Dr. Ron Paul and the Theory of Evolution

Dr. Ron Paul, a graduate of the Duke University School of Medicine, seemingly has added his name to the list of those of the Republican candidates for president who have stated that they don’t believe in the theory of evolution. (Two of them, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, have of course withdrawn from the race, while former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is now a leading contender for the party’s nomination.)  On a YouTube video currently available on the internet, Dr. Paul responded to the question of whether he believed in evolution by answering (in my transcription; I left out the “ers,” the “ahs,” and the most obvious false starts):

Well, at first I thought it was a very inappropriate question, you know, for the presidency to be decided on a scientific matter. And I think it’s a theory, there is evolution, and I don’t accept it, you know, as a theory.

 

It really doesn’t bother me, it’s not the most important for me to make the difference in my life to understand the exact workings. I think the creator that I know created us and every one of us and created the universe and the precise time and manner and all, I just don’t think we at the point where anybody has absolute proof on either side. So I just don’t, if that were the only issue [inaudible], I would think it’s an interesting discussion, I would think it’s a theological discussion, and I think it’s fine, we can have our [inaudible]. If that were the issue of the day, I wouldn’t be running for public office.

 

Given the recent history of the legal struggles over the teaching of evolution and anti-evolution in public schools and more broadly over the separation of church and state, it should be astonishing that a presidential candidate who has been taken with enough seriousness that he participates in the nationally televised debates can maintain that the issue is not important. Alas, it is not astonishing.

 

All of this is not just a matter of academic debate. Questions of very practical import quickly arise. To point to just one example, would Dr. Paul not support federal funding of research into, say, the development of new antibiotics, needed because bacteria have so evolved that today’s antibiotics are no longer effective against them, on the ground that the scientific theory guiding our understanding of evolution is not compelling?

 

There should be absolutely no need for this kind of discussion; we should be well beyond it as even the old Europe is. The next time that I find myself moved to write on this particular topic, I think I will be ready to propose that our accrediting agencies rule that no one shall be so left behind that they graduate from high school without serious and systematic instruction in the differences between and among science, non-science, and anti-science, with religious non-science and anti-science explicitly included in the coverage.

The YouTube video can be seen at “Ron Paul on Evolution” on the onegoodmove site, at: http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2007/12/ron_paul_on_evo.html.

Theology and Science in Conflict 1

Continuing my reflections on the relationship or relationships between theology and science, today I take a first look at the now classic typology or classification of the various possible relationships elaborated by Ian Barbour. Though that typology will be of primary importance in the coming postings, the remainder of this posting will focus on the troublesome version of one such possibility that showed up in today’s news.

 

Polkinghorne introduces Barbour’s typology in the following passage (Science and Theology, p. 20):

If science and theology really are, as has been claimed, partners in the great human quest to understand reality, then they are capable of interacting with each other. Ian Barbour has offered a useful classification of the various kinds of interactions that might arise.

To anticipate the topics of some postings to come, the four kinds of interaction are: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. Polkinghorne (pp. 20-21) describes the first, that of “conflict,” as one that arises with “totalitarian views of the scope of either science or theology.”

This occurs when either discipline threatens to take over the legitimate concerns of the other. Examples would be scientism (the assertion that the only meaningful questions to ask or possible to answer are scientific questions, thus claiming to abolish theological discourse altogether) or biblical literalism (the assertion that Genesis 1 and 2 provide an account of the origin of the universe and of life to which the scientific story must be made to conform in detail). Such totalitarian views of the scope of either science or theology have scant plausibility, being based on gross oversimplifications of the complexity and range of actual human knowledge and experience.

As we are well aware, both the scientism and the biblical literalism are alive and well; evidently some find them to have more than but “scant plausibility.” Of the two, the former is the much more challenging and will therefore require an extended discussion, one which I will provide in the future, God (?) willing. The latter, biblical literalism, is of comparatively little theoretical significance, but is of acute political significance. Thus the “particularly egregious form of one such possibility that showed up in today’s news” alluded to above.

