Who, exactly, doesn’t think there is a war on between materialists and non-materialists?
| March 4, 2007 | Posted by O'Leary under Intelligent Design |
In a recent column on the “lost tomb of Jesus,” Frank Pastore observes ,
Poor James Cameron. He wanted some of that Da Vinci Code action so badly that he jumped on a 27 year old story line that everyone else in Hollywood had wisely passed on. He ignored so many early warning signs, too. When he was hav-ing trouble early on finding A, B, or even C list “scientific experts” who were willing to throw their careers away if they would only validate his silly theories – and they all continued saying no – he didn’t let that slow him down one bit. He pressed on and signed the minor league guys. And later, when the best he could come up with for his advance publicity hook was to claim statistically similar names and unrelated DNA samples – He still didn’t pull the plug – even though any-one who has ever seen just one episode of CSI is sharp enough to spit out the bait. More astute critics simply repeated what the original archeologist on the scene had pointed out: that a poor family from Bethlehem could never afford a mid-dle-class tomb in which to place the ossuaries in Jerusalem, especially during a famine, and that the names on the boxes were far too common to jump to any conclusions about having found The Jesus Family Tomb.
Yes, I remember that “lost tomb of Jesus” canard kicking around in the early Eighties. The problems were so obvious that the story sank out of sight. See, it was one of those stories where, as Pastore notes, a person of average intelligence can see what’s wrong. Remember, Jesus’ family were so poor that they had to bring two doves (pigeons) to the Temple when they presented him – the lowest offering a poor family could bring, intended as a concession to extreme poverty. (It made sense. Anyone capable of producing a son and getting him to the Temple could presumably find a way to catch two pigeons … ) So these were not people who had money or a family tomb. And they had common names, so finding all these names together is no clincher.
The project principals would seem to be orthodox Jews, but the interesting part is the Discovery Channel’s role in all this. Pastore describes this story – accurately, I think – as “the requisite hit piece on Christianity that we’ve all grown accustomed to” in time for Easter, adding “Shame on you if you ever trust the Discovery Channel to teach your kids anything ever again.”ÂÂ
Well now, that raises some interesting issues.
One way that many Christians in science have tried to avoid addressing either the current atheist putsch or materialist media hostility to Christianity (and all other non-materialist points of view) has been to announce that other Christians (the ID guys in particular) have bought into a “warfare thesis.” It is all their fault that science concepts are currently used to bash religion. If only they would just shut up and take what is handed out to them …
Such v oices are gladly heard – despite the fact that it would be hard to think of a point of view on the subject that is so much at odds with observable reality. There is in fact a war on – not between science and religion but between materialism and evidence. Materialists, who have a deathgrip on science, use it to assault any perspective that may harbour evidence against materialism.
Not only are science concepts regularly used to bash religion (in particular, Christianity), but notice two things: First, people have come to merely expect the bashing at key points like Easter.
The response from churchianity? Lame excuses, like “Christians have to face up to problems with the Gospel message.” Problems, yes. But nonsense? Streams of nonsense? Streams of nonsense on a big budget? Sponsored by major media organizations?
Second, it is no longer even thought necessary to find good stories to tell. The “lost tomb of Jesus” is not a good story.* So – if the warfare thesis is incorrect, why is the Discovery Channel fronting this stuff?
Now, I take the view that people do not deliberately run lame stories when they could run hot ones. So we can assume, I think, that no hot anti-Christian story has emerged, despite a pretty intense search.
The reality is that, as the recent attempt to institutionalize atheism – sponsored by major ultra-Darwinists – demonstrates, there is a war on. People who can’t deal with that fact drone on about a “warfare thesis” and accept lionization for their cowardice. The time for pushback never comes, it seems. But what else is new?
*No, “Mary Magdalene and Jesus” wasn’t a very good story either, in the strictly historical sense. But … Brown performed the brilliant manoeuvre of sheltering himself in the fiction aisle by telling it as a yarn. As a yarn, it worked. These “lost tomb” guys apparently couldn’t do anything clever like that.
66 Responses to Who, exactly, doesn’t think there is a war on between materialists and non-materialists?
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Greetings
Seems this is still the hot thread overnight, and that there is a filter that has interesting characteristics. Okay, some follow up thoughts (in part built from the first point from yesterday) . . .
Mats, in # 54, puts his finger on a key point: [Darwinists] seek to undermine the Book which is overwhelmingly responsible for the existence of people skeptic of unguided evolutionism. . . . . [they] show once again that they don’t understand what are they up against. Even though many people can rightly list the Bible as the major reason as to why they reject unguided evolutionism, there’s also the scientific aspect of the all issue . . .
