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This was triggered by Ed Brayton’s answers to the short ID quiz, and particularly by the first question.

1. On a scale of 0 (diehard disbeliever) to 10 (firm believer), how would you rate your level of belief in Intelligent Design? (Minimal Definition of Intelligent Design: The idea that certain [...]]]>

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This was triggered by Ed Brayton’s answers to the short ID quiz, and particularly by the first question.

1. On a scale of 0 (diehard disbeliever) to 10 (firm believer), how would you rate your level of belief in Intelligent Design? (Minimal Definition of Intelligent Design: The idea that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and not by an undirected process.)

I agree with Ed that this definition isn’t terribly accurate for what is actually presented as intelligent design. I’m regularly told that I must not substitute “God” for “intelligent designer” and that it might, for example, be intelligent aliens who interfered with the process of evolution in order to produce the results we actually have. Design by an intelligent alien would only push the process off into the distance, not solve it.

But it is hard to regard something as a serious theory where a single part can be filled by either God or by a super intelligent alien. Yet for various reasons (PR and politics, in my opinion), ID advocates don’t want to just say God.

On the other hand, if you say God is the designer, then you can quite justifiably call ID a God-in-the-gaps argument. Where we have no known path of evolutionary development, or better, where we believe there can be no such path—always based, as it must be, on current knowledge—then we suppose the involvement of a designer.

Such an argument is subject to tomorrow’s knowledge, and indeed new gaps have been filled. Behe‘s “black boxes” don’t always remain black boxes.

But for me, the main issue is simply that I do see  the universe as designed, and I do so for religious reasons. I do not think the natural laws as we see them exist independently, even for a moment. May problem with Paley’s watch is not that I don’t think it’s designed, but that I think the grains of sand around it are also designed.

God, who created the universe, is quite capable of creating either finished creatures or the processes by which they would come into being, and I don’t see any portion as less (or more) the product of design than any other. At most, ID could produce evidence that God’s process was insufficient to its purpose and required interference.

I was interested in this book from the moment I saw the title, not because I immediately expected to agree, but because [...]]]>

Dowd, Michael. Thank God for Evolution. New York: Plume, 2007. 380 pages + front and back matter. ISBN: 978-0-452-29534-6.  (All numbers in parentheses are page numbers from this edition of the book.)

I was interested in this book from the moment I saw the title, not because I immediately expected to agree, but because it, along with its blurbs and description, takes a celebratory approach to evolution. My own position is that evolution is a fact and a valid theory, but it requires some theological work to deal with that. So a book that claims that evolution is not only compatible with Christianity, but something that Christians should thank God for, sounds pretty challenging to me.

The early pages of the book set some pretty high standards. In the “Author’s Promises” Dowd makes some very strong promises, claiming that he is bringing forth a new form of Christianity. For example, speaking to “devoutly committed Christians” he says that “. . . whether you consider yourself conservative, moderate, or liberal, my promise to you is that the sacred evolutionary perspective offered here will enrich your faith and inspire you in ways that believers in the past could only dream of” (xxvi). He also expects that his exposition will be enriching to atheists and freethinkers, amongst many others. That’s a tall order, and if you read the complete section of author’s promises, you’ll find the mission gets even more daunting.

I was reading this book along with my Sunday School class, and I tried to look at it in two ways. First, I wanted to see how much it challenged my thinking and made me reconsider things I already believe. Second, I wanted to see how well it fulfilled the author’s own stated mission.

So how does he go about his task? He divides his presentation into five sections:

1. The Holy Trajectory of Evolution
2. Reality is Speaking
3. The Gospel According to Evolution
4. Evolutionary Spirituality
5. A “God-Glorifying” Future

The first section lays out the view of evolution that underlies the rest of the book. I would summarize this by saying it’s a very directed and goal-oriented view of evolution. The evolutionary process is not just natural laws being laws; it is a process that is leading the universe, and of course our world, to ever greater heights. The second section attempts to relate the concept of revelation with science, and deals, in a sense, with epistemology. The third section attempts to restate basic Christian doctrines in terms of evolutionary theory. The fourth expands this into a more general spirituality, including presenting some ideas of spiritual disciplines. In fact, the fourth section goes so far as to discuss speaking in tongues and relating it to this evolutionary spirituality. The fifth section, to be honest, started to feel rather redundant, but I’d summarize it by saying that it restates the evolution of the entire universe such that it is leading to the fulfillment of the dreams of an American 21st century liberal. Many of these dreams are not at all bad–the question that remains is whether evolution is inevitably pushing in that direction.

