Faith & Science

Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design is being named one of the top books of 2009 in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement (TLS) annual “Books of the Year” issue, officially due out later this week. The selection was made by prominent philosopher (and noted atheist) Thomas Nagel at New York University. The books issue is not online yet, but the TLS website has posted a preview of Nagel’s endorsement of the book: Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter — something that had to happen before the process of Read More ›

At last week’s ID legal symposium at St. Thomas University School of Law, Peter Hess, a theologian with the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), gave a talk titled “Creation, Design and Evolution: Much Ado about Nothing.” Nearly all of his objections to ID were theological in nature, as he stated that ID is “not only not science” but also “poor theology” and “blasphemous.” The NCSE is increasingly turning to religious objections in their campaign against ID, pitting one particular religious view (theistic evolution) against ID’s science. This is of course their right to do, but it’s amusing since the NCSE regularly attacks ID on the grounds that the ID movement allegedly unnecessarily pits one narrow religious view against the Read More ›

Why do so many writers who insist on emphasizing the consequences of radical Muslim belief tend to ignore the social consequences of other belief systems — for example, Darwinism?

My question is prompted by reflections that are being published about the Fort Hood massacre. Darwinist blogger PZ Myers is among many voices to be raised in protest that shooter Nidal Hasan’s Islamic beliefs are getting too little attention: “Unfortunately, there’s [a] factor that seems to be getting minimized in the press accounts: [Hasan] was also a member of an Abrahamic death cult” (i.e., Islam). 

PZ quotes Ibn Warraq’s comment on Hasan’s crime, “To leave Islam out of the equation means to forever misinterpret events,” before broadening the scope of the discussion with a concluding line about religion as a whole. “Too often,” notes PZ, “[religion] has a complex causal relationship to evil.”

My own view is that when you are taking the measure of an idea — let’s say Islam, or Darwinism — it’s a good rule of thumb at least to consider the relationship between it and its consequences, judged by the behavior of people who espouse the idea and publicly proclaim themselves as acting upon it. Sure, an idea could be ugly or dangerous, yet true. But I like David Berlinski’s point, citing Keats, that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” At the very least, you might think, an idea that has a record of persistently inspiring evil is worth a second, skeptical look, rather than your simply swallowing it because the prestige authorities around you say you should.

Or perhaps when someone claims to be acting on the basis of an idea and then does something monstrous, would you say we should assume that it was really some other factor, personal and psychological, that drove him to the wicked deed? That’s our culture’s general approach when considering the motivations of mass killers in other contexts. When there’s a slaughter at a shopping mall, a university, a church, a post office, or some other workplace — alas, in our country, none of these is an infrequent occurrence — nobody much asks about what motivated the murderer. 

I’ve expressed frustration about this in the past, as when the Darwinian musings of Columbine killer Eric Harris, or Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn, were studiously ignored.

There’s a whole community of professional Islam-bashers out there, writing online and in books that sell pretty well, who have been riding the Hasan story full time since it broke, hammering home their habitual point that Islam is an evil religion and always has been, going back to the days when it original source texts were composed.

I recently received an email asking if the correspondent correctly understood my views about intelligent design and God. Since I sometimes get similar questions, I’m posting this correspondence for anyone who is interested.

Q: I understand your current position to be that design is detectable in nature, and that design detection is not merely a theological gloss upon the scientific facts, but is actually an activity appropriate for science. I further understand you to be saying that design detection in itself is neutral regarding the way that the design found its way into nature. Thus, if the bacterial flagellum is designed, it *could* be that God took a regular bacterium and miraculously “tweaked” it, or it *could* be that God “front-loaded” the evolutionary development of the bacterial flagellum, in a manner similar to that suggested by, say, Michael Denton. Design detection as a science cannot rule on these things; all that it can show is that Darwinian mechanisms, all by themselves, could not have produced integrated structures such as the flagellum. If there was not direct intervention (tweaking, guiding, steering, etc.) or advance planning (“front-loading”), neo-Darwinian processes would never have been able to produce all the complex varieties of living things that we see today. Have I got your current position correct?

Me: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Q: Then there is the question whether your views have changed over the years. Someone I know claims that in your early writings and early conference appearances, you said directly, or gave the strong impression, that some things (A, B, C …) were brought about by wholly natural processes, whereas other things (X, Y, Z …) were brought about by design (the implication being that “designed” in your early thought was opposed to “natural”). My acquaintance’s picture of Behean evolution would then be something like this: evolution in the early oceans chugs along on its own, via neo-Darwinian and other stochastic processes, as various sorts of marine worms and sponges and so on develop. But then, during the Cambrian Explosion, God takes a direct hand and literally reshapes marine worms into 30 or so new phyla, after which things go on by natural means again, until the next limit is reached, and God has to disrupt the normal flow of nature again (maybe to create land animals, or mammals, or birds, or man). Thus, there would be a jerky, stop-and-start sort of evolution, with chance/natural law causes alternating with fits of miracles. So, looking at any given creature, science would have to say things like: “Human lungs — evolved by blind mechanisms from primitive air bladder; human camera eye — required special intervention from intelligent designer; bacterial cell walls — evolved by blind chemical mechanisms; bacterial flagellum — was made by a bolt of divine lightning.” Etc. Given this understanding of your views, one can see why my acquaintance or other TEs would characterize ID as “God of the gaps” reasoning. My question is: Was it *ever* your view that ID *required* such a jerky view of evolution, and more generally that it required miraculous intervention (breaking the causal nexus, violating the laws of nature)? Or was it always the case that your view *allowed for* jerky, stop-and-start evolution, and *allowed for* miraculous intervention, but did not *require* these things?

