You can tell without reading the review of Faith Versus Fact by Paul Nelson—a young-earth creationist and a Fellow of the Discovery Institute—that he’s not gonna like it. His review in Biola Magazine (a publication of the evangelical Christian Biola University, euphemistically renamed from The Bible Institute of Los Angeles) is called “How to make evidence for God disappear” (subtitle: A tutorial for atheist magicians”). According to the review’s notes, Nelson now has a sinecure at Biola, for he’s listed as “an adjunct professor in Biola’s Master of Arts in Science and Religion program.”
When reader Richard sent me a link to his review, I didn’t even have to read it to know that Nelson, since he’s a pious believer and already committed to the profoundly antiscientific view of a 6,000-10,000 year old Earth, would find “issues”. But I was a bit surprised at the issue that bothered him.
I won’t go into detail, as you can read the review yourself, but the charge that Nelson levels at me is hypocrisy. On one hand, he says, I am refreshingly willing (for a scientist) to claim that we can’t a priori rule divine or supernatural explanations out of court, for science can never say that something is absolutely impossible. What I did is argue that our reliance on naturalism and dismissal of godly influence is a result of experience—that entertaining the divine has never advanced our knowledge of the cosmos one bit. Therefore, we no longer invoke God when doing science. As Laplace supposedly said, “We don’t need that explanation.”
Remember that there was once a time when divine explanations were a proper part of science, as in Newton’s invocation of God’s hand guiding planetary orbits. He couldn’t think of a naturalistic explanation. Likewise, before Darwin divine creation was probably the best explanation going for the remarkable adaptations of plants and animals, and so I see creationism as a valid scientific hypothesis in the early 19th century. Similar divine explanations once held for many phenomena: disease, epilepsy, lightning, and so on. But as science, time after time, found naturalistic explanations for phenomena once imputed to God, we gradually abandoned divine explanations. That was not an a priori decision, but a result of experience: learning what practices helped us understand stuff, and what didn’t.
And so, when we don’t yet understand something like consciousness, or what early rabbits looked like, or the precise origin of human moral sentiments, history tells us that the best route to understanding is to admit that we don’t know the answer, but to seek scientific (e.g., naturalistic and materialistic) explanations. Nelson calls this a form of hypocrisy on my part, even though in the book I give the kind of data that would provisionally convince me of the existence of gods.
Here’s Nelson defending why some of those gaps may really contain God:
Say that any explanation invoking divine action is a God-of-the-gaps.
Let’s say we have some longstanding puzzle, such as the origin of life, which many theists see as evidence for God’s existence (that is, the complexity of the first cell requires a non-physical cause with purpose, creativity and the power to bring into existence information-bearing molecules such as DNA). Why isn’t this evidence for God?
Because, Coyne contends, “science” — by which he actually means applied materialism or naturalism — must never be foreclosed by hasty appeals to divine action, or to God-of- the-gaps explanations. What is more likely, he asks, “that these are puzzles only because we refuse to see God as an answer, or simply because science hasn’t yet provided a naturalistic answer? … Given the remarkable ability of science to solve problems once considered intractable, and the number of scientific phenomena that weren’t even known a hundred years ago, it’s probably more judicious to admit ignorance that to tout divinity.”
Master this conjuring trick, and one can’t lose. No matter how remarkable the evidence for God’s action might be, either in cosmic history or today, one can always make that evidence disappear into the bottomless bag of “the God of the gaps” objection.
Note though, that I don’t say science will give us the answers here, only that, over history, God has never given us a satisfying answer, while science has. And if we don’t know the answer, we should admit it—one important way that science differs from religion.
Nelson continues:
Calling Trickery What It Is
There’s a simple reply to this sleight of hand. If God is a real cause, he may have left “gaps” in the natural order as his signature. These gaps — call them designed or created discontinuities — won’t go away, or be dissolved into strictly material or physical causes. The discontinuities exist, not because of the incompleteness of our scientific knowledge, but rather because they are real markers left in the world, indicating the handiwork of a divine intelligence.
There are many better ways that God could have left us his signature than by leaving us scientific mysteries. Why couldn’t he have just made a literal signature in the sky, writing “I am that I am” in the stars in Hebrew. Why, Dr. Nelson, didn’t got leave us more obvious and convincing evidence for his existence? Of course Nelson won’t answer, except perhaps to say that “God works in mysterious ways,” but if theism is to explain anything, it has to do better than that. Nelson concludes:
Science as a genuinely open enterprise, where all the causal possibilities, including design, are on the table for discussion, must consider that we can discover and map these discontinuities. Coyne shouldn’t pretend that he’s truly weighing the evidence for God’s existence if he intends to sweep everything puzzling to materialism into his magician’s bag. [JAC NOTE TO NELSON: I TOLD YOU WHAT I’D TAKE AS PROVISIONAL EVIDENCE FOR GOD, AND IT’S NOT GAPS IN OUR UNDERSTANDING BUT REAL OBSERVABLE PHENOMENA.]
