Guest Post: In Opposing Naturalism in Science, the Bible is More Foundational than Design

This is a guest post by Mike Warren.  His website can be found here.

In February a documentary film was released called “Is Genesis History?” that defends the historical accuracy of the book of Genesis from a literal, young-earth creationist perspective.  Paul Nelson was interviewed for the documentary.  He is a scholar at the Discovery Institute, the leading Intelligent Design (ID) organization.  He is one of the few young-earth creationists at the Institute.  But when he saw the completed work, he felt compelled to write a strong denunciation of the message that his interview seemed to convey.  In the article, “New Film Is Genesis History? Presents a False Dichotomy: I Dissent from My Role in It,”[i] Nelson says that his talk about the “conventional paradigm” and the “historical Genesis paradigm” included in the film after some editing presented a false dichotomy between the young-earth creationist view and all the other views of origins.  I have addressed the epistemological problems with the ID movement’s disregard for the Bible in an essay published in the Journal of Creation,[ii] but Nelson’s protest over the film is an appropriate time to revisit the issue and focus on his particular argument.

Although Nelson is a young-earth creationist, he makes clear in his writings that the young-earth view is a minor detail, and that ID is more foundational to opposing Darwinism.  In a book defending the young-earth view with co-author John Mark Reynolds, they say, “We believe the intelligent design movement is on the cutting edge of what is happening in religion and in science. Feel free to put off the question of the age of the earth and the Flood for now.”[iii]  Nelson says in another essay, “The admission price [to the ID tent] is minimal: one need only allow for the possibility of design.”[iv]  And, “The fundamental point is to allow for the possibility of design. The scientific narrative of design — when God acted, and how — might capture any number of competing theories.”[v]  Paul Nelson’s defense of ID as the really important work is derived from the position of the founding father of ID, Phillip Johnson.  Nelson explains in his protest against the Genesis film, “The fundamental difference between the two theories, Johnson argued, did not stem from any particular historical narrative, but rather from what kinds of causes would be allowed in scientific explanation and what would count as evidence. Epistemology — namely, what can be known empirically, and what counts as a scientific explanation — is what truly cuts the origins issue at its joints.”[vi]  Nelson emphasizes again that the age of the earth is not the most important issue: “. . . [W]e should organize the range of current opinion about origins around the deepest or most significant differences that separate positions — and that isn’t the time scale involved.”[vii]  Nelson uses this diagram to depict how different origins views should be categorized, and how the age of the earth is a less-important detail:

Johnson has advocated narrowing the opposition to Darwinism down to the “wedge” issue of attacking the naturalistic epistemology that supports Darwinism, and he thinks that the most direct way to attack naturalism is to insist on the possibility discovering design in nature.[viii]  Johnson is right that naturalistic epistemology is the foundation of Darwinism and that naturalistic epistemology needs to be cracked in order to defeat Darwinism.  But insisting on the possibility of finding design in nature is a rather weak, and ultimately ineffective, way to oppose naturalism.

The standard atheist believes that there is design in nature; they just limit it mainly to human-caused design.  Atheist archeologists detect design when they dig up stone tools and pottery.  Many atheists believe that space aliens exist, and some prominent atheists like Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins have even proposed that space aliens could have designed life that seeded earth to begin the evolution of life here.[ix]  What atheistic evolutionists oppose is not design in itself, but a designer God so powerful that He can mess with the laws of nature, which would allow science-destroying chaos to reign in their view.  Atheist scientist Richard Lewontin is transparent about this:  “. . .[M]aterialism 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.”[x]  Anti-ID, anti-creationist, atheistic evolutionists are fine with space aliens designing life, just not God doing it.  This upends Nelson’s diagram that he thinks neatly categorizes views on the origins debate.  Members of every position listed on the anti-design side of the graph would affirm that humans and space aliens can design things that we find in nature.  There is only one exception among evolutionists, although it is not listed as a separate category by Nelson in his graph.  There are a few atheists who are bold enough to see that an implication of their position is that human thinking is an illusion.  Philosopher Alex Rosenberg writes, “Thinking about things can’t happen at all.  The brain can’t have thoughts about Paris, or about France, or about capitals, or about anything else for that matter.  When consciousness convinces you that you, or your mind, or your brain has thoughts about things, it is wrong.”[xi]  If human thinking really does reduce to the chemical interactions in our brain, then humans don’t think or design things any more than the wind does.

