Anthropocentric religion?

One of the criticisms of Christianity I've heard a lot is that today we know how vast the universe is, and how small a place humans have in it, and therefore how insignificant we are, and therefore how silly it is to think there is a Creator of the universe who cares about us, loves us.

I suppose that would be a strong critique, if only the Bible were not so full of similar sentiments. Whether it's Psalm 8:4, "Whare human beings that you are mindful of them?" or Ecclesiastes 3:18, "I said in my heart with regard to human beings that God is testing them to show that they are but animals," or Isaiah 55:9, "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts," the Bible is full of famous passages which demonstrate human beings' insignifance next to God. Job, the book of the Bible that most directly deals with the problem of evil, culminates with this haunting answer from God: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" If we cannot answer this question, the implication is that we have no right to demand an account from God for our suffering. In the Bible, human beings are very clearly put in their place.

Which is, of course, what makes its more "anthropomorphic" parts all the more powerful. The idea that God loves human beings is simply fantastic, as in Psalm 8:5-6: "Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all thins under their feet."

Now, let's be clear about something. No matter how much we increase in scientific sophistication, in our knowledge of just how vast this great universe is, Psalm 8 is still fundamentally accurate. There is a silly modern interpretation of the theory of biological evolution which states that human beings are not special, since we are just one of the many cousins descended from the same basic life forms billions of years ago. The silliness of this interpretation is self-evident. What other species even asks whether it is special? What other species has a word for species? What other species ever stops to wonder whether God is justified in creating this universe or not? What other species ever writes down extended arguments and passes them on, so that future generations may write back? What other species feels responsible for other species?

In other words, the Christian tradition is no more anthropocentric than mere common sense allows. The fact that the world is billions, not thousands, of years old and that our species emerged as a gradual process of evolution makes not a shred of difference. In fact, perhaps we should be all the more mystified and perplexed that humans exist at all. If intelligence is really the result of purely natural processes, why don't we see it more often? Why is it apparently so unique in the history of the world? And if it is not unique, what happened to all the other intelligent species?

(To be fair, it's a bit hard to know what a Christian would do if faced with intelligent species from other planets. But C. S. Lewis (as well as others, I'm sure) has dealt with this quite imaginatively in his Space Trilogy, so it's not as if Christians need be completely agnostic on that question. I have no idea if the Word became flesh on other planets. Would that be so troubling? It would certainly change certain doctrines, but to me that's hardly a concern.)

There is something troubling to me about a tendency in modern thought which, in a desperate attempt to get rid of theology, seeks to demean humanity as far as possible. Of course we are small, but we know we are small; of course we are insignificant, but we thirst for significance. "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." It is not to feed our anthropocentric pride that we so desperately need the gospel, but, on the contrary, it is to remind us how far down God was willing to come in order to satisfy this desire for the transcendent.

Or are we simply a meaningless clump of particles, searching for meaning where there is none? In that case, what sense does the word meaning have in the first place?

Miracles and the problem of evil

Judging from the questions people ask scientists who are also Christians, I take it that popular opinion holds that modern science and belief in miracles are fundamentally incompatible. I don't know why this is exactly, but I'm sure it's all David Hume's fault.

The argument seems to go something like this. Science is based on the understanding that all of nature exhibits certain regularities, called laws, and that by examining its parts through repeatable experiments, we can learn more about it. If miracles exist, then this regularity doesn't hold. Yet we know that science keeps telling us more and more about the way the universe really is. So miracles don't exist.

But that doesn't follow. If science is based on studying things which are repeatable, then science will tell you about those aspects of the universe which tend to repeat themselves. One will find it extremely difficult to prove that the whole universe follows (and always has followed) certain laws without any irregularity. If you say that we have not found any such irregularity yet, you are begging the question. First of all, a lot of people disagree with you, based on the amount of testimony that exists claiming miracles have occurred. Secondly, your sample size is vanishingly small--especially if modern science is in fact correct about the size and age of the universe. The only way you could possibly extrapolate from such a small sample size is to assume what you want to prove.

On the other hand, I confess that despite my religious affections (or perhaps because of them, as I'll explain shortly), I am attracted to the idea of a globally regular universe--that is, a universe without miracles. This would appear to put me in quite a predicament, and I'm not always sure how to overcome it.

My reason for being attracted to this idea is entirely aesthetic. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, Einstein said, is that it is comprehensible. That is, the most incomprehensibly beautiful thing. You start with a very short list of axioms, you derive a mathematical theory, and then you watch in awe as physical objects actually seem to obey this theory, as if the Creator of the universe were some sort of divine mathematician. And you realize that whatever inherent limitations this puts on you and your life--for instance, I suppose it means death for us humans is probably inevitable--it is simply pure joy to see that at the heart of all reality is supreme rationality, such that only through the slow and painstaking efforts of the greatest minds can human beings start to glimpse the underlying principles. If we have a purpose in this world, it is to be the products of such a divinely rational order.

Aside from sheer awe, however, there is a big payoff to living in a world guided by universal, comprehensible laws. Through science, we can master the world, creating technologies which push back against death and disease, increase our comfort, and allow us to live more fulfilling lives. If this is starting to sound like some sort of modern secular religion, is that at all surprising? Haven't we, thanks to the scientific revolution, in fact stumbled onto something quite extraordinary? All religions have features both attractive and repulsive, and this new scientific religion is no different. It may not promise eternity or redemption, but it promises both awe of the transcendent and practical means by which we can live meaningful lives. That is hardly something to scoff at.

Now if miracles are real, then this glorious vision is tainted, if not shattered. Not only does it ruin the idea of perfectly uniform mathematical laws governing the universe, but it even makes us wonder why we put so much effort into understanding the universe when there is a much easier way. If God can simply cure diseases and raise the dead by the uttering a word, why doesn't he? Why do we slave away trying to understand laws which are not really laws at all, when all the while God could step in and just fix everything whenever he likes? It seems both sacrilegeous and immoral. Only a divine bully with no respect for transcendent beauty could possibly intervene at such irregular intervals, while hiding in the dark the rest of the time.

