Quote of the week: BioLogos insists that the creator is the Christian God

March 26, 2013 • 12:21 pm

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.

Frans de Waal tries to give atheists a good hiding in Salon; Anthony Grayling takes him down

March 26, 2013 • 6:29 am

UPDATE: Reader “GJG” notes that Grayling’s review is available for free here.

I’m not sure what has happened to primatologist Frans de Waal, a man whose work I’ve greatly admired, for he’s been on a bender against New Atheism, using all the familiar tropes about the movement being both militant and “religious” in nature.  One would think that if he attacked one side of the faith-vs.-atheism debate, it would be religion, for, more than anyone else, de Waal has discerned and publicized the roots of human morality in our relatives—primate and otherwise.  He has frequently argued that human morality did not come from God, but was largely a product of evolution.

But instead of criticizing religion, he’s taken to criticizing atheism.  The first signs appeared in a 2010 piece in the New York Times (see my post here) in which he derided New Atheists for, among other things, their stridency. And then there was a note on his public Facebook page last May about his new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist:

The book is almost done! It is a reflection on religion and the origins of morality. It questions whether we get any closer to the truth by bashing religion, the way neo-atheists have been doing, even though I also believe that morality antedates modern religion.

That worried me, and, sure enough, the worries were valid.  In that book, which has just appeared, de Waal devotes a substantial section to bashing “militant” atheists and sticking up for religion.  That’s bizarre, for he’s an atheist himself, and his work has begun demolishing one of the last redoubts of religion: God-given morality.  My theory for his behavior, which differs from Anthony Grayling’s (see below), is that de Waal, realizing that his conclusions aren’t congenial to the faithful, must take some swipes at atheists to maintain credibility with the public.

Read and weep: de Waal has just published an essay in Salon called “Militant atheism has become a religion” (subtitle: “Prominent non-believers have become as dogmatic as those they deride—and become rich on the lecture circuit”). It is in fact a straight excerpt from his new book. You really have to read the essay (and it’s longish) to see how far off the rails he’s gone, for it’s a disjointed ramble punctuated by gratuitous swipes at atheists and sporadic osculations of the rump of faith. A few quotes:

  • “In my interactions with religious and nonreligious people alike, I now draw a sharp line, based not on what exactly they believe but on their level of dogmatism. I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se. I am particularly curious why anyone would drop religion while retaining the blinkers sometimes associated with it. Why are the “neo-atheists” of today so obsessed with God’s nonexistence that they go on media rampages, wear T-shirts proclaiming their absence of belief, or call for a militant atheism? What does atheism have to offer that’s worth fighting for?”

de Waal also suffers from the misconception that most atheists are militant because they retain the zeal they once had when they were religious. Unfortunately, most of the militant atheists I know were not once zealous religionists. I certainly was not, and I don’t think any of the “Four Horsemen” were, either.

  • “Possibly, the religion one leaves behind carries over into the sort of atheism one embraces. . . I like this analysis better than the usual approach to secularization, which just counts how many people believe and how many don’t. It may one day help to test my thesis that activist atheism reflects trauma. The stricter one’s religious background, the greater the need to go against it and to replace old securities with new ones.”

He then uses Christopher Hitchens as an example of someone who “craved dogma, yet had trouble deciding on its contents,” arguing that Hitchens (who was never really religious) went from Trotskyism to Greek Orthodox faith, to “American neo-Conservatism”, and then to dogmatic atheism. de Waal recounts the atheism/religion debate at Puebla, Mexico, between Hitchens, Dan Dennett, and Sam Harris on one side, and Dinesh D’Souza and Rabbit Shmuley Boteach on the other. (I was at that meeting, but had to leave before the debate.) de Waal argues that such debates change nobody’s mind.  He forgets that there are onlookers on YouTube and elsewhere, who do change their minds (or form a previously inchoate opinion) because of such debates. Just read Richard Dawkins’s “Converts’ Corner” to see the effect of strident atheism: hundreds have left their faith.

de Waal, once a Catholic, then spends some time defending that Church as a bulwark of science, and arguing, erroneously, that the Church preserved science during the Dark Ages. He gives the Catholic Church an undeserved pat on the back:

  • “When it comes to evolution, too, there is a tendency to point at religion as a solid opponent while ignoring that the Roman Catholic Church never formally condemned Darwin’s theory or put his works on the Index (the list of forbidden books). The Vatican has endorsed evolution as a valid theory compatible with the Christian faith. Admittedly, its endorsement came a bit late, but it is good to realize that resistance to evolution is almost entirely restricted to evangelical Protestants in the American South and Midwest.”

