Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at Warwick University, England, presents a provocative question in his article The Darwinian Delusion:

The next time you want to stop a conversation among the soi-disant enlightened, ask what has atheism ever done for science. It’s one thing to admit that religious dogmatism has periodically halted the march of scientific progress but quite another to argue that atheism has actually advanced science.

His own answer, in summary:

More generally, atheism has not figured as a force in the history of science not because it has been suppressed but because whenever it has been expressed, it has not encouraged the pursuit of science. The general metaphysical idea underlying Darwinism – that a morally indifferent nature selects from among a variety of organic possibilities – has many secular and religious precedents across the world. In each case, it has led to an ethic of equanimity and even resignation, certainly not a drive to remake the planet, if not the universe, to our own purposes. Yet, so far we have got pretty far on that drive. The longer we continue successfully, the stronger the evidence that at least human life cannot be fully explained in Darwinian terms.

Hat Tip: Post-Darwinist

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.

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

There have been a bewildering 170 comments so far in response to a post published here a week ago. The bewilderment, for me, has been that much of the discussion has been a debate on the Law of Noncontradiction. It’s hard for me to see how that could be controversial–or how controversy is even possible if the LNC is not an agreed principle–but it has been.

It started with the question whether there is such a thing as nonempirical knowledge. One commenter proposed this test:

“If you can’t check it (ie. test it), then even if it is true, you can never know that.”

This alone doesn’t assert that the test must be empirical (based on observation), but that’s the direction the discussion went. One example:

“I showed you a specific example of how logic is verified by observation. I’ll repeat: if the observations I laid out didn’t verify the logic, we wouldn’t believe in the logic, so the logic is directly dependent on those observations.”

All this time I’ve had a relevant resource in my list of waiting web pages–pages I saw when I did not have time study them, and bookmarked to return to later. A few weeks ago J.P. Moreland published a short article on Christianity and Non-Empirical Knowledge. Here’s a taste of it (he is using “see” as shorthand for “testing something with the five senses”):

First, truth (the relation of matching or correspondence between a thought/proposition and reality) is not something we can see, so if we are limited to our five senses, we can have no grasp of it. If I believe that a book I ordered is at the bookstore, and then go to the bookstore and see the book, I know that my belief about the book is true. I can see the book there, but I cannot see my belief that the book was there, nor can I see the correspondence relationship between the book’s being there and my belief that it was there.

(Emphasis added)

What does this have specifically to do with Christianity? I don’t know where Moreland is planning to go with it in his next article in this series. There is, though, a common belief that the only reliable form of knowledge is scientific knowledge, which is further believed to be all empirical. If this is true, then faith is excluded. Moreland shows that this is a false assumption.

I just came across this Modern Age article by Bryce Christensen: The cosmos as memento mori: the ultimate significance of modern science. He has a concern to express regarding science:

Prometheus, it would appear, has stumbled into a very dark and dreary place!

It’s not science’s successes that Christensen bemoans. He expresses a very deep appreciation for its

contact with “external permanency” [by which] science thus overthrows the fantasies of intellectuals who suppose that hermeneutic communities are entirely free to construct their own realities through imagination, interpretation, and dialogue.

He celebrates science’s objectivity, a challenge to “the solipsism and cultural relativism now widely prevalent in a truth-averse world.” You’ll find no complaint here in regard to technology, medicine, or deepening understanding of nature’s fundamentals. You will, however, find a condensed catalogue of ways in which science fails to fulfill anyone’s hope of it leading us to an empirical, objective, and complete encounter with every important truth:

The problem with taking science as a guide to hope, meaning, and morality is that the objective truths of modern science are utterly lacking in metaphysical content. Indeed, on its own terms, science cannot even give a satisfying account of human beings as seekers of truth.

That last sentence opens the first of several ways in which Christensen says science falls short on metaphysical issues, meanwhile showing that this really matters (as Deuce also said here this morning). Humans’ truth-seeking, morality, language, art, emotion, free will, meaning and purpose, consciousness: all of these “disappear in an exclusively scientific world view,” so that

A rigorous and probing investigation of science thus thoroughly dispels the optimism surrounding the scientific enterprise.

This article is not that “rigorous and probing investigation;” it is too brief for that purpose. Strong arguments in favor of these ideas can easily be found elsewhere (beginning in his footnotes), and Christensen does not attempt here to make those arguments. Rather, he is leading toward his central thesis:

One of the benefits of investigating science thoroughly and rigorously is thus the discovery of the profound human need for non-scientific truths.