Science — not to mention philosophy and theology — deserves better.
Sorry, but I disagree. In fact, science, and especially theology, deserve better than Nelson. He’d do well to look at what a savvier theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, said about Nelson’s “God’s-in-the-gaps” argument:
“If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed farther and farther back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat.” (Letters and papers from Prison, 1997, p. 311)
Can we trust a young-earth creationist—someone who’s palpably ignored all the scientific evidence of our planet’s age in favor of Scripture—to tell us exactly which gaps contain God, and which will eventually be filled with science? Nelson apparently thinks that God has told us that the Earth is actually young, and all the scientific evidence to the contrary is both wrong and deceptive. And that’s what he’d do if, for example, we were able to produce life in the laboratory under conditions resembling those on the early Earth. He’s ignore that evidence in favor of what Genesis has told him.
Re Nelson’s statement, “If God is a real cause, he may have left ‘gaps’ in the natural order as his signature,” why have so many of those gaps erased God’s signature and replaced it with (horrors!) naturalistic explanations. Can Nelson please tell us with some confidence which are the real gaps that reflect God’s signature, and which were the deceptive gaps that, being divine forgery, fooled so many earlier theologians? And by the way, can he give us convincing evidence for God’s existence beyond the stuff we don’t yet understand. For unless we have independent evidence for God, there’s no need to consider him as an explanation.
I don’t think Nelson could answer these questions. He is a willfully ignorant man, for he knows that all the evidence points to a 4.6 billion-year-old Earth—and yet he rejects every bit of it in favor of Jesus. That’s intellectual duplicity: a profound double standard in how he treats evidence. So why should we put any trust in his ability to accept any scientific explanation at all? Perhaps Nelson still thinks that diseases reflect God’s disfavor, and all those nasty microbes that cause syphilis and plague are just as deceptive as the scientific evidence for Earth’s age. Does Nelson take his kids to doctors? Why not just pray? After all, if the evidence for the Earth’s age is deceptive, so could the evidence for any scientific conclusion.
Finally, remember the Discovery Institute’s promise that the evidence for ID was right around the corner? I believe that was about 20 years ago. And the many promised peer-reviewed papers giving evidence for a Designer haven’t appeared either. So much for the intellectual fertility of the God hypothesis!
Rational intellectual discourse deserves better, but Biola University deserves what it gets. What it gets is a passel of students who think the Earth is only a few thousand years old: another generation of the benighted. Ceiling Cat have mercy on them, and on Nelson for his intellectual duplicity.
I’m sure many scientists would have loved to have found that a God, particularly the Christian God, was shown to exist by the data of science. Those individuals were all inevitably disappointed in that regard.
IMO its more correct to say that (a) all possibilities are still on the scientific table, but (b) practical concerns require us to prioritize investigations, and (c) because of past failures to explain anything, divine explanations get very low priority when it comes to public funding. Private funding? You are free to investigate whatever you want scientifically, and your findings will be evaluated based on reproducibility, etc. Go to town on that telekinesis study. Look for Noah’s Ark. See whether TM allows you to levitate. Nobody’s stopping you, and if you find some reproducible phenomenon or useful explanation, the community will pay attention. But because funds are limited and we get more requests for funding than we have funds to give out, the government must prioritize what it spends its research money on. And it is perfectly reasonable for one criteria to use to disburse funding to be ‘past success’. Creationism doesn’t have any. Its high risk. In venture capitalist terms, there is a very low expectation of positive return on investment. Therefore, no or limited public funding for you.
Now creationists can respond to that by claiming they’re in a catch-22. No funding means no chance to show success means no funding. However they are wrong in that, for two reasons. Firstly, because there is $millions spent in private funding for creationism already. ‘No public funding’ is not the same as no funding at all. And secondly because the way science works is that everyone must start with small more easily testable ideas for small funding and work their way up to big grants based on prior success. Evolutionary biologists and every other science is in the exact same catch-22; if you have a revelatory idea, you aren’t going to get $20million to research it right off the bat. You will first have to use University support for a grad researcher to research some small aspect of your revelatory idea. If it pans out, you can use that success to leverage a bigger grant. If and when that pans out, you repeat the process up and up until you’ve got yourself a major research effort. But nobody gets to start at the top of the hill; you must work your way up. So a creationist claim that it’s unfair they don’t get to start with some big pot of funding is just facetious; no untested hypothesis gets that privilege.