 

That is, we can read in an article, “Creationist College Advances in Texas,” today’s Inside Higher Ed that:

Texas is fast becoming a key state not only in debates over evolution but over what kind of government scrutiny is important and legitimate when reviewing colleges with particular ideologies.

On Friday, an advisory committee to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board recommended that the state allow the Institute for Creation Research to start offering online master’s degrees in science education. The institute, which has been based in California, where it operates a museum and many programs for people who don’t believe in evolution, is relocating to Dallas, where it hopes to expand its online education offerings.

The article goes on to say:

Officials of the Institute for Creation Research could not be reached for comment, but there is extensive information about the institute’s programs on its Web site. The list of courses required for the master of science education includes a number that are fairly standard (“Advanced Educational Psychology” and “Instructional Design,” for example), but also some that are not.“

Advanced Studies in Creationism” features this description: “Scientific study of the creationist and evolutionist cosmologies; origin and history of the universe, of the solar systems, of life, of the various forms of life, and of man and his cultures. Critical analysis of both creation and evolutionary theory using data from paleontology, astronomy, biochemistry, genetics, thermodynamics, statistics, and other sciences. Study of geologic principles and earth history in the light of Creation and the Flood; scientific comparative studies of recent creation; application of principles of Biblical creationism in various fields.”

That language, and other comments made by institute officials, suggest that students would be exposed to the science of evolution. But other material on the institute’s Web site suggests that one could not teach or study at the institute while accepting the overwhelmingly broad scientific consensus about evolution.

Now, from the egregious to the poignant. National Public Radio’s Climate Connections series presented a report this morning on “Worries About Water as Chinese Glacier Retreats.”

The Tibetan plateau has been called “the roof of the world” and “the third pole” for its ice-covered peaks. There, global warming is happening faster than at other, lower altitudes, with serious consequences for hundreds of millions of people. China’s lowest glacier, the Mingyong glacier — an enormous, dirty, craggy mass of ice wedged in a mountain valley 8,900 feet above sea level — is melting. And as it melts, the glacier on the edge of the Tibetan plateau is retreating up the mountain faster than experts can believe.

That the “third pole” is seeing its ice melt is striking and laden with implications. But what also struck me, having reflected on the Institute for Creation Research’s plans, was an “interaction” of religion and science that the article noted but in passing.

The scientists must scramble over the rocky debris, known as the moraine — left behind after the ice has melted — to move closer to the snout, or lower end, of the glacier. Studying this ice mass is extremely difficult because local Tibetans see it as a sacred glacier, and they have banned people from touching or stepping on the ice. That rules out normal scientific practices like removing ice cores and sinking stakes in the ice to measure its retreat. 

The Inside Higher Ed article can be found at:

http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/17/texas.

 

The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog also covers the story, at:

http://chronicle.com/news/article/3644/texas-board-will-consider-letting-creationist-institute-offer-teaching-degrees?at.

 

The Inside Higher Ed article can be found at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17200108.

The Parallelism of Science and Theology

In my November 27^th posting, “Approaching Polkinghorne’s Science and Theology,” I raised three utterly fundamental questions that an active reading of the title of Polkinghorne’s Science and Theology begs to see answered:

What, in Polkinghorne’s book, is science?

What, in Polkinghorne’s book, is theology?

What, in Polkinghorne’s book, is or are the relationship or relationships between science and theology? 

In today’s posting, I’ll take a first look at his answers to these questions, beginning with this concise statement (p. 18) addressing the first two in one fell swoop:

Just as the object of scientific enquiry is the physical world, so the object of theological enquiry is God.

A bit later on (p.20), Polkinghorne has a couple of things to say that bear on the question of the relationship or relationships between science and theology. First, he draws our attention to what he calls the “verisimilitudinous” nature of scientific and theological knowledge.

As with science, so even more with theology, the search for verisimilitudinous knowledge is subtle and manifold. Its character is cannot be reduced to a simple, flat description. For both disciplines, critical realism provides a concept that both acknowledges that there is a truth to be found and also recognizes that the finding of that truth is not achievable through the application of some straightforward and specifiable technique. Both disciplines are concerned with the search for motivated belief and their understandings originate in interpreted experience.

