Thinking Christian

Kate Muir, writing in The Times (London) positively fawns over Richard Dawkins, as he is releasing his new three-part series Dawkins on Darwin on British TV. I fairly fell over when I read this—even though I was sitting down:

In these barren, thoughtless times, Dawkins gives people something substantial to chew on.

[Link: Richard Dawkins slaps creationists into the primordial soup - Times Online]

Something substantial to chew on? Hardly. In The God Delusion he doesn’t address—doesn’t even demonstrate awareness of—genuine theistic scholarship. Instead he serves up for himself easy, empty arguments about a vaporous version of God that he himself invented. Then, having savored and swallowed them, he burps them back up, pronounces himself satisfied, and expects us all to feel the same. Challenged on his utter avoidance of opposing scholarship (here, for example), he takes up P.Z. Myers’s “Courtier’s Reply” and insists it would be silly to give genuine theistic thinking any more attention than he has.

Is this indeed a corrective for barren, thoughtless times? I think not. There are better assessments out there; this one, for example, from Not Even Modern:

I think I mentioned the [Courtier's Reply] argument before. I detest it, because it is basically a license to intellectual laziness….

The “Courtier’s reply” move is astonishingly poor, to the extent that it’s baffling that Dawkins is actually using it. As it is, it is equally open to rhetorical deployment by Creationists (why read anything about biological evolution, as it’s nonsense anyway?), Flat Earthers, and so on. I really think there’s a hubris thing going on here. To wade into an area which has more than two thousand years of extremely bright believers making cautious and complex arguments and extremely bright disbelievers making equally cautious and complex arguments, and to think all one has to do is to ignore all that and point out the emperor is naked, one needs a pretty high opinion of oneself.

In a similar vein, David Heddle says,

The Courtier’s Reply is license to wallow in ignorance–in fact it justifies, rationalizes, condones, encourages, celebrates, and rewards ignorance, simply by declaring the subject at hand (theology) is not worthy of study. I see that as laziness, not brilliance.

In a masterpiece of oblivious self-parody, Dawkins himself, in his interview with the Times, explains the problem with the Courtier’s Reply. The topic is different but the principle is the same:

“I don’t like giving [Darwin skeptics] the oxygen of respectability, the feeling that if they’re up on a platform debating with a scientist, there must be real disagreement. One side of the debate is wholly ignorant. It would be as though you knew nothing of physics and were passionately arguing against Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

Knowing nothing of real theology, yet being quite content in his ignorance, nevertheless he passionately argues against God.

Such intellectual laziness is apparently all too fitting for our day. Consider this from Karen Muir in the same Times article:

For final proof that Dawkins, rather than God, is everywhere, you need only to have seen the most recent series of Doctor Who, in which Dawkins played a cameo as himself.

Need I spell it out? Am I being ungracious, or does that not speak for itself of “these barren, thoughtless times”?

Now, I will grant her points for this nifty bit of verbiage: “slaps creationists into the primordial soup.” That’s a real nice piece of imagery. We writers congratulate ourselves when we come up with lines like that. It’s a fine example of her own graciousness, too….

Hat Tip: Barry Carey, Al Mohler

Yesterday I posted a short note about the new Louisiana Science standards, which call for schools to encourage students in

critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.

One commenter quickly responded with deep invective, including,

Come on. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is trumpeting this legislation except for its religious proponents. And yet it’s being heralded on sites like this as a triumph for science education. Talk about hypocrisy.

Call it what it is: a triumph of religious organization, an act of political calculation, and another reminder that the state with perhaps our poorest historical and current educational standards supports politicians who will preserve that status quo well into the near future.

He’s not alone in this; his was just one representative response that happened to be handy for me to use.

Now compare that to the James Corbett incident in Orange County, California. Corbett has been caught on tape making repeated derogatory comments about Christianity in the high school social studies classes he was teaching. His supporters rushed to his defense, in interviews and in a rally on his behalf, saying,

He Made Us Think

He’s all about opening people’s minds.

I don’t agree with everything he says, but that’s not the point. Can you tolerate someone saying something that you don’t agree with? Can you have a fiery debate about ideas? It scares me that that’s not acceptable.

Corbett is training young students to think critically.

