Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Education Policy

  • Intelligent Design and Answer All Questions

    Through this week’s Christian Carnival I found two posts on science and religion that interested me. One I agree with completely, and I just want to underline a couple of points. The other, not so much, though it is still a good article.

    The first is An intelligently designed universe from Sun and Shield. Now since I scan Sun and Shield fairly often, I should have caught this one, but I didn’t.

    Here’s the key quote:

    I don’t believe that it is possible to prove that Intelligent Design occurred. (see here for discussion) I am also not persuaded that it is appropriate to teach about God’s design in the science classes of the public schools. However, it is certainly also not appropriate to teach that science proves that there is no God, or that there is no purpose in the universe, or that humans are only animals. Science has proved no such things, and can’t, as they are outside the scope of science.

    I agree entirely. I also think Martin has specified the question correctly. The issue is not whether the universe is designed. Theists generally and Christians in particular are bound to believe that God designed the universe. The question is the detection of design, and I would add, the detection of more design one place than another. My problem with Paley’s watch is not that the watch is not designed, but rather that the rocks, the grains of sand, and even the water are all where they are ultimately as products of design–ultimately. Distinguishing that sort of design is not a function of science.

    In addition, conclusions about what is beyond the scope of science are also not scientific. “I know X about the physical world,” is within the bounds of science. “I know the physical world is all there is,” steps outside those bounds. This doesn’t mean the person who says that is wrong. It merely means that their assertion is not scientific, any more than my assertion that God designed everything is scientific. Neither implies a measurable change in the nature of the physical universe.

    The other article is Science’s Overlooked Problem. Here’s a quote:

    Yet I have been a firm believer that science cannot, and does not, provide ample explanation for things such as life, purpose, or even God (despite rather poor attempts).

    Now Justin goes on to quote Huston Smith on the failure of science to answer the why questions. I don’t think this is a failure of science, however, but rather a failure of people who expect science to answer such questions. Science is well designed to study physical stuff. That it fails to comment successfully on other matters is simply a matter of its design. The problem occurs not because of the limitation, but because of the failure of some people to recognize that limitation. Thus they try to answer non-scientific questions using science with predictable results.

    In any case, I think it’s worthwhile reading Justin’s post and the Huston Smith quotes, because one way or another you’re going to need to think about that, either by recognizing the limits of science or by finding a way in which science can address those questions successfully. My observation thus far is that science is ill-equipped for the task.

  • Bible Curriculum in Odessa

    Ed Brayton has an informative post on the process of selecting a Bible curriculum in Odessa, TX. I haven’t had time to follow the case closely, but it appears that Ed is doing so.

    If one is to have a specifically Bible curriculum in high school, as opposed to appropriate mentions in literature, history, and various social studies classes, I would prefer the BLP curriculum strongly. I do not, however, think it is good either for the state or for the church to venture into this area. I realize it’s constitutional when done right (and NCBCPS is not done right), but I still do not think it is a good idea, as I explained in a previous post.

  • Brownback on Faith and Science

    There have been quite a number of responses to Senator and presidential candidate Sam Brownback’s discussion of faith and science. These have varied from extremely favorable, from some Christians who think Brownback has managed an extraordinarily good balance between faith and science, while others are quite angry because Brownback has clearly injected faith into science.

    Having read his piece several times, trying to get past the probable political motivations, I have to say that I cannot join those who applaud this statement. Though I certainly do not believe that science can or should answer all questions, and faith plays a very strong role in my life, there is a clear line that should not be crossed. That line is crossed when we let faith determine something that should be determined purely by scientific evidence.

    The most blatant example of this problem can be seen in the creation museum. The sponsors of that museum believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old. This conclusion comes purely from scripture. More importantly they come from scriptural text which is clearly not designed to provide scientific information and has only a minimal historical content. Rather than allowing scientific study to determine what it is best able to study, young earth creationists come to a faith-based conclusion, and then impose it on the scientific evidence, no matter what happens.

    A better approach would be to let each element do what it does best. Genesis addresses meaning and the relationship of God to the universe, though even to understand those elements of the story one must be careful to understand the type of literature involved and why it was written. Genesis does not attempt to provide a scientific discussion. When people claim to discover wonderful, scientific things in Genesis, their example always involves taking a vague statement and claiming that it fits precise scientific data exceptionally well. But one can make such vague statements agree with almost any set of scientific data proposed. One would never derive the details from Genesis; they are not there.

    So where in Brownback’s statement does he cross this line? He starts out quite well:

    The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

    This statement uses appropriate words such as “complementary” for the questions addressed by science and by faith. But we already have the seeds of the problem here. Brownback asserts that faith and science can’t contradict one another. Yet if they are truly answering different questions, how could they contradict? If there are baseball games going on in two separate fields, one would hardly find it necessary to assert that the outfielders in one game can’t produce outs by catching balls from the other. We wouldn’t imagine that would happen. We would only make such a rule if we thought someone was going to try it.

    In this case, Brownback seems to be saying it’s OK for the questions to cross over, as long as they don’t contradict.

    People of faith should be rational, using the gift of reason that God has given us. At the same time, reason itself cannot answer every question. Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see more clearly, not less.

    In what way does faith seek to purify reason? If we would say that the goal of faith is to make a more open, more truth-seeking person, then I would find that acceptable, though many, many people of faith have done quite the opposite. Yet as a goal of faith (or better spirituality) I would regard that as good. But just what is it that faith is supposed to do to my reason that would make my scientific conclusions differ from those of an atheist?

    Unless one is first accusing a scientist who is an atheist of falsifying his conclusions, then there is no reason to assume that faith is purifying reason. I would like to think that my faith helps purify my reason, because I believe that my faith helps deal with my motivations and with who I am. But for all of those who read what I write and see what I do my words and actions–the effectiveness of my reason–can be judged by what I produce.

    Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love. Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.

    Again, I ask, in what way does faith supplement the scientific method? This is one of those statements that sounds balanced and well considered, but doesn’t seem to have much meaning. Is there something about Kenneth Miller’s science (he’s a Catholic) and the late Stephen Jay Gould’s (he was agnostic) that is different? Is one a better scientist than the other? Fit any scientist who is also a believer into the first slot and any who is not into the second, and tell me where it is that faith improves the functioning of the scientific method for the scientists of faith. (I do note some cases in which faith, however little I like the particular version involved, does harm to the science.)

    The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

    And here we see the problem. The questions of microevolution and macroevolution may be debatable. Personally I think that the distinction is simply a technical one. People who believe in microevolution but not macroevolution usually simply don’t comprehend either one. Yet whatever they are both are processes of the natural world and should be studied as such. So having said that science and faith are complementary and can’t contradict, Brownback immediately asserts (though without admitting it) that they do contradict, and that when they do, he’s going to take faith.

    Biologists will have their debates about man’s origins, but people of faith can also bring a great deal to the table. For this reason, I oppose the exclusion of either faith or reason from the discussion. An attempt by either to seek a monopoly on these questions would be wrong-headed. . . .

    Again, we contradict the “complementary idea. What precisely is it that people of faith, in other than their role as scientists if such they are, have to contribute to origins? They can discuss the spiritual values of humanity, but there will be no new interpretations of fossils, or of genetic clocks, or of the relationships between lineages that are provided by faith. All of those elements of understanding origins will be managed by scientists doing science.

    I believe the “monopoly” language is to be read as favoring the incorporation of intelligent design creationism in classrooms. Of course science should have a monopoly on determining scientific questions. That’s how science works. Senator Brownback is a politician trying to trade on people’s dislike of the word “monopoly.” Truth, however, needs a monopoly. Compromising intelligence and stupidity doesn’t produce greater intelligence, it produces more confusion.

    While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

    “An image and likeness unique in the created order” goes beyond both science and faith. We have a Bible addressed to humans, and humans are (shockingly!) the subjects. That doesn’t mean that we are unique in the whole created order. We don’t even know whether there is life in the rest of the universe and if so whether there are other intelligent species that hold a similar position in their ecosystems.

