When I pointed out that many Christians don’t believe the Scriptures are inerrant , a great number of Christians do believe in evolution, numerous Christians don’t believe in original sin, some Christians don’t believe in hell, and even more Christians believe in conditional immortality, my uncle was just flabbergasted. To each one of my points, he would say, “well, most Christians do believe that.”

Granted, I don’t know how many Christians hold these unorthodox positions. I haven’t done a survey on them. Over the past two millennia of Christianity, these are undoubtedly minority opinions. However, the fact is that Christians disagree on these issues. The unifying feature of Christianity is in it’s very name – Christ. It is by our faith in Christ that we are saved, not our faith in creationism or the Bible or hell or the apocalypse. One cannot reject the Christian faith based on their distaste for any one of these doctrines. So these are not the issues that we should argue with atheists.

We're supposed to be preaching for Christ, not against Darwin.

If Joseph Porter had argued with me about the earth being 6,000 years old, I would have never become a Christian. I’ve done extensive reading on the subject and would have probably laughed in his face if he had brought the subject up. Instead, we argued about Christ and sin and redemption – the key doctrines of Christianity, the essentials of the gospel. I know of people who have left church entirely because their peers sneered at their beliefs regarding one of these disputable matters. (Granted, the person who left was probably in error for leaving over such an issue, but imagine what a difference it would have made if they were reminded of Christ’s love instead of berated for valuing science.)

That is what Christ commands us to do: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

We are supposed to teach people to obey what Jesus’ commands, not insist upon particular doctrines that don’t affect one’s life as a Christian. Of course, these are all issues worth discussing and debating among Christians, and which are fun to debate in forums like blog posts and pub nights! But we cannot let these disputable matters take precedence. When we preach these things instead of the gospel, we are putting other doctrines above Christ. If we are talking to atheists, we should preach sola evangelium – the gospel alone.

Christianity.com - The Calling of Christian Writers - Richard Doster asks what is different about the new breed of Christian writers, including Marilynne Robinson

Irreligious – Inception Breaks the Rules – Terence muses on how the cinematic hit Inception compares with the behavior of megachurches in Singapore.

The New York Times Opinionator – Your Move: The Maze of Free Will – Science tells us free will is impossible. Why then do we still take responsibility for our actions?

Christianity.com – The Sinkhole Syndrome – Donald S. Whitney comments on the phenomenon of spiritual leaders suddenly collapsing in the mire of heinous sin, and what we should do about it.

Revelation is Real - Gospel and Glitz in Singapore – Tony Siew on megachurches in Singapore, their excesses as well as what smaller churches can learn from their practices and popularity.

InDepthNews – Spirituality Tangos with Showbiz in Singapore – by Kalinga Seneviratne – title pretty much says it all.

img source (c) Judith Huang

You are well known for advocating a view called theistic evolution. Could you tell us briefly what theistic evolution is and what guiding principles led you to this view? What is the relationship between God and evolution? Did God somehow “guide” it? What would you say to Christians who don’t believe in evolution?

How certain is the scientific evidence for evolution? Is it a “cop-out” not to interpret the Genesis creation story literally? Theistic evolution, or BioLogos as I prefer to call it, embraces the evidence of biological evolution. That evidence grows more overwhelming every day, especially on the basis of the study of the genomes of many organisms, providing the kind of digital record of descent from a common ancestor that Darwin could never have imagined. But that answers the “how” question about the marvelous diversity of life on earth, it doesn’t answer the “why” question. In my book The Language of God, and soon to
be further explored in a web site addressing the most frequently asked questions about science and faith (www.biologos.org), the case is made that evolution was God’s mechanism for creation, including the ultimate development of human beings. As for the marvelous and profound Genesis creation story, it has much to teach us about the nature of God and the nature of humans. But thoughtful and highly educated believers like Augustine in 400 AD did not consider it appropriate to interpret Genesis 1 and 2 literally, so it is perplexing indeed that many conservative Christians have found it necessary to do so for the last 150 years.

Can you describe the argument for a moral law that drew you to Christianity? Why was it so convincing? Do you think that evolution can adequately account for morality? What would the consequences for faith in God be if evolution could account for morality?

