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.