Theology corner: Why is the ID guy at the open theology conference a pork chop at a Jewish wedding?
| November 30, 2006 | Posted by O'Leary under Intelligent Design |
Recently, a caffeine-deprived friend was grousing about the fact that ID proponents don’t tend to be welcomed at “open theology” conferences.
“Open theology” implies a much more limited sort of God than the Immortal, invisible, God only wise of the Western monotheist (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) tradition.
Now, it’s unclear to me why the ID guys, who are mostly hard math and science types, should even want to hang out with these children of a lesser god. But my friend insisted on hearing the view from O’Leary’s Point, so here goes. And I have followed it up with a testable prediction, too:
First, what is theistic evolution? Basically, its message is this: Our God is so powerful that you can see no evidence of his presence in the creation of life (though, for some reason, you can see such evidence if you look at outer space). That’s genome mapper Francis Collins’ approach.
As a traditional Christian, I am handicapped in even considering theistic evolution (TE), not because I have a problem with evolution as such, but by the many places in Scripture where the whole creation, including life – together with its imperfections – is said to provide evidence of God’s work. Forced to choose, I consider the TEs more likely to be wrong than the Scriptures.
Now, TE is marketed to Christians mainly as an escape from, say, Kent Hovind vs. Lenny Flank. Many would rather spend an evening watching catfights in the back alley.
The devil, however, is in the details. Pressed to explain why God’s work is not evident in the design of life, the theistic evolutionist announces that Darwin’s theory explains how life comes into existence and develops into the plenitude of forms that we see today without any input from God.
But strangely, while life forms, which are staggeringly complex, can easily perform such a feat, the cosmos itself cannot. No no, the typical theistic evolutionist protests, that couldn’t be done without God. The universe is fine-tuned for life to come into existence.
Yet many cosmologists think the cosmos can do just that. And their evidence is no better or worse than the Darwinists’ evidence. Like the Darwinists, these cosmologists start with their conclusion and place enormous weight on some pretty slender branches of evidence. Then they command you to believe because materialism is true.
(Materialists are like all other sects, except for one critical difference: They generally do not hold out a collection plate or wave a sign on the street. They scalp your tax money to promote their philosophy in the school system and make your kids study from their books.)
So now what becomes of our dear old theistic evolution?
Well, up to now, we have been making certain assumptions about God, right? “Immortal, invisible, God only wise … ” as the old song goes. We have assumed that we must decide between that God or no God.
And if we decide that the evidence from nature favours an omnipotent God, we must treat the Scriptural accounts as evidence too. We do not have to accept the Scriptures in a fundamentalist way, but we must consider them evidence. That means we must confront the fact that Scripture insists that God’s hand IS evident in the design of life. So we should not be surprised to find such evidence, any more than we should be surprised to find that the cosmos is apparently fine-tuned for life. There is no reason in either case to feel compelled to explain away the evidence as arising accidentally from brute forces – let alone to accept large promises from the materialists that some day someone will prove such a proposition.
Materialists can currently compel your tax money, but they cannot compel you to accept their IOUs. Not yet, anyway.
So bye, bye TE. Put simply, what TE is trying to do doesn’t need doing. So it has morphed mainly into an opposition to ID – an opposition which becomes less and less coherent as the materialist agenda becomes more obvious.
For example, one often hears TE’s blaming the ID folk for starting trouble with materialists. Which raises the question of why they themselves haven’t. With arch-Darwinist Dawkins planning to mail tons of anti-God crapola to Brit schools and an evolutionary biologist declaring that ID-sympathetic students should be flunked, the TEs are merely making their irrelevance plain to everyone.
But there is another possibility! Some reluctantly agree with ID that there is evidence for God – but guess what, he is NOT the God portrayed in Scripture. He bungles. He goofs. He’s kinda smart, but he doesn’t know what’s going to happen.
What difference does that make? Well, if you got struck blind, the open God would say, “Crikey! What bad luck! I shoulda seen that coming, Awful sorry there, fella, I wasn’t paying attention …. Tell you what, I’ll … ”
He would NOT say “Who gives [man] sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the LORD?” and inform you, with no further explanation, of your next tour of duty.
Okay, so where are we now? We have a god. Actually, why be exclusivist? We could have lots of gods. We could be back in pagan culture, with the lovable and irresponsible gods. They don’t damn people, because they don’t give a damn – but they do damage them. They are divinized celebrities. Watch the Ring Cycle and you will get the idea, especially Gotterdammitall, where the gods go up in smoke.
So, why might my ID friend’s theology-prone buddies not be welcome at open theology conferences? Well, open theologians are their competitors! Open theologians can make the same claims as ID. They can go ahead and attribute the design of life, alongwith its apparent flaws, to the equivalent of Wotan or – better yet – to an anthropomorphized force.
Darwin, meet Carl Jung.
See, as materialism slowly throttles itself, anyone with a non-materialist idea sees an opportunity. It’ll be wild and woolly.
Conclusion: If ID were not so closely associated with a traditional “Almighty” concept of God, ID guys would be more welcome at open theo conferences.
