I know I should probably write my thoughts on both Greg's and Chuch's thoughts pertaining to "Saints and the Prosperity Gospel" below, but this something that I've been angry about all day.
It started last night while I was watching the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's basically like the Daily Show, a half hour show of witty satire that takes shameless jabs at the political right and the news media. I must preface this by saying that I'm not one to take offense at much, in fact I love it when people tell religious jokes that make fun of the flaws in the church. I love to watch the Simpsons, read Larknews.com, and browse through to shipoffools.com. All of these things poke much fun at the church, and to be honest they make good points and if the church was truly following Christ and not allowing our own agenda's to get in the way they wouldn't have anything to make fun of us for.
Now I'm not angry about any religious joke that they told or anything like that. What I'm angry about is what the guest on the show said. The guest was an astrophysicist who attended an Ivy League school. I missed his name because I was flipping back and forth between this and the world series, however when I found out the guest was an astrophysicist I stayed on comedy central, because astrophysics is interesting.
Ok on to the anger. During the interview the host, Stephen Colbert, asked a few questions and then brought up the topic of intelligent design. After a bit of talking the guest made the statement that intelligent design was "intillectual laziness."
It didn't really bother me last night, but as I thought about it today I kept getting angry, hence the need to vent - and what better place to vent than a blog!
Intellectual laziness?! I'm fine with people disagreeing with intelligent design, and I really don't care if Christians posit theistic evolution or creationism, but to call intelligent design intellectual laziness, just makes me angry.
I don't care how many stinking letters this guy has after his name (PhD...etc) or where he went to school, I would love to see him or any scholar (including Stephen Hawking) go up against the great minds of Christian History (ie: the saints of the Church - to relate to the last post). I would certainly not call Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, on top of many others intellectually lazy.
Maybe I'm just upset because I'm striving to be an academic right now and to be told that one of my views is completely unintellectual is no fun, but I don't think that's at the heart of it. I mean, shoot, I hold a lot of ideas that many people (even some Christians) think are intellectually absurd. To name some examples: I don't believe in the source hyposthesis for the Penteteuch, I don't hold to the Q source as a development for the gospel theory, I believe in a literal Adam, I believe that all of the charism are still to be used in the church today, and the list could continue. So I don't think that I'm taking this as a personal attack. Rather it's almost as if this man has attacked all of the Christian thinkers throughout the ages and declared them to be morons. I take offense to this, the Christian thinkers through the ages were certainly no slouches and I doubt that one could hardly describe them as intellectually lazy.
So enough with the ranting. I really didn't formulate a coherent defense, so maybe I am intellectually lazy, but the great thinkers of church history such as Aquinas, Augustine, Lewis, Anselm, Abelard, Calvin, et al. were certainly not intellectually inferior to the secular minds of their day, or of any day for that matter.
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3 comments:
Ben, I'm typing this with one hand, as my left index finger has a large gash in it from making dinner tonight (curse you, knives and carrots!), but I think you misunderstand our astrophysicist guest here.
It's misleading to say "intelligent design", because it could refer to what you're talking about, that is, some sort of theistic origins to existence. What he's talking about is better called Intelligent Design theory, a particular segment of the philosophy of science that's getting major play in the US right now, especially in Pennsylvania. Basically, the theory postulates this:
1. The current neo-Darwinian synthesis has holes in it; it is an incomplete theory in that it doesn't explain everything.
2. There are some holes that are so huge and intractible that there's no way they could ever be explained- Michael Behe and Darwin's Black Box are an example of this.
3. Thus, since the naturalistic explanation (or as I called it in an essay once, Naturalistic Origins Story, mostly for the acronym) cannot explain the panoply of life, and never will (based on 2), the better option is that an intelligence (NOT necessarily God according to any creed, maybe aliens!) designed life somehow.
Now, most biologists would concede #1. Simply put, they'd readily admit that sure, there are places where they can't explain certain things. There are the phyletic gradualism and punctuated equilibrium camps in evolutionary biology, which differ on the timing of evolutionary advancement. There are other examples, too, but I don't know enough about them to do them justice.
Now, #2 is the first problem. Behe identified what he perceived to be an intractible problem: "irreducably complex structures", he called them. Basically, they're structures so complex and so without precursor use that he says they could not have evolved in one generation. This differs from, for example, the eye, which may not have existed in its current form, but functional precursors have been discovered that orient a cell or an organism toward light, though perhaps not with optical precision.
So, while the current theory of evolution is far from being totally complete in every nook and cranny, the ID theory assertion that it can never be complete is one that has holes philosophically and methodologically. Firstly, one cannot prove the negative here. To say that there's no possible way for science to ever explain these evolutionary processes is unprovable; just try to design an experiment or find data to support that hypothesis. Up to date, yes, there are difficulties, but there's no telling whether or not they could be solved. Secondly, ID theorists tend to jump into probability theory here; their arguments are weak in terms of probability. For example, the probability of amino acids assembling into proteins in a primordial soup is quite low, to be sure. But here's a counterexample:
Let's say that you sit down to play a few hands of poker. Now, your chance of getting a royal flush is quite low: 1/77968800, as I estimate it. My probability theory's rusty, though, so take these with a minor grain of salt. Now, what about five royal flushes in a row? 3.47x10(-40). Absurdly low, right? Right. Ok, want to know something? The chance that you would draw the five cards you did is lower than that. In fact, the probability that you draw whatever hand you did, in that order, is 1/311875200. The probability that you draw the 25 cards you did, in that order? 3.39x10(-43). In short, though the odds are absurdly against you drawing the five hands you did, and had you correctly predicted all 25 cards, you would be clairvoyant, you did draw those cards! Their probability theory argument, then, sucks because it's a complete misunderstanding of, well, probability theory. First, low-prob events do happen, as any poker hand will tell you. Secondly, it displays a fantastic ignorance of natural selection as a device for preserving favorable mutations- there's an experiment whose details escape me now, but basically, if you select letters at random to try to form a pre-selected word (let's say 'choach'), it takes a lot of trials. But if you adapt it so it preserves correct letters, the number of trials shrinks dramatically.