One of the most notable characteristics of humanity, across centuries, cultures, and geographic locations, is a universal grasp of the concept of right and wrong, and an inner voice that calls us to do the right thing. This is often referred to as the Moral Law. We may not always agree on what behaviors are right (and this is heavily influenced by culture), but we generally agree that we should try to do good and avoid evil. When we break the Law (which, if we are honest, is frequently), we make excuses for ourselves, only further demonstrating that we feel obligated to the Law. Evolutionary arguments, which ultimately must support reproductive fitness as the overarching goal, may explain some parts of this human urge toward altruism – especially if your sacrificial acts are offered to your relatives, or to those from whom you might expect some future reciprocal benefits. Martin Nowak has recently extended those models to show that evolution could even favor altruism directed at all members of your own group. But these evolutionary models all require hostility to outgroups within your species. Somehow we humans didn’t seem to get that memo – in fact, we especially admire examples where individuals act sacrificially for others from outgroups that they don’t even know – think of Mother Teresa, or Oskar Schindler, or the Good Samaritan. Dismissing these acts of radical altruism as some sort of evolutionary misfiring, which is the usual response from an atheist, ought to at least be viewed skeptically as a bit of a “just so” story. And if these noble acts are frankly a scandal to reproductive fitness, might they instead be a pointer toward a holy, loving, and caring God, who instilled this Moral Law into each of us as a sign of our special nature, and as a call to relationship with the Almighty? Don’t get me wrong, or interpret this argument as an example of “God of the gaps”. If evolutionary mechanisms turn out to be sufficient to explain the Moral Law, that still doesn’t rule out God’s hand in the process. After all, if God is the author of evolution anyway, it would make sense that a holy God who cares about good and evil would have
used the evolutionary process to instill the Moral Law into humanity.

In your book, The Language of God, you explain how your intellectual quest to confirm your atheism resulted in belief in the God of the Bible. What were some of the most significant turning points along this journey? Why did you leave atheism for Christianity?

I realized that there were compelling signposts to God in nature. Here are just a few examples: the fact that there is something instead of nothing; the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” (Wigner’s phrase) to explain the behavior of matter and energy; the need to answer the question “what came before the Big Bang?”; and the finetuning of physical constants in the universe to have just the value they need to make complexity possible. With my eyes opened by the first chapter of C.S. Lewis’s book “Mere Christianity”, I also realized that there was no simple materialistic explanation for the existence of right and wrong, nor for our universal human calling to be moral beings. While these are not proofs of God’s existence, and I believe no such proofs will be found, the combination of these arguments led me to realize that atheism is the most fundamentalist and least rational of all of the worldview options. In Chesterton’s words, “Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative.” Having come to the point of seeing the existence of God as a compelling conclusion, I then was curious to discover what God was like. For that purpose I studied the world’s religions to see what they had to say. When I encountered the person of Jesus Christ, my life changed. I could see that this was a man like no other – who not only claimed to know God, but to be God. I was astounded to learn that the historical evidence for Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection was compelling. And I realized that Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross provided a solution to my increasing distress at never being able to approach a holy God because of my own unholiness.
____________________________________________________________________________
Francis Collins is a former leader of the Human Genome Project, current director of the National Institutes of Health, and founder of The BioLogos Foundation.

Quantum mechanics is the study of how matter behaves at its smallest levels. The problem is that all of our experiments have demonstrated that particles behave in the most peculiar ways. This has allowed for the conjecture of many different (and bizarre) explanations for what’s going on. To figure out which of these interpretations are plausible, we run many thought experiments. One of the most famous is that of Schrödinger’s cat. One way of explaining the bizarre results of the two-path experiment is postulating that particles exist in a state of superposition – that is, they exist in two places at once. (There is a good explanation of this on page 11 of David Albert’s book Quantum Mechanics and Experience) But it only exists in two places until an observer looks at the device and causes the state of superposition to collapse into a definite position. This sounds a little crazy at first, but the problem is that we can’t run any experiment to figure out what the particle is actually doing. We can, however, as philosophers love to do, think about it for a really long time.

