Thinking Christian

I’m certainly more than overdue to respond to Tom Clark here, and now finally there is opportunity to do so. It has been so long since the last post on this topic, and this answer will run so long, that I’m publishing it as a new blog post.

First, I want to state my agreement with what he wrote about non-Christians’ ability to “be moral in all the ways that Christians endorse,” though only partially. I think he and I would both agree that this applies strictly to moral norms such as found in the latter portions of the Ten Commandments and not to the earlier, where the topic has to do with relating to God. The first and greatest commandment, Jesus said, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind” (Matthew 22:37). This is not something a non-Christian can do or would choose to do, unless she were at the same time deciding to follow God’s way. Somehow, strangely, I think even Christian believers have forgotten that this is a central ethical issue, though as the first and greatest commandment it certainly must be.

Nevertheless in terms of human relationships, atheists can and generally do indeed act morally, as do Christians, so that point is not in contention here. The question is whether naturalism presents a compelling and coherent explanation for morality, and as Tom said at the end of his comment, it was his goal, he said, to show that a naturalistic ethic could be stated and held coherently.

He may have met that goal, though I have serious questions about that. There is another important goal in moral discussion, which is to state an ethic compellingly. On this he ended up where (in my experience) non-theistic ethics always seem to end up, in a place that is not at all fruitful for moral thinking. I’ll explain as I go along.

Coherence
First, my questions about the coherence of his description of morality.

Tom Clark says “values flow from human nature as modulated by human culture… we’re hard-wire to take our moral intuitions very seriously.” We agree that values may be discovered by observing human nature, and by reflecting on our own experiences; and we agree that these are things we take very seriously. To the not inconsiderable extent that this is an empirical fact, it is explained at least as well by theism as by naturalism. Christian and Judaic theism takes it that humans are created in God’s image, which includes having at least some grasp of what goodness is in God’s view.

Tom says then “there’s good empirical evidence for a robust natural motivational basis for the problem morality addresses.” If by that he means that this provides differential support for a natural motivational basis–i.e., that this is evidence for a natural more than for a supernatural basis–I would disagree, for supernaturalism accounts for the empirical evidence at least as well as naturalism does.

We come now to a further point Tom makes here, which raises several puzzling questions for someone like me.

How does a liberal-progressive Western naturalist like myself justify the proposition that all humans have equal claim to the same set of rights against the opposing conservative-regressive claim, advanced by some Eastern Muslim theocracies, that certain classes of humans (gays, women, minorities, non-Muslims) should not be granted equal rights? This is a quintessentially normative, not empirical question, but it is informed by empirical considerations. The basic argument, some of which you kindly quoted, is that all classes of human beings have, in empirical fact, more or less the same desire for self-preservation and actualization – for human flourishing – and there’s no empirical basis to deny any class the opportunity for such flourishing. So, absent any countervailing considerations, they should be granted such opportunities.

Normativity
My first question with respect to this is how it can be, when Tom has set up empiricism as the only basis and test for knowledge, that another category, the normative, can find room to enter in. He seems on the one hand to have set the two in opposition to each other, but on the other hand to have given the normative some epistemic space anyway. I’m not at all sure how this can be done, given his epistemology (discussed earlier in this series).

Equality of Desire
Second, is it empirically true that all human beings (not classes of human beings as written here, but human beings themselves) have the same desire for self-preservation and actualization? How has this been measured? Is there not psychological/sociological evidence to the contrary? What about suicidal persons? The question is important because of a follow-up point found not much later:

The claim that all humans are of equal worth flows from the fact that each of us has more or less the same desire for flourishing, and the fact that there’s no basis to suppose some classes of humans should be thwarted in that desire. The value, the worth of each human being, is rooted in human nature itself, namely in each and every person’s strong innate desire to live and thrive.

If worth is derived from desire to flourish, then if I become depressed and suicidal, does my worth decrease? I assume Tom would answer no, but on what basis? This puzzles me.

My third and fourth questions from this passage requires me to quote part of it again:

There’s no empirical basis to deny any class the opportunity for such flourishing. So, absent any countervailing considerations, they should be granted such opportunities.

Abstractness
I frankly don’t know how to apply morality to a class. This is an abstraction beyond practical application. I can treat a person morally or immorally, and I can treat members of a class morally or immorally, but I can only do so by the way I treat them as individual persons. Maybe my decisions on how to treat them are based on the class to which they belong (in reality or in my perception). But even in that case it is not the class I’m treating well or ill, it is the person. Even if another member of that class feels well-treated or put off because I made my decision on the basis of class membership, that is a person, not a class, that is being affected by my action.

This point matters in this discussion because Tom Clark seems to think equality of worth comes from each class having equal desires for life, self-actualization, and flourishing. Statistical leveling of large groups tends to make this the case, but morality is not about statistically-defined groups, but about persons. I would like to know if he can take this to the level of individuals.

What is a Class?
Further, even if treating the matter according to classes could be defended as legitimate, I wonder if there’s some smuggled-in set of assumptions about what constitutes a class. I think there may be a class of suicidal persons who do not have the same desire for flourishing as others have. Does being a member of that class make one’s worth less than others? Or, there may be a class of suicidal persons and their spouses. Why can we not define a class in that way? This class’s overall desire for self-actualization and self-preservation is, on average, less than the rest of the population. Does that mean that even the non-suicidal spouse, as a member of that class, has a lower worth than someone who is not associated with a suicidal person?

In other words, if there is a coherent basis for regarding each person as equal in Tom Clark’s ethic, I have yet to understand it.

has to do with a to the question, “why should I follow moral system M?” Without this compellingness, there is no reason to follow an ethic, and the person is free to make up his own or to follow an ethic of personal impulse and immediate unmoderated desire. Compellingness (and here for now I will switch to the more common “oughtness”) may be either internal or external. There is the inward oughtness of human nature, discussed above, and there is also that which is learned from outside oneself through family and culture, which often becomes internalized as an inward sense of oughtness.

Compellingness
I suppose I made up that word “compellingness.” It has to do with answering to the question, “why should I follow moral system M?” Without this compellingness, there is no reason to follow an ethic, and the person is free to make up his own or to follow an ethic of personal impulse and immediate unmoderated desire. Compellingness (and here for now I will switch to the more common “oughtness”) may be either internal or external. There is the inward oughtness of human nature, discussed above, and there is also that which is learned from outside oneself through family and culture, which often becomes internalized as an inward sense of oughtness.