Number three is a major leap. Given #2, which is somewhat questionable, #3 strikes a lot of people as the old "God-of-the-gaps" fallacy. To best explain this, an example from history. Kepler was trying to finish his equations of planetary motion, but he just couldn't get them right. No matter what, his orbits were off. His explanation, then, was that God corrected the orbits of the planets. So fast-forward. LaPlanck (I believe), during the Napoleonic age, fixed his equations. It was Kepler's error, not God's corrections, that resulted in an incomplete theory. When Napoleon asked LaPlanck why God wasn't included, the famous response followed: "I have no need for that hypothesis!" There's a danger for us to look at anything we don't understand and to label it magic- or God.
The further objection is that ID backers have maintained that this is science- they have distanced themselves from the young-earth creationists like they were on fire. The reason they want ID taught in schools is that, again, the assertion that Intelligent Design is science. However, despite what many would say, it remains a philosophical exercise at this point. The sticking point that keeps going up is that no ID work has been published in any peer-reviewed journals; at least, the most work they've done is philosophical, NOT empirical. While they've got the whole "this theory is imcomplete" thing down, notice I didn't suggest anything other than the vague "well, somehow life was intelligently designed" argument for their theory construction. I don't know why they want this taught in schools, because it doesn't seem like there's much positive substance to it; if you think cell theory's wrong, then you would have to offer a counter-theory that at least addresses something and gives a credible explanation. ID is nowhere near that point, though some people like to pretend they are, despite zero work being shown empirically.
ID strikes me like this analogy: Imagine a kid who wants to play on the football team. He repeatedly talks about his skills, and how he's better than the starting QB. We know the starting QB has a habit of making throws into traffic, and sometimes taking his abilities and trying to do too much. The kid relentlessly talks about the QB's weaknesses. However, despite his talk about how he should be playing, and how the fans would choose him because he's better, he refuses to work out for anyone. When confronted about this, he accuses them of siding with the starting QB dishonestly, or of having a bias, or not wanting to treat him fairly, even though he refuses to give us any inclination that he's better than out starter- in fact, there's no reason, because we've never seen him throw a ball, call a play, or face a pass rush, to think that he could play quarterback. And yet he demands we start him for every reason but, seemingly, performance.
By the way, this whole ID theory strikes me as yet another attempt to prove the Christian faith, though it's weaker in this case. Heck, even if it were good enough to prove that the current Neo-Darwinian synthesis was fatally incomplete (which I doubt, given ID's current state), hey, that gets us to the pre-Darwin state, where atheists become deists. What's the point? I sure don't see it.
Points taken. Greg, you do offer a great summary of ID, and yes I do agree with you that I may have misunderstood Mr. astrophysicist. However, in the context it seemed that although he probably was primarily refering to ID, he was also refering to all views of existence other than "big bang" and those most closely related to that theory. This would indeed include any theistic view of God; both theistic evolution and literal 6-day creationism.
With that context it does seem fair to pair this man up against the theists of church history. Yes he wasn't explicitly attacking Christians, but attacking a larger group (which you have shown), but his argument is that anything that denies the evidencence (which in his assumption leads to "big bang") is intellectual laziness.
Probably good to note here that he didn't fully explain why it all leads to this point, remember it is a half hour comedy show. But he did indeed set forth those presuppositions - or so it seemed to me.
But you do make good points. Maybe my venting was done in some ignorance, but nonetheless, it felt good at the time.
Ben, did you know that it was initally anathema for physicists to propose the Big Bang theory? Despite what their research indicated, the thought that the universe had a beginning to it- you know, making ex nihilo sound... plausible, was something many wanted not to deal with. Kinda funny, huh?
Secondly, if Mr. Astrophysicist is in fact saying that the only intellectually justified position is this empirical view of the world, then we should commence laughing. If what is valid is only what you can demonstrably prove, then uh-oh: our philosopher pals tell us that, try as you might, you can't prove causality; that A and B are anything other than happy coincedences. We assume it to be true, yes, but can we prove it? David Hume says no.
Secondly, even if we assume causality exists, and we break our little empiricist system, but don't tell anyone, realize how few statements we can truly make. No sane person believes that the sciences are the only source of truth. No, what about literature through the ages? Don't Dostoevsky, Joyce, and all the other great poets and authors have something profound to say about us? Yes, but it's not truth confined to a laboratory. Perhaps he considers holding this empirically-molded position intellectual respectability. By depriving himself of the vast wealth of thought out there, theistic and otherwise, I'd call him intellectually deprived.
One cannot appreciate a stained-glass window from the outside, it's true.
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