I know what you’re thinking – isn’t abstinence the Christian teaching? Hasn’t this method already failed us? After all, numerous studies have shown that abstinence-only sex education does not actually lead to abstinent behavior. In fact, this abstinence-only education that the Religious Right has insisted upon seems to lead to more teen pregnancy! The Christian philosophy has already been proven wrong!

Abstinence may be Christ’s teaching, but abstinence-only certainly is not. There’s a lot more there than simply saying no to sex. Saying that abstinence is Christ’s teaching on sex is like saying that multiplication is a complete education in math. Yes, multiplication is an important and essential part of math, but to teach multiplication-only is to lose all of the beauty and elegance of calculus and curves, of division and derivatives. To teach abstinence-only is to lose all of the power and grace of chastity and commitment, of purity and patience.

So what would a Christian sex-education focus on?

“But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.” – Matthew 5:28-29

“The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery…” – Galatians 5:19

“But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints.” – Ephesians 5:3

Essentially, avoid lust, immorality (sex with anyone besides your spouse), and impurity. This teaching is far beyond what is taught in abstinence-only education programs or in comprehensive programs. Teaching these things would require actually teaching children to avoid all sorts of sexual temptation.

The other trick is getting kids to take health class seriously when we're equipping them with fake babies.

But why should we even bother? Couldn’t we just go back to the comprehensive sex education model and be done with it? No. We need to thoroughly consider this option, because, as the Guttmacher Institute reports, seven of every ten teenagers has had sex by age 19. Furthermore, nearly one in five female teens at risk of unintended pregnancy did not use contraceptives at last intercourse. But Christians aren’t the only ones who think talking about temptation might be the way to fix sex-education.

Jonah Lehrer (one of my favorite bloggers, if you haven’t been able to tell by how often I link to him) wrote last year about the ineffectiveness of sex education:

It’s really difficult to change the sexual habits of adolescents. That’s because we’ve been trying to change behavior with facts and information. We’ve assumed that the way to get kids to wear condoms is give them statistics about sexually transmitted disease, or that the way to get students to abstain from sex is to lecture them on morality, or the difficulty of caring for a child while in high school. The problem with such facts is that they don’t help teens deal with their moment of sexual decision, which most likely occurs when they’re half naked and deranged with desire. In other words, we’ve assumed that sexual choices are rational choices, influenced by classroom exhortations and dry information. But that’s wrong.

Lehrer discusses a study from that looks at the effects of arousal on decision making:

Although the undergraduates could all recite the benefits of sexual protection, this rational knowledge was irrelevant. The charge of arousal was simply too powerful: they could no longer resist doing the wrong thing, even though they knew it was wrong. As Ariely and Loewenstein drolly concluded: “Efforts at self-control that involve raw willpower are likely to be ineffective in the face of the dramatic cognitive and motivational changes caused by arousal.”

I think Lehrer is spot on, and this matches perfectly with the Christian teaching that we must avoid impurity and lust as well as explicit sexual immorality. The Christian worldview maps well onto the discoveries of these behavioral economists. Lehrer concludes with the following:

The point is that we’ve been arming our kids with the wrong mental tools. Instead of giving them statistics, we need to provide them with the cognitive tools to deal with temptation. Instead of urging them to abstain, we need to show them how to abstain.

All I can say is “Amen!”

Many psychologists have studied the relationship between power and ethics. The standard experiment goes something like this:
1. Prime the subjects with powerlessness or power.
2. Measure how they respond to ethical problems (by asking or by testing their behavior).
3. Observe whether a correlation exists between the way the subjects have been primed.

Just because you're the boss doesn't mean you get to be mean.

But God doesn’t give us these excuses. He says just the opposite in Luke 12:48 – “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” So as Christians, we must watch ourselves closely whenever we are in power! Science has only proven what we already knew to be true: power corrupts.

BEYOND

The Creation vs. Evolution Debate

A talk by Professor Denis Lamoureux followed by a Q&A session.

