The brilliant Isaac Newton described the universal law of gravitation and the laws of physics and explained the elliptical orbits of the planets using calculus, a new form of math that he developed just to answer that question. Yet after describing the movements of the objects in the solar system with an astounding precision, he reached a point where he paused in awe of the stability of the motion of the celestial bodies, and stating that he could not see how his equations were able to explain the universality of gravity, he summarized in his monumental Principia, “This most beautiful system of the Sun, Planets, and Comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being, a God.”

Does this sound at all familiar?

Here’s the sad part: the Principia was written at the astoundingly young age of 35, and he went to his grave at the ripe old age of 84 without exploring the issue any further. About a century later, however, the French scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace, using Newton’s own calculus and the laws of physics and gravitation Newton first postulated, explained the stability of the motion of the celestial bodies described by Newton with a method of mathematics that was certainly well within Newton’s mathematical ability. What caused the difference? Why did the English genius not solve the problem in the fifty years between Principia and his death? Laplace saw a challenge and went for it; Newton thought he saw an intelligent design and stopped looking.

This is why the ID movement’s masquerade as science produces such a negative reaction among Christian scientists. Scientific research is harmed and hindered by those who say, “Our current scientific understanding has not explained X, therefore X lies outside the bounds of scientific inquiry.”

HT to elbogz on Steve Martin’s site, who referred me to a talk by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that made this point about Newton.

When I was at Truthvoice 2008 a month ago, the co-author of Beyond Creation Science, Tim Martin, gave two talks that I thought were worthy of discussion on my blog. Here are my thoughts on the first talk.

[Note: I am summarizing based on the notes I took, and I honestly hope I misrepresent nothing he said. I'm going to let him know about this to give him a chance for correction/clarification.]

The Christian religion asserts that the chief failing of mankind has been its overriding predilection for self-sufficiency.

Now, God created a universe that sustains itself; even if He is not logically necessary for it to have essence as materialists contend, it is nevertheless apparent that He (or some other deity) is philosophically necessary for there to be an ultimate, objective meaning to the universe. This leads to a problem.

The better educated we are, the less we feel the need for anything but our own understanding to make sense our place in the world, because we find our own individually defined, subjective meaning for the universe to be sufficient. God has seen it fit to make a universe that runs itself, at least for the most part, so the natural mechanisms that order the universe appear to atheists to be entirely adequate. The more we lean on our own understanding and our own self-definition of meaning and purpose, the less we acknowledge God in our ways (Proverbs 3.5-6). This, as recognized by most Christians, is the danger of education.

I do think education meant to help us glorify God can continue infinitely, but if one’s pursuit of learning is solely for the sake of self-aggrandizement, I tend to think we are in peril of the pride that goes before a fall. But on this subject, here’s a question for my readers:

Do you think there’s an equal and opposite danger for ignorance? I think not, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on it.

Josh recently commented on another thread, “I want to hear your explanation of the origin of life on earth. I have heard the positions you are against. So how did we come about?”

Actually, you’re asking two different questions. The first, concerning the origin of life itself, I have not come to any conclusions on. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a supernatural act of intervention. But then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened by some natural process. The fact is, even scientists don’t have a really good explanation for “abiogenesis” (life from non-life), although they’ve got lots of hypotheses. Yet this current lack of knowledge alone does not make me immediately decide, “Oh! Miracle!” I have explained elsewhere why this God-of-the-gaps explanation is a sinking ship; that some rain god’s direct, miraculous intervention is behind the phenomenon of rain might have seemed like the only possible explanation before an understanding of meteorology, but such a claim would not only have been entirely premature, but, when displaced by a scientific explanation, would appear quaint and superstitious. Just because we don’t know now doesn’t mean we won’t be able to figure it out, and we may even one day be able to reproduce it.

