Thinking Christian

Yesterday in a very quick post I pointed to an inconsistency in Jerry Coyne’s New Republic article, “Seeing and Believing,” which is a critical review of two new books by the theistic evolutionists Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson. Today I must mention several things I really appreciate about what he wrote, and offer some suggestions about what it it may mean.

My first appreciation is this: far too often when Intelligent Design opponents speak of it in terms of creationism, they leave their terms vague. “Creationism” is spat out as an epithet, almost never defined. That’s just never helpful, in view of all the multiple competing denotations and connotations of the word. Coyne, bless him, tells us what he means by it:

But regardless of their views, all creationists share four traits. First, they devoutly believe in God. No surprise there, except to those who think that ID has a secular basis. Second, they claim that God miraculously intervened in the development of life, either creating every species from scratch or intruding from time to time in an otherwise Darwinian process. Third, they agree that one of these interventions was the creation of humans, who could not have evolved from apelike ancestors. This, of course, reflects the Judeo-Christian view that humans were created in God’s image. Fourth, they all adhere to a particular argument called “irreducible complexity.” This is the idea that some species, or some features of some species, are too complex to have evolved in a Darwinian manner, and must therefore have been designed by God.

There are some points to criticize in that definition, especially with respect to the relationship of creationism and Intelligent Design. I have made corrections of that sort often enough in the past, so this time I’ll leave them for others to handle if they wish. Here is what’s more interesting to me. Let’s take this as a working definition for now, for the sake of seeing what it leads to. More specifically, given Coyne’s definition of creationism, what does he consider is wrong with it? The answer, as it turns out, is not what one would expect.

My second note of appreciation is for the careful way Coyne spells out his answer to that important question. He places the entire relationship of religion and science under scrutiny, presenting some very helpful, accurate analysis along the way. For example, some liberal theologians water down religion to make it compatible with evolution, which leaves it, he says, “a hairsbreadth from pantheism,” or “leaves God out completely.” In this he is exactly right. To achieve that compatibility in truth, “a proper solution must harmonize science with theism;” and he correctly recognizes that this theism ought to be of the sort that is “actually understood and practiced by human beings,” not by ivory tower theorists.

This sets the stage for his appreciation and then his criticism of Giberson’s and Miller’s books. Neither of these authors is friendly towards Intelligent Design, much less toward any of the earlier manifestations of “scientific creationism.” Miller is one of ID’s more vocal critics, possibly the most effective of them all. His particular effectiveness comes from his not presenting much of a theological axe to grind: he is a practicing Catholic, a vocal believer in God. Giberson, too, though not as prominent in the debate as Miller is, criticizes ID from the standpoint of a believer in God.

Coyne says several positive things about their critiques of design. Then, in preparation for his criticism, he takes aim himself against not only ID but also the general category of religious truths. Religious truth, he says, is fundamentally flawed:

What, then, is the nature of “religious truth” that supposedly complements “scientific truth”? The first thing we should ask is whether, and in what sense, religious assertions are “truths.” Truth implies the possibility of falsity, so we should have a way of knowing whether religious truths are wrong. But unlike scientific truths, religious ones differ from person to person and sect to sect. And we all know of clear contradictions between the “truths” of different faiths. Christianity unambiguously claims the divinity of Jesus, and many assert that the road to salvation absolutely depends on accepting this claim, whereas the Koran states flatly that anyone accepting the divinity of Jesus will spend eternity in hell. These claims cannot both be “true,” at least in a way that does not require intellectual contortions.

Coyne’s problem with religious truth is similar to that stated by Tom Clark: we don’t have an adequate test for its truth or falsity. Coyne should realize, I hope, that just because religions disagree, that is no proof that all of them are wrong, or that a wholesale rejection of a spiritual view of life is justified. He seems not to be aware that religions are subject to rational and evidential tests, which, though they may not in all cases be conclusive, are nevertheless strongly indicative of which beliefs are worthy of being held.