SATURDAY, OCT 23 at 7 PM in EMERSON 210

Sponsored by the Harvard Ichthus, Harvard College Faith and Action, and Harvard College Alpha Omega

Abstract: Are there only two positions on origins: either “evolution” or “creation”? This lecture is an introduction to professional terminology, science-religion dialogue, and various views on origins (young earth creation, progressive creation, evolutionary creation, deistic evolution, and atheistic evolution). Denis O. Lamoureux is an Associate Professor of Science and Religion at St. Joseph’s College in the University of Alberta. He has debated leading anti-evolutionists, including Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and Jonathan Wells. With Johnson, he co-authored Darwinism Defeated? The Johnson-Lamoureux Debate on Biological Origins (1999). Lamoureux has recently released Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (2008) and I Love Jesus & I Accept Evolution (2009). He holds three earned doctoral degrees—dentistry, evangelical theology, and evolutionary biology. Lamoureux also shares his personal voyage from Christian to atheist, evolutionist to creationist and back again.

Richard Dawkins commented on Denis Lamoureux on The Agenda in 2008. Dawkins doesn’t seem too happy… Check out the video!

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

“Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [1 Timothy 1.7].” (The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Book 1 Chapter 19 Paragraph 39)

Recently the thorny and perennially volatile relationship between faith and science has arisen with a new fury in the circles of American Christianity (see here, here and here among many others).  I have no interest in rehashing these complicated debates here, nor am I an expert in any sense on the questions involved in learned scientific disputes.  What I do find helpful are some of the larger categories and theological insights that Augustine–over 1500 years ago, no less–offers us if we will listen.   Though writing long before the rise of the modern scientific worldview that dominates our collective consciousness today, one is struck by Augustine’s awareness of all the major problems that antagonize us still.

At the heart of much of this quandary, it seems to me, is a whole heap of sloppy, unexamined assumptions on all sides.  Whatever else needs to happen, these precious a prioris must come to the light for a thorough examination.  They must be validated, not simply accepted as self-evident givens.  As Christians, what are our hermeneutical principles when what Scripture seems to teach conflicts with the present consensus in scientific research?  Why?  What justification do we have for our particular construal of their relationship?  Is there any tangible way we could be proven wrong, or are we methodogically sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting to drown out the naysayers who disagree?  Let’s talk about this for a minute before we start screaming again.  Aren’t we bored yet?

Along these lines, let me offer another sterling selection from the Bishop of Hippo’s corpus that I discovered recently in his exhilarating Confessions.  In context, Augustine is recalling his painful disappointment with Mani–the intellectual leader of the Manichees, a group Augustine had sometime earlier begun to identify with before his conversion–and I was surprised to see how important Mani’s uninformed obtuseness on cosmological issues was to Augustine’s growing realization that this entire movement was spiritually bankrupt:

“Lord God of truth, it surely cannot be that simply knowing these [scientific] things renders a person pleasing to you?  Unhappy is anyone who knows it all but does not know you, whereas one who knows you is blessed, even if ignorant of all these.  Nor is anyone who knows both you and them more blessed for knowing them, but blessed on your account alone…Who ever thought of asking some fellow called Mani [leader of the Manicheans] to write on these subjects?  People could perfectly well have learned true piety without any such expertise.  Your advice to us is, Reverence for God, that is true wisdom.  Obviously Mani might have been thoroughly conversant with scientific truths, even if a stranger to piety.  In fact, however, he was ignorant of them, but still had the effrontery to teach them, and from this it emerges that he knew nothing about piety either; for to profess these theories about the world is a mark of vanity, whereas piety is proved by confession to you.  It was providential that this man talked so much about scientific subjects, and got it wrong, because this gave people who had truly studied them the chance to convict him of error; and then by implication his insight into other, more recondite matters could be clearly assessed.  Mani was content with no modest evaluation: he tried to persuade his followers that the Holy Spirit, who comforts your faithful people and enriches them with his gifts, was with full authority present in him personally.  It followed, therefore, that when he was caught out in untrue statements about the sky and the stars, or the changes in sun or moon, his presumption was plainly revealed as sacrilegious, because although these matters are not directly relevant to religious doctrine, he was not simply discoursing on things of which he was ignorant, but even, in his insane, pretentious vanity, passing off his own erroneous opinions as those of  a divine person—himself, no less. 