But as Tom Clark has astutely pointed out, these norms are not all universally shared. The naturalist has two options to revert to at that point: persuasion and power. He states it clearly enough here:

Because there’s no value-neutral criterion (such as God’s authority) by which to decide between competing moral principles, arguments for them necessarily involve appeals to pre-existing values. So, progressive naturalists appeal to the innate moral sense… and they cite the virtues of existing cultural traditions and political arrangements based in progressive values…. However, given sharp differences in cultures and worldviews, there is no guarantee such arguments will cut any ice with the opposition, and sometimes we are forced to use force in defending our principles. This point gets elaborated here.

In the ellipsis I left out part of the way in which he would attempt to persuade those who disagree, but the point is that there is either persuasion or force. What bothers one like me most about this is that quite clearly, morality is a matter of who wins. I don’t see a universal law in naturalism that decrees liberal equality will be the winner. In fact, I suspect there may even be some chronological/cultural chauvinism involved in supposing that our culture, alone among all cultures and all periods of history, has figured it out in a way that will last. The door is wide open for a different winner, one that Tom Clark will argue (unless he changes his mind) fails to meet the standards of empiricism. The new winner may well say, “we see it differently,” and that will be that. The word “compellingness” comes back, with a decidedly less friendly feel to it than in the first way I employed it here; and who knows where “oughtness” goes?

Christian theism’s ethic is based on a much firmer foundation. Standards of morality are part of the furniture of reality, as it were, which is why we have a basic apprehension of them in our consciences. Their oughtness is inherent within them, and not derived from some other non-moral principle. Their compellingness is fitting to them, inherent and appropriate to their own basic nature, and our experience of their compellingness may be internalized or external. Either way, it fits.

After a two-month hiatus, it’s my pleasure once again to take up conversation with Tom Clark, director of the Center for Naturalism, who also runs the website Naturalism.org and the Memeing Naturalism blog. Our first three rounds on this were interesting and productive, in my opinion, and apparently also Tom’s.

Previously we discussed whether his approach to epistemology was adequate and supportable, which I do not intend to raise for discussion again here; I think we’ve covered that, even though we did not come to agreement. The great remaining question has to do with his position on the ethics of naturalism. I will illustrate his position with a series of quotes from his paper Reality and Its Rivals: Putting Epistemology First.

This statement of the obvious – that respect for empiricism matters, crucially – simply sets the stage for the central argument of this paper: that when it comes to representing reality, there is no coherent, ethically responsible substitute for science and other empirical disciplines.

But the empirical imperative is not only rational, it becomes a positive ethical obligation when we engage in collective projects that affect the lives of millions.

A little epistemic humility would go a long way toward reducing the ideological tribalism underlying the culture wars.

So we see that Clark values, and seeks to be guided by, responsibility and humility, and he acknowledges that there are ethical obligations upon humans. On these things we are quite in agreement. He shares more detailed ethical views in passages like this one:

Religiously motivated opponents of birth control, abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage have sought to disseminate information at odds with science: about the supposed inefficacy of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV, the purportedly dire psychological impact of having an abortion or growing up with two mommies or daddies, and the supposedly superior feasibility of some alternatives to embryonic stem cells.

(I note in passing that the “superior feasibility of some alternatives to embryonic stem cells” is, at least at this stage of research, quite empirically factual. But that is not my main point here.)

Now, all of this is in context of an impassioned call for empiricism, Clark’s position that nothing is known unless it is knowable through science or means very much like science, i.e., intersubjective empiricism. In a spirit of epistemic humility, no belief or opinion should be regarded as knowledge unless the object of that belief is a public object, capable of being examined by anyone (theoretically at least), and on which other persons generally find agreement.

Clearly, though, he takes ethical obligations to be an object of knowledge. How can he do this on his empiricist epistemology? One potential difficulty with his position comes to mind but must be discarded immediately. By public object, we can be sure Clark does not necessarily mean a physical object; I’m sure he also includes abstract objects like, say, the triangle formed by our sun, Betelgeuse, and Sirius; or numbers; or logical relations. So even though ethical obligations are not touchable, countable, or measurable, that in itself does not automatically rule them out under his epistemology, provided they can be tested by some appropriately empirical means.

Clark suggests that this is possible. He says that “empiricism and equality go hand in hand,” producing a basis for ethics that stands, by the way, in sharp contrast to religiously based ethics:

The primary justifications for discrimination against women, racial, ethnic and religious minorities, atheists, homosexuals, and other out-groups are found in traditional faith-based religions such as Christianity and Islam, and in non-empirical secular ideologies such as Nazism, social Darwinism and white supremacy. There are no good science-based reasons for such discrimination, so to the extent that we can divest people of their factually unfounded prejudices we’ll move toward a more tolerant, pluralist, egalitarian culture of universal human rights.

In an earlier paper of his he expresses this view in further detail:

By contrast, there is no science-based, empirically derived justification for supposing any class of individuals merits fewer opportunities for self-development, or for limiting their rights to education, political participation, owning property, or any other right commonly held by individuals in liberal secular societies. Such limitations and discriminations can only find justification in non-empirical beliefs about the privileges owed those ranked higher in a social hierarchy, or belonging to certain in-groups, whether based on gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, religious identification, or other denomination. The history of progress in human rights (progress as progressives see it) is the dismantling of such justifications, of showing them to have no basis in empirical fact.

Whatever biological and cultural differences exist between genders, races, ethnicities, religious groups and nationalities, there are no scientific grounds for supposing members of out-groups, or low status members of in-groups, deserve not to have their human needs met, or not to develop their full potential by according them the same rights as others. As scientific empiricism has won allegiance as our guide to reality, displacing faith and other non-empirical grounds for belief, the discriminatory social practices built on such beliefs have been deprived of their rationales, making the presumption of equal rights more and more the norm.

In summary, then, Clark holds to an ethic including responsibility, humility, and human equality (a generally liberal approach to this, as stated elsewhere in that paper); and he considers that there are obligations attached to all of these. He maintains that there is an empirical basis to his ethic.

