Category: science

Book Plunge: Why Science Does Not Disprove God

What do I think of Amir Aczel’s book published by William Morrow? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

The New Atheists have by and large appeared to agree that if they’re going to disprove Christianity, they’re going to go the route of science. It’s a quite strange route really, but it’s the route taken because today most people do think scientifically, or at least think that they do. Unfortunately, a lot of people who make science their forte and ignore all the other areas tend to have that show in their argumentation. Richard Dawkins is no philosopher, but that doesn’t mean he has no grounds to take on the Thomistic arguments obviously. Victor Stenger isn’t a historian, but that won’t stop him from talking about the historical Jesus as if he was an authority. In our day and age, the scientists have become the new priesthood. This is not to disparage science, but it is to say that when scientists speak outside of their field on areas they have not studied, we have no reason to take them as authorities.

Aczel will not take them as authorities either and has written a work demonstrating the fallacies in their thinking. When reading the work, it is unclear also what side Aczel falls on. He does not write like a Christian. In many ways, he does not even write like a theist. Still, his main contention is that the new atheists are doing a disservice to the arguments. He knows the material well and has spoken to many of the best scientific minds out there on the topic. Due to his different positions in the area of religion, it will be difficult for opponents of his to play the bias card.

The downside is that the work is largely a defensive work in that sense and thus does not really touch on the positive arguments for the existence of God. Of course, it does have some areas in science that certainly can seem to point to a deity, but at this point the idea of “God-of-the-Gaps” is trotted out. (Strangely enough, the critics of theism never consider they are going with a “naturalism-of-the-gaps.”) Of course, Aczel could say that these are positive evidences such as the fine-tuning of the universe, and in that case he would indeed be right. The question is not “What is the best explanation of what we don’t know?” but rather “What is the best explanation of what we do know?”

Absent are the great philosophical arguments for the existence of God, which I think are ultimately the way to go. Science can give evidence, but it is not the final authority, despite what many will think and some will think I am attacking science simply by saying that. I instead prefer to think I am giving science its proper field, which is the study of material objects and the material world. The ramifications that one draws from that study are indeed philosophical and the sad reality is that many scientists do turn out to be poor philosophers, but that has never really stopped them from trying!

Ultimately, people who are advocating that science has disproven God are in fact doing science a disservice and limiting people in the field by saying that if you are going to be a serious scientist, you cannot be religious. A lot of great minds who are religious also could be dissuaded from entering the field and who knows what benefits they could bring? From a Christian standpoint, we have too often made it be science vs. religion and when that happens, people will go with whatever they think makes the most important contributions to their lives. Some scientists would be shocked to hear religious people think religion makes the most contribution, but indeed most do. Most think of the morals that they ascribe to their religion and the sense of meaning they find and the wonder of the universe. The scientific view of atheism frankly doesn’t offer an appeal to them and sadly they think “If it’s science or the Bible, so much the worse for science.”

Now I am not of this standpoint as I think it’s not either/or but both/and and the problem is a fundamentalism on both sides that thinks because you know something in one field, you know all fields. Having a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology does not qualify you to speak on Aristotelian philosophy or the study of the New Testament. Believing that your Scripture is the Word of God and that you have an infallible and inerrant message does not mean that you are therefore in the right on everything that you speak about. Both sides are making the same kind of mistake. Consider what one Christian authority said on this:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field in which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

Who said that? Augustine did, about sixteen centuries ago. It still stands today.

Aczel’s book will be a good read for those interested in this debate, though at times if you’re not familiar, the terminology can get difficult to follow, but it does for the most part tend to be readable. If you’re interested in this kind of debate, this is a book you should seriously consider.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist

What do I think of Andy Bannister’s book by Monarch Books? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

As I have studied apologetics more and more, sometimes reading apologetics books now gets boring. It’s a lot of the same-old, same-old. You’ve heard it all several times before and there’s nothing new so what’s the big deal. Honestly, getting Bannister’s book, I was expecting I’d get a good primer on some apologetics issues and put it down thinking that I had had a decent enough read and that’d be it. I don’t mean that in a snide way at all. Many of these books are fine for beginners after all and I read them wanting to learn how well this would help someone who was starting out in the field.

I could not have been more wrong.

As I started going through Andy’s book, from the very beginning I saw that it was different. Now the content is still a good basic start for most people. You’re not going to get into the intensely heady stuff here. You will discuss the issues, but it is just a start. What makes this book so radically different and in turn one of the best that I’ve read on this kind of topic in a long time is the presentation. Bannister is quite the comedian. His humor shines throughout the book and this is one book where I had great joy whenever I saw there was a footnote. Normally, you tend to just pass those over. Do not do that with this book! You will find some of the best humor.

That makes the content all the more memorable. Bannister deals with a lot of the soundbite arguments that we deal with in our culture such as “You are an atheist with regards to many gods. I just go one god further.” He deals with scientism and what faith is and can we be good without God and can we really know anything about the historical Jesus? If you spend time engaging with people who follow the New Atheists on the internet, then you need to get your hands on this book. With humor and accuracy, Bannister deals with the nonsense, which tells us that in light of all the work he invested in this that first off, Bannister is highly skilled as an apologist and second, that Bannister has way too much free time on his hands to be thinking so much about this stuff.

I really cannot say much more because it would I think keep you from enjoying all the surprises in this book. There were many times my wife had to ask me as I read “What’s so funny?” Some parts I even read to her. If there was one thing I would change, it was the chapter on the question of goodness. I don’t think Bannister really answered the question of what it means to be good. He said we need a God to ground it in, and I agree, but that does not tell me what good is. Even if we say the good is God’s nature, that still does not tell me what the good is, yet we all know that people know the good and the evil without knowing who God is.

Still, do yourself a favor. Get this book and then sit down and prepare for a fun and worthwhile time. You’ll laugh and you’ll enjoy yourself so much you could lose track of how much good apologetics is sinking in.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Andy Bannister’s book can be purchased here.

Book Plunge: Faith vs Fact Conclusion

What are our concluding thoughts on Coyne’s book? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

It’s time to wrap up our look at Coyne’s book with asking why this matters. Now I do agree on this point. This does matter. As you can imagine, I disagree greatly with the conclusion of Coyne.

Coyne does list a number of evils that have been done by religious people. This cannot be denied. What can be denied is that Christians themselves aren’t doing anything about this. When I lived in Charlotte, I worked at the Christian Research Institute. Hank Hanegraaff who ran it is quite well-known for dealing with the prosperity Gospel movement, including such ideas as that healing is guaranteed in the atonement. The overwhelming majority of Christians would look at the events that Coyne talks about and say that they condemn them as well. Now some could say that this is based on promises of Scripture, but such promises are read through modern lenses instead of understanding the social and linguistic context of the first century. For instance, ask anything in my name is not a blank check. It means that you will receive anything you ask for that is in line with the will of the Master, and sometimes healing frankly isn’t in line with that.

If Coyne wants to say the kind of thinking done by these people should be stopped, I wholeheartedly agree. The reason it got this way is sadly, anti-intellectualism did sneak into the church. Such a view is really the exception to what has gone on in church history. I also contend that it has made its way into atheism, especially in the age of the internet where we live in a soundbite culture where someone thinks if you just put up a meme, the meme itself is an argument. Memes can be hilarious illustrations of arguments, but they should never be used as arguments themselves.

On page 229, Coyne warns about missionizing, which is an attempt to force your unsubstantiated beliefs on others.

The irony is so rich….

For one thing, I would really like to know how anyone can force a belief or even attempt to. We can only attempt to persuade. Some people will do a terrible job because frankly, they haven’t done their homework and don’t know about the historical evidence for their claims. (People like Jerry Coyne for instance and people like fundamentalist Christians) These people want to argue for what they believe but they don’t read the best scholarly works out there that disagree with them. (Again, people like Jerry Coyne and fundamentalist Christians.) When they meet people who know what they’re talking about, it’s quite apparent that the person wanting to make the argument just isn’t prepared.

So if I wanted to point to a clear example of missionizing, I’d point to Coyne’s book. Remember everyone, this is someone speaking on philosophical terminology who says

Another problem is that scientists like me are intimidated by philosophical jargon, and hence didn’t interrupt the monologues to ask for clarification for fear of looking stupid. I therefore spent a fair amount of time Googling stuff like “epistemology” and “ontology” (I can never get those terms straight since I rarely use them).

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/sean-carroll-assesses-the-stockbridge-workshop/

And as for theological arguments he says

This is an area about which I’m completely ignorant, and happy to remain so, because it sounds like a godawful cesspool of theological lucubration. It of course begins with three completely unsupported premises: that there is a God, that that God has a mind that has “beliefs,” and that how we act now somehow influences God’s beliefs about our actions long before we performed them. It sounds as if what we do now, then, can go back in time and change God’s beliefs. (That, at least, is how I interpret the gobbledygook above.)
Given those three bogus assumptions, the candidate will then spend many dollars ruminating about how God’s prior beliefs relate to the philosophy of time and metaphysics of dependence, whatever that means.
In other words, all the money is going to work out the consequences of a fairy tale. So much money for so much “sophisticated” philosophy!

