Thinking Christian

Robert Pennock recently wrote a guest blog in US News and World Report, calling for a sane and presumably peaceful end to polarization over the origins of life. His leadership toward that end is (ahem) rather remarkable. Pennock is a philosopher at my alma mater, Michigan State University; and his opinion, of which he has frequently written, spoken, and even testified in court, is that Intelligent Design is strictly non-scientific creationism (on which please see here). To my knowledge Pennock does not declare himself an atheist, but his approach to science and nature specifically seeks to exclude any supernatural involvement in the world, and he is a favored guest speaker and writer among atheist and freethought groups.

So here we have Pennock calling for an end to polarizing debate on evolution and Intelligent Design. As he writes at the close of his piece,

Let us forthrightly reject those false and polarizing views and hope that the better angels of our nature will eventually prevail and bring this war to an end.

I’m certainly in favor of putting this polarization behind. Who wouldn’t be? So let’s see where Pennock’s leadership in that direction takes us. He begins with this beautifully conciliatory headline: “Creation of Christian Soldiers a Chilling Sidelight of Darwin Bashing.” Such an irenic opening clearly signals his desire to move beyond bashing those who disagree with his own position. Throughout the piece he displays that same refreshing “let’s all get along together now” tone. His peace-making overtures include:

Yet another Discovery Institute urban cow-dude tries to resuscitate the dead ID horse under the guise of “academic freedom.” Casey Luskin’s claims (one can hardly call them arguments) have been rebutted many times before, so there is no point in doing so again here.

…Ralph Seelke, whom I had observed testify with such brazen misinformation in favor of one of the Discovery Institute’s recent disguised ID bills in Michigan.

I don’t believe that creationist activists themselves would makes [sic] such [threatening phone] calls; no doubt such threats come from individuals who are mentally unstable. But creationist leaders regularly say things that encourages [sic] such individuals.

As I wrote in a recent op-ed about Expelled and the ID culture wars, it is hard to know how to respond in a civil manner to such ignorant extremism. Let me go further here: Such views (and I do here mean views, not people) do not deserve a civil response.

Just a few months ago I received a call from a member of [University of Colorado philosopher Bradley] Monton’s department at Colorado asking for my assistance in repairing damage to the department’s relationship with science colleagues caused by a talk he gave on the subject. I sympathize with the department, but can no longer give Monton the benefit of the doubt in the way I did when he posted his draft while still a graduate student. So far as I know, he hasn’t stooped to publishing out-of-context quotes from private E-mail without permission (no reputable publisher would allow that, in any case), but I was told recently that, like Luskin, he has been making personal attacks on me in talks and a series of Discovery Institute podcasts. I have turned the other cheek to this calumny as well. Again, who is the character assassin?

Note carefully how he has refrained from being uncivil towards anyone. I’ll repeat it in case you missed it: “Such views (and I do here mean views, not people) do not deserve a civil response” (emphasis added). Thank you for that courteous example, Dr. Pennock!

Bradley Monton has a response to this, which we’ll come to in a moment. First, however, we need to note how all of this serves as strong and convincing refutation of an accusation that has been brought against Pennock:

Commenting upon myself and Richard Katskee, [Discovery Institute's Casey] Luskin writes that we and other “Darwinists” aim to “stifle debate” and that we use a “poison pen” and “name-calling” as “intimidation tactics” to silence anyone who dares speak up in favor of ID.

It’s gratifying to know that Pennock would never think of using a “poison pen,” or speak in an intimidating manner. Clarifying further, he tells us,

I don’t hesitate to point out misstatements, deceptions, and fallacious arguments, but I keep the focus on the claims themselves and avoid attacks on individuals.

It’s so good to see he has left individuals out of this. And he really does want to be less polarizing. He said so himself! So inspiring is it, that it bears repeating:

Let us forthrightly reject those false and polarizing views and hope that the better angels of our nature will eventually prevail and bring this war to an end.

