Michael Dowd
TED DAVIS: The Creation-Evolution Conflict in Historical Perspective
Ted Davis is a former president of the American Scientific Affiliation: “a fellowship of men and women of science and disciplines that can relate to science who share a common fidelity to the Word of God and a commitment to integrity in the practice of science.”
I learned a lot from the rich historical perspective that Ted brought to this conversation—both due to his own scholarship and also to his experience on the front lines of helping his fellow evangelicals move beyond the warfare model of the relationship between science and religion.
Here’s more background…
Edward B. (Ted) Davis is Distinguished Professor of the History of Science at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses on historical and contemporary aspects of Christianity and science and directs the Central Pennsylvania Forum for Religion and Science. Mainly known for his work on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, Davis edited (with Michael Hunter) The Works of Robert Boyle, 14 vols. (London, 1999-2000) and a separate edition of Boyle’s influential treatise on God and nature. He wrote the chapter on Isaac Newton in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, ed. Ronald Numbers (Harvard, 2009).
Davis has also written numerous articles and reviews on the history of religion and science in modern America, including a commentary on the Dover intelligent design trial (which he attended) that was published in the Winter 2006 edition of Religion in the News. BBC radio has featured his research on modern Jonah stories, published in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (December 1991). With support from the National Science Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation, Davis is currently writing a book about the religious beliefs of prominent American scientists in the 1920s. An article based on this project was published by American Scientist (May-June 2005).
Additional information on Ted and his work can found here: http://www.messiah.edu/hpages/facstaff/tdavis/home.htm
I’ll post some choice quotes from our conversation in a few days, once I receive the transcript. In the meantime, please feel free to share your comments here.
Here’s the quote from Gil Bailie that I read toward the end…
“It was not those closest to the historical Jesus who first gave the gospel its geographical breadth and theological depth. It was Paul, who had never known him. In addition to that, impressive achievements in biblical scholarship have, in many ways, brought our era closer to the constituent events of the Christian movement than were, say, the Gentile Christians of the second century. If the life and death of Jesus is historically central, then people living ten thousand years from now will be in a better position to appreciate that than we are. Furthermore, when they look back they will surely think of us as ‘early Christians’ – living as we do a scant two millennia from the mysterious events in question. They will be right, for the Christian movement today is still in the elementary stages of working out for itself and for the world the implications of the gospel. There isn’t the slightest doubt that the greatest and boldest credal assertions are in the future, not the past. It may be only at rare moments that this flawed and unlikely thing we call the ‘church’ even remotely resembles something worthy of its calling, but it is nonetheless embarked on a great Christological adventure. Even against its own institutional resistances, it is continually finding deeper and more inspiring implications to the Jesus-event.” — Gil Bailie
I have been enjoying all these conversations that confirm a lot of my own deep knowing.
I have been thinking during this time, and it came up again in listening to this interview with Ted Davis that it might be very helpful, if possible at this point, you could interview Rev. Rita Nakashima Brock and Rev. Dr. Rebecca Ann Parker who wrote the book – “Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of the World for Crucifixion and Empire”. I think they would help greatly in showing the world view of the early Christian Church that they have discovered and reveal in their book. Thanks and blessings Michael and Connie for all you are doing to bring forth this knowledge, and enlighten the world.
Was wondering if Dr. Davis felt that Christianity was changed any by the discovery of Evolution? It doesn’t seem to be of any concern to him at all?
Hi Ted and Michael,
I sensed a different tone to this conversation, probably because the distance between your understandings of Christianity is greater than others so far interviewed, but I really appreciated the content and depth of the conversation.
Ted, your conviction over the centrality of a literal resurrection is one I shared for many years and I think there is a quote from St. Paul about Christianity not having any point if Jesus was not raised. That sure made sense to me for a long time. And yet I had to admit that there were valid reasons to doubt the reliability of the records and the nature of the community in which that story formed and eventually the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” line of reasoning convinced me that I didn’t have the extraordinary evidence to make such a claim. I appreciate N.T. Wright and while I have read some of his work, I have not read the one which you refer to.
This for me points out a central problem facing evangelicalism. The evidence being defended is not self-evident. It takes someone like N.T. Wright or yourself, working full time studying the subject, to buttress my sagging faith. I can’t do it on my own. Like with the mountain of evidence that now has convinced many evangelicals, including yourself, that evolution is a fact, there is a growing mountain of biblical criticism that has done the same for my own understanding of the texts from which we get the resurrection story. This is why an evolutionary perspective is so important to me in, it doesn’t trap me in an interpretation that turns out to be, well, inconsistent with the facts.
Michael,
This points out an interesting side conversation that has been bleeping in my consciousness as I have been listening to these talks, namely the role of belief.
We often say that belief is not the thing, it is experience or action or some other thing and that what a person believes isn’t as important as how they treat other people, etc. etc. John Spong, I think it was, talked at one point about being able to chime in with the recitation of the apostle’s creed because he affirmed it as a historical document that had meaning within the world view of the people who first came up with it. Tom Thresher seems to affirm the same attitude when he spoke of singing an old hymn that no longer expressed our view, but which is a part of our heritage and perhaps even necessary to people as they move up the spiral of development.