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/templeton-funds-inquiry-into-how-god-remembers-stuff/

So here we have someone who has to google basic terms in philosophy and who confesses to being ignorant in theology and happy to remain so, but yet wants to teach us on both of these.

Seriously?

Coyne also says that Natural Law on page 245 refers to innate morality supposedly vouchsafed to Catholics by God and understood by reason.

This from the one who complains about missionizing.

Natural Law is a rich tradition that goes back to the Greeks prior to Christianity. It is the simple idea that there is good and evil and we can all know them by virtue of being human beings and learning. We don’t need any divine revelation for that. It’s also not just a Catholic thing. Muslims and Jews could argue the same. So could Protestants. Perhaps it would have helped Coyne had he, you know, actually read something on Natural Law.

I’d also like to share how on page 250 ending a section on global warming, he talks about how the Vatican has an observatory, which is surprising to most people, and how Father Guy Consolmagno of it says it serves “to make people realize that the church not only supports science, literally….but we support and embrace and promote the use of both our hearts and our brains to come to know how the universe works.” Coyne takes this as a clear expression that people believe what they like to be true rather than what science tells us. How is that so?

It’s hardly necessary to add that the heart is not an organ for thinking, and that we can never understand ‘how the universe works’ by using our emotions, via faith, instead of reason. Father Consolmagno’s heart, for example, has convinced him that if extraterrestrial beings exist, that they have souls like ours.”

It’s hardly necessary to point out to most people on planet Earth, which sadly do not include Coyne, that it’s quite clear that Consolmagno is using metaphorical language here. He is not at all saying that he thinks with the heart any more than someone is denying science when they tell their wife “I love you with all of my heart.” We can easily picture Coyne saying “The heart is not an organ for loving!”

For anyone out there who thinks like Coyne, the claim is simply that with our very beings we can work to know the universe. While it could include emotions, the quote does not refer to them. (It would be a mistake also to say love is an emotion. It can result in powerful emotions we call love, but love itself is not an emotion.) I am sure if Coyne was to debate Consolmagno, he’d find Consolmagno actually has reasons for what he believes, including about aliens.

So where does this all end? Coyne’s big mistake here is the same one that many people make on the Christian side. By making the debate to be science vs. the Bible, most people in America will actually choose the Bible. God does more for them in their minds than science does. God gives them more wonder and purpose in their lives than science does. This is also tragic because Coyne would have to be able to admit that many Christians do have wonderful minds (Who wants to say people like Francis Collins are idiots?) and yet if he makes it an either/or proposition, then he is keeping some of those minds out of science.

Unfortunately, the way many Christians have handled issues like evolution has perpetuated this. Perhaps evolution will fall as bad science some day like some other theories have. I cannot say, but let us be open to the possibility. If it does, let it fall because it is bad science. There is no place for making it be the Bible vs. Science. If you believe the Bible, then you should believe that it won’t contradict science. If that is the case, then the way to show something is wrong in the world of science is to do so scientifically. Using the Bible to do this just perpetuates the stereotype.

Coyne then in wanting to end the problem is in fact making it worse by his works. This is especially so when he writes about topics that he does not know about. It’s really ironic that someone who wants to talk about evidence-based belief takes such a light approach to evidence in what he critiques. The objections that Coyne thinks are stumpers could be seen as parallel to what evolutionists think when they’re told “Well if we came from apes, why are there still apes?” Now could I answer that question? No, because I’m not a scientist and I won’t even try. That’s why I don’t speak on it. I do trust that regardless of my stance on evolution, it would be a bad argument anyway.

This gets us to the tragedy that in one sense, Coyne is right. Faith is opposed to fact. How? Because if science is really that evidence-based belief including history, had Coyne actually read the evidence, he would see a strong case that Christianity is true and Jesus rose from the dead. Since he does not treat evidence seriously but only cherry-picks what is in line with what he already believes without interacting with the best scholarship on the other side, then Coyne is acting on faith. In that case, had Coyne done a proper scientific inquiry, he would have seen that Christianity is true, but as a priest of his religion of scientism, Coyne cannot allow evidence that goes against his faith. The religion of Coyne and the science that demonstrates that Christianity is true are certainly incompatible. It looks like Coyne has decided to be a person of faith instead of a person of science in this case.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Part 1 can be found here.

Part 2 can be found here.

Part 3 can be found here.

Part 4 can be found here.

Book Plunge: Faith vs Fact Part 4

How does Coyne handle it when faith strikes back? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Today we’re going to cover chapter 4 where Faith Strikes Back as Coyne says. I was very pleased to see that he dealt with the Kalam Cosmological Argument of Bill Craig by…

Well, okay. He didn’t deal with that. But hey, you can’t expect him to deal with everything.

Instead, he chose to focus on the Thomistic arguments and he dealt there with…

Okay. So he didn’t deal with those.

About the only arguments you see are ID and the moral argument. Even then, the moral argument is definitely misunderstood. As I am not someone who considers myself a proponent of ID, I will leave that to those who are.

Naturally, we start with a god of the gaps argument, yet I wonder why this is always brought up. In the medieval period, people were looking for natural arguments for why things happened just as much as we were. Did they get them right all the time? No. Of course not. Just like we don’t. In fact, when they filled in a “gap” that led them to have more of awe. It was a mindset that would look and say “I never would have thought about doing it that way.” I suspect this is also one reason why that a requirement for a law I understand a scientist uses is that it is to be beautiful.

On page 153, Coyne tells us that natural theology represents the attempts to discern God’s ways, or find evidence for His existence, by observing nature alone. It does not rely on revelation or Scripture. I do not agree with Philipse who says it’s an attempt to argue for a specific religious view. Let’s consider the Thomistic arguments for instance, the main arguments I’d use in natural theology that all come from an Aristotelian worldview. Could Aquinas use those to argue for the Christian deity? Yes. Averroes and Avicenna could use them to argue for Allah. Moses Maimonides could have used them to argue for a Jewish concept. This is not a problem.

You see, you’re not going to sit down in an armchair and just ponder reality and stand up and conclude “Yes! I get it! God revealed Himself in Jesus Christ!” You won’t stand up and say “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet!” You won’t exuberantly shout “Moses is the greatest prophet of all.” All of these take not just philosophical understanding, but historical understanding as well. Just thinking by itself cannot get you to Christianity just like it could not get you to any scientific theory in itself. You won’t sit down and stand up elated to find out that we all evolved from a lower species. (You could come up and think that after pondering evidence you’d read recently, but without scientific evidence, you won’t reach a scientific conclusion.)

Natural theology was said to be extremely popular after science arose according to Coyne, which leaves me wondering what kind of reading he has really done. Aristotle and Aquinas are both in this tradition and their ways of thinking were extremely popular. Coyne considers the most famous argument to be the Watchmaker one of Paley. This is quite likely true to be the most famous one, but that does not mean that it was the best one. I personally think that after Descartes natural theology started going the wrong way by viewing the universe in a mechanistic sense. (It would help Coyne to read the rest of Paley beyond the Watchmaker argument. It’s a shame that Paley’s entirely brilliant legacy has been reduced to one argument.)

Coyne also tells us that Hume refuted the case for miracles and Kant the logical arguments for God. Unfortunately, examples are lacking here. How did Kant refute these arguments? Which arguments were refuted? We don’t know. I have already said with Hume that Coyne has not bothered to check a work like Earman’s Hume’s Abject Failure. In this one, the agnostic Earman says that if Hume’s argument was followed consistently, that it would lead to not just the negation of miracles, but the negation of marvels as well. In other words, modern science would be killed if followed consistently. Hume’s own argument was dealt with in his day also by the story of a tropical prince who lived in a world where the climate was always warm and being told to believe that there was such a thing as ice. Also, as said before, Coyne ignores the work of Keener. David Johnson of Cornell University Press says about Hume’s argument that:

“The view that there is in Hume’s essay, or in what can be reconstructed from it, any argument or reply or objection that is even superficially good, much less, powerful, or devastating, is simply a philosophical myth. The most willing hearers who have been swayed by Hume on this matter have been held captive by nothing other than Hume’s great eloquence.” (Page 169)

As I said further in my review of Keener, Hume had a problem with racism that affected his argument too.

On pages 223-4, we have a quote from Hume:

“I am apt to suspect the Negroes and in general all of the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No indigenous manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences.”

Some could answer “Okay. Hume was a racist. It doesn’t mean he’s wrong.” On its face, no. It doesn’t. There is something important here. Hume is automatically excluding the testimony of anyone that is not amongst his circle of people he considers educated. Who are the educated? Those are the ones who don’t believe in miracles. If anyone believes in them, surely he cannot be educated. He must be some backwater person. Therefore, all educated people don’t believe in miracles. It is a lovely piece of circular reasoning.

Hume goes on to say

“Not to mention our colonies, there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity, tho’ low people without education will start up amongst us [whites], and distinguish themselves in every profession. IN Jamaica indeed they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning, but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.”

To say “‘Tis likely” indicates that Hume has heard a claim and has not bothered to really investigate it. He has just made an assumption based on his prior notion of the black race. Keener, however, does know who the Jamaican is and says “The Jamaican whom Hume compares with a parrot stimulating speech was Francis Williams, a Cambridge graduate whose poetry in Latin was well known.”

