Wed 2 Sep, 2009
Here is Part One of a series of interviews Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute is holding with Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. There is some real substance here.
Wed 29 Jul, 2009
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.
Tue 28 Jul, 2009
BreakPoint has just published my review of Bradley Monton’s new book, with the unexpected but highly intriguing theme expressed in its title: Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. Monton is a philosopher on the University of Colorado faculty, and he is indeed an atheist who defends Intelligent Design.
He has been the subject of considerable pressure from ID opponents like Robert Pennock, and as I said in the review, readers may decide for themselves which of the two, Pennock or Monton has handled the dispute more professionally. I’ve already had a chance to express my own view on that.
The interesting thing will be to watch and see how this book affects the overall ID controversy, and specifically how ID opponents will respond to Monton’s arguments—and to Monton himself.
Wed 4 Mar, 2009
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:
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:
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.
Sun 22 Feb, 2009
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
Sat 20 Sep, 2008
I’m still thinking about Bradley Monton’s questions, linked from here, about Christians not living up to our beliefs. His observations certainly call for a prophetic response: Christians, wake up! It makes a difference how we live! There is more to it than that, though.
Our inconstancy of practice raises two questions: what does it signify regarding the truth of Christianity (the apologetic question), and what can we do about it (the pastoral question)?
This being a blog and not a book, I can’t answer either of those fully, or even pretend to try. I’m going to suggest just three general areas for us to think about:
Beliefs
Not long ago I heard someone praying, “Lord, please help me just live according to what I believe.” I almost interrupted to disagree, but that is not something one often does in a prayer meeting, so I held my peace. (I’m still not sure I shouldn’t have spoken up.) What I was thinking of saying was, “That is the most unnecessary prayer you could pray. You do live according to what you believe!”
I know what she had in mind, and sure, it was commendable. She recognized she wasn’t being consistent in living in according to the truth of the Gospel, and she was asking God for help with that. Understood that way it was a perfectly appropriate prayer.
But on another level, to pray to live according to what one believes is to misunderstand our problem. Nobody’s beliefs line up as a perfectly coherent system. That explains a lot about why our practices aren’t perfectly consistent. I’ll take myself as an example. I’m firmly convinced that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the true source of love, the ultimate guide to good, the foundation of wisdom; yet still at times I catch myself also believing I’ll be happier (at least for the moment) if I do something outside of his good wisdom. Does that make sense? Of course not! Not everything I do makes sense. And although I can see the problem there, I’m not at a point where I have overcome it.
Jennifer at Diary of a Former Atheist sees it too, I think:
Because I’m so entrenched in my role as organizer and leader, whenever I think of setting aside the checklists and the calendar and just prayerfully letting God guide me, I have this absurd gut-reaction thought that’s something along the lines of, “What if God screws it up?”
Absurd, maybe, but also quite understandable in light of being human.
This is a matter for personal and spiritual growth. So how do we go about this? Here’s one way: by examining our own beliefs and challenging them regularly. Some of that we must do on our own, but much of it we cannot do on our own. We need quiet times of prayer, study, reflection, especially with journaling, to understand ourselves. We also need others to help us understand ourselves, to see us and reflect back to us in ways we can’t do for ourselves. In humility, and as fellow learners, we can also do the same for others.
For example: “When you spoke sharply to that person just now, what were you believing about them, and about your relationship with them?” That’s a simple example. More to the core: “You seem anxious about your 401(k) today—what are you believing about God’s provision?”
Habits
Some things, though, we do with hardly any reference to beliefs about them. Beliefs in the cognitive sense are not the full story. We need to practice what we believe; and I mean “practice” in a certain specific sense here. I was a music major as an undergrad. My weaknesses as a trombonist were not cognitive. Non-musicians won’t necessarily understand this, but my weaknesses weren’t necessarily even a matter of skill. What my teachers drilled me on the most was learning to breathe and learning to relax. Look, I was born with those skills! But I had to practice—a lot—to apply them properly in the specific context of blowing a horn.
Writers like Dallas Willard advise us to practice spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, study, and so on. As a musician, practicing was its own reward: I really loved playing trombone (I won’t go into why I later set it aside), even doing drills like long tones, scales, and the like. But much of it was doing something I could do directly, for the sake of indirectly developing the ability to do something I could not do directly.
Did that make sense? I’ll illustrate. For trombones, music in the key of B major can be very difficult, especially if the tempo is fast and the rhythm complicated. To tackle that directly would be pretty overwhelming. Musicians often take a sort of indirect approach instead. In this case, it would be to practice the B major scale until I had it down cold. Then most of the notes would be drilled into me solidly enough that I wouldn’t need to think about what key I was playing in, and I could concentrate on the music’s other challenges. Playing the scales would be an indirect approach to learning music that would be very difficult to approach directly.
In the same way, I won’t love my enemy as Jesus said to do until I’ve practiced loving someone who is just different from me. We have to grow in these things, starting with what we can approach more directly, and we’ll gain skills that will help us with other spiritual practices.
Addictions may be considered under the category of habits, though, with internal reward and punishment structures dug very deep, requiring more than just disciplines to overcome them. I am not prepared to say more about that now, beyond that simply acknowledging the problem.
Focus
It’s one thing to be fully convinced there is a spiritual dimension to reality; it’s another thing to keep aware of all that means. Psychologists speak of salience, referring to what is most present to our conscious awareness, and most likely to influence our behavior. It takes time and focused attention (we’re talking spiritual disciplines again) to stay in touch with all that is real. Prayer, worshiping with other believers, studying God’s word, hearing and reading about God’s work in the world—all of these will help keep God’s reality more salient before us. Without that, we will indeed revert to living as if physical reality were all there is.
The Work of the Holy Spirit
Our beliefs, habits, and focus are all spiritual issues, for which God supplies us equipping and direction through the Holy Spirit. I would be remiss not to include that as a reminder here, even if space does not allow me to expand on it. We depend on God’s work for all of our growth.
The Apologetic Perspective
What do our inconsistent practices say about us and about the faith? They show that we’re human, we have habits, we are not perfectly consistent creatures, we’re influenced by what’s most present to our awareness. They show that we need God and his grace. All of this is entirely consistent with what Scripture says about us.
What do our practices say to others about the truth of the faith? I think John 13:35 is quite clear, as is John 17:20-21. Our message is a lot more convincing when delivered with true Christian character behind it. We have to give ourselves grace for our failures, but we can never stop striving for growth.
Thu 18 Sep, 2008
Bradley Monton has answered my response to his earlier blog entry, including this:
For these people, their behavior is deeply at odds with their professed beliefs, and it makes me wonder if they really believe what they say they believe.
He is especially on the mark when he points to the pattern of Christians’ lives:
But it’s the systematic behavior that concerns me — the systematic lack of evangelism in many Christians’ lives, the systematic acting as if God is not watching and judging their every behavior, the systematic living as if life is not spiritually sacred.
He’s right. I think that’s all I have to say.
For now, that is. I’ve already written some brief thoughts on how this disconnect between belief and action comes about, and what we can do about it. I think, though, that if I wrote that into this post it would weaken the main point, which is this: when a thoughtful, friendly (shall I say?) critic speaks to us like this, we need to pay attention. We need to let it bother us.
Because far more than we would want this to be the case…. he’s right.
