Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In a cartoon called “The Tao of Tommy: Budding Apologist Edition“, Reader Pliny the in Between presents a self-aggrandizing version of the familiar (and flawed) Ontological Argument:
I think that the kid, though, is really “Billy,” a budding William Lane Craig. However, there’s an unstated premise in the argument: “my happiness must necessarily be instantiated in this world.”
Well, well. Here we have an article in the Guardian by Rowan Williams, the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, arguing that atheists are constantly “arguing against propositions that no serious Christian writer would endorse.” I would have thought that the propositions we were arguing against were those of God’s existence, the divinity of Jesus, salvation, and so on—things that seem pretty much in the Christian mainstream—but Williams, a Sopisticated Theologian™, says “nope.”
In fact, Williams is exaggerating here: the argument he says atheists make, but that no Christian believes, is our refutation of the First Cause argument, also known as the Cosmological Argument. The argument goes, of course, like this: everything must have a cause, including the Universe, but the chain of causation cannot run on forever: there must be a First Cause. And that cause must have been God. God therefore exists, QED.
One response to this argument is this: “But who caused God?” That’s a perfectly sensible question: what brought God into existence? What was he doing before he created anything? In response, theists finesse the argument with a definitional ploy: God is the ONE AND ONLY THING that doesn’t need a “cause.” So their argument is basically tautological and semantic.
I’ll add here that the so-called “law of causality” implied in this argument doesn’t really hold in modern physics. As Sean Carroll pointed out to me, it’s more sensible just to use the “laws of physics” instead of “causality.” That is, there is no “cause” why the Earth orbits the Sun: it’s just obeying the laws of physics. In the same way, there is no “cause” for an atom to decay, even though an ensemble of atoms decays in a predictable way. (I suppose theists would respond, “Well, tell us where the laws of physics came from, then? Must have been God!”)
Williams’ essay is inspired by Rupert Shortt’s new book, God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity, coming out July 1. I haven’t read it since it’s not available, so I’m just discussing Shortt’s argument that Williams finds so persuasive. And it turns out to be the same old cosmological argument, gussied up in fancy language:
Whatever can be said of God, God cannot by definition be another item in any series, another “thing” (hence the book’s title). The claim made by religious philosophers of a certain kind is not that God can be invoked to plug a gap, but that there must be some fundamental agency or energy which cannot be thought of as conditioned by anything outside itself, if we are to make sense of a universe of interactive patterns of energy being exchanged. Without such a fundamental concept, we are left with energy somehow bootstrapping itself into being.
As for Krauss’s Universe from Nothing, Williams is scornful (and of course he has a point: what is “nothing”, anyway?):
And Shortt is rightly merciless towards those who wriggle out of difficulties by slipping disguised constants into the “nothingness” out of which the universe comes – primitive electrical charges, quantum fields, timeless laws or whatever. He quotes the British scholar Denys Turner to good effect on the fact that “nothing” ought to mean what it says – “no process … no random fluctuations … no explanatory law of emergence”. The problem of origins cannot be defined out of existence, and the highly complex notion of creation by an act that (unlike finite agency) is not triggered or conditioned needs to be argued with in its own terms, not reduced to the mythical picture of a Very Large Person doing something a bit like what we normally do, only bigger.
But in the end Shortt’s (and Williams’s) “solution” is again a semantic and tautological one, with the dubious premise that nothing can go on forever and that there is a “Law of Causation.” Yes, maybe there is some conception of “nothing” beyond a quantum vacuum, but it doesn’t follow that such a theological form of “nothing” ever existed, that “causation” is always meaningful at the physical level, or that the cosmos in some form (e.g., a multiverse) could not have existed indefinitely. The argument remains what it always has been: “because something exists, there must have been a god.” Atheists do understand that, and we do see its problems. It’s the theologians, in their willingness to take anything as evidence for god, who don’t look too hard at the philosophical and empirical difficulties of the Cosmological Argument.
Williams gives Shortt’s book a big endorsement, calling it “a powerful indirect commendation of Christian faith, insofar as it lays out some of what it looks like to think in a Christian mode, how the system works – in such a way that it is possible to see that Christian thinking is not automatically stupid or incapable of being used as a resource in handling complex current issues.”
