Thinking Christian

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum ask in today’s LA Times,

Who in the United States will read Dawkins’ new book (or ones like it) and have any sort of epiphany, or change his or her mind?

Surely not those who need it most: America’s anti-evolutionists. These religious adherents often view science itself as an assault on their faith and doggedly refuse to accept evolution because they fear it so utterly denies God that it will lead them, and their children, straight into a world of moral depravity and meaninglessness.

[Link: Must science declare a holy war on religion? - Los Angeles Times]

Some religious adherents may not have thought it through, but for those who understand the issues, “science itself” is most certainly no “assault on their faith.” It is science plus metaphysical tagalongs like philosophical materialism that oppose Christian belief. No, correct that: it is not science at all, but just the metaphysical tagalongs that do that. Science and philosophical materialism belong together like, oh, like coffee and penguins. I suppose I could enjoy some dark roast while watching Happy Feet. But the two are hardly tied together by some essential knot.

Science in its proper philosophical perspective reveals more of God’s wisdom and his ways. Knowing God allows us to use science ethically. Historically, science arose out of a culture imbued with a Christian worldview. Christianity and philosophical materialism could never get along together, since they are contradictory, but Christianity and science have nothing to fear from each other.

Tweet This Post

I was thinking of writing a response to Sam Harris’s recent bleat against Francis Collins. Collins, a world-class researcher, is also a medical doctor to whom my family owes considerable gratitude; when he was actually practicing medicine years ago, he treated one of our family members. But that’s not why I would want to respond to Sam Harris. It’s because there’s so much that needs to be said.

David Heddle beat me to it with all the best responses. Still I think there’s more to be said about this part of what David wrote:

Science more or less dispenses with all criteria except number one. Science is a meritocracy, one of the few true meritocracies. What has always been relevant in science is: what is the quality of your work? and, to a lesser extent, what is the volume of your work?

We have to bear in mind that the NIH position is not just a scientific position but an administrative/leadership/policy/science position. Does Francis Collins’s Christianity hinder his fulfilling any of the extra-scientific aspects of the job? Part of the answer we can settle quickly. Collins was a Christian when he led the Human Genome project, which was an administrative/leadership/science position. He did a not-too-shabby bit of work there, so based on his resume we ought to allow that he knows how to do those parts of the job.

That leaves policy. (He dealt with policy in the Human Genome Project, too, according to a talk I have heard him give on it, but not at the level he would at the NIH.) This is where Sam Harris might be able to bring a charge that could stick, if he could show that Francis Collins’s Christianity would lead him to adopt some irrational, un-ungodly policy with respect to science in America. So now I’m re-reading Harris’s article to see what kind of policy dangers Collins might pose to the Western world as NIH head. Harris begins with considerable bluster against faith and reason coinciding, but that can’t be it, because clearly he can’t charge Collins with being a poor scientist. Also, as David Heddle points out, there’s an empirical question there that Harris et al. have conveniently ignored:

I have repeatedly asked, on some enormously popular websites such as Myers’s own Pharyngula, for someone, anyone, to demonstrate the science/faith incompatibility charge. The people making this claim are supposed to be scientists or at least scientifically literate. They should understand that a hypothesis that cannot lend itself to testing is inherently unscientific. As many of you know, I proposed a test: I would provide ten peer-reviewed scientific papers, five from believers and five from unbelievers. If the charge that religion and science are incompatible is more than just words, we can posit that it should be possible to detect which papers are polluted by the author’s religion. No one has ever accepted the challenge.

Harris’s major complaint with respect to Collins’s science is that Collins believes God had a part in the process of evolution: he is a theistic evolutionist (though he prefers a different term for it that escapes me at the moment). If there were a scientific test that could empirically disprove theistic evolution, Harris might have a point. But there isn’t one. So this is not a complaint about Collins’s science after all. It’s a complaint about Collins’s religion, masquerading as a concern about his science.

The same goes for this that Harris wrote after quoting some of Collins’s Christian beliefs:

Is it really so difficult to perceive a conflict between Collins’ science and his religion?

