Christianity and Science: Current Disputes among the Faithful. Dr. Jeff Hardin University of Wisconsin. November 2014

Transcription

1 Christianity and Science: Current Disputes among the Faithful Dr. Jeff Hardin University of Wisconsin November 2014 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Well, many of you have already met Professor Hardin. As you know, he is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin. He did his Ph.D. in biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley. I know there are about five or six or seven of us in here who did our Ph.D. s in biophysics. (Laughter) MICHAEL CROMARTIE: I did my Ph.D. in biophysics. (Laughter) MICHAEL CROMARTIE: But the wonderful thing about Dr. Hardin is also he has written a book called The World of the Cell. It s a cell biology textbook. And some of us heard Professor Hardin give this presentation before, and when I heard it, I thought this would be a perfect presentation for the Faith Angle because of what he s about to share with us. So without any further ado, Jeff Hardin, thank you for joining us at the Faith Angle Forum. (Applause) JEFF HARDIN: I just wanted to say many of you are not familiar with biophysics, except for Michael apparently. And so biophysicists, when they re talking with physicists, talk about biology; biophysicists, when they re talking with biologists, talk about physics; and when biophysicists are talking to other biophysicists, they talk about the weather. (Laughter)

2 JEFF HARDIN: So I m Chair of a Zoology Department, so Sarah has already gotten the zoo reference in yesterday, and we can come back to that. It s really a pleasure to be with you. This is a bit of a cross-cultural experience for me, and it s really been delightful so far. And I can t get too many opportunities to be around somebody so relentlessly positive as Michael. So thanks for inviting me, Michael, it s good to be here. I do want to change the title of this talk. Michael suggested that title because I think journalists like disputes, they like controversy. I don t like that so much, so I hope it s okay, Michael, if I change the title to Christianity and Science: Dialogues Among the Faithful because that s something that I m fairly committed to. MICHAEL CROMARTIE: But they came because of the title. (Laughter) JEFF HARDIN: Okay. Thank you. Well, you re free to leave at this point if you want (Laughter) JEFF HARDIN: Okay. So I want to talk about three things. First of all, I hope it s all right to give you a bit of a personal perspective on why I think this issue matters. Then I want to talk very briefly about some data on what Evangelical Christians in particular think about science, and some of that data was actually collected in collaboration with Christian Smith, who you ve heard from already. And then I want to move to the thing that Michael asked me to present, which was a bit of a case study on laying out different viewpoints that Evangelicals have with regard to the Bible and science. I m a zoology professor, so hopefully that taxonomy will be useful to you in your thinking about these topics. So let me begin by why I think this matters. (shows next slide) So Geoffrey Cantor, who is a historian and philosopher of science, in a millennial essay in the premier scientific journal Nature, was asked to comment on what are the big challenges in the next millennium for science. You can see the title here is Fighting the Wrong Battle. Cantor 2

3 said one of the issues we are going to face in this millennium is trying to relate science and religion. He said it this way: Issues of science and religion are important to our civilization, far too significant to be left either to the devoutly religious physicist, and I think he was talking about a gentleman named Sir John Polkinghorne or the scoffing atheistical biologist, I m guessing Sir Richard Dawkins there. People holding different beliefs and forms of expertise need to work together in an open nonconfrontational environment accepting both science and religion as valid aspects of human experience. It s a challenge facing the coming millennium. So no matter what your own take is on religion and on science, this is an important topic. And for you, as journalists, I think it s particularly important. (shows next slide) So witness this recent brouhaha over comments made by Pope Francis about evolution in unveiling a bronze bust of Pope Benedict XVI, This is a piece by Elizabeth Dias from Time Magazine MICHAEL CROMARTIE: She was invited to this. JEFF HARDIN: Okay. I really appreciated this article, including the words, Sorry, but media coverage of Pope Francis is papal bull. I think mainstream media outlets, many of them seem to have a very poor understanding of Roman Catholic thought on various aspects of science, particularly evolutionary biology, and Elizabeth is calling them to task here. I think one of the things that s true about you all and is true about me is that, to use Christian s phrase, which is a new phrase to me, is that we are knowledge-class professionals. That s really what we both are, professors and journalists. We re in the business of educating, and so getting this issue right is important for the public, and that s why I think you have such an important mission by virtue of your profession. Now, for me, I will admit that there is some personal importance here. First of all, I m a professor; I m Chair of a Zoology Department at a major research university, so I think about biology and science quite a lot. One thing that s not in my bio, though, is that I happen to be a Christian, and before I did my Ph.D. in Biophysics, I did a Master of Divinity degree at an Evangelical seminary in Southern California, which maybe because I went 3