While these observations upend the ID movement’s official story about how to view origins debate, they nearly admit to this consequence when they allow that atheists are welcome under the big tent of ID.  In an ode to Johnson’s leadership in the ID movement, William Dembski writes, “The ID movement is a big tent and all are welcome. Even agnostics and atheists are not in principle excluded . . . . I’ve seen intelligent design embraced by Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics and even atheists.”[xii] If atheists are included in the big tent of ID, in what sense is naturalism being opposed?  If anyone who admits any design in nature is opposed to “naturalistic epistemology,” as defined by the ID movement leaders, then nearly all anti-ID, anti-creationist, atheist evolutionists are opposed to naturalistic epistemology.  So much for design being the wedge that defeats Darwinism.  Only the hard-core atheists who claim that thinking is an illusion are excluded from the design side of the origins debate.

The problem with stretching the ID tent this big with such a weak view of what counts as naturalistic epistemology, excluding only the hard-core atheists who think that thinking is an illusion, is that it ignores fundamental issues in epistemology and fundamental doctrines of Christianity.

Since Johnson, Nelson, and Dembski, are Christians, it would seem that their focus on epistemology would involve them relating the knowledge from God recorded in the Bible to their theory of knowledge.  But they ignore the authority of the Bible in scientific matters.  They want their scientific methodology to be as close to that of secular scientists as possible. Another Discovery Institute scholar, Stephen Meyer (also a Christian), writes, “ID is not based on religion, but on scientific discoveries and our experience of cause and effect, the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past. Unlike creationism, ID is an inference from biological data.”[xiii]   Meyer is equating secular empiricism with science.  He just wants the possibility of discovering design included in the secular method of science.

The point that Nelson misses in making the age of the earth a trivial issue is that the age of the earth is based on the authority of the Bible. Nelson completely ignores the issue of biblical authority in dividing the approaches to origins.  The authority of the Bible has massive implications for epistemology, scientific method, and the possibility of discovering design in nature.

If the Creator of all things has spoken, then His word must be regarded as infallibly true.  God has assigned the meaning to all facts from all eternity, therefore there is no room for Him to be wrong about any fact, whether pertaining to material objects or to “spiritual” concerns.  God certainly has the freedom to create according to any timescale that He chooses, but if God says that the earth is six thousand years old, then it must be six thousand years old.  To ignore what God says on the matter has implications that relate to the deepest problems of epistemology.  It’s like the issue of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit.  The forbidding of the fruit on that particular tree was arbitrary on God’s part.  There were not evil bits of matter in that fruit.  The point was the test of obedience to God’s word.  Eating that fruit that God had forbidden entailed rejecting God’s authority in principle, and rejecting God’s absolute authority entails rejecting God’s existence as God, the ultimate Being in the universe.  And of course whether God exists has implications for everything in life.  When God says that the universe is six thousand years old, telling Him, “No, it is not,” amounts to atheism in principle, even if that is not the conscious intent of the young-earth deniers.[xiv]

Why should we accept belief in an absolute God who speaks with absolute authority? Because, as Cornelius Van Til has argued, the existence of such a God is necessary for the possibility of knowledge – in all its forms.[xv] God must exist in order for science to be possible. Although going into all the details would take up too much space here, modern philosophy has failed to explain how human knowledge is possible.[xvi]  That’s what the rise of postmodernism is all about:  the failure of modernism.  Modernism is the view that secular empiricism can serve as the basis for scientific knowledge – the very view that Meyer defends.  But that view failed.  Beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers were forced to admit that facts do not speak for themselves.  All facts are interpreted facts.  All observation is “underdetermined by experience.”[xvii] All observation is theory-laden.  Way back in the mid 1700s, David Hume realized that sense experience by itself does not provide a justification for belief in causality.  The necessity of a cause and effect relationship is not itself part of sense experience.  Based purely on sense experience, we cannot say that the future will be like the past because we have no experience of the future.[xviii]  One of the twentieth century’s leading philosophers, Bertrand Russell, was led to the same conclusion:

Academic philosophers, ever since the time of Parmenides, have believed that the world is a unity . . . . The most fundamental of my intellectual beliefs is that this is rubbish. I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without any unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love. Indeed, there is little but prejudice and habit to be said for the view that there is a world at all.”^[xix]

There is no order, and no world at all?  That is hardly a foundation for science.

