First Things
Waste Not, Want Not: Chimps Show the Way to Higher Development
At First Things, Ferment over Intelligent Design
Rabbi Hirsch, Darwin Dissenter
Despite the old canard that the only people to question Darwinian evolution are evangelical Protestants (a canard regurgitated yet again last week by the New York Times), the fact remains that Darwin dissenters can be found among thoughtful scientists and other people from all religions and walks of life. There have been many Catholic dissenters from Darwin, from St. George Jackson Mivart and G.K. Chesterton a century ago to biochemist Michael Behe and philosopher/theologian Benjamin Wiker today. There also have been numerous Jewish dissenters from Darwin. David Klinghoffer writes about one of them in an essay for First Things on Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808—1888): Hirsch insisted again and again that God must be understood as acting with complete freedom Read More ›
Wesley Smith on “The New Inquisition: Ideology’s Corruption of Science”
Wesley J. Smith has an excellent post at his First Things blog on how the recent ClimateGate scandal is just a symptom of a much broader problem involving the ideological corruption of science: Global warming isn’t the only field in which we have witnessed this kind of brazen ideological corruption of science in recent years. I have seen the same approach taken repeatedly against heterodox views in the human cloning/ESCR controversy, to the point that people have been driven off of faculties or denied tenure. My colleagues at… Discovery Institute face a similar buzz saw in their pursuit of intelligent design hypothesis, and then are taunted by the censors for not being published in peer reviewed journals. Indeed, when Richard Read More ›
Clarity and Confusion: Stephen Barr Answers My Questions
Stephen Barr at First Things has responded to the three questions I posed to him in our online dialogue about evolution, God, Christianity, and intelligent design. Parts of Barr’s response are helpful in clarifying the points in contention; other parts continue to leave me perplexed.
For those who have not been following our exchange, it began after Barr took issue with this article I wrote for The Washington Post criticizing proponents of theistic evolution such as Kenneth Miller and Francis Collins (who was just nominated by the Obama administration to be the head of the National Institutes of Health, and who was one of the notable supporters of President Obama’s repeal of the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research earlier this year.) Other installments in my exchange with Barr can be read here, here, and here.
Barr’s latest response comes in two parts: The first part appeared as a comment posted on June 26 to one of his earlier blog posts; it’s a thoughtful answer that advances the discussion by clarifying our disagreements. The second part appeared as a new post on the First Things blog. Unfortunately, this latter rejoinder adopts an exasperated and condescending tone that isn’t especially conducive to civil discussion.
My three questions to Barr focused on his peculiar definition of Darwinism, his public silence on the mainstream theistic evolutionists who promote undirected evolution, and the ways in which Barr thinks design can be detected in biology.
The Humpty Dumpty Approach to Defining Darwinism
In my first question, I asked Barr why he insisted on conflating his teleological view of evolution with the term “Darwinism.” Doesn’t that simply promote confusion rather than clarity?
Read More ›God and Evolution: A Response to Stephen Barr (part 1)
Theistic evolutionist Stephen Barr is a serious and thoughtful man, and on the First Things blog, he has raised some serious and thoughtful objections to an essay I wrote for The Washington Post as well as to reflections on that essay by Joe Carter (also at the First Things blog). Unfortunately, I think Barr’s criticisms confuse matters more than they clarify them. Nevertheless, I’m grateful that he has aired his objections, because some of his misunderstandings are shared by other conservative intellectuals, and they deserve a response. This is the first of three posts responding to Barr.
False Dilemma or Wishful Thinking: Is Darwinian Evolution Undirected or Not?
Barr first claims that Joe Carter and I “are trapped in a false dilemma” because we wrongly think that random processes cannot be directed by God. Barr points out that even random events, properly defined, are part of God’s sovereign plan. Just because something is random from our point of view, doesn’t mean that it is outside of God’s providence. Barr may be surprised to learn that I agree with him. Indeed, most, if not all, of the scholars who believe that nature provides evidence of intelligent design would agree with him. The problem with Barr’s argument is not with his understanding of the proper meaning of random, but with his seeming blindness to the fact that the vast majority of evolutionary biologists do not share his view. Barr’s ultimate disagreement here is not with me or Joe Carter, but with the discipline of evolutionary biology itself.
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