I guess I am seeing, and this interview has highlighted, how we all come to topics with ideas and beliefs and that while we may not want to use a “battle” analogy, there is certainly an “energetic engagement” of some sort going on.
I’m wondering if it might be the dynamic of thesis and antithesis and that those of us who continue to hold our minds open, despite the desire to close them down on “the truth” are straining for that synthesis of meaning that makes a paradox from a contradiction.
Swirling with questions,
Richard
In what ways might something like the resurrection — even if understood ‘literally’ — be understood from an evolutionary perspective? That is, might the resurrection be interpreted as pointing to aspects of physics, chemistry, biology, or evolution in general, that modern science has not yet discovered?
Sure, Angi, some do indeed interpret the story of Jesus’ resurrection that way. But as I discuss in Appendix B of my book, that doesn’t necessarily solve the issue of how to interpret the fact that there are many stories of miraculous resurrections in the distant past. Are all true? Some? Only one? None? To my mind it doesn’t really matter. But clearly it does matter to others!
If I may intrude upon this conversation.
Michael, if we put the resurrection of Jesus on a par with previous resurrections, doesn’t that make Christianity (in a sense) a religion just as good as any other? Should Zeus or Thor be given the same status as the Christian God? Not to mention the rest of the religions in existence today. In fact that’s one of Richard Dawkins’ favorite arguments to mock religious beliefs. Mind you I think there are ways out of this impasse (although surely not ways that would convince Dawkins) but the truth is I rarely (if ever) see anyone confront him on such points.
I think such issues confuse traditional believers looking for a reinterpretation of their faith in view of modernity and science, and it emboldens New Atheists to go on the attack. And, as I’ve noted elsewhere, it’s not just the creationists and fundamentalists they’re after, but religion as a whole.
Jim, what follows is my opinion only. I’m quite sure that Ted and many of the other thought leaders in this series would see and say things differently. (A few might even consider it heretical.) So, with that caveat in place…
I would argue that there are two kinds of Christians in the world today: one-story Christians (those who get their primary inspiration from what is natural and undeniably real), and two-story Christians (those who get their primary inspiration from what is unnatural and undeniably otherworldly). Two-story believers tend to interpret religious concepts and doctrines in a “supernatural” way, which is why they’re called “believers”. One-story Christians, in contrast, interpret traditional religious language and images as pointing metaphorically to our real lives in the real world. They don’t need to believe, they know through experience.
IMHO, one of these ways of thinking has a future, the other does not.
Michael is right about true Christian “believers” (in an “orthodox” sense) holding to the real existence of something beyond the purely natural, whether or not it’s called “supernatural” (a term that’s been used for a long time without a single consistent meaning). I affirm my belief in a God who is often described as “supernatural,” while many (non-traditional) “believers” would not affirm such a belief. This is not something (IMO) that objective analysis can resolve, in the same way that objective analysis *can* resolve a lot of other matters. That’s what Wright is getting at when he talks about “worldview,” a term that Christian scholars have used for quite some time (an equivalent German term would be Weltanschauung).
Dawkins (e.g.) thinks it’s absolutely objective to deny the existence of any and all such entities, even to mock those who do believe in something beyond nature. (This is why his crowd talks about their silly “flying spaghetti monster”–it’s nothing but open mockery of otherwise serious matters.) But Dawkins is not being absolutely objective, and if he wants to dispute that I’d be happy to appear opposite him in a face-to-face debate. (I challenged Jerry Coyne in this way some time ago, but of course he ignored me.)
What Dawkins, Coyne, and so many other new atheists miss is the simple fact that science cannot interpret itself metaphysically, and that it can make sense within quite different metaphysical frameworks. IMO, Christianity makes no sense apart from the concept of a “God” who genuinely creates a universe with a purpose, and it’s very hard for me to separate that from something like a “supernatural” God. For me (speaking here as a scholar of science and religion), the idea of a contingent order (which I talk about in the interview) has been crucial for understanding why the modern scientific method of rational empiricism has been so successful, and I simply cannot make sense of a universe that is *both* contingent (in terms of both its existence and its specific nature) *and* orderly, without something like a “supernatural” God. In short, for me (speaking again as a scholar, not simply as a “believer”), belief in God actually makes more sense than unbelief. Others won’t see it that way, I readily grant, but my I do not grant that my conclusion is unwarranted.
I also can’t make sense of Christianity itself–that is, the very existence of the church, as a body of believers that has continuously since the very beginning identified itself as followers of the crucified and resurrected Jesus–unless something absolutely extraordinary and even unprecedented took place to transform the terrified and sniveling disciples (and that’s how I would have behaved myself in such a situation) into a bold and outspoken group that would not (IMO) have literally given their lives for something they knew was not true (the actual resurrection of Jesus).