The origin of the Scientific Revolution in the West is found in the Christian belief that a rational God created the world.  God is the source of the rational order to the world, including the cause and effect relationships between material objects.  Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead concluded:

The inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner . . . must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God . . . My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.[xx]

Since humans are created in the Creator’s image, humans are capable of gaining knowledge of the world.  All facts are interpreted facts because facts are created out of the words and thoughts of God.  This does not lead to relativism as with atheist postmodernism.  There is an absolutely true interpretation of the facts, and God’s revelation in the Bible provides God’s absolutely authoritative interpretation of God’s world and its history to humans.  There is no problem accounting for knowledge on the Christian view because knowledge has eternally existed.  The Christian does not have the impossible task that the non-Christian faces of explaining the possibility of human knowledge in a world that is ultimately non-rational.  By refusing to regard causality and design as having their foundation in the Creator, ID advocates squander their inheritance for a mess of pottage.

Another definition of naturalistic epistemology than Johnson’s is that it is a theory of knowledge that claims that non-rational nature is the ultimate source knowledge.  Metaphysics is related to epistemology with this approach.  It raises the question of what the ultimate nature of the universe must be in order for knowledge to be possible.  As I just argued, with an absolutely rational God as the ultimate source of the universe, explaining human knowledge is no big deal.  But if you assume an ultimately non-rational source of all that exists, there will be no way to explain how rationality and knowledge can ever arise.  Van Til compares it to the futility of a man made of water trying to escape an infinite sea of water on a ladder of water.[xxi]  If ultimate reality is non-rational matter, there is no basis for the existence of universal, unchanging concepts, to include mathematics and logic.  On the other hand, if ultimate reality is a timeless form, as in the philosophy of Parmenides, there is no basis for the reality of the changing world of matter.  If the two independent elements of formless, changing matter and changeless form are combined, then there is no basis for the intelligible world either.  You are adding chaos to a pure blank.  You are adding two irrational elements together to try to create rationality.  That is like adding zeros together and expecting to come up with a positive number.[xxii]

On this view of naturalistic epistemology, polytheism and deism are as much committed to a naturalistic epistemology as atheism because, even though one or more superhuman intelligent beings exist, these intelligent beings are not the ultimate source of the universe.  They are not the origin of all facts and their meanings.  The gods of ancient mythology ultimately arose out of chaos.  They are products of nature; the non-rational is ultimate.  Ditto with modern atheist belief.  Humans, and maybe some extra-terrestrial intelligent beings, sprang from the chaos of non-rational matter and energy from the Big Bang.

Since only the existence of an absolute God, whose words are absolutely true with regard to any subject, can account for rationality and knowledge, any knowledge, whether of something designed like a watch or of something simple like a rock, presupposes the existence of an absolute God.  In this sense, anyone who admits the existence of design, even if it is limited to humans designing something, is logically committed to rejecting naturalistic epistemology; but this rejection entails a commitment to an absolute God whose word is absolutely true.  And if this God says that the earth is six thousand years old, then everyone is rationally (and morally) obligated to agree and conform their interpretation of the scientific data to it.

While, on the one hand, recognition of any rationality to the world logically commits a person to the existence of an absolute God; on the other hand, denial of the absolute God logically undermines explaining how there could be any rationality to the world.  Therefore, all views that reject an absolute God should be grouped together on the other side of a dividing line from the only design-consistent view, which is the commitment to the absolute God of the Bible.  The following questions that I have formulated all result in the same division among philosophical commitments that admit various degrees of design in nature:

• Are the Metaphysical Beliefs Consistent with Design in Nature?
• Do the Metaphysical Beliefs Entail Rejection of a Naturalistic Epistemology?
• Do the Metaphysical Beliefs Require Divine Revelation?
• Are the Metaphysical Beliefs Consistent with Absolutely Authoritative Revelation about Creation?