If the shameless plugs for the class at the beginning of the article didn't convince you to take the class, I hope that this lecture slide from the class to demonstrate the experimental set-up - complete with blood - will persuade you.

So a philosopher decides to rig up a device in which a particle is forced to go either up or down and hit a detection screen. If the particle goes up and hits the top of the detection screen, a heavy weight will be released directly above a poor kitty and the kitty will be promptly killed. If the particle goes down, the weight will not be released and the kitty will survive! Now, the theory states that the particle will exist in a state of superposition until an observer looks at the experiment. So what does that mean for our precious kitty?

Well, the state of the particle at the beginning can be written something like this:

1/√2 |up, 0> + 1/√2 |down, 0>

All that means is that there is a 1/2 chance that the particle will go up and a 1/2 chance that the particle will go down. If this superposition is real, it’s something like half up and half down until we look at the experiment and force it into the either the |up, 0> or |down, 0> state. But because of the way that the experiment is set up, this particle’s state becomes entangled with the states of other objects. If the particle goes up, then a certain state of the detector and the weight and the kitty will necessarily follow. That means that we can write the state as:

1 √ 2 |up, 0> |detector screen top> |weight falls> |kitty dies> +

1 √ 2 |down, 0> |detector screen bottom> |weight stays> |kitty lives!>

Under the superposition interpretation, the kitty is both dead and alive at the same time until someone looks at it. This rather absurd conclusion has lead some people to conclude that this superposition/collapse interpretation is untenable. That is, even though they could accept the initial claim that particles existed in a state of superposition, they could not accept the necessary conclusion from that assertion that cats could be both dead and alive simultaneously. These two conclusions were entangled in such a way that to accept the first, you must accept the second. If you rejected the latter conclusion, you could no longer hold onto the first conclusion.

At this point, you’re probably wondering why I’m writing all of this on the Ichthus blog instead of on, say, my philosophy class blog. Here’s the answer: it is very easy to entangle theological positions on Christian doctrine in such a way that it makes the initial claims untenable.

So say we’ve got a claim about Jesus:

|Jesus was the Son of God>

And we know based on His testimony that the scripture is reliable, so the states are entangled and can be rewritten:

|Jesus was the Son of God>|The Scripture is authoritative>

Because the Scripture is reliable, and based on what is written in Genesis, we come to the conclusion:

|Jesus was the Son of God>|The Scripture is authoritative>|Man comes from Adam>

This obviously makes us come to realizations about scientific claims regarding creation, so we have a new state:

|Jesus was the Son of God>|The Scripture is authoritative>|Man comes from Adam>|Evolution is false>

Most people (including myself, despite my last post) find this position to be an untenable one. Yet because these states are (seemingly) entangled, our rejection of the last claim demands our rejection of the first. (In particular, I think that if we keep this chain of entanglement up, we come to the even more troubling conclusion that: |Jesus was the Son of God>|The Scripture is authoritative>|Man comes from Adam>|Evolution is false>|Our very experience deceives us>|God deceives us> But that is besides the point.)

The problem is that these states aren’t necessarily entangled as the ones in the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. For example, there are lots of questions about what it really means when we say that the Bible is authoritative. Does that mean that it is a reliable guide for science? For morality? Does that mean it’s inerrant? Or can it still be full of error? Does every word come from God? Or is it simply that all parts are useful?

On the other hand, it seems like the Scripture’s authority is entangled with some doctrinal beliefs. My question is: how heavily entangled is it? Can we draw clear-cut conclusions about heaven and hell? The role of the church? The role of women?

My answer is that I’m honestly not sure. But I do think that it is easy to overestimate how entangled the claims actually are. We underestimate how doctrinally divided the early church was. There was a high level of tolerance for different theological doctrines, so long as there was still faith in Christ and repentance from sin. In 1 Corinthians, Paul does not suggest ending fellowship with a brother who denied any particular theological doctrine, but with one who has continued in grave sexual immorality. Our very own Nick Nowalk wrote a post last month that about how the early Church did not have our distinction between orthodoxy and orthopraxy; errors in practice were corrected by proper doctrine in the formula “Do You Not Know?” Yet each example of Christian error involves practice. There is little (if any) correction of doctrine which does not manifest itself in practical differences.