This leads to an important clarification of my understanding. The rotation of the earth, gravity, photosynthesis, fossil formation - what do these have in common? 1) God is responsible for all of them. 2) They operate independently from overt divine activity. What’s my point? What I’m trying to say is that I affirm that all the rules of the universe, such as those responsible for the processes I just mentioned, operate just as they were designed to do. Therefore, I’m an intelligent design advocate of a different kind. As Howard Van Till says, God designed a “fully gifted creation”, which means that He set it up to run in a way that did not require Him to break His own rules in order to create us. I contrast this with Van Till’s assessment that ID posits a “system of natural causes [that] fails to include the formational capabilities needed for assembling certain complex biotic structures, such as the bacterial flagellum.” I contend that there was in fact more design put into the universe than ID advocates or creationists allow for, only that this design lies so deeply embedded within nature that the unbeliever will not be likely to notice it.

For the believer, however, God’s involvement in nature is much more visible on the surface than even ID advocates claim: scientists in the intelligent design movement go to great lengths to dust biology for God’s fingerprints, when the fact that the laws of nature even exist is God’s smoking gun - He’s responsible for it all, not just the gaps! Note, however, that I’m not using the cosmological argument and asserting that the existence of natural laws are proof of God’s existence; on the contrary, God’s role in the physical processes that perpetuate the natural world is one of intentionality and purpose, unrecoverable by science and unprovable by philosophy. God doesn’t have to keep making the universe work; all He has to do is will it to work. Of course, even creationists and ID advocates would agree: where we differ is that whereas I believe this essentially naturalistic manner of cosmos management started further back than the present day, the stance of the ID/creationist crowd is that God began using natural laws to run the universe only after the creation. This is seen by the fact that they don’t regularly posit the necessity of God’s intervention to make sure that iron rusts when exposed to water nowadays, yet (under a literalist, historiographic understanding of Genesis) the creation, including plants created on the third day, was able to get along without light from the sun until the fourth day, because ostensibly the laws of nature did not apply until after He was done.

Now to the second part of Josh’s question: how did we (humans) get here? We determine these sorts of things by examining all available resources.

What surprises some Christians is that I am fully confident that the Bible is not one of those resources, nor was it ever intended to be. In Genesis 1-11, until we get to Abraham, we are not getting history as we would from a history book; we are looking at stories common throughout the Ancient Near East (ANE), remolded and adapted to serve God’s purposes. I have previously linked to the conservative Wheaton scholar Dr. John H. Walton’s presentation on Genesis 1. Watch it or else: it’s an hour-long presentation, but if you’re at all interested in understanding my position, you’ve got to check it out. An inelegant way of summarizing it is to say that this chapter is a complex literary work affirming that YHWH is responsible for the universe using imagery drawn from the Jewish temple. The Garden narrative, while retaining firm roots in Mesopotamian mythology, has been reformulated as an archetypal story showing God interacting with humanity, in terms reminiscent of and serving as commentary on the Torah. I plan on addressing this stuff later.

If we don’t use Genesis as a science book or to determine the origin of humanity, where do we look? My choice has been to look to those who dedicate their life’s work to observing, analyzing, and hypothesizing about the natural world: scientists. And no, that group of people is by no means primarily made up of atheistic conspirators against theism. For Pete’s sake, the head of the Human Genome Project is a devout evangelical Christian who, from his intimate knowledge of DNA, cannot conceive of another explanation of the data he’s seen than common descent.

I’m not going to be dogmatic about exactly how everything got here in scientific terms, because I’m not a scientist. But for me, as with any question beyond my ken, I yield to those people who have studied the matter in depth. To sum up my position as a non-scientist who doesn’t think the Bible speaks to the “how” of creation, I would like to quote Dan Werner’s comment on Mike Beidler’s post discussing Van Till:

As to the scientific question, I stand with the whole of scientific tradition these past 140+ years in affirming full-fledged evolution. There can be no other acceptable position for a layperson such as myself. To believe otherwise would not be humble.