4 through there no longer exists! It was called the International School of Theology. So for me personally putting together science and Christian faith is pretty important. Now, one proviso in this talk: I am not an evolutionary biologist, so if you want to get into the nuts and bolts of evolutionary mechanism I mean, I can address some of that, but I m not an expert. You should invite other people who are experts to future Faith Angle Forum events, but I m happy to talk about that. I actually study how embryos develop, and that s a lot of what I do for my teaching as well. Now, in addition, though, I m a faculty advisor. So there are a lot of student groups on the UW campus, Christian student groups, and I m a faculty advisor for several of them, so there is kind of a pastoral concern for me as well. So given all of this, these are important issues for me personally. And in addition, I m in a bit of a strange class. (shows next slide) So Elaine Howard Ecklund, who is a sociologist at Rice University and she s one of the co-authors of the article that Christian put out on the tables yesterday did a survey, and I took part in the survey. It was a survey of scientists at leading research universities in the United States about their religious beliefs. This is an infographic from the BioLogos Foundation, and they have a page that is full of really beautiful infographics like this if you want to look for some nice resources. But what this shows is a green test tube that is scientists and a blue test tube that is the general populace. And it breaks people down by their religious convictions from Don t Know, Refuse to Answer, Nothing in Particular, Atheist, Agnostic, Other Religion, Jewish, Catholic, Mainline Protestant, and at the very bottom, there are 4 percent that are Evangelical Protestant. So, you know, I m in a very small minority of scientists at major research universities. Now, compare that to the general populace and what you see is that 28 percent identify themselves as Evangelicals. And so the point is that as a practicing scientist who happens to be this particular kind of Christian, there aren t very many of us out there, and so this is of personal importance for me to get this right. 4

5 In addition, as I said, I m a professor. I interact with students a lot, and one of the students I interact with is a student named Jeremy O Connell, who eventually got his Ph.D. in Botany at the University of Texas at Austin, but he came to me one day because he saw that my hard drive was named Narnia. I don t know if many of you might know that a guy named C.S. Lewis wrote some books called The Chronicles of Narnia; maybe you ve seen some of the Disney franchise versions of those books. [Jeremy] was curious about that and came in to talk to me, and he spilled his heart out in this meeting, and he explained that he was very close to jettisoning his Christian faith when he came to the university because he realized what he had been told about science didn t square with what he learned at the university, and so he felt that he was pushed into an impossible position: either accept his Christian faith and jettison what he was learning about science or, conversely, accept was he was learning about science and cut loose his Christian faith. He seemed to be in an impossible situation. And so we talked about options and I helped him think through a lot of these issues, and as a thank-you he s a digital artist he gave me this picture (shows next slide), and it s kind of like horrible looking anglerfish, kind of Scylla and Charybdis here on the other side, and there is a lamppost in the middle. If you know The Chronicles of Narnia, there is kind of a planted lamppost which features prominently in the first book, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and another one as well, called The Magician s Nephew. So all of this is to say it s hard for Evangelicals to think about these issues clearly in ways that are life giving, and it produces a lack of congruence. (shows next slide) So this is Alyssa Bryant Rockenbach. She studies a kind of educational psychology, and she wrote a piece several years ago which I found very helpful. She interviewed a number of students who were Evangelicals, and they talked about whether they were truthful in the classroom, and one of them she interviewed said this: To get the A, you ve got to repeat what the teacher tells you, regurgitate it, get your A, and get out, even though you might not believe in it. I mean, to me, the irony of it all is that I have to play the part of somebody that s not true to himself, and that is a problem to me. 5

6 So from the personal side, I have a lot of passion for this issue and I have a lot of passion for us collectively thinking well about this and helping the public in the United States to think well about it. So let s turn then to some thoughts that Evangelicals have about science. There are some deficiencies in the way this has been assessed; Christian is far more able to identify the pitfalls here from a social science perspective, and maybe we can get into that in the Q&A. (shows next slide) I guess the most famous assessment is by the Gallup organization, and they have been running a poll since 1982 where they ask about human origins. They ask whether humans evolved, but God had no part in the process; that would be the bottom green line at the very bottom. The darker green line is the percent of people responding that humans evolved with God guiding it somehow. And then the lime green at the top is that God created humans in their present form quite recently. And you can see that these are pretty flat, I mean, there s not a lot of movement in these numbers over three decades despite repeated and vigorous attempts to educate the American public. So, now, there are deficiencies in the way these questions are asked, and we can talk about that, but nevertheless, this is pretty discouraging to biology educators, including myself. And you can break this down, or these polls can be broken down, by political party. I think you can guess how that might shake out in terms of Republican, Independent, or Democrat. And the orange here is the percentage that responded God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. The red is that Humans evolved and God guided the process. And the teal is that Humans evolved and God had no part in the process. So you can see for Republicans a simple majority actually believe in a recent creation of humans. If you look at people who go to church, similarly you can guess that there is a strong correlation with church-going in the United States and belief in a recent creation of humans. So the orange here again is God creating humans in their present form, and you can see that people who attend church weekly -- that s the top row -- many of them hold that position. People who almost never attend church, well, you can see they re kind of 6