As usual, let me state the positives of this book. I’m afraid my reaction is not all that positive, so this is harder than usual. The author’s style is engaging, though I must temper that note by noting that it seems redundant from time to time. The section of spiritual disciplines and some on evolutionary psychology were interesting, though understandably a bit basic. I’m not sorry I read the book, but it doesn’t go onto any of my “you ought to read this” lists.

There are a some things this book is not. It is not an outline of evolutionary theory. There are some basic descriptions of evolutionary processes, but nothing that I find challenging, and I am not trained in any of the natural sciences. (I should note, however, that I’ve been reading books on creation and evolution since I was about 10 years old.) It is not a deep book of theology. While it runs through a number of theological concepts, the major contribution, in my view, was in redefining terms. It does not deal extensively with scripture. If you want to look at how to interpret scripture in the light of the principles expressed here, your guidance is limited to telling you not to take the Bible literally, and to look for revelation of God in the ongoing, evolutionary story of the universe around you.

Before I discuss the success of this book at attaining its stated goals, I want to write a note on accommodationism. Accommodationism is the view that science and religion can be accommodated and need not conflict. The problem with this is that it doesn’t define “religion” and “science.” My religion and mainstream science can be accommodated, but let’s say someone believes that the only way to faithfully read Genesis 1 & 2 is as historical narrative description the creation of the world, then that particular form of religion and mainstream science cannot be accommodated.

I might want to suggest that this view of Genesis 1 & 2 is less important or less essential, but it’s not my place to tell others what about their belief system is essential. I can suggest, but obviously the decision is theirs. I cannot claim to have accommodated their faith to science unless, in the process, I have respected what they regard as important.

Similarly one must define what one means by science. I see science as a way of studying the natural world. If something is supernatural, it can only be observed by science as (and if) it impacts the natural world in a measurable way. So I don’t understand science as the one and only way to know. Yet there are those who do. If one believes science is the one and only way to know, then accommodation with religion will again be impossible.

Thus accommodationism itself tends to become a scientific and religious position on its own, rather than a reconciliation of other positions. In accommodating science and religion, proponents often alter the components in ways that will not be acceptable to adherents of the supposedly accommodated views.

Note that I distinguish a form of political accommodationism, in which proponents of the teaching of evolutionary theory work together even though their positions on religious and philosophical issues may differ greatly. This is simply agreement on certain goals, something much different, in my view.

What Michael Dowd has done, in my opinion, is to create an accommodationist religious position, with some prejudice to both Christianity and evolution. It’s hard to say which takes the bigger beating, though I think Christianity in any orthodox form comes in for the worst treatment.

Evolutionary theory, it seems to me, loses as well, by being presented as a teleological process. It is a very optimistic view, which essentially holds that all the competition and death and suffering of biological evolution leads ultimately and (almost) inevitably to cooperation, enlightenment, peace, and joy. It’s not that I disagree with the kinds of goals that Dowd expresses. His hopes are very attractive. I actually wish I could believe they are as inevitable as he seems to think. I just don’t think it’s so.

Christianity comes in for redefinition. All the words are there, but they come into new meanings. You can claim that resurrection or eternal life means coming back as some sort of stardust (97-100), but that’s not what it means to most Christian believers, and I suspect you’re not going to find that many who want to exchange one view for the other. Similarly, the “realization” of various miracles (Appendix B, 357-370) is going to fall flat for most evangelical or orthodox Christians.

In fact, I would say that if you being this book as an orthodox or evangelical Christian, and substantially accept what it teaches, you will no longer be recognizable as a Christian, except in vocabulary. You’ll use some of the words that Christians use, but you will not mean the same thing. I try not to tell other people whether they can call themselves Christian; I believe God can deal with the labels issue. But these changes in vocabulary are so radical that they really no longer appear to relate to the same religion.

In a sidebar titled “Realizing ‘the Centrality of the Cross’” (210) there is a great illustration of what I’m saying. In describing the traditional Christian understanding of this phrase Dowd says that “. . . it is often taken to mean that only Christians who believe that God’s Son suffered and died on teh cross for their sins will ascend to a place somewhere outside the universe called heaven. Everyone else will be tortured forevere in hell. . . .” In its place, evolutionary Christianity would say that this refers to “vertical integrity,” or “getting complete with the past and being responsible for the future . . .” and “horizontal integrity,” “being in right relationship with my nested world.”

