The fourth part of a six part series of blog-posts attempting to help a reader in difficulty.
Ordering Beliefs: First Things First and Be Open to Speculation
It is hard to be a religious person (as our blog reader is) facing hostility from a professor.
If I could remind her of one thing, it is to never let your opponent force you to defend your provisional beliefs as if they were your primary beliefs.
What do I mean? (Make sure to re-read the second part of this series as background!) Be clear on what is a priority to you and focus on those things. Don’t ever let someone associate an idea you consider possible with those deepest convictions.
Let me use my own beliefs about religion/science as an example of ordering ideas.
What is of primary importance to me in the religion and science debate? What are the ideas that would very hard to change . . . so hard that a change would cause an epistemological crisis?
I am most sure (and would find it difficult to change) that logic and the dialectic are the way to live “the good life.” Anyone who opposes the irrational is my friend at the deepest level! The unexamined life is not worth living.
At a secondary (but still very deep) level, I find naturalism not compelling (see Al Plantinga) and accept some form of personal agency and/or ideas as actually existing independent of matter and energy. I would point to A.E. Taylor as a readable defense of my particular point of view.
At a tertiary (but very deep) level, I find Christian forms of theism the best explanation of the world. My favorite defense of these forms of theism (that is easily read) is by Richard Swinburne and (from a different philosophical point of view) a former professor of mine Ed Wierenga.
At the fourth (deep) level, I am an Evangelical and a member of the Orthodox Church. This means I am a traditional Christian. My favorite popular explanations of my beliefs are by C.S. Lewis. I resonate with Augustine, John Chrysostom, and Christian neo-Plationism. My favorite magazine on this line is Touchstone.
At a fifth level I would put ideas I take very seriously, but that are mostly derived from much deeper views that I might have misunderstood. Things like my views on abortion fit this level.
Finally, there are ideas that I think could be true and which I hope are true and that I am willing to assert, but which very well could be wrong. I would put (in this weakest strand of the web) my views on most economic issues and intellectual speculations about secondary supernatural events. I would also put my young-earth beliefs here. These beliefs are usually based on other ideas, intellectual preferences, or intuitions about how reality works.
This does not mean I am not a young earth creationist. I am. I enjoy working with other young-earth creationists and have found conferences with them stimulating and refreshing, but to state the obvious my views on the age of the earth are less important (epistemologically) than my views regarding theism and less important (theologically) than my views on the nature of Jesus Christ.
Why bother to be young-earth at all then? Later, I will list some basic reasons, but for me the essential reason is that it makes the most sense of the Biblical record and is (philosophically) helpful in dealing with the problem of evil. Nor is “young earth” held more tentatively only for “scientifically-correct” reasons as some of my young-earth friends fear.
Though the state of scientific evidence is part of it, even if the situation were not as it is (underdeveloped young-earth alternatives), I would hold this view weakly for two reasons. First, the Bible and the fathers do not give a specific age of the earth. It is a weaker exegesis to get “age” from the Bible than bigger philosophical issues. Second, the issue is simply less important logically than other issues (existence of God). I cannot imagine being dogmatic about it or holding it as firmly as I hold evidence for the risen Lord.
Do note that if you cast the widest possible net at every level (good advice I think in general), you can make most people your allies on the biggest issues and give yourself more room to speculate (have philosophical fun!) at the lower levels. When someone attacks logical thinking, then I can get all the atheists I know to side with me, in a fight that for me must (nearly) be to the death. Most of the atheists I know are great folk (albeit wrong in my opinion on many other things) and it is fun to side with them as much as possible.
On almost every major philosophical issue for which I have a deep passion (four or lower) most Christians agree with me. That too is a very big community. It is even better to be able to agree with fellow believers on as much as possible.
I might disagree with the Pope on some very important things, but we agree on more than we disagree on when it comes to the central issues (the deepest ones for me) in the religion and science debate. If blessed John Paul II turns out to be right on the relationship of evolution to the church, then I would lose less sleep over it than you might think. John Paul was a supernaturalist who believed in a soul and that makes him a friend on most everything in this topic!