Thus the problem of miracles reduces to the problem of evil: how is God's existence compatible with the presence of suffering, death, and disasters in this world? These latter are most certainly consistent with the laws of the universe--laws cannot be broken, even if it would suit our purposes to do so. But a personal God, capable of intervening--how can he allow it?

The other side is not without objection. There is, for instance, the problem of good: how can we make the concept of goodness intelligible in a world governed entirely by impersonal, unyielding laws? We can push back against suffering and death, yes, but to what end? Short life and disease do not threaten modern people nearly as much as boredom, depression, and even suicide. Try as we might to create our own meaning, anything we invent without any reference to a transcendent source eventually appears, well, meaningless.

I am inclined to think that neither of these problems can really be "solved." So I find my reflections on this matter humbling, both as a mathematician and as a Christian. On the one hand, as much as many of us would love to claim science as the banner of objective truth, the reality is that the vision driving us is every bit as religious as Christianity or any other major world religion, with just as many weaknesses. On the other hand, as a Christian I need to consider this modern, secular religion to be a real contender for my heart and soul. When Einstein spoke of a "cosmic religious feeling," he wasn't kidding.

Whether one of these religions will ultimately succeed in shaping our civilization in the future surely depends in part on how we answer serious philosophical questions like that of miracles. But I believe the more important factor is the human heart, which, once it receives and adopts a certain of vision of the world, will follow it far and wide, for reasons far beyond the intellect's comprehension. For the Christian's heart, of course there are miracles. And for the modernist's, of course there are not. And for those of us somewhere in between, I suppose there is the hope that one day we'll know for sure.

Billions of years

This past week I saw a story about the recent discovery of the world's oldest tools, dating around 3.3 million years old. Which got me thinking again about the big picture of the evolution of life. How many generations of life are simply gone forever? They may have left behind hints and traces of their existence--or not. In either case, what are we to make of our relationship to them?

When people ask about God and Darwinian evolution, they are usually given one of three answers: atheism, creationism, and compatibilism. These are all characterized by being straightforward: the first picks Darwin over God, the second picks God over Darwin, and the third asks why we can't simply have both.

If the first two responses are too absolutist, the third response strikes me as far too easy. The question that concerns me most is not so much the interpretation of Scripture--which is theologically varied enough already, without having to worry about scientific questions. Rather, what bothers me is the basic existential question: did all of those humans (to say nothing of other creatures) live and die for nothing? Or if it was for something, is it something we can appreciate?

Christianity in many ways promotes a hatred of death. God is the God of the living, not the dead. Christ's resurrection is said to defeat death, and one day his followers believe they will also be free to death. It is only in the paradoxical way that Christ taught--that those who love their life will lose it, while those who hate their life for his sake will find it for eternity--that Christians can be reconciled to death. Only with the promise of emerging victorious over death do Christians face it willingly.

But doesn't this promise of victory over death come a little late in the development of human beings? And what about other creatures? Is there any promise for them?

It would be one thing if we could take the Christian story of the Fall quite literally. By that I don't mean word for word out of Genesis 2 and 3. I simply mean that, at a given time in history, the earth was really a paradise, that human beings could eat of the tree of life and not die, that everything was in harmony. Then by an act of disobedience against God we humans, God's chosen guardians of the earth, destroyed that harmony and lost our chance to live eternally. Then the story of redemption playing out through Israel and then through Jesus Christ would answer that. Even if one might raise legitimate doubts about this redemption story, it would be plausible.

Yet if there was no such paradise, and if there was no such cataclysmic moment that literally occurred in history, if death was always part of the natural cycle of life, then what? Are there are truly Christian answers that can be given?

These billions of years really do loom large over the Christian consciousness. Certainly one need not be a biblical literalist to feel the pressure.

Historical and Theological Adam

Peter Leithart's argument on historical Adam confuses me. On the one hand, he subscribes to Pope John Paul II's distinction between "historical" and "theological" humanity. In order to understand Christian ethics, it is necessary to go back to the beginning:

Historical humanity is the humanity enslaved by sin, turned here and there by mixed motives, the humanity of domination and control, of objectification and shame. But the Bible begins with an account of a different form of human life, which John Paul labels the “theological,” according to which humanity is made in the image of God to be God’s covenant partner.

...And this theological form of humanity is still normative. Christians can’t stop at the boundary. We can’t concede that there is only “historical man” in all his evil and shame and abuse. We can’t really understand the career of historical man, John Paul says, without knowing that it is a deviation from the original state of man.

On the other hand, having accepted this distinction between "historical" and "theological," Leithart goes on to assert that,

Unfortunately, Evangelicals appear eager to replicate the liberal error. Today, many, perhaps most, Evangelicals still believe that Adam was an actual man, but there is a growing body of opinion asserting the contrary.

What does "actual" mean in this context? Does it mean ... historical?

Leithart gives theological arguments which suggest that if we give up on the historical reality of the creation of Adam, we will lose our theological and ethical foundation. This is problematic because it simply forbids us from asking any questions about the material reality of Adam. If we buy his argument, we accept the existence of Adam as recounted in the Bible because of the theological implications that come with it. Forget whether or not archaeology, biology, geology, or physics might have anything to say about the possible physical existence of such a human being, or the age of the earth, etc.

While I have never much appreciated the notion that theology and science are wholly separated spheres, the other extreme seems equally problematic. N. T. Wright's description of biblical cosmology has always stuck with me: it's the intersection of two worlds. Just as in C. S. Lewis's Narnia series there are two distinct worlds which intersect, so heaven and earth in the Bible appear to have such a relationship.

So what of historical Adam? Is it necessary that we accept this belief on theological grounds? Would it not be more appropriate to accept the existence of theological Adam?

The common objection from evangelical circles is that this is really a way to say Adam never existed in any real way. My response: this is a limited view of "real." If heaven is real, indeed if God is real, but is not perceptible by the methods of historical humanity--that is to say by the sciences and reason--I don't see why the same can't be true of Adam.