Well, let’s avoid using the word “stupid.” Can we say “blinkered”, for Christian thinking is automatically tendentious and laden with confirmation bias. Before you can start invoking God, you have to give evidence for God: evidence that goes beyond the puerile Cosmological argument.
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If you want to hear Sean Carroll go after the cosmological argument in a debate against William Lane Craig, go here. The debate is nearly 3 hours long, but Caroll’s post has some discussion of the argument at issue. For a shorter take by Carroll go here.
h/t: Barry, Matthew Cobb
We’ve encountered Asra Nomani before: in a post I put up showing her short television debate with Jonathan Alter about whether women should be segregated from men in mosques. Nomani, founder of the Muslim Reform Movement, has no truck with the ingrained misogyny of her faith, and handily won the exchange (video here). I have immense respect for the women, both apostates and ex-Muslims, who fight the sexism of Islam, for they face even more opprobrium from other Muslims (including death threats) than do men. So first a salute to women like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maryam Namazie, Sarah Haider, Eiynah “Nice Mangos,” and, of course, Asra Nomani.
Over at his website Godless Spellchecker’s Blog, Stephen Knight presented a video of an encounter between Nomani and the odious Nathan Lean, the writer who not only produced a ridiculous hit piece on Maajid Nawaz for The New Republic, but called Nawaz a “Muslim validator”, a “trophy Muslim”, and a “lapdog” for simply engaging in conversation with Sam Harris. Lean’s incessant and wrongheaded cries of “Islamophobia!” brand him as only slightly less ridiculous than C. J. W*rl*man as an unhinged defender of the worst bits of Islam.
Here’s a short video of Nomani, in the audience, asking Lean a question after Lean had a conversation with Asma Uddin at Georgetown University. This was three days ago. Nomani wanted to know why Lean, while claiming to defend Muslims against nasty attacks, participates in them when the Muslims happen to be reformers. The cowardly Lean refuses to answer, instead trying to smear Nomani as a way of ducking her question:
Can you imagine someone like Hitchens refusing to answer that question? He would take it head-on. Lean, however, is simply a crybully who refuses to defend his stand in public.
I am still baffled why those people who decry the prevalence of Islamophobia spend most of their venom on people like Nawaz and Nomani, Muslims who risk their lives trying turn Islam into the faith that the apologists claim it already is: a “religion of peace.”
Sajda Khan is identified in The Independent as “a writer and researcher working towards a PhD on Islam in Britain”. And she (I think the name “Sajda” is female) seems to specialize in Muslim apologetics of the “true-Islam-is a-religion-of-peace” variety. Although she hasn’t written much for the Independent, she seems to have quite an oeuvre on PuffHo, including these articles:
Unfortunately, when you try to go to any of these pieces (including the interesting ones like “Mulsim women complicit in their repression?”), you get this message:
Now I can’t guarantee that this is the same Sajda Khan, but given the nature of the piece, and of the Feb. 1 Independent piece that is still up, “The Prophet Mohammed had British values—so the only way to combat extremism is to teach more Islam in schools,” I’m betting it’s the same person. And it’s not at all clear to me why Khan asked for her PuffHo pieces to be removed. They don’t seem to convey any message different from what Reza Aslan has promulgated, enriching and promoting himself in the process.
The substance of Khan’s article is expressed in the title: “true” Islam is peaceful, democratic, and conciliatory, and those, after all, are “British values.” Ergo if we teach the true “British-value” Islam in schools, potential extremists, like teenagers attracted to ISIS, will become moderates.
Dan Dennett once told me that he was in favor of teaching comparative religion in schools, for belief has been such a powerful force in history and remains so today. I could see his point but, I argued, who would determine how each religion should be taught? It’s no simple matter. Would Catholicism, for instance, be presented in its “hard” form, in which homosexual acts are deemed a hell-worthy “grave sin”, or in the softer form that most Catholics practice. Would Christianity be presented as a literalistic or metaphorical faith? And what about Islam? You can imagine the conflict that would arise among Muslims about what tenets of the faith should be presented. There’s no time, of course, to present all the beliefs of all the brands of Islam, much less of the 40,000 sects of Christianity. I’m not opposed to the idea of teaching comparative religion, but doing so at the secondary-school level is a minefield.