Sound like an uneducated parrot with slender accomplishments to anyone else? I didn’t think so.

With Kant, well without getting any specific arguments from Kant, it’s hard to respond. I guess Coyne just wants us to take Kant by faith. All the arguments have been refuted because Kant says so even though we’re not told where he says so or in what work.

To return to the God of the Gaps, Coyne ironically had started off this section with a quote by Ingersoll.

No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.

And yet he quotes Bonhoeffer saying

How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (And that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not what we don’t know.

Bonhoeffer was a theist and was pointing out the problem with the argument. Coyne is speaking about what laymen think and do, but he is not dealing with the real scholars in the field who are arguing otherwise.

On page 157 when he talks about natural theology, he says it is always used to give evidence for that person’s God. He applies this to morality asking how can we know who the origin of this morality is and that he has never seen advocates of natural theology answer this question.

I can only think he’s never asked someone who is a serious advocate of natural theology. I think Edward Feser would answer this question quite easily. I’ll go ahead. You don’t know. All you know is that it is consistent with what you believe. To find out which religion is true, you go to history. Feser himself does this in The Last Superstition. He makes a brief apologia for the resurrection of Jesus to establish Christianity while pointing to William Lane Craig as someone more authoritative.

On page 162, Coyne gives a criticism of fine-tuning when we argue that the universe is designed well for life as we know it here. He asks why life should be based on matter at all. Why not simply souls? The answer is that He in fact did that. He created countless angels, but if He wanted to create another kind of being, it needed to be something beyond being+spirit. That’s where matter comes in and material beings need a material place to live.

For the multiverse theory, I am open to the possibility of a multiverse, but I do not see how this is a defeater for theism. Theists have long been asking to have this one universe explained. How does it explain one to say that there are many? It would be like saying you had solved a case of one murder by saying “Oh. There are a hundred other murder victims over here as well. Case closed.” If there’s more than one universe or even a system producing universes, then I want to know what is responsible for that. How did that come about? That just pushes the problem back further.

Coyne also goes to Philipse again who tells us that if we can’t answer a question, that undermines all of natural theology, but why should this be? This would be like saying we can’t answer a scientific question undermines all of science. If you have ignorance in theology, that means your whole enterprise is doomed, but if you have ignorance in science, that’s okay and is in fact a virtue. Coyne is wanting to treat theology like natural science saying that it should have predictive power. Well why should that be the case? It’s not as if God is a material being that will respond to events in a mechanistic way.

Let’s say something along those lines about prayer experiments. They’re bogus. Even if they come out positive, you could never control all the variables. You can say one group of patients isn’t being prayed for by people, but how could you know that? In our day and age, most everyone in the hospital could have loved ones who will pray for them and then put up requests on the internet to have others be praying for them. We can’t know who all is praying and who is devout and sincere in their prayers and matters of that sort. I consider it a curiosity to discuss, but God is a free-will being and we don’t know all the variables nor could we possibly control for them.

I’d like to start looking at his arguments concerning morality on page 170. Before we read about Coyne on philosophy, let’s remember this quote of his:

Another problem is that scientists like me are intimidated by philosophical jargon, and hence didn’t interrupt the monologues to ask for clarification for fear of looking stupid. I therefore spent a fair amount of time Googling stuff like “epistemology” and “ontology” (I can never get those terms straight since I rarely use them).

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/sean-carroll-assesses-the-stockbridge-workshop/

So remember, you’re getting your philosophy here from someone who is intimidated by philosophical jargon and doesn’t interrupt for fear of looking stupid and googles stuff like epistemology and ontology.

This is also the same guy who has spoken about religion stepping outside of its field….

When he talks about universal morality, Coyne tells us that there are some people who do lack empathy. (He has not made an argument yet saying that empathy is the basis for morality. You do not need empathy to have morality or to know morality.) He also argues that there are still many great evils that go on and that have gone on. That we have changed shows that universal morality does not come from God.

It’s kind of cute isn’t it?

No Coyne. The claim is not that moral customs are unalterable, but that there are moral truths that exist. (This is called ontology by the way, the study of being) We can be inaccurate in our knowledge of them and how we know them. (This study of knowledge is called epistemology.) In fact, this would be upheld Biblically as the greatest passage on this is found in Romans 2 and this just after Romans 1 telling how humans transgressed the moral law. The idea is there are some things you can’t not know. As soon as you come to know what a human being is and what the taking of an innocent life is, you know murder is wrong. This is not based on a feeling about murder but on the action of murder itself. The way around this is to redefine the terms.

Sure. I don’t kill innocent human beings, but those unborn in the womb aren’t human beings, so it’s okay to kill them. Sure. I don’t kill innocent human beings, but those Jews in the holocaust are not only not human, but they are not innocent because they are responsible for all the suffering in our society. In these ways, people can avoid saying that they are breaking a moral law that they find because their victims just don’t count. Let’s finish this portion on morality for now with one piece he has on page 177.

He says the God hypothesis doesn’t explain why slavery, disdain for women, and torture were considered proper but are now seen as immoral.

Perhaps he’s never heard of a doctrine called sin.

They were because as Romans tells us, man fell from what he knew he ought to do. Want to see why women are lifted up? Look at the book that says men and women both are in the image of God. Look at the group also that went against slavery in the Roman Empire. Christians would regularly buy slaves just for the purpose of setting them free. What united both of these? The idea that mankind is in the image of God. Can Coyne offer us anything on materialism that will be a basis for equality?

For now, let’s move on to the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. Keep in mind that Coyne has told us he has to google terms like epistemology and yet he wants to tackle an epistemological argument from Alvin Plantinga, and you can think he’s wrong in his argument, but he is no slouch in the field. For Coyne to enter into this is like saying because you’ve googled the rules of Chess, you’re ready to take on the grand master. Yet Coyne is convinced that Plantinga’s view is so clearly wrong it’s a wonder why it’s popular.

Coyne says we could never have true beliefs according to Plantinga’s argument without God’s interference. That’s not the argument. We could have true beliefs, but we would have no reason to think that they are true. Evolution programs me for survival and not necessarily true beliefs. If those beliefs help me with survival, then fine if they happen to be true, but the goal is still survival. If so, then I have a defeater for thinking that my beliefs are true, including the belief that I am a product of mindless evolution.

Coyne also thinks the most important truth we can be aware of in Plantinga’s argument is the existence of the Christian God and Jesus, yet I am skeptical of a claim that Plantinga would consider Jesus to be among our properly basic beliefs. I think Plantinga is making an argument for theism that is indeed consistent with his version of theism, but is not specifically meant for that version. Much of what we have is just mockery of it as if sin is a ludicrous concept to affect our view of God. Why should I not think this? If Scripture is true, there is a righteous judge that will judge us. Which of us would like to accept that?

There are many more who have looked at Plantinga’s argument and can say more about it. I have no reason to think Coyne has treated it well. At this, let’s return to morality and we’ll start that with a look at scientism. Let’s start with some definitions he gives on page 186.

Truth as conformity to fact.

Fact as something confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.

Knowledge is the public acceptance of facts.

So much wrong here, but the centerpiece is facts so let’s go there.

In the time of Galileo we could not say it was a fact that the Earth goes around the sun. (We couldn’t say we evolved is a fact either.)

If truth is conformity to fact, we could not say that it’s true that the Earth goes around the sun.

And since it was not a fact, then no one could have knowledge of that. Now in essence, the last part could be accurate, but Coyne overlooked the definition as justified true belief. Even if you include the Gettier problem, knowledge is at least that.

Also, Coyne says knowledge must be factual and publicly recognized so private revelation can’t count. This seems over the top. If I wake up before Allie and start reading the Bible, do I need public verification to say I have knowledge that I read Scripture this morning?

These are all questions I have concerning the claim.

It gets worse. On page 189 we are told there are no objective moral truths. Morality rests on preferences. (And in the same paragraph we have a condemnation of slavery in the Old Testament and the conquest of the Canaanites. Never underestimate the fundamentalist ability to contradict so quickly.)

But if truth is conformity to fact then to say there are no moral facts is to say there are no moral claims confirmed to such a degree it would be perverse to deny them.

So do we want to say that don’t murder innocent humans has not been established? It is wrong to rape has not been established? Coyne wants to say the Canaanite conquest is wrong, but He can’t. He can’t speak of moral progress or even an evolved morality. His basic argument would be God is wrong because He does stuff I don’t like, which could be just as valid as saying “Christianity is wrong because it teaches monogamy while I prefer polyamory.” (I am using that as a for instance and not at all saying he either condemns monogamy or favors polyamory.)

So we have epistemological and moral relativism both, and this in a book about faith vs fact.

Keeping this going on 190, he says he disagrees with Sam Harris and says “If there are no objective truths, then morality isn’t a way of knowing, but simply a guide to rational behavior.”

But how can it be a guide to rational behavior? Isn’t rational behavior that which is in accordance with reason? And if there are no moral truths to reason to, how can it be more rational to throw a life preserver to a drowning child than it is to throw a boulder at him? Rational entails there are behaviors that lead to acting in accordance to these truths, but Coyne has denied these truths. Huh?

Perhaps Coyne should have stuck with science….

Naturally, in all of this Coyne thinks Euthyphro is a great defeater showing that people derive morality not from God but from secular institutions.

This would have been interesting since Euthyphro was charging his father with impiety, a crime against the gods. Nice to know a secular institution was concerned about this. In the ancient world, this separation of church and state did not exist. Every action was religious and it affected the state. There were state gods to be worshiped, namely later on the Emperor himself. Euthyphro is not a question about how we come to moral knowledge, but rather what that moral knowledge itself is, and it is never denied that there is a holy. (And I would add it was answered by Aristotle who chose to define the good in the Nicomachean Ethics.)

It’s like Coyne just wants to toss out every pet objection without studying it.

Kind of like he wants to reply to objections he hasn’t studied either.

So what about claims that there are other ways of knowing like saying “My wife loves me” and that’s not based on science. Well Coyne wants to say it is. Why? It’s evidence-based. Unfortunately, the claim of love from my wife is more like the claim of love from God. Both are claims that we receive a claim and we judge it to be true based on the evidence that we see and we live accordingly. Coyne is still living in this world where he thinks that faith means belief without evidence so no wonder he gets everything else wrong.

On page 200 in defending scientism (Since every claim that is evidence-based is supposedly science) he says the claim only comes from the faithful that atheists practice scientism.

Massimo Pigliucci would be very surprised to learn he became one of the faithful.

On 209, Coyne quotes his friend Dan Barker (That explains a lot) in saying theology is a subject without an object.

But wait.

If that’s true, then critiques about how God should have made the universe or revealed Himself or the very problem of evil no longer work because this is all theology. It doesn’t mean God exists, but it means there must be some knowledge of what he’d be like if He did. I can have knowledge of what a unicorn would be like without believing they exist.
We all do theology. Some of us, like Coyne, just do it poorly.

He’s also wrong that it’s just theologians quoting other theologians. Metaphysics studies God for instance and all of Aquinas’s arguments are empirical.

There is an attempt to show Christianity is not responsible for the rise of science. Naturally, he refers to everyone’s favorite historian, Richard Carrier. Perhaps he should have mentioned how with Carrier, this science in ancient Greeks also rose as monotheism was becoming a more viable worldview. Science fits in just fine in a monotheistic context. It doesn’t do so well in a polytheistic context. The Christian church carried this on as soon as they were not being persecuted by the emperor. It’s just anathema to Coyne to think that Christianity could possibly be responsible for science.

Finally, to say the church impeded free inquiry, I would challenge Coyne with what one thinker on the topic says when he’s presented with this idea that the medieval church was anti-science.

I love to totally stump them by asking them to present me with the name of one – just one – scientist burned, persecuted or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of Medieval scientists – like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa – and ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages without molestation from the Church, my opponents have usually run away to hide and scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong.

So Coyne will say I’ve just found another Christian fundamentalist who agrees with me. Not quite. The quote is from Tim O’Neill and is found here. How does he describe himself?

Wry, dry, rather sarcastic, eccentric, occasionally arrogant Irish-Australian atheist bastard.

Yes. This is an atheist kicking this nonsense to the curb. Coyne can talk about the persecution of Galileo and Bruno, but there is more going on in both cases. Galileo was demanding that his ideas be accepted immediately and was a scientist speaking on theology. It also didn’t help that he wrote a dialogue where he pictured the Pope as a simpleton. Galileo lived in a house arrest for the rest of his life where he freely pursued his studies and had a pension paid for him. Bruno was a tragedy, but it was more for his crazy theology than for his crazy science. (Yes. He was right about the Earth going around the sun, but much more of his stuff was just bizarre.) Now should that have happened? No. But it was not because of doing science. Also, this is already out of the medieval period so it can’t be based on the Dark Ages.

It’s a shame Coyne never really took on any major arguments for faith of any kind. If you come here and you’re a new atheist, you’re left thinking a devastating blow has been given. If you come here and you’re a historical and philosophical reader, you leave scratching your head wondering how on Earth Coyne thinks this is a response.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Faith vs. Fact Part 3

How goes our case against Coyne? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Today, I hope to get us all the way through to the start of chapter 4 and then continue tomorrow and hopefully finish up on Monday.

On page 90, Coyne tells us that in the field of biblical archaeology, there has been failure after failure. What do we get? Arguments from silence. Well there’s no evidence of the Exodus from Egypt, which of course you will not find interaction with works like James Hoffmeier’s that can be found here and here. You won’t find out about the claim that the Scythians were a much larger crowd that wandered for a much longer time and all that they left behind were the tombs of their kings, you know, the things that were designed to last. Why should we expect a group of nomands wandering in the desert for 40 years to leave behind something? We certainly should not expect records from Egypt as if Pharaoh would write “Pharaoh’s Journal Entry X. Today, those Hebrews managed to escape from me and go out and wander the wilderness and here I am powerless to do anything about it.” He certainly would not add in “And yeah, their God totally kicked the butts of our deities with powerful miracles that destroyed us.”

For the Gospel of Luke and its Census, there are a number of ways to interpret the passage. One such way is to say that this is an event that took place before the great census of Quirinius which took place later on. This would be the one that led to the revolt of Judas. This is indeed a possible reading and if there is a possible reading that destroys the contradiction, then we cannot say there is necessarily a contradiction. For why a historian should have recorded the miracles at the death of Christ, we have already addressed that. Yet to say it comes up as failure after failure is simply quite false. You can go to a library and find numerous books on biblical archaeology. We have found the bones of Caiaphas. We have found Nazareth. We have found the Asiarchs and Tetrachs Luke wrote about. We are finding that there were synagogues in 1st century Israel. I have near me here Craig Keener’s massive commentaries on Acts which include numerous archaeological discoveries. I have in my library Evans’s “Jesus and His World” which contains much more in archaeology as well.

Of course, Coyne has listed his own sources here on Biblical archaeology like…

Well, okay. There aren’t any, but hey, details. Who needs them?

On pages 92-93 Coyne tries to show that naturalism is not an assumption. Scientists do not assume naturalism. (And for the most part, fair enough. Not all do.) Yet he must deal with what Lewontin said in Billions and Billions of Demons.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Coyne says that Lewontin was mistaken. We can allow a divine foot. We’ve just never seen it. But why should I believe Coyne over Lewontin, especially when Coyne says other scientific organizations echo the same claim? Especially since when Coyne sees two religious people disagree, he thinks that is cause for skepticism. What reason could I give for thinking Coyne’s position is the right one that represents true science while Lewontin’s does not? Is Coyne busy ousting his own that do not speak the true doctrine of science as he sees fit?

When we get to the next chapter, Coyne is arguing against accommodation. Of course, Coyne goes with the natural/supernatural distinction which I do not agree with and defines something of that sort as a breaking of the law of nature, though there is no source given for where this definition comes from. Coyne does say that he could see some things that could convince him of the truth of some religions, but then perhaps it’s really aliens.

Naturally when it comes to miracles themselves, you can be sure that any interaction with Keener is totally left out. One would think that if history was a science and one was doing a scientific study, you’d at least look at the best evidence against your position, but alas, people like Coyne are people of faith and really looking at the contrary position is not acceptable.

But hey, Coyne is not totally closed off to a religion being true. He does say what it would take to convince him. What’s that? Well he tells us on pages 118-119.

“The following (and admittedly contorted) scenario would give me tentative evidence for Christianity. Suppose that a bright light appeared in the heavens, and, supported by winged angels, a being clad in a white robe and sandals descended onto my campus from the sky, accompanied by a pack of apostles bearing the names given in the Bible. Loud heavenly music, with the blaring of trumpets, is heard everywhere. The robed being, who identifies himself as Jesus, repairs to the nearby university hospital and instantly heals many severely afflicted people, including amputees. After a while Jesus and his minions, supported by angels ascend back into the sky with another chorus of music. The heavens swiftly darken, there are flashes of lightning and peals of thunder, and in an instant the sky is clear.

If this were all witnessed by others and documented by video, and if the healings were unexplainable but supported by testimony from multiple doctors, and if all the apparitions and events conformed to Christian theology—then I’d have to start thinking seriously about the truth of Christianity.”

Please note that this is tentative to him. He could still be wrong he thinks even after something like this. What are we to get from this? For one thing, it means Coyne is closed off to evidence. What it would take for him to get to consider the truth of Christianity is not to look at the evidence for Christianity such as the classical theistic arguments or the historical case that Jesus rose from the dead. No. Those won’t work. What it would take is an experience. That means that whatever argument I come to him with minus the experience he has already decided will be ignored. Is this really a rational way to explore evidence? This even after he says we do not assume naturalism a priori? This after trying to tell us that we should go with the evidence?

At the bottom, he says to turn it around and ask religious people what it would take to make them abandon their faith.

Well that’s easy.

For theism, you would need to refute the classical theistic arguments and give a better explanation for reality than theism and at the same time give a disproof for theism. Without a disproof, we just have agnosticism. For Christianity, you’d need to give a better case for the rise of the early church than the proclamation that Jesus rose from the dead. Do you have a better way to explain the data? Note my position depends on the evidence. Coyne’s depends on an experience.

But maybe Coyne can explain the resurrection. That’s what he spends time doing on pages 121 and 123. On 121 he says:

“Historians have ways of confirming whether unique events are likely to have occurred. Those methods depend on multiple and independent corroboration of those events using details that coincide among different reporters, reliable documents that attest to those events, and accounts that are contemporaneous with the event. In this way we know, for example, that Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of conspirators in the Roman Senate in 44 BCE, though we’re not sure of his last words. As has been pointed out many times, the biblical accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection fails these elementary tests because the sources are not independent, none are by eyewitnesses, all contemporary writers outside of scripture fail to mention the event, and the details of the resurrection and empty tomb—even among the Gospels and the letters of Paul—show serious discrepancies. Nor, despite ardent searching, have biblical archaeologists found such a tomb.”

Here we have a lot of assertions. Do we have any scholars cited? Nope. Not a one. When it comes to Caesar, we are not told who these authors and when they wrote that make them reliable, but hey, Coyne has said so so, yeah, let’s just take it on faith.

For the idea of contemporaries, I have spoken of this with another similar event, namely that of Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon and I used Richard Carrier as an example. Coyne acts like writers outside of Scripture would really want to bother writing about Christianity. For one thing, the earliest ones saw this as an oddball sect not worth talking about. Give it a few centuries and everyone knows about it and at that point, there’s no need to state what Christians believe. It’s common knowledge at that point.

But for cases with the Gospels being eyewitness accounts, naturally, there’s no interaction with Bauckham. As for serious discrepancies, none of these are mentioned, but that only goes against Inerrancy if true. Christianity does not stand or fall on Inerrancy. I have already said much about the nature of the writing and events being contemporary here.

But you know, maybe Coyne will have an argument against the resurrection. Indeed, he does. What is it? It’s an argument of Herman Philipse on page 123.

“It seems likely—for Jesus explicitly states this in three of the four Gospels—that his followers believed he would restore God’s kingdom in their lifetime, including sitting on twelve thrones from which they’d judge the tribes of Israel. But, unexpectedly, Jesus was crucified, ending everyone’s hope for glory. Philipse suggests that this produced painful cognitive dissonance, which in this case was resolved by “corroborative storytelling”—the same modern millennialists do when the world fails to end on schedule. The ever-disappointed millennialists usually agree on a story that somehow preserves their belief in the face of disconfirmation (for example, “We got the date wrong.”) Philipse then suggests that in the case of the Jesus tale, the imminent arrivals of God simply morphed into a promise of eternal life, a promise supported by pretending that their leader himself had been resurrected.
If you accept that an apocalyptic preacher named Jesus existed, who told his followers that God’s kingdom was nigh, this story at least seems reasonable. After all, it’s based on well-known features of human psychology; the behavior of disappointed cults and our well-known attempts to resolve cognitive dissonance. Like disillusioned millennialists, the early Christians could simply have revised their story. Is this really less credible than the idea that Jesus arose from the dead? Only if you have an a priori commitment to the myth.”

Is this story really less credible? Why yes. Yes it is. It does not deal with all the evidence even accepted by scholars in the field.

For one thing, how about crucifixion. Did that happen? Why yes, yes it did. (And I must state that since Coyne is even skeptical Jesus existed.)

Christians who wanted to proclaim Jesus as messiah would not have invented the notion that he was crucified because his crucifixion created such a scandal. Indeed, the apostle Paul calls it the chief “stumbling block” for Jews (1 Cor. 1:23). Where did the tradition come from? It must have actually happened. (Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Third Edition. pages 221-222)

Jesus was executed by crucifixion, which was a common method of torture and execution used by the Romans. (Dale Martin, New Testament History and Literature. Page 181)

That Jesus was executed because he or someone else was claiming that he was the king of the Jews seems to be historically accurate. (ibid. 186)

“The fact of the death of Jesus as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable, despite hypotheses of a pseudo-death or a deception which are sometimes put forward. It need not be discussed further here.” (Gerd Ludemann. .”What Really Happened To Jesus?” Page 17.)

And what about the account of the empty tomb. Is it reliable?

“Jesus came from a modest family that presumably could not afford a rock- cut tomb. Had Joseph not offered to accommodate Jesus’ body his tomb (according to the Gospel accounts) Jesus likely would have been disposed in the manner of the lower classes: in a pit grave or trench grave dug into the ground. When the Gospels tell us that Joseph of Arimathea offered Jesus a spot in his tomb, it is because Jesus’ family did not own a rock- cut tomb and there was no time to prepare a grave- that is there was no time to dig a grave, not hew a rock cut tomb(!)—before the Sabbath. It is not surprising that Joseph, who is described as a wealthy and perhaps even a member of the Sanhedrin, had a rock-cut family tomb. The Gospel accounts seem to describe Joseph placing Jesus’ body in one of the loculi in his family’s tomb. (Jodi Magness, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit: Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus, pg 170)

“There is no need to assume that the Gospel accounts of Joseph of Arimathea offering Jesus a place in this family tomb are legendary or apologetic. The Gospel accounts of Jesus’s burial appear to be largely consistent with the archeological evidence” ( Magness, pg 171)

And appearances?

“The only thing that we can certainly say to be historical is that there were resurrection appearances in Galilee (and in Jerusalem) soon after Jesus’s death. These appearances cannot be denied” (Gerd Ludemann. .”What Really Happened To Jesus?” p. 81)

“We can say with complete certainty that some of his disciples at some later time insisted that . . . he soon appeared to them, convincing them that he had been raised from the dead.” (Bart Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, pg 230).

“That Jesus’ followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know.” (E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus, pg 280)

“That the experiences did occur, even if they are explained in purely natural terms, is a fact upon which both believer and unbeliever can agree.” (Reginald H. Fuller, Foundations of New Testament Christology, 142)

Please observe this Coyne. This is how historical research is done. One consults the leading scholars in the field. These are going to be basic facts I will accept until shown otherwise. Note that Christ mythicism is not even on the radar. These are also not a plethora of Christians scholars I’ve gathered. Coyne’s approach would be like making an argument against evolution and thinking it has to be powerful because young-earth creationist scientists say so. But let’s go on.

For one thing, when a Messiah died, you went home or you found a new Messiah, as N.T. Wright says. There is no indication of any other movement where hope went on. Appearances by themselves would in fact lead the disciples to not think Jesus was alive, but that He was most certainly dead. The ancient world knew about such appearances and saw it as a sign that the person was indeed dead. It’s interesting to notice that no one ever considered James, the brother of Jesus, to be the new Messiah.

Second, you would think that if cognitive dissonance was applied, that there would at least be interaction with Leon Festinger. There isn’t. Festinger’s work wouldn’t even apply well to cognitive dissonance anyway since the observers in fact numerous times interfered with the study group, thus damaging the results, but from what we do know, cognitive dissonance does not reach other people outside of the movement and the movement does in fact die soon afterwards. This is not the case of Christianity where even those opposed to the movement accepted it. One has to ask what it would take to convince you that your brother was Lord and Messiah. (And Bauckham, Hurtado, Bird, and others have made numerous cases to show the earliest Christology after the resurrection was that Jesus was and is fully deity.) In fact, When N.T. Wright responds to this argument in The Resurrection of the Son of God he says “The flaws in this argument are so enormous that it is puzzling to find serious scholars still referring to it in deferential terms — which is indeed, the only reason for giving space to discussion of it here.” (p. 698)

Now Coyne wants us to believe that these stories of Jesus being seen as vindicated morphed into a resurrection. When? The earliest accounts we have are of a bodily resurrection per the creed in 1 Cor. 15. If we say that it was for the Gentile mission, the Gentiles scoffed at the idea of bodily resurrection. If we were talking about making a change to the accounts amenable to the Gentiles, we can talk about the Jesus found in the Gnostic Gospels. This Jesus is not at all a threat to the Roman Empire. Christians would be seen as quaint and bizarre, but hardly challenging Caesar. That’s not what we see in the New Testament.

Finally, in the honor-shame context of the New Testament, the Christians would have followed every rule of how not to make a new religion. Tie it in with the religion seen as most odd at the time, Judaism. Forego traditional practices that out you with society like animal sacrifice. Reject a morality common at the time, such as open sexuality. Have your Messiah be someone who was crucified, an utter shame. Make your figure be bodily resurrected, something that would be seen as a joke. Have your belief be a new belief since that would have been viewed with suspicion at the time. The wonder is that Christianity not only won overall, but survived.

So no Coyne, we find the explanation laughable not because we have an a priori commitment to the myth, but because we do know how to do history. Perhaps Coyne should consider going through Wright’s work and responding to it since the case is supposedly so obviously false, or go through Michael Licona’s work here.

On page 138, Coyne interacts with theistic evolution and asks can you believe there would be such a thing as theistic chemistry or theistic gravity? Why only apply it to evolution? Perhaps, but could we not put the shoe on the other foot. We hear talk about naturalistic evolution. Could we not say how ridiculous it would be to think of naturalistic chemistry and naturalistic gravity? Why do we speak of evolution? Because evolution is usually seen as a God stopper as it were. It doesn’t have to be. Again, I leave this to others to debate, but proving evolution does not disprove theism. In fact, if anyone had a bias in this, I would have to agree with Plantinga that it would be the atheist since naturalistic evolution is the only game in town.

Finally, when Coyne interacts with Plantinga, Plantinga in defending his view of creation does appeal to the devil as a possible cause for disasters in the world. Coyne says it’s hard to imagine a serious philosopher saying something like this. Of course, Coyne should not talk about serious philosophy. After all, he says:

Another problem is that scientists like me are intimidated by philosophical jargon, and hence didn’t interrupt the monologues to ask for clarification for fear of looking stupid. I therefore spent a fair amount of time Googling stuff like “epistemology” and “ontology” (I can never get those terms straight since I rarely use them).

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/sean-carroll-assesses-the-stockbridge-workshop/

Yes everyone. Jerry Coyne who has to google terms like epistemology and ontology is going to be telling Plantinga how he should do serious philosophy. This would be like me saying I have to google what a Punnett Square is and how to make one, but I am going to laugh at the thought of Coyne being a serious evolutionary biologist.

Plantinga’s argument however does not need to show the existence of the devil. The problem of evil is to ask if Christianity is consistent with itself and one aspect of Christianity is belief in the devil. If this is even a possible explanation, then Plantinga’s argument stands. I am not saying I agree with it, but I am saying it is still not a problematic statement.

But enough of this, next time, we shall see what Coyne says about how faith strikes back.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Part 1 can be found here.

Part 2 can be found here.

Part 4 can be found here.

Part 5 can be found here.

Book Plunge: An Atheist Defends Religion

What do I think of Bruce Sheiman’s book? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

It’s hard to know what to think when you see a title of An Atheist Defends Religion. You might think a similar title could be A Jew defends Adolf Hitler or A Christian defends Muslim terrorists. The two seem so antithetical. Why on Earth would an atheist want to defend religion? Isn’t religion the bane of the atheist’s existence? Unfortunately, if we start thinking out that way, we start thinking out wrong. In fact, we are thinking in a fundamentalist way that Sheiman in his book condemns that has created an us vs. them climate. Ironically, as Sheiman argues, this only makes the situation worse for atheism and in turn for science (Which is not to be equated with atheism either) since generally, for most of the public, if they’re asked to choose between religion and science, they’ll go with religion.

Sheiman does not hold back in saying he is an atheist in the book, but he also considers himself an aspiring theist. He does not like the worldview presented by atheism. I do appreciate greatly his honesty at this point. Sheiman wants to follow the evidence where it leads and while he would like to believe in God, he says he just cannot bring himself to do it now. I do not know what is holding him back and that could be another conversation some day to have, but I do know that belief is not a lightswitch that you can just turn off and on. We need to have people believe because they think something is more likely than not to be true.

Sheiman also does not see atheism as a form of intellectual triumphalism. I find this to be an excellent point to make as well. There are intelligent people on both sides, but I find way too often that the atheists I meet have the attitude that if you don’t believe in God, you’re automatically rational. My wife saw yesterday as we were leaving church a billboard for rationalists.org saying that if you don’t believe in God, you’re not alone. Now I have no problem with unbelievers getting together and discussing atheism and agnosticism. I have a problem with that being labeled as rational, as if if you are a theist, you are automatically irrational. This mindset I have come to call presuppositional atheism.

That having been said, if you’re interested in the God debate, you won’t find much in the book. Sheiman is not going to take you through the arguments pro or con and weigh them out. Instead, he’s going to defend religion as a cultural phenomenon. God might not be around in Sheiman’s world to do us good, but the belief in God is doing good. This will come out in ethics, in giving to charity, in the health of people who are religious, and even in the advancement of civilization and science. Atheism does not have this. It is bankrupt as an ideology. It does not inspire like religion does and it has a gloomy picture of the world, despite what many atheists say.

At this point, atheists might want to trot out the evils done in religion, but on location 186, Sheiman has an answer:

“Religion’s misdeeds may make for provocative history, but the everyday good works of billions of people is the real history of religion, one that parallels the growth and prosperity of humankind. There are countless examples of individuals lifting themselves out of personal misery through faith. In the lives of these individuals, God is not a delusion, God is not a spell that must be broken—God is indeed great.”

It’s easy to speak about all the evils brought about by theism if you just ignore all the good things and look at only what you think is evil (And much of that is misunderstood!). The same atheists who often do this tend to ignore the millions killed by atheist leaders such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol-Pot, all of which must boil down to a coincidence. When atheists want to see the real legacy of theism, they too often want to exclude any possibility that the Dark Ages idea is a myth, Christianity did nothing to bring about civilization, and want to happily ignore that as they drive down the street they can pass so many hospitals with religious terminology in their names. Have theists many times done evil? Absolutely. That is not because theism is evil, though it could be, but because of another belief we all have strong empirical evidence for. Humans are very prone to doing evil.

As we go through, the start is that religion gives some people meaning to life. Sheiman admits this saying he thinks religion is false and therefore he cannot embrace that meaning. He believes science is true, but it lacks that meaning. Science can tell us many fascinating and wonderful things, and then what? We can also learn that all that we have is going to die in the cold death of a universe that neither knows nor cares. As Bertrand Russell said

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins–all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

(A Free Man’s Worship)

The caveat I have at this point, which will be expanded on later, is to say “Could not both stories be true?” As a Christian, I have no problem saying that science gives us loads of factual information about the world. On the other hand, I have no problem saying God has revealed Himself in Scripture, in Christ, in creation, and in morality. I just wish readers to keep this in their mind as we will discuss it later.

Sheiman also argues that religion leads to greater care of humanity. This is not because religious people want a “Get out of Hell free card” or want to earn bonus points with God. We know God would see right through such things after all. We do this because they see the ultimate example in God. This is especially so for Christians like myself who believe in the incarnation and see the way God lived among us. Who after all would be foolish enough to deny the impetus to good living that the life of Jesus has left on this world? (Unfortunately, I know many who would I think be foolish enough to do just that.)

Sheiman considers it a shame that while religion could motivate some people to do evil, that that is emphasized while all the simple small deeds done in the name of religion are ignored. Most of these will in fact go unnoticed because a lot of religious people who do them do not like to claim recognition for their good deeds. I myself have made it a point often to do a kind act for someone when they can’t see it and then to get away as soon as I can before they find out that I did it for them. It’s nice to be praised for something, but you should not do something because you will be praised for it.

Sheiman also argues that religious people give far more and he has the data to back it up. He gives an example of a Methodist bishop asking for $10 donations to help African children facing malaria. They wanted to buy nets to protect them from mosquitoes. Within minutes, $14,000 had been raised. Atheists can argue that they can give just as much, and no doubt they can, but the same incentive and motivation is not there. Sheiman humorously says on page 40 that militant atheists want the benefits of religion without religion, just like wanting the taste of chocolate without wanting to have the calories.

If someone wants to point to science here, Sheiman has no reason to listen to them. Science paints a dismal picture of selfish genes and the survival of the fittest and that we come from a blind evolutionary process that did not see us coming. The thinking of Harris and Dawkins that morality can be derived from science escapes Sheiman. He is not the only one it escapes. In fact, his chief example of this kind of thinking is Peter Singer. Sheiman says in response to Singer that while he likes the idea of treating animals more like humans, he just can’t have the enthusiasm for the idea of treating humans more like animals.

The next chapter is about religion being union with the divine. I do not have much to say here as I do not really have experience with mystical experiences.

Next we move to mental happiness and health. Those who are religious according to Sheiman tend to be healthier. They also tend to have better marriages. Both of these can be seen to fit because religious belief can often be optimistic. (Despite still many of my fellow Christians who I think are pessimists when it comes to prophecy.) Many of us believe the most awesome being of all loves us unconditionally. With our marriages, if we’re Christians, we believe that we have an example in Jesus Christ. Husbands love their wives as Christ loved the church and wives love their husbands as the church loves Christ.

Of course, there will be people who struggle in their marriages and who struggle with issues like depression who are theists, but the odds of being one are less if you are a theist. In fact, if you do struggle in these areas, your struggle could be made easier because of your theistic beliefs. You can always have someone to fall back on, namely God. Recently I started reading Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage. He points out that if you enter marriage expecting your spouse to provide what only God can provide, you’re going to have a marriage that suffers. Those who look to God to be their savior instead of their spouse will have happier marriages. Overall, theism will mean a better life with marriage and health.

We next move to religion being a force for progress. In our day and age on the internet, it’s common to see the graph that is meant to indicate the hole left by the “Dark Ages.”

stupidchart

An atheist like Tim O’Neill has thankfully helped to shatter this into a million pieces. Despite what atheists think, science was on the rise in that period. I really do not think the Enlightenment contributed much new to the situation. Do we have any reason to think Christian scientists would have stopped studying creation? In fact, if religion has been a driving force in the world, then that we are here now and got to the point where science was possible should show that religion has not been the impediment it is said to be.

Sheiman also attributes to this the rise in the belief in equality of humanity and the abolition of slavery. The reason these came to be accepted was because of a religious belief in the equality of humanity, including passages like Galatians 3:28. If all mankind is in the image of God, should we not treat each person that we meet as if they were indeed someone who bore the image of God?