More coming…
Further comment:
I agree with Michael’s description of the group of religious people he identifies with, as follows: “One-story Christians, in contrast, interpret traditional religious language and images as pointing metaphorically to our real lives in the real world. They don’t need to believe, they know through experience. IMHO, one of these ways of thinking has a future, the other does not.”
What I would question here is the apparent embedded assumption: that “Two-story Christians” (the group I identify with) have no future, because (apparently) our belief has been falsified or become unbelievable as a result of evolution. Unless I am mistaken, this is *at least partly* what is meant by the term “evolutionary Christianity,” and (if I have understood this correctly) it is probably the number one reason why I distanced myself from the term in my interview.
Those who say this (that evolution makes two-story Christianity untenable) are IMO missing the same thing that Dawkins misses: namely, that science cannot interpret itself religiously. Although I would agree that some reliably established scientific facts *can* rule out some specific religious beliefs (such as the belief that the universe is only a few thousand years old), there is simply no way that “science” can rule out something like the resurrection. (Bill Phillips talks about this in his interview.) And, science is entirely incapable of answering the larger questions it raises, such as “why is the universe comprehensible at all?” or “why is mathematics so unreasonably effective for understanding nature?” or “why is it true that ‘beautiful’ mathematical equations are precisely the ones we need in order to grasp the order we find, way down deep, in nature?”
A robust theism explains those things quite well. A robust naturalism (whether a religious naturalism such as one-story Christianity or a purely atheistic naturalism) doesn’t do very well at all; it simply has to accept these things as “brute facts” about the universe, a universe that we are “lucky” enough to exist within. That could be true, but frankly it’s not the sort of attitude that science normally takes; science searches for deeper explanations, and in this case a robust theism provides them. (Ken Miller talks about this briefly in his interview.)
One more coming…
Finally, Michael, let me respond to your point about one-story Christians knowing through experience, in contrast to two-story Christians who know in “supernatural” ways. Partly this is correct; it’s the two-story Christians who usually view the Bible as “divinely inspired.” What this misses, however, is the fact that the group of folks I’ve been talking about–traditional Christians who accept evolution and the creeds together, who do not see in “science” or “evolution” a warrant to dismiss biblical faith–this group typically takes what Polkinghorne calls a “bottom up” approach to *both* science *and* religious faith. What he means by that is that both science and religion are searches for “motivated belief,” which makes them what he calls “cousinly” disciplines. I say more about this in one of the essays that you have already mentioned: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/07/the-motivated-belief-of-john-polkinghorne
In addition, let me point out that the idea of “evolutionary Christianity” puts too much attention on “evolution” and too little on cosmology. I remember being part of a lively conference about Christianity and science in the late 1980s. After listening to a few “one-story” Christian speakers talk about how we needed to discard theism in order to embrace science, I was given the opportunity to make a few comments, and I began by asking them which science(s) they had in mind: biology or cosmology? The message from cosmology is *very friendly* to genuine divine transcendence, especially the apparent fact (not yet contradicted by any actually demonstrated science) that the universe is not eternal and the overwhelming impression that (as Freeman Dyson has put it) “the universe looks as though it knew we were coming.” (Those who would invoke an all-but infinite “multiverse” here need to recognize that such ideas are far from scientific, even though lots of scientists are interested in them. Just one specific “multiverse” hypothesis is even potentially capable of an observational check, and if those observations can be made they would be capable only of showing that that particular hypothesis is *not* true.) So, I would not be so quick to move into a one-story model just yet…
Once again (forgive me for starting to sound like a broken record), I think the future of “science and religion” will lie with those who recognize that (a) the universe makes more sense within a robust theism; (b) science itself (that is, our ability to comprehend nature at all, and to comprehend it in a specific way) makes more sense within a robust theism; and (c) Christianity itself (including its very existence) makes more sense within a robust theism.
Nothing I have said should be taken to imply that one-story Christians are all “creationists” in the Ken Ham sense of that term, although many one-story Christians in modern America are (that was not true in the 1920s). Nor do I mean to imply that one-story Christians are all “creationists” in the Bill Dembski sense of that term (Bill is an “old-earth” creationist). But, one-story Christians *are* “creationists” in the classical sense of that term: we believe that the universe is not self-existent (that is, the universe is not “god,” the core teaching of Genesis One) and that nature did not determine its own nature.
To wrap this up, let me quote from someone who was not at all a Christian believer, as far as I know, the great historian of science Alexandre Koyre, in his book “Newtonian Studies,” p. 114: “The belief in creation as the background of empiricomathematical [sic] science–that seems strange. Yet the ways of thought, human thought, in its search for truth are, indeed, very strange.”
God bless all here,
Ted
For Jim Zikos:
In “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” Wright surveys a huge amount of ancient literature about “raising the dead” and “life after death,” in the process showing clearly (at least IMO) that what the second-Temple Jewish authors of the New Testament meant by “resurrection” was absolutely not what those other stories were about. In other words, Dawkins’ gambit fails.