During the course of his interview with Ben Stein that I mentioned in an earlier post, R. C. Sproul recounted the story of his conversation with a college professor. At one point the professor said that the universe came about by chance. Sproul then started to flip a coin and asked him what the chance was that it would come up heads or tails. The answer of course came back that there was 100% chance it would land on one of the two sides, and 50% chance of either. After the coin fell, Sproul asked the clever question, “How much power did chance exert upon this coin toss? . . . Chance didn’t influence it . . . because chance has no power because it has no being. It’s nothing.” In this clever demonstration, Sproul follows most critics of naturalism^* and misconstrues that the naturalist actually believes that chance is literally an agent, rather than a description of a self-driven process that appears random except from a teleological point of view. He is falsely construing the phrase “by chance” as an instrumental of agent rather than as an instrumental of manner. Now unless the brilliant Sproul is really somehow unaware of this, one has to admit that while this was very clever of Sproul, it severely misrepresented the professor’s stance. Sadly, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this argument used.

This is critical for understanding the inherently and fundamentally agnostic stance of science on the question of the divine. Science cannot say “who” or “what” caused or didn’t cause anything, especially if the Creator is supreme and chose to front load the system to run itself using the principles He set up. Those few scientists who would argue against that are deserving of correction, but they are in the decided minority; because of their error, should the entire discipline disband and its practitioners shrug with a sigh of, “Goddidit”? The implication that anyone believes actual entities named “chance” or “evolution” created anything is a misrepresentation - a falsehood - and Christians will not make any inroads with these people if they continue to use bad arguments like this.

At another point he remarked, “David Hume said that the word ‘chance’ is used as a magic word for ignorance. When you don’t know what causes something, you say, ‘Well, it happened by chance.’ That doesn’t explain anything.”

Surely Sproul is aware of the actual intent of such a statement. When a scientist says “chance”, he is acknowledging that some necessary contingent of the myriad of factors that caused the actual outcome and averted an infinite number of other outcomes remains, to date, unknown. Hume’s derisive comment on chance was a criticism of those who stop seeking evidence to fill the gaps in knowledge and are content to let the unknowns remain unknown. This is exactly what ID advocates do! Watch what happens if I change a few keys words of Sproul’s comment: “The word ‘design’ is used as a magic word for ignorance. When you don’t know what causes something, you say, ‘Well, it happened by intelligent design.’ That doesn’t explain anything.” Now whose position looks more eligible for Hume’s critique?

Arguing that something was “designed” every time there is no obvious answer to how it happened relegates God’s activity only to the currently unexplained. To quote myself, “A creationist is forced to argue the untenable position that whenever a physical explanation for a phenomenon is discovered, God loses His right to claim that He is responsible for the phenomenon.” Thus, for instance, “The biological explanation of how a life is created (i.e., the joining of sperm and egg) removes God from the equation,” by the terms decided upon by critics of natural explanations. Surely God is not content with such a recessive domain as this. Can God only receive credit for miracles, those instances in which He suspends the laws that He Himself created? Should we not give Him the glory for natural phenomena with natural explanations? As long as this is the case, there will be nothing atheistic about evolution.

^*By “naturalism”, I do not mean the type that excludes the possibility of the supernatural, but that which merely focuses on natural explanations of physical phenomena. I am open to alternative terms if one is necessary.

Many thanks to Mike Beidler for directing me to this article by Dinesh D’Souza. This quote stands out:

The problem with evolution is not that it is unscientific but that it is routinely taught in textbooks and in the classroom in an atheist way. Textbooks frequently go beyond the scientific evidence to make metaphysical claims about how evolution renders the idea of a Creator superfluous. My book What’s So Great about Christianity? provides several examples of this…

Most Christians don’t care whether the eye evolved by natural selection or whether Darwin’s theories can account for macroevolution or only microevolution. What they care about is that evolution is being used to deny God as the creator. For those who are concerned about this atheism masquerading as science, there is a better way. Instead of trying to get unscientific ID theories included in the classroom, a better strategy would be to get the unscientific atheist propaganda out.