I find this to be very good news. Christianity is not like Quantum Mechanics. In Quantum Mechanics, there is no question of entanglement. The states are so obviously entangled that the false conclusion may lead us to reject the initial hypothesis entirely. In Christianity, the level of entanglement is unclear. False conclusions do not force us to reject the initial claim Jesus is Lord. Instead, they force us to re-evaluate our conclusions on every step of the way, enabling us to get a clearer and clearer image of the Truth.

Knoll’s epilogue is part summary, part argument, and part exhortation.  It is a summary in broad strokes of the evolutionary story told in earlier chapters; it is an argument (partly implicit) concerning the history and significance of the relation between science and religion; it is an exhortation on the basis of ecology to steward the earth.  My concern is with Knoll’s argument and his exhortation.  Aside from the emotional appeal of the rhetoric he employs to motivate us toward environmentalism, the worldview Knoll advances (and opposes to the religious worldview) fails to motivate.

Knoll’s story about science and religion is typical of Enlightenment-scientistic thought.  All religions (Knoll mentions Christianity, Hinduism, and Aboriginal mythology) are deprecated attempts to account for natural phenomena, their obsolescence was ushered in by the great Scientific Revolution of the seventeeth century, their emotional appeal has led the irrational masses to reject clear evidence for their falsehood, etc.  Knoll sets down none of this, but (I argue) it is clear from his identification of disparate religious traditions, his suggestion that creation myths be treated as parables (not, in itself, objectionable – but Knoll almost certainly has in mind the kind of parable we would do better relegating to anthropological or ethnographic investigation rather than the kind of parable that teaches important truths about the universe and our place in it), and his strange suggestion that science has allowed us to become like God(s).

Well, the Enlightenment-scientistic tradition is one that I have considered and rejected.  There are, I believe, good reasons for doing so.  But my point here doesn’t involve convincing anyone to reject that tradition.  I want merely to reflect on one way in which it differs from religious traditions, and particularly from the religions tradition with which I am most familiar – the Judeo-Christian tradition – and the significance of that difference for Knoll’s argument.  The difference I want to bring out is a difference in the sorts of claims the two traditions have the capacity to make.

Or, "Everything you always wanted to know about Cyanobacteria but were too afraid to ask."

Science is descriptive, predictive, and explanatory.  It is not normative.  That is, science can tell us what is and will be and why, but it can’t tell us what ought to be.  In fact, the thoroughgoing Enlightenment-scientist will deny that normative claims have truth values, or try to paraphrase normative language into language about occurrent emotions.  Religious language, on the other hand, abounds with normative claims.  One thinks, for example, of the Levitical law (“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy”) or the teachings of Jesus (“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”), where imperatives are naturally understood to be equivalent to claims about what one ought to do.

So Knoll has a problem.  He feels strongly that the earth ought to be preserved; he would like to communicate his feelings to the reader; but his intellectual tradition gives him no tools with which either to articulate his own conviction or argue for it.  So he turn to emotive appeal: “If we can understand the immensity of our evolutionary inheritance, we may be moved to preserve it.”  It is ecology, Knoll argues, that convinces us to protect the earth.

But why?  Surely humans are ecologically dominant.  Surely we have the power to build and destroy.  Surely we could, if we chose, destroy the world as we know it.  But none of these merely descriptive claims get us any normativity; none of them tell us what we ought to do.  The Enlightenment-scientistic tradition is not permissive of normativity.  Ecology is not enough.

The reason I bring all this up is that I am frustrated by the prevailing misconception that one can be steeped in the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment and yet keep the uniquely religious, or at least anti-Enlightentment, aspects of human experience like normativity.  No.  We cannot have our cake and eat it, too.  If we adopt Knoll’s worldview, biological diversity has no intrinsic value.  We should think of a living earth and a desolate earth with the same cool detachment.  We should be untroubled by the desolation of the rainforest or the death of thousands of miles of Carribean coral reef.  If we want to care about the earth at all, we need to step outside the Enlightment-scientistic tradition.  We must believe that some things have value and that there is a way things ought to be.  But if we do that, then we must regard Knoll’s claims and stories with some suspicion.  It is, I think, only when we see what we give away by endorsing the Enlightenment-scientistic tradition that we realize exactly how much is at stake in the dialogue between science and religion and begin to think about the issue with some clarity.