One must appreciate his leadership here, presenting (as it were) the first unifying, pacifying round of a sort of START talks negotiation with his ideological opponents.

Back to Bradley Monton now. He blogged a response, beginning with an interesting question:

Robert Pennock has published an article in the online edition of US News & World Report where he says some critical things about me, culminating in the implication that I’m a “character assassin”. (Is calling someone a character assassin itself behaving like a character assassin? Just wondering.)

Before we go too much further here we should identify Monton more clearly. He shares at least two important things in common with Pennock: both are philosophers, and neither believes in God. The crucial difference between them is that Monton thinks Intelligent Design is worth studying for its scientific and philosophical merits. He does not seem to have signed on to a complete endorsement of ID, but he’s certainly in favor of pursuing the question.

And there’s another crucial difference between Pennock and Monton, evident in their two articles linked here. Pennock is the craftsman of conciliation, while Monton (an atheist!) is one of those culture-war-mongering creators of Christian soldiers.

But no, never mind. I cannot sustain the sarcasm any further. I hope you caught what I was really saying about Pennock above. And I hope you’ll carefully read Monton’s response. In genuine courtesy (and I’m not being sarcastic now)—in fact with remarkable courtesy, considering with what force and in what a public venue Pennock attacked him—Monton simply documents several errors in Pennock’s piece.

I don’t agree with all of Monton’s beliefs, obviously, but I am with him 100% on his pursuit of what is true, and his quest for courtesy. His courtesy admittedly exceeds my own: he did not resort to sarcasm, whereas I couldn’t restrain myself from it this time.

The tone Pennock takes, on the other hand, is no surprise to anyone who has followed this debate. (Consider Pharyngula and Panda’s Thumb, for example.) Pennock’s article contains numerous errors, as Monton shows, it’s rife with unconcealed anger, and it is unabashedly anti-Christian. Pennock wants the culture war to end. He wants the polarization to be resolved. His simple proposal for accomplishing that seems to be that everyone who disagrees with him—and especially the “Christian solders”—should just go away. I guess if that happened, that would solve Pennock’s problem, wouldn’t it?

Related: Opponents, Not Enemies

Once I again just recently I have watched The Return of the King, from The Lord of the Rings trilogy, on DVD this time. How I love that story, both in the book and the film version! The DVD is accompanied by behind-the-scenes extra features, which included the actress who played Eowyn saying that though we live in cynical times, yet this is not a cynical story. No indeed; it is a story of courage, loyalty, steadfastness, brotherhood, of evil and righteousness, of discipline and decisions that really matter.

It is a mirror of the real-world battle between evil and righteousness, in which the same virtues are equally called for. Yet the virtue we need is often less obvious: the willingness to love a child, to stay strong in sickness, to keep going after a financial setback, to speak a word of encouragement, correction, even sometimes confrontation. It is the faith to trust in God even when (Psalm 13) we cry out, “How long?” And it is also that which shuns the easy but deadly road of temptation.

This is what speaks to me throughout the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings. In one important way, however, the story’s parallelism with reality fails, and that is in its depictions of battle. Apart from perhaps the character of Gollum, the enemy is unremittingly evil and awful. There is no question of sympathizing with the Orcs or the Uruk-Hai, or with Saruman or Sauron. There is nothing to sympathize with in them. They represent what the Bible calls the spiritual forces of darkness, the unseen evil we battle by faith.

So much of what we fight from day to day is not this: it is each other. It is also ourselves (as the movie did capture, in Frodo, Boromir, and others). Standing between the great good of God and the great evil of darkness there is humanity, which is each of us.

Earlier today, I posted a piece criticizing Robert Pennock for the manner in which he opposes Christianity and Intelligent Design (not the same topic in my mind, though it seems to be in his). In a battle of ideas, which I also take to be a spiritual battle for people’s souls, he is my opponent. Yet he is a man like myself. We have walked the same sidewalks at the university I attended, where he now teaches. Though I stand against much of what he stands for, I recognize much of my own situation in his.

