Comfort and the Origins Giveaway

And today in non-prison-related musings, we have the unveiling (well, an unveiling, as in yet another unveiling) of Ray Comfort's free edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in faux-honor of Darwin's 200th anniversary.

Comfort, as you may recall, is the powerhouse street evangelist behind the Way of the Master, a set of techniques for sharing the gospel that are essentially built around a conversational demonstration of a person's sin and imminent damnation. Together with actor Kirk Cameron, Comfort has started or inspired one of the more prominent trends in twenty-first century evangelicalism--oriented away from denominationally affiliated churches, focused on person-to-person outreach, and grounded in a conservative quasi-Calvinist message.

Of late, however, Comfort has devoted a great deal of energy to combating atheism and agnosticism, particularly as they manifest in the form of proponents of evolutionary theory. His blog, "Atheist Central," has, I admit, become a regular stop in my daily walks through various internet sites. He'll post a cartoon, a link, or (more often) a brief Bible lesson or anecdote, generally wrapping up with some version of "and this shows how foolish atheists are when they deny God."

These posts attract comments like a fresh kill attracts scavengers. Ray's bait apparently offers too enticing a temptation for some professed atheists to resist. Even the briefest post quickly garners, 70, 80, even more than 100 posts, most of which seem to be from "regulars," staunch atheists oddly obsessed with repeatedly, day after day (and often several times a day) pointing out how, once again, Ray's shown how ignorant he is. Of course, the comments also feature regular defenders who pipe up to cheer Ray on or to set out intricate rebuttals to some other atheist's argument.

Comfort encourages such regulars, at times responding briefly to comments himself. Occasionally, a comment or two will itself inspire a posting. Or (like here) Comfort will post some of the more extreme, "I hope you die, Ray," comments. Apparently the only comments he blocks as moderator are those that include cursing, "blasphemy" (i.e., taking the Lord's name in vain), URLs, and/or those that do not capitalize "God" or "Jesus."

Frankly, the comments are half the fun (odd fascination?) of the site for me, staging as they do shrill, repetitive debates between super-polarized sides. The site--and Comfort himself--seem to attract mainly vehement opponents or ardent supporters, anti-Christian (in the Hitches/Dawkins sense) secularists or fundamentalist-leaning evangelicals. Comfort has never really had much truck with mainstream evangelicals or moderate/liberal Christians (the latter of which he would likely not consider Christian at all). If it isn't polarizing, he's not interested (on this site, at least).

Consider, for instance, the Origins giveaway. Lately, Comfort's posts and the comments have revolved around his latest--what to call it?--stunt? Comfort has published and is giving away free copies of Darwin's Origin book with an essay by him that relates bits of Darwin's life and seeks to refute Darwin's theory. Ostensibly, he gives away the book to demonstrate the rationality of Christianity (which for Comfort is utterly opposed to any Darwinian theory). Readers can read Darwin's argument and Ray's (much briefer) rebuttal and decide for themselves who has the right of things.

Early on, Comfort got quite a bit of flack when early readers discovered that he had excised several chapters; Comfort explained that publishing costs had initially prevented him from printing the entire volume and that the expurgated chapters were available for download from his site. The current giveaway apparently solves this problem and includes the unabridged text.

The intro (the link to which appears broken currently) largely recycles standard anti-Darwin arguments, arguments that the more advanced creationist organizations (yes, there are advanced creationist organizations) have left behind.

And that's one of the fascinating things to me about Comfort. As an evangelist, he's distinctive and (from a research standpoint) exciting. As an apologist, and as a creation apologist specifically, he borders on the embarrassing, particularly when compared to some of the slicker creation apologetics outfits out there.

More tomorrow,

JF

The Cul-de-Sac of Autonomous Human Reason!!

Continuing my reading of the Creation Museum's walkthrough tour: having defined to its satisfaction both creationism (the young-earth variety based on a literal interpretation of Genesis) and evolutionary theory (as well as all other science that points to a billions-of-years-old universe) as interpretations based on worldviews, the Museum then proceeds to compare the two interpretations' worldviews. Thus: the Bible versus "autonomous human reason."

Guess which one comes out on top?

To a certain extent, the Museum tips its hand with the "Same Evidence, Different Starting Points" displays, which end up asking philosophical questions about the nature of evil that evolutionary theory--surprise, surprise--proves ill-equipped to address. Already evolution fails one of the worldview tests that evangelicalism puts to non-Christian philosophies: is it comprehensive? Clearly not, if it can't jump the hurdle of Why-Is-There-Suffering.

But things get more explicit as the tour shifts form the theoretical to the historical. The next scenes feature a sort of history of the Bible. Life-sized dioramas exhibit various Biblical writers hard at work scribing Hebrew or Greek on parchment and scrolls. A text-heavy well display informs visitors that the Bible has been under nearly constant attack by critics and heretics, but that throughout history, God has preserved God's Word. As if to prove the point, the next room discovers a mannequin Martin Luther hammering his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg door (signaling tacitly the Museum's Protestant-evangelical orientation). Opposing this display is a stylized representation of the Scopes Trial--a key defeat for fundamentalist creationism and a watershed moment in an ongoing cultural decline. Underlining this point, a line graph slopes downward, dotted with particular historical events, representing the ever-weakening regard for the Bible by rebellious humanity. A special display for Charles Templeton, a former evangelist-turned-atheist, pictures a dark cemetery with "God is Dead" on a gravestone.

The next room arrives at the present, represented by a run-down urban alleyway strewn with trash and (fake) rats. Graffiti and torn newspaper/magazine clippings cover the walls (samples: "Modern World Abandons Bible," "Today Man Decides Truth [with Truth crossed out with spray paint and replaced with "Whatever"]"). The darkened alleyway opens up into a cul-de-sac. On one side, three looped video monitors play scenes of cultural decay: a boy looking at pornography, a teenage girl learns she is pregant, and a minister preaches that evolution and Christianity can co-exist. Across from these movies is a huge facade of a dilapidated church. Through a broken stained-glass window visitors can see the family (the same featured in the videos) sitting in the pew. A massive wrecking ball with the words "Millions of Years" engraved on it hangs from the ceiling, frozen in the act of smashing into the church's walls as the creationist scientist from the beginning totes a wheelbarrow full of bricks (the words "God's Truth" are emblazoned on the wheelbarrow) in a futile act of repair.