7 a mixed bag at the bottom. And so there is a correlation between people s belief systems and their regularity of church attendance and whether or not they re open to some of the evidence for evolution. Now, someone who was a postdoc with Christian, Jon Hill, who is now at Calvin College, he s a really accomplished social scientist. I ll mention him, and give a plug for something that s about to come out in a moment that Jon has been working on, when I think he was still working with Christian -- is that right, Christian? [Christian nods] JEFF HARDIN: Yeah, this is data when he was still working with Christian, he looked at whether or not college education actually influenced your acceptance or not of evolution. I m a college educator; I was very interested in this set of data. It s not encouraging. (shows next slide) People with no college are on the left in this diagram. The purple represents people who are consistently creationists, so they believe that humans were created recently and that the world, in fact, was created a few thousand years ago; that s in purple. People who switched to an evolutionary view, accepting some sort of evolution, are in pink. People who had a consistent view on evolution are in blue. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE SPEAKER: Jeff, is this Evangelicals? JEFF HARDIN: This is Evangelicals, yeah. CHRISTIAN SMITH, Notre Dame: And then to be clear, this is switching between late teenage years and 18 to 25. This is not all people. JEFF HARDIN: That s right, it s not all people. CHRISTIAN SMITH: This is young people. JEFF HARDIN: This is young people. This is part of the National Study of Youth and Religion that Christian spearheaded and has published the results in a number of really fine books that I encourage you to check out. 7

8 So these are Evangelicals. And so what you see then is that people who are college graduates -- that s on the far right -- the purple box is bigger. Those are the people who are consistently creationist in their viewpoint. So education, at least for Evangelicals, doesn t seem to move the needle very much. Now, Jon has gone on to do additional analyses that are going to be published very soon. I ve seen an advanced copy, but I don t want to talk about work that s not been published. Jon has gone on to do a very nice survey to disambiguate some of the data from the Gallup polls. I ll let him tell that story. You should look for that in media outlets and in press releases coming soon, but I think the results show predictably that the Gallup polls are pretty naive in the way they assess people, but nevertheless, these basic facts still seem to hold true. (shows next slide) And this is not the only kind of survey that indicates this: John Evans, who is a sociologist at UC San Diego, has done a general social survey, and his findings suggest that there is no religious group that knows less, and actually mainline Protestants know more than those who are not religiously active. And in fact, ironically, Evangelicals have taken more science classes per capita than other types of students. Many religious groups don t seem to accept the validity of scientific methodology for the few fact claims in which there is a differing religious explanation, particularly evolution. This is John s conclusion from his work. The solution to conflicts over evolution for ordinary people, not activists, is not in teaching religious people the scientific method or showing how scientific institutions produce knowledge. Conservative Protestants already accept that. Rather, it lies in convincing conservative Protestants that scientists are not systematically biasing the findings of their knowledge. So what is that about? Well, fundamentally, that is about trust. In other words, trust for Evangelicals is more important than data. If an Evangelical doesn t trust you, they re not open to accepting what you have to say. 8

9 So what that suggests then is that changing attitudes about science is likely more about allaying theological concerns for the faithful than about imparting information, and that attitudes about science may be as much about social and relational considerations as they are about information. So with that backdrop, let me give you a little bit from a presentation that I ve given to several large Evangelical churches to help them see that there are a range of options that they might think about. Part of the motivation here is to help them to be open to seeing that there are multiple ways to be faithful as a Christian and think about these scientific issues. (shows next slide) And so here is the big idea, and this is the big idea that I tell them actually: Christians should avoid binary thinking about the question of origins. We, in the United States, we like things that are binary, up-down, yes-no, black-white, we re very comfortable with that kind of approach as a nation, but Evangelicals in particular like to think that way. So the goal here is to move them to see some options, and this will also help you get a sense for the taxonomy of possibilities among Evangelicals out there as journalists as well. So let me begin by saying this is not all that easy. (shows next slide) In a really good book by a philosopher of science at Calvin College, Del Ratzsch, called The Battle of Beginnings -- so you can see what that book was about -- says, One of the attractions of the popular caricatures that reign in this area is that they make confident choice appear supremely easy. These sorts of easy solutions are what people tend to go for, so the work is actually very hard to try to provide space in the middle for some discussion. (shows next slide) And so I start by affirming what Christians all can affirm about creation. Let s look at something from the Apostle Paul from the Christian part of the Bible, the New Testament, from his letter to the Church at Colossae (Col. 1:16-17). For by Him, this is Jesus he is referring to all things were created: in heaven and earth, visible and invisible; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold 9