Christians of good faith can disagree on things like ID or the very separate issue of the age of the earth without losing this deeper agreement.
That does not mean I take ID lightly . . . I take it very seriously and believe it shows a good chance of working out. It is logically prior to most forms of creationism (certainly mine).
I think it shows great scientific promise as even a quick visit to the Discovery Institute web site. Something like intelligent design is logically prior to my other philosophical and theological views in the religion and science area. (Though design is a useful scientific notion with philosophical implications and is not itself theological.)
The intelligent design movement (more on it tomorrow) is therefore a “bigger tent” where I can get important ideas and help in forming my view of the world. I do not agree with Michael Behe on everything (he is more open to common ancestry than I am) and he is a Roman Catholic. These are two important disagreement (scientifically and theologically), but in the societal context in which we live our agreements are more important than our disagreements.
I deeply admire Behe’s courage. Why bother, at this phase of the discussion, to focus on our areas of disagreement? By carefully working out my epistemological priorities, I am able to see who my allies are at each level of discussion and which discussions should be had when.
This is the epistemological strategy (though he divides the world up differently!) that one can gain from reading Phillip Johnson. I am not suggesting that everyone must slice ideas up the way I do, but that everyone does order their beliefs. If science gives us (at best) ever more likely stories about the world, then design appears to me (on scientific grounds) more likely. You should start at the Discovery site for more data in this area.
It is not an attempt to hide differences anymore than the robust theological and ecumenical exchanges at Touchstone hide differences! It is acknowledging important common ground in ever larger communities and allowing the smaller communities (in my case and in the case of my reader young-earth) to work apart. It is a charitable (thus Christian) approach.
A final example might help. Our shared commitment to reason and the dialectic (when they are willing to let go of a secularist fundamentalism!) means that we can work together with non-Christian secular people to defend reason and the rights of all communities to differ. This right can be defended against religious terrorists and secular Stalinist. The old anti-Communist movement in the United States which contained both religious and secular conservatives was a good example of this “higher level” epistemological approach.
This is not “political” in the bad sense of hiding differences through words, but I suppose it is “political” in the good Aristotelian sense of living in human community (the polis) in as much harmony as possible.
Don’t let anyone kid you. Any grad student in philosophy knows any view of the world takes risks and has problems. My own Christian view of the world has as its most serious problem the existence of evil. My secular friends struggle with a basis for the good life.
For me the form of Christianity I have adopted (traditional, Evangelical, and Eastern Orthodox) has most of the great risks in areas at the margins and the highest philosophic returns at the deepest levels.
Christianity was instrumental in helping produce most of the great revolutions of though in Western civilization. It is a “culture of life” that gives meaning and purpose to life.
I am willing to be open minded on some things that might be implied by my adopted form of Christianity, take some risks, and see what some of my “high risk” friends (people like Kurt Wise, Paul Nelson, and John Baumgardener) can do. I will help them when I can.
Such an attitude has led me to more friends of varied intellectual commitments and great discussions. It keeps disagreements in their proper place and builds broad alliances.
Never let your opponent make this open-mindedness at one level the issue.
Also don’t be afraid to use ideas that you think might not be true in a provisional manner as a way of testing their usefulness and whether your rejection was ill considered. This is a helpful way to see if you want to change your mind (particularly about the things you hold very, very provisionally).
Give praise to your opponents where it is due. Modern cosmology is an improvement in many respects over older cosmologies, even if it ends up being inadequate (scientifically, theologically, or philosophically)
You just don’t have to think an idea is true to think it an improvement on an old idea or useful.
For example, some philosophers I know think Plantinga’s version of the ontological argument for God’s existence is a vast improvement on older versions. They also think it sound, but are not persuaded by it to abandon atheism or agnosticism. They have other reasons for preferring to continue to defend non-theism. On the other hand, when they talk about the ontological argument, as good scholars, they present the “state of the art” versions of that argument.