My take is that it also highlights the issues of evidence and inference to best explanation vs selective – thus inconsistent — hyperskepticism. For, if you doubt everything to the same standard of “absolute proofâ€Â, you end up in an infinite regress of doubts; so if you then inconsistently apply such skepticism to what you don’t want to accept, you are begging worldview level questions. Thus, this ties into the main cluster of issues that obtains for the blog’s theme debate over design. (Cf. #’s 18, 21 and 47 – 48.)
In short, once the commitment to seek out and follow what is sound [though often unpalatable] is lost, instead men will follow those who tickle their itching ears with what they want to hear, even though there are serious, perhaps even obvious, questions about its soundness. In this light, it shouldn’t be hard to see that even the statistical argument is deeply flawed, through analytical double-standards and flawed calculations, cf. “the statistical analysis falls apart†section, here:
That underscores the importance of consistent and fair standards in assessing and accounting for evidence. Further to this, explanations have to coherently account for the full set of relevant facts, and that includes the basic point that the Christian church from 30′s AD on has taught, starting in Jerusalem, that Jesus rose from the dead and that there were 500+ witnesses, the most prominent 20 or so of whom can be easily identified. These witnesses – according to the 55 AD 1 Cor 15 verses1 – 11, etc, include James [and also the rest of Jesus' family]. In short, the Talpiot theory reduces to a conspiracy between the 11 remaining disciples, the women of the company of disciples [including their leader, Mary Magdalene], and Jesus’ family – who up to the time of the crucifixion were HOSTILE to Jesus’ mission (indeed, at one time tried to get him committed as insane!).
The implication that his same unlikely cluster of co-conspirators bought a tomb near Jerusalem, and buried there Jesus and other members of his family over a span of 30+ years – James was murdered in 62 AD – while successfully preaching at Jerusalem and across the Mediterranean world that this same Jesus was risen from death, immediately falls apart. This is exactly what Morison pointed to [cf # 18]. But, if there is an unyieldingly closed-minded commitment to naturalism, then the most unlikely stories will be preferred to an account that coherently and elegantly accounts for the origins of the Christian faith, but at the expense of allowing a Miracle-Working God’s foot in the door.
Similarly, in all cases where we do directly know the causal story, functionally specific, complex information such as we find in the molecular information systems of life originates in intelligent agency, and the assertion that the technologies in DNA and the associated cellular nanomachines originated by chance immediately exhausts the probabilistic resources of the known universe. But, since inference to design here opens the philosophical door to inference to a Designer, such is resisted with utmost ferocity to the point in too many cases of incivility.
So, the root debate is over worldview level question begging vs proper assessment of alternatives through comparative difficulties.
GEM of TKI
H’mm:
Seems the filter does not like biblical references, even in contexts where such are in fact relevant . . .
GEM of TKI
Then too . . .
We have now brought up the core analytical question of theory-level and worldview level comparative difficulties in arguments by explanation. This is worth discussing.
First, proof is in the end relative to assumptions. To prove A we need B. But why accept B? Thus, C, D, . . . In short, we see here an infinite regress which is beyond the reach of finite, fallible thinkers such as ourselves. That means we in the end stop all chains of demonstration and evidence at some point F, our faith-points or presuppositions or axions or whatever. These are core plausibles or basic beliefs, and in fact are the largest single body of our beliefs: think of how many deliverances of your senses etc you – for excellent reason — took for granted over the past day or so, without a moment’s hesitation. (Those who did classical geometry will at once recall the core axioms and the “Common-sense: notions that that discipline starts from. More advanced students will recall Godel’s 1930′s work that for sufficiently rich mathematical systems there is no set of coherent and complete axioms, and that there is no constructive process for creating a known- to- be- coherent set of axioms. Even Mathematics, the ideal for deductive logical systems, at length cannot avoid an element of faith and its twin, doubt.)
In the messy empirical world, our plight is worse, for one can easily enough construct world models that are empirically indistinguishable from the one in which we think we live, starting from Plato’s famous Cave Parable, and going forward to brains in vats and Matrix type worlds, or Russell’s famous five minute old universe paradox, etc. As Thomas Reid and others pointed out, in effect, we make – a usually, unconscious – choice to accept that we live in the “common-sense†world, because if we cannot trust the general [not absolute] reliability of our senses, we cannot even begin to think and operate in our day to day lives.
That means that we come back to accepting certain things by “reasonable†criteria as credible facts, and then seek explanations for those facts that make best sense out of them. These are our worldviews. Such worldviews, have core assumptions, which are ALWAYS problematic, i.e. face difficulties. So, a mature thinker assesses worldview level systems based on comparative difficulties across live option alternatives. In the West, this set includes in the main: theism, naturalism/evolutionary materialism, and pantheism and/or [more rarely] panentheism. Each of these systems has a core warranting argument, which renders the system plausible to adherents, despite the difficulties. For naturalism, that includes the evolutionary materialist “Scientific†account of origins, from hydrogen to humans. For the Christian form of theism, that includes the 500-witness anchored resurrection of Jesus, which in turn for many Christians anchors the Bible as the word of God, which “cannot be broken,†by the testimony of him who is Lord of Life and Death.. For pantheists, that includes the sense that all is obviously one, so one is the number of truth and two the number of error. And, so on.’
