of the fabric of the physical world, predators and parasites, dysfunctions and diseases were a consequence of the evolution of life. They were not a result of deficient or malevolent design: the features of organisms were not designed by the creator.

Related to that is evolution’s explanation for imperfections in nature (pages 22-23):

If functional design manifests an Intelligent Designer, why should not deficiencies indicate that the Designer is less than omniscient, or less than omnipotent? … We know that some deficiencies are not just imperfections, but are outright dysfunctional, jeopardizing the very function the organ or part is supposed to serve…. Even if the dysfunctions, cruelties, and sadism of the living world were rare, which they are not, they would still need to be attributed to the Designer if the Designer had designed the living world.

For Ayala then, as a believing Catholic Christian, evolution explains many things that seem wrong about the world: imperfections in nature, and the problem of evil.

“Not a Threat”
Evolution is, moreover, a friend of religion because (page 6):

Christians need not see evolution as a threat to their beliefs…. There need not be conflict between religion and science. Apparent contradictions only emerge when either the science or the religious beliefs, or very often both are misinterpreted.

Evolutionary theory resolves a kind of “conceptual schizophrenia” (page 42) by which we might otherwise want to attribute some of nature to natural processes, and some of it to supernatural. A full explanation of the natural world can be accomplished in just natural terms, while religion provides a genuine way of knowing about matters of meaning, love, purpose, and so forth (page 172):

The scope of science is the world of nature, the reality that is observed, directly or indirectly, by our senses. Science advances explanations concerning the natural world, explanations that are subject to the possibility of corroboration or rejection by observation or experiment. Outside that world, science has no authority, no statements to make, no business whatsoever taking one position or another. Science has nothing decisive to say about values, whether economic, aesthetic, or moral; nothing to say about the meaning of life or its purpose; nothing to say about religious beliefs (except in the case of beliefs that transcend the proper scope of religion and make assertions about the natural world that contradict scientific knowledge; such statements cannot be true).

That closing parenthesis is of course aimed directly at various versions of Creationism–any belief, that is, that contradicts evolutionary theory.

This summarizes Ayala’s position on religion and evolution: evolution solves a significant problem for religion, the problem of evil; and science and religion can be friends if they will mind their manners and remain each in their proper spheres.

This blog post will go much too long if I try to respond to all of this in one shot. I expect this will require several entries before it’s done. Having covered some ground here by just introducing the issues, I’ll limit myself to a very limited response now to part of what Ayala had to say regarding the friendship of science and religion.

It is most refreshing to see such a highly regarded scientist recognizing boundaries and limits around what science can do. He has a genuine respect for religious understandings of life; and I have absolutely no questions about the reality of his own religious convictions. There is much to appreciate there. His convictions are of a specific sort, of course; and well they should be, for what good is a vague, unformed set of beliefs?

No Threat–To What?
But he assumes a great deal of authority for his beliefs. Early on he had said that “Christians need not see evolution as a threat to their beliefs.” But what if some Christians believe in God’s literal involvement in the origin and development of life? Ayala says God is not the designer (that’s why God is absolved from responsibility for imperfections and evil). That runs counter to the beliefs many of us hold. Later on Ayala explains that our beliefs are just wrong; that we need to let loose of God’s creative involvement in the world.

Ayala’s version of evolution, which (like Kenneth Miller’s) leaves God entirely out of the process of life’s development, is a friend to Ayala’s version of Christianity. Better this than Dennett’s or Dawkins’s versions, which are clearly at enmity with Christianity. But one could wish that he had not stated so baldly that evolution is no threat to Christian beliefs, for it certainly is at odds with any view that says God has been intimately, providentially, guiding the course of life and nature from the beginning.

There is a tension there. For Ayala, that tension must always be resolved in favor of science; religiously-based knowledge about nature is no knowledge at all. That’s certainly a mainstream belief, yet it’s open to challenge. I am out of time and space to explore that now, though; I’ll have to return to it later.

Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, by Francisco Ayala. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2007. 256 pages. Amazon price $24.95.

*I’m writing this on an airplane, without the book in hand. I photocopied several pages of interest to bring on the plane with me, but I forgot to include Ayala’s biographical information. Thus my rendering of it comes from memory and must be somewhat vague until I have time to look it up and correct it.

Posted by Tom Gilson under Origins and Science | 10 Comments »

Jeff Laird answers this question with a nicely convenient list of scientists who didn’t think so.