Someone need not accept the truth of an idea (broad sense) to still see it as an improvement on an older idea or as useful within certain limits. A young-earth-creationist (in the sense I have described) can accept the strength of an old-earth argument (within the parameters of conventional science), hold to her commitment to her young earth views (based on non-scientific considerations) very loosely, and look for alternative explanations of the world within science. At the same time, she can work within a conventional framework looking for flaws, but also duly noting strengths.
Such an attitude will do little harm to science and has great promise (spread over many areas of speculation) to shake up a status quo always in danger of getting stale. Of course, the same approach should be applied to other disciplines such as philosophy and theology.
It all depends how one wants to live the intellectual life. Some like going with the most conventional ideas in all areas . . . though here philosophy would caution that such a strategy is risky in its own dull ways.
The “conventional” ideas in one discipline (neo-Platonism in math) might contradict conventional ideas in other areas (anti-Platonism in some of the sciences). I prefer being open to calculated risks at the “lower levels” based on my “upper” ideas as more intellectually liberating, open minded, and less likely to miss revolutionary ideas.
What is the greatest risk? I would rather consider (lightly) a few wrong ideas than miss one very exciting one.
In any case the central issues are the ones “higher up” or more central to the web of belief.
Let me repeat that good Christian theists take other approaches to issues like the “age of the earth”. This includes heroes of mine like the late C.S. Lewis or A.E. Taylor. There are many options inside each of the categories. Hold your “loose beliefs” loosely!
Don’t be intimidated by the problems of an active theistic metaphysics. Atheists, naturalists, or secularists each have their own problems. Do you really want to get rid of an objective good, objective truth, and objective beauty? Do you really want to try to explain every putative supernatural event away? How simplistic a metaphysical system can you have before you are just being simplistic?
Read A.E. Taylor’s (too little appreciated) little book Does God Exist?. It will show the troubles an overly simple metaphysics can produce.
Second, if your opponent really wants to defend scientism, let them. I just got back from a marvelous tour of the Norton Simon Museum. I learned a great deal there, but in ways that do not depend on science (as it is presently defined). I am not overly impressed with naturalism as a philosophy of everything . . . and there is a large and growing number of philosophers who would agree. On this important issue, we both have plenty of good company.
There is simply more in heaven and earth than can be explained by the scientific method/s. I am not nervous about that contention and hope opponents to Christianity keep assuming that all of us should believe in scientism in order to be reasonable.
How have Christians taken to resolving these problems? Let us look (all too briefly in a blog post) at three potential solutions . . . all with their merits.
The Three Views
How have Christians reacted to all of these developments in religion and science?
The reaction to Darwin and Darwinism within the Christian community was mixed. Some of the most vocal critics of Darwin in England were his fellow scientists. Many theologians had been prepared for the idea of some sort of “progressive creation” for a long time. Darwinism was in the air in the form of poetic and cultural paeans to progress. Earlier findings in geology had challenged a literal reading of the Genesis chronology and a single, global flood in the days of an actual Noah. Many Christians, especially in the universities, were willing to take Genesis 1-11 at less than actual history. At first, therefore, the majority of English theologians reacted carefully and in a guarded manner to Darwinism. In fact, no large scale “creationist” response to Darwin ever developed in England (as compared to the United States), despite well known and vocal critics such as prime minister Gladstone and the noted scientist Lord Kelvin.
The United States was, however, a different story. There existed a much larger population of more conservative Christians. They were less willing to view Darwin and Darwinism with equanimity. Again, many, even the most conservative, had already accepted the “age of the earth” and the extent of the flood as an open question. Such conservative theologians as Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield were open to these ideas, but reacted more strongly to Darwinism. At the very least, Darwin seemed to limit severely any active role for the Creator in the Creation process. Hodge summed up the feeling of many when he baldly equated Darwinism with atheism.
The struggle against Darwinism and modernism in the academy, even in the United States, was a losing one. By the middle of the twentieth century opposition to Darwinism was limited to the more fundamentalist religious communities. Groups like the Seventh Day Adventists carried on an active assault against evolutionary thinking, sometimes with more noise and vigor than scientific care or rigor. Large numbers of scientists may have been ‘theistic evolutionists,’ reserving for God some nearly invisible role in the process of evolution, but their voice was very quiet in the general culture. The public perception was that Darwinism, and some form on naturalism, had triumphed.