It is very common for creationists to make similar appeals for open-mindedness in other areas like teaching. They now are calling for educators to teach different points of view, and to ‘let the students decide’.
What they fail to realize is that funding for research and the curriculum for teaching are not based on a democracy, but are instead based on a meritocracy. Like you say, we need to prioritize and those priorities go areas that get results.
Open mindedness, like fairness and “for the children” often really means ” give me what I want.”
I would say the same argument applies in a general way to education; we have more subjects on which we’d ideally like to educate kids than we have time in the day/semester/years to do so. We must prioritize, and that necessarily means leaving some stuff on the cutting room floor. It isn’t sufficient to claim that teaching your pet subject has some merit; to make it into the curriculum, you’ll have to show that teaching it has more merit than some other unit you hope to replace. With JHS and HS teaching, the resource limitation is classroom time rather than grant funding, but its a similar ‘allocation of limited resources’ problem in many respects.
Also, as the man said, don’t be so open-minded your brains fall out. What counts as a worth-investigating hypothesis *changes* over time, as our background knowledge increases. This is why I say that materialism, the lawful nature of the universe, etc. *is* a priori, now. This does not entail unrevisable, but I have personally no idea how that could happen.
Its easy to come up with such scenarios, but its hard to come up with any that don’t sound like a modern fantasy or sci-fi novel. Jerry’s classic example of prayers to a God being reproducibly answered is a good example. Pray to Yahweh, poof a loaf of bread appears. Consistently. That would certainly get scientists re-thinking our rejection of ritual magic. But nobody expects it will happen, and the kicker is, not even theists think this will happen. That is why they come up with lower standards of evidential support for their beliefs; because even they don’t believe they will ever be able to meet typical standards of evidence used in physics.
Why does Nelson even bother with reviewing Faith vs. Fact if he isn’t open to accepting any of Dr. Coyne’s arguments? That’s the hypocrisy in this story. And it is simply laughable to even speculate that the gaps in scientific knowledge are god’s signature. Actually, it’s not laughable; it is just desperate. God’s “signature” is just going to get smaller ans smaller over time.
I also like how he blithely throws around the term ‘discontinuities’ as if its something science couldn’t explain or can’t possibly address without God as an hypothesis. We handle discontinuities all the time without invoking God. The observation of a discontinuity does not, in science’s experience, imply divine action. The iridium layer in the soil at the K-Pg is a discontinuity…explained by a comet hitting the earth. The extremely low U-235 content in ores from Oklo is a discontinuity…explained by natural criticality events a billion years ago. The Newton example Jerry gives was another discontinuity; after being completely baffled by Mercury’s precession for something like 150 years, along comes GR and explains it. Right now there is a discontinuity between QM and GR. I doubt very many scientists (outside the DI) think that we will need divine action to explain it.
So Jerry’s point about the failure of divine hypotheses to explain phenomenon applies to discontinuities too; we don’t need that hypothesis to explain them. Based on past history of what sort of explanations have failed and what sort of explanations have succeeded, the smart money is on a naturalistic explanation succeeding to explain currently unexplained discontinuities.
I wonder why Nelson doesn’t consider the many, many, many “discontinuities” in his theory that god exists, as proving that his theory is wrong?
Discontinuities in theology are further evidence of an inscrutable God, not evidence against such a being! 😉
The less he knows, the more evidence there is for God! If he has a brain aneurysm, he could practically be the 2nd Messiah!
I found God! He’s at tan(π/2)!
I thought it was more like at tan(0)
Wow! God is even more mysterious than I thought! Amazing! Praise the Lord in all his mystery!
And PCC (E)’s arguements are based on scientific evidence!! Fossil, biogeographical, and genetic, which have accrued since the dawn of evolution. We win every single time!!
When people, like Nelson, get caught with their pants down around their ankles, they run around pointing at anything they can to distract. It doesn’t matter whether there is evidence or if it is meaningful, they just point and mumble.
Let’s reward him with a MSci.O – Master of Science of Obfuscation.
Thanks a lot for that image, Bob. Now I’ll have to drill two holes in my head — one to pump Purell in, the other for the irrigation tube to drain it back out again.
“If God is a real cause, he may have left ‘gaps’ in the natural order as his signature,”
Would Nelson like to suggest gaps that might be potential signatures? What is his likely response when science fills those gaps? I, for one, am interested to hear an answer to the first?
This really is the whole ballgame, is it not? I mean, besides the cogent criticism from our host in the OP, and development of same in the comments, where is all of this “No matter how remarkable the evidence for God’s action might be” (sorry about the grammar there)? Nelson’s argument appears to be little more than the well-known fallacy of appeal to personal ignorance: I don’t understand it, therefore no one can or ever will understand it, therefore (my particular interpretation of my particular) god.
