Faith & Science

If you want to understand the social and political implications of the atheist/materialist worldview, you need look no further than the science blogsphere’s reaction to the appointments of Francis Collins to head the NIH and John Holdren as President Obama’s science advisor.

Collins is a superbly qualified scientist (a leading molecular geneticist) and administrator (former head of the Human Genome Project). He is also a Christian, and holds fairly traditional Christian beliefs. He is not a young earth creationist, and there is no evidence that his Christian faith has hampered his scientific work in any way.

The reaction in the scientific blogsphere to Collins’ appointment has been apoplectic. P.Z. Myers, Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris, and other atheists have excoriated the President for his appointment of Collins. They believe that Collins’ traditional Christian views either disqualify him or raise grave doubts about his fitness to serve in a high position in science administration.

The atheist science blogshpere has taken a very different view of John Holdren’s appointment. For example, P.Z. Myers gushed

The bads [Rick Warren and Ken Salazar] are awful, but I’ve got to say that [President Obama’s] good decisions are very, very good. The director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will be John Holdren of Harvard University, a professor of environmental policy who takes a hard line on global climate change — he was an advisor to Al Gore on the movie, An Inconvenient Truth

It’s hard for a religious believer not to appreciate, at least in part, the spirit in which Robert Wright presents his new book The Evolution of God. On one hand, he regards the history of religion as the history of an illusion. On the other hand, he argues that the evolution of that illusion represents humanity’s groping toward a truth about the universe that may include the existence of a force operating in human lives, a force that it may even be fair to call God.

He writes admittedly as a materialist — for whom the most basic postulate holds that reality can be explained in purely material terms. He sees an “evolution” in the Bible where relatively primitive, even polytheistic concepts are gradually replaced by more enlightened ones. His case for religion, such as it is, is about as compelling as you can expect, given the postulation of materialism.

I like the person I see in Wright’s writing. Other materialists, on the basis of their own faith in such an arbitrarily constricted picture of the world, leap to demand the dismantling of religion, the mockery of religion’s defenders, and their exclusion from public office. We have the example of bestselling atheist author Sam Harris attacking poor old Francis Collins, Obama’s pick for the National Institutes of Health, on the New York Times op-ed page. Why? Because Collins is an Evangelical Christian. And we have Jerry Coyne in the New Republic attacking Wright himself as peddling “creationism for liberals.” Wright must find such insults unsurprising.

In his Afterword, he notes that following the Islam-inspired attacks of 9/11, faith as a whole acquired a foul odor. Many who previously would have been content to keep quiet about their atheism chose to go on the offensive. Today voicing even the mildly religion-friendly view that Wright does would invite mockery at, “say, an Ivy League faculty gathering unless you want people to look at you as if you’d just started speaking in tongues.”

Luckily, Wright is not a professional academic but a scholarly journalist. He has also taught at Penn and Princeton, so he knows that terrain. What I like about him, apart from the fact that he writes wonderfully readable yet learned prose, is his generosity to people of faith. I’m not being ironic. He writes that he finds it “nice” (and I think there he is being ironic) that some people can lead morally exemplary lives without God. Yet he also finds this surprising: “the natural human condition is to ground your moral life in the existence of other beings, and the more ubiquitous the beings, the firmer the ground.” It’s for that reason that he wants to find, again given his materialist premise, the most compelling case for faith that he can.

Recently Focus on the Family aired part one of a two-part series on evolution. Reaching back into the archives, they played selections from a 1994 debate between intelligent design advocate Phillip Johnson (U.C. Berkeley) and Darwin-defender William Provine (Cornell). One thing in particular struck me: ID advocates are often accused of wanting to push ID into the public high school classroom. Yet even in this early debate, Phillip Johnson clearly notes that ID advocates would be happy just to see Darwinism taught fairly with both its strengths and weaknesses made clear. And, more importantly, ID advocates would like to see the academy open up to discussion of intelligent design — not primarily the high school classroom.You can listen to part Read More ›

Responses from the Darwin faithful to anything touching upon intelligent design are often so thoughtless it takes your breath away. I guess this is how they manage to stay impervious to the evidentiary challenge to their religion — they just don’t think it through, or even read it. A single article in a newspaper or journal taxes their ability simply to read what a person says and respond to that, rather than to what they imagine he would say. Consider the cases of Ewen Callaway and Jerry Coyne.