Clearly the Museum sees the "autonomous human reason" as a ruinous starting point that ends up in a hot mess of relativism, dysfunction, and urban blight. At stake, again, isn't merely evolution or creationism per se but the worldview underlying each: the Bible (certain Truth) or not (no truth).

The rest of the Museum drops the compare-contrast and focuses entirely on the Creationist case, beginning with a "time tunnel" festooned with glowing stars that leads to a "Six Days Theatre," where sonorous narration of the first chapter of Genesis accompanies a multi-screen movie of the first six days. The walkthrough really takes off soon after, as visitors stroll through an immersive recreation of the Garden of Eden.

The worldview battle, though, catches my attention most, as the features of that argument--here's where autonomous human reason leads--forms the basis for a lot of evangelical apologetics today. Of course, most worldview analysis from the evangelicals is more nuanced than the Museum's one-or-the-other focus. Worldview Analysis books and curricula typically go through seven or eight alternative worldviews to "Biblical Christianity," from Hinduism to Islam to "New Age" to Postmodernism. Increasingly, postmodernism gets the most attention from evangelical apologists, as its major threat--relativism--mirrors that staged in the hell-of-the-present cul-de-sac.

Indeed, it wouldn't be wrong to say that much of present-day evangelical outreach in the US operates in reaction to postmodernism.

More tomorrow,

JF

Science, the Bible, and Worldviews in the Creation Museum

The Creation Museum's reasoning presents some complex problems.

Briefly: the Creation Museum's main display tour side-steps the traditional evolution/creation battleground of "who has superior evidence," essentially redefining both creationism and evolutionary theory as worldviews that frame particular interpretations of more or less neutral scientific data. A creationist scientist examines the fossils of a dinosaur and, due to her presuppositions, arrives at one conclusion. The evolutionary scientist examines the same fossils and arrives at a different conclusion--again based on her own presuppositions.

I must repeat here that I do not endorse the Museum's redefinition. As most scientists would point out, the second scientist in the example above arrives at whatever conclusion she does (e.g., the bones are of an animal that lived 100 million years ago and not 4,000 years ago) based not on pure presuppositional faith but on particular methods and knowledges that have themselves been developed, substantiated, and refined by many people over time. She could, if necessary, give a detailed account of how and why she arrived at the conclusions she did. Moreover, she would be open to the possibility that her conclusions might themselves be flawed; if she were presented with superior methods or supporting theories, she would revise her conclusions accordingly (assuming she's an ethical scientist).

This would, crucially, even be the case were tests by her and by other scientists to prove conclusively that the bones came from an animal that died only 100 years ago. To be sure, such a conclusion would be shocking and would challenge many long-held theories of dinosaurs. But, so long as the data were multiply, reliably, and repeatedly substantiated, the shocking conclusion would eventually be accepted. Scientific conclusions change in response to data.

The creationist scientist (following the model of creation science proposed by the Museum), on the other hand, explicitly begins her study of the bones by knowing the conclusion ahead of time. The bones cannot be more than X thousands of years old because the Bible (which is utterly without error), when read literally, suggests that existence itself is no older than 6,000-10,000 years. Any evidence or method that points to the contrary is cause not to doubt the conclusion but to doubt the evidence or method. Creationism, seen in this light, fails the disciplinary test of science not because it isn't detailed or careful or thoughtful (in its own way, it is all of these things) but because it does not arrive at conclusions based on data but expects data to line themselves up behind already-certain conclusions.

The Creation Museum passes over these key distinctions by rendering both creationists and evolutionists mute in terms of their respective scientific rationales. In place of evidence to arrive at their respective conclusions (suggests the Museum), evolutionists and creationists arrive at conclusions due primarily to their respective worldviews. The creationist starts from the assumption that the Bible is God's Word, utterly and literally accurate in every description of reality. The earth, the universe, and all life therein were created in six literal days. God brought into being distinct animal kinds (which later perhaps split off into species, e.g., canines became wolves, dogs, coyotes, etc.).

And the evolutionist? Now, of course, "evolutionists" would themselves answer the question of starting point in a variety of different ways. Many are Christians themselves, affirming that God is indeed the ultimate force behind all of the extant universe. Such Christian evolutionists might credit God with installing within creation the ability to self-develop, essentially making evolution the motor of life on earth. Or they might say that their starting points as religious believers are necessarily different--grander--than their starting points as scientists. Science, they might argue, isn't a worldview but a methodology brought into play in particular circumstances for particular ends. When doing scientific things, the Christian scientist does her best to bracket biases and preconceptions, focusing on empirically accessible data or experiments as well as the logical/mathematical connections and predictions that flow from those. One does not look to science to determine the existence of God or the soul or human rights because those things aren't amenable to empirical investigation.

In the Creation Museum's portrayal, however, that act of bracketing off unprovable biases--actually the act of considering "a belief in the inerrant Bible" as one of those biases--is itself a worldview-based, worldview-generative gesture. That is, if you believe it possible or wise to so categorize the inerrant-infallible-literally true view of the Bible as a consideration to be excluded from science--you're already playing in a different sandbox from young-earth creationist Christians.

And although I consider the Museum's definition of science to be tendentious, I think they score a point here. If you base your approach to all of reality on the foundation of the Bible as literal/inerrant Truth, then to bracket off or ignore Biblical testimony at any time is to break with that worldview. Worldviews are in this sense similar to Thomas Kuhn's scientific paradigms; they determine not only what counts as a conclusion but what counts as data. A definition of science as little more than careful observation of facts fails in that it assumes a kind of pre-agreement among observers about what a fact is. Part of scientific training--indeed, part of any discipline's training in observation, investigation, and analysis--involves absorbing what counts as significant. An archeologist working in the field knows, for example, what dust or dirt to brush away as unimportant and what bit of grit to value as, say, ash from an ancient cooking fire. An astronomer peering through a telescope knows to separate the dots of light that are celestial bodies from those that are optical illusions, reflections, or scratches on the lens.

Similarly, a creationist begins by assuming that a belief in the Bible as Utter Truth is inseparable from any other data she might consider. An evolutionist assumes the opposite, that such a belief is better separated from the investigation of data, at least initially. Crucially, neither of these assumptions are themselves justifiable or provable by appeal to scientific reason. They are pre-scientific, metaphysical.

And, as long as it has its druthers, the Museum is happier to argue metaphysics than evidence.