Khan, on the other hand, is not only in favor of teaching Islam (she doesn’t mention other faiths), but presenting it in a particular way: the way Reza Aslan would present it. Islam would be shown as a peaceful religion, with Muhammad as a man of fully British values: a seventh-century Churchill. I kid you not. As Khan argues:
Many reading this will find it difficult to stomach, but the Prophet Mohammed had what we also call “British values”. Those values of social responsibility, respect for the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect, and tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs that schools are now required to promote are not exclusively British, and are inherently Islamic. The teachings of the Qur’an are unambiguous on being inclusive, and treating others with justice and equality. There needn’t be a discrepancy between what is British and what is Muslim.
. . . The remedy to the poison of warped Islamic ideology is clear, then – we must teach the realities of Islam, that it is a religion of peace and tolerance. I strongly believe that it is a simple formula, one that requires no restriction of civil liberties or demonisation of minorities: Muslim scholarship must provide a genuine counter-narrative. Only then can young people be led to understand that groups like Isis use their religion an excuse – rather than a guide – to justify their barbaric actions.
This isn’t an objective portrayal of Islam, of course, but one strand of a complex faith: that strand that construes the faith as tolerant and accepting. I needn’t add that many schools of Islam, and many Muslims, aren’t so tolerant, favoring the execution of gays, apostates, and adulterers, and corporal punishment of criminals. (Do remember that the fatwa on Salman Rushdie calling for his murder, was just renewed, with the bounty increased.) If you doubt the extremist, “non-British” beliefs of many Muslims, I refer you again to the Pew Survey of attitudes of Muslims throughout the world. Khan goes on:
This is a golden opportunity to develop within our schools a curriculum based upon the biography of Prophet Muhammad, which clearly demonstrates and embeds what are now also considered British values. This is what will develop a strong sense of identity within our youth and dismantle the perverse understanding of Islam peddled by a few. We must be brave enough to say that being a British Muslim is not an oxymoron; it is the most natural thing in the world.
. . . The government should instead understand that the success of Britain’s counter-extremism strategy will hinge not only on the wider engagement with the British Muslim community but also on re-discovering the legacy of Prophet Mohammed. Encouraging those who have found solace in religion to turn away from it makes little sense. Investing in a theological education that teaches the basic tenets of Islam is the only way we can genuinely win over those who have turned to extremism – whether we like it or not.
Now of course there are peaceful Muslims and non-extremist schools of Islam, but to say that those schools that are more extremist—those that have “non-British” values—are the “wrong” kinds of Islam is to engaged in dissimulation. Have a look at some of the less conciliatory verses of the Qur’an, or, better yet, read the whole document (there’s a Skeptic’s Annotated Qur’an that labels the verses by their tone, peacefulness, or divisiveness). And then judge for yourself whether Khan is being truthful.
Perhaps there’s a way to teach comparative religion to teenagers in school, but one way not to do it is Khan’s suggested strategy: using those classes as political tools to slant the portrayal of religions in a way that makes them seem more genial and benign. Let Muslims tell their own coreligionists such things. It’s not the responsibility of the British government to convince Muslims that their entire religion promotes “British values” when in many cases that’s palpably false. For one thing, the subjugation of women is not a “British value.”
One reader’s comment:
About two weeks ago I wrote about the negative correlation among countries between religiosity and happiness: the happiest countries in the world are the least religious, and the unhappiest the most religious. I needn’t discuss this further now, but wanted to put up a new plot made by reader “Gluon Spring” to demonstrate this relationship. Taking data from the UN’s 2013 World Happiness Report and the 2013 Pew Survey of Religious Importance, Gluon made this plot, this time naming the countries as well as giving the 95% confidence interval for the regression line.
When I posted this here and elsewhere, some people argued that a correlation of -0.52 wasn’t impressive. They’re wrong. With the 52 countries plotted here, the probability that this correlation would arise by chance is less than 0.0001. In other words, it’s highly significant. Note as well the narrow confidence interval for the regression line.
