gaps

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at Professor Scot McKnight’s Beliefnet blog, Jesus Creed. The first post in this series is found here, and the second here.

The Origin of Beauty

Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt’s masterful book A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature gives the following illustration of how modern scientific reductionists treat nature and the arts:

Imagine hearing the following account of one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s symphonies: ‘We have been able to prove that this particular symphony is actually reducible to a series of notes that happen to be played both at the same time in chords and one after another, creating a string of disturbances in the air caused by different frequencies. We realize, of course, that these disturbances cause further disturbances in the audience, due in part to the presence of Earth’s particular atmosphere and in part to the effect such disturbances have on the apparatus of the ear as transmitted by neurons to the brain–so disturbing, in fact, that some break into voluntary tears, remarking that they seemed to be hearing the very harmonies of heaven. Happily, we now know that there is nothing more to Mozart’s work in particular and to music in general than mere notes, themselves reducible to waves disturbing air.’

When Christian intellectuals hear such things, their general response is to think that they can have their Darwinian cake and merely scrape off the reductionist icing. But Darwinism, if I may continue the strained metaphor, is, it turns out, a layered cake with icing all throughout.

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at Professor Scot McKnight’s Beliefnet blog, Jesus Creed. The first post in this series is found here.

Intelligent Design and the Deity

In the predominant narrative, Charles Darwin was a humble scientist who proposed a strictly scientific theory. Upon publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, religious folks like Bishop Wilberforce voiced theological objections to it; and thus began the most salient episode in the ‘war between science and religion.’ Many Christians adopt a similar narrative, but suggest this was all a misunderstanding; Darwin’s theory simply has nothing to do with religious or philosophical questions.

If I may be so bold, I’d like to suggest that both narratives are wrong.

“Predicting is very difficult, especially when it is about the future,” Yogi Berra is reported to have said. Phillip Johnson, writing in May’s Touchstone, says I think of the great Yogi’s maxim whenever I hear theistic evolutionists warn intelligent design theorists against committing what they call the “God of the gaps” fallacy. Their point is that it is futile to rely on “gaps” that the theory of evolution has not yet explained as places where divine acts might be necessary, because those gaps will inevitably be filled as science progresses. Eventually, God will be squeezed out of these spaces, with consequent embarrassment to the cause of religion. But why think that these “gaps” will ever be filled? As Johnson muses, Read More ›