More tomorrow,

JF

The Creation Museum and the Creation/Evolution Battle

Just in case there was any doubt, let me declare that I endorse theories of evolution as articulated and studied (and revised and deepened) by mainstream science. I do not believe in a literal rendering of the Genesis narrative as the truth of the universe's origins. Nor do I see my convictions about evolution as in any way incompatible with my Christian faith. I join a host of other believers past and present in affirming my belief in a creating God alongside a belief in the Big Bang, a billions-of-years-old universe, the evolutionary development of life, etc.

Were I an anti-evolution creationist, though, I'd probably try to take my cues from the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis. [True confessions: some of what follows appears in slightly altered form in some articles about the Museum I'm writing currently].

Departing from the attack rhetorics of the creation-evolution data wars (i.e., barrage of specialized and often misconstrued data vs. consensus of scientists), the Museum's main walkthrough tour beings with an irenic scene, a life-sized diorama of two scientists at work. Against a photorealistic backdrop of the Grand Canyon, two scientists (mannequins, of course) perch on a dusty outcropping of rock, brushing dust away from the partially exposed bones of a dinosaur. TV displays on the walls of the diorama room play looped videotape of the two scientists the mannequins represent, each amiably explaining his work.

"I'm an evolutionist," declares the younger one. "I interpret these bones as belonging to a dinosaur who lived millions of years ago."

"I'm a creationist," says the other. "I see these bones as only a few thousand years old, buried in the Great Flood described in Genesis."

Neither scientist shares his rationale or supporting evidence. Nor does either one of the scientists attack his colleague's interpretation. They simply come to divergent conclusions based on their (apparently equally rigorous/well-informed) study of the plain evidence before them.

There's more going on here than a simple scene of collegial disagreement. Theorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that museums do more than merely show; they participate in the creation of knowledge in particular fields. A display of pre-Colombian Native American pots, for example, does more than merely show off some old kitchen implements. Behind that display are a number of predecessor actions, acts of selection (choosing this pot rather than that one from an archeological site), displacement (removing the pot from its original place buried in a cave), and re-situation (placing the pot in an exhibit, with a caption, alongside other such items). These acts collectively transform the pot from "just a pot" to an artifact, a stand-in for a whole culture, a whole history. Through "artifact-ing" objects, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett concludes, museums help to establish what "counts" as (in this case) pre-Colombian Native American culture.

Patterning itself after a mainstream science museum, the Creation Museum likewise creates an artifact in this first display. But the artifact in question isn't the half-buried fossil; it's the scientists. Or, more accurately, it's the sterilized snapshot of what it is to "do" science. Science, implies the display, is nothing more than looking carefully at evidence. By dis-placing the scientists from the context of real-world creation/evolution battles (really, in what context would two such scientists be working together?), by scrubbing the dig site scene clean of any hint of acrimony, legitimation challenges, or detailed rationales, the display presents both creationists and evolutionists equally as scientific.

Right at the beginning of the tour, then, the Creation Museum basically brackets off from consideration the whole data war over "who's more scientific?" that characterizes so much of the creation/evolution debates. What, then, if not legitimate science explains the difference between creationists and evolutionists? What, moreover, makes creationism preferable to evolution if not superior scientific support?

The Museum itself raises and answers those questions throughout the next section of the walkthrough, tellingly entitled "Same Evidence, Different Starting Points." Using a series of wall displays, the Museum strives to present an even-handed, comparison/contrast of evolutionary and creationist accounts of the origin of the universe and of life on earth (evolutionist, for the Museum, covers any scientific theory, biological or not, that posits a billions-of-years-old universe).

The wall displays replicate the pattern of the initial diarama: here's some observational data; here are two conflicting conclusions about that data. Again, the displays banish from consideration any detailed data, scientific theories, or rationales. The only real difference, it seems, between the evolutionary and creationist views concern their "starting point." The evolutionists, argue the displays, begin from a place called "human reason." The creationists start out from a place labeled "God's word."

Now, to an inerrantist--one who comes to the Museum already certain of the literal truth of the Genesis account--the side-by-side explanation presents a no-brainer of a decision: clearly only the Biblical account is true. Case closed. Yet the Museum does not itself immediately make this case. These displays remain decidedly neutral compared to the biased, straw-man presentations of evolutionary theory commonly found in anti-evolutionist literature. To be sure, the Museum's decision not to include the supporting data for non-creationist accounts of prehistory could itself be interpreted as a dishonest act; any mainstream scientist would argue that it is simply not the case that the two theories are coequal in terms of data-based support. But the Museum's choice to mask the data support (or lack thereof) in this section also keeps the museological focus on the starting points.

This focus proves vital as the walkway displays shift from comparing/contrasting views of pre-history to comparing and contrasting evolutionist and creationist views of human life in the present. Questions about how fossils form or how species emerge fade away, replaced by questions like "Why is there suffering?" or "How ought humans behave toward each other?" These latter inquiries are not scientific questions, to be sure. But that's the point: science, in the Museum's logic, is merely the looking at. The conclusions--evolutionary or creationist--are based on starting points, aka worldviews. Creationism and evolutionism are not themselves scientific doctrines to be proven or supported purely through data; they draw instead on essentially unprovable metaphysical presuppositions about what truth is and how humans gain knowledge. Accepting the Bible as literally true isn't a conclusion made on the basis of evidence and reasoning; it's the foundation that defines the nature of evidence and rationality. The interpretation of data (aka science) depends upon one's original worldview.

As worldviews, creationism and evolutionism are amenable to qualitative (rather than merely descriptive) evaluation. To the basic questions of present-day life--why do we live? why do we love? why do we suffer? why do we die?--evolution has no answers, or at best only the brutal, soulless rationale that we are all animals and that suffering/dying is the way of the world. Creationism, however, not only provides a comprehensive view of humanities origins (a view, imply the displays, that enjoys just as much material support as evolution); it also gives an answer to the nagging questions of human existence.

This, then, is the Museum's brilliance. It changes the nature of the creation/evolution debate. Rather than being a battle of data, a battle of science, the Museum re-casts the debate as a battle between worldviews. As a worldview, contends the Museum, evolution simply fails. Creationism wins, in the Museum's displays, not by out-evidencing the competition but by out-religioning it.

More tomorrow,

JF

Comfort and the Creation Museum

The two sites I linked to yesterday, Ray Comfort's "Atheist Central" blog and the home page of the Creation Museum, each represent two different but related strands of the current worldview-evangelism critique of evolution.

