If I seem obsessed with the accommodationist website BioLogos, it’s for two reasons: its fervent attempts to meld science and evangelical Christianity clearly demonstrate both the follies and failures of accommodationism, and its funding by the John Templeton Foundation shows how insidious Templeton really is. (Out of their billion-plus dollar endowment, they give 70 million dollars per year to scientists and theologians, many of them trying to harmonize science and faith.)
Yesterday I highlighted the follies of pastor Dave Swaim, who’s presenting a four-part sermon on BioLogos that supposedly promulgates that science/faith harmony. In part 3, he tried to tell us not only how to distinguish the metaphorical from the literally true in the Bible, but also made completely bogus claims about the historical truth of many parts of Genesis.
It’s gotten worse. In part 4 of his sermon, Swaim engages in some unwarranted denigration of science. First he takes out after plate tectonics and radiometric dating, apparently part of his strategy to show that science doesn’t have all the answers (this is, of course, another accommodationist strategy).
A couple years ago, a researcher at Los Alamos National Labs explained why our models for plate tectonics are all wrong.1 And another presented a paper questioning the veracity of radiocarbon dating.(1) Both of these tools have been foundations for the current theories of the age of the earth.
Note that the editor (probably BioLogos president Darrell Falk) apparently added the footnote (1) here (“Editor’s Note: These are fringe reports that are far outside of the realm of mainstream science”) to distance himself from the evidence Swaim is mentioning. Reader Sigmund, who brought this sermon to my attention, suspects that the tectonics model “is by John Baumgartner and is pure flood geology.”
Swaim then goes on to cast aspersions on abiogenesis, the idea that life on Earth originated as a purely naturalistic process from nonliving precursors:
And while all scientists agree that genetic mutation happens just like the theory of evolution describes, no scientist can explain abiogenesis, which is an undirected process producing the first living organism from nonliving chemicals. That’s scientifically impossible, but atheists must believe it’s true in order to exclude the possibility of God.
This is pure stupidity: scientists—not all of whom are atheists, by the way—don’t “believe” anything just to exclude God. As I’ve said elebenty billion times, we have no a priori commitment to atheism or non-supernaturalism; we take the Laplace-ian stance, born of experience, that the invocation of gods has simply been useless and unnecessary in helping us understand nature.
In the comments section, Darrel Falk tries to defend Swaim:
I don’t think Dave was telling atheists that God is in those gaps more than any place else. He, like me, was just expressing surprise, given the naive state of our knowledge, that atheists think they can—on scientific grounds—rule out the existence of God.
Oh dear, Dr. Falk. It’s the lack of evidence, don’t you know? We can provisionally rule out God on precisely the same grounds that we can rule out fairies, dragons, and the Loch Ness monster.
But Falk emphasizes (and here he agrees with P.Z. Myers and others) that evidence has nothing to do with believing or disbelieving in God:
Jerry Coyne asked me one time, “Can you think of any bit of scientific knowledge that could conceivably arise in the future that would be inconsistent with your view about the existence of God?” My answer was “no.” Science, as I see it, is simply studying God’s activity. The natural laws are a manifestation of the ongoing regular activity of the Spirit of God which pervades the universe.
But this, of course, is a blatant admission not only that belief in God rests purely on revelation, but there is nothing that could ever shake that belief—no fact about the world, no tragedy bespeaking God’s indifference, nothing.
At any rate, Swaim’s semon shows how closely BioLogos is skirting creationism and criticizing science, all in the name of promoting science. It’s the cognitive dissonance inherent in such extreme accommodationism.
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Speaking of the dangers of accommodationism, here’s another: perhaps anti-science Christians won’t necessarily turn toward science if they see that evolution doesn’t entail atheism. Perhaps they also must be convinced that science isn’t connected with other values as well. This came to my attention when Mark Mann, from Point Loma Nazarene University, wrote an essay at BioLogos, “Let’s not surrender science to the secular world,” on the anti-evangelical-mindset essay by Giberson and Stephens.