Part 1

Part 2

Posted by Tom Gilson under Origins and Science | 99 Comments »

Before now, the one topic that has drawn forth the most anger on this blog has been homosexuality. Not any more. About 2 1/2 weeks ago I wrote about why the Darwin-Hitler link is so sensitive. I’ve been learning, since then, just how sensitive it really is. But that’s not all I’ve been learning. Today’s post is my reflection on that process, and it’s not so much about Darwin or Hitler as it is about us.

Many of us have very deep feelings on this matter. I have not personally heard from Holocaust victims’ family members, but we know this is still grievous to you. Others of us, even without that personal connection, remain aghast at it all. This has obviously touched a sore spot.

The reaction I’ve received here has not mostly been grief, though; it has been anger and astonishment. There were several readers who just couldn’t believe that anyone would draw the link from Darwin to Hitler. Some thought we were laying the whole blame on Darwin, though this is clearly a distortion of what I and others have been saying. Others had a more measured reaction but were still upset that we (myself, and the commenters who have supported this position) would find ethical fault in evolutionary theory. To me, it remains clear that there is an ethical fault in naturalistic evolution. It’s certainly not the kind of error that entails a Holocaust; instead, its failure is that it eliminates any strong ethical corrective to someone like a Hitler. (If you wish to continue discussing whether my analysis on that is accurate, please do so on the original thread.)

The philosophical link from Darwin to Hitler is nowhere near as strong as the historical link. I had said that it appears to be a plain historical fact that German Darwinian scientists were highly influential in establishing the kind of national ethos that could permit a Holocaust. Three different kinds of questions were raised regarding that assertion:

• There was no historical link, and how could you even say so?
• If there was any historical link between Darwin and Hitler, how should we evaluate it in light of all the other historical influences on Hitler?
• The historical linkage from Darwin to Hitler was based on contemporary misunderstandings of Darwin. Why should mistaken views on Darwin be taken as a mark against him or his work?

The first one has been well discussed already. From Darwin to Haeckel to an entire set of German intellectual elites and their widely-selling books and pamphlets, there was an historical train of ideas and events that ended up with individual and racial eugenics being promoted.

The second one goes far out of my expertise and became a learning experience for me. Let me put this in context, especially for readers who do not run your own blog. I have another name for this business: it’s white-water writing. It’s quick, and there are rocks around the next curve. There’s no river guide (editor) other than your own judgment. I adhere strongly to the principle that I will not blog on a topic that I do not know well enough to field questions and challenges on it. This time I entered in without anticipating the question.

The fact that there were multiple influences does not negate the significance of any single one of them. The Darwin-to-Nazism historical linkage remains well supported by evidence already presented. How strong was it among other influences, though? I yield the question. I do not know.

There’s yet another name for blogging like this: it’s learn-as-you-go-in-public. Which means sometimes stumbling in public. It’s not for the timid.

The third question came from Tony Hoffman, and it’s a good one. It’s parallel to one Christians face all the time. If someone claiming to be a Christian commits some atrocity, does that mean Jesus Christ should be blamed? Does it disprove the Christian faith? If someone like Haeckel claiming to follow Darwin’s theory concludes that Papuan humans are more closely related to simians than to Europeans, is that Darwin’s (or Darwinism’s) fault? If others following Haeckel advocate racial eugenics, is that either Darwin’s or Haeckel’s fault?

It took me several days of reflection before I felt ready to answer.

Somewhere along the way Charlie Scott showed us that the basis of the question is not as clear as we thought it was. Properly understood, evolutionary theory provides no true basis for Haeckel’s racism. On the other hand, as Charlie revealed,

[Haeckel] wrote that Darwin was his inspiration, that Darwin was the originator of “struggle to exist” and that he, Haeckel, studied natural selection every day. Darwin wrote back that he was greatly influenced by Haeckel and that Haeckel, among few, truly understood natural selection.

Darwin’s endorsement of Haeckel complicates the matter considerably (please see Charlie’s comment for the source of his information). Did Haeckel really get evolution so wrong after all? In hindsight he did, but what did Darwin himself think? Like almost everything else in this matter, there is ambiguity here.

Anyway, not everyone was satisfied with my answer to Tony, which I need not repeat here. That’s no surprise. It’s a complex issue. Frankly, I’m not completely satisfied with it myself. I’m still wrestling with it in my mind, still trying to learn as I go.

This topic raised considerable anger, as I’ve already said. I’ve been called names this week like never before, here and on other blogs. Why is it so upsetting to suggest this linkage existed in history? Why did it draw forth such emotion when I said there is no proper philosophical link from Darwinism to Hitlerian ethics, yet naturalistic Darwinism also eliminates good correctives for such ethics? These are just facts.