Comfort's postings, which are often nowadays about the foolishness of evolution, partake of what might be called a low-road approach. He will, for example, cherry-pick some random bit of evolutionary data, quote it out of context, and then basically state, "Now, who in their right mind would believe this? It just goes to show how idiotic/delusional atheists [i.e., anyone who believes in evolution] are." Call it aragumentum ad incredulitatum: because Mr. Comfort finds it personally unlikely that, say, the "Ardi" fossils represent an ancestral homonid species, it must therefore be foolhardy for anyone to think so.

I call this the "low road" because it's basically the same tack taken by generations of anti-evolutionists: erect and knock down a straw man figure of what scientists actually assert. Such a tactic invites (and receives) derision from people who affirm evolution (or, at least, from people who dislike shoddy rhetorical tricks); Comfort's "comments" section sizzles with the acid of his detractors.

The Creation Museum, by contrast, largely eschews such low road tactics. Established and maintained by Answers in Genesis, the Museum taps into the same repertoire of display conventions that people use to identify and invest trust in mainstream natural history museums. Indeed, the Museum, which features work by a former Universal Pictures Theme Park designer, combines the glitziest features of a discovery center and a theme park. It's edutainment with a Biblical twist.

And--to be frank--it's impressive as all get-out. Evangelical culture features an array of alternate-universe versions of mainstream (secular) cultural products. There's evangelical rap, evangelical historical romance novels, and evangelical superhero shows on TV (you haven't lived until you've seen Bibleman). Most of these are, well, faintly embarrassing, akin to watching the nerdy kid in school (and I speak as a nerd myself) trying to act like the cool guy and not quite getting it right.

The Creation Museum shatters this stereotype. In terms of the slickness of its design, marketing, and execution, the Museum rivals any secular edutainment I've yet encountered. A ton of talent and effort (and money) went into the place, and it shows. From the exquisitely detailed life-size tableaux of scenes, to the multiple films shown in big-screen auditoriums, to the planetarium show, to scenes of animatronic dinosaurs, to the well-stocked fossil displays--the Museum delivers on its promise of just-like-secular culture family fun.

Well, "just like secular culture"--with the glaring difference of the overtly creationist worldview. The dinosaurs cavort with Adam and Eve's young children (not Cain and Abel but other ones). The tableaux features scenes drawn from Genesis. The films explain how, for example, dragon legends from around the globe substantiate the recent history of dinosaurs living alongside humans. The planetarium hints at elaborate explanations of how light from galaxies billions of light-years away can possibly reach earth. The fossils are accompanied with captions that explain the rock layer (not the age) from which they came, specifying some time in the last few thousand years (rather than millions of years) as the date of fossilization. The Museum is not shy about its anti-evolutionist stance.

Yet the Museum displays, its main walk-through, and its multimedia features all steer clear of the dismissive attack that characterizes Comfort's blog postings. Instead, the first part of the Museum devotes itself to a relatively even-handed examination of why people might believe in evolution versus creationism.

More tomorrow,

JF

Two quick sites to check out

Lost time today-- short post.

Some sites to check out:

Ray Comfort's anti-atheism blog, where he's been on the warpath agains evolutionists. His arguments follow much of the pattern I've been laying out: http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/

Also--the website for the Creation Museum, the $27 million testament to Answers in Genesis's particular brand of creation evangelism and apologetics. I'll discuss it on the morrow! http://creationmuseum.org/

More tomorrow,

JF

Worldview Apologetics and Evolution-as-Faith Arguments

While some of the most characteristic and attention-getting tactics by anti-evolutionists (i.e., young-earth creationist evangelicals) involve arguments that evolution is flawed as a science, the more potent case of late seems to be that evolution is flawed as a faith.

How? The latest iteration of young-earth creationism suggests first that science involves direct observation that leads to certain, unchanging truths about nature. It then points to, even glorifies, data from fossils, biology, geology, and astrophysics--all to establish that, while this data reveals much about the present state of the universe, it does not allow people to travel magically back in time to see the universe's past or origins. Every propositional statement about the universe that moves beyond a description of the present is, from this perspective, essentially extra-scientific speculation, a kind of faith based on a worldview.

I will bracket for a moment the fact that non-creationists can and do contest this line of thought at multiple points (a few: that definition of science is unworkable/inaccurate; that data from the present, when properly studied, do in fact point in countless ways to a history at odds with that narrated in Genesis; that old-universe theories can and do coexist with religious faith). The important thing is that the evolution-as-faith argument performs two important functions for creationists: 1) it brings an otherwise esoteric debate involving advanced scientific theories and methods down to a "plain-sense" level of accessibility; and 2) it forces evolutionary theory to play by religion's rules. The question posed to evolution and creationism shifts from "which is superior science?" to "which is the superior worldview?"

This latter question creation evangelists are primed to answer. Worldview apologetics, the present-day descendant of presuppositionalist thinkers like Cornelius Van Til and Carl Henry, postulates that humans make primary decisions about faith based not on a neutral consideration of rationalities but from within the assumptions and presuppositions--the "starting point"--of their worldview. You cannot, generally speaking, argue a person into belief in Christ by piling up reason after reason. One's worldview exerts a definitional power, pre-determining for a person exactly what he or she considers good or bad reasons. Items that qualify as good reasons within one worldview ("the Bible says X, Y, and Z") may not function as such within the context of another worldview ("Who cares what the Bible says? I'm an atheist!").

The worldview apologist, operating from what is generally termed the "Biblical Christian" (i.e., conservative evangelical) worldview, takes it upon herself, then, to recognize where an unsaved person is coming from, enter (provisionally) into the thought-world of this foreign worldview, and find where and how the worldview suffers from inconsistencies. Because--and this is what would drastically separate a worldview apologist from a garden-variety postmodernist--worldview apologetics never questions that the Biblical worldview represents anything but the Absolute, Ultimate-Objective Truth. As per evangelical theology, worldview apologetics teaches that a day will come when God makes clear just which worldview is actually accurate--and thus which worldviews are necessarily misleading or deluded.

This, of course, is close to Gregory Koukl's approach that I wrote about last week. Rather than presenting the Biblical Christian worldview as true from the get-go (a tactic that worldview apologists would argue simply won't work with non-Christians), evangelicals must gain an appreciation for what non-Christians believe and why, confident that those reasons will reveal themselves as flawed.

