This is the 3d part of my presentation to BioLogos this March.

Where do we go from here?

As a professor I teach my students at least two things about method: face the facts and do not fear the facts. I believe this means we have to face both what the New Testament teaches and what science teaches. So we are right back with our two facts: science’s view that human DNA goes back to more than two people and the Bible’s view that sin goes back to Adam (and Eve).

So we face the facts. The Bible really does make it look like Adam and Eve are humans from whom we descend, sin and death entailed. But scientists are going to tell us straightaway that Adam and Eve themselves had ancestors, one of whose millions of years old grave I walked into just outside Johannesburg South Africa in what is called “The Cradle of Humankind.” Here I encountered hominid fossils dated at 2-4 million years. (Well, not the fossils themselves but the places they found them and the pictures.) Others are going to tell us that the DNA make-up of humans today goes back to thousands and on and on… so we come to this point and it is for me the most significant pastoral question pastors need to ask in tandem with scientists is this one: What if we are wrong in our interpretations of the Bible? [Read more...]

The current issue of Books and Culture contains a review of The Language of Science and Faith by Karl Giberson and Francis S. Collins provided by Alvin Plantinga, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University Notre Dame. I worked through this book a bit over a year ago (March 2011) and you can find links to the posts in the Science and Faith Archive on the side bar (this one is easy to find as it is the first book on the page). The book by Giberson and Collins is an excellent book – one I would recommend to anyone who is beginning to think through the issues raised by science.

Plantinga’s review is something of a mixed bag, some excellent points mixed in with some not so useful comments and observations, the kinds of comments and misunderstandings I wish we could move beyond. You can (and should) read Plantinga’s review itself, available here. An excellent reflection on Plantinga’s review by David Opderbeck is also worth reading.

Plantinga meanders through a number of different issues that are raised by the intersection of evolutionary biology and the Christian faith. In rather annoying fashion he emphasizes “Darwinism” and separates it from evolution, he doesn’t appear to have read what Giberson and Collins actually wrote at places, rambles off on tangents (like the vitriolic nature of some of the internet world), and throws some asides I would not expect from a scholar of Plantinga’s reputation. As an example of the latter, he notes that many will think Giberson and Collins “a bit unduly sanguine about science” … well yes, that is true, “many” generic persons probably will; but Plantinga appears to endorse that thought and gives little reflection to the fact that Collins is both an expert on evolution and a Christian, while he is a Christian and a philosopher, but quite clearly not an expert on evolution. And then there is the ever annoying “An important feature of science is that it keeps changing in the face of new evidence; this very virtue, however, makes it a bit dicey to invest total confidence in its current deliverances.” While the statement is true in a fashion, it is not true in any way that has bearing on the intersection of science and Christian faith.

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My presentation at BioLogos… surely a highlight of this academic year was getting to attend the event and offer this presentation. It is a repost of what appeared originally at BioLogos, and this lecture will be spread out this week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

With a Tear in His Eye

At the end of a class on Genesis 1—2, having finished a freshly-brushed-up lecture I give at least once a school year, a student whose name I had just learned approached me with the kind of seriousness in his eyes a professor recognizes. He looked me in the eye and said, “Thank you. This lecture saved my faith.” He hadn’t said a word in class, and he hadn’t given off the signals one sometimes sees in student behavior that indicate mountains are moving in his head. I simply looked at him with the invitation to go on. So he did. “My pastor told me that I couldn’t be a Christian if I didn’t believe in six-day creationism. He told me if God didn’t create some 10,000 years ago, then the whole Bible fell apart.” He paused then said this, “I love science and I want to be a biologist, and the earth is more than 10,000 years old. So I was wondering if I could believe in the Bible and the Christian faith any longer.” The element that gave this young biologist the courage to continue was no less than eighteen points from John Walton’s book The Lost World of Genesis One. I’m not sure that the cosmic temple theory got him excited as much as a credible, historical Ancient Near Eastern reading of Genesis 1—2 (we’re waiting for Genesis 3, John) that meant it wasn’t talking about a creation ex nihilo some 6-10,000 years ago. In public schools this student had been taught that science tells us the universe is 13.7 billion years old and the earth is about 4.5 billion years and quantum physics is giving that period of time life and choice it never knew before (or that we never knew before). [Read more...]

I was recently sent a copy of the new book by Harry Lee Poe and Jimmy H. Davis God and the Cosmos: Divine Activity in Space, Time and History. Harry Lee Poe (Ph.D., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is the Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University in Jackson TN, Jimmy H. Davis (Ph.D. University of Illinois) is University Professor of Chemistry at Union University.

In God and the Cosmos Poe and Davis explore the interaction of God with his creation. There are two parts to their approach. Part One explores ideas about the kind of God who interacts with the world and the ways humans have considered this across cultures, religions, and time. Part Two turns this around and asks about the kind of world that allows God to interact.

Part One: What kind of God interacts with the world?

This section of the book does not address this question directly – but rather asks questions about the way humans have conceived of God and the way this impacts ideas concerning God’s action in the world. Poe and Davis begin with a survey of the way that God or divinity is understood in major world religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam. This is an interesting survey – although the discussion of Judaism makes such a break with Christianity that it left me scratching my head at times.

How do we think about God?

How does this affect the way we think about God’s interaction with the world?

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Amina Khan:

Does this not need also to be examined from the angle of how we influence our own brains on the basis if what kind of thinking we do?

Scientists have revealed one of the reasons why some folks are less religious than others: They think more analytically, rather than going with their gut. And thinking analytically can cause religious belief to wane — for skeptics and true believers alike.