“When I hear one or other of my fellow Christians expressing a mistaken opinion arising from his ignorance in these fields, I regard with tolerance the person who entertains the notion.  As long as he does not believe anything unseemly about you, O Lord, creator of all things, I do not see that it does him any harm if he chances to be ignorant of the position or characteristics of a material creature.  It does harm him, however, if he thinks his view forms an essential part of our doctrine and belief, and presumes to go on obstinately making assertions about what he does not know.  Yet when this kind of weakness occurs while faith is in its cradle, our mother, charity, bears with it, looking forward to the day when newly created humanity will grow to the stature of perfect manhood, and no longer be tossed about by every gust of teaching.  The case was quite different with a man who set himself up as a teacher and writer, and as the leader and principal guide of those to whom he propounded his views, and this so persuasively that his disciples thought they were following no ordinary man but your Holy Spirit.  If ever such a man were proved to have spoken untruly, could anyone doubt that he must have been grossly deranged, and that his ideas were abhorrent, and to be rejected outright?” (Confessions, 5.5)

Perhaps in the coming months I can return to the question of how modern Christians ought to view science in light of their biblical committments, and how they ought to read the Bible in light of science.  For now, I content myself to make mention of several themes apparent in these two citations from Augustine.

*Human beings can know many things with certainty about the physical world simply through experience and reason, quite apart from Scripture.  Interpreted divine revelation does not simply trump natural revelation on extra-biblical matters, as much as some presume.  Indeed, Augustine realized that being filled with the Holy Spirit has little to no impact on the scientific skill (or lack thereof) of believers in comparison to unbelievers.  Being justified by grace does not automatically make one marvelous in the laboratory.  Deep down, don’t we all believe this?  Do any of us really think the roundness of the earth or the centrality of the sun in our solar system are up for grabs until we find them approved by Scripture.  Don’t we pre-reflectively grasp that any such passages which on the surface seem to operate with these antiquated ideas are actually about something else entirely?  Why then are we not consistent with this intuition in other areas?

*The apologetical importance of not majoring in the minors.  Augustine is frank–rightly so–that what one believes about the stars and moon and sky and earth bears little on the quality of one’s faith and relationship to God in daily life.  The really important questions are elsewhere. Who are we as human beings?  What is wrong with the world?  Who is God, and what are His purposes for our existence?  Moreover, Augustine argues that the worst possible scenario is that of hindering a learned unbeliever from entering the kingdom of God by ruthlessly insisting that they first agree with our pious, often nonsensical cosmological convictions, even though they matter not for him or for us.  If stumbling blocks to the gospel are to be studiously avoided anywhere, it is here.  Once again, common sense, right?

*The key is striving to read the Scripture in accordance with their overarching purpose in God’s economy.  The priority for Christians is to get in line with what God’s Word is trying to do in us and through us, and not asking it to speak to issues that are incidental at best to the biblical narrative at any given part.  Augustine, long before the Enlightenment ever raised the issue of science with blunt force, already sensed intuitively that metaphor and symbolism were heavy laden within the creation account.  Its purpose is primarily theological, not scientific.  How much more so ought we to realize this today in light of the stunning cosmological common ground that exists betweeen Genesis and virtually every Ancient Near Eastern creation account that has turned up?  The difference lay elsewhere.  What truly matters, as Augustine writes above, are realities like the resurrection from the dead, the Lordship of Christ, the kingdom of God, and faith and obedience in the struggle against every form of human evil. 

*Finally: how about just admitting we might be wrong on any given issue, that we don’t always know, and living with the tension as we debate the various views in faith, love and hope?  Augustine demonstrates admirable humility throughout his writings in not thrusting forth bold convictions on every conceivable scientific dilemma of the day.  In fact, he oftens admits forthrightly that he simply does not know.  When was the last time you heard anyone on any side of the current debate utter such a sentiment?

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.

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.