More on Mohler

Some felt I was being unfair to Al Mohler in this recent post by stating his position in an unflatteringly blunt way.

As a general rule, it is best — both kindest and most constructive — to try to restate the positions of those with whom we disagree in terms they would accept. But I'm not sure that's possible with Mohler's position here. His implicit position seems deliberately left implicit and so any attempt, such as in the previous post, to state it explicitly is bound to introduce a clarity and starkness he seems to be hoping to avoid.

Mohler is quite clear and explicit in stating that he believes evolution to be contrary to the Bible. Evolution and the Bible, he says, cannot both be true. If evolution is true, then the Bible is false. And if the Bible is true, then evolution is false.

Any attempt to reconcile these two contrary things, Mohler suggests, is suspect. The scientists of the BioLogos Forum attempt this and Mohler believes this attempt is futile, dangerous and most likely the product of sinful motives such as pride, vanity and an unseemly desire to avoid "intellectual embarrassment."

I don't think Mohler would object to the above two paragraphs as a restatement of his position. The problem though is that by restating his position so clearly we also wind up restating his distortion of the position advocated by the BioLogos scientists. Because they are not merely suggesting that they have chosen or decided to regard evolution as true, they are stating that it is true — demonstrably true, regardless of whether or not one agrees to accept that it is so. Preference and choice and belief don't enter into it. Evolution is something they have seen and measured. It has provided the basis for decades of fruitful work on their behalf — work that would have been fruitless had it not been the case that evolution is, in fact, true. That it is, in fact, fact.

Mohler seems obstinately reluctant to accept that this is what they are saying. He insists on characterizing what they regard as fact as, instead, a belief — something they have chosen to "believe" in.

I've written about this idea of "belief" in evolution previously, so allow me to quote from that here:

It's hard to know what that means, exactly, to "believe in" or "not believe in" evolution. It's like not believing in Missouri, or not believing in thermal conduction. Those two examples are a bit different from one another, but they both get at aspects of what this odd sort of disbelief entails.

"Not believing in Missouri" doesn't affect the Show-Me State one way or another. To say that you don't "believe in" Missouri is really to say that you deny it exists — that its existence is a fact you refuse to accept. That's delusion No. 1. Delusion No. 2 is a corollary to that refusal — the idea that your belief or disbelief somehow makes it so. These are delusions because Missouri does, in fact, exist, and because its existence is not conditional upon your "belief" in the reality or unreality of that fact. Both of these deluded notions, I think, are a part of what many of those [60 percent of a 2009 Gallup poll] respondents meant when they told the pollster that they "do not believe" in evolution. …

On the other hand, if someone tells you that they "don't believe in" thermal conduction, it's likely that they're not so much saying they deny its existence as that they don't understand what you mean when you say "thermal conduction." For all their supposed disbelief, after all, they still avoid sitting on metal park benches in the winter. I suspect that something like that is the case with at least some of that 60 percent — that the more they can be led to understand this thing they don't believe in, the less they'll feel the need to disbelieve it.

Or, in Philip K. Dick's more succinct phrase, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

The BioLogos scientists present evidence for the truth of evolution and Mohler opts not to believe in it in the apparent hope or belief that it will therefore go away without him needing to give that evidence any serious evaluation. He dismisses that evidence and even the possibility of that evidence by stating that it simply "cannot" exist.

That's a remarkably casual dismissal considering that it was Al Mohler himself who framed this question as a matter of infinitely high stakes. If evolution is true, he has written repeatedly and emphatically, then the Bible is false — but he then pretends to be wholly unconcerned with whether or not evolution is, in fact, true.

That won't do.

You can't start out by saying "If X is true then the very core of my identity is false" and then go on to pretend as though you're not at all interested in examining the evidence that suggests X is true. That's not a credible or a legitimate response. When someone claims to have evidence that the very core of your identity is premised on a falsehood, then — so long as that someone is not a drooling, gibbering madman — you have no choice but to demand to see such evidence, if only for the opportunity to refute it.

Mohler's pose of glib contempt for the possibility of evidence worthy of his attention can only be just that — a pose. If his utter lack of concern and curiosity about such evidence were genuine, then it would be mind-bogglingly irresponsible, but I do not think it is genuine. I think it is a pose that allows him to evade the evidence without confronting it — a way of escaping an argument he has already lost. That argument isn't with the scientists of the BioLogos Forum, it's an argument with reality itself. And reality almost never loses such arguments.