This need is not just psychological or emotional; it is an ultimate kind of need, for if science cannot explain the human search for truth, or even language, then science cannot even explain itself. Yet as Christensen goes on to re-affirm the great value of science’s objectivity, he takes it in a direction many will not expect (emphasis added):

Nothing in all of religion–not the Enlightenment of Gautama Buddha, not the visions of Mohammed, not the hymns in the Hindu Samhitas, not the creation myths of Shinto–resonates with empirical expectations like the instruction the risen Jesus gives his perplexed disciples in order to verify the truth of his Resurrection: “Handle me and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39).

Judaism’s roots are in history, Christianity’s even more so, for God walked incarnate on real roads in a real place in real time. (I turn now from Christensen’s thoughts to share my own.) Jesus’ disciples, seeing Him resurrected from the dead, did not say, “This is great! But I still wonder if this is the one true religion.” No, they did the sensible thing and followed Him, their questions (and ours) having been answered.

We cannot relive that experience, for history has a stubborn way of happening just once. (”History repeats itself,” they say, but they’re talking about trends and principles, not events.) Thus there are frequent disputes over the Christianity’s historical truth. Compare our problem, though, with that of every other religion. Are there disputes over the historical truth of Hinduism? What could that possibly mean? Hinduism makes no historical claims to speak of. Buddhism? The claim is that Gautauma lived a holy life and left important teachings behind, but Buddhism is about its teachings, not its teacher, and as far as I know, nobody claims his life was proof of his teachings. They point to the teachings themselves. Islam centers about a person, but its revelation is not a revelation-within-history like Judaism’s or Christianity’s. There’s a world of difference between God revealing Himself in the flesh and God dictating revelation to a prophet, as the Qur’an is said to have been delivered. Is there any historical test that could prove or disprove Islam, even in principle?

Christianity, quite uniquely, lives both in heaven and on earth. Hinduism and Buddhism would prefer to have nothing to do with the earth; they are anxious to be rid of it. Islam’s “72 virgins” takes the earth too much into eternity–especially from the virgins’ perspective! The sexual inequality expressed there has its obvious reflection in Islamic cultures today. That other major world faith system, scientific naturalism, will have nothing to do with heaven, or indeed with transcendence of any kind.

Only the Jewish and Christian Scriptures–the Old Testament, as known by Christians–teach that God is good, and creation can be too. Only Christianity teaches that creation continues to be good (even if marred for a time by evil): Jesus Christ was resurrected in a body. The physical reality endures. Physical creativity is good and valuable. Science is transcended, yes, but never made irrelevant; and the earliest leaders of scientific Europe considered themselves to be studying God’s mind as they studied His work in creation.

Promethean optimism fails those who hope just in science. But that is not science failing: it is just what happens if we depend on that which is limited, to be the explanation for all.

A few days ago I confidently announced I was going to blog my way through J.P. Moreland’s Christianity and the Nature of Science: A Philosophical Investigation. What I failed to recognize was that the first chapter is considerably more “bloggable” than the rest. I’m scaling back my plans now.

Moreland’s book began with the difficulty of strictly defining what science is or is not. Within his set of reasons there was one easily extracted subset, from Judge Overton’s decision in a creation science trial. The conclusions Moreland drew were both significant and relatively uncontroversial, as witnessed by neo-Darwinist Michael Ruse’s general agreement. All this made it rather easy to blog.

I let myself think the rest of the book would be similarly easy to condense, but it isn’t. (I should have known better from the start.) Though it’s not my first time reading the book, it’s the first time I’ve done it with blogging in mind, and now I’ve recognized it won’t all summarize into this format.

There are some things I will come back to, like the misconceptions surrounding the “scientific method” we all learned in school: science doesn’t always use it, science doesn’t only use it (other disciplines employ many of the same methods). There’s some very fascinating stuff there to discuss.

But I’m backing off on my plans to cover it all. It won’t condense that way. That opens the door again, though, for me to make a strong recommendation: get yourself a copy and read it! Agree or disagree with what he has to say–either way, you’ll find a lot to learn in it.

Joe Carter ends a detailed and eye-opening correction to the myth of Galileo, and concludes with:

I suspect that there are many more lessons that can be gleaned from this story. But I find that the real moral is not so much in the story itself but in the fact that the story even needs to be told in the first place. While I first heard the story of Galileo in elementary school, it wasn’t until long, long after I had graduated from college that I finally learned the truth. No doubt some people are just now hearing about it for the first time. How is that possible?

