Faith & Science

At the risk of sounding a brief religious note and therefore inviting from ID critics the usual (and so extremely logical!) inference that the Discovery Institute supports theocratic rule, let’s consider for a moment the message of Purim. That Jewish festival is upon us today and, with its themes of randomness versus a guiding providence at work in history, it happens to be an excellent time for reflecting on themes relevant to ENV.

Celebrated with lots of eating, drinking, and charitable and other gift-giving, Purim recalls the events told in the Bible’s book of Esther. In the story, which is very much screenplay-ready, a conniving minister to the king of Persia uses his influence on the monarch to plot the destruction of the Jewish people. This fascinating villain, Haman, is no mere mindless anti-Semite. He is motivated by his own views about life’s ultimate meaning, or the lack thereof — a secular theology, a religion of a kind that’s precisely opposite to Biblical faith.

According to Scriptural tradition, Haman was a descendant of the Bible’s personification of wickedness, the mysterious tribe called Amalek. As recounted in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, Amalek, seemingly without reason, fell upon and slaughtered many Jews. That was back when the children of Israel were living in the desert, following their exodus from Egypt.

Actually, Amalek’s attack was not without reason. The Hebrew text associates Amalek with the word “keri,” which means a chance or random event: “Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt; How he happened upon thee (karecha) by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God” (Deuteronomy 25:17-18). The same Hebrew verbal root can mean to “cool” someone’s ardor, put a chill in his faith.

Timothy Sandefur, a Panda’s Thumb contributor and an atheist, is a leader in the Darwinist crusade to censor balanced discussion of evolutionary theory in science classrooms. Mr Sandefur responded to my open letter to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, a Darwinist organization that lobbies for censorship of discussion of the weaknesses of evolution in public schools and has boycotted the citizens of Louisiana because they recently passed legislation protecting academic freedom in public schools.

Mr. Sandefur begins his post with a sneer:

With the possible exception of Casey Luskin, no Discovery Institute fellow seems more eager to embarrass himself in public than Michael Egnor…

I always strive to be more embarrassing than Casey, but now it seems I’ll have to try harder. Here goes.

Mr. Sandefur asserts:

The problem with creationism is precisely that creationists like Dr. Egnor want their religion to be taught in government classrooms.

Mr. Sandefur misrepresents my views, which I have explained at length on this blog for several years and will now explain again.

This is my viewpoint on evolution:

I am a Christian and I believe that God created man and the universe. The Bible isn’t a science textbook, although it does offer insight into truth about the natural world. Reason, one form of which is science, can lead us to important truths about nature. I believe that faith and reason cannot ultimately be in conflict, because God is the source of both.

I believe that the earth is ~4.5 billion years old, and the universe is ~14 billion years old. Universal common ancestry is a reasonable inference from the evidence, and life evolved over several billion years. Some aspects of life arose by random variation and natural selection, and some aspects of life (e.g. the genetic code, molecular nanotechnology) show evidence for design by intelligent agency.

This week’s conference in Rome on Darwin and evolution, nominally sponsored by the Gregorian University and Notre Dame “under the High Patronage of the Pontifical Council on Culture,” has a public relations budget to promote some conclusions that would seem to vary from the positions of Pope Benedict. The Council on Culture has little or no funding of its own for such science conferences and has had to accept non-Vatican funding — and the guidance and other strings that go with it. Intelligent design scientists not only are not present, as a consequence, but their views were misrepresented and trashed ahead of time by the conference organizers. Instead, alongside some rather interesting speakers, you will hear a parade of atheists, Read More ›

Dr. Steven Novella recently took issue with an essay I wrote for Forbes.com. Forbes has a fair survey of differing opinions on Darwin’s theory, which, of course, has angered Darwinists, who realize that the continued viability of Darwin’s theory depends on its insulation from criticism. They censor criticism of Darwinism in schools, and they aren’t happy to see the weaknesses of Darwinism discussed in the public forum, along with its strengths.

In my essay, I reviewed some of the scientific problems with Darwin’s theory, and I pointed out that Darwinism is itself a religious ideology. Darwin’s theory is the creation myth of atheism.

Dr. Novella begins:

Darwinist Dr. Jerry Coyne, in his New Republic article “Seeing and Believing; The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail,” quotes the National Academy of Sciences on the reconciliation of religion and science. The NAS statement is worth a post on its own.

Dr. Coyne notes:

The National Academy of Sciences, America’s most prestigious scientific body, issued a pamphlet assuring us that we can have our faith and Darwin, too:

“Science and religion address separate aspects of human experience. Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies of biological evolution have enhanced rather than lessened their religious faith. And many religious people and denominations accept the scientific evidence for evolution.”

Science and religion don’t address entirely separate aspects of human experience. There is one truth about the world. The truth about the natural world is obviously a part of metaphysical truth. Science addresses the truth about the natural world, and religion addresses the deeper metaphysical truth. There are no separate magesteria, despite Stephen J. Gould’s spin. If God made the world, then intelligent design is true, assuming that the artifacts of His designing intelligence can be recognized as such. If there is no God, and the world just came to be, then Darwinism is true, because ID and Darwinism are just the affirmative and the negative answer to the same question: is there evidence for design in biology?