"Flawed" in this sense means self-contradictory. Most worldview apologetics, drawing from the presuppositionalist tradition of Gordon Clark (rather than Van Til), rely directly or indirectly on the second of Aristotle's three laws of logic, the principle of contradiction. That is, for Aristotle, one cannot rightly believe one thing and its opposite at the same time. Do hold the two beliefs at once is to engage in irrational activity. Worldview apologetics (including Koukl's version) seek to locate and highlight contradictions within other worldviews' systems of thought.

For evangelicals, holding fast to a simplified version of the law of noncontradiction gives them a perceived edge over worldviews they consider secular or atheistic. The Bible, in conservative evangelical thought, has no contradictions. Its tenets are utterly harmonious with each other. Apparent contradictions in scripture can be explained, they insist, in any number of ways. Properly interpreted, then, the Bible is complete and whole, granting to believers a certain foundation for their worldviews.

Evolution, by contrast, leads to some fairly obvious moral contradictions. If humans are not qualitatively different from any other organism, if we are just one more kind of animal sprung from the same common ancestor without guidance of a Divine Mind--how then can any evolutionist claim that human life is worth saving or that human effort enjoys any kind of ontological privilege over rats foraging through trash or germs colonizing a gut? If the standard of evolution is "survival of the fittest," how then can any human moral system--necessarily secondary to the biological imperative of evolution--claim anything other than a war of all against all mentality?

Evolution, considered through creationist eyes, thus becomes a monstrous religion of soulless machines eating, reproducing, killing, and dying in endless procession. No wonder, then, that creationists find Biblical Christianity more appealing.

The creationist tactic toward evolution has parallels in evangelical approaches to secular life and thought more generally, particularly when confronted by the nonChristian worldview evangelicals call "postmodernism."

More tomorrow,

JF

Evolution as Faith

For those interested in a great history of the anti-evolution movement, I heartily recommend a book by Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (the expanded edition is great). Reading Numbers's detailed, riveting text, an odd thing happens, at least for me: I start rooting for the creationists. Throughout the early twentieth century and thereafter, the creationist cause seems forever vexed by the scorn of mainstream science and the internal divisiveness of its proponents. More poignant still are the stories of creationists who recognized the need to gain education in mainstream science only to find themselves unable to use that science to justify the anti-evolutionists' arguments. To see friendships strained or even destroyed due to what could only be heart-wrenching conversions by those involved--well, it inspires sympathy.

To be sure, the pathos-inducing narratives of 20th century creationism do not mitigate the fact that creationism largely failed throughout its many endeavors to find widespread appeal among mainstream science. As I related yesterday, though, creationism's current proponents have not entirely given up the fight against evolution on scientific grounds. They have become quite adept at recognizing and responding to the latest discoveries or arguments that seem to support an ancient universe.

But attacking evolution does not ipso facto support young-earth creationism. To a large extent, however, anti-evolutionism's major young-earth organizations, Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International, seem uninterested in positive support for their brand of creation science (flood catastrophism). Instead, they are modulating their case, not only seeking to undermine evolution's status as well-supported science but also arguing that evolution is a faith--a matter of unprovable metaphysical commitments--on par with creationism.

Note that last--this modulated argument concedes that Biblical creationism is not, strictly speaking, a scientific matter. By their tacit and not-so-tacit definitions, science consists of conclusions drawn (intuited) from direct observation. Evolution fails as science, in their arguments, because its processes cannot be directly observed; no one has yet spied a lower life form turn into a higher life form, nor has anyone witnessed (and this is a favorite catchphrase) "something [life] coming from nothing [non-life]." Evolutionists' counter-arguments (e.g., the definition of science being used is misleading, evolution unfolds over massive timescales and could not reasonably be expected to be observed by humans) get dismissed as pie-in-the-sky, ad hoc rationalizations.

Yet, admit creationists, neither can they respond to a skeptic's demand to see God appear and creation brand-new life before their eyes. Apart from the Bible, which only young-earth creationists and inerrantists accept as reliable history, creationists are as bereft of observable evidence of divine creation as evolutionists. Creationism and evolution, argue the creationists, are similar in that both are essentially unprovable, unobservable explanations of evidence, explanations that must be taken not on the basis of superior science but on faith. Evolution, in other words, is as faith-based as creationism.

To judge from the explosion of young-earth creationist resources in the last decade or so (a shift that Numbers notes with some surprise in his book), this argument has been working like gangbusters, at least in the US. I think several factors make the evolution-is-faith argument fly.

First, the counter-arguments from mainstream scientists can be pretty complicated. Whereas creationists rely on common-sense, no-fancy-learnin' simplicity for their appeal, science of any branch requires some degree of training and education to get. Some of this training is disruptive to "common sense" as such, highlighting how first-order observations are themselves in need of bias-checking, double-blind controls, and peer review. Moreover, historians and philosophers of science point out that the paradigms and models used to shape scientific discourse are to a certain extent culture-bound. The most revolutionary scientific models--especially those that eventually become the new dominant paradigm--often involve thinking that runs against the grain of what constitutes "common sense" in a particular time ("The earth moves around the sun? Preposterous! Light is a particle and a wave? Crazy talk!"). And, of course, the tools and vocabulary endemic to a discipline (molecular biology, for instance) simply aren't readily accessible to laypeople. Science remains vulnerable to straw-manning and "common sense" critique.

A second reason for the success of the evolution-as-faith-not-science argument has to do with the liberal tradition, by which I mean not left-progressive politics but the post-Renaissance idea that humans are best considered as singular individuals vested with certain inalienable rights and personal sovereignty. People, within the US liberal tradition as expressed currently, have a right to their opinions, especially when those opinions are religious or metaphysical. The US's history renders its citizens resistant to the suggestion that religious belief or expression (particularly if that belief is Judeo-Christian in origin) should be curtailed or suppressed. Indeed, it's considered bad form even to suggest that another person's faith might be invalid (though conservative evangelicals have been developing multiple ways to do just that). To people nervous about the threat to the sovereignty of their faith convictions that evolution seems to pose--a threat creationists intensify in their rhetoric and materials--viewing evolution as just one more kind of faith levels the playing field.

But I think the most compelling reason that the evolution-as-faith tactic wins so much support from pro-creationists has to do, again, with the issue of certainty and antipathy to doubt.

More tomorrow,

JF

A Sample Creationist Argument

I've been sketching out some of the broader issues in the creation/evolution debates as a means of highlighting some general tendencies within conservative evangelicalism. Specifically, I'm fascinated by the possibility that an aversion to doubt and uncertainty serves as a more or less accurate rule of thumb evangelical faith. Evangelicals know the Truth. They are without doubt or nuance about the exclusivity of Christ for salvation, the inerrant literalism of the Bible as history, the trans-historical-objective status of moral standards, and a host of other points.