Now, Wright wasn’t aiming specifically at Dawkins, but (you might say) Dawkins’ position is part of the collateral damage.
Comments for Richard Powell:
You’re right that my views are quite different from Michael’s views, on some of the most important issues we talked about. Let me express my considerable gratitude to Michael for simply allowing me to be myself in the interview, and for including me in the conversation. Michael is an excellent interviewer, and he’s already interviewed quite a few people whose views are pretty similar to mine. There may be others as well, but I think immediately of William Phillips, John Polkinghorne (a good friend of N. T. Wright), Ken Miller (a traditional Roman Catholic who’s been attacked by Jerry Coyne for holding such beliefs), Denis Lamoureux (who has also been attacked by Coyne), Karl Giberson (ditto), and Owen Gingerich.
One of the points I made in my interview is that Dawkins, Coyne and company are pretty much holding a shotgun aimed broadly at all forms of religion–as they define it (namely, anyone who thinks the universe is purposeful or that spirituality touches something real “outside” of our own psyches). As I define it, however, they are religious themselves, but they’ll never admit it.
More comments coming…
Apparently Mr. Coyne will stop at nothing. I was shocked to read his horrendous inaccuracies and butchering review of Robert Wright’s excellent book The Evolution of God. And Wright, mind you, isn’t even a religious writer. So I can imagine his treatment of the aforementioned gentlemen above.
Sadly, it seems fundamentalism can come in different stripes.
Well said Jim.
More comments for Richard Powell:
I understand your point about evangelicalism and evidence for the resurrection. As Wright points out in one of the passages I quoted, there is no neutral starting point from which one can evaluate the evidence for an event like the bodily resurrection. This is no less true for a David Hume or a Richard Dawkins than it is for Tom Wright or Ted Davis–or Richard Powell. That doesn’t mean that we just have to throw up our hands and give up, but it does mean that intelligent, well-informed and well-meaning people are not all going to draw the same conclusions. Worldview is very hard to keep out of that calculation, and worldview is not purely objective. If you are looking for reasons to believe, Richard, let me indeed recommend that you study the final parts of Wright’s massive book (going back to the details from there, selectively), or the chapter on “Crucifixion and Resurrection” in Polkinghorne’s “The Faith of a Physicist.” IMO, both of those authors are very hard-headed in their approaches to the evidence, but just as hard-headed in their criticisms of Enlightenment rationalism. An appropriate response to Hume’s skepticism can be to show some skepticism toward his skepticism. Hume basically argued that *no amount of testimony* for a miracle would ever be sufficient for him to accept it, and that’s not exactly an objective analysis.
The biggest problem I am addressing in my interview gets to the heart of this: for at least a century, it’s been pretty much assumed both by secular minds and by many Christian scholars as well, that thoughtful people can’t believe in a literal resurrection. Along with this comes an uncritical embracing of the “warfare” view, either (like Dawkins) in the hard-core atheistic form or else (like many Christian scholars) in the softer, gentler form of A. D. White, according to which “science” is always “progressive” and “dogmatic theology” is always the opposite, so that in order to make intellectual and social progress we have to remove the bathwater of Christian theology in order to save the baby of Christian ethics–all in the name of “science.”
More coming…
Ted,
Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful responses. It is so important to me that you are taking the time to dialogue on this subject. I haven’t had as warm an experience with other evangelicals. Some, like their counterparts in the atheistic camp, essentially just want to convince me, sometimes at almost any cost, including bullying and scare tactics. I’m not getting a sense that you are doing that, nor did I get a sense that you were doing it in the interview, only that you are energized by the subject and dedicated to understanding. This is so refreshing and affirming.
I will try to keep my responses in the same spirit and as brief as possible, since I know for many these topics are beyond boring — somewhere in the realm of mind numbing.
Without reading Wright, I suppose it is difficult for me to say, but I’m not sure I agree with you when you say, “there is no neutral starting point from which one can evaluate the evidence for an event like the bodily resurrection.” I think I get part of what you mean, that we all bring some kind of world view or a priori assumptions to the subject. Fair enough.
I’m certainly not where Hume is in saying that no amount of testimony would be enough, but I am at the point of saying that the testimony we have is not enough. We have a pre-scientific and almost pre-historic (in the sense of someone deliberately writing history) account, by anonymous or multiple authors with a mixture of styles and uncertain dates and distance from the events. No first hand reports. Certainly nothing that would count as journalism or witness testimony. And while your point about bias as a reader is valid, it is also valid for the writers. The writers had motives, and they were passionate about them. I accept that Paul had a “turn around of belief” because of a mystical experience of some sort, and I don’t discount the validity of that experience. I actually think that is closer to describing what Christians down through the ages have experienced and has strengthened their faith. They “meet Jesus” in some way that is real and it changes their lives. I don’t doubt that for a second. I also don’t think that automatically means a bodily resurrection.
There is a lot more I could say on the topic, but without the body of Jesus before me, and some way to confirm it is the same body that was dead and buried in the grave, it is a different kind of evidence, and must be in a different category.