We can debate the meaning of this relationship in the comments below, but I wanted to show a plot that other people can use. At the very least it demonstrates that the most religious countries don’t contain the happiest people. Click to embiggen:
If you’ve followed the career of Simon Conway Morris, the famous Cambridge paleontologist, you’ll know about his work on the Burgess Shale as well as his refutation of Stephen Jay Gould’s thesis that the animals in that formation represented fundamentally novel phyla that died out due solely to “historical contingency.”
You might also know that Conway Morris is a devout Christian, and has bent some of his science toward natural theology: the use of natural history to give evidence for God and understand His ways. So, for example, Conway Morris’s 2003 book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, a discussion and list of “convergent evolution” (lineages of animals or plants that, though unrelated, come to resemble each other), was part of a Templeton-funded project whose underlying theme was that the uniqueness of human intelligence was the result of God’s intervention.
Conway Morris, then, seems to be drinking the Kool-Aid of religion, co-opting his science in service of praising and giving evidence for God and Jesus (who are, of course, One Being). That is certainly the lesson from Conway Morris’s new scholarly paper in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (free download, reference and link below), which makes no bones about adducing “evidence” for God from mathematics.
Try reading it yourself. It’s a long and tedious read, made harder by Conway Morris’s penchant for what he thinks is breezy and readable prose, which in fact he has no idea how to produce. The article is loaded to the gunwales with phrases that Conway Morris thinks are clever, but in fact weigh down his prose and distract from his thesis. Here are just two examples:
For example, if the minimum additional weight that needs to be added to eighty ounces (or if you prefer 2268 g) for me to perceive a tangible difference is one ounce (for those of you wedded to Gallic certainty that is of course is 28.35 g). . .
and
Be that as it may, and with no reason to doubt that our mathematics would not emerge without some sort of cultural foundation, is our competence in this regard any better explained? In this context, I am rather wickedly reminded of the plot situation familiar to the less able writer whereby the narrative has ensured that the hero is trapped in some impossible predicament (chained in steadily flooding cellar, that sort of thing) until the author picks up the pen and continues “ and with a mighty bound he was free”. So in an analogous way lurking at the back of the numerosity debated that is to ask how on earth the numerical approximations employed by animals like a rhesus monkey or guppy can be squared with the capacity to employ square roots (let alone complex numbers), there nestles an all-purpose and perhaps too convenient explanation.
Oy! That is just bad writing, and the paper would have been immensely improved had Conway Morris not been so infatuated with his own cleverness.
But I digress. Here, as best I can make it out, is Conway Morris’s argument:
. . . claims for an evolutionary basis for a capacity for abstraction seem to rest on weak ground. This emphatically is not to contest that we at least require neuronal equipment and such a nervous system could only arise by the processes of evolution. It is, however, to protest that we are not a whit closer to explaining how even relatively simple mathematical operations are actually conducted. Related to this is the sense that effective mathematics is impossible without language and in this sense is a test-case for consciousness itself.
Here he gets even closer to the idea that doing math is something that reflects a gift from God. If you think I’m exaggerating, Conway Morris quotes Robert Kanigel on the remarkable mathematical gifts of Srinivasa Ramanujan, well known to many. The bit below is longish, but I think is necessary to quote in full, as it suggests that Ramanujan’s abilities had a divine source (Kanigel’s quote, my emphasis):
“It is uncanny how often otherwise dogged rationalists have, over the years, turned to the language of the shaman and the priest to convey something of Ramanujan’s gifts.. [R]epeatedly [mathematicians] have been reduced to inchoate expressions of wonder and awe in the face of his powers, have stumbled about, groping for words, in trying to convey the mystery of Ramanujan.. [I]n the language of the Polish émigré mathematician Mark Kac, [Ramanujan] was a “magician,” rather than an “ordinary genius.” Mystery, magic, and dark, hidden workings inaccessible to ordinary thought; it is these that Ramanujan’s work invariably conjures up, a sense of reason butting hard up against its limits.
But at reason’s limits does something else take over? Do we here flirt with spiritual or supernatural forces outside our understanding? T. K. Rajogopolan, a former accountant general of Madras, would tell of Ramanujan’s insistence that after seeing in dreams the drops of blood that, according to tradition, heralded the presence of the god Narasimha, the male consort of the goddess Namagiri, “scrolls containing the most complicated mathematics used to unfold before his eyes.”
