A few weeks back, Peter Hitchens (brother of the late Christopher) argued in his Mail Online column that the notion of intelligent design (ID, aka creationism advocated by Ph.Ds) wasn’t religious because it didn’t specify the designer. I think I laid that one to rest, for the history of ID clearly shows that the designer is simply Jesus in a lab coat. Now the BioLogos guys, Karl Giberson and Francis Collins, have also identified the “designer,” but have distanced themselves from ID by calling their designer “the creator”. And surprise—their designer is also the Christian God!
Here’s the quote of the week, a howler from Giberson and Collins’s The Language of Science and Faith (subtitle: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions). On p. 193, after having themselves engaged in ID by imputing the “fine-tuning” of physical constants to a creator, they try to draw a distinction between their view of life and that of the ID advocates they oppose. Here’s their “straight answer” to the question of whether Christians should embrace ID.
“Christians should be concerned about embracing ID, because it does not affirm that God is the creator. In fact, they even say that the designing intelligence could be a space alien! Of course, virtually all the ID people are Christians who believe that the designer is God, but that is not officially part of ID. BioLogos insists that the design of the world comes from the God that Christians worship, not a random intelligence.”
Insists. Insists! And where exactly, did they get the evidence supporting this insistence—the evidence that the creator is in fact the Christian God rather than the Muslim God, Yaweh, Brahma, Zeus, and so on? There isn’t any. Or rather, the evidence is that the creator disclosed himself to Giberson and Collins as the father of Jesus via revelations—in the latter’s case, through a tripartite frozen waterfall. But revelation isn’t a reliable reason to accept a Christian God, for advocates of every faith have revelation, and clearly Giberson and Collins don’t trust the revelations of Hindus and Muslims.
(By the way, I love their statement that “God is not ‘officially’ part of ID”. How does one make the designer “official”?)
The problem with this whole issue is that Giberson and Collins can have no more assurance that the deity is the Christian God than Muslims have that the deity is Allah, or ancient Greeks that it was Zeus. This is all laid out in John Loftus’s Outsider Test for Faith: that is, nearly everyone acquires their religion from their culture and upbringing, so there’s no reason to think that yours is any truer than anyone else’s. Herman Philipse, a Dutch philosopher, states it nicely in a recent book, God in the Age of Science? A Critique of Religious Reason, (2012, Oxford University Press; p. 13):
“With a small leap of the imagination, believers will fancy that if they had been born into another religious tradition, they would have been equally convinced of a religious creed incompatible with the one they happen to endorse now. However, if the religion to which one adheres is selected by the accident of birth, and if one has the conviction that salvation and eternal life depend upon accepting the creed of the only true religion, one has a powerful motive for engaging in a comparative research of religions. This means engaging in natural theology and attempting to show that one religious revelation is more likely to be true than the competing revelations, given the available evidence.”
Of course neither Giberson nor Collins have done such a comparative study; Collins’s “investigations” appear to be limited to reading the Bible and C. S. Lewis. Giberson and Collins are Christians by accident of birth, for Christianity was the religion to which they were exposed.
By the way, Philipse’s book, which gives a rigorous, 340-page philosophical defense of atheism, is the best work on religion I’ve read in the past year besides Walter Kaufmann’s Critique of Religion and Philosophy. Philipse’s book is academic and a bit dense, but still eminently readable and accessible to non-philosophers. I recommend it very highly.
It is definitely going to be fun watching them try to walk that one back.
Jerry, thanks for the reading recommendation. I have a copy of Walter Kaufmann’s Critique of Religion and Philosophy, which I liked very much, so if Philipse’s book is as good, I suspect I’ll have another enjoyable read.
So relieved! Would hate to think that the universe was created by some “random intelligence” that didn’t even know how to market/advertise it properly!
Liars for Jesus are still liars but they don’t think of themselves as such because they love Jesus. Psychological illness, plain and simple.
They are getting desperate, aren’t they? And that’s good news!
lol.