It's difficult to capture the distinction, here, but I'll try to do so with the Resurrection, the fundamental turning point for Christian theology. Christians historically believe that the Resurrection really happened--that is, Jesus physically, literally, really rose from the dead. But what we don't believe is that there is any scientific explanation for this. How could there be? Science insists on explaining things in terms of things we can control or observe repeatedly. We can't repeat the Resurrection. If it happened, it happened once and for all, and we hope it will happen to the rest of us some day. What can we say about it, then? Is there an explanation of the Resurrection? The most we can say is that the power to raise the dead came from heaven. This is inaccessible to us, but we believe it is there, and we believe we will have access to it again one day.

So with Adam, what analogy can one draw? Adam is inaccessible to the sciences. We can't see him with archaeology, we can't verify the historical records and find he is there. But we believe he was there, in the sense that we believe humanity was in a real sense created in the image of God. We don't have access to this. We believe that one day we will, but for now, all we have is the historical tools of historical humanity, which don't have access to theological Adam.

I am not suggesting the Bible is describing another world which has no relation to ours. But then I am suggesting that the Bible is not describing solely our world. If there really are two world which intersect (and sometimes collide?) then it should not be surprising of sometimes the Bible describes things which are simply inaccessible to any rational tools we have.

Whatever the appropriate response may be, I've found conservative evangelicals consistently failing in addressing this issue, because they always give me theological reasons to believe something historical, rather than theological reasons to believe something theological (or historical reasons to believe something historical). As someone who believes both science and theology are very important, I believe the distinction is worth making and then exploring.

Literal creation?

A blog post by Peter Leithart got me thinking once more about creationism. Responding to a book entitled Darwin's Pious Idea, Leithart asks why some things can be taken literally while others can't:

"What makes the notion of “creation by speech” an un-literal interpretation and the notion of creation “in six days” literal? How does Cunningham know which is which? Perhaps evolutionary biology decides for him. Again, we have to guess, because he doesn’t say."

It's a funny question, because I honestly never thought "creation by speech" was literal. When God spoke the universe into being, did it make a sound? Clearly there's something more to speech than the literal action of speaking. What does "literal" mean, anyway?

To me Leithart's worry is a little strange, and indicative of a sort of interpretive panic on the part of evangelicals. Always the same question arises: if we can't take the creation story literally, then how can we take any historical account from the Bible, in particular the Resurrection, literally?

If I recall Luther's famous quote correctly, he insisted on both "Scripture and plain reason." I think plain reason tells us that when God spoke the universe into existence, it didn't literally make a sound. Before anything existed, there was no sound. Plain reason also tells us that plants can't live without the sun. And yet, plants come into being a day before the sun. Plain reason, finally, tells us that the narrator of Genesis does not intend the audience to think he was an eye witness to the event, nor that he personally knows any eye witnesses. The gospels, by contrast, read somewhat differently.

And modern scientific reasoning, while not so plain, really has reached a rather strong consensus on the age of the earth. I confess that it bugs me when Christians bring up "Darwinism" when the discussion seems to be about much more than Darwin. There's no point in discussing the evolution of life if you haven't come to grips with what modern geology and physics have told us about the age of the earth. It's clearly not "Darwinism" versus creationism. It's a much broader skepticism of modern science, based solely on the stubborn insistence that we read the Bible "literally."

A new challenge to materialism?

Two reviews of a new book by Thomas Nagel, entitled Mind and Cosmos, caused me to revisit one of the fundamental questions about the philosophy of science: can everything be "reduced" to matter? Though I haven't read the book myself, I take it the reason Nagel's book is so provocative is that he is both an atheist and a skeptic of the standard materialist worldview that makes atheism most plausible. Arguing for teleology in a world without God seems to be reaching for the impossible, which is why one critic says Nagel is "Awaiting a New Darwin" to fill in the gaps. This critic concludes, in what I find to be a rather even-handed statement:

"The question, then, is not whether teleology is formally compatible with the practice of science. The question is whether the practice of science leads to taking teleology seriously. Nagel may find this question unfair. He is, he says, engaging in a “philosophical task,” not the “internal pursuit of science.” But it seems clear that he is doing more than this. He’s emphasizing purported “empirical reasons” for finding neo-Darwinism “almost certainly false” and he’s suggesting the existence of new scientific laws. These represent moves, however halting, into science proper. But science, finally, isn’t about defining the space of all formally possible explanations of nature. It’s about inference to the most likely hypothesis. And on these grounds there’s simply no comparison between neo-Darwinism (for which there is overwhelming evidence) and natural teleology (for which there is none). While one might complain that it’s unfair to stack up the empirical successes of neo-Darwinism with those of a new theory, this, again, gets the history wrong. Teleology is the traditional view; neo-Darwinism is the new kid on the block."

Alvin Plantinga, not surprisingly, is in favor of the teleology proposed by Nagel but is waiting on Nagel to convert to theism:

"Nagel’s rejection of theism does not seem to be fundamentally philosophical. My guess is this antipathy to theism is rather widely shared. Theism severely limits human autonomy. According to theism, we human beings are also at best very junior partners in the world of mind. ... This discomfort with theism is to some extent understandable, even to a theist. Still, if Nagel followed his own methodological prescriptions and requirements for sound philosophy, if he followed his own arguments wherever they lead, if he ignored his emotional antipathy to belief in God, then (or so I think) he would wind up a theist. But wherever he winds up, he has already performed an important service with his withering critical examination of some of the most common and oppressive dogmas of our age."

I find both critics make good points, but both also make the same predictable move of getting down to what it's really all about, which amazingly enough is a restatement of one popular dogma or another. In the first case we get a restatement of modern scientific orthodoxy: science proceeds by testing hypotheses empirically, ruling out those that don't work, and accepting those that continue to be verified by experiments. In the second place we get a call to conversion: if we're looking for something to make sense out of this universe, we ought to find it in God.