Gaps like missing early rabbit-appearances, as mentioned in a previous post? 😉
Nelson: “…Coyne contends [that] ‘science’ — by which he actually means applied materialism or naturalism — must never be foreclosed by hasty appeals to divine action, or to God-of- the-gaps explanations.”
Science of course doesn’t assume naturalism; rather, naturalism is the best science-based conjecture about reality: it isn’t divided between the natural and the supernatural. Were compelling evidence for such a division to present itself, naturalists would concede the existence of the supernatural. We’re not holding our breath.
The gaps in scientific knowledge create a mystery that fills life with intrigue and wonder. Mystery novels fly off the shelves for a good reason. Mystery is awesome. A perfect cure for boredom. Why would one want to crush this wonderful mystery with a lie?
I do like to fill the gaps in scientific knowledge from time to time but when I am in such a mood I chose a much better gap filler than religion. It’s called philosophy, and it’s fun. Religion is the most depressing form of gap filling I could imagine.
Imagine how crappy a mystery novel would be, if it turned out the killer was God. You get to the end of Agatha Christie’s And then there were none, and it turns out that God’s been eliminating the victims one by one because they were sinners. How deeply unsatisfying.
But every tornado, tsunami, aotomobile/train/plane accident, disease (cancer, diabetes,ad nauseum), parasite, childhood disease, drowning, stumble off a roof/cliff, winter storm, heart attack, cardiac arrest,etc. could have god as a savior, but if you believe this, then god is also the one to either cause them or allow them to happen.
A lose-lose proposition for religion.
Ah yes, but God’s motives always remain a mystery and are none of our beeswax so at least there’s that.
Sounds like the ultimate Deus ex machina plot device.
Good point. Filling a gap with a simple “magicmandoneit” is woefully unimaginative.
A YEC and a member of the DI? That must be embarrassing for the DI since they often distance themselves from both terms.
Yeah, in its quasi-academic stuff, maybe. But the DI scrupulously avoids ever taking an official public position on things like the age of the universe, so as to create a “big tent” for evolution denialists of different stripe. Which reveals that it is, at bottom, the spearhead of a political movement even more than of a pseudoscientific one.
Its beyond merely not taking a position on YEC, the DiscoTute brand (and that is the ID movement), they have acted as enablers of creationists all the while, cuddling up to full-blown ones again and again while characterizing them merely as “design” advocates. I have been tracking that topic in my #TIP research, specifically TIP 1.7 on the dynamics of the ID movement (http://www.tortucan.com/chapter1/the-intelligent-design-movement-comes-along-to-save-the-day-and-hide-the-ball.html) including quite a few cases not previously covered in the literature (such as the Joe Baker case involving Phillip Johnson). I do invite all to dive into the post to see just how extensive the pattern is (the work can’t have an impact of not reading it).
As for the failure of ID to critize YEC views, this has two prongs: first, their reluctance to savage people who are otherwise theologically congenial (Dembski sucked up to Henry Morris in that way after Morris dumped on one of his books for coddling old earth chronology), but also the fact that it is easy for ID not to take a stand on geochronology topics because chronology plays no role in their own thinking, so avoiding the subject is a snap.
Its not that IDers are closet creationists, its that when they do alude to fossils it is not in any working Map of Time in their head, the Cambrian is just a vague catch all where sequence ultimately doesn’t matter to them (which is why Steve Meyer can coauthor stuff on the Cambrian with YECers who think the events took place at the time of Khufu).
Lets review: Biola U., Creationist, Discovery Institute, and Paul Nelson.
And Nelson says he does not like Prof. Coyne. I am shocked and confused. But then the answer arrives from Paul Nelson himself. All that Jerry Coyne need do is declare himself the Divine Creator. If only Nelson had known before he wrote this review.
I think Nelson says he likes Jerry, especially his tastes in feline companionship and rock music. He laments that his affection is unrequited, since Jerry refuses to reciprocate.
Yeah, it’s kind of like – I liked that Taliban fellow okay. He had a cat. But it was a little difficult getting past the fact that his wife was inside a bag all the time.
I hear these spurned bromances can turn bitter. Guess Nelson got him back with the thumbs-down book review. That’ll show Jerry for not liking him back.
“Let’s say we have some longstanding puzzle […] Why isn’t this evidence for God?”
Just let the ridiculousness of this question sink in for a moment. This really is the bottom line reasoning that all of ID “theory” relies upon. It’s why the entire field fails at the first hurdle. “Irreducible complexity” is predicated on the supposition that the mere existence of a question can be taken as its own answer. Absolutely mind boggling.