As evangelicalism comes into increasing contact with disciplines that repudiate such absolute and metaphysical certainty--science, for instance--evangelicalism has little choice but to alter those disciplines to fit its needs or attack them as enemies of faith. Anti-evolution creationism has, over the course of its 150+ years, done both. Darwinism is wrong; it's atheism in a trumped-up costume of fossils and family trees. Or: Darwinism--methodological naturalism in general--is bad science; excluding the possibility of divine agency in the origins or development of the universe is itself a kind of fundamentalism, blinkering scientists' gaze from the full (true) view of nature.

Of late, however, the most visible strains of creationism (apart, perhaps from the Intelligent Design movement) have adopted a different tactic. Groups like Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis or the Australia-based Creation Ministries International (CMI)seem initially to be little more than the latest variety of creation science data warrior, blasting shotgun barrages of factoids and doesn't-this-seem-unlikely's at various aspects of "old-earth" science and evolution.

I listened, for example to a recent sermon by one Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, a CMI spokesperson. His talk certainly contained a great deal of evolution-is-shoddy-science discussion. The tactic, well worn but still a favorite, goes something like this. Dr. Sarfati relates (generally with out clear attribution) a number of scientific finds regarding, say, fossils. He explains that "science textbooks" (a favorite foe of creationists) explain fossilization one way (ex: a fish dies, sinks to the bottom of a body of water, becomes covered in sediment, and over time fossilizes). Then, in his charmingly calm and reasonable New Zealand accent, he proceeds to offer some "common sense" problems with this view. Fish don't sink when they die, he claims (showing a picture, I gather, of a dead goldfish floating in an aquarium). Everyone knows they float. Thus the only way that fish could be covered in sediment is from some undersea tidal wave of rock and debris--exactly the sort of even that would happen during a global catastrophic flood.

He follows this with examples of several other fossils from around the world that seem to show an organism very much in the process of living before being caught in a seemingly sudden and total burial (i.e., giving birth, eating, etc.). These, too, he says, give evidence to a global flood catastrophe. Yet evolutionists (or "atheists"--he uses the terms almost interchangeably) never so much as admit that a global flood might account for the plain evidence. They have to go and make up "millions of years" to account for what the Genesis flood as recorded literally in scripture clearly explains.

Of course, Dr. Safarti is speaking to a congregation of believers at the front of a sanctuary, granting him a friendly audience basically eager to hear how science really at the end of the day "proves" scripture. His tone is patient, lightly humorous, and authoritative without seeming elitist or intimidating. His accent (and I wonder sometimes whether his talks change when speaking to other Kiwis), practiced presentation, and legato baritone lend an air of charming competence that smooths over what might otherwise be seen as gaps in logic.

And, let there be no mistake, his reasoning contains plenty of gaps. Any first-year student of rhetoric could spot a number of tricks he uses to make scientific consensus about the age of the earth seem flimsy and ridiculous. By setting himself up as teacher (highlighting his academic credentials--a PhD in Physical Chemistry), adopting an educational voice ("here's how this works, now..."), and peppering his presentation with evidence both numerical and visual, Sarfati justifies the fact that all information about fossilization, evolution, and the age of the earth--the very notions he's attacking--come from him. He can present the evolutionary case as he wishes, making the straw man of Darwinism he eventually erects seem fair.

Of course, he leaves out important facts about fossils, such as the fact that fossilization happens in a number of ways, many of which do in fact involve sudden inundation by sediment. He neglects to mention, also, that fish don't necessarily float when dead. He masks the fact that his samples come from wholly different sources dated at wholly different times. Basically, like most data war creationism, he never asserts that the present evidence positively proves the mechanism of the Genesis flood as the sole or primary agent of fossilization. The positive case for young-earth creationism never really gets made. He merely pokes holes in his vastly over-simplified version of evolution and suggests that his vastly decontextualized examples make a general kind of sense in the Genesis flood narrative.

From a scientific point of view, Sarfati's lack of positive proof for his alternative dooms his case. Despite his and other creationists' claims, young-earth creationism is not a natural or viable alternative to evolutionary theory. Even if evolution were somehow completely falsified (finding, as one scientist quipped, fossilized rabbits in Precambrian-era rock), it does not follow that Genesis wins by default. The case for Genesis has to be made--and it never really is. For a side who I see as relying on a rhetoric of certainty and final truth, this would seem to be a damning failure.

But making the certain scientific case for Genesis isn't really Sarfati's goal, and here, I argue, is the new tactic for creationism.

More tomorrow,

JF

Provisional But Reliable

I need to qualify the last thing I wrote yesterday, that science (as practiced by mainstream scientists in the present) is a matter of uncertainty.

An anti-evolutionist would seize upon this statement with some glee, trumpeting that evolution only works as a theory of life's origins, and only then as an ever-revisable theory. Scientists discover some new bit of data, goes the anti-evolution critique, and "move the goal posts," rewriting their theory to fit the new facts. For the creationist, operating under a basically nineteenth century view of science, this is cheating. Science, in this latter view, is legitimate to the degree that it produces (reveals, actually) unchanging truths of God's creation. Young-earth creationism, argue the proponents of such a view, is superior to evolutionary theory in that its account of the origins of the universe does not change to accommodate the latest discovery; instead the data--when properly interpreted--are shown to support good old six-day creation.

I need, therefore, to explain how the uncertainty of scientific theories (particularly longstanding or well-tested ones) does not imply unreliability--quite the opposite. The first test of any theory's legitimacy is pragmatic: does it work as an explanation of the data? A theory that the sun rises only because the cock crows would fail to explain how the sun rises when the rooster oversleeps. It is, in Popper's terms, easily falsified by repeatable experimentation and (in others' formulations) fails to make substantiated predictions or to inspire new directions for research.

Theories that survive tend to be theories that display explanatory power. They withstand tests of falsification, they link to and unify theories in related fields, and they define directions for new research. They are in that sense reliable.