So I’m inviting another learning opportunity. What is it that has made this so anger-producing?

Someone emailed me and asked how I would feel if they wrote a history showing that 9/11 was massively influenced by Christian thinking. Actually, that’s not such an academic question. Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris have virtually done that. They say that religion caused 9/11, and that all fundamentalist belief is fundamentally flawed in pretty much the same way. I don’t know of any Christians who have gone over the top with anger at them. More recently it was suggested here that Luther was as much to blame as Darwin for the Holocaust. None of us Christians got angry over the suggestion.

I’m going to speculate on why it’s different for the Darwin-Hitler issue. This may turn out to be another white-water learning process, for I run a real risk of being wrong. (Understand, please, that I put this forth very tentatively.) I think this may have become a focal point for a large reservoir of anger against Intelligent Design in general. Expelled put it to powerful rhetorical use, which made it even more volatile. Evolution proponents have been wishing Intelligent Design would go away, and it hasn’t; in fact, Expelled put it out before the public more than ever before. It must be really frustrating. Add that to all the questions and all the historic grief and anger surrounding the Holocaust, and this is the result you get.

If that’s anywhere near the right analysis, I can see why this would have come out the way it has. It’s more sensitive than I realized before, in a post I wrote before most of us had seen the movie, including myself. At this point, I’m going to ask for readers’ awareness of the position I’ve been taking: trying to help Christians and/or ID proponents handle this kind of topic responsibly and sensitively. Whether I succeeded with that encouragement, or whether I succeeded even in following my own advice, is not for me to judge. I’ve been trying to do the best I could do.

So for what it’s worth, which may be nothing at all, that’s my reflection on the process we’ve been involved in here. I would ask that if you have further thoughts on the substantive issues involved in this topic, please continue those discussions on the threads where they have already been in progress. It’s just less confusing that way. Comments here will be open for your reflections on my reflections. I’m sure some of you have completely different perspectives, and we’ll be interested to hear them.

Posted by Tom Gilson under Arts and Culture & Origins and Science | 2 Comments »

Blog entry deleted: see here.

Posted by Tom Gilson under Origins and Science | 49 Comments »

A few days ago Tony Hoffman suggested,

Expelled’s charge and the constant revival of this aspersion on this website — that Darwin leads to Hitler — seems fundamentally wrongheaded….

Tom, you keep saying that although you concede that there is no philosophical link from Darwin to Hitler there is in fact a historical one. While I agree with you, I have no idea what your point is in raising it….

It’s a good question. Besides having had about half a dozen deadlines land on me since then, I’ve had to take time to give it some serious thought. Now that I have some time again, what, indeed, is the point of all this?

I hope Tony recognizes I didn’t start this discussion. It was brought up by a movie that’s proving to be fairly popular, as documentaries go. There were some who objected that the Darwin-Hitler link was an ID proponents’ fabrication. I’ve weighed in to respond to that, but I didn’t start it.

Also, if one reviews what I’ve actually posted on this topic, I think “constant revival of this aspersion” is overstated. I wrote one post calling for understanding on why this is such a sensitive issue. I hope an approach of that sort isn’t considered off limits. Other than that, I’ve posted just one link to an article on another website, and two other sentences. Of course there has also been discussion, fueled by participants on all sides of the issue.

But whether or not I’m not to blame as Tony apparently thinks I am, that doesn’t address his real question: why would anybody expend any effort on this at all? Isn’t it all a complete red herring, a distraction from genuine issues? I don’t think so.

First, we ought to learn from history. That ought to be relatively uncontroversial. If the German scientists made a mistake interpreting Darwin, then for heaven’s sake, let’s not forget what they did, and make the same kinds of mistakes all over again! I see potential for it even in our enlightened 21st century. Haeckel’s biggest error was dehumanizing some races of humanity. Peter Singer and PETA are doing the same for the whole human race. For Ingrid Newkirk of PETA, “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” For Singer, we are guilty of “speciesism” if we hold humans to be of more value than animals. This is Haeckel’s error writ large.

Second, it’s not quite true that there is no philosophical link from Darwin to Hitler. There are two at least two valid connections between them.

A. There is an ethical consequence to Darwinism. It is not, as was supposed at the time, that it leads to a moral requirement that we “advance the species.” The connection is this: naturalistic Darwinism, if taken to be the sole explanation for all of life,* erases all ethical requirements. It is specifically the naturalism–closely related to atheism–that is the serious problem in all non-theistic versions of evolution (which I think answers Point 1 in Tony’s comment).