This is wrong in several ways. First, as I noted in my Evolution paper in 2012, Catholics are by no means down with modern theories of evolution:

The Catholic Church, for example, accepts a form of theistic evolution, mostly natural but still guided by God when it comes to the evolution of humans and their supposed souls (John Paul II, 1996). Nevertheless, 27% of American Catholics think that modern species were created instantaneously by God and have remained unchanged ever since, while 8% do not know or refuse to answer (Masci 2009).

The Catholic Church claims that humans are unique in evolution because God inserted a soul at some point in the hominin lineage. Further, it is official Church dogma that Adam and Eve were real people. I don’t call that a “valid theory of evolution”.

And when it comes to Catholicism, de Waal forgets to mention Galileo and Bruno, who were threatened or killed for going against Scripture (I reject the common claim that the Galileo affair “had nothing to do with religious dogma”).

It’s also specious to claim that resistance to evolution “is almost entirely restricted to evangelical Protestants in the American South and Midwest.” That’s not true even for America, where resistance to evolution is geographically widespread. 40% of all Americans are young-earth creationists, and only 12% believe in naturalistic as opposed to theistic evolution. Resistance to evolution is common in other countries as well, and is virtually universal in Islamic countries of the Middle East.

Well, I won’t go on, except to reproduce this very bizarre quote from de Waal’s piece:

  • “Given this intertwinement [a supposed history of mutual respect between science and faith], most historians stress dialogue or even integration between science and religion. Neo-atheists keep pitting the two against each other, however. Their audiences pee in their pants with delight when the flat-earth canard gets trotted out.

Pee in our pants with delight?

To be sure, de Waal does offer some criticisms of religion, but repeatedly equates extreme religiosity with extreme atheism, considering the latter to be religious in both nature and fervor.  The whole piece is very, very odd—and disappointing. I would have hoped for better from this man. Well, his invective will surely sit well with many readers, and one is tempted to level the same criticism at him that he does against the New Atheists, whom he accuses of using stridency to gain wealth on the lecture circuit.

Fortunately, we have Anthony Grayling to defend New Atheism here. He’s just published a review of de Waal’s book in Prospect Magazine, and in his piece, called “Apes and atheism” (sadly, behind a paywall), pretty much dismantles de Waal’s contentions about atheism. I’ll offer just a few whiffs of Grayling’s pungent prose.

He begins by praising de Waal for the many advances he’s made in understanding the evolution of morality, but then gets down to business, giving an overall appraisal of the book:

The book is, however, an oddity. Besides the stated aim it is a mixture of memoir, repetition of de Waal’s now familiar views, and hostile discussion of the ‘new atheist’ movement. The result is a somewhat unfocussed ramble one of whose main points for de Waal, apart from rehearsing the already-won ‘apes R us’ argument, appears to be to distance himself from the ‘new atheist’ attack on religion.

The Salon excerpt certainly is unfocussed and rambling; have a look.

Why, [de Waal] asks, are the ‘new atheists’ evangelical about their cause? ‘Why would atheists turn messianic?’ He cannot see why Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett and others attack religion and believers, and why correlatively they robustly and even aggressively argue the case for atheism. He can see why the advocates of religions do it; the more believers, he says, the more money they get. (Here, as a sympathizer, he should perhaps recognize that some religionists sincerely believe they have the Truth that will save us, and might be trying to be helpful; not all of them want money, though doubtless the ranting preachers of the Nigerian megachurches do.)