I can’t prove this, but I’d be willing to bet that many of the people around the country who would support Corbett’s “teaching how to think” are the ones most appalled that Louisiana will be encouraging students to learn critical thinking skills and logical analysis.

The difference, of course, is that Corbett’s apparent religious agenda is more agreeable to these people than the one they see behind the Louisiana bill. It seems many people really like learning to think critically, as long as “thinking critically” means learning how to disagree with religiously-connected ideas.

There’s a double irony here: Corbett’s supporters, as displayed in reports at the time, weren’t displaying good critical thinking at all. They weren’t even engaging the issue that was in question. Maybe some of them should go back to school—in Louisiana.

I was going to close on that note, but instead I am going to repeat a quote from above, and ask you to think of it in a different light:

I don’t agree with everything he says, but that’s not the point. Can you tolerate someone saying something that you don’t agree with? Can you have a fiery debate about ideas? It scares me that that’s not acceptable.

Ironic.

John G. West explains it:

Louisiana Confounds the Science Thought Police

EurekAlert does it again!

Would someone please explain to me how this article merits this headline???

Homosexual behavior due to genetics and environmental factors

As a writer, I often enjoy Language Log simply for what I learn there about language, whether it’s connected to topics I’m involved with or not. Once in a while, though, they focus on one of my hot buttons: science journalism. On their blog they call it “The Language of Science,” on ways that science journalism is not always (ahem) quite what it ought to be.

Today Arnold Zwicky has taken New Scientist seriously to task for reporting that the “gay” sexual orientation is determined at birth. The science doesn’t support the conclusion, he says. Understand that Language Log is no right-wing, fundamentalist (or whatever stereotype you like to name) shill group. I don’t think any of the several Language Log authors have made a case for faith. Some of them seem to be agnostic or atheistic, based on what they’ve written.

What Zwicky complains about is that some reports on this research have had little connection with what the studies actually demonstrated. It’s the science, not the ideology, that drives his analysis. Says Zwicky,

First we get an (unsupportable) essentialist interpretation of the statistics, and then this feeds into some vulgar phrenology…

[Link: Language Log » Gay or straight, it’s decided at birth]

It’s hard to avoid the inference that somebody else’s conclusions are being driven by their ideology.

Jason Rosenhouse finds this, from Kenneth Miller’s Only A Theory, to be lacking:

Turning our attention to the special case of our own species, we can be fairly confident, just as Gould tells us, that our peculiar natural history would not repeat, and that self-awareness would not emerge from the primates. Indeed, we would have no reason to suppose that primates, mammals, or even vertebrates would emerge in a second running of the tape. But as life reexplored adaptive space, could we be certain that our niche would not be occupied? I would argue that we could be almost certain that it would be — that eventually evolution would produce an intelligent, self-aware, reflective creature endowed with a nervous system large enough to solve the very same questions that we have, and capable of discovering the very process that produced it, the process of evolution.

[Link: EvolutionBlog : My Review of Only a Theory]

Miller, a strong opponent of Intelligent Design, takes the position that God and evolution are compatible features of the universe. He particularly defended, in Finding Darwin’s God, the idea that evolution is undirected. Kenneth claims to believe in Christianity (he’s a Roman Catholic) but also believes the course evolution has taken was not guided by God. I’ve been scratching my head over that one since I read Finding Darwin’s God. The Bible is chock-full of statements of God planning things out well in advance (Ephesians 2:10, for example). To believe in undirected evolution is to believe in something other than the biblical view of God and his relationship with humans.

Rosenhouse is no theist and no friend of Intelligent Design, but he is right to question Miller about this:

Actually, to argue otherwise is simply to acknowledge that Darwinian natural selection driving animals to fill adaptive niches is not the only thing that goes on during evolution. It was not just the relentless march of natural selection that made possible our appearance on this planet. There were also numerous mass extinctions to open up large numbers of new niches….

I don’t agree with Rosenhouse’s full conclusions, but it sure seems that he’s being more consistent to his underlying theory than Miller is. Either accept that God exists and cares about life on earth, or set aside the whole idea of God entirely. Miller seems to be trying to keep one foot in Christian theism and another foot unguided, undirected evolution. But that’s like trying to keep one foot on the dock and one foot on the rowboat–when the rowboat’s mooring lines have been thrown off, and the current is flowing away from the dock.

