Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Michael-Behe

  • Unlumping the Various Creationists

    . . . or not, as the case may be.

    Almost two years ago I wrote about my difficulties with the term theistic evolutionist. (I dealt with these definitions more recently here.) My problem was, and is, that the theory of evolution I accept is not different from that accepted by non-theistic evolutionists. The theory of evolution explains a variety of natural processes and brings them together in a theoretical framework. My theism doesn’t alter anything there.

    Today Ed Brayton has elevated a discussion between himself and commenter King of Ireland about this issue to a full post. In his case it’s kind of the opposing sphere, and the question is whether it’s right to lump together a large group of people from intelligent design (ID) advocates to young earth creationists and call them all “creationists.” Would it be useful to add those who believe in guided evolution into the same crowd?

    Let’s look at this just a bit. Evolution involves a group of concepts. I’m going to list them in the order of how thoroughly established they are. Understand that I regard all of these elements as well established; I require them in an order to deal with division of the creationists below.

    1. The earth is old, about 4.5 billion years old, in fact
    2. All life on earth is related (common descent)
    3. The relatedness of all life can be substantially explained by variation and natural selection

    I call anyone who accepts all these points an evolutionist. I don’t like the “ist,” but “someone who accepts the theory of evolution” gets clumsy after a few repetitions. There are a couple of variants that should be mentioned.

    First, there is the notion of guided evolution. There is an important divide here between those who think guidance can be detected, and those who do not. The latter are still generally evolutionists, and could carry out research within the theory. Guided evolution in that sense is a philosophical view, not a scientific one as I see it. Those who believe that the guided evolution is detectable, on the other hand, step outside the theory of evolution, and should be expected to provide hypotheses and test them.

    Second, there is that group of people who expect natural causes to explain everything, but don’t think the current explanations are sufficient. They might, for example, assume that life came here from outer space, but believe it formed elsewhere under unknown conditions. Aside from noting that the actual origin of life is not part of the theory of evolution, while this is a bit perverse, it is nonetheless a natural type of explanation. Lacking evidence for or against, it is simply speculation. Again, the proponents need to get down to the hard science.

    Now for creationists. There are several key breaking points, which I list below in less logical order:

    1. The Bible provides accurate scientific information
    2. The earth is young, 6,000 to 10,000 years old (young earth creationists who deny the great age of the earth)
    3. There is a substantial barrier to variation so that new “kinds” cannot be produced (generally old earth creationists, though the point is applicable to all)
    4. God has intervened repeatedly in the history of life to produce new kinds, and this interference can be detected, or at least the need for it can be demonstrated. (I regard “it might be a space alien” as just a silly attempt to distract us from the religious nature of the claim.)

    Are there substantial differences between these views? Absolutely. The fourth option does not require one to accept that the Bible conveys accurate scientific information, nor does it expect one to deny the overwhelming evidence of the age of the earth. One might argue that it doesn’t even require one to deny common descent, as claimed by Michael Behe.

    So is it fair to group these people together as “creationists” and to exclude the people I described as evolutionists from the camp, even though they might believe in God as ultimate creator?

    There is, in fact, one huge common denominator between all of the groups of creationists: They believe that God has intervenes in the world on an ongoing basis in a way that can be detected. Generally this takes the form of claiming that certain levels of changes in organisms cannot be explained through natural means, thus requiring intervention of the intelligent designer. I’d be unsurprised if someone came by to tell me yet again that this designer need not be God, but I find that explanation so contrived that it’s hard to imagine it is being seriously presented.

    The ID proponents themselves, however, have contributed to this lumping, even though they regularly complain about it. In creating a big tent, they have brought young earth creationists, old earth creationists, and guided evolutionists into the same big tent. Then they complain if they are all called by the same label. The odd thing is that ID is a proposition that can sound good to people with such a wide variety of viewpoints. The sneaky part of it is that it manages this by failing to propose anything very substantial.