Well: here is the answer to de Waal’s question. Some atheists are evangelical because religious claims about the universe are false, because children are brain-washed into the ancient superstitions of their parents and communities, because many religious organisations and movements have been and continue to be anti-science, anti-gays, and anti-women, because even if people are no longer burned at the stake they are still stoned to death for adultery, murdered for being ‘witches’ or abortion doctors, blown up in large numbers for being Shias instead of Sunnis…one could go on at considerable length about the divisions, conflicts, falsehoods, coercions, disruptions, miseries and harm done by religion, though the list should be familiar; except, evidently, to de Waal.

He might respond with the usual points: on one side the charity, art and solace inspired by religion, and on the other side Hitler and Stalin as examples of the crimes of atheism. And the usual replies have wearily to be given: non-believers also engage in charity and make great art, and their love and care for others provides solace too; and the totalitarianisms are just alternatives of the great religions at their worst, possessing their own versions of the One Truth to which all must bow down – at risk of severe sanctions otherwise. (Hitler was not an atheist – Gott mit uns said the legend on Wehrmacht belt buckles –  and Stalin was educated in a seminary, where evidently he picked up a few tricks.)

As for those benign Catholics, here’s Grayling’s answer:

[de Waal] tells us that the Roman Catholic Church never formally proscribed Darwin’s Origin of Species, as if this exculpated them from every other effort made to resist the march of science, as for example in burning Giordano Bruno at the stake and forcing Galileo to recant on pain of the same fate, both for accepting the Copernican geocentric view. De Waal says that religion’s opponents are wrong to say that if religion had its way, we would still believe that the earth is flat – his reason being that the ancient Greeks already knew that the earth is a sphere. What then does he make of the fact that in 1615 Cardinal Bellarmine warned a scientifically-minded monk against the Copernican view, on the grounds that Psalm 102 explicitly states that God has ‘fixed the foundations of the earth that it might never be moved’?

If de Waal thinks this is all ‘mere history’, let him look around at the creationists and Intelligent Design ‘theorists’ trying to subvert the teaching of biology in today’s schools, opposing stem cell research, preventing girls from going to school in some Muslim countries, persecuting homosexuals – and so on again through the familiar litany. And he still wonders why some atheists are evangelical?

Finally, we have Grayling’s scathing last paragraph:

The chimp and bonobo stories in de Waal’s writings are, as always, entertaining and charming. They make me think that if ideas about reincarnation are true, I suspect that quite a few people would not mind being reborn as bonobos. Their motive would be related to the perversions and limitations of human sexuality that has so successfully been achieved by the religions de Waal defends.

Grayling’s theory for de Waal’s anti-atheism differs from mine: he thinks that de Waal’s view that religion is benign comes from his Catholic upbringing, and from inculcation with “the psychological finesse” of Catholicism, which exercises a permanent hold over one’s mind.  And there may be some truth in that: I’ve found that those “faitheists” who are most sympathetic to religion tend to be people who were once deeply religious, but haven’t yet shaken it all off. This contrast with de Waal’s theory that the most strident atheists were once the most religious people—a theory that, I think, is disproven by simply seeing which atheists are most vociferous.

At any rate, I’m disappointed by de Waal’s views (and note that I’ve read the excerpt, Grayling’s comment, and de Waal’s earlier statements, but not yet the whole book)—and in the same way I’m disappointed by E. O. Wilson’s latter-day incursion into group selection.  Someone I have respected has gone off the intellectual rails. In Wilson’s case it’s about science; in de Waal’s it’s a gratuitous and misguided attack on atheism.  And gratuitous it is: for what conceivable reason would de Waal, in a book on the evolutionary origins of morality (the books’s subtitle is In Search of Humanism Among the Primates), decide to mount an attack on New Atheism? He may have a score to settle, but he should have settled it elsewhere.

h/t: Emily, Barry

Spring break footwear

March 26, 2013 • 4:24 am

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, after I gave my final exam eight days ago, not only that week was free from teaching, but also this week, as it’s SPRING BREAK.  In honor of the perambulating students (not really—U of C students don’t indulge in Floridian beer-and-sex fests), here’s a hopping pair of custom boots, made by the estimable M. L. Leddy of Fort Worth, Texas.

Guess the hide.

Boots

An invitation to shoot some fish in a barrel

March 26, 2013 • 2:17 am

by Matthew Cobb

Yesterday The Guardian published two brief letters from religious folk (they don’t appear to be on the website), replying in a religious way to previous articles and letters.

