Gospel Disproof #24: PID

Back when I was a Christian, the big controversy was over something called “scientific creationism,” the view that you ought to be allowed to teach Genesis in public schools as long as you did so under the guise of presenting it as a scientific theory of origins. But it flopped. It was too easy to see through, and too blatantly anti-scientific. Then some lawyer decided to write Darwin On Trial and show all those biologists where they were wrong. Thus, the modern Intelligent Design movement was born.

The problem with ID is that it’s really just superstition in a lab coat. You find some natural phenomenon whose origins you do not understand, and you jump to the conclusion that no one will ever understand it, because some magical power or being created it supernaturally. It’s a “scientific” approach with at least a couple problems, even for Christians.

First, because it depends on not understanding the origins of natural phenomena, it’s intrinsically hostile to any branch of science (e.g. evolution) that successfully does explain the natural origin of things. It is therefore inescapably anti-science, rather than part of a proper scientific domain. But the bigger problem for Christians is that ID, as “scientific” evidence for God, supports polytheism a lot better than monotheism.

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Gospel Disproof #23: The Star of Bethlehem

John Loftus has an interesting post up about the various inconsistencies in Gospel stories about Jesus’ alleged birth at Bethlehem. I’m going to piggyback on just one part of that story: the bit about the “wise men” from the East who followed a star to the place where Jesus was born. According to Matthew, their first stop was Jerusalem, where they asked King Herod where the next king was going to be coming from. Herod sent them to Bethlehem, based on a prophecy in Micah, so they went back to following the star.

After hearing the king, they went their way; and the star, which they had seen in the east, went on before them until it came and stood over the place where the Child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. After coming into the house they saw the Child with Mary His mother; and they fell to the ground and worshiped Him.

Let’s do just a quick reality check here: the next time there’s a clear night, go outside, pick any star you can see, and tell me which house it’s over. Kind of hard, right? Now wait 10 or 15 minutes. Which house is it over now?

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Verifiable worldviews

If you ask young-earth creationists what they think about postmodernism, you’ll find they generally consider it the height of liberal apostasy. Truth, they’ll tell you, is absolute, and not just some postmodernist “social construct.” If you then point out some of the scientific evidence against a literal Genesis creation, you’ll catch them in a bit of hypocrisy. Everybody has a worldview, they’ll tell you. Theirs is a Christian worldview, and yours is a materialistic worldview, and the same evidence can be used to support either one. In other words, your evidence can’t disprove their creationism.

Whether you call it “postmodernism” or whether you prefer the more verbose “everybody has a worldview,” the result is the same: you’re claiming that it’s impossible to tell what the real truth is by comparing your conclusions to the evidence. Worldview (allegedly) overpowers the evidence, and colors one’s conclusions to the point that all conclusions end up being subjective and irrelevant. That’s postmodernism in a nutshell—the very doctrine the creationists condemn as liberal apostasy. But creationism can’t survive without it.

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The ID Zombie

It’s the 20-year anniversary of Darwin on Trial, the book that started the Intelligent Design movement, and here, via PZ Myers, is a link to Jason Rosenhouse’s blog post, “ID is Dead.” It’s a good review of what ID has failed to accomplish in the past 20 years, but at first I thought, “Gosh, I hope he’s wrong. It would really be terrible if ID were dead.” Then I remembered: Hey, these are fundamentalist Christians we’re talking about. Keeping dead things alive in their hearts and dreams is like second nature to them. And sure enough, here’s a post by David Klinghoffer doing what ID’ers do best: pouting, patronizing, and bragging about what might be called peer-reviewed ID papers if you aren’t too picky about details. I’m confidently optimistic that the ID zombie is alive-ish and shambling, and we’ll continue to see him lurching about for many years to come.

Why is that a good thing? Because Intelligent Design—or perhaps we should call it Not Intelligent Enough Design—is a great way to show that Yahweh is a man-made God.

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Why evangelicals believe weird things

There’s an awesome article over at scienceandreligiontoday.com, with the irresistible title of “Why Evangelicals Believe Weird Things.”