Two questions come to mind in response. First, is there any place where he proposes to bridge the is-ought gap? This is the famous issue posed by David Hume and described as the naturalistic fallacy: that one cannot derive an ought from an is. Christian theism has no problem with this, for the ought is as much an aspect of the character of God, and thus the foundation of reality, as any other aspect of his character. The oughts of human ethics do not start from an is, they derive from the original oughts of basic reality in God.

Second, is there really an empirical basis for any of his ethics at all? What is the empirical basis for supposing we have an ethical obligation to empiricism? Is that not somewhat circular? In his paper he poses this ethical obligation as being demonstrated in its results; that it leads to more equal treatment for humans, more respect for public health and the environment, and so on. These imply values attached to the environment and to human equality. Do these values flow from empirically-based knowledge?

To the second of those, human equality, he proposes an answer. He says there is “no empirically derived justification for supposing any class individuals merits fewer opportunities…. there are no scientific grounds for supposing members of out-groups, or law status members of in-groups, deserve not to have their human needs met.” But what is the empirical study that supports this? Is it not empirically obvious that persons are not equal? As individuals, some of us are more intelligent, some less; some more emotionally intelligent, some less; some more athletic, some less; some more productive in giving to society, some less, some even taking more than they give. Now, it’s true that science has shown that, taken as groups, we are all very much the same (some highly controversial studies even differ on that). But individuals are not at all the same.

People as individuals differ, groups are similar, at least on a biological level. What ethical imperative flows from that? About a hundred years ago, it was forced sterilization and other eugenics programs. Now, Clark says that the ruling value is that people should be allowed to “develop their full potential.” This sounds suspiciously like Maslow, whose “Hierarchy of Needs” has, unfortunately for Maslow and possibly also for Clark, not been supported by empirical research. Regardless of that, what empirical study showed that individuals developing their full potential is more important than the improvement of the race? Now, I certainly do believe that individual growth is a better ethical idea than eugenic manipulation, but I didn’t get gather that opinion from an empirical study, and I don’t think Tom Clark could have, either.

Further, suppose people were much markedly similar to each other than they are in fact. How would that fact make equal treatment an ethical imperative? It seems that “equal treatment” was picked out of the empirical air.

But in fact it wasn’t. It comes from historical roots, for example, “All men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator…” And those historical roots have roots themselves. The principle of equality was never one of empirical observation, but of theological reflection. The only relevant sense in which humans are equal is in worth, but worth is not an empirical concept at all. How is it measured? How could it be? No, equality is a matter of our standing before God. As a matter of historical fact, this conception of human equality arose out of Christian roots. Agreed, it took time to flourish, but it’s no accident that is has never flourished anywhere but in lands informed by Biblical beliefs.

Now, this post is running long, and it was not my primary purpose to establish the validity of Christian ethics or to defend their historical expression. (Timothy Keller does a great job of this in this talk: mp3 download.) Rather, my main purpose has been to explore two of Tom Clark’s central beliefs: that the only reliable route to knowledge is the empirical one, and that there are ethical obligations binding upon us, including the obligation to be empiricists. I think he can maintain those two beliefs as long as he does not try to impose the first one on the second one. If he does, he will find that on his terms of knowledge, his knowledge of ethics has no standing.

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Michael Shermer on why science and religion can never unite:

I don’t think a union between science and religion is possible for a logical reason, but by this same logic I conclude that science cannot contradict religion. Here’s why: A is A. Reality is real. To attempt to use nature to prove the supernatural is a violation of A is A. It is an attempt to make reality unreal. A cannot also be non-A. Nature cannot also be non-Nature. Naturalism cannot also be supernaturalism.

[Link: Edge.org]

This is part of an ongoing discussion on science and faith at Edge.org, to which I have also contributed on the side here. There are several things in his short piece that puzzle me.

The Un-Argument from Unreality
First, we have the editor of The Skeptic telling us that

1. A is A
2. Reality is Real
3. To attempt to use nature to prove the supernatural is … an attempt to make reality unreal.

This is a fiat statement asserting that either the supernatural or the natural is unreal. It’s obvious which one it is in his mind. I’m rather puzzled why he threw in this language of reality/unreality, with no argument or support whatever for it. Given The Edge’s audience, he might not have felt it necessary to argue that the supernatural is unreal, for most readers would already share that opinion. Perhaps space was limited so he couldn’t develop his train of thought on this. That’s the charitable interpretation; another way to look at would be that he forgot to make his argument on the matter, or that he assumed his conclusion; neither of which is a helpful way to demonstrate one’s point.

The Argument From Naturalism: Philosophical Naturalism?
Aside from that, I’m also puzzled by where he goes from there, in what unquestionably is intended to function as an argument. “Naturalism cannot also be supernaturalism,” he says. Of course he’s right, if he means that philosophical (or ontological) naturalism cannot be supernaturalism. They are contrary to one another; it’s completely impossible for both of them to be true descriptions of reality. But how does that have anything to do with the questions at hand?

There actually seem to be two questions. One is, can science contradict religion? To say that philosophical naturalism contradicts supernaturalism does not answer the question, obviously; it’s a merely definitional statement. Shermer moves rather toward the second question, which is epistemological, or one might say methodological in nature: does science deliver knowledge to show that God does not exist? But philosophical naturalism is a metaphysical position, not a methodology. Shermer speaks of the “attempt to use nature to prove the supernatural,” but an ontological position is not something one employs in the pursuit of knowledge. It’s not an epistemological strategy. It is especially not something one would think of as a strategy for proving its own opposite. For if by naturalism he means philosophical naturalism, then the middle sentence from the above excerpt is equivalent to:

To attempt to use my firm conviction that the supernatural does not exist, to prove that the supernatural does exist, is a violation of A is A.

That violates a lot more than just “A is A”!

The Argument From Naturalism: Methodological Naturalism?
So then, I wonder if he meant instead to say that methodological naturalism cannot be supernaturalism? But that would be committing a category error, for the former is an epistemological position, a way of approaching the practice of science for the advancement of knowledge; while the latter is an ontological matter. It would be like saying that doing research in a library is not the same thing as believing that the world really exists. The statement is true enough, but it hardly advances the discussion.

