Thinking Christian

Just published at BreakPoint: God and Science Do Mix, beginning,

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that is replete with unintended irony, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss says, “Science and God Don’t Mix.”

With all due respect for a man who has contributed significantly to what we know about the universe, on this point Krauss is wrong…

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From Melanie Phillips today comes possibly the most intellectually aware statement I have seen from any journalist on the Intelligent Design controversy, including this:

While materialist fundamentalists can deal with religious believers by scoffing they are in a separate domain altogether from the real ie scientific world, the suggestion that science might itself arrive at the conclusion that there are limits to what it can understand is a heresy that directly threatens the materialist fundamentalist closed thought-system — and therefore must be stamped out.

… they cannot grasp that ID is a metaphysical idea that comes out of but stands separate from science, in that science leads here to an idea with which by definition it must abruptly part company. Instead they insist that the two must be fused – and when that proves impossible, they cry victory.

As Charles Johnson asks on LGF:

If ‘intelligent design’ is really based on science, why have their advocates failed to produce any scientific evidence for that claim, despite millions of dollars worth of funding and years in which to do it? Instead, ‘intelligent design’ proponents spend all their time on public relations. Where are the peer reviewed studies? Where are the experimental proofs that can be duplicated by other scientists? Answer: nonexistent.

Well of course they are non-existent — because ID is not in itself a scientific discovery. It is rather an inference from scientific discoveries. Looking at the complexity of the created world, it says the evidence points inescapably to a guiding intelligence as the cause of that complexity. It is an idea, a conclusion to a chain of observation and thought. When people demand proof of this idea, what they are actually demanding is proof that an ‘intelligent designer’ exists. The fact that there are no peer-reviewed studies (!) demonstrating the existence of such a cosmic ‘designer’ provokes this yah-boo response. But it is obviously no more possible to prove the existence of an ‘intelligent designer’ than it is to prove the existence of the Biblical God.

ID is thus a paradox. The whole point is that it states that the ‘intelligent designer’ it posits as the only logical inference from scientifically verifiable complexity cannot be known through scientific means. This is because the essence of the ID idea is that there is a limit to science beyond which it cannot go….

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Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott write in a Scientific American article dated today,

Creationists who want religious ideas taught as scientific fact in public schools continue to adapt to courtroom defeats by hiding their true aims under ever changing guises

Such is the expected stance from leaders of the National Center for Science Education, which would be more aptly named the National Center for Serving up Evolution. The burden of their message is this: Creationism hasn’t changed in any way since the 1920s. It has only “thinly disguised” itself “with a fake mustache.” Intelligent Design is creationism; creationism (today) is Intelligent Design.

Conspiracies can be so scintillating, and a conspiracy is what Branch and Scott see here. They see conspiracy behind the recent Louisiana legislation on science education, which was designed to

“create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied,” which includes providing “support and guidance for teachers regarding effective ways to help students understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review scientific theories being studied.”

First asking “what’s not to like” about that, Branch and Scott go on to see dark things in it indeed:

[L]urking in the background of the law is creationism, the rejection of a scientific explanation of the history of life in favor of a supernatural account involving a personal creator. Indeed, to mutate Dobzhansky’s dictum, nothing about the Louisiana law makes sense except in the light of creationism.

Most of the rest of the article is about creationism lurking everywhere.

Rhetoric is a blunt weapon, and in many cases, the blunter the better. A clear, sharp definition of the terms used here would not have served Branch and Scott’s purpose at all. What is creationism? They don’t say (but it’s lurking everywhere!). What is it about creationism that’s so awful? They’re more clear on that: it disputes evolution, and it proposes the possibility of a Creator. (Watch out! It’s after you!) In the end it’s going to get you:

Moreover, it is a dangerous lie…. Students who are not given the chance to acquire a proper understanding of evolution will not achieve a basic level of scientific literacy. And scientific literacy will be indispensable for workers, consumers and policymakers in a future dominated by medical, biotechnological and environmental concerns. (Emphasis added.)

Let me note in passing the lie (shall I call it a dangerous lie?) contained there. There are no responsible spokespersons or leaders in the Intelligent Design movement who want to deny anyone a chance to acquire a proper understanding of evolution. I’ve been urging my own son and daughter to learn it better than their classmates. But oh! there’s an awful risk–the risk that some might not believe! It cannot be worth taking, can it? There may be advantages, yes, in students learning “critical thinking skills” and “logical analysis,” and the ability to “understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review scientific theories.” But stand that up against the possibility that they might not believe everything about evolution, and those advantages begin to look pretty small. Critical thinking and analytical understanding are okay in their own way, but belief in evolution (not just knowledge, but unquestioning, unblinking, unchallenged belief) is more important by far. Yes, sir, that’s how we keep science advancing! Make sure everybody believes everything the prior generation believed, and make sure they never hear about any dissent!