Before we start, we must understand the important distinction between macroevolution, which generally entails the claim that man evolved by chance alone, and microevolution, which is only requires natural selection operating within populations. Anyone who denies the latter must blatantly reject empirical evidence to the contrary. However, there is an important question as to whether the natural selection we observe occurring within a short period of time can be extrapolated to defend speciation. Even if it can, I think there are problems with believing that evolution can explain the presence of all life on earth.

First, although macroevolution can explain speciation, it cannot explain how the earliest forms of life began. How did life spring out of non-life? How did matter go from being inanimate to animate? How did objects miraculously start self-replicating? These are questions that science still struggles to answer. Harvard’s own Andy Knoll stated in an interview with NOVA, “The short answer is we don’t really know how life originated on this planet. There have been a variety of experiments that tell us some possible roads, but we remain in substantial ignorance.” Interestingly enough, in what I can only imagine is a veiled reference to 1 Corinthians 13: 12 (KJV), the interviewer later asks “So at this point we’re seeing the origins of life through a glass darkly?” Knoll essentially said yes, and that science will always have some unanswered mysteries, even though we will eventually get to a better understanding of those mysteries.

I think Knoll’s response is articulate and intelligent. However, it reveals that there are still very big holes in our theory of evolution (especially the gaping one at the very beginning). An evolutionist can claim that since scientists have come this far in figuring out evolution, they will eventually fill in the holes. The problem is that they’d be relying pretty heavily on a “science of the gaps” argument and essentially taking on faith that science can and will figure out the problems (even though it hasn’t for over 150 years). I have no problem with that, so long as evolutionists are intellectually honest where the evidence ends and their faith begins. Of course, most like to pretend that the theory is based on incontrovertible empirical evidence alone.

Even if this gaping hole were filled, there would still be a big problem with evolution: the problem of man. Under a purely macroscopic evolutionary account, man is but another life form created by chance, the result of completely natural events, and a part of nature itself. Yet our experience screams at us that man is distinct from nature. A bird’s nest is drastically different from a man’s home. What a beaver makes is a far cry  from the Hoover dam. A mole’s den cannot compare to the chunnel.

Look what Nature made!

I’ve heard many people in support of evolution describe how some catastrophic event will eventually occur and wipe out mankind, restoring the planet to her “natural state.” In other words, somehow man is an ugly unnatural force in an otherwise beautiful, natural earth. Yet if evolution is true, then we should view man’s machines as no more mysterious or unnatural than the twigs in a birds nest. There can be no return to nature if man is merely a part of nature itself. A city should be as natural as a forest. But the fact is that we don’t look at a city and think “oh, what a beautiful thing that Nature has wrought.” We distinguish between the beauty of nature and the beauty of objects made by man.

This is where I take issue with the evolutionary account of the world: it denies the fundamental difference between man and nature. Man strikes me as much more than a mere arrangement of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and phosphorus. Evolution doesn’t give a good explanation of how that is possible, and that is why I don’t believe that evolution gives a complete account of life on this planet.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive the book (even though the text is available online), because it may be one of the most influential works of all time.

But I was also confused. Who has the money to hand out hundreds of nice, glossy books to college students? I checked the back cover and saw that the book had been published by the Bridge Logos Foundation.

Now, I was suspicious. A quick perusal of the “special introduction” by Ray Comfort confirmed my unease; Comfort had “introduced” Darwin by devoting fifty pages (!) to discrediting evolution, disparaging Darwin’s personal character, and asking the reader to pray Jesus into his heart.

I was annoyed.

The Gospel by any other name does not smell as sweet.

Doing some research online, I discovered that my little encounter on Mass Ave. was actually part of a much larger undertaking, a project to deliver these copies of On the Origin of Species to thousands of college students at America’s most prestigious schools. (This video summarizes the plan. And yes, that is that Kirk Cameron.)

Now, I don’t have any problem with the dissemination of creationist materials per se. I am extremely sympathetic to evolution, but it’s a free country, and we definitely need to discuss evolution more and not less.