Your work on revealing the “warefare” view, as described in your interview and above was clear and convincing and a great contribution to the field. It is amazing how much of human language and thought, is confrontational and adversarial and down right violent. Hopefully we can expand this awareness and commit to a different form of communication.
And I think your point about dogmatic theology being consistently painted in the negative is accurate and helpful; and unfortunate. I personally see “received views,” as those that were tested and pragmatic in some way, and usually the best interpretations available to those that went before us. As more knowledge and evidence comes to light, however, we do have to re-examine dogma and with due consideration and respect. This is a point that “we progressives” need to remain mindful of.
Thank you again for your comments.
Richard
More for Richard Powell:
In light of what I just said, my main point could be put like this: a lot of the bathwater is pretty important, and it shouldn’t be poured out on the basis of either David Hume or A. D. White. I don’t have the competence to make formal arguments against Hume; I’ll leave that for my friends in philosophy–many of whom have done so quite effectively. (There are now far more Christian philosophers than there used to be, and a lot of them are quite traditional in their Christian beliefs. This hasn’t gone done all that well in some circles. For an interesting commentary, see http://www.philoonline.org/library/smith_4_2.htm)
However, I do have the competence to question White’s competence as an historian of religion and science, and here I’m not making any radical claims. I’m simply doing what a lot of secular historians are also doing: showing what’s wrong with White’s “facts” and interpretations, and helping to create a new history of science and religion.
To a very significant degree, the Protestant “modernists” I spoke about in my interview bought White’s picture entirely; they even praised it for giving them license to get rid of a traditional picture of God. A few got rid of God entirely, such as George Burman Foster, while mostly they just denied that God had ever taken human form or raised anyone from the dead. As Shailer Mathews said in his Autobiography, speaking about his generation of liberal Protestants, “orthodox theology was felt to be incompatible with intellectual integrity.”
The irony here in all of this is as follows. Many contemporary Christian thinkers bring very similar attitudes to the “dialogue” of religion and science, yet they see themselves as rejecting the “warfare” view and bringing about a “harmony” of science and religion. Well, in fact they have largely bought the warfare view–White’s warfare view, of course, not Dawkins’ version. In short, they’ve bought into a view that they think they are rejecting. If we really want to reject the “warfare” view, IMO, we need to reject both White and Dawkins and get on with the business of constructing a theology of creation that is capable of having a genuine dialogue with modern science, not simply a monologue in which “science” (as seen by Hume and White) calls all the shots.
That’s what Polkinghorne does, and that’s precisely why I like his work so much: he gets it.
Ted,
This is masterfully summarized, “If we really want to reject the “warfare” view, IMO, we need to reject both White and Dawkins and get on with the business of constructing a theology of creation that is capable of having a genuine dialogue with modern science, not simply a monologue in which “science” (as seen by Hume and White) calls all the shots.”
I agree that we should reject a warfare view (because it doesn’t really help us get at the truth) and embrace genuine dialogue. And for that to be real, for me, it means profound humility. i.e for both scientists and theists, it means being completely open to what is real, to create mechanisms to prevent self-delusion and self-illusion, and to value above any sacred view, clarity and honesty.
I feel like we are soundly on the same page in this regard.
Richard
Comments for Dvonne Miller:
I did not say very much about evolution and Christianity in the interview, which focused on the larger historical picture of science and Christianity more generally (that’s what most of my scholarship is about). However, I have written about evolution and Christianity, esp how both “fundamentalists” and “modernists” responded to evolution (and other aspects of science) in the period between the two world wars; I’ve also written some things about contemporary issues. A partial list of my writings on these things is at http://home.messiah.edu/~tdavis/americanscienceandreligion.html; a few of my essays are linked there, but many are not freely available electronically (you’d have to go to an academic library to get them).
If you want to see me being very critical of Christians who don’t accept evolution, perhaps the best thing to read is this: http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1991/PSCF12-91Davis.html
(evolution isn’t the central thread there, but it’s not very far from the center)
Here’s another place where I talk at some length about evangelicals and evolution, in a critical way: http://evanevodialogue.blogspot.com/2008/06/evangelicals-evolution-and-academics.html
I certainly do think that evangelicals and other conservative Christians have a lot of re-thinking to do, relative to evolution. At the same time, I think that liberal Christians also have some re-thinking to do, relative to how they have responded to science. As Bill Phillips points out in his interview here, ordinary faith (by which he means a rather traditional faith) and ordinary science (and he’s speaking very modestly here, since he’s hardly an “ordinary” scientist) actually make a pretty good match. IMO, we aren’t going to make genuine progress in the contemporary conversation until the “conservatives” start to accept evolution and the “liberals” start to profess the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds without crossing their fingers–or, at least, to recognize that “science” in no way implies that “orthodox theology is incompatible with intellectual integrity.” (see my comment above for context)
Ted, thank you so much for interacting here with listeners in such a thoughtful, impassioned way!