Newsflash Mr. Nelson: a “puzzle” is not – and cannot be – “evidence” of anything…except the existence of the puzzle itself. If you wish to establish your favorite hypothesis (ie “God”) as the ANSWER to this puzzle, you must point beyond the puzzle to empirical, repeatable observations which demonstrate the operation of this “God.”
“Question” does not equal “answer”.
+1
Y first time hearing “designed or created discontinuities.” Great! I just love new words/phrases.
I think it was Feynman who said that ‘what we don’t know we call religion’.
These kinds of reviews and blogs are just frustrating to me. PCC has gone so far as to show how he can be proven wrong but no one will touch that one. I’m surprised he wasn’t accused of ‘scientism’ and of hatefully excluding God. Reviews like this are the antithesis to reason – they begin with an idea and then look at the world through those colored glasses only (no young earth literalist will thoughtfully consider Hindi creation stories) and what do you know? They find what they look for?
Nelson’s suggestion that God may leave gaps in natural revelation as his signature is cringingly close to the old saw that God created fossils to purposefully fool sinners and heathens. But what else can he say? He’s backed into a corner. He knows that except for the few remaining questions (some of which might be unanswerable with certainty) every single religious answer to natural phenomena has been over turned and replaced with a description in which God is unnecessary.
Unless we’re all brains in vats on the planet Zoltar. Then the whole jig is up.
What a pathetic excuse for teacher of the next generation? Nelson is clearly unfit to speak objectively about much of anything.
I’m sure students at Biola are generally brainwashed by their parents and churches so that these fundy fabrications seem reasonable. What I’d like to know is, how many of the students coming out of that sort of school retain their fundamentalism and literalism after 5 or 10 or 20 years. You’d think that exposure to the real world would bring enough doubts to get them to alter course.
If the real world actually had this effect, then parents would no longer be sending their kids to Biola.
I know someone, a mature man way more intelligent than I, who is completing a “Master of Arts in Apologetics” at Biola. He wasn’t sent there by his parents, he made a grown-up choice. I feel sad about this.
IMO, such institutions should not be dignified with the title “University”, since they are the antithesis of what universities are for.
I’m sure there are a few that make this sort of choice without parental involvement, but I expect the percentage is small. Yes, it’s sad to see someone waste an intellect in this way and it’s also disappointing not to be able to claim these people are stupid.
True historically I suppose, but now with the internet, etc.? I would think they would have to explain a lot in any discussion with even a middle of the road christian let alone a “none”.
But, I suspect it will still be a slow process of enlightening.
It would be interesting to know how enrollment or application numbers have changed over the past ten years.
I did a quick search for enrollment trends. Biola claims it’s growing.
This CNN article says generally Christian schools are desperate and are dropping tuition dramatically to encourage enrollment. Some schools change their name to disguise the religious affiliation to get skeptical candidates.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/pf/christian_colleges/
I had started to say that perhaps they were dropping their entrance standards to keep enrollment, but then laughed at myself.
We can all laugh at them. I think they will die out eventually.
In 2002, CSICOP (now renamed) sponsored a 4 day “Science and Religion” conference in which evolution was debated with the creationist side being argued by William Dembski and Paul Nelson and the evolution side being argued by Ken Miller and Wesley Elsberry. The debate was moderated by Massimo Pigliucci. All 4 debaters were Christians, though MP is not of course.
While observing, Dembski struck me as cocky and confident (even a tad icy), but Nelson struck me as diffident, demure, and unsure of himself. He was very reluctant to answer when Ken Miller pressed him on the age of the earth, and when Nelson finally admitted he was young earth, some boos rose from the audience (the only occasion thereof) and Nelson sort of shook his head, but subtly seemed to be genuinely embarrassed, actually sheepish.
The debate was Friday morning, and both Dembski and Nelson hung around for the Friday lunch at which Harlan Ellison spoke about Jerry Falwell’s response to 9/11. Nelson hung out AFTER the lunch to talk with various attendees, and he just openly said that since Jesus spoke in one of his parables about the age of the earth, he had to ask if fully accepting the authority of Christ meant he had to accept a young earth.
(I was whispering “Jesus H. Christ” under my breath in a contextually very different way.)
—-Nelson…and he just openly said that since Jesus spoke in one of his parables about the age of the earth, he had to ask if fully accepting the authority of Christ meant he had to accept a young earth.—
Someone should ask Nelson if “Fully accepting the authority of Christ” involves an axiomatic acceptance of an inerrant Bible as a perfect record of what this “Christ” supposedly said and did.
I already know the answer – these sorts of people just accept the Bible as perfect and inerrant ahead of time, and everything else seemingly flows from that.
Doesn’t sound very scientific to me, Mr. Nelson.