10 together. So Christians think that Jesus is sort of the metaphysical glue that holds the universe together and he underlies its creation and its day-to-day functioning. (shows next slide) And this is reflected in the ancient creeds, the Nicene Creed, for example, which many churches affirm: We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom all things were made. So Christians can affirm all of this, and, in fact, Christians have a history of what s called the two books kind of approach, and this really comes from a piece of poetry in the book of Psalms, Psalm 19, (shows next slide) where it begins, The heavens declare the glories of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day-to-day they pour forth speech that word is literally from the Hebrew bubbling up, you know, kind of like bubbling crude from the Beverly Hillbillies: oil, that is you know that kind of idea. So it s irrepressibly telling us something about God, its creator. But the psalm also goes on and talks about the Scriptures, how the law of the Lord is perfect and how it revives the soul, how everything there is trustworthy, and these commands are radiant, they give life. And so there are these two books, the book of God s works in the world, and the book of God s word. So Christians all affirm this, and you would think, well, that s a good start; right? In fact, ironically Francis Bacon took this two books analogy and really ran with it, and you may have heard of him, he was one of the important figures in the so-called scientific revolution. (shows next slide) He said let no person think or maintain that they can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God s word or the book of God s works. Now, the ironic thing is that this is quoted in a very interesting place, it s in the frontispiece to the Origin of Species. Interesting. So Christians affirm these two books. Where do the controversies come from? Where do the disputes that are in need of dialogue come from? Well, first we need some ground rules, and so I spend some time defining those. We talk about what evolution is: it s change over time. Biological evolution is the biological change that occurs over time. And as classically defined in the modern synthesis, evolution is descent with modification from earlier life forms that have shared ancestors, it s made possible by mutation, changes in genes, and by natural selection, pressure to 10

11 select for particular beneficial changes that confer a reproductive advantage on various organisms. So that s evolution. And you would be surprised that most students really cannot articulate this, which is disappointing from a zoology professor s perspective. Microevolution is small changes over time. Most evolutionary biologists think those are just amplified over time to get what some people call macroevolution, large-scale changes that transcend species boundaries and lead to large-scale changes in organisms over geological time. But we also have to define the word creationism, often used very badly. So what does that mean? Well, this is the idea that the universe and ultimately life on Earth were created by one or more intelligent agents. Now, based on what I told you earlier, for Christians, the agent is God. And therefore all Christians in some sense are creationists. Of course, we know there is a proviso there, and we ll get to that. Now, in addition, I have to define for these folks what is naturalism, and maybe you re wondering what that might mean. We learned about methodological nationalism yesterday from Christian. He was kind of playing off of the phrase methodological naturalism. This is the idea that the natural world is to be explained using the scientific methodologies that are common to science. Many of us would prefer the word natural science for that. Metaphysical naturalism, in contrast, is a worldview or a philosophical commitment that the natural is all there is and that the supernatural can t occur. So no Christians, at least traditional Christians, are metaphysical naturalists, but they may be methodological naturalists. In fact, many Christians who are scientists would be in that latter camp. Okay, so with that backdrop then, I lay out some perspectives on all of these things, and I begin with a really helpful rubric from Eugenie Scott, who herself is not a believer. She has run the National Center for Science Education out of Oakland, California, which is committed to helping foster education about evolution in public schools and other venues. And in her book -- it s in several of her books and also in her articles -- she says, 11

12 I encourage people to reject the creation-evolution dichotomy and to recognize the creation-evolution continuum. What she s trying to do -- and actually a lot of people got mad at her for saying this -- is to say, look, we need to recognize that there are a spectrum of views, and that if we want to move people and their understanding of biological processes, we need to accept that and actually help people to think -- move away from thinking in black-and-white binary terms and think more creatively. All right. And Eugenie kind of lays out this interesting spectrum, and this is what I want to go through with you now. If you look at Evangelical Christians in particular, there are a number of possibilities. Up in the upper left, people in that position on the spectrum believe that the earth is very young, created very, very recently. So they would be called Young Earth creationists. They might believe that the earth is apparently old -- you know, it s actually young but appears old. Then there are people who believe in progressive creationism over geological time scales; they might be called Day-Age or Progressive Creationists. Then there are people who believe that God accomplished his purposes through the evolutionary process. Because they re Christians, they re creationists remember I told you that but they believe in evolution, so they would be called Evolutionary Creationists. So on the upper left then are people who believe that evolutionary biology has either got it wrong or it s very, very incomplete. If you move down towards the lower right, evolution becomes a more complete understanding of the way the world works and how living organisms on the planet have come to arise. So you get the idea that there is a spectrum here. Then on the very lower right is what we would call Materialistic Naturalism. These would be people who certainly believe that evolution is true, but they are metaphysical naturalists. All right, so that s kind of the continuum. And it s worth realizing what motivates each of these perspectives, and I hope this will be helpful to you as you interact with Evangelicals. First, it s certainly true that people in the young Earth camp have a more literal -- and I put that in quotes for a purpose -- interpretation of the Bible. What they really do is they tend to read the Bible in a mid-20th century kind of way. It seems to be straightforward 12

13 and it seems to tell them that the earth was created in 144 literal hours, and that s the viewpoint that they adopt. And then as you move down towards Evolutionary Creation, these are people who have a more nuanced -- I use the phrase nonliteral, -- I m not sure that s a good phrase, but they have a more nuanced way of interpreting the Bible. They seek to find complementarity between the Bible and science, or they re independent, not really talking about the same things. And, of course, materialist naturalists don t care about the Bible, so that s the guys on the bottom. All right. So let s go through each of these and let s see what motivates young Earth creationism. Now, you may think that people who are young Earth creationists are not well educated, they are not particularly thoughtful, and in that, you would be wrong, at least among some young Earth creationists. A good example here is Joe Francis. You may wonder, well, who is Joe Francis? Well, Joe Francis graduated from the University of Michigan with a Ph.D. You may wonder why I m mentioning him. Well, he was one of my college roommates -- (Laughter) JEFF HARDIN: -- so he tried to teach me how to -- yeah, he unsuccessfully tried to help me with my jump shot in college, a very good basketball player. So Joe is well educated, but he holds a young Earth position because he believes the Scriptures insist upon it, so he s trying to be faithful to the Scriptures. All right. In fact, that leads to some motivations for this position. You know, I think the fundamental motivation among the faithful here is that these folks are trying to uphold a strong view of Scripture and God s sovereignty, how he acts, and his kind of authority over the natural world. And it seeks to be faithful to a particular way of interpreting the Bible, a hermeneutic, and one that tends to be literal. You may have heard the phrase, If the plain sense makes sense, seek no other sense. At least I learned that one in 13

14 seminary. So that s a particular way of approaching the Bible. And we can talk about whether that s truly a literal interpretation; we ll come back to that. And then I think, very importantly, young Earth creationists are afraid of what I ll call the hermeneutical slippery slope, the belief that if you give up a literal reading of Genesis, then the rest of Scripture can t be trusted, including what it seems to say about human individuals and how they are rightly related to God through Jesus Christ. So another way to think about that last idea is that -- I ll come back to it in a second. What I want to emphasize is that this is really what s underlying at least one of the largest young Earth creationist organizations, Answers in Genesis, founded by Ken Ham. (shows next slide) He has got a very large museum outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, in Kentucky. He s got a nice dinosaur there that he s got his hand on. And Ken said it this way: I want to make it very clear that we don t want to be known primarily as young Earth creationists. Answers in Genesis main thrust is not Young Earth as such, our emphasis is on biblical authority. For Ken, this is the linchpin idea, and he s trying to be faithful to that. And Ken is definitely one of those people who talks about this hermeneutical slippery slope. (shows next slide) And so for Ken, another way to think about this is this is sort of an epistemological domino theory. Some of us in the room are old enough to know about the domino theory of foreign policy from when I was a kid, and, you know, this is the same idea here, that if we knock over that particular domino that relates to the book of Genesis, then everything that we thought we believed about our faith must be wrong. You can see how wrenching this has to be for someone if you re asking them to make that choice, if they believe this is the only alternative. Now, there are challenges with Young Earth creationism, of course. (shows next slide)this is Paul Nelson, who is a Young Earth creationist. He is also associated with the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington. He says it this way; this is succinctly put: Natural science seems to overwhelmingly point to an old cosmos. It is safe to say that most recent 14

15 creationists are motivated by religious concerns. That s absolutely true. So the evidence, even for a young Earth creationist like Paul, seems to point against it. People who are trying educate Christian students about this encounter an interesting phenomenon. Take Dennis Venema, who is a professor of biology at Trinity Western University up in British Columbia. (shows next slide) He said it this way: I ve seen students willing to discard nearly the entirety of modern science in order to maintain a particular view. So one of the challenges from denying the scientific evidence is that you kind of have to walk away from those things that science seems to be telling us. Now, in addition, there are some theological concerns. (shows next slide) You know, this seems to suggest that we re not trusting that second book that I mentioned from Psalm 19. Some Christians have problems with that entailment here. And you know there is a whole interpretive approach to Genesis used by this group; some Christians feel that this interpretive approach doesn t take the Bible literally enough, in the sense that it doesn t seek to understand the original audience. They would not have known anything about modern science, so seeking modern scientific explanations in the text may not be a wellfounded approach. Okay. For Young Earth creationists, I think you got a sense for some of their motivations. I hope you get a sense for why they hold them. We can talk in much more detail in the Q&A about all of this. Let s move on, though, to people who accept the geological time scale but nevertheless are motivated to remain faithful to what the Scriptures seem to say to them from the book of Genesis, and that s Day-Age or Progressive Creationists. (shows next slide) Probably the flagship organization here is a group called Reasons to Believe, run out of Southern California by the astrophysicist Hugh Ross, a really great person, very nice man. He has written profusely about this in many, many books, and many of them are very good in terms of their coverage of astrophysics and astronomy and those sorts of things. 15