Of this Conway Morris says two telling things:
Such a view is, of course, congruent with the view that mathematics inhabits a transcendental world. As Morris Kline (1980, 323) notes there are individuals and schools that “affirm that the mathematical concepts and properties exist in some objective sense and that they can be apprehended by human minds.”
and
Ramanujan’s encounters with his god ring very true, but I may be engaged in wishful thinking.
Now the first bit is just adumbration of mathematical realism, but the second claims that our ability to apprehend those “out-there” truths may come not from naturally selected brains, but from God. And that this is in fact Conway Morris’s view is clear from his last paragraph (my emphasis).
There is another observation, linked to this thought. Oddly the idea of animal numerosity being extrapolated to human mathematics almost always presupposes that our neural architecture actually has any capacity to know the world. This, however, may not be true unless we have an independent warrant that tells us that what we believe to be true is in reality truly true. Darwin saw the abyss and dithered, unable to take the plunge. It is, of course another story, but such a warrant exists. Not on the basis of unreflective faith, the recurrent gibe offered from Huxley to Dawkins, but because in a world of radical uncertainty we have only two options. One is to erect a thanatocratic culture, of existentialist despair, where suicide rates grow and euthanasia is “legal”. The other is to become creatures of trust. Curiously enough, and from a very different direction, in his essay “Sorry, but your soul just died” Tom Wolfe (2000, 109) comes to what I think is a similar conclusion. Speaking of our existentialist morass that Nietzsche so presciently identified, Wolfe writes of “modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He’s floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can’t see it, but he’s much impressed. He names it God”. Back to square one.
The first bit is straight out of Alvin Plantinga’s playbook: natural selection could not possibly have given us the ability to apprehend truths about the cosmos because natural selection favors not apprehension of truth, but ability to survive and reproduce.
I’ve criticized this view in Faith versus Fact, and of course the answer is simple: in many (but not all) cases, natural selection could give us the ability to apprehend truth and the tools (rationality and logic) to do it, because apprehending truth helps us to survive and reproduce. (If we can’t tell a lion from an antelope, we are in big trouble). Sometimes, of course, we don’t apprehend truth: optical illusions and other false beliefs (i.e., we’re smarter than most other people) could also be the results of natural selection, but a form that promotes false beliefs because they can be adaptive, too.
At any rate, at the end of the paragraph Conway Morris goes off the rails, claiming that “in a world of uncertainty” we must choose between nonbelief in God, leading to nihilism and despair, or to become “creatures of trust”, i.e., believers in God. Can there be any doubt from the above that this is what Conway Morris means?
Finally, his notion that disbelief in God leads to nihilism is refuted by simple observation: most atheists haven’t taken to their beds in despair, nor wallow in sorrow and gloom. And euthanasia and suicide—really?
Here’s the last bit of his argument:
The purpose of the whole piece, if you can slog through the prose, is to show that the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” is evidence for God, so that science buttresses Conway Morris’s Christianity. Now THAT sounds like a Templeton project, for Sir John Templeton’s belief—and the goal of his bequest to his Foundation—was that science, studied properly, would support the existence of God.
It’s no surprise, then, that you find this at the end of Conway Morris’s paper:
TEMPLETON again! But that’s not surprising: the organization has supported Conway Morris for years. In fact, I’ll venture a guess here: Conway Morris, who’s rapidly becoming the Francis Collins of paleontology, will win the million-pound Templeton Prize within five years.
Below is a video of Conway Morris attacking materialism as an explanation of consciousness; it’s more or less a plumping for dualism. He’s presenting a God-of-the-gaps argument based on the puzzle of consciousness. This is the kind of stuff that Templeton loves: in our ignorance resides the divine. Note that he at 4:29 he regards the Resurrection of Jesus as true, because it’s simply impossible to make up that kind of story!
I’m still amazed that a scientist as good as Conway Morris can accept the reality of the Resurrection on evidence so thin that he’d never use such a line of reasoning in his scientific work on fossils!