A REAL scientist might think: “Well, the totality of scientific evidence strongly indicates an 4.6 BYO earth, and then this book I’ve got here, written by pre-scientific people, quotes some guy who says the Earth isn’t old. Maybe this “Bible” is just WRONG, and all the scientific evidence on the other side id right.”
But these people usually can’t even go there. Saying “NO” to the Bible is completely off-limits. Again, real scientists don’t behave in this manner. No real scientist thinks a book which has all the hallmarks of mundane human construction (like all other books) is somehow still a “magic” book.
Its sad about the boos. But the last question you mention in your post really hits the nail on the head; to people like Nelson, you approach earth history and all other science “theology first.” You ask what you need to believe to be a good Christian, and then selectively accept/reject empirical observations based on that. That’s the basis of creationism, and if creationists were honest, they’d admit that the first step is what excludes it from being science.
If we just accepted “god did it” as the answer to every phenomenon we can’t currently explain (which seems to be the thrust of Nelson’s argument), isn’t that simply the end of science? Why investigate anything if that’s an acceptable answer?
Indeed.
This is the epistemic equivalent of “religion poisons everything”.
“Remember that there was once a time when divine explanations were a proper part of science, as in Newton’s invocation of God’s hand guiding planetary orbits. He couldn’t think of a naturalistic explanation. Likewise, before Darwin divine creation was probably the best explanation going for the remarkable adaptations of plants and animals, and so I see creationism as a valid scientific hypothesis in the early 19th century.”
I disagree. The supernatural has never been a plausible explanation for anything. It has certainly been a reflexive explanation, our ‘pattern-seeking’ response to stimuli pretty much ensures that. But deciding that something you/someone made up – and in particular a ‘something’ that is inconsistent with observed phenomena – is a ‘valid explanation’ is not made any more scientific by virtue of ‘no one having any better explanation’. And particularly so when using a supernatural explanation stifles inquiry into the true nature of things.
I concede immediately that in the logical sense you are 100% right.
However in the beginning of the 19th century science had not really shown its awesome explanatory power yet. In that light I am inclined to be somewhat more sympathetic towards the supernatural hypothesis for the origin of species (before Darwin came along).
I am the first apparently to post a comment on Nelson’s review at their site. There was a 3000 character limit, which I came in under with this:
Although this lofty minded generic defense of “God” will appeal to everybody in the antievolution subculture, from Discovery Institute to Answers in Genesis, it depends on several buried assumptions of questionable validity. The first concerns which God(s) one has in mind as the one(s) responsible for the allegedly godish activity. While the Christian version is a major player today, it remains a minority faith globally (2.6 billion out of 7 billion). That is true for all religions, and appears to have been so through human history. So although the Biola clientele may flatter themselves to have the proprietary nametag for the proposed divine tinkerer, remember that yours is not now (nor ever has been) the only game in town.
But beyond that is what Nelson is so reluctant to specify, which God of Abraham version he envisages. Nelson is, after all, a Young Earth creationist (that recent brand of antievolution apologetics that sprang from the brow of Helen White’s Adventism at the turn of the 20th century, and which Henry Morris cleaned up for an evangelical audience). For those unfamiliar with the players, there is a wide literature. I cover the matter from my #TIP Troubles in Paradise methods perspective at http://www.tortucan.wordpress.com, html versions of the new modules at http://www.tortucan.com.
The God version Nelson believes in made the universe only a few thousand years ago, with a literal global Flood roughly 4500 years ago (smack dab in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, who seem not to have noticed, yet another discipline that must be shredded, along with geology and radiometric dating, but also the cosmology whose Big Bang so many anthropically-minded ID advocates favor).
The version of Christianity that Nelson believes in is as empirically falsified by science and history as Quetzalcoatl or Zeus, meaning whatever deity gets to lay dibs on the Natural Theology designer label, it can’t possibly be the one Nelson believes in. But, lo, Nelson has the Mere Christianitty figleaf handy to allow him to keep on the same pedestal as Steve Meyer or Bill Dembski.
Nelson’s argument falls under the “Origins or Bust” category, of wagging fingers at initial causation and origins (which may well be permanently unresolvable because we cannot build tools capable of studying them) instead of openly defending the specific applications that begin to trouble all Christian theology the moment you step back to consider what happened after the alleged divine designing thing.
The advocates of design are not now, nor ever have been, players on the “doing the work” scene, but are merely post-hoc spin doctors trying to figure out which of the voluminous facts of nature they are not going to pay much attention to in filling their Natural Theology Hall of Evidence for God (only just their own, no others allowed to apply)
Well said. I wonder how long your comment will stay up?
It was still up when I accessed in a bit ago for inclusion in #TIP references (along with Jerry’s post here). Not all religious groups practice information tidying, so it may remain permanently.
Very nice!