Liars for Jesus are basically just trying to calibrate and correct the original lies told by their superhero.
I’m not sure why this is at all surprising. BioLogos is an explicitly Christian organization, after all. BioLogos was never straightforward ID, as it always had apologetics as its mission.
If the Discovery Institute made a statement this clear, that would be noteworthy, but this, not so much.
Slightly off topic, but BioLogos ability to square evolution with basic tenets of Christianity always raises the question of what to think of original sin, of Adam and Eve, and so on. Apropos of that, I saw this picture today and wanted to share it:
http://www.myconfinedspace.com/wp-content/uploads/tdomf/224130/Creatiolution.jpg
So is Intelligent Design now MORE religious than Theistic Evolution?
Good. Based on some other good reviews I bought Philipse’s book a month or so ago and it’s been waiting patiently on my kindle. I look forward to reading it.
It seems to me that religious belief rests far more heavily on the existence of ESP than most believers would like to admit. When you get right down to it most people think that they have managed or solved the multiple-god problem (or Loftus’ Outsider Test for Faith) through direct experience: they received their own inclinations through a reliable extra-sensory means of perception. If THEY had been born in another country or culture, they would still have been able to figure the truth out by listening to the inner voice which comes from God.
How can they know that this intuitive ESP is reliable? Through intuition. It’s self-confirming.
I suspect they also suffer from the assumption that they are the center of the Cosmic Story because they are the center of their own story. God would not allow them to be drawn to the wrong religion — and God would ensure they were drawn to the right one — because … well … because they’re them. They’re the “me” who narrates their life and God is the listening Audience. Other people distort God into their own image — they are different. They simply receive His extra-sensory message by humbly admitting their willingness to recieve it.
ESP + narcissism = reliable knowledge of God.
Although I regret it this time, but truth has her rights: Herman Philipse is Dutch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Philipse
Yes, you’re right, and I’ve corrected it above, thanks. I guess I was flummoxed because I’ve been corresponding with real Belgian philosophers.
For me it is almost incomprehensible that a professional scientist like Francis Collins doesn’t use his scientific thinking to see the obvious.
I *insist* that Karl Giberson and Francis Collins would benefit from Geodon 20mg b.i.d.
The flagrant ideas of reference, delusional thought processes, phantopsia, and tendentious revelations may require long-term monitoring and a higher level of care than BioBogus is capable of providing at this time.
“When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should have really happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of the testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.”
— David Hume, ‘Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals’
In terms of Steven Law’s book Believing Bullshit, does this seem about right for ID = Christian God?
But It Fits
Playing The Mystery Card
I Just Know
Isn’t Yahweh the same thing as the Christian God?
Just what I was thinking.
Officially, yes. However, in practice no. Yahweh is a much bigger dick than the Christian God that people actually believe in. Yahweh is concerned about just his Chosen People ™ whereas the Christian God is more universal. Yahweh is distinctly a single entity (the lone survivor from a polytheistic past that is conveniently ignored)while the Christian God has Dissociative identity disorder: the Trinity.
So, there’s no question we can’t answer by making a bunch of shit up. Francis Collins needs to resign.
Dave – I think that this has been hashed out here before, with the conclusion is that there does not appear to be any evidence that Collins’ faith beliefs have had any negative impact on his duties at the NIH. There are many highly competent folks in a variety of disciplines, including science, that believe wierd stuff. Should we exclude Tom Cruise from making movies, and so on……
Why a creator & not a creatrix?
From the Amazon description, Philipse’s book includes a demolition of Swinburne’s supposed Bayesian approach.
I read a bit about Swinburne’s stuff a couple of years ago and briefly toyed with the idea of writing a paper pointing out all the errors. Then I realised that I’d have to read the whole of Swinburne’s book first, and unlike JAC I don’t have the stomach for that sort of thing.
How does one make the designer “official”?
By putting him on the payroll, natch.
One would think that there would be an accreditation body somewhere to confer these designations.