What then did he mean to say? Let’s bring in the rest of his short article and see if it helps at all:

In a natural worldview, there is no non-natural or supernatural. There is only the natural and mysteries left to explain through natural means. Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. The only way to do this for theists is to posit that God is outside of time and space; that is, God is beyond nature—super nature, or supernatural—and therefore cannot be explained by natural causes. This places the God question outside the realm of science. Thus, there can be no conflict between science and religion, unless one attempts to bring God into our time and space, which is a violation of the principle of A is A.

The phrase “In a natural worldview…” and that which follows, suggest that he is speaking of philosophical naturalism. It does nothing whatever to solve the difficulty I’ve already described with taking that view of naturalism. His repeating his non-argument about making reality unreal also accomplishes nothing more here than it did in the prior paragraph. So in the first few sentences, no progress is made.

The Argument From Relying On the Opposite of One’s Conclusion?
And then he presents another puzzler: what does he mean by “the only way for theists to do this is to posit that God is outside of time and space”? What does the pronoun “this” refer to? Grammatically, the best I can make of it is with this substitution for the pronoun: “The only way to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism, is for theists to posit that God is outside of time and space.” Why, though, would theists have any interest in turning naturalism into supernaturalism? We’ve already seen the problems with the way Shermer has presented this. It’s hopelessly muddled. Furthermore (if I’ve read the mysterious pronoun usage right), then he’s saying the only way theists can only prove the supernatural exists is by first making sure it doesn’t. If overthrowing theism were that simple, it would have happened long before Christ walked the earth! But of course that approach is all wrong, as we’ve already covered.

Or, The Argument From Being My Trombone So I Can Play It?
Maybe, though, the antecedent of that mysterious pronoun “this” came from earlier in the preceding sentence. Then it would read, “The only way to have both religion and science is for theists to posit that God is outside of time and space.” Now that, of course, is exactly what theists do posit. Apparently Shermer thinks there’s a problem with that: he says that if “one attempts to bring God into our time and space, [that] is a violation of the principle of A is A.” Here he touches tangentially on a true statement: God is not his creation; God (A) is God (A); he is not his creation (not-A).

Of course theists do not think that God is his creation. Pantheists may think so, but theists disagree with pantheists. We believe that God influences or actually rules over time, space, and events therein, which has nothing to do with his being time or space. I can play my trombone without being my trombone. There is no violation of the law of identity here, nor of the law of non-contradiction.

The Final Puzzle
None of this is very hard to see. So I close with a fourth puzzler, this one in two parts: What am I missing here? Or was this really the best Shermer had to offer?

This came to me by email this morning, and there are good questions here. The sender agreed that it would be good to answer here on the blog. I’ve changed her name here, as we also agreed.

Hi, I’m a Christian, but I’m having some problems. I was thinking that maybe some naturalists believe what they believe because naturally the universe just has to “be”, I guess, in the way that a circle and a square can’t be the same thing at the same time. And you can’t really create the fact that a circle and square can’t be the same thing because it just has to be so, which is the height of logic, isn’t it?

Also, I think, like Tom Clark said, a supernatural God, upon further investigation, wouldn’t actually be supernatural because that really wouldn’t be possible, again, in the same way that a square and circle can’t be at the same time. There always has to be a way and means for anything to happen, right? I mean, nothing could just simply happen with no way for it to happen. It seems like this would sort of answer the reason why for everything, maybe, in the way that, if there is anything at all than there simply can’t not be anything. So, because it just has to be, that’s why it is, like it’s impossible for it not to be.

Do you understand what I mean? Also, it wouldn’t matter if you had evidence for evolution or not because this fact would have to be so, anyway. I’ve been obsessing almost every waking moment over the past few days about science and psychology and I’m not sure I can really think of a way out of this argument. Please let me know what you think. Thanks. Heather.

Does the Universe Exist Necessarily?
There’s more than one question there, obviously. We’ll start by considering whether it’s possible that the universe exists just because it’s one of those things that had to be. Is the universe something that exists necessarily? Actually Heather wrote a significant piece of the answer to this herself, in the second paragraph of her email. She may not have intended it to be used in this connection, but it’s an insight that’s important for this issue:

There always has to be a way and means for anything to happen, right? I mean, nothing could just simply happen with no way for it to happen.

That’s exactly right. I would word it this way: everything that begins to exist must have a cause, or every event must have a cause. God is not an event, and his existence does not have a beginning, so his existence does not require a cause; he is eternal.

There was a time when scientists and other thinkers thought the universe might be eternal and beginningless. That was before Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding outward at great speed. Astronomers modeled what this must have meant going backward in time. It led to the rather surprising conclusion that billions of years ago, the entire universe must have been compressed into an almost infinitely small volume. That in turn implied that the universe began in a huge explosion, which astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called a “Big Bang.” As you know, the name stuck.

This was rather upsetting to some scientists: they knew all too well what it implied, which I’ll come back to in a moment. There was hot debate over the Big Bang vs. Steady State theories until a couple of scientists at Bell Labs noticed a “cosmic microwave background radiation”—you could think of it as a small degree of heat—distributed everywhere throughout the cosmos. It was exactly what had been predicted by the Big Bang theory. That and some further research confirmed the Big Bang theory.

This means the universe began to exist. And remember, whatever begins to exist must have a cause. The universe could not have caused itself. You can’t even coherently describe what it would mean for something to cause its own beginning. It would have to exist before it existed if it were to do that! Since then the question has been what or who caused the Big Bang.

Is it possible, then, for the universe not to be? Certainly. Go back 15 billion or so years, and there was no universe. The universe’s non-existence is surely possible, since it did not exist more than about 15 billion years ago.*

Is God Part of Nature?
It will come as no surprise that I think the cause of the universe was God. I had been convinced on other grounds that God was the Creator, long before I became aware of things like I just discussed. But the Big Bang suggests a very powerful and personal God as the “beginner” (the one who begins) the universe. Whatever caused the Big Bang had to be immensely powerful, since the effect of his or its work was to create all the hundred billion galaxies that exist. The cause also had to be personal, though. If it were something impersonal, with no ability to choose, and yet it had the ability to cause the Big Bang, it would not have been able to choose to exercise that ability, or choose not to exercise it, or choose when to exercise it. This impersonal cause could not have existed without immediately causing the Big Bang, for where there is a cause capable of producing an effect, the effect necessarily happens immediately (taking all factors into account, obviously). The cause of the universe and the universe itself would be the same age, about 15 billion years old. This seems strange and highly unlikely; and it leads to further questions about what caused the cause.