But reliability--even extensively substantiated reliability--does not grant theories the status of absolute, eternal truth. A theory or paradigm can be extremely useful and fruitful without necessarily being, by subsequent standards, accurate. Newtonian physics, though inferior in many ways to relativity physics or quantum mechanics, proves as venerable as it does because it works--it wields explanatory power--for the time/space scales most of us deal with in everyday life. At or near super-luminary speeds, or at sub-atomic levels, Newtonian physics break down and are better explained via reference to a subsequent paradigm. Indeed, as any fan of Nova or the Science Channel knows, scientists hope one day to find an even better paradigm that might unify the currently disparate theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Do they have such a theory now? Not that I know of (though brane theory seems like a hopeful candidate). Thus there are in physics a number of areas of uncertainty or even contention. Yet, within their respective realms, Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics remain good (in the scientific sense) explanatory models. Evolutionary theory similarly has areas of uncertainty, and biologists regularly anticipate the development of newer and better models to account for and predict organisms' change over time.

Contra the creationists, such uncertainty--scientists' knowledge that even their most reliable theories may one day be replaced by another model--constitutes the very stuff of (present-day) science, not its opposite. The scientific method, insofar as one (or ones) may be delineated, isn't a sure-fire process for arriving at final truths but a method for managing the testing and refinement of theories. These theories, particularly well-established ones, are simultaneously reliable and provisional.

I've spent time hashing this out because the evolution/creation debates (and again, many scientists and believers view this as a false dichotomy) reflect, I think, similar certainty/uncertainty tensions about epistemology and ontology explored by conservative evangelicalism. The nineteenth century shift toward fundamentalism came about in reaction not only to Darwinian theory but also in reaction to the "higher criticism" of the Bible and liberal theology. Such higher criticism could be seen as advancing a new paradigm for approaching Biblical texts, a new definition of what it meant to study the Bible as a scholar.

For the higher critics and liberal theologians of the 1800s (and here I stray beyond my expertise and must be general), the Bible needed to be approached as any other text from any other culture. Bracketing a believer's reverence in the divine inspiration of scripture, the higher critics mobilized methods and tools from fields like archeology, philology, and literature to examine various different manuscripts of Biblical books. Comparative analyses of the oldest texts yielded to these critics a picture of the Bible not as a unified, stable work of a single Author but as a patchwork of stories and accounts that were written, redacted, passed down, altered, and combined over centuries by a number of different writers and editors in a number of different times and places. Moreover, this picture of the Bible was itself open to change as new scholarship made new discoveries or offered new theories of authorship, translation, and transmission.

The fully developed view of the Bible as inerrant, infallable, plenary (complete), and Divinely preserved crystallized in reaction to such scientific investigations. Faced with a destabilizing and provisional theory of Biblical origin, the "Bible-believers" of the late 1800s, echoed by the leading theologians of Princeton Seminary, asserted that the Bible was complete and true "as-is." No paradigm beyond "plain sense" was necessary to understand the Bible. And if the "science" of the higher critics or the science of the Darwinists suggested pictures of reality at odds with the plain sense of scripture, then bully for the scientists.

Thus was the seed planted of what evangelical Mark Noll later diagnosed as "the scandal of the evangelical mind": there is no evangelical mind. Conservative evangelicals, the heirs to the Bible believers and anti-modernists of the 19th century, removed themselves from mainstream scientific (or even, more generically, from scholarly) discourse. If the Bible is understood best by those who have been educated least, then scholarly study of scripture can only undermine the certainty that defines faith.

More tomorrow,

JF

Uncertainty, Creationism, Science

So--young-earth creationist evangelicalism loves "science" but hates uncertainty.

By "science," they seem to mean inductive examination of readily apparent data or details--e.g., how does the bombardier beetle's defense work? Such examination, in their view, properly yields solid facts about the world, facts which of course reveal the grandeur of God. Evolutionary theory, in this view, is not proper science because it functions not as a readily apparent fact or set of facts but as a provisional, revisable explanation of the data. To the creation scientist, evolution is a "guess" unproven by data, a guess that unscientifically biases the interpretation of available data and immorally contradicts the grandeur-of-God conclusions.

Thus we have the common anti-evolutionist attack that evolution is "only" a theory.

Now, mainstream scientists from any number of fields can (and have, and do) marshal a great deal of evidence to demonstrate that evolutionary theory (and other scientific theories that contradict a "young earth") is well supported by data from numerous studies. A number of anti-evolutionist scientists respond with detailed criticisms of such evidence. Evolutionary scientists respond with even more detailed counter-criticisms, and so on. Such back-and-forth barrages of evidence and criticism have historically sucked up a lot of air in late-twentieth century creation-evolution debates.

Two quick observations about such data wars: First, in no way do I suggest that these wars feature evenly matched opponents. Evolutionary theory in general enjoys broad consensus across scientific fields. What do I mean by "consensus"? I mean that, in pretty much any center of scientific research and teaching, the basic validity of evolutionary and other "old earth" theories is not an active question. Certainly, areas of revision and debate within such theories exists, but (as I will argue later), this is qualitatively different than saying there's ongoing doubt about whether evolution in general (versus, say, young-earth creationism) holds water. For all intents and purposes the old universe, evolutionary model is the only game in town. Science-based opponents of evolution are by comparison few and far between (though there are certainly more of them now than ever before).

Second, although the data-war debates often (and very quickly) become more super-specialized than my training allows me to follow, at no point do the anti-evolutionists get any closer to winning my support for the young-earth creationist case. Certainly my trust in the mechanisms of scientific-scholarly consensus has something to do with this. But more compelling is the fact that all this anti-evolutionist effort goes into attack. Historically, very little young-earth creation science research or writing presents positive propositions of its own. Where's the proof for a young earth as described exactly in Genesis? Would an objective examination of available non-Biblical data lead to a young-earth conclusion?

In other words, even if anti-evolutionists were successful in undermining evidence for evolution, it does not follow that young-earth creationism is therefore correct. Remember, science (for young-earth creationism) isn't about a theory or model about which you find some support. It's about discovering positive, absolute truth derived directly from readily available data. To meet its own definition of science, the young-earth model would have to function as the only logical conclusion from all data currently available. But very little in the creationist library advances any such claim. At best, young-earth creation science strains to offer mechanisms that might conceivably explain how, for example, light from stars seven million light-years away could possibly have reached earth in 6,000 years (the current favorite? "gravitational lensing"). This is a far cry from the plain-and-sure Truth standard to which creationists hold evolutionary theory.

But ultimately the data wars overlook a crucial point: science isn't about discovering Truth. In the early twentieth century, Karl Popper famously argued that science doesn't tell the story of small facts leading to big, certain truths. It's instead, he writes, a process of provisional explanations--hypotheses and theories--being repeatedly challenged by experiments that try to disprove them. Unassailable scientific theories do not exist. Indeed, any truth statement that presents itself as unassailable by definition fails to be scientific. In Popper's view, all legitimately scientific statements are falsifiable though experimentation. The best theories are at minimum those that withstand repeated experimentation without being falsified.