Be that as it may, in making his complaint about religious truth, Coyne draws a firm line in the sand. Though on the surface they may seem to be allies among those who battle against Intelligent Design or creation science, Coyne considers Miller and Giberson to be virtually creationists themselves.

Although Giberson and Miller see themselves as opponents of creationism, in devising a compatibility between science and religion they finally converge with their opponents. In fact, they exhibit at least three of the four distinguishing traits of creationists: belief in God, the intervention of God in nature, and a special role for God in the evolution of humans. They may even show the fourth trait, a belief in irreducible complexity, by proposing that a soul could not have evolved, but was inserted by God….

Besides his “aesthetic design” argument, Giberson offers another reason for his faith–we might call it the argument from convenience….

This touching confession reveals the sad irrationality of the whole enterprise–the demoralizing conflict between a personal need to believe and a desperation to show that this primal need is perfectly compatible with science.

It would appear, then, that one cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time. That alleged synthesis requires that with one part of your brain you accept only those things that are tested and supported by agreed-upon evidence, logic, and reason, while with the other part of your brain you accept things that are unsupportable or even falsified.

And now we are ready to answer the question, what is the problem with creationism, as Coyne sees it? And what is the problem with Intelligent Design? Astonishingly, it’s not that he disagrees with ID’s scientific findings! Otherwise how could he lump staunch evolutionists like Miller and Giberson together with ID proponents or other “creationists?” On this evidence, is it too much to suppose that Coyne would reject ID even if Behe’s and Dembski’s arguments for it were widely accepted?

The question isn’t about the science at all, is it?

No, it’s not the science, it’s the worldview behind the debate. And here is my final note of at least partial appreciation for what Coyne has done here: he has succeeded in making it clear that for him (and likely for others) the ID question is a matter of worldview. I call it “partial appreciation,” because I’m not entirely sure Coyne realizes what he has done. He has drawn his line in the sand, and where he places his friends and his opponents has nothing to do with their science; it’s about their religion.

It is for him a religious battle, and his position is a religious one—not that he is religious himself, but that his position is defined by his own view of religion. This is what he has accused ID of doing, and yet he has done it himself.

I’m glad he has made that so plainly apparent, whether he sees it himself or not.

Recent Related Posts:
A Man of Great Faith
Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Whose Rhetorical Maneuvering?

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This talk on Views of Truth was given on March 9 to the Chapel at Kingsmill. I regret that I had no control over the recording method–the microphone was far from the front of the room, so there’s room noise. It’s still audible and listen-able in spite of that, though.

Click To Play:

 

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For The Chapel at Kingsmill, where I’ll be speaking this morning, here’s a short resource list for learning more on the topic of the discussion:

Books To Start With

• Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey
• Kingdom Triangle by J. P. Moreland
• The Reason for God by Tim Keller
• God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? by John Lennox

Websites

• Breakpoint (Chuck Colson)
• Stand to Reason
• Ravi Zacharias
• William Lane Craig
• A Four-part series on this Thinking Christian blog on Thinking Christianly, especially for non-specialists
• See also the blogroll links, at the very bottom of this page in the right-hand column

Outstanding Podcasts

• Ravi Zacharias
• Tim Keller

Magazines

• Touchstone
• Books and Culture

… all of this of course is to supplement the main thing, the Word of God.

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My guest column in the Newport News Daily Press appeared again today, under the headline “God answers it all.” It’s on Charles Colson’s provocative assertion that “Christianity is the explanation for everything.”

(The above link will disappear in 1-2 weeks, after which you may still access the article in PDF form here.)

Because of limited space, I could not address all the questions I knew my article would raise. My focus was not so much on whether Colson’s statement was true, but on what it means. To summarize: God, through His self-revelation, has given us a structure of knowledge and a background of information by which we must interpret and understand everything.

Whether this is true obviously matters, too, though; so I wrote:

This is but one brief illustration of what Colson was getting at….
But was his statement true? Is Christianity really the explanation for everything? Again, space will not allow me to address that question here the way it deserves (though I’m happy to do so at www.thinkingchristian.net).