Why are we at such an impasse when it comes to questions of reductionism, materialism, and teleology? One side goes on about "what science can do," while the other side insists there's more than just science. I suspect Nagel has found the place where it all converges into a tangled mess: the mind. It is here, more than anywhere else, where modern scientific materialism will inevitably clash with other worldviews.

Modern science seems to owe much of its existence to a philosophy move toward mind/matter dualism. Cartesian dualism is more than just a metaphysical statement about the mind and the body; it's a methodological decision, placing a priori questions in a different realm than empirical ones. Such a move allows empiricists to proceed with an unquestioning confidence in their enterprise. We know, a priori, that the world behaves according to logical rules. All that remains for us to conquer the world is to perform enough experiments until we discover all its secrets.

This story plays out pretty well until this relentless application of the scientific method starts to tear down the source of its boldness: the mind. If the mind is itself mere matter, subject to the same rules as anything else, and in particular the rules of evolution by natural selection, then no longer does the scientific method possess an eternal mandate from the realm of a priori truths. The method itself is an experiment, one in which we have confidence because it just seems to work (for now). But now we are trapped in a vicious circle (this is the famous problem of induction).

I understand the need to face this problem, and I find it intolerable the way some try to shrug it off for merely the sake of keeping science free from metaphysical questions. Indeed, the very notion that science (or what we now call "science" in the modern age) can be separated from any other discipline is in some ways a throwback to the worldview which most scientists now reject. Empirical questions are only independent from other questions if there really are two (or more) separate spheres of existence--for instance, mind and matter.

What I don't understand is teleology. The idea of "intrinsic bias" seems to already be present in the very notion of physical laws. In physics we posit many "intrisic biases," such as the tendency of particles in a closed system to settle in low entropy states, for matter to follow the influence of gravitational and electromagnetic fields, etc.

When we start talking about more complex things like the evolution of living organisms, it seems to me there is a double temptation. On the one hand, we marvel at the complexity and precision which present themselves in even the most basic organisms, and we are tempted to say it can't be the product of "merely random" changes, thereby rejecting Darwinian biology. On the other hand, we are tempted to interpret Darwinian biology as saying the array of organisms we see now is completely arbitrary. I would say this latter interpretation is highly misleading. The organisms which now exist have one extremely important feature in common: they survived the process of natural selection. It would not be entirely unfair to say that nature is "biased" toward producing, in certain environments, the kinds of creatures we do in fact see.

Naturally, I look at these issues from my own perspective, which is shaped by my study of dynamical systems from a mathematical point of view. From a mathematical perspective, the essence of a well-behaved dynamical system is that it tends toward some sort of "nice" behavior in the long run, even though it is governed not by a guiding hand but by a law which is applied mindlessly at each instant in time. Calculations demonstrate the intrinsic relationship between this law mindlessly applied on the long run behavior which is bound to result. On the one hand, this cannot be called "teleology." On the other hand, it cannot be called "chance." Indeed, it is a form of determinism unaided by any sort of mind.

On the other hand, how can we be so convinced that the universe evolves according to such laws? Without the guidance of a priori and immutable truths, why put our faith in the use of scientific laws to explain the world?

The reason theism seems an unattractive option to so many modern intellectuals is that they believe they understand it. By the same token, the reason so many theists make it so unattractive is that they, too, believe they understand it. There seems to be some sort of paralysis of the human mind, such that whenever theologians say something to show God higher, we interpret it as placing man lower. For instance, Plantinga says, "According to theism, we human beings are also at best very junior partners in the world of mind." I find my natural response is, wrongly, to assume this means that the amazing achievements and liberty of the human mind are not so grand after all, because we are really all little ants in God's ant farm. What a grotesque image, I say, as I search for philosophical reasons to reject it. I am not the sort who would find comfort in being an ant in an ant farm, as safe as that would be.

When I come to my senses, I realize theism should not be interpreted this way. God, I say, is not an explanation of anything. Explanations allow us to understand and manipulate the world. Belief in God does precisely the opposite: it affirms the unknowable and uncontrollable.

As such, I confess I don't find theism much help in explaining why the universe obeys certain laws, or whether or not Darwinism is true. It seems to me that teleology, in the sense of studying God's purposes for the world, cannot so much be a matter of study as a matter of patience. We honestly have no idea--certainly not a priori--where we are headed, but I am convinced we are headed somewhere.

Suppose that, unlike Descartes sitting in an armchair pondering a priori truths, we are more like children eating what is presented to us by a nurturing mother. At first we have absolutely no proof that such food is good for us, or that it is even edible. We merely have an instinct to eat, and we have no one else to trust. The proof comes later, when we are all grown up precisely because we trusted in something to begin with. Later we may find there are better things to eat by comparing to what we have already eaten.

As far as I can see, this is the true story of scientific discovery. We start with many things taken for granted. There is no way to even begin an inquiry into anything of scientific importance without being fed by someone else more experienced and learned. Once we are all grown up, we become more and more free and independent, capable of adding to the wealth of human knowledge by using what is known to face the unknown.

And it seems this is the story of all knowledge and even of living things. It is the story of evolution. I see very well why natural selection can seem like a cruel process with no discernible purpose. On the other hand, it is very much the story of growth, the story of inheritance being passed down and tested while new possibilities emerge from these trials. My intuition says that many of these philosophical arguments may just come down to how we interpret this story.

In this story there is no division between empirical and metaphysical. Mind is itself an inheritance, not an a priori metaphysical postulate. Perhaps there is something, higher and more wonderful and mysterious than mind, which permeates the universe, but I am rather sure we do not have that. What we do have is the opportunity to understand as much as we can, knowing there is never an end to what we can know.

The reason we accept materialism as a framework for modern science seems to be that it is a simple idea with far-reaching explanatory power. By assuming all things can be broken down into small, physical pieces with observably properties, we have been able to revolutionize the world. I think one can be forgiven if he sounds a bit overly excited about this. It truly is astounding how much has been accomplished by modern science. Modern science is itself the product of evolution, having been "selected" because of its unprecedented ability to yield new discoveries. If in the future we see changes emerge, so much the better. But in any case, I see the "reduction" to matter as a way to transmit a body of scientific knowledge in an effective way. It is the function of materialism as a philosophical inheritance that interests me, more than its final intrinsic truth.