    When he continues that “[a]spects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected” we understand that despite any lip service given to science, Senator Brownback places his particular faith, and his particular doctrines of that faith over and above the scientific evidence. The origins of human beings are to be discovered by science. The relationship of human beings to God can be discussed in religion. But if my conclusions in religion deny the evidence of science, then I’m crossing the boundary.

    As a scientist who comes to realize that the earth must be older than 6,000 years must adjust his understanding of Genesis accordingly, so a scientist who has based some aspect of man’s relationship to God on a scientific conclusion that is superceded by a better one must adjust his understanding accordingly. To do anything else would be to deny the revelation of the creator as given directly in his creation. But in this case, the most important thing to note is that such a person is not supporting science.

  • More on Bible Curriculum for Public Schools

    I have previously expressed my concerns about Bible classes in public schools, even as electives. These objections come from multiple directions. Because I support separation of church and state, I prefer to keep such classes out, even though in principle they have been held to be constitutional. As a Christian, I believe there is a serious danger in having a Bible class which will necessarily be from one perspective provided at state expense. I think providing Biblical knowledge is part of the function of the church. As a Bible teacher I’m concerned with the competence of prospective public high school Bible teachers.

    My objections do not apply to inclusion of scripture passages in literature class as appropriate to the academic goals, nor to references to the Bible at appropriate places in history. There is good reason to be acquainted with the Bible and how it has functioned in western history especially, but that goal is best attained by teaching the Bible as part of those other classes, not with a specific Bible curriculum.

    In particular, the NCBCPS curriculum has been found not to meet the needs of teaching a neutral, academically sound Bible class. I have reviewed only the reviews and not the material, but the points brought up by the professional reviewer are well-taken, and precisely correspond to the objections I have to public school Bible classes.

    Ed Brayton has an excellent post on this which quotes a letter from a Jewish teacher in the Odessa, Texas public schools. The link also leads to other letter that illustrate some very unchristian attitudes about this program.

    I strongly oppose the inclusion of this curriculum in any public school program.

  • Homeschool Textbooks and University Admission

    It’s been a few days since this was front and center, triggered by the presentation of an expert report by Dr. Michael Behe, but I wanted to write a few notes about the issue of admissions at UC and homeschooling. There’s an article ACSI v. Stearns, aka Wendell Bird vs. UC on Panda’s Thumb article here. I agree with the criticism of the textbook content. In addition, here’s an older article that contains a good summary:
    Culture war pits UC vs. Christian way of teaching : Religious schools challenge admission standards in court    .

    My issue is not with the assessment of these textbooks, but rather with priorities and appropriate diversity in education. I was homeschooled eight out of 12 years through high school, and the four years in formal schooling were spent in a very conservative Christian school. I knew nothing about evolution except that it happened and it took a long time. My textbooks on science were deficient in all the areas noted. On the other hand, I took a GED and went on to college and graduate school. I had no difficulty with science or math courses (as in getting As with no exceptional amount of study), and when I began to study the appropriate material, I had no difficulty coming to understand evolution, at least sufficiently for my needs as a non-scientist.

    My question on this issue is this: Can this possibly be the most pressing issue in admissions at UC or any university? Is there some ongoing problem with home schooled students failing out of introductory biology? I’m not saying that any university shouldn’t have standards, but I am wondering if this is more about academic culture than about standards. I’m not certain from reading what I see, but while I often deplore what certain home school parents do (lax discipline and schedules, very narrow curricular material), there are also many, many parents who home school quite effectively, and whose children are well above standards.

    I was never in a situation of playing catch-up in any of my classes from the moment I entered college. I moved to upper division courses in my second semester (with some annoyance to the academic affairs committee). Any deficiencies in my curriculum were easily overcome by the fact that I knew how to study, how to sort out information, and was ready to pick up new material in a hurry.

    I’m not sure of the legal aspects of this case, but to me it seems appropriate to keep the diverse options open. I oppose teaching creationism and intelligent design in high school classrooms, because I think in the limited time we should teach consensus science and do it as well as possible. Evolutionary theory is the overwhelming consensus. But in addition, I believe it’s important that people who disagree with me have options, if they’re willing to put in the time and money. Private schooling and home schooling are two of those options. They have to pay for it. They have to live with it.