[From the evangelical outpost: The Myth of Galileo: A Story With A (Mostly) Valuable Lesson]

I’m hoping it won’t be long before we can see this on video: last night’s debate between Jay Richards and Christopher HItchens on Intelligent Design. Stanford Daily Online reported on it, including this:

Hitchens then requested the chance to ask Richards a question.

“Do you believe Jesus Christ was born of a virgin?” he asked when Richards assented. “Do you believe he was resurrected from the dead?”

Richards said that he did.

“I rest my case,” said Hitchens. “This is an honest guy, who has just made it very clear [that] science has nothing to do with his world view.”

Earlier Richards had pointed out the obvious: “a sneer is not an argument.” He could have said it again here. (As a debater, Hitchens is definitely quick with the smug sneer of superiority.)

Hitchens’s point seems to be that belief in miracles precludes science being a contributor to one’s worldview, and vice versa. What would have to be true in order for that to be the case? First, it would mean that Isaac Newton’s and Francis Collins’s worldviews have had nothing to do with science, to say nothing of hundreds of other eminent Christian scientists. Is that not just a bit unlikely?

Second, it would have to mean that the virgin birth of Christ is so contradictory to science that no person could accept both at the same time. But this distorts the Christian position regarding miracles in general, and the virgin birth and resurrection in particular. Christians believe the universe behaves regularly, according to natural law, reflecting the rational mind of God; but that God as a personal Being interrupts this regularity from time to time, for the sake of relationship with the people He created. Interventions of the clearly miraculous sort are rare, rare enough that science can successfully discover the regularities that do exist. There is no contradiction there.

Hitchens might argue that science has proved miracles are impossible; but this is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific conclusion. Science studies regularities, that which usually happens. It does not know whether the usual always happens. If science says the usual must always happen, it is speaking outside its field. It can only study what is normal, regular, usual. How could it prove God never intervenes?

So Hitchens’s sneer is empty. We do not know how Jay Richards responded. According to the report, moderator Ben Stein got there first:

“Many people are deeply religious,” he said. “Are they just stupider than you?”

I wonder where he got the impression that Hitchens feels that way.

“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.

Book Review

Science, Evolution, and Creationism, richly illustrated and printed on glossy stock, is a marvelous scientific defense of evolutionary theory from the National Academy of Sciences. If that were all it tried to accomplish, it would be quite a fine little book (just 54 pages plus bibliography, index, and author bios). What it attempts to do instead, though, is to show the compatibility of religion and evolution, and the utter worthlessness of Intelligent Design and other “creationisms.” Like so much else that has been written on this topic, it oversimplifies in some places, misrepresents in others, and is thoroughly wrong in others. It’s hard to know where to begin addressing it all.

I’ll dive in with this from page 37, the opening words of a chapter titled “Creationist Perspectives.” Several of the book’s major distortions crop up in these two-plus paragraphs:

Advocates of the ideas collectively known as “creationism” and, recently, “intelligent design creationism” hold a wide variety of views. Most broadly, a “creationist” is someone who rejects scientific explanation of the known universe in favor of special creation by a supernatural entity. Creationism in its various forms is not the same thing as belief in God because, as was discussed earlier, many believers as well as many mainstream religious groups accept the findings of science, including evolution. Nor is creationism necessarily tied to Christians who interpret the Bible literally. Some non-Christian religious believers also want to replace scientific explanations with their own religion’s supernatural accounts of physical phenomena.

In the United States, various views of creationism typically have been promoted by small groups of politically active religious fundamentalists who believe that only a supernatural entity could account for the physical changes in the universe and for the biological diversity of life on Earth. But even these creationists hold very different views. Some, know as “young Earth” creationists, believe the biblical account that the universe and the Earth were created just a few thousand years ago. Proponents of this form of creationism also believe that all living things, including humans, were created in a very short period of time in essentially the forms in which they exist today. Other creationists, known as “old Earth” creationists, accept that the Earth may be very old but reject other scientific findings regarding the evolution of living things.

No scientific evidence supports these viewpoints. On the contrary, as discussed earlier, several independent lines of evidence indicate that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and that the universe is about 14 billion years old…

Defining Terms
In any social or political discourse, being successful at defining vocabulary is the equivalent of taking the high hill in military battle. If you can pin an emotionally laden label on your opponent, you can cut thinking short. That’s why abortion supporters won’t use “pro-life” for their opponents, but label them “anti-choice.” A “creationist,” the NAS says, is “someone who rejects scientific explanation of the known universe in favor of special creation by a supernatural entity.” They don’t mention that “creationist” has a history of anti-intellectualism and poor science, but they do toss in some great buzzwords: “politically active religious fundamentalists.” Yes, indeed.