All of this debate over materialism is part of that process of evolution, and I suppose the strongest challenges will survive. There probably will always be weaknesses in the materialist account of things, but I believe it futile to search for a replacement in immutable, a priori truths. (Ironically, it was perhaps just these immutable truths that gave us materialism in the first place, with all of its simplicity and orderliness.) All we can do is search for what is on the boundary of our current knowledge, and hope for growth.

Now I understand Richard Dawkins

Recently I was enjoying this really cool story about how slime mold can be used to construct efficient networks, which used the example of the interstate highway system as a model. If you haven't seen this, check it out:

I read the NY Times op-ed written by Andrew Adamatzky and Andrew Ilachinski, the scientists who pioneered the use of slime mold (Physarum polycephalum) for various sorts of computing tasks. Read this excerpt:

But it’s worth remembering that the highway system was created by mere humans, using only human intelligence. To find out if it’s optimally designed, we need to consult a higher authority. Namely, slime mold.

What follows is a fascinating explanation of how such a bizarre creature can be used to solve complex problems like path optimization. Super-cool, right?

Well, later I saw a link someone posted to a blog article written by a conservative Christian entitled, "Who Needs Engineers?" The blog post makes the following complaint against Adamatzky and Ilachinski:

In short they argue that we really did not need all those engineers and planners who gave us the Interstate Highway system because we could have just let some slime do the work instead. I am not kidding, and I hope you will read this story to your children and help them see why the Bible says that those who hate God are fools.

Upon reading that, I realized why people like Richard Dawkins have such a missionary zeal about trying to promote science in the public realm. At some point Christians ought to realize that this kind of anti-scientific statement doesn't just make them look stupid. It's also, dare I say it, sinful. For one thing, it's false. Adamatzky and Ilachinski are clearly not saying that designing interstate highway systems is as simple as watching a slime mold. At the very least, have enough respect to understand what these men are actually saying.

For another thing, think about how hateful this is. "I hope you will read this story to your children and help them see why the Bible says that those who hate God are fools." So two creative, passionate scientists who have given the world a fascinating perspective on an interesting problem are being blasted, not for anything they said against God, but simply for sharing their research. I'm not going to look it up, but for all I know reading their article, these two scientists could be Christians. Whatever the case may be, it is wrong to judge people like that.

What provoked such an insult from this Christian blogger? Apparently, it was the mere mention of "evolution," as in this statement from the Times article: "the slime mold was designed by evolution to solve just one problem: how to build an optimal transport network (for its nutrients)." Thus, if you continue reading the aforementioned blog post, you will read yet another explanation why it is absurd to believe in evolution. I am almost 100% sure that Adamatzky and Ilachinski never even thought about the controversy over evolution when they were writing their op-ed for the NYT. If a single word can provoke such ire, perhaps I shouldn't tell my fellow church-goers that I study evolutionary differential equations.

I see these attacks on science as symptomatic of a couple of serious moral issues in the church, which Christians have yet to deal with. First, let's be clear: anti-intellectualism is a moral problem. Christians need to be reminded that intellectual pedigree does and should demand a certain amount of respect in this world. To treat scientists as if the very foundations of their research can be refuted in a short blog post is not only stupid, it is incredibly disrespectful. This is what I mean by anti-intellectualism.

But by far the more important moral problem in the church is a simple lack of respect for truth. For all this talk about standing firm against the cultural tides of relativism and skepticism and boldly proclaiming the truth, Christians are often profoundly lazy about trying to discover the truth. Thus they refuse to cope with the reality that some things we discover about the world are going to conflict with what the church has traditionally believed. Life is hard that way. Sometimes our beliefs don't withstand rigorous scrutiny. Failing to accept this is both an intellectual problem and a moral one.

There is another thing I find sad about this, and that's the apparent lack of imagination displayed by Christians who refuse to accept that the theory of evolution might really be true. All of their arguments come down to the same thing: I can't imagine how such complex systems came into being without any sort of design involved. Essentially, this is a bias born of conceit. Think about the title of that blog post: "Who Needs Engineers?" We humans seem to be of the biased opinion that any sort of order in the universe comes from the work of human hands, so when we discover that in fact there is a beautiful and complex order in nature, it makes sense that we tend to attribute that order to God the engineer. Not God the artist, not God the gardener, not God the lover of things spontaneous and free. No, it must have been God the designer, because we all know that really cool things can't just come into being on their own.

Yet probably the opposite is true: the more complex a system is, the more essential it is that it be allowed to freely evolve. Our complex economic and political systems came into being through a process of cultural evolution, and not thanks to "social engineers" (notice how many of these same Christians hate socialism--to me this boggles the mind). In the same way, this rich world of complex organisms and ecosystems could not have come about any way other than a process of evolution building spontaneous order.

When we say "designed by evolution," we of course mean "selected," but perhaps in a higher sense there is a sort of design to it all. Evolution is not "random" just because it is free. On the contrary, it has the remarkable tendency to produce improvements in living things, which we never could have produced using our feeble mental capabilities. And this is exactly what Adamatzky and Ilachinski were saying from the beginning: "To find out if it’s optimally designed, we need to consult a higher authority. Namely, slime mold." We have much to thank God for and much to learn from this beautiful world he has given us, but we will never understand it if we insist that God is an engineer.

More importantly, we will never understand it if we demonize those whose life's work it is to bring us creative insight into the wonderful and mysterious world around us. I hope the church can feel some sense of shame about this, before it forces out all of us who take scientific truth seriously.

In related news, the General Assembly of the PCA will soon vote on whether or not to reject all evolutionary views on the origin of man.