I believe he is wrong in many ways. I believe also that he has cut himself off from God, the true source of life, joy, and love. I believe that he has tasted life, joy, and love, as God gives his gifts to all humans, but that he cannot know them in their fullness while he stands apart from God. So this evening, having thought this through with the epic battles of The Return of the King fresh in my mind, though I believe he is wrong, I cannot see him as my enemy.

Unlike the combatants in the trilogy, he and I have much in common, including mutual enemies. There are many of these, of which I’ll mention just one, since it’s very much on my mind. I’m in the sixth week of treatment for pneumonia, and it’s not working yet. I’ll see a specialist tomorrow to see if we can figure out something better than the antibiotics I’ve been on. I’m sure Robert Pennock has faced something like this, in himself and/or his family, and that he’ll face it again. Not that I’m worried about this ending up this way this time, but to face a disease like this is in some measure to face death, to be reminded of the one most significant enemy each of us faces. (Even for Christians who believe God can redeem it, death is still an enemy—1 Corinthians 15:24-28.) It is our common foe.

So looking back on what I wrote this morning, I do not regret saying that I believe he is wrong (massively so). I seem to have the ability to recognize and communicate some of what is going on in this battle of ideas. I do regret this, however: I regret that I do not more often feel, and more effectively communicate, that this battle is with a fellow human.

What I would like most now to communicate, which I’m sure I will fail to do well, and which I’m sure non-Christian readers will hardly believe or understand, is this: that this fellow human, this man with whom I so much disagree and who represents others with whom I disagree—this fellow human, whom God loves, who has for now at least cut himself off from God, is one for whom I have wept today.

The estimable Nick Matzke has raised the issue here again whether we can appropriately draw any causal linkage from Darwin to Hitler or Nazism. He suggests that to make that connection is not only historically inaccurate but morally opprobrious. Some of what he has said is certainly exaggerated. Still, he has presented some new information to me, and this has opened up the topic again.

The last time I wrote about this was last May. On top of the blame he places on me for thinking there’s some link between Darwin and Nazism, Matzke adds the fault that I have not kept up with all of the literature on the question. Mea culpa. Lately I’ve been trying to catch up, through reading what’s available on the web. There has been a new book published on the subject by Robert Richards, which I have not read, but there’s enough on the web to work with for now. Here are some sources:

• http://www.asa3.org/groups/expelled/weblog/17854/Jeffrey_Schloss_Review_of_Expelled.html
• http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2006/11/hitler-as-social-darwinist-another.html
• http://vfpdissident.blogspot.com/2008/11/ernst-haeckel-scientist-artist-mystic.html
• http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/reason-and-reverence
• http://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/staff/webpages/site.cfm?LinkID=397&eventID=34 (There are a number of articles listed at the end here)
• http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/06/from-darwin-to-1.html
• http://home.uchicago.edu/~rjr6/articles/Myth.pdf
• http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=9837
• http://www.csustan.edu/history/faculty/weikart/DarDevalue.htm
• http://www.csustan.edu/history/faculty/weikart/hitler-evil.htm
• http://www.ferris.edu/isar/rejoiner3.pdf

In a word, Matzke proposes that Robert Richards, historian at the University of Chicago, has effectively disproved any meaningful link between Darwin and Nazism. Taking the opposing view are Daniel Gasman and Richard Weikart. Jeffrey Schloss points out (as Weikart certainly would agree) that a monocausal interpretation could not be anything but oversimplified, especially in view of Christian understandings of human nature. My sense after reading all this is that Richards’s case (which Matzke supports) is far from established, and that Darwinism was one contributor to Nazism, and that there were very many other contributors besides, in the usual tangle of events and ideas that lead to any historical outcome.