    If there is some evidence of home schooled children struggling with their college courses because of deficient curricula, then there’s a point here. Otherwise, I’d let the results speak for themselves.

  • Academic Freedom and ID

    Intelligent Design advocates are trying to make us believe that their struggle is primarily about academic freedom, about allowing a new idea to get the examination it deserves, and about ensuring that people are not persecuted for their beliefs. Similar arguments are used from the high school level on up, with the phrase “teach the controversy” setting the tone. People attuned to fair play like the sound of “teach the controversy.” It sounds like a fine idea–whenever it’s done in somebody else’s sandbox.

    Recently a firestorm has arisen in the blogosphere over the decision at Iowa State University to deny tenure to Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez. You can find some of the controversy via the following links:

    I don’t have any new revelations from the Gonzalez case. The arguments over the facts surrounding it are going full steam around the various blogs involved. I want to think just a bit about academic freedom, priorities, and how serious we are about them.

    You see, I don’t think the ID people put a high priority on academic freedom as such. What they put a high priority on is freedom specifically for their point of view. That is not actually all that uncommon. Most of us get hostile about attacks on freedom of speech when the person speaking does not support our particular point of view. When we despise them, it’s much harder. This isn’t a left or right phenomenon. When I see footage of a KKK demonstration, at some level I’d really like to see their mouths forcibly shut and have them hauled off the streets. I feel even more strongly about the Westboro Baptist people (not to be associated with any other variety of Baptist), who protest at funerals.

    But I have a stronger belief in freedom of speech. I think that in the long run we are worse off if I get to cart the people who anger me at the most basic level off to jail. For me, freedom of speech is more important. The ACLU is frequently criticized for supporting free speech for people who are despicable, but their finest work, in my opinion, is done when they are under attack from the right and the left. They stand up and demand freedom for people that they themselves despise.

    There are some similarities in academic freedom. I see this from a slightly different perspective because I was homeschooled, and then completed both undergraduate and graduate work at private schools (Walla Walla College and Andrews University respectively). These are Seventh-day Adventist institutions, and are not only conservative, but in the area of origins are (or at least were) generally young earth. I started as a young earther myself with a view of Biblical inspiration that was compatible with inerrancy.

    During my studies I came to reject both inerrancy and young earth creationism. But that wasn’t where I got into trouble. My studies had nothing to do with that. Where I got into some difficulty was in the area of comparative literature. Just what of the Biblical text is original, and what might have its source, either literarily or in terms of ideas, in other ancient near eastern literature? When it came time to write my thesis, it turned out that due to timing, we could find two, but not three professors who were open to my research subject. I am a controversy avoider, so my adviser and I did a count, we demoted my thesis to “project” and I took four more hours of classwork, completing a non-thesis MA. Now there’s no reason to sympathize with me here. The university was private, religious, and I was writing a thesis in Biblical studies. I took the path of least resistance and took my degree. But just beyond the edges of my path of least resistance I knew there was the fact that academics are not entirely free.

    Should academics be entirely free? That depends on what one means by freedom, and the range over which the problem is discussed. In discussing freedom of speech, I argue that speech should be almost entirely free. I accept obvious exceptions such as incitement. But there are those who will argue that one’s speech cannot be free unless one is provided a platform. I see that differently. I don’t have to provide a platform to everyone, no matter what they have to say. They can provide their own platform.

    I believe that applies even more in academic freedom. For some people, academic freedom means that no matter what a person teaches, no matter how bizarre, no matter how untested, they should have a university platform from which to say it. Now they don’t usually make such a broad claim. What happens in fact is that when my favorite idea is not given the hearing that I think it deserves, I yell “academic freedom.” But academic ideas are not created equal. Professors are not equal. In general those in academia approve of standards of some type. They just want those standards to let them in and keep others out.

    But I don’t see academic freedom threatened by one wrong decision on tenure at one university. (Note that I am not calling the decision on Gonzalez at ISU wrong. Let’s call this a hypothetical wrong decision.) First, there are numerous universities. Other people who are denied tenure go find themselves more fertile ground. Students then examine various universities and decide where they want to get their education. A pattern of wrong decisions on tenure would be destructive of any academic program in the long term. Good decisions will tend to make a strong department. DIs blog has just such a suggestion.