It’s not that at all that Collins fails as a scientist, just that there’s something about his religion that poses a problem. Harris compares Collins with James Watson whose career was “defenestrated” (thrown out the window) when he made a stupid remark about race. At least he is candid here about it being a political issue, not a scientific one. Racial bigotry is a real political liability, as it should be. Harris thinks faith in God ought to be an political liability at the same level as racial bigotry.

We’ll come back to that point at the end. Meanwhile I continue to look through Harris’s article for any other policy-related deficiency in Francis Collins. He describes Collins’s conversion experience, and finds that Collins is lacking in good sense or reason. For example:

Collins’ ignorance of world religion is prodigious. For instance, he regularly repeats the Christian talking point about Jesus being the only person in human history who ever claimed to be God (as though this would render the opinions of an uneducated carpenter of the 1st century especially credible). Collins seems oblivious to the fact that saints, yogis, charlatans, and schizophrenics by the thousands claim to be God at this very moment, and it has always been thus. Forty years ago, a very unprepossessing Charles Manson convinced a rather large band of misfits in the San Fernando Valley that he was both God and Jesus

Harris’s ignorance of Jesus among world religious leaders is prodigious. Only Jesus made his claim from within the context of the most monotheistic culture ever to rise, bar the two (Christianity and Islam) that followed in its path. When yogis or “saints” (not Christian saints, obviously) make claims of deity, they’re not making the same claim Jesus made. When charlatans or Charles Manson made the claim, it was obvious they were fakes or madmen. Neither of those is obvious or even credible in the case of Jesus Christ: fakes and madmen do not launch movements that last for millenia and produce the kind of good that Christianity has done. They do not teach with the wisdom Jesus taught. They do not exhibit the humility Jesus did, or make the sacrifice that he made. They do not rise from the dead, either.

Intending to put Collins’s rationality on the rotisserie, Harris continues to skewer himself instead:

It should be obvious that if a frozen waterfall can confirm the specific tenets of Christianity, anything can confirm anything.

It should be obvious that was not what Collins claimed the waterfall did for him. It was just a moment that contributed to his developing view of God, along with many other factors. Harris misrepresented him badly, arguing in obvious bad faith. He is calling Collins irrational, but his proof thereof is seriously lacking.

Does Harris have anything better to offer? The next part of his article might be more promising. This quote begins with Collins’s words, followed by Harris’s response:

As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence; and you are right to hold fast to the certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted…. (Collins, 2006, p.178)

God, who is not limited to space and time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral Law. (Ibid, p. 200-201)

Imagine: the year is 2006; half of the American population believes that the universe is 6,000 years old; our president had just used his first veto to block federal funding for the most promising medical research on religious grounds; and one of the foremost scientists in the land had that to say, straight from the heart (if not the brain).

First of all, Harris is wrong about “the most promising medical research.” Embryonic stem cells’ medical success has been overwhelmingly negative, while adult or other stem cell research has been quite fruitful. Second, Harris is aghast at Collins’s conclusion that some questions cannot be answered by science. But Collins is right: some questions can’t be answered by science. Does Harris not know that? What really sets him off, though, is that Collins supplies a Christian-based answer to some of those questions.

He scoffs at Collins’s approval of certain religious thinkers, including John Polkinghorne, also a scientist himself. Harris says of Polkinghorne,

The problem, however, is that it is impossible to differentiate his writing on religion—which now fills an entire shelf of books—from an extraordinarily patient Sokal-style hoax [link added].

No, Mr. Harris. Maybe you can’t tell the two apart, but what does that signify? I couldn’t tell a mathematically-intense physics article from a Sokal hoax because I don’t know the field. But I don’t point at all mathematically-intense physics articles and call them nonsense. That would just highlight how huge is my ignorance: not only that I don’t know the field, but that I don’t know that I don’t know the field. If you can’t tell Polkinghorne’s theology from nonsense, it’s because (as you’ve already demonstrated), you don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you know that you don’t know?

So where we on our search for a policy-related deficiency in Francis Collins? Harris didn’t do too well in showing that Collins lacks reasoning ability. He complained about Collins’s belief that some questions can’t be answered by science, but Collins is simply right about that. All of Harris’s anti-Christian opinionating is marred by his patent ignorance (or is it willful misrepresentation?) of the faith. So let’s keep looking.