I propose taking this question in a different direction, though, somewhat in keeping with Schloss’s approach. Whether Darwin actually led to Hitler is fiercely disputed by scholars more knowledgeable than any of us here. It’s also not necessarily the most salient issue, as far as I’m concerned. It affects how one evaluates the movie Expelled, I suppose, but that’s not my most pressing issue right now.

Here’s the more important and interesting question: Is Darwinism, along with its intellectual descendants* the kind of thing that could contribute to something like Nazism? Does it lay any intellectual or philosophical groundwork that might tend to promote generalized hatred, mass killings, dreams of absolute racial and national domination, and especially the horrifying dehumanization of victims that still, sixty-plus years later, sets Hitler apart from other genocidal tyrants?

Nazism was fed by many historical streams. The most significant of them goes back before the dawn of history: it is the nature of humankind. Biblically the description of humanity is that we were created in God’s image, but we are all tainted and marred by pride, self-centeredness, desires for power and prestige, disregard for God’s righteousness, and an innate inability on our own to rise to his righteous standard. From a human perspective, this sinful taintedness appears in varying degrees of destructive desire and opportunity. (From God’s perspective, those differences are much like the different heights of buildings seen from an aircraft at cruising altitude.) Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, the leaders of the Rwandan massacres, Milosevic, Mao Zedong, Bin Laden, and others of their ilk have expressed this sinfulness far more fully than most others have, but we all possess it.

With that in mind, surely Nazism could have arisen without any help at all from Darwin.

Nevertheless ideas have consequences, and under what Christians describe as God’s common grace, even with sin in the world, better ideas have better consequences. One almost gets the sense from Nick Matzke’s protestations that Darwinism couldn’t have negative consequences. This seems rather unlikely, and somewhat of an overly defensive position to take. I want to suggest that it is also dangerously false, and that it is not (contra Matzke) a moral failing on my part to think so.

At this point I’m going to turn specifically toward naturalistic Darwinism, which (for reasons I won’t go into here) properly includes monistic Darwinism such as Haeckel’s, even if his monism was not strictly naturalistic or materialistic. The best authority I can reference to make my point is actually Richard Dawkins, from his critical review of Expelled.

My own view, frequently expressed (for example in the The Selfish Gene and especially in the title chapter of A Devil’s Chaplain) is that there are two reasons why we need to take Darwinian natural selection seriously. Firstly, it is the most important element in the explanation for our own existence and that of all life. Secondly, natural selection is a good object lesson in how NOT to organize a society. As I have often said before, as a scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a human being, I want to construct a society which is about as un-Darwinian as we can make it. I approve of looking after the poor (very un-Darwinian). I approve of universal medical care (very un-Darwinian). It is one of the classic philosophical fallacies to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Stein (or whoever wrote his script for him) is implying that Hitler committed that fallacy with respect to Darwinism.

Dawkins acknowledges that natural selection is no basis for ethics. (I’m sure that if pressed he would have the same opinion of random variation.) He also astutely acknowledges that one cannot derive an “ought” (ethics) from an “is” (the way life has developed). So here, in Darwinian evolution, there is no good basis for ethics at all to be found. But that presents a rather overwhelming problem, which Dawkins overlooks. The causal space has been filled: all of life (says Darwinism) has been fully explained by random variation and natural selection (i.e. the success of that which succeeds). They cannot be the source of ethics, just as Dawkins said. But then what else could be? If you suggest there is something within humans that leads us to some true, real, higher ethical realization, where did it come from? There is no other source to turn to, no other place else it could have come from. There is no conceivable cause for the existence of right and wrong.
Is the proposal then that right and wrong have existed from eternity past? This seems unlikely, to suggest that in the early inflation of the cosmos, ethics existed along with coalescing galaxies. Or was it injected into human life from some exterior (yet fully natural) authority? What would that be, and what would give it that authority? If it hasn’t existed from eternity past, and if it didn’t arise by some cause within time, then it doesn’t exist. Under naturalistic Darwinism, properly speaking, right and wrong do not exist.