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Conway Morris, S. 2016. It all adds up. . . Or does it? Numbers, mathematics, and purpose. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. Online, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.12.011
UPDATE On both Phys.org and PsyPost, I’ve made a comment calling attention to the post below, and in both cases the comment has either not been accepted or has been expunged. Here’s the Phys.org comment that wasn’t accepted:
As you see, my comment wasn’t nasty or strident, but they were obviously too hot for these cowardly sites to handle.
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Liam Fraser, a Ph.D candidate in systematic theology at the Divinity School of the University of Edinburgh, and is well on the way to making his career on the backs of New Atheists. Part of his thesis, a paper called “The secret sympathy: New Atheism, Protestant fundamentalism, and evolution” has just appeared in the journal Open Theology, and it’s the usual palaver about the similarity of Christian fundamentalists and New atheists (Fraser appears to be a Christian).
Fraser’s paper has already garnered some publicity, including a mention in, of all places, Phys.org, which is a science news website (!), as well as on PsyPost, which deals with new findings in psychology. I have no idea why these websites would highlight a paper on the philosophy of religion—unless they have an implicit desire to criticize atheism. Both sites take comments, and you can bet I’ll go there and post a link to this piece. Readers may wish to participate as well.
Fraser’s paper takes ten pages of leaden academic prose to make four simple points:
Isn’t that DEEP? This simple thesis is neither new nor correct, but it’s a sign of the times that it can not only get published, but gets highlighted on two “scientific” websites. But the paper is neither psychology nor harder science; it’s simply theology.
Here’s why Fraser’s argument is wrong:
a. While Christian fundamentalism is indeed characterized by Biblical literalism, New Atheists don’t see all religion as being totally literalistic. Many of us have argued, as Fraser notes, that the literalist meaning may be the most honest reading of scripture, for it requires the least interpretation and the least intellectual dishonesty. After all, neither the Bible nor the Qur’an says, “This book is all allegory,” and, indeed, they read like historical narratives. If you take the Bible as allegory, as we all know, then you have to claim that some bits are to be seen as metaphor, while others, like the story of Jesus, are to be taken largely literally (virtually all liberal Christians, and surely Fraser, see Jesus and his deeds as historical). And there’s simply no guidance for how to winnow the metaphorical from the historical. There’s also the tiny problem of what you do when you decide that parts of scripture are allegorical: what is the correct reading?
Of course all NAs recognize the “sophisticated” nonliteral versions of religion, and I discuss them at length in my book Faith versus Fact. For example, I talk about the problems with theistic evolution, one of the “solutions” of liberal Christianity (see below). But even Sophisticated Religionists™ have some literal beliefs: the divinity and resurrection of Jesus, and the idea of salvation by accepting him as Savior, are what I see as the ‘non-negotiables’ of Christianity. Few believers of any stripe have no beliefs that conflict with empirical observation and/or reason. That’s why I always say, “Some believers are literalist about everything, but nearly every believer is a literalist about something.” (That statement is trademarked, by the way.)
One last point: somehow Fraser sees the Bible as a source of truth, but not scientific truth. For example, he quotes Dan Barker saying, in his book Godless, that “I lost faith in faith. I was forced to admit that the Bible is not a reliable source of truth: it is unscientific, irrational, contra- dictory, absurd, unhistorical…” Fraser comments on that statement:
This is an uncompromising rejection, yet one which assumes that the Bible should be a source of scientific truth, a coherent whole without contradiction, providing historically precise information regarding past events. New atheists typically share the same presuppositions as fundamentalists regarding what Scripture should be, and, finding that it does not meet their assumptions, reject it as worthless.