Now, I don’t know that the number of Christians who “don’t care” about the origins debate is so insignificant (at least in America). But my impression of Expelled as it is being paraded by Christians is that it declares open season on the pernicious religion called “Darwinism,” demonized with guilt by its association with evangelical atheists, and in this, D’Souza and I share a concern over casting aside science in favor of “unscientific ID theories.”

The main point of this quote, however, gets at the heart of my hesitation to come down for or against the film before seeing it. Inasmuch as materialists are overplaying their hands and claiming that naturalism is evidence against the supernatural, they should be chided and corrected just as any other apologists for ideologically driven inaccuracies (such as ID!) should. It is important for this to happen because allowing these guys to mischaracterize science bolsters the false impression that fuels the anti-evolution crowd’s fervor to draw and quarter poor Darwin. The denial of the innately spiritually agnostic nature of scientific inquiry is contradicted by such prominent unbelieving scientists as Stephen Jay Gould, who comments in his famous essay, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria“,

The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains—for a great book tells us that the truth can make us free and that we will live in optimal harmony with our fellows when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.

What Gould wants to express in this essay is some measure of disbelief that there is so much attention paid to the so-called “faith vs. science conflict”. Faith is not scientific; it is, by nature (and Heb 11.1) belief in the unseen, unobservable, and non-empirical. It is metaphysical - so why should anyone expect there to be any intractable conflicts with observations of the physical? Gould and Francis Collins, as well as an innumerable list of other atheists I have interacted with, all agree that in the field, a scientist’s position on any of the various scientific theories is not diagnostic for that person’s position on faith or their likelihood to have a personal faith. This may or may not be the case (I suspect it really isn’t so much) in liberal, activist academia.

It’s “atheism masquerading as science” that we Christians should be uneasy about, and we’re only marginalizing ourselves by burning the entire town where the materialist atheist lives in an attempt to ferret him out.

R.C. Sproul recently had a discussion with Ben Stein, host of a documentary called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. This documentary takes a look at the way some colleges appear to be discriminating against their faculty who entertain the possibility of Intelligent Design (ID). It apparently makes the case that draconian measures are being used to deny tenure or even fire professors critical of “Darwinism” (as the critics of evolutionary theory customarily refer to it). I must reserve judgment upon the legitimacy of Stein et al.’s concerns until I see the documentary. My evaluation will depend on the specific basis upon which these professors are being released or denied tenure.

As my regulars probably know, I like podcasts. One I listen to regularly (it comes out daily) is Renewing Your Mind with Dr. R.C. Sproul of Ligonier Ministries. He is well-known as a partial preterist, but, as you will see here soon, posits a future consummative coming of Christ. This is what he said in a recent podcast.

After the Resurrection [Jesus] sojourns on the earth for a few weeks with His disciples until that moment comes where He ascends into heaven. And what’s the point of the Ascension? . . . [The] “ascension” here takes on a technical meaning, where it means not simply to go up, but . . . to go up to a specific place for a specific purpose. And the place to which He goes is the right hand of God and the purpose for His ascent is to go to His coronation, to His investiture, as the fulfillment of the Davidic Covenant, where God now crowns Him not just one more king in the line of Davidic kings, but He crowns Him the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords and to Whom all the nations of the world are given beneath His authority and under His dominion. And His reign is announced by God in the New Covenant not to last for four hundred years like the dynasty of David but “He shall reign for ever and ever” and ever and ever to which the Church cries, “Hallelujah!”

Ok, it’s been long enough for me to do another meme, and because I am a good sport, I will respond to both memes I was tagged with by one merciless (mercilessly funny, that is) blogger friend of mine, Kev at Special Kind of Stupid (you want a laugh? check him out!). Unfortunately, my answers will not be particularly funny. But come on, Kev, just be glad I’m doing these at all

You won’t believe this. I didn’t believe it. I can’t even really comment on it without getting flustered, and the article speaks for itself anyway, so let me just give you this link.

Oklahoma state legislature ponders evisceration of science curriculum

Please return here to offer me your stunned responses.