There are a number of expressions used here that need to be unpacked, including “verisimilitudinous knowledge,” “critical realism,” and “interpreted experience.” For the time being, however, I want to dwell a bit on the parallelism that Polkinghorne is drawing between science and theology. They are, he continues, alike in that: 

Both are trying to grasp the significance of their encounters with manifold reality.

That statement sits in the middle of a paragraph that deserves to be read in its entirety.

Science does not have a privileged route of access to knowledge through some superior ‘scientific method’, uniquely its own possession; theology does not have a privileged route of access to knowledge through some ineffable source of unquestionable ‘revelation’, uniquely its own possession. Both are trying to grasp the significance of their encounters with manifold reality. In the case of science, the dimension of reality concerned is that of a physical world that we transcend and that can be put to the experimental test. In the case of theology, it is the reality of God who transcends us and who can be met with only in awe and obedience. Once that distinction is understood, we can perceive the two disciplines to be intellectual cousins under the skin, despite the differences arising from their contrasting subject material.

So one relationship between science and theology is that of similarity, in that both involve an “encounter” with a reality; another is that of dissimilarity in that the two realities are quite different, the one being physical reality and the other being divine reality.

But so placing theology in a relationship of similarity with science does theology no favor, precisely because of the dissimilarity just noted. For the time being, however, I’ll content myself with the following. First, as we are not dealing now with radical skepticism, there is no reason for any argumentation here on behalf of the thesis that scientists “encounter” physical reality. (That I take to be but an alternative way of saying that scientists observe, experience, and experiment with physical reality. This in turn I take to be an essential part of the experiential and experimental method that belongs to science, i.e., empirico-mathematical science, uniquely; it certainly does not belong to mathematics.)

Second, the parallel thesis, that theologians “encounter” divine reality, or that they somehow experience the divine, is one that absolutely needs argumentation, sound argumentation, on its behalf if it is to be accepted. For while it is perfectly evident in sensory experience that physical reality exists, it is just not evident in sensory experience that divine reality exists.

I have not, in reading either Polkinghorne’s Science and Theology or his Science and the Trinity found any such argumentation. I fear that he is in the position of simply having asserted his thesis and not given it the argumentation that it requires; this does not bode well for his view of theology. As I continue, however, in my reading in and reflection on the book at hand and others, I will be on the lookout for the needed argumentation.

Mitt Romney on Faith in America

 

In this posting I will interrupt my review of Polkinghorne’s views on science and religion to take notice of a few points in the speech, “Faith in America,” that Mitt Romney gave on Thursday. Romney takes precedence for the moment, not because of any powers he may have as a scientist or theologian, but because the possibility that he will be the next president of the United States is still a live one.

Romney spoke about the matter of the separation of church and state as follows:

We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust.

 

I find interesting a comparison of what Romney has to say about the separation of church and state with what Amendment I to the Constitution does. Amendment I reads:

 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In the clauses bearing on religion, then, we are presented with two distinct theses:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

 

Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.

 

In Romney’s statement we are also presented with two distinct theses:

 

No religion should dictate to the state.

 

The state should not interfere with the free practice of religion.

 

The two sets of distinct theses do not fully coincide. Romney’s second thesis, prohibiting interference in religion, is actually stronger than the Constitution’s second thesis, prohibiting the prohibition of religion; his thesis would certainly imply its. I do not know whether there would be additional church and state problems were “interference” the legally operative word.

 

The two first items are less closely related, though they may be seen to be connected if one adds in a presupposition that the path to a religion’s dictating to the state would pass through the Congress. At any rate, I am very much in favor of the sentiment that “No religion should dictate to the state.”

 

What troubles me is that Romney, in speaking of those un-named persons who “seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God,” has created some straw-men, if I may. These straw-men would indeed be guilty of having taken “the notion of the separation of church and state … well beyond its original meaning.” In fact, any Congressional legislation that would “remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God” would clearly violate the immediately following provisions of Amendment I , which hold that, to state things expressly:

 

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

 

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.

