One of the chief criticisms that I hear levelled against members of the “intellectual dark ages” like myself (e.g. young-earth Creationist types) is that we’re so close-minded. In fact, a popular trend in anti-Creationism writing these days seems to be to argue that Creationism can’t be science because it can’t change. Any idea that is “fixed” and closed for discussion is non-scientific, it is argued, because science never closes the book on anything. If science doesn’t prove hypothesis, but merely fails to falsify them, we need to be open to the idea that our pet theory might have to be changed somewhere down the road.

Now, one might argue that these same people effectively try to “close the book” on evolution, but that’s an argument for another blog entry. My question in this post is this:

Where do people get the idea that creationism isn’t open to change?

Well, it’s pretty simple. They get that idea from creationists. Apparently, there’s a lot of us who would argue that creationism is a slam-dunk, who would shut our minds to any new evidence, any new information that might require us to change or discard our “pet theory”. I think that’s, well, a bit idiotic. Sorry for the strong language.

Now, here’s the thing: I’m pretty unlikely to discard my opinion that God created the universe. But change? Happens all the time. I used to think God created each species exactly as we see it today. I don’t think that any more. Then, I used to think that we could easily divide evolution into “micro-evolution” (changes within species) and “macro-evolution” (everything from speciation to common origins). I figured we could throw the evolutionists a bone on “micro-evolution”, but clearly “macro-evolution” is right out. Then I heard about the three-spined sticklebacks in northern Vancouver Island that may very well be a perfectly good example of speciation (at least in terms of the biological species concept), where I previously thought none existed.

You might argue that I was (or am) an undereducated ignoramus, and that the creationist movement as a whole doesn’t accept change to their theory. Well, perhaps that’s true for some big-C “Creationists”, particularly some of those in the States. But even a cursory glance at the history of creationist belief will show you that, by and large, major changes in what most creationists believe about creation have in fact occurred, and parallel my own personal changes quite closely in some respects.

I think that people, both Christians and non-Christians alike are guilty of having a pretty naive view of Christianity – namely, that anything falling under the umbrella of Christian thought has been “fixed” and “static” since the beginning of Christianity itself. This, I suppose, is one area of post-modernity that fits pretty well with the world as I think it’s unfolded: changes in how we think are expected and embraced. The way we think about creation has changed because of the cultural context we find ourselves in, and also because of new observations that force us (in, surprisingly, a rather scientific way of doing things) to revise our hypothesis and the predictions that follow from it.

So, please don’t pull the ol’ straw man on us on this one. My fellow creationists are prolific enough at setting up logical fallacies without the evolutionists getting into the game. (Note: I don’t actually personally know any creationists who are as weak at arguing their point as the poor “straw creationist” who is dismantled in that last link.)

For me, the debate is a bit tiring. Now, oddly, I’m one of those pesky young-Earth Creationists (I don’t even waste my time couching it in “Intelligent Design” language, although I don’t mind it if you want to yourself), so you’d think I’d really enjoy this sort of thing, perhaps cheering quietly in front of my computer when the news article hits one of my favourite news sites.

Instead, what I actually do is groan inwardly (because so often the “far-right Creationist / Intelligent Design” camp gets their science wrong anyways), and then read, with the same sort of curiousity that makes others slow down to rubber-neck at a traffic accident, the extensive comments on the bottom of the article that inevitably follow.

The latest article that I’ve been reading is from Ars Technica. The comments, of course, range from the insightful to the insulting - insulting of my intelligence, if not my religion. There are the usual “why don’t we allow math teachers to teach that pi = 3?” comments, demonstrating a thorough misunderstanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, at least as espoused by, well, any philosopher of science in the past 150 years.

Then there’s the “Creationism isn’t science - it’s veiled religion” camp. They’re right in some sense, except that I don’t really see the point in veiling the religion bit. The problem is, if you want to take religious theories (note: not necessarily “theory” in the scientific sense of the word) of origins and throw them out, you’d more or less have to do the same with the evolutionary theories of origins.

The sense of the argument from those who comment on geek-news at Ars Technica or Slashdot seems to be that:

1. The scientific evidence for evolutionary origins of living things are overwhelming
2. There is no scientific basis for creation; in fact, a scientific basis couldn’t even be imagined for creation.
3. Therefore, creation doesn’t deserve a mention.

I can see where people get point #1 from, even if I don’t agree. Points #2 and #3, however, I’m afraid I don’t understand.

The “old-style” scientific method goes something like this:

1. Someone makes an observation about some phenomenon.
2. They hypothesize an explanation for that phenomenon.
3. They develop predictions that would be true if the hypothesis was true
4. They test the predictions, ideally by experiment, to support or refute the hypothesis.

So what is it, there, that precludes creation science? The observations are easy: life exists, life is complex. In fact, that’s far easier to buy now than it was even 60 years ago. The hypothesis seems obvious enough: “since life is so complex, it must have been made by something intelligent, like the Christian God”. Why is it that so many have a problem with calling this a hypothesis? One of the commenters on the article I was reading refers to creationism as the “antithesis of hypothesis”. In usual form, there’s no explanation of what invalidates creation as a hypothesis.

Then we move on to predictions. Can we really not imagine some rational predictions that would support the idea of a creator? Of course we can - but significantly, some of these are exactly the same predictions that evolutionists might make to support evolutionary theory. Google “creationist predictions”, and you’ll get lots of them - some good, some wacky, some are in between. But, clearly, there’s no issue here of coming up with predictions.

How about testing predictions? Well, we’ve got the same problem here that the evolutionary camp has. There’s some predictions that lend themselves very well to testing, and others which don’t, due to the time scales required for such research. We have a difficult time (or is it impossible?) developing experiments to test creationism, but we also have a difficult time developing experiments to test things like common origins. I’m using the proper sense of the word “experiment” here, mind you - we can certianly “test” predictions by making further observations, but that’s not the same as experiment.

Interestingly, in the philosophy of science, there are fewer and fewer people who support this nice, cut and dried view of the scientific method. Do a bit of reading of Kuhn, Lakatos, and Popper, and you’ll see that the idea of a standard “method” is rather non-representative of the reality of scientific discovery. Popper’s “imaginative” hypothetico-deductive model widely opens up the concept of hypothesis. Kuhn’s ideas of competing paradigms is directly relevant to the debate raging around the creation / evolution hypotheses, both today and in Darwin’s time.

One of the hallmarks of good science is a willingness to examine competing hypotheses. I think the last word needs to go to Imre Lakatos, one of the pre-eminent philosophers of science of the last century. His message, I think, applies to both camps - the creationists as much as the evolutionists:

Indeed, the hallmark of scientific behaviour is a certain scepticism even towards one’s most cherished theories. Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.

Thus a statement may be pseudoscientific even if it is eminently ‘plausible’ and everybody believes in it, and it may be scientifically valuable even if it is unbelievable and nobody believes in it. A theory may even be of supreme scientific value even if no one understands it, let alone believes in it.

So, let’s move on already, but let’s do so in a way that embraces the controversy, rather than suppresses it. Let’s be skeptics of our own pet theories, by all means. Let’s allow our educators to talk about issues that matter to their students, rather than taking them to court for “shoving religion down our throats” when creation is mentioned. Who knows, we might actually learn something.

I sat there about 3 feet away from this guy, this morning, using my 32gb iPod Touch to find the passage that the preacher was on. Now, I’ve been preaching at my students lately about my iPod Touch, and how it represents my own selfishness, my me-first consumerism, my “buy-in” to the world’s view of things. I’ve been comparing it to the BMW that Tony Campolo talked about way back when, when he said he didn’t figure Jesus would have a BMW in his driveway as long as there were poor people in Haiti (or, for that matter, in the seats in my church). For me, I drive a ‘93 Civic, so I felt pretty good about myself until I thought about that 32gb iPod Touch that I’d recently bought. When I bought it, I stood in the Costco for a good 15 minutes, trying to come up with a reasonable justification why I needed not just an iPod Touch, but the 32gb version. The thing cost me about $500.

The preacher this morning was preaching from the end of Galatians. He got to this passage this morning, which I finally dug up on my iPod Touch:

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is a new creation. ~ Galatians 6:14-15

I sat there, feeling rather uncomfortable. What does it mean to be crucified to the world? What does it mean to be a new creation? Is there anything about me that doesn’t shout “I love the world!”, but rather says “I love God”? Does my willingness to rush out and drop $500 on an electronic gadget that I really don’t need at all, while a guy sleeps outside the bank 2 blocks from my house, nearly freezing to death, say “I’m a new creation”?

I think if the “world has been crucified to me”, my attitude about the things of the world, the “stuff”, the “lust of the flesh”, the “pride of life”, ought to be different than the attitudes of those who are “of the world”. Why is it that, so often, and perhaps most obviously around Christmas time, we let ourselves become enthralled with things?