Now the vertical and horizontal components do form a sort of cross, but the only connection between those two views is in the vocabulary. Further, the orthodox position could be stated much better, and would subsume integrity, though in quite a different way. I do like the concepts of horizontal and vertical integrity, but they are not the essence of “the centrality of the cross.”

The main purpose for which I could recommend this book would be in order to understand this evolutionary Christianity movement. Many of the theological positions would be better studied from writers expressing theological positions such as process theology or panentheism. I rate the book three stars out of five.

I believe that both Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God and Richard Colling’s Random Designer provide a better presentation of ways to reconcile Christianity with evolution.

Related articles

• Another accommodationist book on evolution (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)
• Evolution is not a threat to religion (tangenttalk.blogspot.com)
• Crevolution! (thecynicalchristian.blogspot.com)

While I believe acceptance of the theory of evolution will [...]]]> The Christian Post has an article on a series of teleconferences that are available via evolutionarychristianity.com. The post uses scare quotes to set off the word “evolutionary” and in some ways I find the title troubling, just as I do the term theistic evolution.

While I believe acceptance of the theory of evolution will have an impact on some beliefs, and while I do believe religion and science do have overlapping areas of study, the theory of evolution is a scientific theory, and qualifying it with a theological position sounds odd to me. Even so, what’s the alternative.

Evolutionary Christianity seems troubling to me in the reverse sense. Here we have a theology qualified by a scientific theory. That also seems unjustified with me. Non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) is not entirely accurate in my view, yet one needs to keep one’s categories in some order. Science tells us about the physical world and what happens in it. To the extent that creation tells of its creator, this does impact theology, yet placing a single theory as the qualifier for a view of Christianity … seems odd.

Just some musings …

I absolutely believe in design. I believe everything is designed by God. I believe God is involved in everything. In teaching on this subject I have [...]]]>

Since I hadn’t commented on the Intelligent Design controversy for some time, I want to add a couple of notes to what I said yesterday.

I absolutely believe in design. I believe everything is designed by God. I believe God is involved in everything. In teaching on this subject I have occasionally simply started dropping my pencil on the podium. Someone will surely ask me why I’m doing it. I then ask why the pencil always falls. The 20th or 21st century answer is, of course, gravity. Duh! “No,” I like to say, “The pencil falls because God wants it to.”

What do I mean by that? Do I not believe in gravity? Oh absolutely! Like everything else, I do so because I believe in God. God’s desire is expressed so consistently that we can write it as a law.

I followed the suggestion in one of the comments to the Science and the Sacred post I linked yesterday, and went and read the entire essay in PDF, thus avoiding the wait for the second half. I want to quote a couple of paragraphs.

The first is this:

The point is, different chance hypotheses give different results. Dembski writes, “…opposing chance to design requires that we be clear what chance processes could be operating to produce the event in question.”2 Dembski is very explicit about the necessity of the design inference eliminating all chance hypotheses. But this is a fatal flaw: except in very unusual cases, it is impossible to identify all possible chance hypotheses simply because finite human beings are unable to identify every chance scenario that might be operative. [link added]

This is what I meant in my fumbling, non-mathematician’s statement that I reject the design inference on the grounds of garbage-in garbage-out. We don’t know how the creation of life or certain biological structures occurs, and thus it is not possible to determine the probability of such events.

Again:

Also, suppose an intelligent agent designed a natural process that incorporated chance. Human beings do this frequently …

Even if we accept, as I do, that God is the creator, we don’t know the process, so how precisely to we identify God’s fingerprint? I would also suggest that the claim that God cannot design a process that includes chance is just as limiting to God as any of the many other limitations we try to put on him.

Dr. Bradley further argues that design is one of those points where theology can legitimately contribute to our knowledge of the world. It’s a great essay. I suggest reading it.

I would note another issue I have with intelligent design, which is simply that it is detecting instances of design in a universe that is, I believe, designed. Thus, in some sense it is detecting “more” design in some portions of the universe than in others. This is the problem I have with the design argument going back to Paley. The watch is designed, yes. But the sand is also designed in some sense. (Note that I’m aware the analogy is between the watch and living organisms, not sand. That is, in fact, my problem with it.)  One could almost infer that the design argument tests for the absence of God’s designing work in other places in the universe. Almost, but not quite. This is, of course, a theological argument on my part, but then I have always thought this argument should be theological and philosophical, rather than scientific.