 

The problem with the demolition of straw-men is that it is all too easily taken, and all too often intentionally, to be the demolition of the real, flesh and bones-men to whom the straw-men bear some misleading resemblance.

 

The flesh and bones-men here are those who, in perfect keeping with the clause saying “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” would oppose the state’s making laws “respecting an establishment of religion” and so would oppose any effort at giving legal force to such sentiments as, say, the handy ones “We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust.”

 

This is classical sophistry at work. And to the degree that it succeeds and the straw-men and the flesh and bones-men are confused with one another, those who, like Romney, confuse them are positioned to go on to make two arguments. The one holds that people who would oppose any effort at giving legal force to such sentiments as, say, “We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust,” would in fact “seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God” and thus would indeed be guilty of having taken “the notion of the separation of church and state … well beyond its original meaning.”

 

The other argument holds that those who favor efforts that would give legal force to sentiments like “We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust,” would in fact be seeking merely to keep the acknowledgment of God in the public domain and thus would not be guilty of having taken “the notion of the separation of church and state … well beyond its original meaning.”

Some notes in conclusion: the speech’s force relies on ambiguities in its understanding of its central terminology. To take note of what we find in the but two of the speech’s more than forty paragraphs quoted above, there is, for example, the expression, “public domain.” We have to distinguish the public domain, in which the any reasonable understanding of the First amendment would permit an acknowledgement of God, from the legal domain, in which the any reasonable understanding of the First amendment would forbid an acknowledgement of God. The legal domain is only a part of the public domain. To illustrate the difference concretely: while I am perfectly content to have Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, etc., standing in the public common of my New England town and offering its good citizens religious literature, I reject the right of anyone to have citizens’ taxes paying for a Christmas display, or for an anti-Christmas display, for that matter.

The statement, “It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism,” cries out for its own discussion. I’ll have to content myself here with two points. One is that any “religion of secularism” is a religion in a sense very different from the religions of, say, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. The religion of secularism would as a matter of principle base its theses on reason and evidence, while religions in the latter sense base their central theses, as a matter of principle, on faith, and not on reason and evidence. Another is that we have to distinguish the attempt at persuading, in the public domain, people that the secular path is the path to follow, from any attempt at having Congress establish a “religion of secularism.”

 

Again, the statement, “in God, we do indeed trust,” with its unqualified use of “we”, is either false or, interpreted charitably, ambiguous. If its intent really is to say that “we all” or “all of us” trust in God, then it is false, for those who do not believe that there is a God, and there are at least some such people, certainly do not trust in God. The only way it could be true would be if its intent were somehow to say that “some of us” trust in God. That is a fact well worth noting. As, however, a de facto truth, it has no logic bearing on what is true de jure.

 

Finally, it needs to be understood that, while the Declaration of Independence does make mention of “Nature’s God,” the “Creator,” and “Divine Providence,” the Constitution does not. It further needs to be understood that, while the Constitution enjoys legal standing, the Declaration of Independence, for all its historical importance, does not. “We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust” has no constitutional warrant.

 

I found Romney’s speech at:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/12/faith_in_america.html

A Digression: Faith in Science and Faith in Religion

 

In a “Comment” on a December 2nd posting, “Concern Over Scientist’s Support for Intelligent Design Surfaced Before Tenure Vote,” in the “News Blog” of the Chronicle of Higher Education, a respondent identified as Marci wrote, “But I can’t accept that science does not itself rely on many aspects of blind faith.”

 

This follows my having read a November 24th op-ed piece in the New York Times by Paul Davies, the celebrated “scientist-theologian,” entitled “Taking Science on Faith.” He begins the piece by saying:

 

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

 

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

 

Then, after having discussed the need he sees to investigate and finally to explain the order of nature and the fundamental laws of physics, he says:

 

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too.

 

After further discussion, he concludes his essay:

 

In other words, the [physical] laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

 

But this is troubling, because it aids and abets those who, for quite ulterior motives, motives very different from those of Davies, want to denigrate scientific knowledge by putting it on the same epistemological footing as religion. It is also troubling because it based in is a deep equivocation, that of an identification of the faith on which science may be said to depend with the faith on which the orthodox religious, e.g., orthodox Christians, believe themselves to depend.