This impersonal cause almost sounds like the picture of God Heather is wrestling with in the second paragraph, actually. It’s a being that’s part of the machine. A personal God who created the universe, not as part of himself but as a separate thing from himself, is not part of the machine.

But then how does God insert himself into the actions of the machine? He does it by his own spiritual power, which he first exercised through creation and continues to employ up until now.

Is That Really An Answer?
Is that a satisfactory answer? Not to some people: they want that “how” answer to be a lot more descriptive than that. Here’s the problem, though. When God works in nature, it involves an interface between his spiritual essence and the natural world we live in, which are two entirely different things. Part of the transaction has to take place on the spiritual side of that interface. People who press for a more descriptive “how” are asking for something that looks like a natural description, but if we gave a natural description, then we wouldn’t be talking about God, we would be changing the subject. The one who asks “how could God do this?” must expect and allow that the answer not be entirely in the form of a physical description. This is as logically necessary as that a square cannot be a circle.

To say otherwise would be analogous to asking how a magnet attracts iron, and adding “but you cannot answer in terms of the properties of a magnet.” If we want to know how God does something, part of the answer has to be given in terms of who and what God is. Thus it is simply wrong to expect the explanation to work entirely as we’re accustomed to scientific explanations working.

The next objection I’ve heard, following this, has often been, “But then you have no explanation!” To which I say, “God is the explanation! Do you insist that explanations involving God be just like physical explanations? Then you’re demanding that the way God the creator works must be just like the way his creation works. It’s saying that you’ll consider God as an explanation, as long as this God isn’t God. That doesn’t quite seem logical, does it?“

God is not one of us. To accept that is to be appropriately humble before him.

The Evolution Question
Your third question, Heather, was whether evolution itself might have been a necessity. I don’t think there’s anyone, even among highly committed evolutionists, who would say that the origin of life was inevitable in a universe that’s only natural. It happened (they say), and we’re, shall we say, the lucky beneficiaries, but it didn’t have to happen that way. If the origin wasn’t inevitable or necessary, then the whole rest of it could not have been either.

For this (and also to some extent for the first question) I would refer you here to read about the incredible odds against our universe being suitable for any complexity at all, much less the complexity of life.

The Other Big Question
You also asked, “Do you understand what I mean?” I hope I do. It’s always possible that I missed it completely, and that none of this is much help for what’s really on your mind. If so, please let me know and I’ll take another shot at it.

*Some think there might have been a different universe before the Big Bang. Rather than taking space to address that here I will refer you to these articles by William Lane Craig, especially The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe.

In this third look at Tom Clark’s paper, Reality and Its Rivals: Putting Epistemology First, I have just one topic to address:

Most thoughtful religionists, paranormalists, New Agers, or adherents of other non-science based worldviews feel, at least to some extent, the force of the empirical imperative: that beliefs need validation independent of one’s subjective convictions. There are two main ways that they attempt to satisfy this requirement. One is to claim to be doing science, the other is to claim that there are reliable non-scientific ways of knowing which reveal truths that science can’t capture.

I’m surprised he would say there are these two, and apparently just these two, ways in which believers validate their faith independently of subjective convictions. The two he addresses are quite at the bottom of the list among apologetical arguments.

When he speaks of our “claim to be doing science,” he is pointing specifically at biological Intelligent Design arguments.

The first strategy is exemplified by creationists and proponents of intelligent design, who argue that science, were it honestly and properly conducted, would consider and confirm supernatural explanations of phenomena, for instance the appearance of life on earth and the diversity of species. Science, they say, has been hijacked by philosophical and metaphysical naturalists, who conspire to discount evidence that the earth was created 10,000 years ago, or that the human form is the result of supernatural agency, not the historically contingent process of natural selection.

I think almost every apologist would be quick to admit that, no matter how convinced he or she may be regarding biological ID arguments, using such arguments to persuade unbelievers is an uphill battle. There are too many weeds to clear out of the way, especially philosophical discussions about scientific methodologies and what may be admitted as possible explanations. There is also all the weight of established biology to push against.

Over the course of time, ID can indeed be persuasive: witness Antony Flew, for example. But if I were invited to debate an atheist/agnostic on the existence of God, I certainly wouldn’t begin there. The natural world offers much easier starting places, like the evidence of design in the fine-tuning of the cosmos, which I consider extremely strong. It’s so strong, in fact, that the only real competing explanation is as non-empirical, non-falsifiable as you can get, and quite likely the hugest violation of Occam’s Razor in the history of thought.

When Clark expands on the other way he says we believers validate our beliefs, he points only to inner impressions of God that believers sense (specifically John Haught, in Clark’s example). This is a matter for careful thought. Alvin Plantinga, one of today’s leading philosophers of religion, devotes something like one-third of a book to it (Warranted Christian Belief). The end of it all is this: there’s nothing necessarily irrational or incoherent at all about perceiving God through an inner sensus divinitatus. It can most assuredly count as validation for those who do perceive God in that way. It does not count as evidence for others, though. As William Lane Craig puts it, the internal witness of the Holy Spirit is one way I know about God, but not a way I can show God’s reality, for no one else has access to my internal experiences.

So Haught is not wrong about this at all, at least as Clark represents him, but one person’s internal assurance is not expected to be another’s convincing evidence.

Where Clark really misses the boat is in representing believers as having only these two forms of validation. If all I had to go on was the witness of the Holy Spirit within me, I might be fully persuaded on that basis alone—God could do that in me without any external evidence at all if he wished. The fact is, though, I don’t have only the Holy Spirit to show me the reality of God. Christians do not rely on just that; nor do we place our faith in biological Intelligent Design. (There were Christians around for at least a few centuries before Scientific Creationism, after all!) There are multiple other evidences, evidences that satisfy Clark’s “requirement” of “validation independent of one’s subjective convictions. Alvin Plantinga’s quick overview of Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments lists multiple starting points. History provides much evidence in support of the Old and New Testament records.

Clark probably views all these arguments as less than convincing. That’s his privilege, though I would disagree. What seems strange is that he would pick out two of the least convincing (for non-believers) arguments of them all, and present them as if that’s all we count on in Christianity.

Several weeks ago Tom Clark commented here on a blog entry about dualism. Clark is the director of the Center for Naturalism and is (I believe) also responsible for a related website, Naturalism.org. He speaks nationally on naturalism and has authored many articles on the topic. I’ve read several of these articles and exchanged a couple of emails with him, and I’ve found him to be both gracious and thoughtful. If I were a naturalist or atheist, I would rather have Tom Clark for a spokesperson than some of the more prominent writers like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris.

Here at Thinking Christian he referred us specifically to his article Reality and Its Rivals: Putting Epistemology First. In it he argues (as stated in the abstract),

Being epistemically responsible—not taking appearances at face value and seeking external confirmation for belief—inevitably pushes us toward intersubjectivity and science. This in turn increases the plausibility of the claim that there’s nothing over and above the natural world, what science shows to exist.

As reflected in its title, the article’s primary focus is epistemology: how we know what we know, how we know that we know it, and what practices one ought to follow in order to gain knowledge most reliably. He touches also on matters of ethics and meaning. I plan to respond to the latter two topics in future posts here. For this one and another soon to come I will concentrate on what he has to say about knowledge.

He opens with this:

About the most crucial distinction we can make as cognitive creatures is between appearance and reality, between how things seem and how they really are, between subjectivity and objectivity.

He proceeds to describe how science has succeeded in developing human knowledge over the past several centuries, and contrasts science’s reliability and success with what comes of “disdaining empiricism,” especially “religiously inspired anti-empiricism,” which he equates with “contempt for intellectual prowess.” Anti-empiricism, he says, is “driven by ideology and profit as well as by its role as a cultural identifier.”

Christian evangelicals, who believe the planet and its life forms are God’s creations, and that Darwin’ [sic] theory of natural selection inevitably leads to moral decay, have a religious stake in science being wrong about evolution and cosmology. They work tirelessly to inject young earth creationism and its offspring, intelligent design, into public school curricula.

There are several errors of fact in these short bits quoted so far, which I trust others will be able and ready to comment on. I am mostly interested in what Clark calls “the central argument of this paper:”

that when it comes to representing reality, there is no coherent ethically responsible substitute for science and other empirical disciplines. The alternatives—faith-based religions, empirically unfounded secular ideologies, and commercial agendas hostile to evidence—often claim to be objective representations of how the world is in various respects, but have no entitlement to such claims. The only reliable basis for knowledge, the only route from subjectivity, is to relentlessly subject a belief, then to allay the doubt (or confirm it) by gathering evidence that’s independent of one’s commitment to the belief…. We must put epistemology first and get it right, and make no bones about it.

So how does he propose to get it right? He places primary emphasis on two cornerstone principles. First is what he calls the insulation requirement:

To back up our claim that experience captures reality we must rule out such influences [intensity of experience, strong expectations, lifelong immersion in a religious culture, etc.], insulating our beliefs as best we can from subjective bias and possibly mistaken conventional wisdom…. We must do our best to insulate beliefs in [G]od, the soul, and the supernatural from sources of potential bias.

I note in passing that Clark generally knows how to capitalize proper nouns. Other than the occasional (and understandable) typo, he does it for every proper noun in every article I’ve read of his; except there is one such word he never capitalizes, for some strange reason. I don’t quite understand the rule of grammar that calls for “God,” when used as a proper noun, to be written all in the lower case. Suppose I were to capitalize every proper noun in this blog post except for “Clark.” I think he might take it as a very intentional yet rather puerile personal swipe against him. If he has some reason other than disrespectful dismissiveness for not capitalizing “God,” I would be interested to know what it is. For my part, when I quote him in sentences that include the word I will correct his grammar, as I have just done.

Back to the argument. His second cornerstone principle is what he calls the public object requirement:

Unless there’s intersubjective data, a public object of some sort we can all in principle see or sense in some fashion and thus agree exists, it doesn’t matter how many millions of individuals report subjective experiences of [G]od and the soul: they could all be mistaken, just as all those reporting experiences of alien abduction could be (and likely are) mistaken.

By these two criteria, he is quite sure that religious claims are “perilously unsupported,” extremely likely to be false, and irresponsible to hold as knowledge claims. Science, on the other hand, can be insulated from bias and rests entirely on intersubjective, public-object methodologies, and is therefore reliable as a means of gaining knowledge.

What can be said about this? Is there value in his two central principles? Quite obviously there is, especially for dealing with the natural world; there’s no disputing that science has built its enormous success on these and other methodological principles. But should we take them as normative for all knowledge? We run into serious problems if we try. I’ll start with the insulation requirement. Clark supposes that (a) all religious knowledge claims are tainted by bias, and (b) science can be (and often enough is) free of bias. He insists that

science as it’s commonly practiced manifestly does not make any commitment to naturalism…. science can’t be accused of dogmatism…. Science isn’t in the business of defending or rejecting a worldview, whether naturalism or supernaturalism, scientology or Briantology….

There’s nothing of worldview naturalism in any of this, only a quintessentially natural desire for trustworthy grounds for belief. Non-empirical ways of knowing fail to meet worldview neutral standards of epistemic accuracy….. Were they to champion empiricism as the most reliable route to objectivity, science-friendly organizations wouldn’t thereby be promoting naturalism.

Now, I certainly think that science can operate as nondogmatically, with reference to naturalism, as he describes here. Naturalism is hardly essential as a foundational belief either for scientists or for the practice of science. Science has to hold that there is a natural world and that it operates generally in ways that can be studied, predicted, and understood, but it does not have to hold that the natural world is the only reality. That science has this worldview freedom is not to say that it always exercises it, or that Clark himself is consistent on the point. His own naturalistic bias is quite evident.

Should science find public, reproducible evidence for intelligent design, including a specification of the designer and a clear account of its mode of operation, all this would perforce be incorporated into our best intersubjective picture of the world. The more reliable and convincing this account, and the more integrated with the rest of what we reliably know, the less tempted we would be to call such design supernatural. By illuminating the connections between phenomena of vastly different scales and types, science is inherently monistic in showing the unity of reality. So it’s hard, perhaps impossible for purportedly supernatural phenomena to survive clear explanation and empirically-based understanding; instead, they get naturalized.