When Stephen C. Meyer wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe on Thomas Jefferson as a proto-ID supporter, outraged science journalist Callaway at the New Scientist couldn’t even mount an argument. He calls linking Jefferson and ID a “ridiculous assertion.” But he doesn’t tell us why it’s ridiculous. He writes:

Public schools didn’t exist in their current form in America during Jefferson’s time, but Dr. Meyer never pauses to consider whether Jefferson would have supported the teaching of ID — a religious philosophy — in government-funded schools.

Meyer “never pauses to consider”? Whether Jefferson would have supported teaching ideas critical of Darwinian evolution is the subject of Meyer’s first paragraph and it goes on from there. Jefferson would not have supported teaching a religious doctrine in government schools, but Jefferson did not consider design in nature and the cosmos to be a religious doctrine but rather an empirical idea, supported by reason, “without appeal to revelation.”

Callaway then concludes in oracular fashion: “He wouldn’t have” — Jefferson would not have supported acknowledging Darwinism’s scientific shortcomings in a public school setting. This isn’t an argument. It’s an assertion. Actually, it’s necromancy. Callaway believes that he can speak with authority for the dead Jefferson.

He goes on to airily dismiss the massive scientific evidence in Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design as if it were a kind of temper tantrum:

Meyer cannot accept that the genetic code evolved naturally. Never mind the fact that the building blocks of DNA and its cousin molecule RNA existed on early Earth and even in space.

Check out that link. This is mind-boggling. Callway cites as evidence against Meyer’s book that a meteorite in Australia was found to contain “uracil, a base that is essential for the creation of RNA, and xanthine, a close chemical relative of the DNA base, guanine.” But what’s so mysterious about DNA is how the bases got into the specific sequence needed to carry information in the first place. This is the enigma of life’s origin. That’s the whole question that materialist science is unable to answer, about which intelligent design at least gives a clue. Pointing triumphantly to that meteorite is like pointing to a baby with a box of Scrabble letters in front of him and saying it’s thereby obvious that the baby can now proceed to write works of equal merit to Jefferson’s because hey, he’s got all the letters ready to work with.

But let’s lay off Ewen Callaway. He’s just a science writer. More startling is the laziness of University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True.

Picture a majestic T. rex receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments in its undersized forelimbs, or an elegant octopus crucified on an old rugged cross with four crossbars instead of one.

Such images are what Kenneth Miller presumably has in mind with his comforting Darwinist thought that intelligent creatures were guaranteed to pop up even in the course of an evolutionary process of purely unguided, purposeless churning. You see, he tells us, evolution was bound to “converge” (as theorized by Simon Conway Morris) not necessarily on a human being but on — well, as Miller has said, it could have been “a big-brained dinosaur, or… a mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities.” Just for fun, let’s grant the scientific merit of “convergence” — though many Darwinists, in fact, do not. My argument here is not with Miller’s science but with his imagination.

A Roman Catholic and a Brown University biologist, Ken Miller is one of those theistic evolutionists who want other religious believers to feel there’s nothing in Darwin to offend religious sensibilities. He and others (such as Obama’s favorite geneticist, Francis Collins) invite us to imagine God being delighted with such creatures, noble and impressive in their way, as the culmination of the evolutionary process that He chose not to guide. But what if the intelligent creature that resulted from all the purposeless churning, and that was intended to reflect God’s own image, had been something really horrible.