    Intelligent Design activists could try to model the type of behavior they advocate by creating departments at their various religious schools and seminaries that include “Darwinists” and atheists, and of course Christians of various other denominations to “teach the controversy” in all of their various departments. I think Baptist schools should have Methodist professors to “teach the controversy” about baptism by immersion. Certainly, Richard Dawkins should be a regularly invited speaker for programs at seminaries to “teach the controversy” over the existence of God.

    You may think I’m joking. I truly believe that Christian education could do with a huge dose of the academic freedom that is now advocated for public and/or secular institutions. I’ve carried out such projects in Sunday School classes and small groups. I recommend Bible study with commentaries from traditions that get on your nerves. Anything that will tend to prevent inbreeding.

    At the same time there need to be boundaries. Another popular definition of academic freedom is freedom from criticism. The inverse of that is the definition of any criticism whatsoever as “persecution.” Scientific ideas need to be tested and challenged. Amongst the questions that should be raised are whether the idea itself is a scientific idea that generates explanations and new questions that can be objectively studied and tested. Few people would argue that an astronomy department should grant tenure to someone who believes that the earth is flat, or that the sun revolves around the earth, or that the earth is the center of the universe. Few would argue that a chemistry department should invite an alchemist to teach or grant him tenure.

    Where one draws the line is going to be difficult. Most importantly, however, different departments are going to draw that line in different places, and thus we will get to see how things work. It may be sad for people refused tenure who might have deserved it, though I suspect if someone truly deserved tenure and was refused, they will find an institution to grant it. It may be sad for the students who study at the university that makes a series of poor decisions. But those students also have a choice of where to study.

    But in the end, the fact that we have a very large academic community in many institutions under many different organizations will tend to bring things out to better conclusions. The ID community is itself proving how free ideas are through their ability to keep the waters stirred in public discourse even while they claim academic persecution. If rejected by all of academia, one can, as a last resort, write popular books.

    And there is where I think the real failure of the ID community lies thus far. They are more anxious to play the PR war than to demonstrate their ideas. I personally don’t think they will ever be able to do so. I think their ideas are philosophical and religious despite their claims. But the one way to push the scientific community into seeing their work as science is to work on their formulations to provide testable material and then get into the lab or the field and test those predictions. If the existing publications won’t publish, publish those articles yourself. Build a substantial body of research literature that demonstrates your claim that you’re being frozen out. I don’t think you can, but that’s the proper way to gain acceptance for a scientific idea, and it’s the proper response to skepticism.

  • Brokeback Mountain for Kids

    For some balance on the incident of showing Brokeback Mountain to middle schoolers, check out this post on Pursuing Holiness. I really can’t comment much since I haven’t seen the movie, but the phrase “age appropriate” (or in this case, not so much age appropriate) makes sense to me.

  • From the Land of the Deluded

    A couple of weeks ago I made the mistake of trying to reply to a point in Plantinga’s review of The God Delusion, and got caught. The first commenter on that post suggested I should read the actual book “if only to be able to evaluate reviews of a different book going by the same title.”

    Well, I have now read the book, and it was less irritating than I expected, though my expectations were fulfilled. In general, I was not surprised by anything Dawkins had to say. This should not be shocking considering that I have studied Christian theology fairly extensively for a non-theologian (I remind readers that my field is Biblical studies, not theology, and thus at theology I am an amateur), and I have also read a good bit of Dawkins’s writing, and I am very fond of it, even though I recognize that I am precisely the type of Christian theist for which he has the greatest contempt. This latter point is repeatedly emphasized in the text of The God Delusion.

    There is, however, one way in which the book is worse than I expected. I linked earlier to a post by Bruce Alderman, in which he performed a humorous source analysis on this text. I got a good laugh out of it, but at the time I was assuming it was pure humor. Having read the book, I think I can build on his analysis.