David Opderbeck, Professor of law at Seton Hall University School of Law, has in the past offered some insightful criticisms of the Dover ruling, including the facts that Judge Jones: Now over at the pro-Darwin BioLogos blog, Professor Opderbeck writes “In Defense of Dover.” Well, only sort of. Professor Opderbeck qualifies his post’s pro-Judge Jones title, stating: “I still think Judge Jones’ opinion in Kitzmiller missed the mark in some important ways, even though I think (and have always thought) the end result was correct.” Truthfully, I don’t disagree with a word of Professor Opderbeck’s praise of the Dover ruling when he writes: It seems clear from the trial record that the Dover, Pennsylvania school board officials who promoted the Read More ›

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from an editor at a Jewish publication soliciting from me an article “related to creationism.” He asked that it be pegged to the coming Sabbath when Jews across the spectrum of Judaism begin a new cycle of Torah readings. That cycle begins with the account of creation in Genesis.

The editor seemingly wasn’t aware that I’m not a creationist (i.e., a naïve Biblical literalist), or he didn’t know what the word means, or who knows what. Anyway, I wrote and sent off to him the piece he seemed to urgently want, suspecting even as I did so that it would never run in this particular publication. The Jewish religious world — from Haredi to Reform and just about everything in between — is in general so scandalously indifferent and ignorant on scientific issues relating to life’s origins and evolution that I felt there was a strong possibility whatever I wrote would never get past editorial scrutiny. Sure enough, a week and a half went by without a response from my correspondent. Finally, asked for a status update, the editor told me it likely wouldn’t be appearing in their pages.

So with the relevant Sabbath approaching tonight at sundown, I offer to you the piece I wrote:

Orthodox Jews have almost a sixth sense for feeling out of place. Many of us know this experience: On a visit to an unfamiliar city, you head into a restaurant that you have been assured is strictly kosher. On entering, you look around at the crowd of diners, expecting to see identifiably religious Jews — men wearing kippot — but there are none. Uneasy, you ask to see the establishment’s kosher certification. Maybe the place is no longer under rabbinic supervision? Maybe you’re in the wrong restaurant altogether. The manager produces a piece of paper with a rabbi’s name on it, which looks legitimate. And yet…something doesn’t sit right.

If there are no frum Jews there, could it really be kosher? That is a question I’m often asked by other Jews of all stripes, if not in exactly those words, about what I do in my professional life. And what is that? Do I work as a pork butcher? As the door attendant at a radical Muslim mosque? No, I’m a senior fellow at a think tank, the Discovery Institute, well known for supporting research in intelligent design — the scientific critique of and alternative to Darwinian evolution.

At first glance, you might think nothing could be more Jewish. Very shortly Jews around the world will be celebrating a new yearly cycle of Torah readings, beginning with Genesis, the parsha of Bereishit, narrating God’s creation of the world. Like Shabbat, which similarly recalls the primordial sequence of divine creativity, studying Bereishit again is a time to re-center ourselves as Jews on a truth that today is widely forgotten or denied.

That truth is that we live in a world bearing testimony to purposeful design. The very idea is under widespread, influential attack from Darwinists who insist overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrates that life originated and developed as the product of blind, churning, purposeless natural forces. Answering the challenge is a scientific pursuit, but it has spiritual implications as well, just as Darwinism has its own implications that rule out purpose, meaning or design in life’s history.

Many Jews, however, including many on the more liberal end of the Orthodox spectrum, see intelligent design as a purely Christian undertaking, with no support from Jewish tradition. The Wall Street Journal has promoted as a representative Jewish view that of Yeshiva University biologist Carl Feit “who is an ordained rabbi and Talmudic scholar…. Prof. Feit says that in nearly a quarter-century of teaching introductory biology, he has always taught evolution — supported by traditional Jewish source material — and that ‘there has never been a blip on the radar here.’ His assessment echoes the official line of the Modern Orthodox rabbinical association, which states that evolution is entirely consistent with Judaism.”

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The Anti-Defamation League, the country’s leading group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, is rightly sensitive to the offense of trivializing the Holocaust. Why, then, has the ADL said nothing in protest against the Darwinian biologist and bestselling atheist author Richard Dawkins and his comparison of Darwin doubters to Holocaust deniers?