16 Others in this group would include someone named Jack Collins, who does a lot of writing on this topic, and others. So what s motivating this particular view? This is kind of a via media view, a middle ground. It seeks to uphold a strong view of the Bible. That s a huge motivator for Evangelicals, but balanced against the seemingly congruent results from the physical sciences. So it tries to harmonize what the Bible seems to be saying with the evidence from geoscience, astrophysics, and other sciences, but in a way that tries to knit them together using a particular approach. And in particular, it seeks to uphold the uniqueness of humans and the historicity of something called the Fall. If you re not familiar with Christian theology, the Fall is a cataclysmic event involving our first parents and the ancestors of humans who got this whole sin thing going that we re all wrestling with today. So it seeks to uphold an initial pair, Adam and Eve, because the text seems to require that. (shows next slide) This is Fuz Rana, and he is one of the Reasons to Believe scholars. He is quite comfortable, moreover, saying that because the text seems to say that God creates groupings of organisms, but there is no evidence from the text that those change over time or go outside their boundaries of their created categories, that evolution cannot really be true. Even though there may be progression over time, God creates different organisms over time, and so we see them in the geological record, but evolution doesn t account for how those forms arise over geological time scales. And so one entailment of that is what Fuz says here: Reasons to Believe scholars believe God miraculously intervened throughout the history of the universe in various ways, millions, possibly even billions, of times to create each and every new species of life on Earth. What are some challenges here? (shows next slide) Well, Young Earth creationists are troubled by it because it accepts an old Earth. We saw it s a problem because they seem to think, they seem to feel, that the Scriptures indicate a young Earth. Evolutionary 16

17 creationist Christians see this view of God s creative activities as sort of ad hoc the millions of creative events seem a little bit interesting to them. And this approach uses concordism: it tries to knit together what the Bible is saying with a modern scientific account, trying to make them fit together so they overlay on one another successfully, so the Bible is actually giving us the sequence of events that occurred over geological time. If we could only understand the biblical record properly, we would see that it s laying out the order of creation: a day is used in a sense kind of like back in the day, you know, it s an undefined long, very long, period of time. But if we could figure that out, they would dovetail really nicely. A lot of people feel, a lot of other Christians feel, that this approach may bring modern approaches to the text. It wouldn t have made sense to the original audience; they wouldn t have known about geoscience or many other processes that are implied by this approach. Okay, so we ve talked about young Earth creationists and this progressive creation idea. And then there is something that s lying along this diagonal line. It s really hard to know what to do with this, and that s the idea of intelligent design. So it s worth talking about that very briefly. What is that about? All right. Well, you may have heard that. Some of you may be very knowledgeable, so if you are, please forgive me for being a bit pedantic here, but I think it s helpful to say what ID is not. (shows next slide) All Christians accept the idea that intentionality underlies the creation. That s not what s meant by Intelligent Design in a technical sense here. ID, as a technical concept, is an argument. It s an argument for the existence of a Designer based on the premise that certain features of the universe and living things can only -- and this is important -- only be explained by an intelligent cause. In other words, there is no possible mechanism that can explain certain events about the natural world, particularly the origins of living things from nonliving systems being one of them. Also for many ID proponents, evolution itself actually one day will be shown to be impossible, and therefore an intelligent designer needs to move the process along. 17

18 And so Michael Behe was one of the first writers in this area; he wrote a book called Darwin s Black Box. Bill Dembski, a mathematician by training, has written a number of books about, Can we infer design? So that s his specialty. And probably the most articulate proponent nowadays for Intelligent Design is Stephen Meyer. Steve has written a number of books. One of them, a very thick book that I m showing here, is called Signature in the Cell. And all of them want to say that there are certain impossible structures, things that if you remove one of their components, they stop working, so they couldn t have evolved. Those are things Mike Behe calls irreducibly complexthings. Where does the information come from that cells use to pass on their genomes to the next generation? That s a subject of Signature in the Cell, et cetera. And Phillip Johnson, who actually went to the same church that I did, First Presbyterian Church Berkeley in Berkeley, and who is a law professor, is kind of the initiator of a movement of Intelligent Design folks. It also includes Paul Nelson, whom I mentioned earlier. All right. So what s motivating this particular approach? Well, the main stated motivation is to provide an alternative to neo-darwinian theory, modern kind of evolutionary thinking, since this theory is viewed as inadequate. But sociologically, at least, it is true that the vast majority of Intelligent Design advocates are Christian in their outlook, and so a key motivation I think is the concern that evolutionary theory is dysteleological in nature. In other words, it seems to imply that there is no purpose, built into the process at least, and this leads to lots of concerns about whether God is providentially overseeing what s happening in the world. All right. So what are some challenges here? (shows next slide) Well, many scientists who are Christians feel that intelligent design makes no positive predictions about how to do science or about scientific mechanisms that lead to really testable hypotheses, so it s 18