    Consider the vast differences there would be in nature if there had been a world wide flood. I can’t see how you get believers in a world wide flood under the same tent as those who propose a more local event. Actually covering the entire planet with water would leave such an indelible mark that it would be unmistakable, and no explanation of the geological record that didn’t take it into account would get anywhere. Yet supposedly both work together under ID.

    Someone might say that I have been terribly unfair, because ID says nothing related to a global flood. ID could be true, whether or not such a thing happened. And certainly ID would be true in all cases. That’s how in combines Michael Behe on the one hand and someone like Paul Nelson on the other. It doesn’t say very much.

    But what it does say is very, very powerful–to the creationist mind. It provides the one single thing that all these views have in common: God intervened repeatedly in the history of life in the world.

    All varieties of creationist agree that natural processes, whether or not one postulates they were created by God, are insufficient to explain the diversification of life on earth. ID is not merely creationism; it is distilled, bottled, and aged creationism.

    Based on this I believe it is entirely fair to refer to this entire group as creationists. They may distance themselves from one another, and it is also good to distinguish them from one another when that is signification, young earth, old earth, believer in a universal flood, and so forth.

    ID is the essence of creationism. It is creationism. It’s proponents have been careful to gather the widest variety of creationists possible under their umbrella. All we are doing in calling them creationists is going with what they, themselves have done. They’d prefer we didn’t, and that should tell us something as well. What sort of people like to disguise their identities?

  • 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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  • Bad Theology and ID

    Quite frequently in the debate over intelligent design someone mentions that ID is “bad theology.” That someone might even be me! The problem is that it is not all that easy to delineate just what is bad theology. My bad theology may well be someone else’s belief system. Of course, the reverse may also be true. There isn’t a common set of standards by which someone can judge just what is bad and good in theology when the term is used in a general sense.

    In addition, if ID is bad theology, so what? If the primary issue is whether it belongs in the science classroom, or in peer-reviewed science journals, what difference does it make whether it is good theology or bad? The issue seems irrelevant from that point of view.

    But when we recall that a large part of this battle is political, then we can perhaps understand why the accusation of bad theology is frequently heard. But the question remains of just how one can tell what is good and bad in theology.

    There are two senses in which I believe “bad theology” can justly be referenced in the discussion of ID. There is one overarching point that I must make first, and that is that the simple statement that ID is theology rather than science is more relevant than the quality of the theology involved. One could also say that ID is philosophy, and it would be hard to draw the line in that case. Personally I think it is a theological construct not very cleverly disguised as science, but that is another subject.

    As an aside, it is this variety in the standards, premises, and even processes of theology that differentiate it so much from science and make the teaching of particular religious beliefs so inappropriate for the public school classroom. Teaching about beliefs is another matter. One should ask whether ID behaves like science or theology in this sense.

    The first sense in which ID can be described as bad theology is by showing that it is not internally coherent, i.e. that arguments made in favor of it are inconsistent with one another or are not derived from the stated (or assumed) premises. It is often hard to support such a claim, simply because it’s often hard to tell just what those premises are. It would be inconsistent, for example, to argue that the design of the first living organism requires a supernatural agent, but then claim to have resolved the issue by positing an intelligent natural designer.

    ID advocates rarely do this in one and the same paragraph or speech, but this kind of inconsistency shows up in the difference between the way ID is presented to religious audiences and to secular ones. To the secular audiences the designer is presented as unknown, but potentially natural (as though that would solve anything), while to religious audiences are told (or at least permitted to think) that the designer must be God.

    If ID could be satisfied by a natural designer, then it is either not theology at all or very bad theology. It really bad science, since it proposes an undefined and unbounded entity, and declines to investigate it.

    This type of theological critique requires that the one giving the critique shares some standards with the one critiqued, but only in a minimal way. Both would have to accept, for example, that theology ought to be internally consistent. If that is not the case, this will blend over into my second category.