Incidentally, it is my belief that God is involved at all points in the universe that makes theistic evolution a difficult thing for me. For many people it is simply a matter of saying that the Bible tells us God created but science tells us how God created–evolutionary processes. This said, we move on without examining our theological views based on the result. But the idea that the earth is old and that death occurred before before the fall seems to display a God who is quite willing to let sparrows, amongst many other things, fall. That is a challenging gulf to bridge. I cannot agree with many of my friends who say that evolution doesn’t really make much theological difference.

I’ve rejected the design inference on the grounds of garbage-in garbage-out. You can’t determine how likely a chain of events is when you don’t know what events constitute the [...]]]> I’m definitely going to follow this new series on Science & the Sacred. The first post is Why Dembski’s Design Inference Doesn’t Work. Part 1.

I’ve rejected the design inference on the grounds of garbage-in garbage-out. You can’t determine how likely a chain of events is when you don’t know what events constitute the chain. The probability of unknown events is, well, unknown, or so it seems to me.

James Bradley is Professor of Mathematics emeritus at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, and is addressing the heart of the matter.

There is no more foundational subject than the doctrine of Scripture. All the current theological arguments that are causing such disruption in the Church today stem [...]]]> And as you might expect, I’m disagreeing with him. In introducing a post urging people to read Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology (not a bad idea), he says:

There is no more foundational subject than the doctrine of Scripture. All the current theological arguments that are causing such disruption in the Church today stem from a lack of confidence in the authority of Scripture. …

Now the first part of that statement is pretty obvious and quite foundational. I don’t think we can be Christian and talk about being Christian without dealing with the doctrine of scripture. However far you may end up away from regarding scripture as foundational, you’re going to have to deal with this doctrine.

As it happens, I believe that scripture is foundational, and whatever we believe must be rooted in it. Not only our doctrine of scripture, but also our hermeneutic that is derived from that basic doctrine is critical in how we will understand and live our faith. I would like to see us discuss this more.

But the second sentence is quite problematic, and I think represents one of the greatest barriers to sound dialog within orthodox Christianity today. Let me quote it again:

All the current theological arguments that are causing such disruption in the Church today stem from a lack of confidence in the authority of Scripture.

Um, not so much. Now there are people who lack confidence in scripture, and this can lead them to many odd views, views which fall outside of reasonable definitions of the bounds of Christianity. There are also people who express (at least) great confidence in scripture but who show no great ability to actually discover what it’s saying.

Yes, there are certain disputes which results from differences in various people’s confidence in scripture, but I don’t think they are the major ones, and I especially don’t think they are the bulk of those that are debated within orthodox Christianity.

Let’s illustrate with a point I’ve debated (indirectly via blog post) with Adrian before, penal substitutionary atonement. For Adrian, nothing less than viewing penal substitution as the meaning of atonement is adequate.

I believe that penal substitution does occur in scripture, but that it is one of a number of metaphors, all of which are required for an understanding of the atonement. I believe this, not because I lack confidence in scripture, but because I am confident that a full scriptural understanding of the atonement requires much more than penal substitution. Like every other finite description, using penal substitution exclusively or even to diminish other views, especially in my view christus victor, diminishes our understanding of the atonement.

From the evidence of reading Adrian’s blogging over several years, I’m certain that penal substitution is a “current theological argument” and is “causing disruption” and thus I must exclude it from any list of those based on a lack of confidence in scripture.

I think I made my best statement on this in my post from last Easter, Atonement: The Error Adrian Warnock and Giles Fraser Share.

I see a similar type of issue in the debates over creation and evolution and certain major figures in reformed Old Testament studies, such as Peter Enns, Bruce Waltke, and Tremper Longman. I think it would be ridiculous to assert that these three men lack confidence in scripture, yet they are in the middle of a theological controversy. The difference is not confidence but the way in which they understand scripture.

In connection with this I appreciated Jeremy Pierce’s recent post, Arguments Against Old Earth, in which he reclaims the term “creationism” for any set of beliefs that God created the universe. I am a creationist, because I believe in God the creator. I do want to debate a bit about Jeremy’s categories, though they are really quite good. That’s for another post.

In summary I would say that the problem in most theological debates within Christianity is not confidence but understanding. There is an element here where one’s hermeneutics make the decision, but in a number of cases, such as understanding 2 Corinthians 5 an imputed righteousness, I think often the hermeneutics are similar, but the application is different. Confidence, however, is not part of the problem.

(Note: I have not yet read, but I do intend to read Adrian’s book Raised with Christ: How the Resurrection Changes Everything.)