Even Dawkins as “a citizen and a human being” knows he has to fight his Darwinian biological roots for the sake of his ethical position. That’s an odd position to take, for one who believes that biology explains all, and Darwinian processes explain all of biology!

I understand that beliefs and opinions about right and wrong exist. They certainly exist among naturalistic Darwinists, and obviously naturalists act in accordance with them; they do what is considered good and right, perhaps as much as anyone does. Matzke speaks of a “high ground, ” and Dawkins speaks of universal medical care and looking after the poor. Evolutionists have little trouble accounting for the existence of moral beliefs or opinions. But the belief or the opinion is not the reality; having a thought about right or wrong does not cause right or wrong to exist. The “high ground” is not really more elevated than the level plain, for there is no real up or down. “Higher” and “lower” have no actual reality; they are matters of opinion, and such opinions are unconnected to any real elevations.

Darwinism did not have to lead to Nazism. It didn’t have to lead anywhere. It does not—cannot—direct anything anywhere, except toward what succeeds reproductively (and even to say that is rather anthropomorphic). If it is true, however, there is also nothing in it to prevent any impulse, especially that which might succeed reproductively. This much, I think, is incontrovertible. As for the dehumanization that Hitler committed (warehousing human parts for sale, for example), there is certainly nothing in Darwinism to restrain that—for naturalistic evolution entails that there is nothing essentially different about hair from human corpses (still stored at concentration camps, as a lesson for history, but originally intended for commercial purposes) and horsehair used for violin bows. There is nothing essentially different between the woman and the mare.

Now, there are those who say that Darwinism leads to certain ethical obligations: that the most powerful ought to succeed, or that the more advanced have some moral duty to supplant that which is less advanced. Those are not proper conclusions to draw, since Darwinism cannot support any oughts or obligations whatever. It’s a very seductive fallacy, however, and it certainly was committed by many. Darwin made that very mistake himself in The Descent. The eugenicists followed him. Is it so unlikely that Haeckel, and later Hitler, did too?

So if Darwin did lead to Hitler (which I continue to think was likely), and especially to beliefs that the Aryans must dominate, it was not by philosophical necessity. It was by mistakes men made in interpreting Darwin. Yet these were plausible mistakes, in an age when progress was virtually a god, and when Darwin seemed to have defined progress as the upward climb of the better species, when men like Haeckel placed the Aryans at the top of the species tree, and when anti-Semitism was running rampant. What if Haeckel was not an anti-Semite, as Richards claims, and others dispute? The mood was rampant in Europe, and Haeckel (and Darwin) opened wide the door for anti-Semitic nationalism by saying, “We welcome the opinions of those who think some humans aren’t really fully human.”

Was this, too, a mistake? Philosophically and biologically, yes. (By the way, can someone explain why Dawkins thought it implausible—see the quote above—that Hitler might have made a mistake in moral reasoning?) Was it really, actually morally wrong? No one who takes a consistent naturalist Darwinian position could say so, for naturalism excludes real moral rights and wrongs. The best such a person could say is, “It’s wrong in my personal opinion!” or “Most of us around here are of the opinion it’s wrong!”

So I have in a sense sidestepped whether Darwin led to Hitler. I’ve done that because it’s a question for specialists in history, which I am not. I have an opinion, which I hold with (I hope) appropriate tentativeness while the experts work it out.

I say this as directly as I can, though: there is nothing immoral in anyone suggestion that it could have happened, since it is a live historical question. And under naturalistic Darwinism, it wouldn’t have (couldn’t have) been really wrong if Darwin actually did lead to Hitler, because under naturalism there can be no real right or wrong.

*The issue in Hitler’s day was Darwinism; now it is neo-Darwinism, the modern synthesis, etc. I’ll continue to use the term that applied in the 1940s and earlier, since to jump back and forth between older and newer terminology would be tiresome.