Real Knowledge of God Makes All the Difference
The question surely comes down to this: did God create the universe, and did He reveal His ways to us through the Bible such that we can understand what He has said? Do we have real knowledge of the Person and purpose by which the world was made and we humans came to be the way we are? If so, that knowledge must make all the difference.

This does not mean that we do not live in a natural world where ordinary things happen in ordinary ways. It means rather that we have a different perspective on those ordinary things: they can often have extraordinary significance under God. Every choice matters.

It also does not mean that we ought actually to use the word “God” in every explanation, as for example (using Ohm’s Law for electricity),

Voltage equals current times resistance, because God made it that way (and we hope He doesn’t change His mind too often!).

No, for when we’re looking in the natural sphere, natural explanations are generally quite sufficient for the purpose. In the background, though, we can bear in mind that all this came from a Person who created a world where we can count on natural events happening predictably in natural ways. Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project, provides a great example of that mindset:

As a scientist who is also a believer, virtually everything that we uncover day after day about the human genome and how it works is also a glimpse of God’s mind. My work is a celebration of our understanding of nature, but more importantly a celebration of what God has done.

Open For Questions
Again, though, do we really have knowledge of God and His purposes? The controversy on this is undeniable. My position is that God has given us considerable and very sufficient evidence that He is real, through the record of the Bible, through His work in history, through what He has created, and through His work in the lives of many, many followers.

There’s a space limitation here in this blog, too, but in the right-hand column of this web page you’ll see a link for “Evidences,” which will refer you to much additional information on this (or just click here). There is also another set of evidence-oriented blog entries you can reach from the right-hand column here, the former home page of this blog.

And to save you the trouble of searching for specifics, the comments section below is open for your questions.

(Thanks to Mark D. Roberts for the Francis Collins link.)

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Reading the NAS book on Science, Evolution, and Creationism, I was struck by the fact that naturalistic evolution is underdetermined by the evidence. That is, one cannot validly conclude, just from evidence in nature, that everything can be explained only and exclusively in terms of natural causes and effects. There is always a background perspective.

How, for example, does one treat the incomplete fossil record? Do we see Tiktaalik (discovered in 2004 in northern Canada, with features combining those of fish and of four-legged animals) as a strong confirmation that land animals evolved out of the sea? Or do we ask why, of all the millions of transitional forms there must have been over the eons, so terribly few have been found? If transitional forms are like rafts for a swimmer across a sea, do we pay more attention to the few rafts or the long water?

But for science, only one perspective is allowed in the debate. As the book said,

In science, explanations must be based on naturally occurring phenomena.

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days, and trying to write on it for a long time today, and I’ve just recognized I’m not going to do any better this time than I did in previous postings on this. So I’m re-publishing something I first wrote in December 2005, with some edits and updates. As we’ll see, the NAS’s naturalistic position can only lead to one conclusion, but it’s a position (and therefore a conclusion) that precedes the evidence rather than following from the evidence.

To put it another way: how we interpret the evidences of natural history is inevitably colored by the presuppositions we bring in to the question with us. The NAS position is functionally one of ontological materialism (also known as philosophical materialism, or philosophical naturalism). It does not go so far as saying there is nothing but natural phenomena, but it only admits natural phenomena into discussion. But this is not a position that flows out of science or out of the evidence; it is a position by which one interprets science.

Everybody starts with some opinion on these philosophical and theological issues. The following chart shows how different initial viewpoints will color one’s interpretations. It is not intended to cover all options exhaustively. It’s focused on the major players in the debate. I’ve left out the impersonal pantheistic and polytheistic views of deity, which don’t seem to be involved in the discussion. Pantheists (or panentheists) of the New Age variety typically land in the Neo-Darwinian camp anyway, and other eastern religions do not seem to propose creation stories with any real attempt at credibility. I’m not qualified to speak on their views, at any rate, nor am I qualified to speak on the Muslim form of theism. Panspermia is not included here because it seems to be another version of the ontological materialist view, and this is more about the development of life than its initial origins on earth anyway.