    Bruce’s H source writes much like the Richard Dawkins of books like The Blind Watchmaker. He does surgery on ideas with a laser scalpel, coming to specific points, and then rebuilding the structure with care and precision. You may disagree with his conclusions, but you normally do so by debating his premises, not by criticizing his logic. Such a person presumably wrote most of chapter 5. There, even though I disagree with some conclusions about religion in general, we find an excellent presentation of Darwinian explanations for the evolution of religion, or a propensity to religion in humanity.

    I originally intended to say that Bruce’s A source, contrary to H, uses a shotgun approach, but on further reading and reflection I don’t think that is an adequate description. The approach would better be compared to the use of a blunderbuss, a weapon to which I was introduced by Tolkien in “Farmer Giles of Ham.” There the question of what a blunderbuss is received this response:

    Indeed this very question, it is said, was put to the Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford, and after thought they replied, “A blunderbuss is a short gun with a large bore firing many balls or slugs, and capable of doing execution within a limited range without exact aim. (Now superseded in civilized countries by other firearms.)

    However, Farmer Giles’s blunderbuss had a wide mouth that opened like a horn, and it did not fire balls or slugs, but anything he could spare to stuff in.

    The aforementioned farmer Giles of Ham used a blunderbuss on a giant with the result that:

    . . . By luck it was pointed more or less at the giant’s large ugly face. Out flew the rubbish, and the stones and the bones, and the bits of crock and wire, and half a dozen nails. And since the range was indeed limited, by chance and no choice of the farmer’s many of these things struck the giant; a piece of pot went in his eye, and a large nail stuck in his nose.

    “Blast!” said the giant in his vulgar fashion. “I’m stung!” . . .

    So DawkinsA has loaded his blunderbuss with whatever was available, pointed it in my general direction (or perhaps I stuck my face in front of it), and fired. And thus, in the words of the giant, “Blast! I’m stung.” Well, actually, not so much, and unlike Tolkien’s giant I have no inclination to turn aside.

    Those who haven’t dealt with the vagaries of source and redaction criticism will perhaps get less amusement from Bruce’s analysis or from my aside, but those who have will recognize the stylistic differences that can make one wonder what happened between one passage and the next. I think this is also the problem that resulted in the exchange in the comments to my previous post. Basically you can get two completely different impressions from reading this book. The first is of a proposed dialog which invites a broad range of people who are opposed to placing religious dogma above science, of indoctrination, of forcing religious beliefs on people, and of limiting the freedom of scientific inquiry. The second is of a desire to suppress religion if it is possible to do so by any means short of violence, and describes all people of any variety of religious faith in disparaging terms.

    There is one basic element that I fully expected, and did in fact find. For Dawkins science is all there is. There is no supernatural of any kind, and his use of the term “supernatural” is not so nuanced as that of some theologians. For him, “supernatural” is anything that cannot in theory at least be fully investigated by scientific means.

    Thus he occasionally indicates that he is not arguing against the guy in the sky with a beard concept of God, yet in practice he is arguing against the philosophical equivalent. His God must be measurable and explainable in natural terms, thus any attributes one supposes God might possess that do not fall within that scope are automatically dismissed.

    Dawkins operates with a thoroughgoing ontological naturalism. This is it. If I were to allow him that assumption, generally implicit, we could simply say, “That’s the ball game.” And in fact most of the book is superfluous for the simple reason that Dawkins never allows a supernatural definition of God to come into play at all. Despite what he says, God is not a hypothesis. He would be a rather bad hypothesis if he were one.

    While Dawkins does not believe in God, he appears to believe he has god-like powers. Repeatedly he suggests that the religious faith of scientists or other thinkers whose work he appreciates were not really sincere, but rather went along with their time. Such is the case with Kant (footnote to p. 231, quoting A. C. Grayling favorably), Mendel (p. 99 becoming a monk was ” . . . equivalent of a research grant.”), the American founding fathers (p. 39 – “. . . the greatest of them might have been atheists. Certainly their writings on religion in their own time leave me in no doubt that most of them would have been atheists in ours.”).

    It’s astonishing how easy it is to know what someone would have been years after the fact!