Even though you and I see the world and interpret our faith differently, I have nothing but the deepest respect and admiration for you and the vital work that you and your colleagues at ASA and BioLogos (and those you mentioned above) are doing.
I am thrilled with how compellingly articulate and faithful to scripture, tradition, and science that you and most of the others in this series have been. In addition to Denis, Karl, Owen, Ken, Bill, Charles, and John (airs tonight!), I encourage you to also listen to those you would be tempted to write off as liberal or radical. I recommend the meat and bones principle:
“The meat and bones principle”: Eat the meat. Don’t choke on the bone.
Sometimes, as we all know, there’s lots of meat and not much bone. But other times (like spare ribs) there’s lots of bone and only a little meat. But what’s there sure is good!
In any event, thanks again both for your participation in the series as a whole and for interacting in such a meaningful way here in the forum.
Love and blessings,
In Christ,
~ Michael
Michael,
The genuine warmth you bring to this conversation is too rare a commodity in too many religious–or political–conversations. I praise you for it. My friend Robert Boyle (if I may speak of him that way) once said that to go after persons rather than ideas doth “mis-become both a philosopher [scientist] and a Christian.” Or something pretty close to that. Thank you for playing Mr Boyle’s role so well. I try hard to do the same thing myself, but I don’t always achieve it.
I’ve actually listened to many of the interviews so far, starting with Ian Barbour–without whom I would not be able to have any sort of academic career dealing with “science and religion.” Ian is one of the finest people I’ve ever met. In criticizing some of his “liberal” views (as I do implicitly here), the last thing I would want anyone to think is that I am dismissing him–or his crucially important ideas. I’m simply making the case for an alternative to the mainstream “liberal” religious response to science that is also an alternative to the usual “conservative” religious response to science.
IMO, both as an “orthodox” Christian believer but also as an academic expert on the relevant parts of the history of science and religion, there is a very significant difference between the “science and religion” landscape as we find it today, relative to what it looked like in the 1920s (the heyday of the “fundamentalist-modernist” debate). It is this: we find today numerous world-class scientists and theologians/clergy who accept both evolution and the ecumenical creeds (in a traditional sense). Perhaps there were one or two theologians like that in the 1920s (I am not yet confident of my answer to that), but there weren’t any scientists like that–at least, if they existed, they were awfully quiet about articulating their faith. American Protestants in the 1920s faced a pretty stark choice: your faith (in the “orthodox” sense here) or the science–choose which one you want to accept and move on. Today that is absolutely not the case. IMO, the issues are actually *less* polarized now, *within* Christianity, since there is a substantial middle ground theologically, even though both camps from the 1920s (the “fundamentalists” and the “modernists”) are still very actively part of the conversation.
Anyone looking for that middle ground might be pleasantly surprised to discover the ASA. Give us a try.
Great response, Ted! I’m both deeply honored and humbled by your comment about me playing the role of Robert Boyle in this series. I am also warmed in my heart imagining you friend smiling down through the centuries at both of us and offering his blessing on this endeavor. Mmmmm. So nice!
Your generosity of spirit and clarity of thinking, Ted, is a delight to behold and experience.
BTW..I mentioned your review of John Polkinghorne’s work in my blog post on his and my conversation.
Also, Connie wants me to tell you that she loved editing your interview and especially appreciated being able to step into your worldview and have it make sense to her for the very first time. (Thanks!)
Ted -
I have a Science-and-Religion 101 type of question: I have never understood why anyone who is a full-scale metaphysical naturalist (such as I am) would today be disappointed to learn that no scientist (the word wasn’t even coined back then) — no natural philosopher — was an atheist (or at least an unconfused atheist) prior to Darwin. Indeed, prior to Darwin but post the discovery of the progression of fossils in rock through time, I don’t see how anyone could be even as lax as a deist. For, as soon as extinction was discovered as real (by Georges Cuvier), and as soon as it was discovered that trilobites, Triceratops, and tigers had no overlap whatsoever in the fossil record, a removed deistic God was no longer held strength. Thenceforth a deistic God really had to step back in and keep intervening — at least in biological development.
And even with Darwin, though the fact of organic change through time was thenceforth well-established, one could easily doubt whether Darwin’s ideas about exactly how organic change happened were actually robust enough — especially since Darwin changed the heritability side of his argument from edition 1 to 6 of his Origin.
But after Darwin, each time a new discovery was made: Mendelian genetics, DNA, chemicals jolted into amino acids in a tube, evo-devo, and onward, it has become easier and easier, from a biological standpoint, to jettison any role for God.
So, back to my question, why should anyone like myself today be shocked or concerned by a historian such as yourself who turns up evidence that the ancient icons of modern science were not perfect little atheists? Indeed, who among us expresses shock? Who disagrees with your view of, say, Robert Boyle or Newton?
Connie,
I’ll have to make this one short, since I have other things coming up very soon (thankfully, you are probably thinking). Shorter than it should be to do justice to your question.