Testable prediction: The open-ists will probably permit the hearty priestesses of Gaia to declaim, and now and then they will host a pundit known as something like Thundercloud who claims to be a male witch, and assures you that he is in touch with himself, or some part of himself ….
Go ahead, I told my friend. Call me wrong – until they actually do it. Meanwhile, let the professoriat hold forth with predictions that do not come true – for example that the Dover trial was a curtain call for ID.
Now, for me, back to journalism. For him, back to teaching.
70 Responses to Theology corner: Why is the ID guy at the open theology conference a pork chop at a Jewish wedding?
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But neither do I think design can be proven.
But design can be proven/shown/established and the standards used to do so are used with success in archaeology, military intelligence and other areas.
What’s wrong with pointing out that these standards show life to be designed?
I think theology has to reassert the primacy of revelation (general and special revelation) as categories that ultimately are not validated by / subject to human reason.
I could probably go along with that. Now, how do you get a judge to agree? And if you can’t, how do you get a school to stop teaching we are all here by accident since that is the only thing that they can legally teach concerning origins?
But design can be proven/shown/established and the standards used to do so are used with success in archaeology, military intelligence and other areas.
Right, but in each of those cases, we know what human design looks like, and we can contrast it with the “background noise” of nature. With regard to creation, there is no background noise — our faith affirms that all of it is designed. What you’re really trying to do is to identify “special” instances of design apart from “ordinary” design in creation — which is not directly analogous to identifying whether a pattern of scratches in some rocks was made by humans or just by water and wind.
Now, how do you get a judge to agree? And if you can’t, how do you get a school to stop teaching we are all here by accident since that is the only thing that they can legally teach concerning origins?
Probably you can’t. That battle isn’t winnable, or at most, it’s winnable only as a Pyhrric victory in which the doctrine of creation is so compromised that we could just as easily substitute a space alien as the designer. In this area, culture won’t be transformed through lawsuits. The ID movement should accept that, drop the pretense of agnosticism about the identify of the designer, and work on developing a robust, thoroughly Christian understanding of creation that can penetrate the culture in other ways.
but in each of those cases, we know what human design looks like
We know what design looks like. Now, if the criteria we use to find design in ruins and arrowheads is applied to biology and we find that there is a strong correlation, what does that mean?
The ID movement should accept that, drop the pretense of agnosticism about the identify of the designer,
There is no pretense! The claims are sincere. It’s not a religous thing. You said, and I agreed, that we can’t prove God via science. Now, I said — and if you think about it you’ll agree — that we can prove (or strongly show) design through science.
We can show that life is designed. We can’t show who the designer is via the tools of ID.
and work on developing a robust, thoroughly Christian understanding of creation that can penetrate the culture in other ways.
Some, like Billy Graham, have a gift for evanglization. Some, like Dr. Dembski, have a gift of using objective means to find design in nature. We should all use our gifts as we see fit.
There is nothing insidious about ID.
We know what design looks like. Now, if the criteria we use to find design in ruins and arrowheads is applied to biology and we find that there is a strong correlation, what does that mean?
It probably means you’re making a category mistake. You aren’t addressing the problem with this approach: we know what human design looks like in part because we can contrast it to phenomena that happen in nature without human intervention. There is no similar contrast when it comes to creation, because all of creation came about by God’s action.
You are trying to contrast God’s intelligent work with other aspects of God’s intelligent work to see if an intelligent agent was involved. Of course an intelligent agent was involved! But you won’t establish that if you presuppose that only certain bits of creation — the irreducibly complex bits, or whatever — bear the hallmarks of creation. All you are doing in that case is conceding that most of the creation doesn’t appear designed at all.
If you want to say that all of creation generally appears to be beautiful and purposeful, and thereby to point to some transcendent source, that’s fine, and I think Biblical and true — but that is not what ID in its strong varieties does.
There is no pretense! The claims are sincere. It’s not a religous thing.
I’m sorry, but I don’t agree that this is generally true, at least as applied to the troops on the ground. I’m no anti-religious outsider, mind you. I’m an evangelical Christian, and I believe creation was designed by God. And, I’ve read a great deal of the ID literature and followed the legal issues carefully (I’m also a lawyer). Moreover, I’m sympathetic to some criticisms of Darwinism, I think Judge Jones’ decision about what constitutes “science” was ludicrous, and I’m also sympathetic to many general design arguments (e.g., arguments from the anthropic principle).
Yet, I have to speak truthfully: much of the agitation I see on behalf of getting ID into public schools is the work of YEC advocates who are trying to use ID as a way of getting around earlier creation science rulings. It is disingenuous.
I do believe some of ID’s intellectual leaders, including Dembski and Behe, are sincere about designer-agnosticism, but as to them, I think their approach is mistaken. Even if sincere, I think it’s bad to separate arguments from design from the Christian God, for all the theological reasons I’ve mentioned. They are theists; I would love to see them use their considerable minds to develop a specifically theistic and Christian philosophy of creation.