Also, I’m not suggesting that every contributor to this discussion does or should approach it this way. There are Darwin skeptics who haven’t done much metaphysical work, at least not publicly; they’re primarily concerned about empirical (scientific) problems they see in evolutionism. This chart is designed to fit only those who approach it from a particular perspective, and that within limits.

And a final disclaimer: because it is not exhaustive, this chart only works from top to bottom, not in reverse. A philosopher like Antony Flew can accept Intelligent Design and yet have problems with Biblical revelation.

Much of the debate on ID centers on whether it’s credible even to consider the possibility that the development of life has been purposefully guided. That’s where this chart begins. Those who say “no” are ontological materialists/naturalists: they are convinced that nothing at the ground of existence (ontology) has purpose or can act as a guiding agent; all there is, is matter and energy and their interactions. The only option on the table for materialists is neo-Darwinism and/or its intellectual descendants.

Belief in purposeful guidance, on the other hand, is typically tied to belief in a personal God. God’s guidance may conceivably have been entirely contained in “seed” form from the moment of creation, such that God has not intervened since then. This is a generally deistic view, which leads also to something like a neo-Darwinian conclusion, though its assumptions may not be as strictly materialistic as those of many neo-Darwinians.

Among those (including myself) who believe in a personal God who intervenes (the theistic view), some are young-earth creationists who view Genesis 1 as being literally true. Others view Genesis 1 as not being literally true in that sense; most of these hold what I call the figurative/literal view. It’s possible to believe that the Bible is literally true according to the authors’ original intent, and that Moses, the author (under the Spirit’s inspiration) intended the creation story to be viewed in a poetic, figurative sense. There’s no need to discuss that at length; the point is that it’s possible to believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible and yet not believe in a literal 6-day creation.

Thus there are those who believe in a personal God who may have intervened in the development of life since creation, and who do not ascribe to the young-earth view. This group may further divide into two sub-groups, based on their theology or their view of the evidences. The determining question at this stage is whether God’s intervention was hidden or discoverable. Theistic evolution believes God was present and involved in the development of life, but his work was hidden, perhaps even tucked away on a quantum level, so that we will not discover his intervention through empirical means. The final group is that of Intelligent Design theism, those who believe that God’s intervention left traces that scientists can discern today. (Remember where this flow chart begins and how it progresses. It leads to a theistic version of Intelligent Design, but that does not mean that all ID is theistic. ID research that sticks with empirical evidences in nature leads toward intelligence as a conclusion, not toward God. To move to God from ID is to move from science into philosophy and theology. That’s a legitimate move to make, as long as one has recognized the shift in methods and disciplines employed.)

The first octagonal box on the chart points out that neo-Darwinism and theistic evolution are empirically indistinguishable. There is no science that can discern between God being absent or having just hidden his interventions. This contributes to answering whether evolution science and religion are necessarily incompatible. They are not, if this box represents any possible reality. Neither can disprove the other, so neither need view the other as enemy. It also demonstrates that atheistic evolutionists like Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson, etc. have not arrived at their dogmatic atheism through evolutionary science (as they claim) but through other prejudices. Their position is not determined by the evidences.

The second octagonal box asks whether there is any theological need to choose between ID and theistic evolutionism. The question mark is there for a reason. Our friend and former commenter here Mike S. has said there is nothing unbiblical at all in theistic evolution. Young-earth creationists strenuously object. For me, this is a matter that requires more work, yet for now I lean toward a figurative-literal interpretation of Genesis 1, after the hermeneutic suggested by Lee Irons, and an old-earth version of Intelligent Design with God as creator. But it may be that for theists the only way in the end to choose between theistic evolution and ID will be the empirical method.

Interesting, isn’t it, that empirical methods are more determinative for theists than for naturalists! We do not have all our answers pre-determined regardless of evidences; but a strong case could be made that naturalists do.

Related:

• I Had No Idea Intelligent Design Proponents Were So Stupid
• The NAS and the Fact-Value Dichotomy
• The NAS on Science, Evolution, and Creationism

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