Lay evangelicals evaluate the arguments made by “experts” in a manner different from many non-evangelicals. The latter will often ask: How prestigious is her academic pedigree? Is she representing the consensus of similarly credentialed experts? Insofar as I can understand her arguments, do they convince me? Lay evangelicals ask different questions: How good of a Christian is this guy? (Or, in evangelical parlance, “How is his walk with the LORD?”) How closely do his arguments line up with my understanding of the Bible? Is this guy one of us?

Evangelicals also tend to come under the sway of those with the biggest microphones, not the best arguments. Although many evangelical scholars are also capable of projecting piety, they rarely have the resources to flood the airwaves or the communication skills to connect with the average believer…

The evangelical community also keeps its scholars in check. When a college’s base of donors, prospective students, and even board of trustees are made up of lay evangelicals, this places severe limits on what its scholars can say publicly. This fact became apparent at my alma mater, Calvin College, when public outcry and the powers that be combined to silence two scholars advocating the acceptance of human evolution.

The comments are a pretty interesting read too.

The Dawkins/Lewis debate

Looks like the fine folks at “Truthbomb Apologetics” have set up an impromptu “debate” of their own between Richard Dawkins and C. S. Lewis. It has this in its favor: it’s short.

Richard Dawkins: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

C.S. Lewis: “If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”

Notice the difference in the two approaches. Dawkins’ approach is based on reason and evidence: we consider the consequences that would result from having a universe created by a good God for the purpose of bringing souls to eternal bliss, and the consequences that would result from the absence of such a God, and then observe which set of consequences is closer to the data we actually observe. Lewis, on the other hand, uses an equivocation fallacy to make it sound like the evidence has to point to God no matter what form it takes.

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Physics and Philosophy

Over at the other blog, my coverage of William Lane Craig’s cosmological arguments has attracted the attention of a commenter whose URL is biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com. He has at least one comment on each of my posts starting with the one I published three weeks ago, and part of his first comment is this:

I see no reason to believe that the cause must occur before the effect. For example, if I throw a brick through a window, the brick does not pass through the window before the window breaks. At the precise moment the window breaks the brick is acting upon the window. Cause and effect are simultaneous.

He’s responding to my argument that time (and thus the material universe of space-time) must exist before cause and effect is possible, because cause and effect exist in a chronological order, and the cause has to happen before the effect. I know what I want to say in response, but perhaps some of you who know subatomic physics could comment on whether or not I’m on the right track.

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Evidence for God’s incompetence

Writing for ID propaganda haus Evolution News, Casey Luskin criticizes scientists for claiming to have evidence supporting evolution.

In the case of Richard Lenski’s Long Term Evolution Experiments (LTEE) with E. Coli bacteria, we saw that Dennis Venema of BioLogos cited purported examples of natural selection increasing specified and complex information — but intelligent design (ID) proponents had long before critiqued these examples.

As ID proponents keep reminding us, the God of the Bible is simply incapable of creating any natural systems complex and sophisticated enough to generate genuine “complex, specified information.” It’s not surprising, since God never went to college and has no advanced degrees in biology. I rather doubt He even understands the mechanisms proposed by real biologists. But then, that’s not really His fault. You don’t get to choose your own parents, and mythical deities don’t get to choose the educational level of the primitive tribesmen who imagine Them.

Thanks to Mr. Luskin for reminding us of what the “Intelligent Designer” is absolutely and definitively incapable of. It’s reassuring to us unbelievers to know that real people are smarter than He is.

This week on ER: A question of origins

In this week’s installment of our tour through On Guard by William Lane Craig, we look at his discussion of the scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe. Dr. Craig’s tone is hugely biased, of course, but despite this he does a remarkably good job of presenting an overview of modern cosmology, and it’s one I hope a lot of Christians and creationists pay attention to.

It’s only when he tries to make his faith fit in, at the end, that he really screws things up.

Read more at Evangelical Realism.