Since Popper's time, other historians and philosophers of science have challenged and modified Popper's standard. The best scientific models and theories, for example (I draw here on Michael Ruse's arguments), aren't merely falsifiable; they're also (among other things) predictive, productive, and consilient. That is, scientific models accurately predict yet-to-be discovered objects and phenomena, they inspire new kinds of experiments and new directions in research, and their explanations and predictions jibe with those of other fields' scientific theories.

Most importantly, however, scientific statements and models are tentative. Few scientists would claim that their theories are the final, complete, total word on any subject. Here the writings of science philosopher Thomas Kuhn prove especially valuable. Kuhn wrote that "normal science" within a particular discipline (say, astronomy) tends to operate under a single prevalent explanatory model, a paradigm. That paradigm, like any scientific model, opens certain avenues of experimentation and research while leaving others unexplored. For centuries, the Ptolemaic model of the universe (earth at the center, with the heavenly bodies orbiting around it) ruled.

Evidence that appears to dispute the dominant paradigm gets explained via additions to or elaborations of that paradigm. At times, for instance, Mars appeared to observers to travel backward for a bit (traveling in retrograde) before resuming its normal course across the sky. Operating under a Ptolemaic paradigm, medieval astronomers simply (well, not simply) added "epicycles"--revolutions within revolutions--to their model.

Finally, Kuhn, argues, paradigms so stressed become vulnerable to challenge by a radically new and contradictory paradigm, such as the Copernican or (later) Galilean models of a heliocentric solar system. Paradigm shifts change what "normal science" in a particular field is. Avenues of inquiry and experiment once open become closed off; previously unexplored ones open. Previous data gets re-interpreted through the lens of the new (and generally superior) paradigm.

Kuhn has his detractors, but few historians or philosophers of science would dispute that science involves revisable claims, not final truths. It is in the nature of science, in other words, to be uncertain.

More tomorrow,

JF

From Fascination to Certainty: Creation Science

Let it not be said that evangelicals hate science.

Well, perhaps some of them do, but most of the conservative evangelical groups I study would contest that allegation. Indeed, those perhaps most often labeled as anti-science--young-earth creationists--generally profess a sincere love for science. A quick examination of young-earth creationist media and books provides some degree of confirmation for this.

Take, for example, the Incredible Creatures That Defy Evolution series. These three films operate like simple nature documentaries. A host, David Hames, sets up a series of mini-lessons on various "incredible creatures" narrated by one Dr. Jobe Martin. Dr. Martin, who identifies himself both as a trained dentist and a former evolutionist, describes some of the features that make this or that particular incredible creatures so, well, incredible. The bombardier beetle, for example, gets its name from a peculiar defense mechanism: when threatened, the beetle simultaneously releases two chemicals which explode when mixed, making a series of pops. Here's Dr. Martin himself to explain:



The rest of the film (and, I presume, its two sequels) proceeds similarly. Describe some fascinating feature of an animal and express incredulity that such a brilliant mechanism could possibly have come about via evolution.

Now, Dr. Martin's reasoning could be faulted on several counts, but it's clear that he and the film as a whole know have a fairly accurate, even sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms over which he marvels. He does not, in other words, lie about how the beetle's defense works (or about the surprisingly complicated processes involved in a giraffe's drinking water). Indeed, I get the strong sense that Dr. Martin, the host, the filmmakers, and their audience (conservative church groups and home schools) are honestly fascinated by such wonders of nature. But for the "how could this possibly be evolved?" skepticism, these films don't differ that much from standard Animal Planet fare (well, cheap Animal Planet fare).

A surprising amount of current creationist discourse similarly consists of marveling at nature--how this or that animal behaves, how the earth moves around the sun, how big the galaxy is, etc. Creationists (and for this blog entry I mean young-earth creationists) defend their love of science via reference to the mass of facts and tidbits they collect and enjoy. In their view, the wonders of nature operate as proof of God's greatness. How could they not be scientists?

And, so far as that goes, who can blame them? Young-earth creationists are hardly alone in finding spiritual inspiration in nature. I remember how once when I was working at a summer camp in the mountains outside of Sante Fe, I climbed up a mountaintop that overlooked the camp valley. It was a clear night with a full moon--bright as you could want--and dazzling. In the quiet, cool evening, with a million tiny suns above me, I sang "How Great Thou Art."

Where I and others differ from the anti-evolutionists, however, is in the young-earth creationists' insistence that such fascination with nature is itself science. Well--they mean not fascination so much as investigation, and then not just any kind of investigation but a particular mode of investigation. For creationists, science involves the observation and analysis of apparent facts of nature. Anything beyond the plain-facts approach ("here's what the bombardier beetle does and how it does it") reeks of pseudoscientific guessing. The theory of evolution, they argue, isn't science but an unobservable "guess" that contaminates scientists' ideally pure investigation of the plain facts of nature (in living animals, in fossils, in geology, etc.).

Scholars like George Marsden have pointed to turn-of-the-(19th) century evangelicalism's tacit reliance on a particular philosophy of science, the Scottish School of Common Sense. From this tradition, evangelicals and fundamentalists derived the idea that properly scientific investigation consists of induction, examining readily available facts and cautiously drawing general conclusions from those specifics. Deductive reasoning--starting with a general hypothesis and searching for specific confirmations of that hypothesis--is epistemologically invalid. It fails to give certain truth. Only induction--examining the simple, plain-sense facts readily available to the senses--can generate reliable truths.

Marsden goes on to demonstrate how this inductive philosophy of science bolstered the late-19th-century Princeton school of Biblical inerrancy. You approach the specific facts clearly presented in the Bible and use them as the foundation on which to gradually, carefully build theological truths. To read the Bible by the light of hypothesis (say, the hypothesis of Isiah's multiple authorship) is to traffic in uncertainty.

That anti-evolutionist creationists read nature and the Bible similarly isn't surprising. Both are, in creationist theology, revelations from God. The Bible is the Special Revelation; nature is the General Revelation. Of course, since God is complete and without contradiction or change, the general and the special revelations must match each other. And, in the creationist approach, both do so--provided that you deal with both scientifically, i.e., inductively.

More tomorrow,

JF

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