Then what’s the problem with the project? Well…

1. It’s manipulative.

Comfort’s intention in distributing On the Origin of Species to college students is to convince America’s brightest young minds of creationism and Christianity. His website admits as much: “In one day, 170,000 future doctors, lawyers and politicians will freely get information about Intelligent Design (and the gospel) placed directly into their hands!”

If you want to convince people of creationism and Christianity, be my guest! I’m not in the business of convincing people that evolution isn’t true (I think creationism is based on bad science and – more importantly – bad exegesis), but I’m all for a healthy discussion about religion, philosophy, and science.

But if you want to convince people of creationism and Christianity, be honest and upfront about it. Don’t hide behind Darwin’s beard. Don’t pretend that you want to give me Origin of Species when what you really want to do is to evangelize. It’s true, Harvard students are probably more interested in On the Origin of Species than Why Evolution Is Wrong – but the solution to that is not dressing up the gospel in the very garb which you oppose. Introductions to On the Origin of Species should not end with exhortations to pray Jesus into your heart.

Comfort argues that this approach is not deceptive because his name will be on the cover. That’s a pretty weak excuse in my mind; if he really didn’t want to be deceptive, he could have made himself the author and added On the Origin of Species as an appendix.

To act otherwise is, in my opinion, to act out of sin and cowardice, completely unlike the  apostles. Peter and John claimed that they could not help but speak about what they had seen and heard (Acts 4:20); there was no doubt in anyone’s mind about what they were preaching. Similarly, Paul did not invite the Athenians to a symposium on Platonic thought; He preached “Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). We should do the same.

2. It’s ad hominem.

Comfort’s introduction devotes a few pages to Darwin’s (alleged) misogyny and racism, and mentions Adolf Hitler’s reliance on evolutionary theory. The implication is that evolution leads to eugenics and other horrors.

Maybe it does. So what? There have been plenty of Christians who used Christianity to justify racism and murder. Furthermore, evolution could be true even if it led to deteriorating morals.

3. It’s doubly ad hominem.

Comfort writes about atheist reactions to his project on his website:

“When [atheists] found out that I was writing an Introduction to [On the Origin of Species], they threatened lawsuits, tried to organize themselves into gangs with the intent of tearing the Introduction out of the book, and have even talked about book burnings.”

I’m sure there are some atheists who have overreacted to Comfort’s evangelistic means. But not all atheists have reacted in this way. The people from Comfort’s organization handing out books at Harvard yesterday were not disturbed at all by anyone.

Of course, even if atheists have acted so unfairly to creationists, Christians have not always been extremely charitable to non-believers. (In particular, Comfort probably shouldn’t write books entitled You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can’t Make Him Think.)

4. It undercuts serious discussion about evolution.

There are serious scholars who have qualms with evolution, and not all of them are religious. Ray Comfort, however, is not a scholar, but a preacher. I have nothing against preachers – my parents were missionaries in Brazil – but muddying the waters by conflating scientific criticisms of evolution with Evangelical Christianity is not the way to go.

5. It gets the gospel wrong!

If you’re going to preach the gospel, you should take care to make sure that you are preaching the actual gospel. Comfort’s introduction ends with a plea that the reader receive the forgiveness of sins by saying the following prayer:

“Dear God, today I turn away from all of my sins … and I put my trust in Jesus alone as my Lord and Savior. Please forgive me, change my heart, and grant me Your gift of everlasting life. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.”

The sentiment expressed in that prayer is exemplary – would that we could all offer prays to God such as that! But the Sinner’s Prayer is not biblical doctrine; it is a modern invention.

The Bible does not say that we are saved by prayer, but by faith, repentance, confession, and baptism for the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit (cf. John 3:5, 16; Acts 2:38-40, 3:19-20, 22:16; Ephesians 2:8-9 Romans 3:28, 6:3-7, 10:9-10; inter alia).

(If you don’t believe me, just ask the earliest Christians what they thought.)