The ADL has objected to attempts to inject Nazi imagery into the health-care reform debate (“Such statements only serve to diminish and trivialize the extent of the Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity”), the abortion debate (“Such analogies can only trivialize and diminish the horror”), the animal-rights debate (“the issue should stand on its own merits, rather than rely on inappropriate comparisons that only serve to trivialize the suffering of the six million Jews”), and in many other contexts.

But if Rush Limbaugh, for example, used “outrageous, deeply offensive and inappropriate” Nazi comparisons to stigmatize sponsors and supporters of health-care reform, why is it no less outrageous to compare people (like the late Irving Kristol, for example) who doubt Darwinian evolution to the moral cretins who deny the Holocaust? In his new book, currently the #22 best seller on Amazon, The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, Dawkins calls Darwin critics “history-deniers” and dwells on the comparison, even remarking that “The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust.”

Is that some sort of cruel joke? The evidence for Darwin’s account of evolution and, more so, its controversial mechanism of natural selection is a matter of inference, no matter how strong you think the inference is. The evidence for the Holocaust includes countless eye-witness accounts — a very different and superior order of evidence.
“People who reject the theory of evolution should be placed on a level with Holocaust deniers, argues an author in his controversial new book,” headlined the London Times when the book came out there last month. Yet not a peep from the ADL.

In his last book, The God Delusion, Dawkins used incredibly offensive language in characterizing the God of the Hebrew Bible, whom he called among other things, “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Now in a Newsweek interview he repeats the insult, saying: “The God of the Old Testament is a monster. It’s very, very hard for anybody to deny that. He’s like a hyped-up Ayatollah Khomeini.” Asked by Newsweek‘s Lisa Miller where this leaves the “90 percent of Americans [who] say they believe in God” and of whom “some portion…are intelligent people,” Dawkins replies, “But they wouldn’t disagree with what I said about the God of the Old Testament. They’d probably say something like, ‘Oh, that’s quite different. We believe in the God of the New Testament.'”

This places Jews among the portion of believing Americans who would have to be characterized as unintelligent. Miller calls Dawkins on this. He then says of Jews: “Well, sure enough. They’d say, ‘OK, we’ve moved on since that time.’ Thank goodness they have.”

The Problem of Evil is perhaps the most vexing problem in theology. There are many answers to it, which means that there is no single satisfying answer to it. What I’ve never understood about theodicy is this: why do atheists ponder the Problem of Evil?
Jerry Coyne has a recent post on theodicy. He (finally) admits

…I’m no philosopher…this is amateur philosophizing.

Damn right. For a man who recently sneered at Thomas Aquinas, this is progress.
Coyne:

If you’re ever given a choice between seeing one of two doctors about a health concern, with all else about them being apparently equal, you’d be well advised to choose the older one. Oh but won’t the young guy have all the latest techniques and therapies at his disposal, fresh from med school? Maybe or maybe not. What’s more likely, and more important, is that the seasoned practitioner will have wisdom and experience of the human condition.

So too in the political world, where on the conservative side of the spectrum you have “neocons,” “paleocons,” and “theocons.” Those distinctions have always seemed a bit spurious, having to do more with preferences in personal style and social networking than anything else. A more important distinction may be between generationally older conservatives and younger ones.

The thought is prompted by the death of conservative icon Irving Kristol. The older conservatives, like Kristol and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, William F. Buckley, Richard John Neuhaus, Robert Bork, and others had (or have) a broader view and didn’t miss the forest for the trees. They were also Darwin-doubters. It’s the younger ones who are so focused on inert policy details that big philosophical issues mostly pass over their (or rather, our) heads. That, or they’re too intimidated or impressed by the culture around us to think fundamentally about the most important questions.

On the Darwin issue in particular, the explanation may also have something to do with the fact that former lefties like Kristol, or daring intellectual nonconformists like Buckley, had already shown the temerity to break with former ideological comrades or shock friends and elders. They took risks and had guts. Following their work as pioneers, being a conservative today requires no comparable courage, much as some conservatives would like to think otherwise.

Here, for your delectation, is Kristol on teaching the evolution controversy, from a New York Times op-ed (“Room for Darwin and the Bible”) in 1986, one that likely could not be published there today (or in many a conservative venue for that matter):

Recently the Wall Street Journal published dueling articles by Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins entitled Man vs. God. The editors’ choice of Dawkins to represent the atheist viewpoint is understandable enough; in the interest of balance, it seems that the WSJ editors searched hard to find a theist who mangles theism as effectively as Dawkins mangles atheism. Author Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun given to syncretism who believes that “we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence,” answered the WSJ’s “Mangler of Theology” Ad, and Dawkins had his disputant. Armstrong: …Darwin may have done religion — and God — a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding Read More ›