Correcting assumptions about religion and science

From the Browser, which is always a great source for reading up on the latest in modern thought, I found an article called "Christianity and the rise of western science" by Peter Harrison. Excerpt:

In spite of this widespread view on the historical relations between science and religion, historians of science have long known that religious factors played a significantly positive role in the emergence and persistence of modern science in the West. Not only were many of the key figures in the rise of science individuals with sincere religious commitments, but the new approaches to nature that they pioneered were underpinned in various ways by religious assumptions.

Could modern science have arisen outside the theological matrix of Western Christendom? It is difficult to say. What can be said for certain is that it did arise in that environment, and that theological ideas underpinned some of its central assumptions. Those who argue for the incompatibility of science and religion will draw little comfort from history.

Those who have magnified more recent controversies about the relations of science and religion, and who have projected them back into historical time, simply perpetuate a historical myth. The myth of a perennial conflict between science and religion is one to which no historian of science would subscribe.

This part was really on the money:

What historical record also suggests is that insofar as modern science posits natural laws and presupposes the constancy of nature, it invokes an implicit theology. Most important of all, perhaps, religious considerations provided vital sanctions for the pursuit of scientific knowledge and, arguably, it is these that account for the positive attitudes to science which have led to the high status of science in the modern West.

And this part actually surprised me a bit:

The adoption of more literal approaches to the interpretation of the bible, usually assumed to have been an impediment to science, also had an important, in indirect, role in these deveolopments, promoting a non-symbolic and utilitarian understanding of the natural world which was conducive to the scientific approach.

The whole thing is a good read. Very little of it was stuff I didn't already know, but I realize that sometimes it's not so much how new your ideas are, it's how often they get repeated. One could take the article as a healthy antidote to misleading "New Atheist" rhetoric. On the other hand, you could also take it as an exhortation to Christians in the west to earn once more the healthy relationship with science that we once had.

Folks on all sides need to remember that religion is extremely diverse, and as a result it's hard to pin down ideas and label them correctly. Christian ideas played a role in bringing about the rise of modern science, but not all Christian ideas played the same role. All I would ask of atheists is that they admit that science comes with a certain theology--not necessarily a Christian or otherwise traditional theology, but a theology nonetheless. Likewise, I would ask Christians not to label something as outside the realm of Christian thought simply because it doesn't align with their own traditional beliefs.

What the article addresses most thoroughly is the Christian conception of nature and the relation between that conception and western science. Where I think it gets interesting is in more recent years, when, starting with Darwinian biology and continuing on with psychology and neuroscience, science begins to penetrate into questions about ourselves. No longer is science about this vast sphere of reality known as nature, with human beings attempting to be objective observers. Now human beings are studying themselves, trying to determine where we came from and by what laws we behave.

Small wonder that this creates such a great deal of tension with religion. Christianity, like many religions, is largely a story about who we are and where we came from. As modern science begins to challenge that story, it creates conflict where there was none before. It's one thing to say that time started with the big bang; that doesn't necessarily change the story about ourselves. It's quite another to say human beings have a common ancestor with other species of living things. That definitely changes the story.

Then again, it's all in how you tell it, isn't it? The Genesis account has human beings made both in the image of God and from the dust of the earth. One suggests great power and dignity, the other suggests fragility and corruptibility. Does the story modern science tells really change so much?

I don't know the answer to that, I'm just offering some space for better theological discussion. At the very least, we all need to realize that at the heart of everything we do is some sort of theology, good or bad. The false assumption that we can get by without thinking theologically at all is helped along by these great historical myths about the inherent conflict between science and religion. We'd be much better off having real theological discussions, instead of arguments in which we either assume our theology is basically correct or else pretend we don't need any.

Empirical religion

A friend of mine alerted me to a new book being released by philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who takes on the ideas of the "new atheists" and offers a new defense of the Christian faith as compatible with modern science. He says he wants to move from being on the "defensive" going on the "offensive," bringing positive arguments for why atheism is wrong and must be rejected.

I don't know very much about Plantinga, and the NYT article doesn't explain very much about his real argument. Nevertheless, the article got me once again thinking about that great question in our time: can a person believe in God and embrace science? It's a loaded question, to be sure, but it's one I am doomed to face for the rest of my life if I am to continue taking both my faith and my profession seriously.

I get very uncomfortable with Christians being either on offense or defense in this game. What most people seem to miss is a point atheists often make but don't consistently bear out in their arguments: none of us really know that much. To say that there are still questions science can't answer doesn't logically necessitate that Christianity has a claim on our lives. If science can't explain everything, it may be equally the case that Christianity can't, either. More importantly, it could very well be true that Christianity (or theism in general) doesn't even explain what it claims it does.

The reason I say all of that is because I think there is too much intellectual conservatism dominating Christian apologetics. Classical arguments for the existence of God are interesting, but there are good reasons why they don't work anymore. I find it hard to take the claim Christians so often make that even if evolution is true, it doesn't change what Christian orthodoxy ought to be. For God's sake, why not? Are there not a million ways in which this could profoundly affect our understanding of who and what we are? Or what about the age of the universe? Or the nature of atoms and subatomic particles? How can we help but think about the implications these have, not only for determining our place in the universe but for understanding our very nature?

Atheists say that the logical consequence of all these discoveries is that it's silly to believe in God, and so their bigger point gets lost because they tie it to a particular conclusion that Christians can't accept. The bigger point is, I think, a good one: it is that orthodoxy cannot simply be a matter of closing your eyes and missing new discoveries. A community genuinely interested in truth will not persecute or cut off those who challenge traditional thinking. It will not constantly be on the defensive against new explanations that refute old ones.

Is this not, in fact, more consistent with the story of Christianity? I am constantly impressed by how often the word see appears in the gospels. "The eye is the lamp of the body," Jesus says. He accuses the Pharisees of being "blind guides of the blind." And this accusation comes after they take offense at his overturning of traditional food laws, to which he replies, "Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?" The central story of Mark's gospel is the healing of a blind man, which requires two healings, because the first healing only partially restores the man's sight; this seems to symbolize the disciples only partially "seeing" what Jesus really came to accomplish. In John's gospel, light and darkness are central themes throughout. Jesus is "the light of the world," and "Whoever sees me has seen the Father." And John says that "we have seen his glory."