IN case you’ve missed it—it started with a post named Robert Pennock the Conciliator, in which I made remarks on philosopher of science Robert Pennock’s article on Intelligent Design (ID) in U.S. News and World Report. That post drew attention from another philosopher, Bradley Monton, whom Pennock had rather gouged in the USN&WR piece. Monton takes a unique position: he is an atheist who supports pursuing ID as science and philosophy.

On a follow-up blog post, Opponents, Not Enemies, we were visited by Nick Matzke, who is known as having been the Public Information Project Director for the National Center for Science Education, perhaps the most prominent anti-Intelligent Design advocacy group in the world. Matzke contributed heavily to the prosecution’s successful case against teaching ID in the 2005 Dover trial. Not long after, Casey Luskin dropped in with comments. Luskin is Program Officer in Public Policy & Legal Affairs for the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute, the most prominent pro-ID advocacy group in the world.

There have been the usual Thinking Christian commenters taking part as well, and others who have come to join in what has turned out to be some fascinating fireworks. I added a third post to try to untangle some of our topics, How Wrong Is It To Suggest a Darwin-Hitler Link. Now, in another attempt to cut the knot, and also for the benefit of those who are just trying to catch up, I’m trying to summarize where we now stand. This will be very brief and therefore should be taken as an outline, not as a new set of arguments. Obviously when writing about others’ views from one’s own perspective, distortions, errors, or bias can creep in. I’ll be glad to make appropriate corrections here.

There are three major topics weaving through these threads:

1. The manner of conduct among ID proponents and opponents
2. The link between Darwin and Hitler, as claimed by many ID proponents
3. The question of whether naturalistic evolution is compatible with certain kinds of ethical statements or beliefs

As of Monday evening, Nick Matzke more or less declared victory on (2) and (3), writing “I’ve got you over a barrel,” and “Game over.”

We’ll take our topics in reverse order here. With reference to ethics, he has most recently said that the fact that we have common moral opinions is enough to make ethics non-subjective and binding. Charlie and I have both said this is inadequate, except in context of our being created for a purpose. It specifically lacks explanation of what makes ethics really real (the ontological question) under naturalistic evolution (NE), particularly since NE cannot seem to find any basis for considering humans different in nature than other life.

Discussion on the link between Darwin and Hitler (2) has been mostly a back-and-forth between Charlie and Nick, in which Nick has said that Hitler never referenced Darwin (and that we had never read either Darwin or Hitler) and Charlie has responded by quoting passages from Hitler, where Hitler made clear reference to Darwin. As far as I have noticed, Nick has not responded to those quotes at all. (I’m open to correction on that.) My own response to (2) has been to move away from that question, on which I lack the historical expertise, and proceed to (3), concluding, that if NE is true, then there is no basis for ethics anyway, so how could it be wrong under NE to say anything at all about Darwin and Hitler?

Finally (1), the latest has come from The Deuce and Casey Luskin, who continue to maintain that there is a qualitative difference between the way ID proponents and ID opponents speak about the issue and the people on the other side of the issue. One case in point has been Wesley Elsberry’s blog, where the language directed toward ID proponents is often caustic and insulting. The Deuce has pointed out an inconsistency in Matzke’s response to that: Matzke seems to think that “guilt by association” should not be imputed to Elsberry, yet Matzke has practiced it in his conflating ID with some forms of creationism. The Deuce has posted twice on this, and unless I’ve overlooked it, Matzke has failed to respond to this.

Casey Luskin’s last post, too recent to allow time for Matzke to respond yet, was a call for respect, with examples of how that has often been lacking. Which takes us back to where we started: Monton’s response to the way Pennock treated him in the USN&WR article.

In summary (of the summary), there are these open questions:

1. Can NE explain the basis for ethics (not just how we know what’s right, but how right and wrong can actually exist)
2. What about Hitler’s words referencing Darwin?
3. What response does Nick Matzke have to “guilt by association” in light of the Deuce’s recent comments?
4. Can we treat one another with respect on all of this?