He makes two dubious but familiar accommodationist points. First, he claims, correctly, that no form of Christianity is opposed to science in its entirety:
There is no ‘Christianity’ that stands or ever has stood as a whole against science or reason. Whatever Christianity IS it certainly is an incredibly complex movement, and throughout its history there have been multiple ways that Christians have thought about the relationship between faith and reason, science and theology. This is a point I wish to unpack at greater length in a later blog, but for now it is sufficient to say that there has never been any single way that Christians have thought about the relationship between faith and reason, much less what faith and reason even mean. So to treat Christianity (if there even can be said to be such a ‘thing’) as a univocal totality is highly problematic.
That’s irrelevant, for many forms of Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, are opposed to things like evolution and global warming, and on scriptural grounds. The point was not that Christians oppose all science: presumably many of them take antibiotics and use cellphones. I don’t think Giberson and Stephens erred on the important issue, particularly because Giberson, who’s on board with evolution and anthropogenic causes of warming, is also an evangelical Christian.
Mann also reprises the dreary argument that the roots of science lie in religion:
The same goes for science. Is it truly or purely a secular pursuit? [JAC: Of course it is!] What are we to make, then, of the countless religious individuals who have been scientists and who have made significant contributions to our knowledge of the cosmos? Did they do so only by some kind of compromise between their faith and secular forms of knowledge? Again, the historical evidence would indicate quite the contrary. Take, for example, the Islamic Golden Age of scientific discovery (c. 750-1200).. . .
And the list of Christians who have made significant contributions to scientific discovery ever since is absolutely eye-popping: Nicholas Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Robert Boyle, Joseph Priestly, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Lord Kevlin, Max Planck…to name just a few . . . I can, I believe, say with a great sense of confidence that few, if any, of these great Christian scientists understood themselves to be integrating their faith with secular knowledge.
Totally irrelevant again. Everyone back then was a Christian. To say that science wasn’t a secular pursuit but a religious one is to say that brewing was also a religious pursuit, because nearly all brewers were Christians. Even an addled creationist can see through that argument.
What I found most interesting, though, was one of the comments: #6748, by a Christian named Alan:
It is op-eds like Giberson’s that makes me generally nervous about Biologos. I do find much that is helpful on the website, but when I read the op-ed, it seems that the head of the organization not only wants us to accept evolution, but also the global climate change scare and the legitimacy of homosexuality and gay marriage. I accept evolution because of the evidence. But why mix these other issues into the pot? Mr. Giberson, respectfully, I would suggest that you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you really want conservative evangelicals (like myself) to consider the case for evolution; as soon as they read your takes on global warming, but ESPECIALLY homosexuality/gay marriage, they will just disregard you as a politically left-leaning Christian.
This suggests that getting Christians to become pro-science isn’t merely a matter of showing that science doesn’t entail atheism. You have to accommodate Jebus in other ways, specifically, by not accepting the idea of global warming or gay marriage.
If you’re. say, Chris Mooney, and tell the faithful that evolution doesn’t cause atheism, that might not convert them if you also take stands in favor of gay marriage or anthropogenic global warming (things I’m sure Mooney accepts). All they have to do is “read your takes” on these issues, and their interest wanes. Since many people who advocate science (and most accommodationists, I think) are in favor of gay rights, that accordingly diminishes their effectiveness.
All this shows is that accommodationism involves more than disconnecting science from atheism. In fact, to convince the faithful, it seems as if you have to be largely on board with much of their social/political agenda. And that is why BioLogos is increasingly kissing up to evangelical and conservative Christians.
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UPDATE: Alert reader Sigmund points out that BioLogos president Darrel Falk has added a comment to Mann’s post that supports my contention about what the organization is up to. Here’s part of Falk’s comment:
Our primary goal at BioLogos not to convert conservative Christians to the BioLogos point of view. More than anything, our task is to work towards depolarizing the discussion. That, as I see it, supersedes whether people actually come to take on the BioLogos point of view. I am more concerned that we exhibit Christian integrity in how we dialog with each other.
And Sigmund’s take:
So they’ve stopped trying to change the evangelical environment and have settled on building a nature reserve—with evangelical theist evolutionists as the pandas.