The study, published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, indicates that belief may be a more malleable feature of the human psyche than those of strong faith may think.

The cognitive origins of belief — and disbelief — traditionally haven’t been explored with academic rigor, said lead author Will Gervais, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

“There’s been a long-standing intellectual tradition of treating science as one thing and religion as separate, and never the twain shall meet,” he said. But in recent years, he added, there has been a push “to understand religion and why our species has the capacity for religion.” [Read more...]

In 1962 Thomas S. Kuhn published a book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Few academic books become classics – must reads in a field, much less more broadly. Kuhn’s book has achieved that status – some 1.4 million copies sold and still counting. And more have heard of the broad concepts of his work than have read the book I am sure. Although Kuhn’s premise – that scientific revolutions represent changes in an accepted conceptual framework more than progress toward an objective truth – is rightly criticized by many, his insight and insistence that the conceptual frameworks of science are always influenced by historical and social factors remains an important, even revolutionary, contribution. In this, its 50th year, Kuhn’s book is again a subject for reflection. The April 27th issue of The Chronicle Review (Section B of The Chronicle of Higher Education) has a nice essay on the book, Shift Happens by David Weinberger (p. B7-B9).

I first became aware of Kuhn’s book and his ideas when I began exploring the relationship between science and the Christian faith. The book was frequently referred to by Christians and used as a means to dismiss and discount scientific theories, most importantly the theory of evolution, as representative of an objective reality. The theories of modern science are merely human constructs to be overturned and overthrown as cultures change. As a result I bought the book, and have read much (but not all) of it. There is no doubt that Kuhn contributed important insight into understanding the progress of science … but this book is also not the end of the story.

Toward the end of his article Weinberger notes:

Consider the popular take on SSR: Science consists of self-coherent bubbles that replace one another without necessarily progressing closer to the truth—a model of nonrationalism. This misunderstanding of Kuhn is understandable given his unwillingness to blurt out what so many of his readers wanted to hear: There are propositions that are true because they correspond to reality. “Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature, and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?,” he wrote in SSR. Well, yes, it would, if we’re trying to show that our knowledge is progressively more in accord with that objective reality. But if that approach is closed to us—”We must learn to get along without anything at all like a correspondence theory of truth,” he wrote in 1986—we need another idea of what truth is and how we can ascertain if we’re progressing closer to it.

Thomas Kuhn called into question the right of science and scientists as the priests of a new religion to declare that they had achieved Truth with a capital T. But in doing this all he really did was to bring science down from a pedestal and place it on the same plane as all other forms of human knowledge. “Objective” reality is what we, in our particular time, social environment, and context, make of it. Given this it strikes me as odd that Christians, who believe in an absolute truth, latch on so readily to Kuhn’s ideas.

Why do Christians find Kuhn and his ideas so appealing?

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I was recently sent by the publisher a copy of the new book by Harry Lee Poe and Jimmy H. Davis God and the Cosmos: Divine Activity in Space, Time and History. Harry Lee Poe (Ph.D., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is the Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University in Jacksonville Jackson TN, Jimmy H. Davis (Ph.D. University of Illinois) is University Professor of Chemistry at Union University. This book should prove to be something a bit different from our usual fare of late.

There are a number of different questions at play in the discussion of the interaction between science and the Christian faith. For some people the controversy over creation and evolution is driven by a desire to be faithful to scripture, and explicitly to a favored interpretation of scripture. Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis fall into this category.  For others there is an appreciation for the sciences, but also a conviction that if the science is true traces of it will be found in scripture. Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe fall into this category. But there is another set of question at play, especially within the Intelligent Design movement. Science and scientists are finding a natural explanation for all manner of phenomena formerly attributed to the work of God. This appears to squeeze God into an increasingly small corner of the universe – and many argue it removes God from the picture all together. As Laplace famously replied to Napoleon … we have “no need of that hypothesis.”  Poe and Davis are addressing these latter kinds of questions in their book. Can a transcendent and personal God really act in the universe? and Can science help us answer this question? The answers are not what one might expect – and call into question some of the assumptions that motivate the search for Intelligent Design.

The introduction to the book begins with reflections by Davis and Poe. Davis begins by posing the question – where is God in, for example, a chemical reaction? The reaction is the same and the explanation is the same whatever the worldview or presupposition of the person who brings together the reactants and starts the process.

Modern science assumes that all physical events have physical causes. In order to find these causes, modern science breaks down the event into parts and looks for some mechanism (pattern of connections) that give rise to the event being studied. Modern science explains natural phenomena in terms of natural events and does not invoke supernatural invention. (p. 15)

There is an assumption of methodological naturalism inherent in the process. This leads many to a further assumption that the description of the universe or any process in the universe is a zero-sum game. If there is a 100% natural explanation for some process – there is no room divine involvement.  There may be a God – but if the explanation of the universe is a zero-sum game we are quickly left with a deist view of God. He got things started, set the laws, and now steps back and lets it go.

Davis suggests that the error in this approach lies in the mechanical view of the cosmos. The models we construct are closed machines. But there is an intrinsic openness in nature – seen in quantum phenomena, chaos, and epigenetics.

This openness is an internal part of nature, not a God-of-the-Gaps ignorance that will one day be removed. We suggest in this monograph that God is there not only in the working of the “machine” but in the underlying software that tells the “machine” how to behave in a particular situation. It is an open universe providing an open vista on which the master Artist can craft what he wills. (p. 23)

Do you think explanations for observed phenomena are a zero-sum game – either there is a natural explanation or there is divine action?

What is the case for Intelligent Design? What should we expect?

[Read more...]