:Reasonable Force

Each year, a question is posed by Edge Foundation, Inc., to its membership of what it calls “some of the most interesting minds in the world.” The stated purpose of Edge is “to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.” Following is an excerpt from their introduction to this year’s question, “What is your dangerous idea?”

What you will find emerging out of the 119 original essays in the 75,000 word document written in response to the 2006 Edge Question — “What is your dangerous idea?” — are indications of a new natural philosophy, founded on the realization of the import of complexity, of evolution. Very complex systems — whether organisms, brains, the biosphere, or the universe itself — were not constructed by design; all have evolved. There is a new set of metaphors to describe ourselves, our minds, the universe, and all of the things we know in it.

Richard Dawkins makes his contribution to this topic by extolling the logical outworking of the materialist’s view of humanity. He claims, quite rightly, that if there is no supernatural component to our being, a proposition he views as inarguable, our behaviors are determined purely by the biological machinery of our minds. Under his view, even the vilest acts are no more worthy of blame or condemnation than the mechanical failure of an engine.

Basil Fawlty, British television’s hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn’t start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. “Right! I warned you. You’ve had this coming to you!” He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don’t we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn’t the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

If we recoil at the implications of Dawkins’ assertion, we must at least respect this about him: he is clear on the implications of naturalism.

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Responding to my previous post, a friend and brother named Keith made the following comment:

I have a kind of dualistic approach toward cosmology. I believe in the whole hog literal six days and such, but I also don’t think the physical evidence we have right now points to it. I think if scientists follow the evidence where it most naturally (naturalistically?) leads, I have faith that science will eventually self-correct itself to correspond to scripture. I believe scientists really are trying to find the truth, and the smartest scientist Christians that I know firmly believe in evolution and an old Earth, so I don’t think evolution can be explained away by saying that scientists want to corrupt the world’s youth or whatever.

My response to that grew a bit lengthy so I decided to post most of it as a new post.

I’ve spoken about the self-correcting aspect of science before, and how examples can readily be found in which the peer-review process acts to stifle views that run contra to the prevailing paradigm. But, of course, science involves a constant process of investigation and discovery and it does indeed correct itself frequently. The limitation on that mechanism, however, is that scientists can only correct within the bounds of what they believe is reasonable.

I would agree with Keith that it is unreasonable to presume that naturalistic scientists are engaged in a conspiracy of willful deception in an attempt to convert all of our children to secular humanism. To the extent that such conversion attempts are underway it is not with the intent to deceive, but out of a desire to enlighten. There’s no malicious intent because they truly believe what they teach. And, like Keith, I believe the vast majority of them truly want to understand the hows and whys of their areas of study.

Of course, when we say that most of them are “trying to find the truth” we must speak on two levels. If they are unregenerate then they may be trying to ascertain the truth of the physical world while having subconsciously rejected the Truth, personified in Christ, who created all things and holds all things together. They are therefore crippled in their perception and their reasoning. They are able to recognize patterns that lead to a formalization of physical laws, but they are unable to make that leap from the law to the lawgiver.

Evolution is demonstrative of how scientific observation without the undergirding of well-founded faith can lead to conclusions that are simply bizarre. One sees various species and notes similarities between them. One also notes that, within species, variations are formed in response to environmental pressures. One can only make the colossal leap from these observations to the idea of macroevolution apart from the theological foundation of Creation of distinct types of creatures by a personal, purposeful God.

The modern scientist would view that as an example of science freeing itself from the constraints of an outmoded belief system in order to follow the evidence where it leads.

The orthodox theologian, on the other hand, views it as science going badly astray by tearing itself away from a necessary mooring to reality.