    Second, one may be asserting that the theology of ID contradicts some important aspect of the theology of a specific group. A simple version of this is pointing out that teaching evolution is not anti-Christian, because there are a substantial number of Christians who accept the theory of evolution. One might point out specific groups, such as the Roman Catholic Church, or the United Methodist Church (of which I’m a member).

    The creationist movement in general has been guilty of a good deal of sleight of hand in dealing with groups. When they want there to be lots of creationist, everyone who believes in God is a creationist. They then turn around and say that theistic evolutionists are not really Christians when challenged with the number of Christians who do accept evolution.

    This sort of behavior is illustrated by recent comments by Michael Behe about Kenneth Miller. Miller believes that the universe is designed by God, yet does not believe in intelligent design. Behe wants to claim him on the one hand, but exclude him on the other, because he doesn’t believe quite enough. He believes in design, but not the (alleged) theory of design. (Pim van Meurs discussed this today on the Panda’s Thumb blog.)

    “Bad theology” in this sense, means theology that contradicts key tenets of a particular group or fails to meet the standards of that group in terms of how theology is formed. Since it is so community based, it is clearly only of value in helping to clarify those groups that support, or are likely to support a particular view and those who will not.

    It is in this second sense that theological critique of ID is most important. As I’ve mentioned, it is really irrelevant just how good of theology is contained in an idea that is trying to masquerade as science. A scientist can justifiably say, “So what?” But in the political and PR game, one of the issues is trying to treat the teaching of evolution as an attack on Christianity. It is quite critical, in that case, to be able to point out how many Christians find the theology involved in ID unacceptable.

    In my own area of work, religious education in local churches, this becomes very important as well, because the ID propaganda mill is working quite well. Many churchgoers, even those who accept evolution, are convinced that the whole argument is over whether God is the ultimate designer of the universe. Stated in those terms, they are in favor of intelligent design. When they realize that ID searches for specific evidence of God’s design at the molecular level, they generally become much less attracted to it. It looks like ID is proposing that God is more the designer of some pieces of the universe than of others. Of course the idea that one can prove design of the whole by discovering instances of design in the whole is as old as Paley’s watch, at least.

    The theological critique of ID is important in Christian theology, in which Christian theologians need to look carefully at the implications of ID within their own faith traditions. This is where serious questions of a “god of the gaps” argument arise, for example. Scientists do not, and need not, care whether a particular argument is a god of the gaps argument.

    There are also the very interesting issues of the origin and design of damaging organisms raised by Behe in The Edge of Evolution. I have not read this yet, so I cannot critique it directly, but I will certainly be reading it carefully looking for claims of intelligent design of specific pathogens.

    These sorts of issues will have a great impact on how acceptable ID will be in Christian circles, which in turn has a great impact on the success of various political goals related to such success.

  • Theisms, Creationisms, and Evolutionisms: An Exercise in Definition

    The debate about labels is one of the most interesting aspects of the creation-evolution controversy to me, and at the same time one of the most frustrating. Since my primary training is in Biblical languages, and by my own efforts in linguistics, the way words are used simply fascinates me.

    There is plenty of influence of the PR efforts, particularly those made on the intelligent design side, but also by those of folks in mainstream science. I’m not writing to complain about this. I think it is a natural thing for those who think they are advocating a true or valid position to try to label themselves and the issues in the most favorable fashion. Often this will seem to them as the most accurate labeling as well. After all, they are presenting a “true” position!

    My attention was brought back to this topic a couple of days ago when I read this entry on the Panda’s Thumb which shows that [tag]Bill Dembski[/tag] rejects common descent. I then looked around for some evidence, because I thought I remembered that [tag]Michael Behe[/tag] accepts common descent. And sure enough I found it on Telic Thoughts in an article complaining about the use of terminology:

    In reality, it is more accurate to label Behe a theistic evolutionist, as this label would accurately communicate that a) Behe is an evolutionist and b) believes God was involved in the process of evolution. And in fact, this is how most people interpret theistic evolution, as some sort of God-guided process. How most people interpret a label is the most important point.

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