This is clear: metaphysical truth determines scientific truth. If there is a designer (metaphysical truth), then intelligent design is true (scientific truth). If there is no designer (metaphysical truth), then Darwinism is true (scientific truth).

Darwinist Dr. Jerry Coyne, in his New Republic article Seeing and Believing; The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail”, asks if religion and science can be reconciled. He notes:

…[T]here are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers. ) It is also true that some of the tensions disappear when the literal reading of the Bible is renounced, as it is by all but the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities. But tension remains. The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic? The incessant stream of books dealing with this question suggests that the answer is not straightforward.

Dr. Coyne’ s description of the beliefs of many Christians of the literal truth of the Bible as “the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities” is a perplexing slur. I disagree with young-earth creationists on the time-frame of history and biology, but I don’t believe that their beliefs are “primitive.” They understand Christianity differently than I do, but on the really important question — ‘is there teleology in biology and in the natural world’ — they are exactly right, in my view. I reserve the appellation “primitive” for the utterly unsubstantiated Darwinist belief that human beings arose literally from mud by a random process of ‘survival of survivors.’ Unlike Darwinists, young-earth creationists get the important part — the obvious evidence for design in life — right.

That aside, Dr. Coyne’s sloppy use of the terms ‘religion’ ‘faith,’ ‘science,’ and ‘revelation’ muddle the real issues.

I must say that I’ve never understood the rhetorical force of the ‘God of the Gaps’ argument. The God of the Gaps sneer is invoked to imply the inexorability of materialism as a complete explanation in natural science. Any critique of materialist dogma in science from a design or immaterial perspective is derided as a ‘God of the Gaps’ argument. But the real issue is the gaps, which are plentiful and very wide.

Dr. Novella is fond of the God of the Gaps sneer, in the form of “Dualism of the Gaps.” I have not met a materialist as supremely confident of the complete explanatory power of materialism as he is. It’s ironic, as Dr. Novella claims the appellation “skeptic,” yet he shows no skepticism for his own materialist dogma. Profound skepticism for the views of opponents, combined with complacent credulity for one’s own views, is the stuff of ideological advocacy, not skepticism.

Dr. Novella responded recently to my post in which I clarified my views on the mind-brain problem. He accuses me of using a ‘Dualism of the Gaps’ argument. I’ve merely pointed out that the salient characteristics of the mind, such as intentionality, qualia, free will, incorrigibility, restricted access, continuity of self through time, and unity of consciousness (the ‘binding problem’) seem to be impossible to explain materialistically. Materialistic explanations for subjective mental states are not impossible merely because we lack experiments or evidence. Materialistic explanations for the mind are impossible within the framework of materialism itself, because mental properties are not physical properties. Nothing about matter as understood in our current scientific paradigm invokes subjective mental experience. The essential qualities on the mind are immaterial. Invocation of immaterial causation that incorporates subjectivity seems necessary for a satisfactory explanation of the mind.

Medieval alchemists searched for a legendary “philosopher’s stone” capable of turning lead into gold. Modern Darwinists have given us a different “philosopher’s stone” — one that turns gold into lead.

Darwinism is the doctrine that all living things are biological descendants of common ancestors that have been modified by unguided variations and natural selection. Although Darwinists claim that their doctrine is supported by “overwhelming evidence,” nothing could be further from the truth. The fossil record shows that living things originated in a particular pattern, but Darwinists themselves (when they’re being candid) admit that the pattern tells us nothing about the process of origination. As for the process, variation and selection are well-documented in existing species, but Darwin didn’t write a book titled How Existing Species Change Over Time. He wrote a book titled The Origin of Species — and no one has ever observed the origin of a single species by variation and selection.

Empirical science tests hypotheses by comparing them with the evidence, but Darwinists never allow evidence to jeopardize their basic claims. Darwin called The Origin of Species “one long argument,” but his followers are engaged in one long bluff. Books and articles promoting Darwinism invariably make inflated claims based on little evidence — or worse, evidence that is misrepresented or even faked.

Darwinist and University of Toronto biochemistry professor, Larry Moran, who has called publicly for the expulsion of Christian college students who, despite passing all exams, don’t personally believe in atheism and materialism, has commented on my recent post on qualia in the mind-body problem. I had used a famous traditional philosophical argument on the mind-body problem called the ‘knowledge argument.’ The knowledge argument, first articulated explicitly by Frank Jackson in his ‘Mary’s Room’ thought problem in 1982, highlights the hard problem of consciousness, which is the problem of subjectivity. Why is it that we have subjective first-person experience, whereas all that we know about the brain is objective third person knowledge? The knowledge argument points out that there are things about mental states — subjective experience called ‘qualia’ — that are knowledge that is not material. The denouement of the knowledge argument is that materialist monism is an incomplete description of the mind because it is inadequate to explain subjective experience. Some sort of dualism is necessary for a satisfactory understanding of the mind.

The knowledge argument is a profound problem for strict materialism, and materialist philosophers of the mind such as Daniel Dennett have devoted considerable effort to refuting it. The primary materialist recourse has been to deny the reality of subjective mental states. Most philosophers — and most other people — find such denial hard to take seriously.
I formulated a question for Dr. Steven Novella, who is a materialist with a dogmatic approach to the mind-body problem, that is based on the knowledge argument. My question is this: