Science and ID

I'm currently listening to a series of lectures on the historical interactions between Western science and Christianity. The lecturer is Lawrence Principe, who's a professor in chemistry and history of science at Johns Hopkins.

Among the points he makes in the lectures are:

1. The "warfare" model of science-religion interactions is a product of the late 19th century and is historically inaccurate.

2. Intelligent Design does not add anything useful to science, even if one is a believer, and purely naturalistic science has not historically come packaged with atheism.

His take on ID was particularly interesting. He situates ID in the tradition of natural theology stretching back centuries and in attempts by "natural philosophers" (i.e., scientists) in the 17th century to come up with ways to distinguish between miracles and the normal workings of nature.

Principe points out that one of the claims of IDers is that ID has explanatory force regarding scientific questions. The problem is that "God did X" doesn't provide an explanation, at least not in the scientific or analytical sense. It's equivalent to saying that something was a miracle. If something was a miracle -- the direct work of a god -- then it's inherently beyond our analytical ability. It can't be broken down any further.

Even if we accept that, for example, the Christian god created the universe, that idea neither advances our scientific understanding nor hinders our search for explanations of natural phenomena.

EDIT: Some of the Q&A regarding the above post, from the Philosophy & Religion discussion board at IMDb:

Theist: "Then why do evolutionist professors see the 'ID' movement as such a threat?"

Response: "I don't think science professors see ID as a threat. Certainly not as a threat to science. If anything, they see it as an annoyance. It's an annoyance because IDers fill (some of) their students' heads with the mistaken ideas that (1) ID deserves to be called 'science,' and (2) it's not taught in science class because of a conspiracy among 'secular humanist' scientists. They react to ID claims with the same exasperation that your doctor would display if you told him/her that, instead of taking the medicine s/he prescribed for your high cholesterol, you're going to have a shaman wave a rattle over your loins."

The Bible

The Bible comes in for a lot of abuse from the average atheist. Too often, s/he seems to simply dismiss it as a "book of fairy tales."

I wouldn't deny that the Bible does contain some stories that could fairly be characterized as fairy tales. But it also contains much, much more than that.

The Bible is of course an anthology of ancient works written at widely different times by different people. The Old Testament (mostly written between about 900 and 500 BCE) includes works whose literary value matches almost anything produced during the same period by other cultures. As for the New Testament, from a literary standpoint it's widely agreed to be greatly inferior in quality to the OT. It is, however, fascinating from a historical perspective, since it includes hints of everyday life in the ancient Near East that can't be found in any other primary sources we have.

"Official" Bible translations typically homogenize everything and thus give a poor sense of the Bible's literary merits. To get a sense of the literary qualities of the OT, I recommend A Poet's Bible, which consists of terrific translations by David Rosenberg. (It's inexplicably out of print, but lots of used editions are available.) I also recommend The Book of J, which contains Rosenberg's translation of the portions of the Pentateuch believed to have been written by a single author referred to as "J" (short for the "Jahwist" or "Yahwist"). If you read the reviews on Amazon, you'll find a lot of quibbles with Rosenberg's work, mainly because, in an effort to bring the ancient texts to life, he takes liberties with the literal meanings. But he has tried to do something really unique and significant in rescuing the Bible from ritualism.

Rational Arguments for God and Apologetics

I recently finished reading Julian Baggini's Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (from Oxford's "Very Short Introduction" series). Toward the end of the book, he gets into arguments for & against religion. I think he makes a good point about arguments for the existence of a god:

Pick up any introduction to the philosophy of religion and you'll see a number of traditional arguments for the existence of God. ... [T]o my mind it is not worth spending too much time on them for the simple reason that these arguments don't provide the reasons why people become religious. This isn't just my view, but the honest opinion of many religious people who give much thought to these arguments. For instance, Peter Vardy, a Christian philosopher and author of several leading textbooks in the philosophy of religion which consider these arguments, calls them 'a waste of time'. Russell Stannard, the leading physicist who wrote a book called The God Experiment on evidence for God's existence, says, 'I don't have to believe in God, I know that God exists -- that is how I feel'. In other words, evidence and arguments are neither here nor there -- it is personal conviction that really counts.

Baggini then explains that these arguments were never intended to prove that a god exists, but instead were apologetics:

The function of such arguments is not to show that God exists, but to show that belief in God does not require any irrationality. It is about reconciling belief and reason, not showing belief to be justified through reason.

I agree with this analysis. As proofs, the arguments for a god are quite weak. They make a lot more sense as efforts to show that belief in a god can be consistent with a rational approach to life.

(cross-posted from the Philosophy & Religion discussion board at IMDb.)

The Santa Claus / Tooth Fairy Argument

In his book Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, Julian Baggini discusses the objection to atheism that it is "too committed to the value of rational explanation." This objection maintains, he says, that atheists are wrong when they say we should disbelieve in "anything we have no rational reason to think exists." According to Baggini, the problem with this objection is that

it open[s] the door to any number of irrational absurdities. For example, if you want to seriously argue that we should believe in things we have no rational reason to think exist, why not believe in the tooth-fairy? (Non-atheists tend to get irritated when atheists invoke entities such as the tooth-fairy and Santa Claus to illustrate the ridiculousness of permitting belief in what is not rational, but such irritation does not comprise a serious counter-argument.)

I understand what Baggini is saying here and think his reasoning is good. But by using the tooth-fairy and Santa Claus as examples, I think he makes his argument seem weaker than it really is.

Believing in a god doesn't necessarily open the door to believing in any absurdity. Some things we have no reason to think exist are much more absurd than others. We have a very good basis for not believing in the tooth-fairy or Santa Claus, since we know that parents are the ones who put money under kids' pillows and presents under Christmas trees. There isn't "room" for such beings in the same way there could be room for certain types of gods.

Baggini could have made his point more persuasively by using "absurdities" that are not as easily disproven as the tooth-fairy and Santa Claus. Alien abductions, for example, or the gods of dead religions.

(cross-posted with minor edits from the Philosophy & Religion discussion board at IMDb)

Epitomes of Christian Theology

As a former Roman Catholic, I find these amusing:

"God had to kill Himself, to appease Himself, so that He wouldn't have to roast us, his beloved creations, alive for all eternity. Except that He didn't really die."

"God sacrificed himself to himself to appease himself."

"God sacrificed Himself to Himself to appease Himself so that He could change a rule that He made which said that His creations should be punished for being how He created them, and that
He knew He would one day have to change."

(from the Philosophy & Religion discussion board at IMDb.)