Always and not at all, if we are to believe the pronouncements of most contemporary Evangelical thinkers.  I present as a starting point the following series of short excerpts from a systematic theology by John Feinberg, Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (emphasis added):

i) “We should not ignore the data of disciplines such a science, but as evangelicals we must our views insofar as possible on the basis of biblical teaching.”

ii) “Though some might see this issue [i.e. the interpretation of Genesis 1-2] as a test of orthodoxy, so long as one’s views do not clearly contradict biblical teaching on origins one could hold them without compromising evangelicalism.  There is room for charity toward many who hold views that differ with ours.  Having said this, I note that many theories that will be discussed seem to have originated in an attempt to fit Scripture with science.”

iii) “… I don’t think biblical data allow either an atheistic or a theistic evolutionary account.  This judgment is based both on exegetical and theological reasons, but also on a judgment of the scientific case in favor of any form of evolutionism.  This goes against the findings of the contemporary scientific community, but that doesn’t bother me unduly.”

My aim here is not to prove that Feinberg is wrong so much as to point out that his position seems inconsistent.  For how could we more patently “ignore the data of” science than by making no attempt whatsoever to fit Scripture with it?  Feinberg and many other evangelical thinkers, when questioned on this issue, initially present a vision of the interplay between science and theology according to which the two inform each other but Biblical evidence is given the final say.  Yet these very same thinkers would be extremely uncomfortable with the idea that the current scientific consensus concerning (for example) evolution puts any pressure on Christians to accommodate their views to the data.  Why?

If the answer were that these thinkers take issue with the most basic methodologies of modern empirical science, perhaps we would have no reason to blame them. Their position would be consistent, if almost unintelligibly strange.  But that can’t be the answer, because the same thinkers who so fervently refuse to countenance a single piece of evidence for evolution go on to argue on empirical grounds for the historicity of the resurrection and the traditional authorship of the epistles and a host of other evangelical positions.  Moreover, such thinkers always seem eager to produce evidence that the current scientific consensus on evolution is incorrect; not merely irrelevant, in which case they could happily admit that all evidence points towards an evolutionary explanation of life’s development, but incorrect – scientists have gone wrong in applying their own tools of investigation and endorsed a theory for which there is no good evidence.  Feinberg himself argues extensively that there is no cogent case for evolution; in short, that scientific experts have made silly mistakes.

So it seems like Feinberg and others believe on the one hand that scientific modes of inference are valid (scientists just keep getting things wrong about evolution) and on the other hand that science could never press us to shift our interpretation of scripture.  These two beliefs are inconsistent; to admit empirical grounds for belief is to admit that facts about the world could give us reason to re-evaluate our interpretation of scripture.  As long as we admit empirical grounds for belief, accommodation may not reasonably be regarded (a la Feinberg) as an inherently suspicious theological move.  We must, after all, be open-minded enough to actually weigh the evidence concerning evolution and other contentious scientific theses.

Perhaps my conclusion here seems weak or obvious.  If it does, I couldn’t be happier.  But I think that if we actually take my conclusion seriously, if we honestly weigh the evidence and seek theological consistency, we will have to make serious changes to our traditional evangelical approach to understanding scripture.  And the conclusion that we have become exceedingly narrow-minded in our ill-considered hermeneutical conservatism is neither weak nor obvious.

Modern science has regularized our view of the world. The old dividing lines – the four humors; the sublunary and superlunary spheres; man, angel, and beast – have been erased. Everything is one, capable of being modeled by universalized mathematical laws; many physicists consider a Theory of Everything to be within reach.

Why bring God into the equation?

Is there nothing more to life than applied mathematics?

The late H.L. Mencken (an agnostic, ironically) said, “For every problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong.” And I wonder if atheism’s elegant simplicity is really an elegant oversimplification – if its scientific (and often extremely reasonable) impulse to reduce and generalize reality to the result of a few fundamental laws glosses over how complicated reality actually is.

Did space-time begin with the Big Bang? If so, how? Why are the laws of Nature what they are? Why were the initial conditions of our universe what they were? Can physical reality explain its own existence? What about morality? Does it exist? If it exists, can it be “reduced” in the same way that all other phenomena have been reduced? (Wouldn’t the world be simpler if it just didn’t really exist?) What about minds? Are brains and minds the same thing? If they are, why can I see your “brain” but not your “mind”? If they are not, how can minds be explained solely by physical phenomena? Do we truly believe that every facet of the human experience – every oddity, every relationship, every composition – can be explained solely by the fact that humans evolved from lower apes? Does nothing transcend our mammalian minds?