In his review, Nelson credits Jerry for not being a dogmatic nonbeliever — that is, for remaining open to possible evidence for the existence of God, and for his willingness to sketch out the potential evidence that might suffice to convince him. After all, “[n]o one wants to participate in a debate,” as Nelson observes, “where the evidence has been rendered irrelevant.”
OK, your turn, Paul: I’m sure you don’t want to be the kind of debate participant who has cut himself off from the evidence, either. Please specify for us what evidence, if it were adduced, would falsify the God hypothesis for you. If you’re unwilling, then for what purpose would anyone on the other side be willing to engage in debate with you?
What Nelson wants to claim as evidence for God is the alleged “created discontinuities” that foreclose our ever having a complete naturalistic explanation for some observed phenomenon in the universe. It is richly ironic that the “discontinuity” that Nelson, a young-earth creationist, is keen to raise concerns the origin of life — viz., the lack of an encompassing scientific explanation for the transition on earth to living cells from strictly nonliving matter.
Let me see if we’ve go this straight, Paul: your best “scientific” evidence for God is what didn’t happen on earth some 3.8 billion (give or take 6,000 to 10,000) years before you contend God poofed the earth into existence?
Why weren’t longstanding puzzles that were solved in the past evidence for God? Why isn’t the fact that they were solved evidence that you’re full of shit?
Claiming that gaps in our knowledge is the handiwork of God is simply making a virtue out of necessity.
How striking are the differences between minds that can not follow the course of science, and the minds that do follow that path, as if born to it! On one side we see a person who, upon seeing the absence of evidence says ‘See? That is evidence for the thing I am looking for!’. On the other side we see people (scientists) who, when confronted by an unsolved mystery, will simply say ‘Huh, I guess I don’t know the answer to that one. Maybe someday we figure it out.’
For some reason “biola” always strikes me as a useful synonym for “poppycock”: “Whatta buncha biola!”
Always makes me think of “payola”, not a great association.
Where are Nelsons “unexplorable gaps” where God still subsists? Is perhaps the uncertainty of quantum mechanics where God according to Einstein does not throw dices such a resort? Does an enlightened humanity eventually reduce the interaction of the Christian fatherly God with His world to the scale of atoms and molecules only? During a discussion with a friend, a former physics colleague, he said: “Maybe it is an interaction on the level of neutrinos” and that would be very small indeed.
Nelson’s got a point. Look at all those “created discontinuities” man and his fancy science have never been able to explain, like lightning — one minute nothing; the next, flash of light, big boom, scorched earth — and the tides (water comes in, water goes out, you can’t explain that, as Baba O’Reilly put it on The Factor).
Actually the lighnting case is quite relevant (and I brought it up in my #TIP work). While its been known since the 18th century that bolts are electrical, just how the zots arise inside of clouds is still not nailed down at the electron exchange level (segregation of electric charges are thought to involve dust particles, but modeling the phenomenon at the cloud level taxes the proficiency of even supercomputers).
Now IDers (or YECers) are not attempting to “teach the controversy” on the naturalistic origin for lightning, but this is only because their apologetics doesn’t go into eye-twitching mode on that subject. But if they were operating consistently insofar as “have we proven this” argument, they’d have to object to that, too. Only consistency is not one of their attributes (I’d use the T word but Jerry will grump, so let’s just call it an aspect of their propensity for what Peter Boghossian calls Doxastic Closure).
Well, gee, maybe since we don’t know exactly how lightning is formed, there’s room right there for gods of gaps. I suggest Thor, or perhaps Zeus, or the goddess Dian Mu. Would Nelson agree?
To reply, tt would be a useful example to hit him with in a debate, should that occasion arise, to try and force him to display his own methodology and its inconsistent application. Such dynamics, I contend, are why Old Earth creationism has faded as an active form, since it is harder for OECs to use methdological naturalism in thir physics and cosmology and geology arguments, then flip it off without anyone noticing when they engage the evolution issue using the same hair-splitting method of their YEC opponents.
ID can do this more easily because they do’t really work through chronology issues, as I have noted previously.
Ha, “atheist magicians”! I wonder if the constant pointing out of the obvious evolution of magic (such as shamanism) into modern religion (such as prayers) is finally getting on fundamentalist nerves?
Or is Nelson just his usual oblivious self, the deceptive gods-of-the-gaps theologian (after refusing to accept everything that already rejects his sectarian beliefs)!?
Yeah, protocells constituting of *two chemicals* (RNA and fatty acids) yet growing and dividing when circulated in hot environments are very ‘complex’! Creationist crap.
“..unless we have independent evidence for God, there’s no need to consider him as an explanation”. I think Professor Coyne put his finger on a central issue there.