The “game” is not “over.”

I’m certainly making mutual respect my goal here. If in the process of summarizing I’ve missed some person’s comments, I apologize, and as I said, I’m open to corrections.

I just had lunch with Bradley Monton, the University of Colorado philosopher who has stepped up as “Intelligent Design’s Unlikely Defender.” He and his friend/colleague Robert Pasnau were on their way to the Poudre River in northern Colorado for a kayaking trip, I’m in Fort Collins for a conference, and the three of us met for lunch at an excellent Japanese restaurant in Old Town Fort Collins. The first thing I want to say is how gracious they both were as professional philosophers conversing with a much less learned amateur such as myself. The second thing to say is that it was just enjoyable to be with them: it would be easy to be friends with men like them.

We talked about Brad’s new book, Seeking God In Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, and the cultural controversies surrounding the ID debate. He argues that ID is a question worth pursuing. By doing so he has placed himself in the center of a storm. Though he doesn’t say he believes ID is true, he has been subjected to considerable pressure just for suggesting it’s worth working on—called “anti-intellectual” by other professors, for example, and repeatedly criticized by people who had not even read or heard what he actually says. I had one “burning question” for him related to this: what would he have done if I had worn my Michigan State University shirt to lunch? He laughed. (It’s not entirely an inside joke.) As far as I can tell he’s taking the pressure with a good sense of humor. Amazingly enough, he’s even willing to have his name associated with a “Thinking Christian” blogger!

I was curious how he came to choose atheism as his position, something he doesn’t explain in his book. I’ll leave it to him to make his reasons public if he ever wants to do that. Though our discussion was on the record in the sense that he was happy to have me write it up here, still some things we talked about are not really mine to pass along. Robert in turn asked me whether I thought the existence of God is provable. I said no, I don’t think it’s provable. Rather I believe (as I’ve written here before) that God provides strong internal assurance of his reality to believers, and that this assurance lines up strongly with external (philosophical, historical, and existential) evidences for God. Those things together give me very high confidence that God is real. I appreciated that they listened, and I hope I was giving them the same courtesy.

We didn’t get as much into the ID-related arguments he makes in the book as I would like to have done; that would have taken another hour or two. One point of discussion, though, was that in the book he discusses four “somewhat plausible arguments for Intelligent Design,” as he puts it: the fine-tuned universe, the Kalam cosmological argument (briefly defined here, though not in quite the same terms as in the book) the origin of life, and post-origin biological arguments for ID. He considers all of these to have probabilities at least somewhat greater than zero. I asked if he had ever put a probability number on their likelihood or plausibility. If they were all, say, 50% likely, and if their probabilities were all independent (which is an interesting question we did not try to resolve) then the probability that none of them is true is equal to 1/2 raised to the fourth power, or one in sixteen. Or, to say the same thing conversely, the probability that at least one of the design arguments is true, on those assumptions, is about 94%. But those were just numbers I used to illustrate the point I was making, and he did not commit to any estimate of the probabilities.

I won’t try to replay the whole lunch conversation. Brad and I certainly disagree on one extremely fundamental aspect of reality: the existence of God. (Robert did not explicitly state his position on that. nor what he believes about ID, except to say that his interest in ID comes mostly by way of his friendship with Brad.) Nevertheless I very strongly respect and appreciate Brad for taking a courageous stand in the current academic environment, for handling it as a search for truth rather than pushing ideologies, and for being a decent human being in the way he goes about doing it. I hope the three of us can get together again sometime for another good talk together.

I hope their kayaking trip works out, too, but it’s not looking good for them. It’s raining out, and I’m hearing thunder and seeing lightning out toward the mountains as I write this. Bradley Monton is already taking enough risks in his life by publishing on ID. I have a feeling he and Robert are smart enough to stay off a river during a thunderstorm.