19 not fruitful. And it really hasn t proposed any alternatives to methodological naturalism in the laboratory with regard to the way we do science. And Chris has already addressed that a bit with the social sciences as well, and we can talk about that. Now, to be fair, Intelligent Design proponents think that s just a matter of time, so if we just wait long enough, we ll figure it out; it s a young movement, it hasn t been around very long, give it some time. I mean, that s what -- when I talk to my friends who are intelligent design proponents, that s typically what they would say here. All right. (shows next slide) So here is Paul Nelson again. Remember he s a Young Earth creationist, but he is also a key member of the Intelligent Design movement, and here s what he says about this: Well, easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. Right now we have a bag of powerful intuitions. That s interesting. So he s saying it feels that evolutionary approaches must be wrong, so we need to look for alternatives. I think that s kind of an emotional motivator for many in the ID movement, Paul included, and Paul is a really wonderful, generous human being. We had him up to speak at the University of Wisconsin, just a great, articulate guy. He would be a good interview. If you were looking for someone from this perspective, he s a fascinating contradiction. He got a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science at University of Chicago, but he s a Young Earth creationist; we can talk about that. Okay. All right. So let s then come back to the bottom of this sliding scale here, Evolutionary Creation. Let s talk about that here. (shows next slide) There have been a number of really nice books. The first really early one that was probably the best is by Howard Van Till, who was at Calvin College, a Christian college in Western Michigan. Darrel Falk, who was president of the BioLogos Foundation, also a professor at Point Loma Nazarene University in Southern California near San Diego, wrote a really wonderful book called Coming to Peace with Science. Denis Alexander, who is a molecular biologist at Cambridge University wrote Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? Denis really likes that whole chimpanzee thing poking through the arm. I m not a big fan. (Laughter) 19

20 JEFF HARDIN: And then my favorite title is by Denis Lamoureux. He wrote a book called I Love Jesus and I Accept Evolution. Interesting. Evolutionary Creationists then, you can see that they are devout Christian believers, but they believe that evolution is how things work. And many Christians who are scientists in the United States who are part of something called the American Scientific Affiliation (I m a member of that), and in the U.K., Christians in Science, (I m also a member of that organization), the Faraday Institute; these are examples of organizations that promote this particular viewpoint. But the most well-known proponent of this view is Francis Collins. Francis wrote a book in 2006 called The Language of God in which he lays out this view. Francis is an incredible person. He s a bit constrained through his work as the Director of the National Institutes of Health right now to grant interviews, but any of you who have interacted with Francis will know what I m saying. He leads worship songs at meetings that he attends that are Christian meetings. He s got a guitar with a DNA double helix inlayed in the fret a 12- string guitar. MICHAEL CROMARTIE: We had him here. JEFF HARDIN: And you had him here. He did that whole thing; right? So some of you, you ve seen that whole thing. Right, yeah. Francis I think is the most articulate and certainly the most winsome spokesperson for this view. And I will say he s very persuasive as well. Francis started something called the BioLogos Foundation. The BioLogos Foundation was created to foster thinking about evolution, what molecular biology and genetics tell us about that, and how to make sense of that given the Scriptures and to be faithful to the Scriptures from an Evangelical perspective. I said Francis is fairly persuasive; he is, and he asked me to join the Board of the BioLogos Foundation, so I have. Just to let you know that that s true, if you Google me, you will find me there. So we can talk about that. (shows next slide) 20

21 What are the motivations here? Well, the motivations are to seek to integrate what appears to be the strong evidence for biological evolution from the fossil record, from modern molecular analysis (if you don t know what that is, it s okay; it s kind of like fossils in our genomes), all of that data seems to fit beautifully with the modern theory of evolution, and yet it s committed to faithful Christian theism, and in particular, because they are Evangelicals, they are committed to the authority of the text in some sense. They re committed to biblical authority. But it also seeks to honor the Second Book that I mentioned in this two books approach, by acknowledging new biological data and taking it on board. Now, you may think, Well, that s interesting, that seems to fly in the face of people who have a fairly conservative view of the Scriptures, and I think we can talk about this. David Rennie mentioned the word inerrancy yesterday. (shows next slide) You know, here is one of the architects of the modern view of inerrancy, a theologian named J.I. Packer. He said it this way: I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and I maintain it in print, but I can t see anything in Scripture, in the first chapters of Genesis or elsewhere, that bears on the biological theory of evolution one way or the other. So the idea that you can hold these two together isn t just coming from Evolutionary Creationist scientists, but it s also something that is consistent, at least with some, in the pretty conservative Evangelical Christian community. And it comports with a lot of recent Evangelical scholarship on the Bible. (shows next slide) Henri Blocher is a French biblical scholar; Tremper Longman, who is at a place called Westmont College on the West Coast; and John Walton, who is at an Evangelical bastion, Wheaton College, in Wheaton, Illinois. All of these guys are taking a more nuanced literary/cultural analysis approach to the Bible, trying to understand what it said to its original audience. For them, there is really no direct conflict with the scientific account of the origins of the universe, of this planet, or of human beings. But there are challenges. (shows next slide) Many Christians, not surprisingly based on the survey data I showed you, fear that this approach is dysteleological, it seems to be lacking in purpose. God doesn t seem to be running the show in a way that they re comfortable 21