But the analytical [dialectical as opposed to rhetorical] issue then is the comparative success of such systems, across: factual adequacy, coherence and explanatory power.
And, as they say, thereby hangs a long tale. For, arguably [as C S Lewis and Alvin Plantinga among many others point out], naturalism cannot account for the credibility of the mind we need to think materialistic thought, nor can it ground the ethical systems that motivate us to the truth and the right. Pantheistic systems, likewise founder on the issue of unity and diversity, for the world is many just as it is one – and that includes the conundrum over good and evil. This is often cast up as a counterto theism, as well, but in fact Plantinga showed that theism is coherent in the face of the problem of evil through his free-will defense . . .
GEM of TKI
i wouldn’t call this materialist vs. nonmaterialist, but as one Catholic put it: Religion vs. bad science.
There is a legitimate and meaningful question that science itself cannot answer.
Is nature an isolated system?
Within nature, we know there are no completely isolated systems. Is nature itself the one exception?
Materialists (or whatever they are called) answer Yes. Others have reasons for coming to the alternate conclusion.
Following up:
I cannot but observe:
Fross: i wouldn’t call this materialist vs. nonmaterialist, but . . . Religion vs. bad science.
What I find fascinating about this comment is how hard it seems for many to see that Religion and Science are not so-called “non-overlapping magisteria,†but in fact are both linked to a common-core issue, one way of another: worldviews.
Religions, plainly, make claims about the nature of the cosmos,and of our status within it, which are thus amenable to worldviews analysis. Insofar as they make factual claims and historical assertions, as the historic Christian tradition has for 2,000 years, they are subject to [indeed, sometimes even invite, cf 1 Cor 15:1 – 11] epistemological tests, as I have outlined above.
Then, too, as Lakatos has outlined, scientific research programmes have a belt of major theories that are integrated by a common core that is largely philosophical, i.e. constitute a view of the world. In this case, evolutionary materialismas a programme, since the mid-late C19, has asserted that everything from hydrogen to humans is self explanatory without reference to an external entity, through evolutionary mechanisms driven by in Monod’s famous allusion to Plato’s The Laws, Book 10, “Chance and Necessity.â€Â
In short:
1] neither religions nor scientific research programmes are free of worldview level assumptions and claims, some of which are testable;
2] Evolutionary Materialism, is not equivalent to Science as a discipline [indeed the founders and many current practitioners of science work in the framework of seeking to understand the principles used by the Creator of the cosmos in unfolding the reality we see and experience], but is instead, a particular, worldview freighted research programme; and
3] Therefore, the conflict between Judaeo-Christian theism and Evolutionary Materialism, is not “Religion†vs “Science†but rather between two worldviews that make overlapping and contrary, in part testable claims.
Thence, we see the key value of worldviews analysis in providing a level playing field for the analysis. Of course, this is directly a major chunk of the discipline known as philosophy. Here, therefore, we can see and fairly assess the key contrasting worldviews: Judaeo-Christian theism, and evolutionary materialism (a more clearly descriptive term than “Naturalismâ€Â). So, the underlying contrasting worldviews can be examined on their core warranting arguments, and compared on ability to handle issues of factual adequacy, coherence and explanatory elegance.
Handling the issues at stake at such an analytical level, first, has the great advantage of moving beyond rhetorical games and emotionally loaded language [e.g. Science – good, Religion (usually, here, the Judaeo-Christian tradition) – bad (or at least questionable), usually] to a level where the real underlying questions can actually be seriously addressed on a level playing field.
But then, such a move robs the usual rhetors of their favourite emotionally loaded persuasive arguments.
On the particular matter at stake in this thread, Mr Cameron has plainly abused the scientific aspects of archaeology to make a claim that cannot stand reasonable historiographical scrutiny seem plausible to the ill-informed. In so doing, he has abused the science of statistics in particular, creating an argument that asserts an unwarranted probability for his thesis. The underlying purpose is plainly to make it seem that Christian theism’s fundamental warranting argument rests on fraud [whether or not he openly says that, it is directly implied]. It is therefore entirely in order to highlight the underlying worldview level issues and agendas, and to correct his scientific errors.
Unfortunately, many who are only looking for ear-tickling rhetoric, will latch on to his fallacies and cling to them as “proof†that they are right to reject the Christian claims.
In promoting such obvious fallacies, Discovery Channel has been grossly irresponsible, and we should take note of it in assessing the credibility of any further claims made by the same entity.
GEM of TKI