That’s the scenario that an author I enjoy, a committed Darwinist and atheist — H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) — allows us to contemplate. In his terrifically imaginative horror stories, most set in a spooky, antiquated New England, the great theme is that humanity is but a tiny, unimportant speck in an unimaginably vast universe that has cast up innumerable varieties of extraterrestrial beings, some of which have colonized our planet. Darwinists love him. If you follow PZ Myers’s blog, you’ll know PZ linked the other day to an “Unholy Bible” — Holy Scriptures tweaked along Lovecraftian lines (Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning Cthulhu created R’lyeh and the earth”).

Many of Lovecraft’s creatures are so repellent that when a human being encounters them, he’s as likely as not to die right there on the spot from the sheer terror. Here’s a description of one, depicted in the form of a little statue at the beginning of “The Call of Cthulhu”:

Advocates of Intelligent Design and others who practice skepticism toward the pomposities of much of modern Darwinism can be forgiven a little amusement when they see their detractors engaged in an internal squabble that highlights the philosophical absurdities of the scientistic rationalism that pervades much of modern Darwinism.

Ever since the publication of Jerry Coyne’s New Republic article, “Seeing and Believing,” the Darwinists have been engaged in a three-way tug of war over the issue of “accommodationism.” The gnawing and snarling has pitted three camps against each other in a contest over the right way to wage the PR war against the Intelligent Design movement for the hearts and minds of the scientifically naive.

The Three Non-Amigos

There are, first, those who, scornful of any public dissembling, declare outright their unapologetic commitment to metaphysical naturalism. Generally speaking, these are the New Atheists, whose online champion for several years has been P. Z. Myers, a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota who is perhaps most famous for his public desecration of the Eucharistic Host, a one-time publicity stunt that only temporarily overshadowed his more regular and customary nastiness toward those who consider his narrow scientific reductionism … well, narrow. Coyne, a University of Chicago scientist, has recently joined Myers at the head of the pack.

On one hand this group has called on scientific organizations like the NCSE to take a neutral position in regard to whether Darwinism is reconcilable. On the other hand, they favor a wider war on religion as the only ultimately victorious Darwinist strategy. These are the crazy uncles of the movement — those who the mainstream Darwinists would rather not let the neighbors see.

Discovery Institute senior fellow David Klinghoffer has written an insightful column in The Jerusalem Post on the evidence for design in DNA — and what it means for materialism: DNA are three letters full of paradox. What they represent remains little understood by the public, yet they are on everyone’s tongue. Amid the chatter of popular culture, the truth gets lost that DNA is one of the most powerful clues we have of the existence of a spiritual reality, maybe to the existence of God. An acronym for deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA refers to the form taken by the biological information that directs the production of proteins and other cell components. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick famously described its Read More ›

Update: An earlier version of this release mistakenly attributed a quote from lecturer James Williams to the Daily Telegraph to Archbishop Rowan Williams, also cited in the article as critical of intelligent design. SEATTLE–Earlier this week, The Daily Telegraph reported attacks on the inclusion of intelligent design in a British science exam, provoking a sharp response from the intelligent design research community, led by Stephen C. Meyer, a Cambridge University-trained philosopher of science whose just-released book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne) is already drawing praise from leading U.K. scientists. Lecturer James Williams of Sussex University complained to The Telegraph, “This gives an unwarranted high profile to creationism and intelligent design as ideas of Read More ›

Last December, I wrote a post about a book titled Life on Other Planets, aimed at junior-high-aged kids. I found it at a local library. The book promoted materialist science fiction about the origin of life on earth. More recently, the Seattle Public Library system had its annual booksale, and I loaded up. One now-former library book I bought was Journey from the Dawn: Life with the World’s First Family, by Donald Johansen and Kevin O’Farrell (Villard, 1990). I liked this book far better than Life on Other Planets, but instead of promoting materialist science fiction to kids on the origin of life, this one promoted science fiction to kids regarding paleoanthropology and the origin of humans. The book starts Read More ›