A passage like that is hardly free of worldview bias. It predicts that if any truth about God or spirituality is ever reliably discovered, it must push us toward naturalistic interpretations of God and the spiritual world. Elsewhere, similarly and with no less bias, Clark argues for “causal closure, the idea that a scientific examination of bodily action leaves no explanatory room for anything non-physical.’”

But there is a deeper problem with the insulation requirement, if I have understood correctly. Its purpose is to insulate knowledge from bias. Its effect, however, is to rule out non-natural knowledge by definition. It cannot permit a person to come to a non-natural conclusion. It is thoroughly biased toward naturalism. The bias of which Clark accuses religious knowledge is peanuts by comparison. He says that it has great difficulty overcoming preconceptions, desires, and prior expectations. His epistemology, on the other hand, does not just have great difficulty overcoming its expectation of non-supernaturalism, it cannot ever, by definition, overcome its prior commitment to non-supernaturalism.

More specifically, it is biased against any knowledge toward which the knower holds a personal relationship of concern or commitment. Clark says that those who claim to know God ought to be able to do so dispassionately, unconcernedly, if they are to trust their own claim. He supposes, I guess, that God would want us to relate to him as we do to a laboratory experiment; that our doctrine of God might be of no more personal concern than our doctrine of quarks. If God is personal, a being of love and holiness who relates to us as such, then Clark says such a God cannot be known, because inevitably we would care about that which we think we know, and as soon as we care about it we must conclude we don’t know it after all. The insulation requirement does not insulate us from bias, for it is itself inherently biased. It rules out even the bare possibility that there is a knowable personal God.

I have two principles of my own to suggest to Tom Clark. (I’m sure he already knows them, but if my analysis is correct he has not applied them here.) One: any rule of knowledge that by definition rules out even the possibility of knowing something in matters as important as God, is biased and cannot be used to judge whether there is a God. Two: if you propose a universal rule of knowledge that violates its own strictures, it would be wise to discard it.

Now to Clark’s “public object requirement.”

Not only must we do our best to insulate beliefs in [G]od, the soul and the supernatural from sources of potential bias, we must find evidence for them outside private subjective experience, evidence that’s publicly observable by those who haven’t experienced [G]od’s embrace.

His discussion on this is pointed primarily toward disagreements he has with a theologian, John Haught, whose religious epistemology is (according to Clark) based on internal experience alone. I have not read Haught, but I have seen enough quoted from him in secondary sources to doubt that he represents historic Biblical Christianity—he seems to hold to something like process theology. Clark also speaks of similar discussions he has had with Stuart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, who I believe are more orthodox in their Christianity. Nevertheless I share the view that one contributing factor to Christian knowledge is one’s personal encounter with the personal God. I don’t see anything the least bit incoherent about that. My experience with God is not evidence for you to believe in, but it certainly can be evidence for me, supporting my belief. Not the only evidence, but part of it.

Clark makes his own case absurdly simple, though, by pointing to Haught in the way that he does. He represents Christianity as if it had nothing more to offer on its behalf than Christians’ internal experience (or Intelligent Design, mentioned elsewhere in his paper). This is hardly the case! There is the historical record of Israel, Christ, and the church; there are strong philosophical arguments in favor of God, and also in favor of the soul and free will (see below); and there are strong existential arguments in favor of Christianity. There is evidence for Christian belief outside private subjective experience. If Clark addresses this anywhere, I have yet to find it. I haven’t read all of his papers, so maybe he can point us toward one that’s relevant. In this article he certainly treated it as if there were only the two ways of knowing about God.

Clark also says,

Just as belief in[G]od needs support by public observation to be warranted, so too does belief in the soul and free will.

What could be more publicly observed than people (one’s self and others) leading lives by our own decisions, exercising free will? And what basis could there be then for denying free will, other than a strong naturalistic bias?

Finally, the public object requirement seems rather too stringent. In a paper devoted entirely to Haught’s religious epistemology, he puts the requirement this way:

Given the fallibility of human experience, its potential to misrepresent the world, it seems reasonable to ask for further justification for the claim that religious experience reveals the truth about things. This normally involves producing evidence for the claim that’s independent of the experience itself, something other than the mental state of the experiencer, such as a publicly observable object or measurement.

It seems to me that a consistent application of this requirement would lead to a rejection of any knowledge that was not, in principle, available for public observation and measurement. Thus I cannot know what I am thinking at this moment, for my thoughts are quite inaccessible to any other person’s verification, or for observation by any instrument. Now, perhaps there is some valid principle whereby the public object requirement is set aside for knowledge of one’s own thoughts and internal state. If so it ought to be articulated; for Clark certainly seems to make it a universal test for reliable knowledge:

I’ve called this the public object requirement, and along with the insulation requirement it constitutes basic epistemic good practice, without which no factual claim about the world has credibility (emphasis added).

So although Tom Clark’s paper is well written, and his tests of knowledge are interesting, the standard they set is one they fail to meet, if my analysis is correct. They are fatally self-contradictory. And there is yet one additional major sense in which I think they fall short, which I will save for my next post on this topic.

Alvin Plantinga, the prominent Notre Dame University philosopher, says that if you’re a believer in evolution, you have no warrant for believing in naturalism (atheism, roughly speaking). Here’s part of his argument, to whet your interest:

Now what evolution tells us (supposing it tells us the truth) is that our behavior, (perhaps more exactly the behavior of our ancestors) is adaptive; since the members of our species have survived and reproduced, the behavior of our ancestors was conducive, in their environment, to survival and reproduction. Therefore the neurophysiology that caused that behavior was also adaptive; we can sensibly suppose that it is still adaptive. What evolution tells us, therefore, is that our kind of neurophysiology promotes or causes adaptive behavior, the kind of behavior that issues in survival and reproduction.

Now this same neurophysiology, according to the materialist, also causes belief. But while evolution, natural selection, rewards adaptive behavior (rewards it with survival and reproduction) and penalizes maladaptive behavior, it doesn’t, as such, care a fig about true belief.

[Link: Evolution vs. Naturalism - Books & Culture]

Update 9/6/08: I have turned off threaded comments, as explained here. This will unfortunately jumble up the sequence of the comments on this post, for which I offer my apologies.