Some, like Billy Graham, have a gift for evanglization. Some, like Dr. Dembski, have a gift of using objective means to find design in nature. We should all use our gifts as we see fit.
Yes — or better, we should all use our gifts with rigor and excellence befitting the Kingdom of God. If Billy Graham preached that the incarnation and crucifixon of Christ demonstrates that there is a savior, but that we don’t have to identify who the savior is, and in fact the savior could be a space alien, I think we’d all agree that this is bad. Christ, of course, is God’s ultimate self-revelation; it’s nonsense to speak of Christ’s work on the cross without the particularlity and offense of Christ’s exclusive claims to be Lord. Creation also is part of God’s self-revelation, and it’s equally nonsense to say the “heavens declare the glory” of some unknown agent who might not be God.
we know what human design looks like in part because we can contrast it to phenomena
We have this phenomena that corrolates quite well with what we know to be human design. We know humans couldn’t have designed it. Should we presume it occurred by accident?
Yet, I have to speak truthfully: much of the agitation I see on behalf of getting ID into public schools is the work of YEC advocates who are trying to use ID as a way of getting around earlier creation science rulings.
And I disagree very much. I believe most of those who want ID in the classroom are generally theists more concerned about moral relativism being forced on children via the claim that everything has an established material answer.
If Billy Graham preached that the incarnation and crucifixon of Christ demonstrates that there is a savior, but that we don’t have to identify who the savior
Then Billy wouldn’t be doing his job. OTOH, if he said impossible to shingle a roof without specifically identifying Our Savior before one started, then Billy wouldn’t be doing his job either.
We have this phenomena that corrolates quite well with what we know to be human design.
Which phenomena are you talking about? Creation in general? I wouldn’t say that creation in general correlates well with human design — creation as a whole is way beyond correlation with human design. IC systems only? What then of the rest of creation?
Should we presume it occurred by accident?
No, but you have the order of reasoning backwards. We don’t observe the phenomena neutrally and then draw conclusions. We come to our observations with presumptions. The question is, which presumptions do we bring to the observation?
I believe most of those who want ID in the classroom are generally theists more concerned about moral relativism being forced on children via the claim that everything has an established material answer.
Yes, I think that concern is there as well. But I don’t think that is what animates efforts to introduce ID into schools at the local level. It’s mostly animated by YECism, unfortunately.
OTOH, if he said impossible to shingle a roof without specifically identifying Our Savior before one started, then Billy wouldn’t be doing his job either.
You lost me on this one.
We have this phenomena that corrolates quite well with what we know to be human design.
Which phenomena are you talking about?
The phenomena that ID concerns itself with.
We don’t observe the phenomena neutrally and then draw conclusions.
If you are practicing science — or any participating in any material investigatiion — you do exactly that.
It’s mostly animated by YECism, unfortunately.
Polls indicate most Americans support ID being taught alongside evolution. If YECers are doing the heavy lifting to get it done, God bless them.
The phenomena that ID concerns itself with.
You have to be more precise than that. What in nature, exactly, correlates to human design? Nature in toto, or some particular piece of nature? Irreducibly complex systems only, or something else as well?
If you are practicing science  or any participating in any material investigatiion  you do exactly that.
Nonsense. All observations are theory-laden. There is no such thing as a “neutral” or “objective” observation. (See Kuhn, Polanyi, Lakatos, Feyerabend, etc.) I think most of the thought leaders of the ID movement would agree with me here. To his credit, Dembski has written some pretty good things about this. Check out, for example, his chapter “Science & Theology in Mutual Support” in Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology. Here is what Dembski says there:
If YECers are doing the heavy lifting to get it done, God bless them.
If the thought leaders of ID don’t distance themselves from YECism, ID will remain a backwater. One of the great tragedies is that ID was gathering some intellectual momentum when it was coopted into the YEC / religious right political agenda.
You have to be more precise than that.
We know this sentence is designed. Why? Because it is a pattern that while complex contains a large amount of specific information. A strand of DNA is also a pattern. It is even more complex and contains even more specific information. It does not corrolate with anything but known design.
All observations are theory-laden.
Are you saying that science works by forming a theory then making an observation to back it up?
I agree with Alan Rhodaâ€â€theistic evolution (TE) and open theism are not the same!! In fact, let me suggest that they are at opposite logical poles. For the TEist God is so omni-everything that a future to his specification is assured from eternity pastâ€â€this without his lifting a finger in all of history. But for those of us who are not compatibilistsâ€â€i.e., those of us who think it illogical that God can have exhaustively determined the future and at the same time breathed free will into his creaturesâ€â€those of us foolish enough to think this way should be more prone to accept ID . . . don’t you think?
One can read the Cappadocian fathersâ€â€and Augustine and Aquinas and Calvinâ€â€and savor their intelligence yet still disagree. The Scientific Creationists demand allegiance to a particular theology and interpretation of Genesis. And so as an unaffiliated, dyed-in-the-wool heretic that leaves me out. I love ID because its house is big enough for all those who appreciate the science yet dissent within the great religious plurality that is America.