Again he refers to Collins’s beliefs and responds,

How many scientific laws would be violated by such a scheme? One is tempted to say “all of them.”

Here, though, he wanders out of science into metaphysics with the word “law.” Sure, there are regularities in science. I have an article coming soon on BreakPoint explaining why this is completely compatible with the Christian view of God. To assume that regularities are unbreakable laws, however, is to move beyond what science can prove and into metaphysical thinking. It is not scientific to refer to “scientific laws” in that sense.

So here we have Harris’s metaphysics pitted against Collins’s religious beliefs. Which position disqualifies a person as a spokesman/leader for science? Is it not the one that is so confused it cannot tell the difference between science and metaphysics?

I could go on, but the same kind of thing appears in Harris’s article over and over again. Let’s put the matter to rest: Harris has no good scientific reason to think Collins is unqualified to lead in a policy position. He does a very poor job of making his case that Collins’s rationality is suspect. He gets nowhere at all in proving that Collins’s faith contradicts science. What does he have left? Nothing but this: Collins is the wrong religion. Harris is calling for him to be excluded from a senior Federal government position because he fails a religious test. What do we call this? Bigotry? Unconstitutional? A denial of America’s first and most basic freedom? All of those certainly.

David Heddle said this, too:

Harris hates Christianity. When it cannot be ignored, he goes on the offensive.

We could also call it hatred.

Tweet This Post

The LA Times is reporting on a “Spirituality for Kids” curriculum being presented in some Los Angeles public schools.  

‘Spirituality for Kids’ is not religious,” said Karen Timko, who is in charge of elementary counselors for the Los Angeles Unified School District and has included the group in a resource fair for counselors. “It’s tools for navigating your life.”

This is another good argument for appropriate separation of church and state, religion and public education. (Yes, I’m in favor of that.) It’s also a good opportunity to show some of the confusion that exists on religion. The curriculum developers’ website says,

Founded in 2001, SFK was established to create global change by empowering children with the understanding that all possibilities lie within – their choices can influence the world around us.

This is close to truth, and close to a secular truth, except for that important word “all.” Yes, possibilities lie within us, and yes, as the same web page shows, education can yield positive character outcomes for children. I’m all in favor of teaching character in schools, a curriculum that has been sorely neglected or distorted over the years. As an education major at Michigan State University in the mid-1970s, when MSU was regarded as one of the top education (teacher-training) schools in the country, I was taught “values clarification,” the doctrine that every child’s values are to be brought out, respected, clarified, and celebrated. Our professors had apparently not anticipated Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s values.

No, it’s not character education that’s the problem. It is the teaching that “all possibilities lie within.” This is in fact a direct contradiction of historic Christian doctrine, which says we must rely on God. It is through Christ who strengthens that we can “do all things.” (The context counts on that, by the way; it’s not about being able to do everything we wish, but about living a life of spiritual power in any kind of circumstance.) Note that the point I’m making does not depend on your agreeing with Christian doctrine; the fact is that the SFK curriculum conflicts with a major point of Christian doctrine, and thus has definite religious implications.

But beyond that there is the title wrapped around the whole program: “Spirituality for Kids.” If they had called it Maturity for Kids, or Character Development for Kids, or Life Skills for Kids, that would have been one thing. But they called it “Spirituality for Kids.” They can say all they want that it isn’t religious, but are students that dumb? Do they even want students to think spirituality is divorced from religion? And if they do, are they not in this also teaching something definite about religion, i.e., that religion is optional for spiritual development?

The excellent National Study of Youth and Religion spoke of large numbers of teens who are “spiritual but not religious.” Obviously there are implications for religious belief in this. I would hope that school administrators in Los Angeles and everywhere would not be blind to this.

Tweet This Post

The question at New Scientist was, how did we ever come up with the idea of gods? The answer begins,

It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods. Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. “It’s not that religion is not important,” says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, “it’s that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress.” The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions….

Two thoughts on this:

1) “Science has largely shied away from asking why…. but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions.”