    In my view, more even than an attack on belief, this book is an attack on moderation. By moderation I mean any system that does not automatically push for the extremes, but recognizes that there are a range of positions between. I do not mean that one has to accept that those other positions have an equal claim to truth; I simply suggest recognizing that they exist. Dawkins wants the conflict to be between fundamentalists of any religion and atheism. He objects to being called a fundamentalist atheist, but this very attitude suggests that in some ways the title fits. My experience with Christian fundamentalists indicates to me that if you disagree with them in any little thing, you are the enemy. I’m often called an atheist by such people because I accept the theory of evolution. Dawkins has problems with all of the folks in the middle, with moderates being a frequent target. (For notes on my view of moderation, see Moderate Thinking.)

    I’m going to divide this response into several posts, though I will post them all together. A directory follows, though you can find the entire series by choosing category The God Delusion.

    So from the land of the deluded, let me present just a bit of a response. I’m not an apologist. I’m frequently embarrassed by what Christian apologists have to say. My apologetic is very simple, and we sang it in the Easter Sunrise service at my church: “You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart.” It’s subjective. I don’t expect it to convince you. But it’s what I bring to the table. Categorize me as a deluded simpleton, but a joyful one!

  • Religious Rights Bill in Colorado

    It is very important not to assume what a bill will actually accomplished based on its title. Titles are generally designed to put a positive spin on the contents of the bill in the hopes that people will not read further or seriously consider the consequences of what is actually proposed.

    A new bill in Colorado has precisely that problem. There are a number of issues in terms of implementation, but I want to look at one particular line:

    NOT BE REQUIRED TO TEACH A TOPIC THAT VIOLATES HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND NOT BE DISCIPLINED FOR REFUSING TO TEACH THE TOPIC;

    Matt Young at The Panda’s Thumb comments:

    Realistically, what subject besides evolution will spur a great many parents, teachers, or students to opt out of a lesson? Enough, that is, to interest the legislature? None. I find it very hard to believe, then, that this bill is not a cover for undermining evolution in favor of a narrow religious agenda.

    Perhaps my past experience with very narrow religious groups gives me some perspective on the possibilities here, but sex education comes to mind immediately. But more importantly I know people who regard numerous works of classical literature as evil, and who could well claim it was a violation of their conscience to have to teach those. In effect, the bill hands over the curriculum to the individual conscience of teachers.

    I would suggest that a better plan is for those who feel they cannot handle the public school curriculum to go either the private or home school route. I don’t mean to be nasty here, or to suggest that the public should have no involvement in curriculum decisions. I believe parents and the public should be very much involved. But a public school teacher needs to teach the curriculum provided. Free speech rights do not mean that every individual has the right to modify the curriculum. It’s a public process. The teacher’s free speech is not impaired by this, in my view, simply because the government fails to provide a platform.

    The public schools exist as infrastructure, to produce citizens educated to a certain level. An individual teacher cannot be permitted to distrupt that process because he or she cannot conscientiously teach some subject matter that is required. The proper response is to find a job that he or she can conscientiously do.

    While I’m at it, I would suggest to Christian parents that the best time for your children to get their first exposure to ideas you find objectionable is while they are still at home. At that point you can respond with your own beliefs on the matter. Your Sunday School classes can teach on it, and your youth leaders can provide instruction as well. The child then gets a choice. If the sex education class doesn’t cover abstinence in the way you’d like, you can provide that instruction. If you disapprove of evolution, arrange to have your beliefs taught through the auspices of your church, or in your home. Parental involvement is tremendously important. Use it!

    I hope people will consider these issues and a number of other troubling points of this bill, especially if, as predicted, similar bills are introduced in other states.

  • How God Impacts Science

    There’s been a bit of a dust-up around the blogosphere about this over the last few days to a large extent amongst people involved in science professionally in one way or another. Since I’m not responding directly, I will only note that I read of this debate through Dispatches from the Culture Wars, and you can find links at Ed’s current post, Clarifying the Moran Debate.

    Since I’m called a theistic evolutionist, though it is a term to which I have previously objected, I thought I’d make a few comments on how God and scripture impact the way I look at science. I can’t say “the way I do science, because my field is Biblical studies, and not one of the natural sciences.

    My answer to the question could be either “lots, in every way” (to paraphrase Paul in Romans 3:2), or “not at all.”

    (more…)