I do not mean to say that only theists have offered substantive answers to these questions. But the impression I often get is that many non-religious people have not even considered these questions, as though the march of Science were inexorable and plenary. Such a belief, of course, is not elegantly simply but simplistic; it ignores a number of philosophical questions that truly cannot be reduced to answers drawn from the scientific method.

The truth is that the world is not so simple. If there is room in our understanding of reality for emergent minds and multiverses, there is room for angels and demons. And if there was ever a time during which the universe behaved according to different rules than those it follows now – can the universe possibly have followed the same “laws” during the Big Bang that it follows today? – then there may yet be a need for the God hypothesis. ]]> http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2009/10/secular-reductionism/feed/ 1 http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2009/10/what-is-science/ http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2009/10/what-is-science/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:00:15 +0000 J. Joseph Porter http://www.harvardichthus.org/?p=1805

“[R]ejection of the supernatural should not be a part of scientific methodology…. [S]cientists should be free to pursue hypotheses as they see fit, without being constrained by a particular philosophical account of what science is…. If science really is permanently committed to methodological naturalism, it follows that the aim of science is not generating true theories. Instead, the aim of science would be something like: generating the best theories that can be formulated subject to the restriction that the theories are naturalistic… [S]cience is better off without being shackled by methodological naturalism… [Intelligent design] should not be dismissed on the grounds that it is unscientific….”

- Bradley Monton

I’ve blogged about philosophy of science before, and I’ve even read some arguments by Christian philosophers (such as Norman Geisler) arguing that intelligent design should be considered a scientific theory. At first, I was unconvinced, but Professor Monton’s thoughts forced me to reconsider my opinions, not just about intelligent design, but about Science in general. What is “Science”? What are its limits? Where does it end (and begin)?

I think everyone has a rough picture of what Science is, and I also think that our rough pictures tend to agree. Lab coats, graduated cylinders, complicated math: the markers of Science are pretty obvious.

But what, fundamentally, unites chemistry, physics, and the other sciences (while excluding, for instance, the study of literature)? It’s hard to say.

Bradley Monton, an atheist, thinks intelligent design could potentially fall within the purview of science.

The first problem is that there’s an ambiguity in the definition of “Science” (which my friend CDK pointed out in his comment on my aforementioned blog post). Science, it seems, consists both in the gathering of empirical data through observation and in the theoretical extrapolation from that data toward a more generalized understanding of the world around us. Except…how is that different from a posteriori reasoning in general? I don’t see an immediate answer. To me, the boundaries of Science appear blurry and arbitrary.

Let’s take intelligent design as an example. A lot of people believe that ID is pseudoscientific because its hypothesis cannot be tested. But I could easily argue (and have argued) that many evolutionary claims cannot be tested. For example, we know (or have very good reason to believe) that there are extinct species that left no fossil record, but we have no means of testing putatively scientific claims about how these species evolved.

The point isn’t that ID should be considered scientific, or that a systematic and coherent formulation of what constitutes “Science” is impossible. Rather, the point is that “Science” may be an arbitrary category (at least in the popular mind), whose exact definition depends more on the historical development of particular disciplines than on anything else.

Maybe Monton (and ID theorists) are wrong and Science should be grounded upon some sort of methodological naturalism. But we should at least ask why. Why should philosophers and theologians have the freedom (that is what it is) to consider ID as a potentially viable (if ultimately untenable) option, while scientists preclude it as “unscientific” from the get-go? Why assume methodological naturalism if we are not explicitly advocating metaphysical naturalism – or if we are explicitly arguing against metaphysical naturalism?

There may be good answers to these questions, but I am not sure they will amount to much more than pragmatic answers. And, if that is the case, it may behoove us to remove Science from its cultural and epistemic pedestal.

(Hat tip to CR; his blog is where I found the post that motivated my own thoughts.) ]]> http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2009/10/what-is-science/feed/ 5