What, then, of all the really smart Christian scientists (not to be confused with Christian Scientists) who also hold to evolutionary theory and an old earth? Well, I’ve addressed in my last post how I think the earth itself might be old, possibly allowing for some ancient geological ages. Unfortunately, that doesn’t do anything to bring Genesis in line with the consensus views on biology, astonomy, or a host of other disciplines. Quite simply, I think the foundations upon which these Christians obtained their scientific education were faulty. I think they’ve allowed views which were shaped by men with presuppositions of naturalism to supplant their trust and faith in the Bible.

One of the most difficult truths I’ve had to come to grips with is that, for virtually any position, you can find very intelligent people who subscribe to it. Theology is rife with examples, certainly, of men of equivalent intellect staking out diametrically opposed positions and defending them from Scripture with equal persuasiveness. Similarly, while many are in the camp Keith describes above, there are highly intelligent Christian scientists who reject the predominant views on evolution and, though undoubtedly fewer, ancient ages.

The institution of science can correct itself, but only within the philosophical boundaries imposed by the individuals who guide it. As regards the individuals who practice science, some have had, or will have, their eyes opened by the beauty of the design that they perceive. Some already know the Designer. For them, science can be a pursuit of truth that ultimately will indeed align harmoniously with correctly interpreted Scripture. Others will only ever see a purposeless universe careening inevitably toward a meaningless end because anything else would force them to deal with a God they prefer, at some level, to avoid. The trick for the former is knowing when their assumptions have been shaped by the unbelief of the latter.

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blestwithsons, my übertalented sister, is excited about the Creation Museum being built in northern Kentucky by Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis organization. Her post is enthusiastic about the museum, but critical of some aspects of the FoxNews article that mentions it. Among her objections is the choice of a pastor in nearby Cincinnati who denounces AiG’s young-Earth creationism as “silly.”

Says blest, “Hmmm. Of all the pastors available in the country, or at least in Kentucky or Ohio, the reporter chose a Reverend from the United Church of Christ, which is not exactly known for their faithful handling of the scriptures.”

That’s certainly true. My opinion is that Christians of his stripe are simply afraid of being embarrassed in the eyes of the world by their “simpler” brethren.

That, in itself, isn’t so hard to understand. After all, I’ve been known to cringe myself when some Bible-believing brothers or sisters call in to radio shows and cast reasoned arguments to the wind as they grossly distort or misapply the Scriptures in which they, to their credit, place their trust.

The difference is that this pastor and countless others are firmly nestled into their creche as the matrix program provides them an illusion of reality that they’ve not allowed Scripture to peel back for them. They, many of them anyway, honestly believe that the evolutionary pronouncements of Science are founded in objective, empirical, reproducible evidence.

They haven’t grasped, apparently, that the conclusions of Evolutionary science are necessitated by the naturalistic presuppositions with which their investigations begin.

All that said, here is my view (at this point anyway) on Genesis and length of days. First, I utterly reject the premise of macro-evolution; that all living things are the process of chance mutation and natural selection, gradually causing one species to change to another, beginning with so-called “simple” organisms and culminating with humanity in our present time, until another leap produces some new type of humanity. I believe all types of creatures were created by God and that their genetic codes contain the information that has allowed their original progenitors to variate within their species in adaptation to various environmental conditions.

Second, I have absolutely no problem with the idea that God can do this in six days or six hours. I freely admit that I don’t know the ins and outs of how scientists derive their numbers for ages, but since I know that any method that produced a young-earth age would be dismissed out of hand I’m not too troubled by that.

Third, I do believe that there is some legitimate wiggle room in the language of Genesis that could allow for an age of the universe and/or the earth itself much older than humanity, and possibly even for day lengths that don’t correspond to our 24-hour cycles, at least for the first two days.

The first detail in the account that leads me to keep an open mind is the fact that the six days of creation seem to begin with the heavens and earth already in place. It could be argued that the very first verse stating that “God created the heavens and the earth” is meant to be included in the first day. I don’t have a problem with that view, but I don’t necessarily think it’s unfaithful to Scripture to see it as a starting point. That leaves the prospect of any conceivable amount of time prior to God saying “Let there be light.”

