Undeception

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 of 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.

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