After all, as Branch and Scott assure us, “Allowing teachers to instill scientifically unwarranted doubts about evolution is clearly beyond the pale.” Really, now. It’s bad, sick, immoral, and unconscionable! Well, my, my! It certainly wouldn’t do to reveal that where textbooks say such-and-such “could have” or “might have” happened to bring about the first life, what they really mean is “nobody in the whole world has the vaguest trace of an idea how the first life originated, or could even possibly have done so just by natural means.” That would be instilling “unwarranted doubts,” wouldn’t it?

But I’m letting myself get sidetracked here. What I really want to know is how Branch and Scott define “creationism.” If we’re going to drive a whole world’s education policy by reference to such a dangerous concept, we ought to know what the concept is and what’s dangerous about it. Creationism was once a pretty useful word, a word that actually had a reliable and useful definition. It stood for a full constellation of ideas, including:

1. Adherence to the Judeo-Christian scriptures, especially Genesis
2. A relatively young earth (thousands or at most tens of thousands of years old)
3. Catastrophism (the Noahic flood) as an explanation for fossils
4. Reliance on a certain literal reading of Genesis as source and guide for research and conclusions about the natural world
5. Rejection of common ancestry of species; all species were created separately

Now if Intelligent Design is creationism in disguise, it is quite an effective disguise indeed. But then a good conspiracy theorist can always see through these things. See how perceptive they are: they’re wise enough to see that Intelligent Design is really creationism, even though ID specifically rejects or at least sets to the side every one of these five creationist tenets.

I’m a Christian; I believe in the truth of Genesis. I hold to Item 1 on the above list, yet I know that some ID proponents do not. I do not hold to a young-earth interpretation of Genesis or of nature, however. I think the fossils are best explained by gradual processes. My interpretation of Genesis, tentatively and non-dogmatically, is more along the lines of the Framework theory, which takes some of Genesis 1 and 2 to have a figurative rather than a plain literal intent. And with regard to #5, my mind is open; I don’t claim to know. I believe in Creation: does that make me a creationist? Not by its usual definition.

>Could creationism’s definition be broadened to include people like me? Certainly! You could say a creationist is any person who believes that God created, without respect to the methods, timelines, or processes involved. But then, if we’re going to be honest with it, we also need to be honest with how we employ the term rhetorically. You see, there’s a reason, other than conspiracy theorizing, that Branch and Scott (and Pennock and Gross and others) keep harping on that “creationism” term. It’s because the scientific evidence lines up so strongly against young earth theories, catastrophism, and so on. Creationism (as in the 5-point definition above) has been discredited; its reputation is poor.

ID and creationism have two things in common, conceptually: they both challenge evolutionism, and they both challenge scientific materialism. In both senses they challenge the reigning dogma. How convenient it is for these defenders of dogma to attach ID to an old, discredited idea; even though the new idea shares little if anything in common with the specific areas in which the old one has been found wanting.

Never mind that a few facts get distorted along the way; never mind that the whole of Intelligent Design is being misrepresented and distorted in the process.

Conspiracy hunters who distort reality to that extent usually get labeled as kooks. They’re in the majority this time, so that protects them from disreputable branding. Being in the majority doesn’t make them right, though. Creationism in its rhetorically useful (for evolutionists) form, the form in which they want you to think of it, is not Intelligent Design; and ID is not creationism of that sort.

A final note as I close. I’ve said this often, and I’ll repeat it yet one more time. I’m probably undercutting ID’s own best strategy by pointing any of this out. As long as ID opponents fight a form of ID that doesn’t exist in reality, they’re not even in touch with the real battle. Branch and Scott are off fighting a war of their own imagining. Maybe I shouldn’t point that out to them; but then, if they ever did come over and address what ID really is, things might actually get a lot more interesting, and a lot more productive besides.

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From the comic strip Partially Clips, via Language Log.

“[The scientist] knew that he could say yes or no, and the reporter would print whatever answer he gave. But he also should be grateful for any kind of media interest in his field, even if treating scientists like oracles of knowledge this way is probably why some people confuse science with religion.”

Compare: Servants of a Twisted God

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

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

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

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

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One of the podcasts I enjoy listening to is the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, a science-oriented, religiously skeptical discussion conducted out of the New England Skeptical Society. The shows run long, so I can’t listen to all of them, but I’ve heard a couple of them, featuring Michael Shermer and John Rennie. You can learn a lot of science and unlearn a lot of myth from these discussions.

When they wander onto religious territory, however, their skepticism tends to take a strange turn. I have noted in the past that Michael Shermer’s skepticism does not range as far as it ought. His magazine, The Skeptical Inquirer, approvingly cited a discredited article purporting to show that Christianity has negative social effects. He would have done well to treat that study with more caution.

In an article in current Touchstone magazine, titled ”The Skeptical Inquirer,” Edward Tingley takes this question of self-proclaimed skeptics’ skepticism to a far broader and deeper level. The article’s subtitle tells more than the title: it is, If Only Atheists Were the Skeptics They Think They Are. Tingley, a philosopher at Augustine College in Ottawa, launches a strong counter-assault on what he considers an erroneous conception: that today’s atheists and agnostics are the virtuous thinkers who never jump to conclusions ahead of the evidence.

He begins provocatively:

Unbelievers think that skepticism is their special virtue, the key virtue believers lack. Bolstered by bestselling authors, they see the skeptical and scientific mind as muscular thinking, which the believer has failed to develop. He could bulk up if he wished to, by thinking like a scientist, and wind up at the “agnosticism” of a Dawkins or the atheism of a Dennett—but that is just what he doesn’t want, so at every threat to his commitments he shuns science.

That story is almost exactly the opposite of the truth.

He continues in that tone for a few paragraphs, and then moves into providing real support for his claims. It’s drawn primarily from Blaise Pascal:

There are skeptical theists; Pascal was one….

“I have wished a hundred times over that, if there is a God supporting nature, [nature] should unequivocally proclaim him, and that, if the signs in nature are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether”—but nature prefers to tease, so she “presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt” (429). “We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty” (401). “We are . . . incapable of knowing . . . whether he is” (418). This is where the modern person usually starts in his assault on the question, Is God real or imaginary?

This is base camp, above the tree-line of convincing reasons and knock-down arguments, at the far edge of things we can kick and see, and it is all uphill from here. Thus, it is astounding how many Dawkinses and Dennetts, undecideds and skeptical nay-sayers—that sea of “progressive” folk who claim to “think critically” about religion and either “take theism on” or claim they are “still looking”—who have not reached the year 1660 in their thinking. They almost never pay attention to what the skeptic Pascal said about this enquiry.

Could it be that it is the atheists and agnostics who have rushed to judgment? Have they missed 350 years (or more) of good thinking on the question of God? In what ways was Pascal a model skeptic? He recognized–did not shrink back from–our inability to judge the existence of God by our senses. Translated: our inability to judge the existence of God through science. The modern atheist says, “well, then, there’s no scientific evidence for God; thus there’s no God.” Tingley suspects more than a little of a rush to judgment in there! For Pascal,

There is still the reasoning of the heart.

The scientist Pascal claims to know a route that will take us over the ice to convincing discovery. It is the refusal to test his thinking that betrays the faith of atheists and agnostics.

No no, they will say, point to something material on which to base belief and then I will look at it. “Give us solid evidence!” They insist that every belief about reality must be accepted on the basis of evidence (“experience or logic”). On what basis do they accept that? Evidence? But there is none.

There is no evidence, that is, for the idea that every belief must be accepted on the basis of “experience or logic.”

But atheists and agnostics pick. They commit in the absence of evidence.

I have quoted enough here. The argument is Tingley’s not mine, so I will borrow no more of it. Don’t evaluate it, please, on the basis of these short excerpts; I present them here merely to stimulate you to go to the source and read it for yourself. Then we can talk about it here.

Related: “Though It Is Not Impossible To See God…”
and Evidence of the Heart: The Sense of God

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Book Review

In this, my fourth and final post on Francisco Ayala’s book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, I wish to examine very briefly his views on knowledge as related to science and religion. I am addressing the same primary audience that he does in his book: believers in God. For the sake of brevity, and because Ayala seems also to have accepted them himself, I am going to work on the basis of two starting assumptions: there is a God, and he has revealed himself through the Scriptures. I ask readers who contest those assumptions to recognize that this is not the place for me to defend them. This is a blog, not a book, and to do the job properly would run very long. Even as it is, my treatment here can only be an introduction to issues of religious versus scientific knowledge, but I trust it will at least open up some good discussion.

Fences Around Religious Knowledge
Ayala devotes an entire chapter to showing there need be no contradiction between revealed religion–Christianity, to be specific–and evolutionary theory. Clearly he respects Scripture. He would like Christians to understand that Darwin has been a gift to religion as well as science. If it is a gift in the Ayala takes it to be, however, it comes to us as a horse once did to Troy with dozens of armed men hidden inside. The problem is most clearly expressed on page 172 (emphasis added):

The scope of science is the world of nature, the reality that is observed, directly or indirectly, by our senses. Science advances explanations concerning the natural world, explanations that are subject to the possibility of corroboration or rejection by observation or experiment. Outside that world, science has no authority, no statements to make, no business whatsoever taking one position or another. Science has nothing decisive to say about values, whether economic, aesthetic, or moral; nothing to say about the meaning of life or its purpose; nothing to say about religious beliefs (except in the case of beliefs that transcend the proper scope of religion and make assertions about the natural world that contradict scientific knowledge; such statements cannot be true).

When there is a conflict of knowledge or opinion between science and religion, science always wins; religion’s statements “cannot be true.”

Now, is this necessarily so? Why would it be? One could muster several plausible reasons, I suppose: science is evidence-based, its conclusions are open to public challenge and revision, it follows a near-universally trusted method for determining what is true, and its results have been wildly successful in helping us understand and control nature.

Why Would This Necessarily Be?
Let us, however, recall the assumption we have made for present purposes, and that Ayala seems to hold: that there is a God who has revealed himself through the Scriptures (an assumption that I hold to be quite true, but again, it is not my purpose this time to defend it). This God is revealed as the omniscient and omnipotent Creator, faithful and reliable, certainly able and eager to reveal himself to humans. He speaks with complete authority: he knows what is true. He cannot lie. Therefore what he speaks through the Scriptures is true, and if I may paraphrase, when science makes assertions about the natural world that contradict Scriptural knowledge, such statements cannot be true.

Given our assumptions, why would that conclusion not follow? Why would Ayala (who appears to have respect for God and Scripture) say just the opposite? We can never trust any Christian beliefs except as science allows, he says. It’s tantamount to saying we can only trust God as far as science allows; but who forced God aside and enthroned science in his place?

Religious knowledge has its obvious difficulties. Agreement is hard to find, and from a human perspective there is no universal method for testing religious truth. Let us not overstate the problem, however. Ayala is not speaking of comparative religion, or the conflicts of belief between Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and secularists. He speaks as one who believes in a Christian conception of God, to others who believe in the same God.

Interpretation: It’s for Both Science and Scripture
Ayala takes the position that the Bible just isn’t intended to speak to the same questions as science. It’s not a book on natural history or cosmology. Therefore if science contradicts the apparent teaching of theology on these subjects, then theology can gracefully bow aside and say, “A thousand pardons; I didn’t mean to be intruding on your territory.” This opens up the matter of interpretation: how literally (for example) are we to take the Genesis creation account? That’s a valid question. But interpretation is a valid question for science as well. How do we interpret nature and its evidences? Theologians have been wrong; scientists have been wrong too. Scientific knowledge is fluid, sometimes adjusting in minor ways, sometimes completely being overturned. A few years ago it was scientific knowledge that stomach ulcers were caused by stress; now it’s scientific knowledge that about 90% of them are caused by H. Pylori bacteria, and most of the rest by certain medications. Why then should “assertions [by religion] about the natural world that contradict scientific knowledge” necessarily be false?

Historic Christian theology teaches that God has spoken through nature, through an internal witness in human hearts (conscience, for example), and most clearly and unambiguously through Scripture. Psalm 19 expresses all three of these sources of revelation. Some theologians point out that God has written two books: the Bible and the book of nature. Both “books” may be understood correctly or incorrectly; both need to be interpreted. For a Christian, then, there is more than ample room for discussion about interpretation: Are the early chapters of Genesis intended to be taken literally or figuratively? Great question! Let’s work on it. The book of nature is open to similar discussion. Properly understood and interpreted, the two sources of knowledge must agree.

Necessary Agreement
If God is indeed God, the Creator of all, who speaks only truth, there is no need to ask which source of knowledge trumps the other, for in the end there can be no contradiction between them. Apparent contradictions are signals that our understanding or interpretation from one or both of these perspectives is wrong, and that we have more work to do. They do not automatically signal that science is right and that Scripturally-based knowledge is wrong. That view of knowledge is no gift at all.

Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, by Francisco Ayala. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2007. 256 pages. Amazon price $24.95.

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