Seneca’s main point is that it’s pointless to complain about how short life is. Life, he says, is plenty long enough; the main problem is that we waste most of it. It’s a valid point, from my way of thinking at least. Seneca’s suggestion, of course, is that we’d do a lot better with things if we just spent all our time studying philosophy. As much as I like philosophy, I don’t think that’s the example Jesus would have us follow, however.

What particularly struck me, though, was a comment buried way down in the middle of Chapter 7. Seneca says:

It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and - what will perhaps make you wonder more - it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.

Frankly, the quote comes off a bit like meaningless pseudo-intellectualism to me. What do you mean it takes the whole of life to learn how to die? Surely lots of people actually do die without having figured it all out. But how about the first part? How do we learn how to live?

On one level, the Christian life is pretty simple. We are to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We’re to love our neighbour as ourselves. Everything else hangs on that. You can read it, you can understand the principle, in around a minute or so. On another level, though, it’s a life-long process. Tozer, in chapter one of The Pursuit of God, cries out to God to help him to desire God more; it seems the more we do know God, the more realize we need him even more still.

I am glad that, although some people may try to convince us otherwise, the good life isn’t achieved by a Stoic renouncing of all of the pleasures of life and dedication to pondering high thoughts. The good life, for the Christian, is lived in relationships: first with God, then with those around us.

So, I recently went to take a look at what he’s been up to lately.

In my browsing, I stumbled across this podcast, in which Dawkins “takes on” Alistair McGrath, an Oxford theologian who has published a couple of books taking cracks at Dawkins’ work.

McGrath, unfortunately, fails to impress. He’s clearly got a fairly thorough understanding of his position, but his ability to communicate to the lay-person leaves something to be desired. Big flowery sentences, but it’s easy to miss his point (and it, sometimes, makes it too easy for him to speak without having a point). To some extent, I’m used to hearing Christian apologists and (more frequently) intelligent design advocates who fail to impress me, so I wasn’t all that surprised.

What surprised me most of all, though, was how unimpressive Dawkins was. He has a very clear way of speaking, a perfectly understandable and cultured accent, and clearly is highly intelligent. But, in espousing his atheist/strongly agnostic position, he seems a bit out of his depth. In particular, he seems a bit muddled in his epistemology (theory of knowledge).

Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone with a science background, his language is full of objectivism (the idea that an objective truth exists). He claims, over and over throughout the interview, to only be interested in “the truth”. Clearly, for Dawkins, an objective truth must exist. To go further, he seems to be very strongly positivist (an objective truth exists, and we can figure out what it is). For Dawkins, the scientific method is the way to discover objective truth, and during the podcast he holds up the laws of physics as good examples of truth, whereas religion is ridiculed and dismissed.

At one point during the discussion, while explaining that he doesn’t care how many good things religion has contributed to the world, he simply exclaims,

“Is it true?”

Good question.

Interestingly, the moderator in the discussion asked a revealing question from an entirely different epistemology. She asked something along the lines of this:

“Would you agree that Islam might be true for someone else, in the same way that Christianity is true for you?”

This type of epistemology is called subjectivism, which claims that no objective truth exists (or that no knowledge exists external to the individual who is doing the knowing).

Subjectivism is a pretty tough viewpoint to adhere to, because there are certain types of knowledge that sure seem to be external to the individual, such as the laws of physics. Your idea of the laws of physics might differ from mine, but in that case, we’d probably assume that one of us had it slightly wrong.

Dawkins leaves little room for subjectivism, it seems, even in terms of moral and ethical truths. In the discussion, he refers to a widespread consensus about what is right and wrong, appealing to our morals about child labour and slavery. This is surprising, since it’s generally Christians or members of other religions who claim that there is an objective moral or ethical truth. Dawkins, however, is forced to say that “something other than religion” is giving us this moral consensus, but he isn’t in any way equipped to know what that is.

So, how does an objectivist, positivist scientist start figuring out what moral and ethical truths are out there? Unfortunately, the scientific method doesn’t give us the tools to find that truth. Where Dawkins seems to fall apart is in his determination to stick with a firmly-entrenched scientism and naturalism that undermines any other means of knowing.

I decided that this might prove useful to others, since we don’t always decide to start reading the Bible on January 1st. So, I created a site, yourBibleReading.com, that allows you to set up your own Bible reading plan.

Some of the highlights:

• Flexible start date / end date
• Consecutive, straight-through styles
• Parallel styles that mix the OT and NT
• Several other styles
• PDF print-outs
• Online progress tracking
• and (much? well, at least a little) more…

It’s free to use, so go ahead and try it out.

!http://www.daverosborough.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/yourbiblereading.png (yourbiblereading)!:http://www.yourbiblereading.com/