Talk about a love/hate relationship…

I highly commend Gary Demar of American Vision for a number of reasons. Chiefly, he is on the front lines in arguing against the immobilizing effect premillennial eschatology has on the Church; I love that his postmillennialist approach emphasizes the advancement of the Kingdom of God over every facet of culture and society.

Unfortunately, another of his preoccupations is the “Darwinism Hate Train” of which he is the blindfolded engineer.

On a recent installment of American Vision’s weekly Gary Demar Show entitled “A state-sponsored religion?”, he gave us another doozie. He was sounding the alarm, criticizing the Florida state school board’s proposed revision of its educational standards. Specifically, he argued that the revised science standards come down too solidly on “a scientific question [on] which there is great deal of debate within the scientific community, not only coming from what we might call scientific creationists, six-day creationists, intelligent design advocates, but scientists in general who may still believe in evolution to a certain extent but still have a problem with some of the basic building blocks of evolutionary theory and want the topic discussed, think it ought to be discussed and in reality the science standards framer’s committee is in the process…[of] re-writing those standards to force compliance to a particular dogmatic worldview without question. It’s really something that’s unthinkable within the realm of science for anybody at any period of time to say, ‘This scientific theory is now established fact and there’s no way to debate that.’” He reiterated at another point that any public school curriculum that focused only on evolutionary theory was guilty of “cutting off debate” in the classroom.

Does anyone else see a problem with this thinking? Demar is apparently of the opinion that a high school classroom is a necessary forum for debating and challenging scientific theory — even one of the most universally accepted scientific theories. Say what?

Jeremiah 18 and Romans 9: a shared metaphor

In talking with Calvinists, there is always one passage that they pull out that in effect tells Arminians/non-predestinarians to “shut up and color.” This passage is the potter/clay metaphor of Romans 9. Most bible scholars acknowledge that Paul’s potter metaphor was drawn, at least in part, from Jeremiah 18. Here’s the relevant passage (Rom 9.18-24 NET):

You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who has ever resisted his will?” But who indeed are you - a mere human being - to talk back to God? Does what is molded say to the molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right to make from the same lump of clay one vessel for special use and another for ordinary use? But what if God, willing to demonstrate his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the objects of wrath prepared for destruction? And what if he is willing to make known the wealth of his glory on the objects of mercy that he has prepared beforehand for glory - even us, whom he has called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?

Contrast this with Jeremiah 18.5-12:

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get into a topic I’ve been reading into for quite a while now, but it’s so deep and I’m so shallow. The issue is the so-called New Perspective on Paul. The Paul Page has some extraordinary articles describing it (start with Mattison’s summary), and so what I reproduce on this blog should only be seen as appetite-whetting for that excellent website.

For those of you who would like a summary of the summary listed above, read on. What is this “new perspective”?

Well, for starters, it’s not really new; it takes into account what its supporters insist is the actual historical context for Paul’s teaching on justification and removes it from the lens of Luther’s anachronistic understanding of the issue. What’s “new” about it is that it wasn’t until the seventies that Christians first started taking it seriously. The four most important scholars for this view are Krister Stendahl, E.P. Sanders (with his watershed 1977 book Paul and Palestinian Judaism), James Dunn (who modified Sanders’s view), and N.T. Wright (who has modified Sanders and Dunn). This position has plunged the scholarly community into a flurry of debate for the last forty years, with old school Reformed types standing the hardest against it but other Reformed theologians (such as Wright) showing a willingness to accept criticism of traditional Lutheran understandings on justification.

If you want a short sound-bite summary of this view as I did, you’ll be disappointed; it is, after all, an interpretation of one of the fundamental aspects of Pauline theology, which is remarkably complex for any position. But let me say a couple things that help position us to view Pauline theology in this way.

Okay, how many of you guys have seen the site Garfield minus Garfield? The idea is to show the strip without Garfield, making Jon seem delusional, and almost outright psychotic. It’s a riot!

Here’s a sample: