Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Intelligent Design and Faith

    An interesting discussion broke out in the comments to this post on The Panda’s Thumb, regarding the nature of faith and how intelligent design relates to faith. On the one hand we have some who hold that anything that provides evidence for God works contrary to faith, i.e. the purest faith is based on no evidence whatsoever. On the other we have the claim that faith is largely trust rather than belief, and thus that the issue is irrelevant.

    I’ve written a number of posts on theological problems with intelligent design (ID), and I have tried to stay general for the most part. What are the theological problems with ID that would be recognized by most theologians? What are the hidden problems, if any, that would be of concern to a variety of Christians? I recognize that there are very few things one can criticize in theology without reference to a particular theology, but I have tried to address the broadest base possible.

    In this post, however, I’m speaking directly from my own theology, which is moderate to liberal Christian. To anchor the discussion, what does that mean? Well, I’m a Christian believer who accepts such central doctrines of Christianity as the incarnation and the Trinity. I can say the apostles creed without crossing my fingers, but I’m not rigid on the details of interpretation. When I say “I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth” I see myself in fellowship with a range of beliefs about how God accomplished this creation. When I say that Jesus was crucified, dead, buried, and rose the third day, I’m not extremely tense about just how one believes that accomplishes salvation.

    Hidden in that short statement is the idea that I accept the possibility of divine intervention in the physical universe. While “Trinity” may be seen as language for us limited mortals to use in talking about God, a reality that would probably be shocking if we could actually come to comprehend it, “incarnation” involves intervention. God, in some way, becomes more part of his creation in this one person than at any other time or place. My observation is that in most miracle claims the issue is communication, rather than an alteration of reality. In other words, I don’t believe that God intervenes generally to do things all the way from emptying parking places for people to eliminating or preventing the results of a madman like Adolph Hitler. (I’ve addressed the issue of why this would be so briefly in my book Not Ashamed of the Gospel: Confessions of a Liberal Charismatic. I’ve also discussed the notion of miracles more extensively in my series of essays on the Hand of God, part 1, part 2, and part 3.)

    The key element here is that God created a universe that is functional, and that God lets that universe function according to consistent, observable rules as much as possible. I think at a minimum we can observe that God doesn’t intervene on a constant and regular basis in our daily lives. If God behaved in that way, one could get much clearer results from all these “prayer studies.” If God consistently altered the general chain of cause and effect for believers, all you would have to do would be to separate a group of believers from a group of non-believers (including those who believe differently than your target group), and watch what God does. While there may be statistical arguments about God’s intervention based on studies of prayer at a distance, unknown to those who are prayed for, those are marginal numbers. No study suggests that every Christian in the group, for example, is healed, or that everyone prayed for by a Christian is healed.

    I’m not saying here that nobody is healed as a result of prayer–I’m remaining agnostic on that point for purposes of this essay. What I think the evidence demonstrates quite clearly is that there is no regular, predictable form of intervention going on. This can be a critical point. I know of quite a number of people who believe that if a believer prays for something and has faith, that thing will happen. This is especially asserted in terms of healing. The excuses, of course, are always with us. If someone is not healed, someone didn’t pray with enough faith. Some would say that if a group prays for someone’s healing and one person in the group lacks faith, then the healing won’t take place. As a result, it’s hard to present airtight counterexamples. But if you look at the general picture, there are many people praying and believing, and relatively few people getting better. The data certainly counterindicates a consistently favorable result.

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  • PSA: Thoughts on Centering

    David Heddle commented on my earlier post, PSA: An Unbalanced and Ineffective View of the Atonement, in his post Penal Substitutionary Atonement: it’s not about Justice. I haven’t had time to respond until now, and I will only respond to a few points. One of the things I have noticed about debates on the atonement is that they tend to cover wide swathes of material, and bring on board large numbers of assumptions. It’s pretty much impossible to avoid.

    First let me note a couple of quotes to which I want to respond briefly and then get to the actually topic.

    Heddle says: “The scriptural support for PSA is impressive.” He then proceeds to cite Isaiah 53:5 and Romans 3:23-25. Of course both sides claim support from scripture–that’s required–but it seems to me that proponents of PSA find every verse that has both the words “redemption” (or salvation, or something similar) and the word “for” in them, and claim that they support substitutionary atonement as understood in a courtroom setting.

    That importation is certainly wrong in Isaiah 53, which quite clearly has the concept of substitution, but lacks the courtroom metaphor and doesn’t deal with someone being adjudged in one way or another. It is not good practice to interpret the substitution of Isaiah 53, in which the servant suffers for a group of people, without looking at the servant passages in general. In this case, we have a small group of people suffering as a result of the actions of the whole nation. There is substitution and representation, but there is no imputation or impartation going on. The more I study “clear” texts supporting penal substitution, the less clearly they support penal substitution. In particular, few can properly be read in a courtroom setting.

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  • Moderate Christian Blogroll Change

    The RSS feed for the Moderate Christian blogroll, useful for putting links in your sidebar, will be changing. Since many of the blogroll members don’t read the blogroll admin blog, I’m putting the announcement here as well. The old feed will be going away, and the new feed is already active. If you are using this feed to display links to the blogroll members, please change the link.

    The new feed is: http://ncs.hneufeld.com/?bdprssfeed=1.

    I had to make this change because the level of traffic on this blog got beyond a couple of administrative items, and it isn’t because of blog readership. It appears to be the overhead of the aggregator software that caused the problem.

    Note: If you’ve had problems getting this blog over the last couple of days, it’s because of this problem. I know the blog has been down at least three times.

  • Random Designer III

    Continuing to work through this book, chapter 6, “Magnificent Molecular Micro-Machines” presents a great deal of the complexity of the cell, and its form and structure. I’m going to start this time with a quote:

    At first glance, it would seem impossible to generate such increidble diversity from such a small pool of amino acid building blocks. However, in living organisms where random design has been effectively operating for billions of years, the task is actually quite simple. ( p. 54)

    One of the serious problems, I think, for Christian readers of books like Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, is that they may have learned just how complex cells are in the book for the first time. That leaves those who are uninformed with the impression that scientists are kind of ignoring all this complexity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scientists are constantly working on learning just how all of this works. This chapter in Colling’s book will put the incredible complexity into some perspective, and show how it is quite workable within evolutionary theory. In fact, Dr. Colling calls this “incredibly productive.”

    Chapter 7 continues with a basic description of RNA and DNA, and their functions. This is fairly routine stuff, though critical, of course, and again Dr. Colling lays it out in a way that the lay reader can easily understand.

    I’m going to conclude this entry by looking at chapter 8, “Trial and Error-or is it Trial and Success.” The production of many options and a selection of only a few was introduced earlier concerning the production of various complex molecules. Generation of random options with selection of working results looks very interesting when we’re talking about molecules, but when it comes to living creatures. We’re OK with molecules falling apart. Few of us are even concerned about the death of bacteria, but what about puppies? Or people?

    Dr. Colling makes the strong case that the principle of Random Design applies everywhere, even to human beings. Human beings may be more than physical beings–he believes we are–but we are also biological entities and the laws of biology act upon us fully. Whatever spiritual nature we possess, it doesn’t exempt us from the same rules that apply to all other life.

    This is probably the hardest thing for a Christian to present regarding evolution. Dr. Colling presents it very positively, as his optimistic chapter title indicates. But if Christian readers are going to stumble, they’re probably going to do it right her in this one chapter. But the bottom line is that the evidence is too overwhelmingly strong that random design does apply to all living creatures, including human beings, and if one believes in God the creator, it must be God’s product.

  • Christian Carnival #201 Posted

    . . . at Thinking Christian.

  • Links for 12/7/07

    Here a just a few things I think my readers might find interesting, but that I won’t get much time to comment on:

    • Human events has an article on intelligent design by a conservative who doesn’t think much of it. In fact, he thinks the main stream media cover it because it’s embarrassing to conservatives. “The Left believes, correctly, that Intelligent Design is a political loser, and so they gleefully attempt to hang it around the neck of every right-of-center movement from libertarian neo-conservatism to isolationist populism — shouting all the while ‘See, the American Taliban has come for your children! Elect a Democrat before it’s too late!’” — It’s an interesting perspective! (HT: Panda’s Thumb)
    • It’s not really about evolution, but Carl Zimmer has his 100th picture of a science tattoo
    • Steve Martin has the fourth in his series of articles on Polkinghorne quotes, in which we find this quote (from Martin, not Polkinghorne): “Many Christians, I think, put too much stock in the implications of scientific discoveries.” Hmmm! It leads one to think!
    • I’m just getting all my RSS subscriptions updated on my new computer or I would have gotten this one earlier, but this post by Dr. Steve Matheson is too good to miss. He looks at a Discovery Institute showcase piece by Jonathan Wells, and shows it’s serious problems. The answer seems to be that there was a testable hypothesis in the article, but it proved wrong, and didn’t have anything to do with ID in the first place. In addition, any article that calls Jonathan wells “a former developmental biologist” can’t be all bad!
    • And in the obligatory link to something I wrote, my fictional God-Talk Club gets into ID while discussing homeschooling in my latest post. Remember that those posts are for fun and practice, though I do welcome responses either to presentation or to content.

    There are very few things that haven’t been moved to the new computer, imported, or otherwise sorted out. For those who my have missed the post I switched not only to a new CPU but to a new operating system. I’m now using Ubuntu Linux, after trying it on a separate machine for a few months. I’m thus far very happy with the results. Having the old machine on the same network has made moving stuff pretty easy.

  • Christian Carnival #201 Posted

    . . . at Thinking Christian.

  • Heresy Hunting with Closed Ears

    Since I write frequently on minimizing the number of essential doctrines, and maximizing lines of communication, I just had to call attention to this blog, Herescope. It’s “About” tells the story:

    This non-interactive blog contains information revealing heresies and false teachings affecting the Church today. . . . [emphasis mine]

    Need I say more?

  • Creation-Evolution Posts and Reading Recommendations

    I’ve been posting a good deal about evolution since the Florida science standards have been rewritten and it’s time for comments. Early next year we’ll be dealing with a vote. Generally people think the new standards are good, but as is not uncommon, a different standard is applied to evolution than to other scientific theories.

    The issue is often framed either as faith vs. evolution, i.e. all who accept evolution are atheists, and atheists are bad, so we should reject evolution. As a subset the issue is framed as Christianity vs. evolution. Every aspect of that framing is wrong. Evolution is a well-supported scientific theory. It’s unfortunate that one can smear a theory by associating it with a certain category of people, but in the case of atheists that seems to work. It’s wrong, but there it is. But one of the advantages to science is that its results can be replicated, and they look the same to a Hindu, a Christian, or an atheist. One’s religious beliefs don’t change the information. Thus who it is that produces the information is not the issue.

    To back up some of my current writing, I’d like to point to some of my past post, taking on the religious issue first. There is not just one creationism. Even Christians subscribe to a number of different posts. In my review of What Is Creation Science? I commented on the attempt by the authors to separate the flood geology, the age of the earth, and what they call the “fact” of creation. This is an astounding claim. How can one make predictions about the fossil record without any timeline? How can one make predictions about it without regard to a universal flood? If such a flood happened, then it would certainly leave evidence. This situation is only made more complex by views such as old earth creationism, ruin and restoration creationism, and some minimal forms of ID that claim that perhaps God either tweaked the creation just a little bit here and there, or perhaps only created the first life-form with front-loading.

    I wrote a series of posts early in the days of this blog outlining these various views and also relating them to basic Christian doctrines. The major posts in that series were:

    For those interested in the religious aspects in particular, combine this with my series on my Participatory Bible Study blog. That series actually starts with Genesis 3, but it references my pre-blog (though updated) essay, Genesis Creation Stories – Form, Structure, and Relationship, and then continues with Genesis 3.

    You can get the whole series using this link, or by clicking on “Genesis” in the tag cloud in the right sidebar (at Participatory Bible Study).

    To the list of suggested readings, I would now have to add at least John Haught’s book God After Darwin, and Richard Colling’s book Random Designer, which I’m reading right now.

  • Barbara Forrest makes Statement on Firing of Chris Comer

    I blogged before about the firing of Chris Comer. PZ Myers now has a post that includes the full statement by Barbara Forrest about this. Comer was apparently fired for forwarding a memo announcing Barbara Forrest’s talk in Austin. It’s a good statement.