The obvious underlying assumption is that until science tells us, we don’t know; for there is no other way to know but through science.

2) “It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times…. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.”

This is marvelously consistent with our having been created in God’s image, for relating with God. What’s lacking in that answer? Sure, we can also “conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods, and monsters,” but this is easily understood also from a Biblical perspective: our relationship with God has been broken, and in our alienation we worship the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:20-23).

The New Scientist article proposes two cognitive features of humans as sources of our religiosity: the way wementally treat living things as opposed to non-living things, and an “overdeveloped sense of cause and effect.” There’s no need to doubt these are true of humans, from childhood on. There’s also no need to doubt that they contribute to beliefs in that imaginary world. But is there a need to assume that the explanation for religion is entirely natural and evolutionary? No, for God has spoken to us, we have his revelation of where our belief in him first originated, where it has gone wrong, and what he has done through Christ to bring us back to him.  

Tweet This Post

Here’s an interesting discussion at Scientific American: “Is Religion Adaptive? It’s Complicated.”

Schloss’s point is the one that gets most people thinking. “That’s all fine and dandy about the scientific research, but what does it all tell us about the existence of God?” What if, as I suggested in my answer to this year’s “Annual Question” at Edge. The data suggest that God is actually just a psychological blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? Would you still believe if you knew God were a byproduct of your evolved mental architecture?

What if, indeed? That’s easy. If (and it’s a very big if) the data showed God was just a psychological blemish on my brain, then I could no longer believe.

That the question could even be asked is telling. “Could you believe in God if you knew he didn’t exist?” The question only makes sense if belief means something divorced from what we know to be true about the world. It’s another illustration of the commonly observed fact-value dichotomy: facts are about objective knowledge, while values (which include what we decide to believe) are private matters with no necessary connection to external realities, or so it is thought. For whatever reason, far too many Christians, even, have bought into this relativistic dichotomy.

Christianity, properly understood in its evangelical historical form, makes objective concrete statements about reality, and if they are wrong, then Christianity is wrong. Our belief is that God actually created the world, called Abraham, formed the nation of Israel, brought them out of Egypt through a parted Red Sea, spoke through the prophets, was incarnated in Christ who lived, died, and rose again in real history. If I ever came to know that these things were false, how could I “believe” they were true? As J.I. Packer wrote as long ago as 1972,

Nor is this all. Scepticism about both divine revelation and Christian origins has bred a wider scepticism which abandons all idea of a unity of truth, and with it any hope of unified human knowledge; so that it is now commonly assumed that my religious apprehensions have nothing to do with my scientific view of things external to myself, since God is not ‘out there’ in the world, but only ‘down here’ in the psyche. The uncertainty and confusion about God which marks our day is worse than anything since Gnostic theosophy tried to swallow Christianity in the second century.

(Knowing God, Foreword)

Amen to that. It hasn’t become noticeably better in 37 years since then.

As to the question posed in the article’s title, the answer is of course religion is adaptive. Any dummy knows it could never have evolved if it weren’t! Either it’s adaptive in that sense, or (and they apparently spent precious little time considering this) people are religious because there’s a reality beyond nature that we know we need to tap into. I’ll buy that latter option, myself.

Tweet This Post

When Doug wrote this on the Discover Magazine blog, the magazine thought it was good enough to warrant printing it in their December issue:

“Because God said so” could be the answer for everything. While [sic] go to school anyway? Just teach our kids that phrase. No need to go to medical school, no need to study economics. Everything is because “God wants it that way,” so don’t bother thinking, questioning, challenging.

The problem with “because God said so” seems to be this: that if one can resort to it as an answer, then one no longer needs to think about interesting or difficult issues. One already has the answer. The better way instead is to continue thinking, questioning, challenging.

As one who believes in God as the ultimate explanation behind all other explanations, I find this ironic. Here’s why. First, it is highly, shall I say entirely, theoretical. It pays very little (shall I say none at all) attention to empirical reality. It’s the answer that “could be” the answer for everything. Is there any evidence that anybody in the history of the earth has actually taken it to be the answer for everything? Is there any evidence that this theory is borne out in reality; that people who believe God is the explanation behind all other explanations are any less curious about the way the physical world works?