The sixth chapter is on fundamentalism and violence, and this is quite an amusing one as I contend there are fundamentalist atheists just as much as there are fundamentalist Christians. When it comes to the violence, Sheiman argues that much of the violence is political in nature rather than religious. It could use religion to push it further, but it could just as easily use, say, belief in evolution to push it further. This would not argue that evolution is false, so why should religion being used to promote violence be seen as an indicator that religious beliefs are false? Those stand or fall on other grounds. As Sheiman says on page 117:

“The militant atheists lament that religion is the foremost source of the world’s violence is contradicted by three realities: Most religious organizations do not foster violence; many nonreligious groups do engage in violence; and many religious moral precepts encourage nonvio lence. Indeed, we can confidently assert that if religion was the sole or primary force behind wars, then secular ideologies should be relatively benign by comparison, which history teaches us has not been the case. Revealingly, in his Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips chronicled a total of 1,763 conflicts throughout history, of which just 123 were categorized as religious. And it is important to note further that over the last century the most brutality has been perpetrated by nonreligious cult figures (Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-Il, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, Robert Mugabe—you get the picture). Thus to attribute the impetus behind violence mainly to religious sentiments is a highly simplistic interpretation of history.”

Sheiman also argues that those who are violent and we would think psychotic tend to be some of the most normal people. The difference is they’re just constantly surrounded by like-minded people. Keep in mind the 9/11 terrorists blended in quite successfully with the American culture they were hiding in. Unfortunately, when these people get together, they tend to reinforce each other’s own radical ideas. This is not just the area of religion. Atheists can do the exact same thing. Atheists can even have their own Messiahs, such as a Utopian idea brought about through fascism, or the idea that science is the guiding light that is going to save us all. Consider these statements as well, On page 124 we read:

“Recent research cited by Cass Sunstein, for example, has shown that people with a particular political orientation who join a like-minded group emerge from that group with stronger political leanings than they started with. “In almost every group,” Sunstein writes, “people ended up with more extreme positions …. The result is group polarization, which occurs when like-minded people interact and end up in a more extreme position in line with their original inclinations.” And with the Internet added to the fundamentalist equation, it is now easier than ever for extremists of all types to find their ideological soul mates and reinforce their radical thinking.”

Consider this with one of my favorite groups to show as an example, Jesus mythicists. It’s on the internet that you get this crazy idea being popularized that Jesus never existed and it relies on some of the worst conspiracy theory thinking. I put these people in the same group as 9-11 truthers or anti-vaccination people. Still, internet atheists can get together and applaud themselves as being rational people who see past the smoke and mirrors. Interestingly, these people who are often opposed to Intelligent Design (And I am not advocating that) because it is “on the fringe” do not realize that their belief systems are even more on the fringe. At least with ID, you have a number of PH.D.s in the field who hold to this, though definitely a great minority. In the field of mythicism, you could count them on one hand.

In fact, Sheiman in speaking of these fundamentalists say they’re often just as closed-minded as their counterparts. One difference is that I have met many conservative Christians, like myself, who actually read the other side and seek to understand it. I do not meet many atheists who have done likewise. (Sheiman is obviously an exception.) In fact, one question I usually ask is “When was the last time you read a work of scholarship in this field that disagreed with you?” Usually, I get just crickets and in fact if any such work is recommended, it is discounted immediately because the author has “bias.”

For now, let’s move on to science. I am interested in the philosophy of science and the history of science, but I do not speak about science as science. I could not, for instance, give you an argument that would show you should believe in evolution, nor would I give much of one that would show you shouldn’t. I choose to debate on questions that I know. If I woke up tomorrow and saw a headline that said “SBC all agrees macroevolution is a fact,” I would say “Cool” and move on. If I saw instead “National Academy of Sciences says evolution is proven false,” I would say “Cool” and move on. It doesn’t matter to me. My interpretation of Genesis does not hang on evolution.

In fact, I like the description I heard best of science and religion this way. Science and religion are opposed, much like a thumb and a finger are opposed, so that they can grasp everything between them. Unfortunately, if they are made opponents, atheists will only lower themselves. After all, if you say you cannot be a scientist if you are a religious person, then people will see science as the enemy. Sadly, there are a lot of great minds who are religious and these people will be excluded from the discussion of science and who knows what they could contribute to the field?

I am one of those who thinks science cannot offer the final proof on theism. It cannot prove or disprove theism. Hence, my wondering with what Sheiman says earlier. Could you not believe in both stories? There are many Christian scientists who do. Could not you not say both stories give truth about reality instead of having this idea perhaps unknowingly that the two stories are opposed? Science on its own would tell you that we will die in a cold death, but that’s assuming there is no outside interference. A religious person can believe that if God does not interfere, this will happen. (Note I am not using the term supernatural. I do not use it as I find it inaccurate.)

One response to this could be the one one often finds on the internet of science being either the only way to truth or the best way to truth. Sheiman says that this is scientism and not science, and rightfully so, and that this is just atheism masquerading as science. I agree wholeheartedly and such people do a disservice to science and religion both. It is as indicated earlier a belief in the salvation of science. Such people often treat scientific conclusions the way their Christian counterparts treat the Bible. I often refer to such people as not daring to question the words of prophets Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett, and anyone else who comes along. The new atheists have spoken. The case is closed.

Many atheists look at the world of science and speak of wonder, but for those of us who are religious, science alone does not bring that wonder. It is wonderful what we see, but we consider it all the more wonderful to think about the mind behind this creation. I can drive down the road and think “Wow. God made all of this.” I am amazed at that point. In reality, we are often looking at the same data. It is the belief that we bring to the data that is changing matters.

As we go on looking at this topic, I do see Sheiman talk about the literal interpretation of Scripture. This is a term I do wish many times would just die. The word “literal” has come to be in some ways meaningless. Literal often refers to a hard wooden interpretation of a text instead of a look at the text as the author intended. I happen to agree with John Walton and think that the text should not be read in light of modern scientific understanding when it comes to Genesis 1-3, but should rather be read in light of the way ancient Israelites saw the world around them.

I also disagree with Sheiman that if theism and atheism was a matter of evidence, people would be converted all the time. I think there are many other factors that influence why people believe what they believe. People in cults, for instance, are given a mindset by the cult that affects how they view and interpret evidence, including counter-evidence to their position. We could look at many Christians who get such emotional solace from their beliefs that they really cannot handle anything that goes against them. We could look at atheists who would face a social stigma if they went against their atheism or even some who would not want to abandon atheism because a belief like Christianity has something to say about their sexual lifestyles. We all know people who believe what they believe for less than intellectual reasons. Pascal years ago said that if you take the most astute philosopher and put him on a plank of sufficient size and suspend that plank over a large chasm, watch and see how quickly his emotions overtake his reason.

I did find myself disappointed by Sheiman’s argument of “Who created God?” as a question he often asks. I hold to a Thomistic view which in essence sees this as asking “What created existence?” To ask who created God becomes a question that doesn’t make sense on that since God’s nature is to be.

I also did not find the last chapter convincing with Sheiman’s way on getting the universe we have that seems to have some design without God. I kept wondering in it why this should be the case, but to be fair, I will not claim to understand all the science involved.

If there’s one thing that would definitely improve this book, it would be seeing where the quotes can be found that Sheiman gives. Many times he can give a quote and give just an author who said it without being able to know where the quote can be found. If a book is given, many times a page number is not given. I saw a number of quotes I would like to have been able to look up, but I would not be as easily able to.

Still, this is a fascinating read and one that I wish more atheists would read. We could probably have better debates if we did.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Does Science Show The Bible To Be A Myth?

If we have science, does this mean the Bible is false? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

A friend messaged me wondering what I’d say to someone who says the Bible can be relegated to the category of myth because of science. Now for this, I am going to be assuming that the person means a false tale, although myth does entail a wide genre of categories and would not necessitate something false. That is not a discussion I’m going to be entering into at this point. For now, I simply want to address the objection. It is a common one in our day and age where it looks like science has become the new priesthood and many people think the only way something can be demonstrated is scientifically.

To begin with, when we look at this question, we are not going to be arguing that the Bible is true. We are just going to be arguing that the Bible has not been shown to be false. Of course, it’s up to the apologist to still make the positive case. Therefore, if someone thinks I have not demonstrated Christianity is true by this, yes. I have not, at least not in this post. I have simply made it my aim to remove a defeater.

A stance a Christian should not take in this is to denigrate science. Science is a wonderful tool and it is our ally. If we think that Christianity is true, then that means we should be able to accept everything that can be demonstrated scientifically. I also want to advise Christians that if you have not read up on a scientific topic, do not debate it. When you meet someone who knows it better than you do, you will be embarrassed and even worse, Christianity will be embarrassed by what you say. This is one of those times it pays to know people in the field of scientific apologetics who can help you.

One of the first steps with how science supposedly disproves Christianity is to look to the creation accounts. As readers of this blog and listeners of the podcast know, I am not persuaded this is a creation account per se. I think John Walton has made a powerful case. You can listen to my interviews with him here and here. Does this mean I subscribe to the idea of macroevolution? No. It doesn’t even mean Walton does. It just means I do not see it as a defeater for Christianity. Keep in mind that even if I was incorrect, the worst case scenario would be we’d lose Inerrancy. We would not lose the resurrection.