Two points. First, the discontinuity represented by Darwin and evolution–that is, after Darwin one can be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist.” (There were indeed some notable atheists prior to Darwin; Hume was a prominent one.) I agree with that, actually, given the context from which it comes. The first American Darwinian, Asa Gray, who was also the first “theistic evolutionist” in America (at least the first who was “Darwinian”), realized this also. He understood that Darwin makes the design argument less forceful. However, he also realized that the whole picture of the history of life still suggests design–it simply wasn’t design in all of the particular contrivances. In other words, he thought that the argument from design had to be different, and might not be quite as forceful, but it was hardly dead. (For a relevant essay, see my review of Owen Gingerich’s “God’s Universe” in the *print* version of “First Things” magazine, May 2007. You can buy the electronic version at http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-163063575.html)
As for “jettisoning any role for God,” it all depends (of course) on what it is that God is thought to be doing. My own view is that God does it *all*, and that our perceptions of the regularities God placed in the creation are what we call “laws” of nature (a term that has theological roots, to such an extent that atheist philosopher Nancy Cartwright wants to get rid of that term). God isn’t simply the explanation of every thing; God is the EXPLANATION of EVERYTHING. Not exactly out of a job.
Second point. My argument about the close connections between theism and natural philosophy in the Sci Rev was not along these lines: “most of those people were Christians; they saw no problems with science; neither should we.” Rather, it was an argument along these lines: “the very same methods that all scientists still use–a combination of reason and experience–came into prominence to a significant degree *because* those people believed that “nature” is a contingent order, created freely by a creator with the power to determine the nature of nature.” This hardly means that one has to be a Christian to use the same methods, but it does mean (IMO) that modern science is going to make a lot sense within a framework of a very robust theism. It also means that, when Dawkins asks, “what has theology ever done for us?”, one of the answers can be, “given you the scientific method”; and, when Coyne says that atheism could be science’s contribution to religion (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7208/full/4541049d.html), one can show the ironic fallacy of such a claim–as I did in a letter to Nature in response to his.
Ted,
Thank you for offering your insightful commentaries here.
During your interview with Michael I found it interesting when you suggested that his reading of the New Atheists was a partial one. I made the same point during a lengthy exchange I had here with Michael’s wife Connie Barlow on Ian Lawton’s page.
Michael has (rightly, IMO) characterized the New Athests as “God’s Prophets” for their role in confronting fundamentalist religious beliefs. Connie supports Michael’s position on pragmatic grounds, a stance I understand and respect. At the same time, one should not lose sight of the fact that the New Atheists are attacking religion in every guise and form, fundamentalist or not, and that’s a point you made in the interview and in the posts on this page. In my exchange with Connie I provided a list of some of the positions and activities of the New Atheists that demonstrate how much broader their agenda actually is.
Perhaps everyone has their own constructive role to play in this whole process. I am pleased that part of your own role is to expose the New Atheists’ own fundamentalist tendencies.
Jim
Great post, Jim.
And, Ted, thank you for the response to my query above. I just went to wikipedia and discovered that Hume (the atheist that Ted mentions) died 20 years before Georges Cuvier (in 1796) shocked the deistic intellectuals and naturalists of his time (notably, our own Thomas Jefferson) by providing sound evidence that the fossils of gigantic land creatures — mammoths and mastodons — represent extinct forms of elephant relatives. Previously, it had been the norm to assume that fossils of things like trilobites and Mesozoic reptiles represented forms of life in the depth of the ocean or its geographic hinterlands that humankind had not yet visited. But with giant land creatures — well, game over. So I wonder how Hume would have responded to Cuvier had he lived longer? Would his worldview have had to shift?
Things really came to a head in the 1830s when Iguanodon fossils were put together into a real skeleton in Europe, and then a couple decades later when the race to discover dinosaur fossils in the arid American West ensued. Gentle deism was getting really troublesome, I would imagine, by the time Darwin’s hand was forced by Wallace into writing the Origin of Species.
Overall, I love trying to step into the shoes of Thomas Jefferson at the time that he was confronted by Cuvier’s evidence. Similarly, I am old enough to have gloriously witnessed the tussle in geology and our overall understanding of the assumed gentleness of earth history when the Alvarez team published the somewhat serendipitous findings of iridium traces at the end-of-Cretaceous boundary layer — grounds for posing a meteor impact of biblical proportions as the non-uniformitarian cause of the death of T rex and cohorts.
And, post my last writings as a science writer, I have delighted in the popular works of Sean Carroll — bringing the next revolution in our thinking (evo-devo) into my understanding that, for me, utterly solves the problem of “macroevolution” that young-Earth-creationists have (rightfully, to my mind) been holding against us evoluitonists for decades. But with evo-devo, clearly, it is game over.
Overall, what a joy to delve into, and to some extent live through, the marvels of scientific discoveries that utterly change our view — ever more towards a sense that naturalistic forces in the world are more competent than we can yet imagine at producing the wonders of the pageant of life!
