Koukl, Inquiry, and Science

And now, the rest of the story.

Yesterday I praised evangelical approaches such as Gregory Koukl's for their willingness to engage (at least partially) the worldviews of nonbelievers. I think that willingness goes a long way toward refuting the stereotype (well-earned, I'm afraid) of evangelicals as doing nothing more than sticking their fingers in their ears and going "lalalalalala" whenever they encounter ideas not instantly recognized as "Bible-believing Christian."

Unfortunately, Koukl and other worldview evangelists refuel that stereotype by taking on only part of the task of critical inquiry. Much of Koukl's book--actually a lot of worldview evangelism materials--could serve as material for a general course in critical thinking and argumentation. There's a surprising renaissance of old-fashioned logic training (ex: types of argument, varieties of fallacy, etc.) in conservative evangelical circles. It's not for nothing that Regent University (the conservative college founded by Pat Robertson) has a reputation for winning national moot-court-debate competitions. Koukl and apologists like him make for excellent rhetoricians.

But they miss the boat on a truly critical thinking experience in this respect: they assume from the get-go that own views, their own worldviews, are utterly impregnable. I do not mean they have confidence in their views; any debater invests at least a modicum of confidence in his or her stance. But inquiry is different than debate. In debate, the point is to win, defeating the opposing side and convincing some audience (perhaps the opposing side itself) that your argument is superior. Inquiry, however, demands that the answers not be known in advance. Going into an inquiry with the certainty that you will emerge with exactly the same set of opinions as you started out with is evidence that you never really meant to engage in an inquiry at all.

Koukl equips his (evangelical Christian) readers with a number of tools for hacking away at an unbeliever's unbelief, all of which take the form of seemingly innocent questions. "I'm just curious," becomes the evangelist's motto. But Koukl isn't inquiring, really. Any information gained through the evangelist's questions is to be used as ammunition with which to entangle the unbeliever in a logical contradiction. And even these contradictions get phrased as questions (e.g., "How can you be for animal rights yet support abortion?"). These questions are thus doubly rhetorical; they mobilize tactical rhetorics for winning an argument while (eventually) asking a series of questions to which the evangelist already knows the answer.

Now, lest I accuse Koukl of deception, I think he's clear enough to his readers that he's not actually engaged in open-minded inquiry. This is apologetics--a defense of faith meant to be won or lost--and not pure curiosity. The problem, however, is that I don't see any evidence of honestly open-minded inquiry anywhere else in most conservative evangelical life. Similarly closed-ended investigations characterize multiple other realms of evangelical thought.

Take, for example, the evolution issue. The creation/evolution debate (already a false dichotomy for many believers) forms one of the primary sub-fields in my research. Its history is fascinating, and perhaps I'll sketch it out at a later point. Suffice it to say, though, that for the first time in the history of the evangelical battle against Darwinian-inspired theories of evolution, the default evangelical position is that of young-earth creationism, the belief that the universe was created in accordance with a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis: everything at once, in six twenty-four-hour days. This was not, crucially, the position of most anti-evolution creationists for most of the first decades of the anti-evolution movement. William Jennings Bryant, the lawyer for the anti-Darwin prosecution in the Scopes Trial, himself held the opinion that the "days" of Genesis were likely eras of thousands, even millions of years.

Since the mid-twentieth century, however, creationism has gradually come to mean a "young earth" (young universe, actually) 6,000-10,000 years old. Evidence to the contrary, particularly geological and paleontological data (i.e., rock strata, fossils), get explained via the mechanism of the Great Flood. Only the young earth model, goes the argument, properly comports with an inerrantist reading of scripture. To question the young earth model, then, is to question the inspiration of the Bible.

This puts evangelical apologists in an extremely awkward position, having to explain mounds of evidence from astronomy, geology, chemistry, biology, paleontology, anthropology, archeology, and other scientific fields in a way that confirms the creationists' narrative of universal origins. Moreover, creation apologists strive to frame these explanations as more scientific than the scientists' own explanations. In other words, creation apologists will make the argument that it's evolution and not creationism that is anti-science.

Why are scientists who support evolution (and an old earth/universe) wrong? Because, argue the creation apologists, their conclusions keep changing. They traffic in uncertain theories, guesses about how the universe works. When presented with evidence that troubles or contradicts those theories, argue creationists, the evolutionists simply alter the theories. Creationists, by contrast, know the Truth about how the universe was formed, how the earth came to be, and how life emerged; they read the Bible. That truth doesn't change. It's merely more and more deeply supported by the data from various scientific fields.

Of course, most scientists would call this image of "science" laughably off-base. Science aims not for Eternal Propositional Truths but for better and more accurate descriptions and explanations of natural phenomena. Confronted with the allegation that theories change with evidence, scientists will say, "Of course they change! That's the nature of scientific inquiry." Science (ideally) isn't a contest to be won with tricks and debates but an open-minded, ever-revisable search for ever-more-accurate/useful explanatory models. If science weren't revisable, we'd still be stuck in a Ptolemaic universe with all of the heavens revolving around the earth in fixed crystalline spheres.

It's a problem to examine any data, conduct any experiment, read any scientific report with the answer to a scientific question already in mind. Any scientist not open to having his or her theories refuted or changed--any science unwilling to submit his or her theories to doubt, in other words--isn't doing proper science.

And here's where the arguments get tricky.

More tomorrow,

JF