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.

“Pantalaimon,” a commenter on Thinking Christian, supplied a number of quotes yesterday to show that (in his words)

ID is not a scientific research program in any sense, and never has been. Scientific understanding is of no intrinsic interest to ID. Any “research” they may undertake is strictly subservient to the philosophical goal of crushing naturalistic science for religious and philosophical purposes.

Strong generalities like that are risky; nobody is one-dimensional, and in fact Pantalaimon’s quotes were a great example of quote-mining out of context. When I pointed that out to him, he graciously offered me the opportunity to track down the source of the quotes myself and put them in correct context. I have declined his generous suggestion. Instead I’m going to try to put the issue in its proper full perspective, based on my entire experience with Intelligent Design.

Intelligent Design is entirely a ploy, manipulating science in order to win religious/political battles. That’s the charge. This statement touches, albeit lightly, on something like the truth of the matter. Many leaders of the Intelligent Design movement are Christian believers, and one (Jonathan Wells) represents the Unification Church. (Unification Church theology as I understand it has little in common with Christianity, other than a belief in some spiritual reality.) These ID leaders recognize strong opposition between a certain dominant form of evolutionary theory–naturalistic neo-Darwinism–and their religious beliefs. Not surprisingly, they consider their religious beliefs not only true but also important. Thus there is a conflict.

I don’t know anybody who has ever handled a major conflict perfectly. I do not need to be convinced that everything ID leaders have done was done just right. The infamous “Wedge Document” was a strategic mistake, in that opened a wide and inviting door for interpretations of evil scheming. The Discovery Institute has worked hard to correct misinterpretations related to the Wedge, not entirely successfully. I think it’s fair to acknowledge errors, to learn from them, and move on wiser than before.

Phillip Johnson is regarded to be the father of the ID movement. At the core of his message is a direct, unflinching, head-on assault against philosophical naturalism, a form of atheism. From his first foray into this field, Darwin on Trial, Johnson has highlighted the close association between Darwinism and philosophical naturalism. His disagreement with Darwinism has been based in part on its assumptions that nothing could have happened, and nothing ought to be explained, by any means other than strict natural cause and effect.

Johnson has been accused of falsely assuming all evolutionists are Richard Dawkins; that is, that evolution is equivalent to atheism. I don’t know that he has actually always made that error. Nevertheless there is a strong association between evolution and atheism in this sense: evolution may not entail atheism, but atheism certainly entails evolution. Without evolutionary theory, atheism has no explanation for nature whatsoever.

Confronting philosophical naturalism has been one aspect of Johnson’s approach to the issue from the beginning. Further, he took a very long and careful look at the scientific literature, and came to the conclusion that evolutionary theory is not well supported by the evidence. Though he is a lawyer, let that not blind you to the fact that he was approaching the question from the basis of science and the available evidence. He concluded that evolution’s explanatory strength depends critically on the assumption that all explanations must be in terms of natural causes and effects and nothing else. This, he rightly noted, is a philosophical assumption that is open to question, which puts evolution itself open to question.

So in Johnson, back at the start of it all, there were three intersecting streams: religious, scientific, and philosophical. He was not an expert in all three (with apologies to all of you out there who are). He proceeded to gather conferences and symposia of scientists and philosophers to explore the question further. Out of this the Intelligent Design movement was born.

The three intersecting streams still pervade the question, but not monolithically so. When David Berlinski’s new book, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions comes out, don’t expect a shrill screed for some kind of fundamentalist American Christianity. He is a secular Jew living in Paris. Whether or not Michael Denton wants to be associated with ID now, the fact is his Evolution: A Theory in Crisis critiqued evolution strictly on scientific grounds, and set a course that is still being traveled.

Anti-theists also follow the same three threads. Daniel Dennett employs philosophy and evolution in service of dissolving what he calls religion’s “spell” of misunderstanding. Richard Dawkins uses science, and something reminiscent of philosophy (I can’t call it better than that), to call God a delusion. They both have a strong interest in defeating religion, but that hardly means they are uninterested in science–though it would be easy to quote-mine them and make it appear that way.

By the same token, if ID leaders have an interest in philosophy and/or religion, as represented in the quotes Pantalaimon pulled, that hardly means they are uninterested in science. The relation between science and design is controversial; commenter Holopupenko is convinced design cannot be detected through the sciences and that ID scientists are philosophically naive; meanwhile ID-supportive philosophers like Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, J. P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and my friend Rob Koons are confident it potentially can be. On that basis, the scientists in the ID movement proceed with their research.

Let’s grant the obvious, looming in the background, which is that ID’s record of published science is hardly stellar. That in itself does not show there is no interest in science, which was the charge Pantalaimon made. The activities of Minnich, Behe, Marks, Dembski, Seelke, Gonzalez, and many others put the lie to that. Their low published output could be attributed to the difficulty of defining relevant research problems, the fiery-hot hostility toward ID among other scientists and journal editors, the relative youth of the field, or many other explanations. Many observers think they know another reason, which is that ID cannot actually produce science. My somewhat educated word of caution is not to rush to judgment on this. Whatever science ID could produce, conditions are so set against it being published that it’s worth giving it considerably more time.

There is a fourth stream that has been sometimes bundled in with ID, the political, especially in regard to public education in America. Where schools have been pressured to teach a positive theory of Intelligent Design, that has been nothing but a mistake. On the other hand, schools’ resistance to bringing up evolution’s evidential difficulties seems puzzling to me, except as just another facet of academics’ ID-phobia. In hindsight, though, I believe it would have been preferable to leave even that question off the political table, innocuous though it should have been. ID miscalculated the opposition and ended up stirring up even more antipathy without much advancing its primary agenda, which is research. Now it has become difficult to pull out of the PR battles and get focused. Nobody gets everything right.

So to Pantalaimon, in summary, I see your own deep animosity toward ID seriously distorting your view of the matter. ID is not uni-dimensional. (Not even Richard Dawkins is uni-dimensional!) Intelligent Design cannot be defined by mined quotes. It has to bear responsibility for its missteps, but so do we all. It wasn’t very long ago that evolutionists confidently spoke of the useless, vestigial appendix and junk DNA as evidence for their theory, after all.