I could go on and on. The point is that Jesus does not make classical arguments for the existence of God. He instead wants us to see what God is doing: "See, something greater than Solomon is here!" Christianity is not a logical deduction from axiomatic truths about God. It is the direct result of people bearing witness to the world that they saw something new.

If we miss this central characteristic at the heart of the Christian faith, we lose out on the most valuable resource truth-seekers have: the willingness to be surprised, and the courage to break with tradition when the time calls for it. Not that breaking with tradition means turning away from it in resentment. Early Christians could not help but see themselves as the fulfillment of ancient Israelite tradition. In the same way, all new discoveries have the potential to give us a greater understanding of what we had previously believed.

The idea that previously held beliefs still have a place in spite of new discoveries is just tragic to me. Rather, we ought to have our eyes open to ways in which new discoveries can change our vision of who God is. I think the theory of evolution, for instance, really should cause us to rethink and reinterpret the story of creation, particularly the idea of the image of God in human beings. We should not leave this rethinking up to those who have no patience for faith and no desire to build it up. We should be the ones courageous enough to accept that God is not the same as our ancestors believed he was. The story of God and his people is full of surprises.

I am sensitive to the fact that many have taken these ideas and used them to collapse Christianity into a metaphor for the human experience, replacing divine interaction with the created world with human progress. I understand that orthodoxy cannot simply embrace the latest trends in human thinking uncritically. But after a while I lose patience with conservatives, who seem painfully close to what Jesus would call "blind guides of the blind." Do scientists really make discoveries, or not? Is theology so privileged as to be beyond all empirical correction? There would be no such thing as Christianity if that were true!

I am sorry that I am not able in these blog posts to give satisfying answers to the serious problems that Christians face in reconciling faith and modern science. Many people attempt to do this in a way that is trite or illogical, while others claim they are irreconcilable. Neither strikes me as attractive, which is why I will continue to try patiently to think about these things on as deep a level as I can manage. And whatever I think, I'll blog.

But the truth is, answers can never be satisfying forever. Life is always changing. When things stop changing, that's called death. God is the God of life, and I believe that if we are faithful to him we can never stop embracing the change that is necessary. For that we need our eyes to be open.

"Top down" vs "Bottom up"

One repeatedly encounters these two metaphors in discussions of science and faith--or in discussions of economics! Most recently I've encountered the distinction in Polkinghorne's Exploring Reality, where in Chapter 2 he writes,

The 'laws' of physics discovered at low levels of complexity would then simply be 'downward-emergent' approximations to the character of a more subtle and supple causal story in which the whole truly did influence the behaviour of the parts. ... Making us of science's account of future behaviour in this open metaphysical way by no means demands us to abandon the principle of sufficient reason, requiring a full explanation of the origin of what actually occurs. It is simply to conceive that the portfolio of causes that bring about the future is not limited solely to the description offered by a methodologically reductionist physics and framed only in terms of the exchange of energy between constituents. Instead, the concept of causal influence can be broadened at least to include holistic effects of an informational, pattern-forming kind. One might called this top-down form of causality 'active information.'

In my opinion, Polkinghorne gets overly technical in a book apparently designed as an apologetic work for the public. In any case, here's what he's basically saying: reductionist scientists have a solely "bottom-up" approach, whereas Polkinghorne believes that a lot of our discoveries demand a more "top-down" explanation.

Let's think about this dichotomy for a bit. First, I want to stress that it is a metaphor. That is, we are not talking about a literal "top" and "bottom" to the universe. Many times metaphor is simply the only way to talk about abstract concepts like the nature of causality, but nevertheless it is often important to acknowledge the limits of our metaphors, and to be aware of the influence they have on our thinking. In this, I'm not sure the influence of the metaphor on our thinking is entirely good.

I don't believe ontology exists

Just an honest, gut reaction here. After a discussion group today about science and faith, I think my head will explode if I hear one more mention of ontology. We're reading through John Polkinghorne's Exploring Reality (the title really narrows down the discussion, don't you think?) and of course the first chapter had to do with this study of the "nature of being." Look, it may be interesting to distinguish between questions like, "Does God exist?" on the one hand, and "Do subatomic particles exist?" on the other. But folks, let's just agree that the difficulty in making such distinctions does not lie in the word "exist." I don't think anyone was ever convinced that something existed because he experienced a conversion of ontological principles. I have to fault the Christians, not the atheists, for bringing it up. I believe the word "ontology" was actually an ancient incantation spoken by a philosopher in ancient times as an attempt to frighten and confuse his opponents. My theory is that it never worked, but they kept doing it all the same until it finally became legitimized as a real (but how will I ever know it's "real"?????) subject of philosophical inquiry. Moral of the story: avoid talking about ontology at all costs.

Speaking of banning words, however, beware lest you fall off the other side of the horse. For all the atheists' reliance on rationality, some of them occasionally say some amazingly silly things. Heard today:

"I don't think the word ought has any meaning, and it should be eliminated from our language."

Do you need to read that again? Maybe this time I'll put some emphasis where it needs to be:

"I don't think the word ought has any meaning, and it should be eliminated from our language."

If he's allowed to say that, then I'm allowed to say, "Ontology doesn't exist."

Charles Darwin on "Chance"

Although the theory of evolution is now progressed far beyond Darwin's original work On the Origin of Species, I thought it would be interesting to read through it, for historical perspective, and to round out my education (I never did learn very much biology). I'm not finished, but a couple of things have caught my eye that I wanted to write down.

Many people take issue with Darwinism based on the general idea that it promotes chance over design, thus making the universe out to be chaotic and purposeless. But that's not how Darwin himself wrote about it. Chapter V is framed by the following statements:

I have hitherto sometimes spoken as if the variations--so common and multiform with organic beings under domestication, and in a lesser degree with those under nature--were due to chance. This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation.

...