When I read FvF, I found myself constantly trying to recall the first case of somebody asking that obvious question of a theist, which is ‘How do you know that?’. I eventually found it in a book on medieval history, Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror”. Robert the Hermit was sent from France to England where he declared “Surely, whoever is or will be against the peace shall pay dearly for it, be he alive or dead”; the Duke of Gloucester quickly asked “How do you know that?”. Robert the Hermit responded “Divine Inspiration”. Gloucester apparently shared Professor Coyne’s view that this did not constitute ‘knowledge’.
haha! Oh, Jerry, you “master of the conjuring trick”, you! You and your sleight-of-hand arguments!
I’ve visited some of these young-earth Creationist sites (like Answers in Genesis) — who try to hijack your Google search. There’s a group called “Science Against Evolution” and their article “Why Evolution is False” keeps popping up when I type in Why Evolution is True. What I don’t understand is… these groups frequently understand the data behind the Cambrian Explosion, say — they seems to understand sophisticated concepts in earth’s evolutionary history. Some attempt to make “learned” arguments AGAINST radiometric dating methods — it’s not like they haven’t done SOME homework. How do you debunk all of what science is telling us — then go back to a core belief of “the big father in the sky created us”?
I think some of these sites must be duplicitous. They’re like politicians who work the system and say whatever their base wants to hear for financial gain. They’re CATERING evolutionary disbelief to staunch Jesus believers without believing any of that disbelief themselves.
That would be “Do-While Jones” site. In my #TIP analysis, he falls into the parasitical redactor department (most antievolutionists are in that category), touching on a smattering of technical literature, but essentially what is already gleaned from the YEC apologetic arguments, not generating original arguments.
There are very few core claimants in antievolutionism (people who make the original claim about some science data point or paper, which others then repeat). So far out of 1900 authors, I’ve identified only about 40, running from Steve Austin on the YEC side (2/3 are YEC btw), to Jonathan Wells on ID. Together that group accounts for about a quarter of the 6800 antievolutionist citations in my #TIP reference base.
The core claimants are more likely to pen actual science paperish work (in their own journals, naturally), even imitating the visual style (as the IDer “Bio-Complexity” journal does the PLoS format). Since those are directly aiming at building a science evidence based argument, they are much more interesting from a methods perspective, as the content of the science work they cite may be compared to how they represent it.
My intent in #TIP is to hit these core claimants comprehensively and pull down all the parasitical gang who repeat the assertions unchecked along with them. I’ve already done a lot on this regarding core topics (reptile-mammal transition, bird origins, human evolution) in the pdf stuff at http://www.tortucan.wordpress.com (more blatant invitations for readers to check that stuff out, otherwise its of no utility to anyone).
Being able to spot who is a copiest and who is original turns on chronology, of course, but also telltale minutia (typographical errors repeated by the redactor, eg). Parasitical daisy chains are very common (including in the claimant core, where for instance Hugh Ross (of the dwindling category of Old Earth creationism) or Casey Luskin (the DiscoTute’s paleontology department, generating 14% of all ID lit on his own) who retread their own material long after it was wise from a methods direction).
Interesting…William Lane Craig is a professor at Biola, and I believe this is where the debate he had with Sean Carroll took place. Perhaps, WLC and Paul Nelson should get up there and debate the Physics the way Carol and Craig did. I’m sure God will amicably provide the correct answer to whoever is wrong. I mean, why confuse people if they’re truly seeking him?
Neither being a physicist, I suspect would be hard to lure either into that debate. A Robert Spitzer (formerly pres of Gonzaga University up in my neck of the woods) would be a more interesting case, water-carrier for the grand anthropic case. Should he be set against Nelson, fun part would see how Spitzer would have to use methodological naturalist arguments to circumvent the YEC claims (or whether Nelson would eschew technical details altogether and go for a purely theological defense).
Nelson seems no more likely to engage on that front, though, than the late Duane Gish (who steered clear of cosmology in most of his antievolutionary career, obssessing largely on paleontology).
Those gaps keep getting smaller. Maybe Nelson should apply for a grant for a high resolution transmission electron microscope. I never saw a god in any of the gaps in the sections I looked at when I was an electron microscopist, but that was years ago and the scopes have better resolution now!
The size of the divine effect changes with the resolution of the instrument, such that it is always on the margins of statistical significance. Very much like Uri Geller’s telekinetic powers, or the amount of hydrogen released in cold fusion. I will leave you to decide what that parallel means. 🙂
It absolutely is a problem for theists that “evidence” for a god only comes in gap form. Would Nelson really agree that gap-type evidence is the equal of actual, positive evidence? If god appeared to all humanity wouldn’t Nelson agree that that would be better evidence than the question of abiogenesis?
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