 

The former may be understood as the faith that scientists have in the judgments of fellow scientists, i.e., in the judgments of fellow humans. This faith is quite provisional; because humans are capable of error, their judgments are always subject either to non-belief if reason and evidence do not support them or to outright rejection if reason and evidence show them to be false. Or it may be understood, as Davies understands it, as the reliance by scientists upon “an unexplained set of physical laws” or, alternatively, an “[un]testable theory of the laws of the universe.”

 

In at least the critical cases, such as, for orthodox Christians, the Trinity, the faith that the believers take themselves to be ultimately relying upon is something quite different. This faith is understood as faith in God’s revelations. Because, they believe, God simply does not err, these critical “revelations” are subject neither to non-belief if reason and evidence do not support them nor to outright rejection, for, they hold, reason and evidence cannot show them to be false.

 

It is not only the case, for orthodox Christianity, that God is the ultimate source of the revelations that the believer accepts in faith. It is also that case that the gracious action of God within the believer, empowering the believer so that he or she is able to accept something in faith, is a necessary condition of a person’s having that faith. This is clear in the First Vatican Council’s definition of faith, as reported by John A. Hardon, S. J., in The Catholic Catechism (p. 35):

 

The Vatican Council said many things about faith, but notably that: Faith is an assent of the mind in co-operation with the will under the influence of grace and a free gift of God; the object or focus of faith is God’s revealed word, and once embraced, God will provide that the true faith will be retained firmly and faithfully and not denied or brought into positive doubt. [The italics are Hardon’s.]

 

That this is the view too of orthodox Protestant Christianity can be seen in, e.g., Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology. An Introduction (Second edition; Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), p. 440: “Even faith itself is a gift of God, rather than a human action.”

 

QED: the faith of the scientist is not the faith of the religious believer.

Theology and Science? What about Philosophy? (Cont.)

 

In my last posting, “Theology and Science? What about Philosophy?,” I said that I would show that “Polkinghorne’s perspective actually cannot do without philosophy and that, despite its absence from the title and the first paragraph of his book, philosophy will find a way to creep into his discussion.” I will, it must be said, have to defer a good part of that demonstration as I reread Science and Theology and examine more thoroughly and reflect upon what he has to say on the topic. I will content myself in this posting with the observation that while he seems to be somewhat dismissive of “professional philosophers,” he does not reject philosophy, or it may be “philosophy,” out of hand.

 

Thus, in speaking (p. 15) of “the question of how one hits upon the research programme that will represent the next progressive step [in science],” Polkinghorne tells us:

This was precisely the sort of problem discussed by Michael Polanyi, who was a distinguished physical chemist before he turned to philosophical pursuits. His ideas have largely been neglected by professional philosophers but they resonate with scientists who recognize in Polanyi someone who knew their discipline from within.

 

There is more than a hint here of an argument ad hominem: if you don’t know a discipline from within, i.e., as someone who has (ibid.) served “an apprenticeship in the ‘convivial’ community of scientists,” then your view can be discounted.

 

And, passing to another text, we find him speaking of “critical realism,” the view that the “intertwining of theory and experiment” that characterizes science yields

[U]nique and intellectually satisfying understandings of the physical world of such a kind as to be persuasive that one is actually learning about the nature of things. Yet that is what the history of modern science exemplifies. Critical realism is a philosophical position based on the actual experience of the scientific community, rather than on a claimed abstract necessity that things had to be this way. This basis in experience is why it is the position adopted, consciously or subconsciously, by the overwhelming majority of working scientists, despite the criticisms leveled at it by some of their philosophical colleagues.

 

In other words, he respects the philosophical, or it may be the “philosophical,” reflections of those who, though not necessarily amateur philosphers, are scientists and thus know science “from within.” What I need to reflect upon, as I continue to read and ponder, is whether these reflections are genuinely philosophical, belonging to the autonomous discipline of philosophy, or just “philosophical,” belonging, strictly speaking, to empirico-mathematical science.