To label Intelligent Design as a form of creationism is a rhetorical ploy with some emotional force. Tactics like this have been successful already in leading many to believe that ID “rejects scientific explanation of the known universe,” and science in general. (I’m willing to bet some readers here have bought into that error.) Ironically, the book in previous chapters acknowledged that there is no scientific explanation of the known universe, i.e., the Big Bang; nor is there a scientific explanation for the first life on earth. There’s nothing there to reject.

Intelligent Design could be considered anti-science on one definition. On page 10 the book says, “In science, explanations must be based on naturally occurring phenomena.” That’s a perfectly sound and true statement, except that it’s used immoderately, with an assumption that explanations must be scientific to be of value. I’ve never read any ID author even hinting that scientific explanations be sought and applied in every conceivable circumstance; but they reject the view that every explanation must be based on naturally occurring phenomena, on grounds that there could be some causes that are not natural. This is the distinction between philosophical naturalism (or materialism) and a broader view that refuses to suppose that nothing exists besides matter, energy, and their law- and chance-based interactions.

So if one equates disagreement with naturalism to being “anti-science,” then much of ID is anti-science. That’s rather a twisted perspective, however. It’s like saying I’m anti-books because I believe I can read, enjoy, and learn from sources outside the bound, printed page.

Mixing Terms
I cut short the third paragraph of this quote because it continues in a very similar vein. Note how, after describing young Earth and old Earth creationism, it says “no scientific evidence supports these viewpoints,” but proceeds to refute just one of them. The rest of the passage is about the same. This is slippery work. Yes, young Earth creationism seems to be rebutted quite effectively by science. Given the definition of science as requiring natural explanations, though, what could it mean for scientific evidence to support the old Earth creationist viewpoint? It would have to support the finding that a non-natural cause was involved in natural history; but science, by definition, can’t do that. What they should have said with respect to old Earth creationism is that scientific evidence cannot speak to it.

I it cannot yet be a legitimate scientific finding that all life came about on Earth by strictly material, natural causes. Science can and does show the relatedness of all life. From there, the inference of common descent is a reasonable one to make (disputable on some grounds, yet certainly reasonable from the scientist’s perspective; more on that in a future blog posting). The further inference they want us to make, that common descent happened entirely from within a closed system of natural cause and effect, is philosophical and theological, not scientific. This is because the methods of science restrict it to knowledge of what happens within its sphere. If there is anything happening outside that sphere, science does not have the tools to comment on it.

Compatible With Politics, Too

“As was discussed earlier, many believers as well as many mainstream religious groups accept the findings of science, including evolution.”

The earlier discussion referred to was intended to show that religion is not incompatible with evolution. I don’t know anybody, though, who believes in religion. I know people who have very specific beliefs about the nature of God, His work in the origin of the universe, His relationship to people, and the like. Some of them agree with evolution in all its materialist glory, some accept theistic evolution, some who remain uncommitted, some are ID proponents, and some are young Earth creationists. I struggle with understanding the value of showing, as this book attempts to do, that evolution is compatible with religion. You might as well say it’s compatible with politics.

The only conceivable purpose of this could be to try to persuade readers to change their religious beliefs. There’s nothing wrong with that in general, but in this instance it’s another example of the immoderacy of science. Certainly my beliefs take scientific evidences into account; that’s why I’m not a young Earth creationist (there are Biblical reasons as well). To suppose that readers will alter their beliefs only on account of science, however, is presuming far too much. Our beliefs take in far more than that: history, philosophy, personal experience, God’s revelation, and more.

Just a Couple of Paragraphs
In just two-odd paragraphs we see several confusions and distortions. I’ll write further on this later, for these are not all that there were.

Let me reiterate, though, what I said so briefly earlier: the explanation of evolution in this book is excellent. I am strongly encouraging my two children to learn as much as they can about evolution, including the arguments in its favor. Even if it’s wrong, it’s essential education. You could say the same about the Bible–though I obviously I wouldn’t agree that it’s wrong. Both evolution and Bible are essential parts of the intellectual landscape in the Western world, and they are both mighty forces to contend with. If this book was intended to bring some reconciliation between people who reject one or the other, it has unfortunately not done the work necessary to succeed.

Related:

• I Had No Idea Intelligent Design Proponents Were So Stupid
• The NAS and the Fact-Value Dichotomy
• Naturalistic Evolution: Underdetermined by the Evidence