Part of this post mysteriously disappeared sometime today, June 3. I don’t know how long ago that happened; in fact, it may never have been published correctly, though some of the comments that were written here seem to indicate it was for at least a while. I am rewriting it to finish it out again at about 10 pm Eastern time. It is not the same as it was before. My apologies. I don’t know what happened.

David Heddle has been posting on the relation between science and religion on his blog, He Lives. I especially appreciate what he says in “God is not a God of confusion.” I recommend you take a look there before you read on here.

Speaking from a Christian position, I think that much unnecessary confusion arisse from those who correctly understand that the Bible is perfect and inerrant, but incorrectly conclude that the way they understand the Bible is also inerrant. David points out that this ain’t necessarily so.

We can shed light on David’s topic by taking a common principle of Scriptural interpretation, and extending it somewhat. Bible students universally agree that we must let Scripture interpret Scripture. That is, we must not latch onto one verse or short passage and draw conclusions from that small piece alone. There are many passages on prayer in the New Testament. Some of them, taken individually, would lead one to believe that we can make God do things just by asking him according to a certain formula. Only by considering the full teaching on prayer, in all the relevant contexts, do we approach a correct understanding. We can get there, too, on prayer and other topics too, for the Bible is clear on its major teachings. Scripture interprets scripture.

Science also interprets science. This is so commonplace in the sciences it hardly needs to be stated. Findings in one area of research certainly affect conclusions in other related areas, and vice versa.

But if David is right, as I think he is, that both Scripture and science are revelations of God, and both need to be interpreted, can we not extend the principle? Consider this approach: Revelation interprets revelation.

This would mean that where science and the Scriptures speak to (or even seem to speak to) overlapping areas, we ought to be looking for how they can inform one another. Where there is agreement, that ought to increase our confidence that our interpretations are on the right track. Where there is disagreement, that ought to tell us we have more work to do: we’re on the wrong track, either in our understanding of nature, or of Scripture or both.

This could be a dangerous proposal. In some Christian circles the rejoinder will be quickly shouted, “You can’t let science overrun Scripture!” Many scientists would cry out the converse: “How could you possibly let an old book like that influence your view of nature?!” It’s not my purpose here (I’ve worked on it elsewhere) to explain why some of us believe there is knowledge and authority to be found in the Bible; I’m speaking mostly to those who already accept that is true (so was David Heddle, in his post). What I do want to say is that I’m not talking about either field overrunning the other. If all truth is a unity, then Scripture correctly understood must agree with science (nature) correctly understood, where the two overlap with each other.

Scripture and science only partially overlap, of course. Science has nothing particularly important to offer on whether Jesus Christ rose from the dead or how we enter a relationship with him. Those aren’t matters for scientific investigation. Scripture doesn’t help us program our VCRs, much less map the genome or solve the mystery of dark energy. But there are important areas where the two do intersect. The most obvious is origins. Biblical revelation also speaks to some of science’s underlying assumptions, like the question of scientific realism, the rationality and knowability of nature, and more.

Anyway, if the Bible is indeed true, then Christianity has nothing to fear from science, and science has nothing to fear from revelation. All we might have to fear is that certain cherished interpretations might be overturned, as we let revelation interpret revelation, and draw on our full range of knowledge to try to understand the full range of truth.

Having written a four-part series on Francis Ayala’s Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, I was already in strong disagreement over what Ayala called a “gift” to religion in Darwinism. Now I’m reading his monograph for the AAAS, “The Difference of Being Human,” and have found even more reason to disagree with him on this. The core of his argument is

(1) that the capacity for ethics is a necessary attribute of human nature, and (2) that moral norms are products of cultural evolution, not biological evolution.

I thought Biblical religion taught that moral norms flow from the character of God. Cultural evolution is no more friendly to Biblical religion than biological evolution; either way it contradicts what God has revealed about himself.

As far as I can remember (the book is back at the library now) Ayala did not mention this contingent, non-God-centered view of ethics in his book. Could that be because this is quite obviously not a gift to religion?

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.

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.