Miracles are a more common objection, but it’s hard to see how this is an objection. A miracle is a being outside of our space-time world in some fashion acting on that world. The only way you could recognize a miracle would be if you had at least some rudimentary science. You only know a virgin birth (Which I of course affirm) is a miracle because you know what it normally takes for a birth. You only know walking on water is a miracle if people don’t normally walk on water. It’s quite bizarre to hear so many atheists say that dead people stay dead, as if this is a new discovery of science. Ancient people also knew that. That’s why they did something called burial.

Can an outside force interfere? The only way to really establish that would be to say that there is no outside force. Of course, saying that there is one does not mean that a miracle will necessarily take place, but it opens the door. In that case, we just look at a historical event and decide what we think the best explanation is. There’s nothing wrong with wanting an explanation that falls within known causes first, but if we find nothing, then we should be open to an unknown cause and if we have evidence that there is a cause beyond us, then that makes it all the more likely.

It’s also important to bring up an idea of God of the Gaps here, where we have this idea that there have been all these gaps and that theists plugged in “God did it” throughout history. This simply isn’t the case. The medieval period, often called the Dark Ages, was actually a great time of scientific advancement. It doesn’t mean that we have the rapid advancement we have now, but the preliminary steps were taken then, such as first off bettering agriculture so that people would have more free time for scientific pursuits since food was more readily available.

We should also state that contrary to what people might think, science cannot answer every question. It can answer a lot, but not all of them. Most of our day to day decisions are not made based on science. When we make a major decision like choosing a spouse, we do not do a scientific experiment to find out if the other person loves us or if we love them. We have other ways of knowing. When it comes to the God question, philosophy is a much better route to take. When it comes to the question of understanding Scripture, history and anthropology and literary studies are much better routes to take.

Overall, it’s the kind of position I do not find convincing, but in our day and age, science has become the new priesthood and it is one that we must answer.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Deeper Waters Podcast 3/7/2015: John Walton

What’s coming up on the Deeper Waters Podcast this Saturday? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Back in 2013, we were blessed to have John Walton come on the show and talk about The Lost World of Genesis One. Now John Walton has brought us another excellent book, The Lost World of Adam and Eve. As soon as I saw this was coming, I knew I wanted Walton back on the show again and indeed, he was happy to come back again to what I believe could be the first podcast interview on the book that will be done.

So who is John Walton?

Walton

According to his bio:

John’s research and his energized presentations are rooted in his passion for drawing people into a better understanding of God’s self-revelation in Scripture. John (PhD, Hebrew Union College) is a professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College and Graduate School. He focuses his research on the literature and cultures of the ancient Near East and the Old Testament, with a particular interest in Genesis. Before his role at Wheaton, John taught for 20 years at Moody Bible Institute.

John has authored many articles and books, including The Lost World of Adam and Eve, The Lost World of Genesis One, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology, and Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament. John also served as general editor of the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary: Old Testament and co-author of the IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament.

John’s ministry experience includes church classes for all age groups, high school Bible studies, and adult Sunday school classes, as well as serving as a teacher for “The Bible in 90 Days.”

I have found John Walton’s viewpoint on the Old Testament to be incredibly eye-opening. Prior to reading the book, I had done my own research project on science and Christianity and came to the conclusion that the best arguments I could find are metaphysical arguments and it does not help to marry our apologetics to science. If some want to do scientific apologetics, that’s fine, but it’s really not something that I prefer to use. Also, N.T. Wright had been a scholar definitely helping with my understanding of the New Testament. For years, I had been working to learn how Jews at the time would understand Jesus and thought “How would Jews at the time of Moses understand Genesis?” John Walton provided the answers.

That’s why I’m thrilled to have him come back on the show again. We’re going to be talking about his views on Adam and Eve and asking the hard questions. We will be asking what role scientific data does play and how much impact should it have on our reading? We will be asking him what the impact is of other human beings besides Adam and Eve being around. Doesn’t that go against what Jesus said in the Gospels? We will be asking about the serpent in the Garden and what was the impact of the event called the fall on humanity?

So be watching your podcast feed! You won’t want to miss this one!

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Fact Vs. Value

What do I think of John Lepp’s self-published book? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

factvsvalue

John Lepp was looking for people to read this book. A friend recommended me so I figured I’d give it a look. I am someone who is not really interested in science as science, but I am interested in the philosophy of science and the supposed history of the warfare between science and religion. Because of that, I figured I would give this one a look and see what I could find out as I am always interested in learning more about this area.

Now my position on this is unusual to some. I am not one who can say yet that I support the movement of Intelligent Design. I think it still ends up with a too mechanistic universe and I do think there are better arguments out there, arguments that hinge on final causality which I consider much more important. When I use the Kalam, I do not use the version of Bill Craig. Frankly, I don’t care if the universe had a beginning or not, though it is my understanding that scientific evidence today does lean that way.

I can’t say I really found what I was looking for here. I found some arguments against Dawkins and Harris and Hawking and others, but these are also found in several other places. I also would have liked to have seen more emphasis on the real enemy here and why there is no real conflict between Christianity and science. The real enemy is not science. Science is to be our friend and ally. The main enemy is scientism, which shows up quite frankly everywhere on the internet.

You see, it’s believed that in medieval times, the priesthood controlled everything and theology was seen as having all the answers. This is simply false. When explanations were given for natural phenomena, natural explanations were preferred. It could be that those answers were wrong many times, and in fact they were, but this was before advanced means of research was around to answer such questions. The point is that attempts were made and these did not run to “God did it!”

In fact, the medievals were people who were looking constantly for scientific explanations and when it was found, it was not like God was less out of a job. In fact, God was held in greater awe. It was the way of saying “I never would have thought of doing it that way.” The medievals expected to find explanations for the phenomena. That is why it was that they were looking in the first place.

Despite this, it is believed that the priesthood was seen as the group that could answer every question. Today, there is a new priesthood and that consists of science. Now not all of the scientists today hold to what is thought to be the classical priestly vows of the scientist. Not all of them believe that science is the answer to everything. Some do believe that there are questions that science cannot answer.

Unfortunately, the group that speaks the loudest often gets the most attention, and that is the group that holds to scientism, the belief that either all questions must be answered scientifically, or else that the only way to know something for certain is through science. Both of these of course are self-refuting positions, but they are still the real enemy that is around today.

Today then, science has become a new priesthood and the scientists are the bearers of all knowledge. Keep in mind this is not saying anything about science. This is saying something about some views of science. An example of this kind of scientism is found in JT, an opponent that John Lepp has a debate with at the end of the book. An example of this is a statement like this JT makes in the debate:

“The bible makes numerous claims that conflict with the way science has revealed the universe to work over a long list of different disciplines. For instance, the idea of somebody rising from the dead could not be more offensive to our understanding of biology and medicine. We have established this so completely that virtually nobody opposes interring the deceased, regardless of how loved they were in real life, for fear that they will reanimate”

This kind of statement is so incredibly hysterical. Does JT really think that ancient people didn’t know this? Does he really think that people were hesitant to bury the dead because they thought the dead would return to life? The Jews were the ones that had sects that believed in resurrection and even they buried their dead. That the dead don’t naturally come back to life is not a discovery of modern science. It has been a well-known fact for ages before.

resurrectionmostinteresting

JT goes further with this kind of statement saying that walking on water is offensive to physics. It is as if JT does not know that ancient people built boats. Why did they do this? It’s really quite simple. They knew that people don’t naturally walk on water. This is not a discovery of modern science. This is something that those stupid ancient people who did not have modern science already believed. Contrary to what might be thought, ancient people were not stupid.

Yet people like JT believe that we can no longer believe in miracles because, hey, we live in an age of science. It is in fact because of basic rudimentary science that people could believe in miracles if they happened. Why? Because in order to recognize something outside of the normal realm of nature, you have to know what the normal realm is. You won’t consider a virgin birth a miracle unless you know people don’t get naturally pregnant on their own. You won’t consider walking on water a miracle unless people naturally don’t walk on water. You don’t consider a resurrection a miracle unless you know that dead people stay dead.

Unfortunately, I think Lepp on his end of the debate focused too much on science and not enough on scientism, the real problem, not just for religion but also for science. I did not see in the debate with JT an argument made for the existence of God or the reliability of Scripture or the resurrection of Jesus. JT’s problem was not really bad science, and I am not to say if he had it or not, but bad metaphysics, a metaphysics that holds to scientism and does not then answer basic questions on our existing.

So in the end, I found the book to be an okay read, but not what I was expecting. I will say that the book does end on a happy note, and one that I was pleased to read, and also one that I will not share on this blog. It is not part of the main thesis of the book, but it is a story that should be heartwarming still.

If the author wrote a second edition or a sequel, I would like to see more on scientism. I would look to see more on showing why the claim about the Dark Ages is frankly a myth. I would also like to see more quotations from leading scientists on how they are not opposed to religion to show that the viewpoint that says they are at war is a loud and ignorant mythology.

In Christ,
Nick Peters