Our ignorance of the laws of variations is profound. Not in one case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign any reason why this or that part has varied. But whenever we have the means of instituting a comparison, the same laws appear to have acted in producing the lesser differences between varieties of the same species, and the greater differences between species of the same genus.

In other words, we only perceive natural selection as due to "chance" because it occurs in systems of so many constituent parts that we cannot possibly know how they all relate to one another. Or better, "chance" is simply an expression of our ignorance, not nature's chaos.

Darwin's assumption is a very modern one: there must be some underlying principles which are both comprehensible to humans and universally applicable to what humans perceive in nature as distinct objects. Creationism, by contrast, asserts that the existence of the several species is fundamentally inexplicable: God spoke, and the species came into being, and that's as far as we can go. I consider both of these ways of thinking to be in tension throughout the history of Judeo-Christian thought. On the one hand, God's inexplicable intervention into history is central to the message of Scripture, particularly on Mount Sinai and at the resurrection of Christ. On the other hand, God's faithfulness, sovereignty, and wisdom are also essential parts of his character, and creation is thus characterized as fundamentally driven by principles which are comprehensible to human beings.

Can we therefore say that Darwin's idea is thoroughly unbiblical? True, it goes beyond the creation account in Genesis, as some would say attempting to see the "story behind the story." But if one were to completely forbid this kind of attempt from Christian thought, would we not have to give up all talk of the Triune existence of God, seeing that we do not ever see this explicitly spelled out in Scripture? Indeed, most Christians see the Trinity in the first few lines of Genesis: the Spirit is present in the "wind," and the Son is present as the Word of God speaking all things into existence (cf. John 1). Is this not also an example of seeing the "story behind the story"?

One final point: discovering the underlying principle does by no means remove all mystery from the universe. Even in light of modern genetics, there is no way we will ever be able to predict the long-run outcomes of evolution, as it is driven by countless tiny variations of which we will never be fully aware; much less can we possibly conceive of their future use. Because the process is so far beyond our control, we may thus call it a matter of "chance," but only if we are so inclined for reasons other than the facts themselves.

Love and Science

Try Googling "faith and science," and immediately you'll encounter web pages and opinion articles and blog posts devoted to studying the conflict between religion and science. Some will try to take one side over the other; many will try to find some new way to reconcile the two. In all cases conflict is assumed, because that is the culture we live in.

Certainly some argumentation is needed to help resolve this conflict. Those who care about truth will not be content with all the messy details being swept under the rug. Yet popular discussions of this topic seem altogether lacking in what Martin Luther King, Jr. called "the only creative, redemptive force in the universe." Love, of course. Whether it's deciding on science curriculum in public schools or dealing with global climate change, we would do infinitely better than we are doing if only love were more deeply cherished as a political virtue.

If intellectuals find this embarrassingly trite, perhaps this is the result of a faulty epistemology, which does not acknowledge love's central role in acquiring knowledge. Scientists sometimes appear prone to accept that absurd caricature made by the public, which makes science out to be a cold, detached endeavor whose reliability stems precisely from that detachment. Nothing could be further from the truth, as any real scientist very well knows. All those hours spent in the lab, or staring at equations, or out in the field (possibly in danger), or analyzing data--no one would ever demonstrate such dedication if not for the love of the subject.

Evolution of Science and Religion

Some people argue that science has its place, and religion has its place. But this perspective fails to take into account evolution, specifically in culture and language. Consider the concept of (not to mention the word) "science." Once theology was the queen of the sciences, since "science" in this sense meant simply the acquisition of knowledge. "Natural science" is what most people now think of as "science," but even then it is not so easy to think of a definition. Is it a method? Is it a body of knowledge? Is it knowledge about particular kinds of things? Which things? Can it imply a certain kind of "worldview"? Or consider the word "religion." How does one define it? Does it have to involve belief in the supernatural? Does it have to involve participation in an institution of the faithful? Is it a philosophy? Is it a collection of morals? The difficulty of these questions is symptomatic of a deeper fact, namely that the word "religion," like the word "science," has a long cultural and linguistic history which is still moving forward. I find it highly absurd to think that we could predict the outcome of this evolution for a period of time longer than a few years.

Application: Anyone interested in providing a view on the relationship between religion and science must in some sense offer definitions of those terms. Yet these definitions must compete with one another for popular usage, and thus they are hardly definitive. For instance, science as a worldview has gained some ground in the intelligentsia at certain points in recent history, but it probably will not have huge success in the long run. It feels to me as if the most popular definition of science these days is strictly utilitarian: we like it because of what it does for us. For that reason our culture has little reason to precisely sort out the relationship between science and religion; as long as science just keeps giving us cool stuff, can't we all just believe what we want? There are probably much worse ways our culture could handle the situation. In any case, we cannot simply decide what the two words "science" and "religion" mean, and then logically deduce their compatibility. If we did that, then all of language would just be mathematics.

What is "intelligent"? What is "design"?

If you read my posts on a regular basis (I really have to wonder how many of you there are) you may have noticed that I keep coming back to two seemingly abstract subjects: epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. These seem to creep up on me as an unavoidable subtext to just about every debate I care about: between Christianity and atheism, concerning the origins of life and the material world, and even on bioethics. Nowhere has this been more true than in the debate concerning evolution that seems to go on relentlessly. I've been part of a reading group on Francis Collins' book, The Language of God, in which he lays out a case for Christianity with a special emphasis on harmony between faith and science. The reading group involves Christians and atheists/agnostics of various backgrounds, and I've appreciated the chance to clarify some of the key issues. The key issues are, in my opinion, all matters of epistemology.

Justice and the natural order

A recent article in First Things by Stephen M. Barr entitled, "Fearful Symmetries" argues that scientific reductionism has been misapplied by scientific materialists. Barr decries the "diminished ontological status" of the fundamental "stuff" of the universe in the materialist view of things. In contrast, he expresses the belief that it is precisely by looking at the basic building blocks of the universe that we see its underlying order, and thus we see the Mind of God at work. Working "down" from the complex to the simple does not mean explaining away the beauty of the universe; on the contrary, it means discovering that beauty.