 

NO	YES
·         Hard-core Atheism (thinking is an illusion) ·         Standard Atheism (humans are highest intelligence) ·         Atheism with Extraterrestrial Intelligence ·         Polytheism ·         One Limited God (“Deism”) ·         Greek Rationalism	·         The Absolute Creator of the Bible

 

The wedge that cracks the foundation of naturalism is an absolute revelation from an absolute God.  “Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?” (Jeremiah 23:29).

[i]  Paul A. Nelson, “New Film Is Genesis History? Presents a False Dichotomy: I Dissent from My Role in It,” https://evolutionnews.org/2017/02/new_film_is_gen/.

[ii]  “Intelligent Design Leaders Promote a Naturalistic Epistemology,” Journal of Creation 29, no. 3 (Dec. 2015), http://www.christianciv.com/IDnaturalism.pdf.

[iii]  Paul Nelson and John Mark Reynolds, A Case for Young-Earth Creationism (Zondervan, Kindle Edition), Kindle Locations 591-593.

[iv]  Paul A. Nelson, “Life in the Big Tent: Traditional Creationism and the Intelligent Design Community,” www.equip.org/PDF/DL303.pdf.

[v]  Ibid.

[vi] “New Film Is Genesis History? Presents a False Dichotomy: I Dissent from My Role in It.”

[vii]  Ibid.

[viii]  Phillip E. Johnson, The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism (Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity Press, 2000), p. 13.

[ix]  Directed panspermia is the view that advanced civilizations on other planets deliberately spread life to earth.  See Sagan, C. and Shklovsky, I., Intelligent Life in the Universe, Holden Day, San Francisco, CA, 1966; Crick, F. and Orgel, L., Directed Panspermia, Icarus, Vol. 19, 1973, profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/B/C/C/P/_/scbccp.pdf;  Hoyle, F. and Wickramasinghe, C., Evolution from Space, Touchstone, 1984.  Richard Dawkins supports the view in his interview in the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, DVD, Premise Media Corporation, USA, 2008.

[x]  Richard C. Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/01/09/billions-and-billions-of-demons/.

[xi]  Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality:  Enjoying Life Without Illusions (New York:  W.W. Norton & Co., 2011), p. 172.

[xii]  William Dembski, preface; in: Dembski, W. (Ed.), Darwin’s Nemesis:  Phillip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement, IVP, Downers Grove, pp. 17, 20, 2006.

[xiii]  Stephen C. Meyer, “Intelligent Design is not Creationism,” The Daily Telegraph, London, 9 February 2006, www.discovery.org/a/3191.

[xiv] Of course, many young-earth deniers couch their denial as an issue of honest exegesis leading them to the conclusion that Genesis 1 should not be taken literally, but William Debski calls their bluff and admits that “it’s hard to imagine how these other things could turn people from the 24-hour day reading of Genesis except for the challenge posed by the natural sciences.  If science is not the whole reason for questioning the traditional reading, it is the reason for the other reasons.”  William Dembski, The End of Christianity (Nashville, TN:  B&H Publishing, Kindle Edition, 2009), Kindle Locations 3962-3964.

[xv]  See, for example, Van Til, C., Christianity and Barthianism, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Phillipsburg, NJ, pp. 204–205, 1962; and A Survey of Christian Epistemology, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Phillipsburg, NJ, pp. 38, 42–43, 1969.  Van Til, C., The Reformed Pastor and Modern Thought, The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, Phillipsburg, NJ, chs. 2, 4, 1971.

[xvi]  See Michael H. Warren, “Christian Civilization is the Only Civilization – In a Sense, Of Course: A Restatement of Cornelius Van Til’s Argument for Christian Theism,” at http://www.christianciv.com/ChristCivEssay.htm.

[xvii]  Willard Van Orman Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricsm,” http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html.

[xviii]  David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1978).

[xix]  Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook (London:  George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1954), p. 98.

[xx]  Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1997), pp. 12-13.

[xxi]  Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, NJ:  Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.), p. 63.

[xxii]  Cornelius Van Til, Christian-Theistic Evidences, (Phillipsburg, NJ:  Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1978), p. 87; and An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ:  Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1974), p. 20.

 

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