BTW: I posted a 10-minute video on my YouTube channel where I talk about Cuvier’s assertions and the philosophical resistance to them. It is titled “Time and Death: The Secrets of Evolution with Sagan, Cuvier, Darwin, Eiseley, and Barlow”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnTAzhLIEIg
Very interesting comments about Cuvier and Hume, Connie. Your instincts are right, concerning the ways in which Cuvier’s discoveries (and those of many others) were perceived, in terms of their impact on a generally deistic view of the world. A prime example, probably better than bringing Hume into this particular issue, would be the Scottish geologist James Hutton, whose idea of was later called “uniformitarianism” was so very influential on another Scot, Charles Lyell. Hutton and Lyell held (a priori) that the world is a “steady state,” i.e., that it does not undergo any major changes tending toward a certain “direction.” This was rooted in their shared theology of deism/Unitarianism, according to which the perfect God was obliged to make the best of all possible worlds, right from the start–essentially the view of Leibniz in his correspondence with Newton via Samuel Clarke. (Newton defended the contrary view, namely that God is free to act in different ways at different times–that would be a more perfect world than one in which God’s hands are bound.)
On that view, then, if God had created a world that would undergo major changes over time, then God would not have done the job right the first time. (This parallels the deist/Unitarian rejection of the need for God to take on human form in order to repair relationships that had gone wrong. The perfect creator would not have made a world that *could* have gone wrong to such an extent. Thus, incarnation and redemption are not part of the deist/Unitarian story; God must remain a constitutional monarch who did it right from the start.)
Lyell interpreted the fossil record in terms of such a steady state: even with extinction (which he accepted; he was post-Cuvier), there could not be absolutely new forms appearing on the earth, except for “man.” There had always been mammals, reptiles, birds, and amphibians; there had never been a time when only the fish existed. That is classical uniformitarianism.
The advocates of “catastrophism” (also a later term), on the other hand, held that God could create entirely new forms, through the eons of earth history, in separate creative acts de novo.
Ted -
One of my favorite history of science quotes that shows how a scientist has to work hard to accept evidence when it confronts his deepest worldview tenets is this quote by Tycho Brahe (when he witnessed a supernova explosion — seeming, to him, like the birth of a new star, not the death of an old one):
“When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.”
That is because, in his view, God and perfection existed beyond the distance of the moon — so anything out there amid the fixed stars, by definition, had to be changeless. No birth and death out there!
I see, again in your comment above, how God incarnating as Jesus is a vitally important piece in the logic of your worldview: “the need for God to take on human form in order to repair relationships that had gone wrong.” It all hangs together that way. So I am curious . . . Kevin Kelly sees God incarnating as Jesus as central to his Christianity too, but listening to his conversation (a couple days after yours) I was struck by his twist on that. No creator, not even God, who allows the creation to keep creating (via emergent processes) can absolutely ensure that nothing “evil” will eventually come of that creation. Sure enough, evil did emerge (at least here on Earth), so God incarnated as Jesus and took the cross to atone for HIS own unavoidable sin. Then Kelly ramps up to humans creating technology — if even God cannot preclude evil emerging in his creation that keeps creating, then surely humans will sometimes stumble in our new technologies: evil will emerge there too, and we will need to follow God’s example — we too will need to atone.
What do you think about Kelly’s take on the incarnation within Jesus — and how that applies to our own technological future?
Connie,
You’ve asked me a great question. This is going to be a very heavy week for me in my day job, and I don’t think I’ll be able to give Kevin Kelly’s ideas the hearing that I should give them, in order to answer you thoughtfully. The best I can do presently is to say that I also think (apparently in agreement with him) that we will continue to sin. For me, original sin is a key theological tenet. Although I don’t define it in terms of the “fall” of an original “pair” of humans in a “garden,” I do think that Chesterton and Niebuhr were right to say that original sin in the most empirically confirmed Christian doctrine. I don’t see the Incarnation/Crucifixion/Resurrection event as curing us entirely of our wicked tendencies, but I do see it as showing us (a) that we don’t have to live that way and (b) our eschatological hope for a new creation, entirely free of wickedness, is not in vain.
In other words: I don’t think we will achieve moral perfection in this life, but I do think we need to strive for it by imitating Christ. However, I think the belief that we *can* achieve moral perfection is this life is not only wrong theologically but actually dangerous politically and religiously. In terms of the history of evolution and religion, for example, it was a core background assumption to the “liberal” religious embracing of social Darwinism, esp in the USA in the early 20th century. (I will link the short, accurate summary provided by Kevin Shapiro: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/preaching-eugenics-by-christine-rosen-9779)
In short, I would say that a doctrine of the “fall” is absolutely crucial to my understanding of Christianity. It’s also pretty much confirmed by science, including evolutionary biology–according to which we are aggressive, self-interested animals. If we’re ever going to be wholly different, it will have to be in a new creation, not in this one.
Allow me to quote from the Book of Books (KJV)
Ecclesiastes 12:12 – of making many books, there is no end;and much study (and commentaries) is a weariness of the flesh.