Father Alec Mitchell from Manchester wrote:

‘Dark matter is an invisible substance… whose existence can be inferred only by its gravitational pull’ (Cosmic map casts new light, 22 March). How more – or less – intellectually credible is that than the suggestion that God is an invisible spirit whose existence can easily be inferred by God’s pull on human souls?’

Just below, the Reverend Dr Moira Biggins from Derby wrote:

‘John Illingworth (Letters, 23 March) asks if all religions are ‘made up’. Now there’s one of the big questions of life and not even Google can answer it.

WEIT readers are invited to answer either or both of these minor examples of Sophisticated Theology™ in the comments below. Will it be like shooting fish in a barrel? Will you be shrill? Let’s see how Sophisticated Atheists™ can argue. You could also send your best answers (or all of them) to The Guardian – letters@guardian.co.uk

Tard the Grumpy Cat sells out to Friskies

March 25, 2013 • 12:53 pm

Oy gewalt! Every time a cat leaps to internet fame, it gets bought out and corrupted by Friskies, forced to tout suboptimal catfood for big bucks. But you have to hand it to that company: it knows the power of internet cats.

First, Henri went over to the Dark Side. Now the latest sellout for thirty pieces of shrimp is by Tard (real name Tardar Sauce), the famous grumpy cat.  Alert reader Ginger sent me this communique by Catsparilla:

“I’ve seen a lot of pop-cultural Web sensations rise and fall in my day, but I have never seen people wait two hours in the spitting rain for the chance to be photographed next to a sleeping cat.” – Andrew Leonard, Salon.com

Depending on who you talk to, Tardar Sauce the Grumpy Cat had the best, or worst weekend ever. The popular internet meme made her first public appearance at the South by Southwest music, movie, and tech festival in Austin, Texas, where she shot a celebrity version of “Will Kitty Play With It?” for Friskies, before taking up residency in the Mashable house, where she met with throngs of adoring fans.

Tard, whose unusual appearance is attributed to feline dwarfism, became the breakout star of the interactive event, making headlines from ABC to CNN. On Friday, TMZ posted paparazzi shots of the cat, and reported that she flew to Austin first class, and “was living it up…with her own, full-time assistant to brush her, an endless supply of Friskies as well as other treats, bottled water and her very own room at a four-diamond hotel … king-sized bed included.”

Fans generally responded favorably to the hoopla surrounding the feline star — as one TMZ commenter put it, “I’m down to make the Grumpy Cat the new ‘it girl’ as long as she replaces Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan. Please, TMZ, she’s already more interesting, pretty, and more respected” — but even an 11-month old cat is not immune to controversy.

Motivated by an All Things D article called “People of South by Southwest — Please, Free Grumpy Cat”, several supporters took to Twitter to protest the tiny feline being put on display.

In response to the criticism, Grumpy’s owner, Bryan Bundeson, told The Austin Chronicle, “Yeah, we get a lot of messages about how we’re exploiting her, you know? Or from people concerned that we’re doing something to make her grumpy. But that’s just how she looks. Ninety-nine percent of the time she’s just a house pet. She’s very well taken care of, and we love her.”

The Austin Humane Society also chimed in, tweeting, “They aren’t allowing anyone to touch #grumpycat and she’s getting lots of breaks. She’s doing good.”

Here’s Tard, pretending to be peeved as she rakes in the bucks:

Sellout!
Sellout!

And a tweet from Ed Yong about Tard’s threat to sue interlopers on her “brand”:

Ed Yong tweet

Who’s gonna be corrupted by Friskies next—Maru?

How the faithful see free will

March 25, 2013 • 10:16 am

Apropos of this morning’s post, we should remember that many religious people really do believe in dualistic free will. In fact, it’s often their only justification for evil in the world, at least the kind of “moral evil” committed by human beings.

I’ve been reading a fairly new book by Karl Giberson and Francis Collins, The Language of Science and Faith (InterVarsity Press, 2011), which is basically an explanation of the BioLogos position that science and evangelical Christianity can be reconciled.  The book apparently grew out of the “frequently asked questions” portion of the BioLogos website, leading Collins and Giberson (then a vice-president of BioLogos) to package all the answers in a book.