I’ve never seen a good refutation or even rebuttal for this. Paul stated the issue quite well two and a half years ago, long before the current debate began:

Just to be clear, I think the Holocaust was wrong. From my culture’s morality, from many cultures’ morality, but not from Hitler’s. I would fight against it no less.

That’s a hole big enough to drive a Panzer division through. Paul would “fight against it,” and for that I commend him; yet for him, that’s all he has. The only ultimate moral decider is power:

A relativistic moral law is made when a group of people (family, tribe, culture, country, etc.) decide to do so. There is no absolute or objective foundation for doing so: as I’ve said before, it is merely a question of power what laws are made…. When differing moral cultures clash, it’s up to power to decide the difference. Doesn’t look pretty, but that’s the way it is, assuming there’s no God.

Fighting is all anyone can do. There’s no recourse to any higher ethic. If Hitler had won, his power would have decided the difference between the differing moral cultures. Now, lest anyone think I’m picking on Paul, I think he’s right, based on his assumptions. I think he gets it. “That’s the way it is, assuming there’s no God,” says Paul, quite rightly; and that’s an assumption that squares up quite nicely with naturalistic, unguided evolution.

B. There is an ontological implication in Darwinism: humans are the same kind of thing as animals. Hitler applied this selectively, to be sure, but he applied it with great effect. He packed up hordes of people on trains like cattle, took them to the slaughtering plant, and used their parts as raw materials for industry. Yes–they wove gunny sacks out of Jewish hair. You can see unused remains of it still warehoused at Dachau. This, I believe, is why we abhor Hitler so much more than other great murderers like Stalin or Mao: they all killed; but only Hitler so thoroughly dehumanized. Darwinism dehumanizes in a different way. Hitler treated humans like animals; Darwinism says that’s what we are.

Third, ideas matter. I suppose we could trace all kinds of historical linkages to the Holocaust. In fact, I’ve actually heard people say this, even taking it to ridiculous extremes: “if you’re going to say Darwin was responsible, then so were the people who invented shower heads. It couldn’t have happened without them, either!” The difference is in ideas and their consequences. Darwinism–the naturalistic version–is not ethically neutral. It is not lacking in ethical implications. True, it doesn’t prescribe an ethic–it just applies a kind of metaphorical poison gas to any overarching, culture-transcending ethic a nation might turn to, in deciding whether to stand with or against a would-be tyrant like Hitler.

Fourth, contrary to Tony’s point 2, influencers certainly can be blamed for the actions of others that follow. They can be blamed to the extent that others did harm while following them:

• Doing actions the influencers recommended, taught, or prescribed, or
• Doing actions for which the influencers opened an ideological or ethical door, which would not otherwise have been opened.

Darwin was responsible in the second sense. This is the sense in which Berlinski (in Expelled), and Weikart (in his book on this topic) said, “Darwinism was not a sufficient condition for Hitler’s atrocities, but it was a necessary condition.” Without Darwinism, I believe, Germany would have resisted Hitler. It was not the only necessary link leading up to Nazism, but it was one of them.

*This is the sense in which I am speaking of “Darwinism” throughout this article: naturalistic evolution by means of random variation and natural selection, unguided by any intelligence. I recognize there are other versions of evolutionary theory.

Posted by Tom Gilson under Arts and Culture & Origins and Science | 73 Comments »

This reminds me of so many other untested beliefs. Parents and teachers have been of the opinion lately that students will understand math better using real-world objects to illustrate abstract concepts. Research now suggests this is wrong.

“The motivation behind this research was to examine a very widespread belief about the teaching of mathematics, namely that teaching students multiple concrete examples will benefit learning,” said Jennifer A. Kaminski, a research scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State. “It was really just that, a belief.”

Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

[From Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices - New York Times]

I don’t have an axe to grind regarding how math gets taught. I’m just intrigued that they actually tested the theory. It reminds me of other theories that have clear and testable sociological implications. Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody actually did research to these to see if these are true:

• Intelligent Design is a science-stopper: if you can say “God did it,” you’ll give up doing research in the natural world.
• Raising children as Christians is child abuse.

But wait a moment: there already is research on that second one.

Do you have any other similar examples of ideas that need sociological research?

Posted by Tom Gilson under Origins and Science | 2 Comments »

Interesting:

In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive… or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?

[From When Language Can Hold the Answer - New York Times]

Posted by Tom Gilson under Origins and Science | 2 Comments »