The list of theists in science is enormously long. These are men and women who did not stop “thinking, questioning, challenging” on account of having “God said so” as part of their mental furniture. The list includes Bacon, Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Kelvin, van Leeuwenhoek, Faraday, Maxwell, Cuvier, Gregor Mendel, Gingerich, Collins, and many more.

On this, Doug (and by extension, the magazine that highlighted his comment) is long on theory and short on empirical evidence. It seems as if a theoretical pronouncement is enough to cut short any real investigation into the matter. Let’s phrase it this way. Is it wise or unwise for science to recognize even the possibility of a God? Doug would say no. Here’s why. It’s Because ‘”Because God said so’ could be the answer for everything.”

There are too many becauses there, though, so it’s a bit confusing. Let’s code it this way. We’ll replace

“‘Because God said so’ could be the answer for everything”

with simply

“B.”

Doug’s statement in this abbreviated form, not intending to change it at all, is

“B.” While go to school anyway? …

So the reason Doug would not want science to admit the possibility of a God in natural events is “Because ‘B.’”

Doug (and Discover) don’t know whether “B” is true in empirical fact; they seem to ignore the plain reality that it is in fact false. But on their view, it appears there’s no need to study this through available means like social research. There’s no need to explore whether God has any place in science; there’s no need to wonder whether God has any place in any individual scientist’s approach to reality. There’s a ready-made answer right at hand. There’s no need to bother thinking, challenging, questioning, because they can always just say “Because ‘B.’”

It’s a wimpy argument, self-referentially weak. Why?

Because (with respect to theism in science) “‘Because God said so’ could be the answer for everything” could be the answer for everything. Why go to school anyway? Just teach our kids that phrase. They’ll never have another reason to think about God, or about any evidence relative to God in nature, or about whether a scientist’s attitude toward God affects his or her professional work. Everything is because “‘Because God said so’ is the reason for everything,” so don’t bother thinking, questioning, challenging.

I know, the phrasing is a bit convoluted, but I hope you get the point. Doug has a nice catchphrase that he thinks shows the other side has an out from thinking things through; but his catchphrase seems itself to have been an out that kept him (and the magazine) from thinking his own theory through.

The final irony: there’s no evidence that “Because God said so” ever hindered anyone’s scientific curiosity. We do have evidence, though, that “Because ‘B’” actually causes people to believe they don’t need to think these things through. It’s right there in front of you.

P.S. Just for the sake of entertainment, please be sure to read the rest of Doug’s comment. I wonder how much thinking, questioning, or challenging he has subjected his own theories to. I wonder if he knows the hydraulic problems relating to the giraffe’s neck he has bypassed, for example; and how much he has questioned his own understanding of “creationism,” and how it relates to contemporary challenges to evolutionary theory.

Tweet This Post

From the conclusion of a paper out of the University of Virginia (emphasis added):

This brief provides an array of evidence indicating that religion is an answer to the male problematic—that is, the tendency of fathers to become detached, emotionally or physically, from their children and the mothers of their children. I find that fathers who are religious, and who have partners who are religious, are—on average—more likely to be happily married, to be engaged and affectionate parents, and to get and stay married to the mothers of their children. As a consequence, religious fathers and husbands are much less likely to fall prey to the male problematic of late modernity.

[Link: Center for Marriage and Families » Blog Archive » Is Religion an Answer? Marriage, Fatherhood, and the Male Problematic]

The “male problematic” was defined earlier in the paper:

One of the most important consequences of the family revolution of the last half-century—a revolution marked by dramatic increases in divorce, nonmarital childbearing, and cohabitation—is that ever larger numbers of men are becoming disconnected from family life. From New York to New Orleans, from San Francisco to Seattle, more and more men in the United States are living apart from the children they helped to bring into this world. This growing disconnect between men and families has been aptly called the “male problematic” by University of Chicago theologian Don Browning.

This entry joins others showing positive outcomes associated with faith. Please note the disclaimer there (at the end of the page) regarding how this information should be interpreted.

Tweet This Post