But the only truth that is more than a subjective truth (i.e., “I had a vision of Jesus”) IS scientific truth: truth that can be verified by all rational people. The use of the word “scientific truth” instead of “truth” is meant to denigrate New Atheists. As for “moral truth”, well, there isn’t any—at least not objective moral truths that all people can agree on. What we call “moral truths” are really behavioral prescriptions you should follow if you desire a certain (subjective) outcome. Finally, surely Fraser sees some part of scripture as “scientific truth,” like the divinity and resurrection of Jesus, or the existence of a soul or an afterlife.
b. While Christian fundamentalism is indeed characterized by God’s palpable intervention in the world, New Atheists attack the brand of religion in which God at least has some influence in the world, and that brand is ubiquitous. After all, a deistic God, or a God who does nothing, is indistinguishable from no God at all. And even if a Deistic God makes souls or sends us to Heaven or Hell, there are in principle ways to get evidence for such claims. Of course, if you’re a Deist who claims that God either created the universe and didn’t do squat after that, with no interventions, no souls, or no Heaven, or a Sophisticated Theist™ who claims that God merely “sustains” the Universe—those are forms of God that don’t fall within the ambit of science. But neither are they gods we should take seriously, for there’s not a whit of evidence for them.
c. Fraser’s “solution” of reading scripture as a metaphor sounds good, but he offers no clue to whether we should take all scripture as metaphor—in which Christianity devolves to a fictional book like the Beowulf saga—or whether we should take parts of scripture as literal, like the story of Jesus. This tactic leads to either atheism or ambiguity.
Here’s Fraser’s solution, given in his peroration:
I therefore propose an alternative approach. Given that the belief of both groups in the incompatibility of Genesis and evolution rests on biblical and theological presuppositions whose cogency is highly questionable, those wishing to challenge the conception of the Christian faith shared by new atheists and Protestant fundamentalists should direct serious attention toward these presuppositions. This approach, which I explore in greater depth in my doctoral work, accomplishes two objectives. First, it reiterates that the Church has traditionally read Genesis in a variety of ways, of which the literal was only one. The literal, univocal, and perspicuous understanding of Scripture shared by atheists and fundamentalists can only be dated to the Reformation at the earliest, and did not attain its current form until the late seventeenth century. Second, when attention is directed toward these presuppositions, it is shown that atheist and fundamentalist readings of Scripture are more influenced by the biases they bring to the text than what the text teaches. Far from teaching the mutual exclusivity of design and evolution, passages such as Psalm 104:10-18, Job 38:39-41, John 1: 1-18 and Colossians 1: 15-20 teach the immanence of God’s activity in all natural processes, an immanence that is Christologically mediated. These texts elide any easy dualism between natural and divine activity, and engagement with them has the potential to yield Trinitarian models of creation, preservation, and concurrence that repair the faulty biblical and theological presuppositions of new atheism and protestant fundamentalism.
This is bogus. It’s simply untrue that literalism didn’t arise until the seventeenth century. Perhaps a form of total and nonallegorical literalism arose then, but for nearly two millennia theologians took much of scripture as absolutely literal. Some theologians, who include Aquinas and Augustine, said that allegorical readings could be made as well as literal ones, but a literal interpretation always took primacy. That held for Adam and Eve, the creation, the existence of Heaven, Hell, and angels, and the divinity and resurrection of Jesus. I both distrust and dislike scholars who say that nobody took the Bible literally until recent times, for they’re both wrong and intellectually dishonest.
As for theistic evolution, it’s unscientific in many forms, including those forms that mandate some form of creation of species, or of God-given mutations that direct species in certain preferred ways (i.e., toward H. sapiens). At any rate, I’d ask Fraser to tell us two things: a) which parts of the Bible are pure allegory and which contain historical truth (after all, he takes the Trinity as some kind of truth in the passage above); and b) what kind of theistic evolution he’s talking about. While he says this,:
The biblical and theological presuppositions of new atheists and protestant fundamentalists therefore exclude the possibility of theistic evolution, the belief that God’s creative agency is mediated in some way through variation and natural selection.
he doesn’t tell us exactly how “God’s creative agency is mediated through variation and natural selection.” Without more detail, we needn’t take this possibility seriously.
If you want to see Fraser, here is is expatiating about his Big Idea:
Fraser has a bright future in atheist-bashing. I foresee many columns in the Guardian. And his appearance, his “muscular Christianity,” and his earnestness reminds me a lot of another Scot: Eric Liddell in the movie “Chariots of Fire,” as in this clip (start at 1:20; go here if you can’t see the video below):
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Fraser, L. J. 2015. The secret sympathy: New Atheism, Protestant fundamentalism, and evolution. Open Theology 1:445-454.