Most unexpectedly, however, the critics of Darwinism were reinforced by two important groups at the mid-century point. First, many conservative Christians began to receive a larger number of graduate degrees in science. In the 1940’s, the American Scientific Affiliation (A.S.A) brought a small, but growing, number of evangelicals together who had training in the sciences. At the very least, this group tended to be cautious about Darwinism. It allowed both theistic evolutionists and critics to dialogue in a sustained and responsible manner. The A.S.A. created a respectable forum, and some peer review, to critics of evolutionary thought.
A smaller and more conservative group of scientists, who rapidly became more influential with lay people in traditionalist Christian circles, developed a more radical critique of the reigning paradigm. They were the “young-earth creationists.” With the publication of Henry Morris and John Whitcomb’s The Genesis Flood, the movement came to full flower. It insisted that both scientific and Biblical evidence favored an earth, and usually a universe, younger than 10,000 years. The young earth creationists also explained many of the features of the modern world by recourse to Noah’s flood. Such organizations as the Creation Research Society, the Bible-Science Association, and Morris’ own Institute for Creation Research spread these alternative views. Frequently plagued by irresponsible advocates and sloppy scientific methodology the movement was widely ridiculed and attacked by the secular media and academy. Their influence tended to be quite limited in even the evangelical and fundamentalist academic mainstream.
By the end of the twentieth century, five important developments changed the landscape of this dialogue. First, the rise of post-modernism in the secular world assaulted the confidence of the advocates of Darwinism from within the academic mainstream. Feminist and other critics of modernity questioned the “truth” of scientific theories. This assault on the left sapped some of the strength of the scientific establishment. These Wallace secularists were not friends of Christians, but the internal fighting helped.
Second, young earth creationism began to develop a broader, and more sophisticated, line of reasoning. By the late eighties and the nineties, meetings like the quadrennial International Conference on Creationism attracted hundreds of scientists, theologians, and philosophers. More and more journal articles and conferences were adequately peer reviewed and of a much higher quality than earlier efforts. Currently, efforts are being made to present a positive theoretical model, and not just to attack evolutionary ideas. While total success in this latter area remains elusive, the quality of the effort (Wise, Austin, Baumgardner) has shown great improvement.
The third important shift in the Darwinian debate came with a more thoughtful and theologically conservative form of “theistic evolution,” really a slow-motion creationism. Scientists, often within the A.S.A. or mainstream denominations, developed a new way of integrating the findings of modern science and theology that seemed to allow for God’s action in Creation without limiting the scope of scientific inquiry. Again since it allowed for supernaturalism, usually for a human soul, and other “miracles” it was correct on important issues from even the most narrow point of view.
At times, however, some forms of “theistic evolution” limited God’s actions by not allowing (as a a theoretical constraint) His fingerprints to show in nature. A refusal to make “miracles” detectable or Divine intervention detectable sounds like deism and has less appeal for a traditional Christian.
Fourth, a renewed interest in “old earth creationism” in lay and academic evangelical circles has been in evidence. These Christians accepted evidence for an old earth and universe, while rejecting Darwinian evolution. They usually argued for a literal Adam and Eve and a local Deluge. Often caught in the middle, too accommodating for young earth creationists on Biblical issues and too conservative for theistic evolutionists, their penetration into the Christian community had been somewhat limited. The ministry of popular writers and speakers such as Hugh Ross gave their ideas new prominence by the end of the nineties. This prominence, by bringing more people into the debate on the central issues, was a good thing.
Philosophically, Nelson and I suggested (in Three Views) reasons to worry about “old earth” views. Amongst philosophical concerns is the issue of “deep time” and the problem of Divine wisdom and animal suffering (not just animal death) as a subset to the problem of evil (made worse on an old earth account). Amongst theological concerns, we included Biblical exegetical issues (it is not the simplest reading of Scripture) and Church tradition (it is a relatively new view in Church history). These led us to prefer to keep our young-earth options open.
Tomorrow we will (again too briefly) discuss the rise of intelligent design as an idea and a movement.