22 with. There are also concerns about the view of Scripture that may be entailed, or at least that some advocates of Evolutionary Creationism have held. And this idea of the origins of human sinfulness and our need for salvation that is part and parcel of the Christian message, understanding that and taking on board evolutionary ideas is a theological challenge for Evangelicals. (shows next slide) Now, other mainline Protestants and Catholics, many of them are quite comfortable with evolution: Simon Conway Morris, who is a leading evolutionary biologist on the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian explosion. He is an Anglican. Joel Martin is a Presbyterian and wrote a book about evolution called ThePrism and the Rainbow. Kenneth Miller is a Catholic at Brown University; he wrote Finding Darwin s God. All of these are comfortable with evolutionary approaches. Okay. So we ve covered some Christian approaches. Why is there so much pushback if there are some options here? I mean, after all, I have presented some options to you. What is the fundamental burr under the saddle, the bee in the bonnet, for Christians that tends to get them to dig in their heels so much? Christian mentioned yesterday that one word can set dialogue back many years in this area. I think he called it posttraumatic stress disorder approaches to the discussion. That was very helpful for me because that immediately gave me a mental image of the kind of emotional pushback that words can cause, and I think it comes from this bottom view, Materialistic Naturalism. [animated bricks slides into graphic to separate Christian views from materialistic naturalism] We kind of need to put a brick wall between the Christian views and this view on the bottom, and I think it s this view primarily that s motivating a lot of the pushback among many Evangelicals. 22

23 (shows next slide) It s because of statements like this Here is George Gaylord Simpson, leading evolutionary biologist in the mid-20th century: Man, [human beings], were certainly not the goal of evolution, which evidently had no goal. Humans were not planned, in an operation wholly planless. Richard Dawkins, the most articulate spokesperson for this view nowadays, said it in The Blind Watchmaker and many, many places elsewhere: Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. And there are a number of other new atheists: Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, a neuroscientist. Stephen Jay Gould had a different take on this, but even he thought, you know, Christian faith shouldn t really be speaking to evolutionary biology. (shows next slide) So what s going on here when Dawkins or Simpson make statements like this? Well, I think what we re engaging in here now is no longer a natural explanation. Clearly it s gone well beyond that, it s gone to a worldview or metaphysical statements about the way the world fundamentally is, and it s the metaphysical naturalism which seems to be an entailment based on the writings of people like Dawkins that Evangelical Christians look at and go, I can t accept that, so therefore I cannot accept thinking at all about evolutionary biology. Now, it s interesting. At this point in the talk I usually try to help the audience to understand that I know a lot of agnostic or atheist biologists many of them are friends of mine and atheist or agnostic philosophers. Not all of them see that there is this kind of inevitable entailment of metaphysical naturalism with evolutionary biology. 23

24 And a guy I really like a lot is Tom Nagel. He is from NYU. Some of you may know his work. I know Andy has written a really nice piece on Tom fairly recently. And that s great stuff. You should read that piece, by the way. You can talk to Andy about that. (shows next slide) And here is what Tom Nagel said in a book called The Last Word: I want atheism to be true and I m made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It s not just that I don t believe in God and naturally hope that I m right in my belief, it s that I hope there is no God. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it s responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life. What I appreciate about Tom Nagel is he is just irrepressibly honest. He says evolution, it s convenient for me because it seems to give me an out; I have this cosmic authority problem. And I think that s what s motivating some of the rhetoric here, and at least in my experience, this is helpful to some of the Christians that I present this material to. (shows next slide) Now, there are problems with metaphysical naturalism, of course, and one of them is articulated really well by Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel Laureate himself, an atheist or agnostic, who said it this way: The existence of a limit to science is made clear by its inability to answer childlike questions having to do with first and last things, questions such as, How did everything begin? What are we all here for? What is the point of living? For Medawar, science cannot possibly answer these questions. We need to seek answers to these questions through something else. And for a Christian, including one who believes in evolutionary biology, as I happen to, the answers to these kinds of questions do not lie in the scientific method, they lie outside of science, and Medawar saw that science is limited in this way. It s spectacularly successful, but its success lies in the selflimitation of its methodology. 24