Which brings me to the second detail; why are our days twenty-four hours long? Because that’s how long it takes the earth to rotate on its axis creating the visual effects of sunrise and sunset as that celestial body appears to pass across the sky. But while God created light, separating it from darkness and establishing the concepts of day and night, He hadn’t yet created the sun. In fact, God did not create the sun until the fourth day when He established it along with the moon and all of the other heavenly bodies to give light on the earth.

Where did the light come from prior to the advent of the sun? I have no idea. Perhaps it came somehow from the effect of an expanding universe. Regardless, I have to consider the possibility that at least the three days prior to the creation of the sun could have been of some duration other than the standard day that we know.

I agree with blest that attempts to reconcile naturalistic evolutionary science with Scripture are misguided at best, so if I haven’t made it clear, that’s not what I’m trying to do here. I’m just giving my reasons for not slamming the door on the possibility of an older universe than most young-earth creationist views allow for.

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Whenever a discussion arises between evolution adherents and opponents, inevitably someone on the side of the prevailing scientific paradigm will attempt to defend science against charges of presuppositional bias by asserting its purported self-correcting nature.

If, they contend, evolutionary science was not a solid foundation, then at some point over the last hundred years competing theories would have supplanted it as king. While there may have been dissenters, none have survived the highly touted process of “peer review.”

In fact, the most common critique leveled against scientists critical of the theory, aside from the hand-waving claim that they practice “bad science,” is that their work doesn’t stand this rigorous peer-review process and, thus, isn’t published in any respectable scientific journals.

This U.K. Telegraph article by Robert Matthews is illustrative of why that process may not always lead to the sort of correction science may need.

At issue is the thesis that the earth’s temperature is gradually increasing primarily due to man’s influence on the planet. One scientist published a paper concluding that this “fact” was nearly universally acknowledged by scientists based on her review of 1000 papers from other scientists.

This result was greeted with skepticism by some:

They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents – and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.

Some might argue at this point that this is the self-correcting nature of science at work. I would agree, but for the fact that merely doing research and drawing conclusions is not sufficient. In order for your work to be granted legitimacy by the scientific community at large, your results must be published. This is where Peiser claims he ran into trouble.

The article goes on to document claims by Peiser and others that the editorial boards of the journals Science and Nature, along with their panels of reviewers, routinely filter out submissions based on their ideological commitment to anthropogenic climate change.

Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: “It’s pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It’s the news value that is most important.”

He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review – despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.

As a result, says Prof Spencer, flawed research is finding its way into the leading journals, while attempts to get rebuttals published fail. “Other scientists have had the same experience”, he said. “The journals have a small set of reviewers who are pro-global warming.”

Representatives of both magazines deny these claims and cite other reasons for rejections which are, in some cases, no doubt legitimate. The journal Science, however, unwittingly gives itself away with its attempt to illustrate its tolerance of dissenting views:

A spokesman for Science denied any bias against sceptics of man-made global warming. “You will find in our letters that there is a wide range of opinion,” she said. “We certainly seek to cover dissenting views.”

I don’t know whether any papers have been published in Science challenging man’s culpability for climate change, but this spokesman certainly doesn’t expect to see any outside of the letters page.

If the claims of these scientists are accurate, and this is the sort of ideological barrier that meets scientists offering dissenting views on an issue as relatively unsettled as the causes of climate change, how difficult might it be for a paper to be taken seriously in such journals if it ran contra to the orthodoxy that is Darwinian evolution?

Thus the circular argument is formed by those who oppose alternatives to an evolutionary model. Intelligent Design, for example, is not to be taken seriously because its proponents haven’t submitted any research that passes the muster of peer review. It doesn’t pass peer review because all of the reviewers view legitimate science as that which falls within the evolutionary model.

In this way, the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge are able to continue to dodge the inherent fallacies of Darwinian dogma.

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