The book contains the usual apologetics about  how evolution is really God’s best way of creating, how science and scripture can be reconciled, and so on. It even adduces two bits of “evidence” for God: the “fine-tuning” of the universe and the “moral law” (our instinctive moral feelings). Collins used the “Moral Law Proves God” argument often, but he and Giberson have apparently backed off a bit from that, saying (see below) that instinctive morality is “consistent with God” or “a pointer to God.” Nevertheless, it’s still using god as a finger in the dike of science.

In the chapter on theodicy (explaining evil), Giberson and Collins offer the usual explanation for moral evils like the Holocaust as an unavoidable result of God’s having given humans free will, and of course with that comes the ability to choose evil paths. (This is, of course, dualistic free will.) In other words, the Holocaust was the result of God wanting to give the Nazis free will, and it’s better to have free will than to not have 10 million people killed in the camps.

Of course, God could have given people the ability to choose, but choose only good actions, but that level of sophistication eludes the authors.

It’s harder, though, for theologians to explain natural evils: leukemia in children, bubonic plague, tsunamis and such.  Why couldn’t God prevent those if he’s loving and omnipotent? I’ll let Giberson and Collins answer in their own words, invoking the fact that God gives nature freedom in the same way he gives humans freedom:

“Likewise, the same forces that produced a life-sustaining planet, including the laws of physics, chemistry, weather and tectonics, can also produce natural disasters. As with the free will of humans, God cannot constantly intervene in these areas without disrupting the inherent freedom of the creation and disrupting his consistent sustaining of all the matter and energy in the universe. Without this consistency, science would be impossible, moral choices would be subverted, and the world would not be as rich with meaning and opportunity.

If God blocked the consequences of human moral choices (e.g., committing murder) and natural events (e.g., tsunamis) every time they led to evil results, moral responsibility would disappear and the natural world would become incoherent.  Imagine a world where we could feel totally free to lose our temper and, in a fit of road rage, run down jaywalking teenagers, confident that God would whisk them away at the last minute so we couldn’t actually harm them.” (p. 140)

Wrong. The natural world would not become incoherent if God just stopped plague in its tracks, or prevented a tsunami.  We wouldn’t know about those things! And why is it so important that the natural world be coherent, anyway? It wasn’t when Jesus came back to life, or when a virgin gave birth to Giberson and Collins’s savior. Why not one more miracle: kill Hitler by giving him cancer in his teens?

Everything gets God off the hook, for there’s nothing apologetics can’t explain:

“In exactly the same way, outside of the moral dimension, when nature’s freedom leads to the evolution of a pernicious killing machine like black plague, God is off the hook.  Unless God micromanages nature so as to destroy autonomy, such things are going to occur. Likewise, unless God coercively micromanages human decision making, we will often abuse our freedom.” (p. 137)

So natural evil is no problem; it’s consistent with God.  And so is the ubiquity of moral standards:

What we would suggest, based on present understandings, is that the prevalence and universality of moral standards is entirely consistent with the existence of God and may even be a pointer to that God.” (p. 144)

After pondering all this, I wonder exactly what in our world would be inconsistent with the Christian God. What couldn‘t they explain away as consistent with his loving and omnipotent nature? If they can explain away the Holocaust, they can explain away anything.  But they gave the whole game away on p. 127, when they began the chapter on “Science and God’s existence” with this quote:

“We begin this chapter with a different argument often used against the existence of God. This is the argument that the world is so evil and purposeless that there cannot be a creator like the Christian God behind it.  Our job will be to undermine this powerful and enduring argument against the existence of God.”

Such is apologetics. What better evidence for the incompatibility of science and faith than for a religious person to nakedly state that their job is not to take the evidence on board, but to refute every bit of it that undermines what they want to be true?

I challenge Giberson and Collins to give me one horrible thing that could happen to this world that they couldn’t explain away as consistent with their God.  And I wonder if, when they construct these ludicrous apologetics, people like Collins and Giberson don’t feel at least a smidgen of shame. How dishonorable to spend one’s life this way!