I thought of using Pennock's book for some classes I teach but decided not
to mainly because of the book's poor organization. You never know quite
where you are and the Chapter titles don't help any. Also, for my taste,
there are too many adjectives like "stupid" and "absurd" used to label
creationist arguments or interpretations. I prefer to simply present
arguments and assess their validity without the invective.
All that aside, I thought some of the analysis was very good. I
particularly liked the analogy Pennock drew between Phillip Johnson and a
Star Trek episode. In this episode the Enterprise encounters an alien
civilization that thinks that after death each individual soul enjoys an
afterlife in the vicinity of a particular asteroid. Spock of course finds
this "curious" and after much investigation, it is determined that there is
an "energy destabilization" or some such trekkie babble near the asteroid
and this is interpreted as scientific confirmation of the existence of alien
"souls" there.
I haven't seen this episode (I would love to have a copy), so I'm
not sure how the crew reacted. On the one hand, the discovery would seem to
confirm the existence of the alien souls and their religious beliefs. On the
other hand, the discovery might be seen as showing that what the aliens
thought were supernatural entities, namely their souls, were actually simply
complicated physical phenomena.
Pennock points out that Johnson's insistence that the God he believes
in is one who "has left his fingerprints all over the evidence" and is not
one who would create through natural evolutionary processes places Johnson
in the position of demanding scientific confirmation for the existence of a
supernatural entity. Pennock thus labels Johnson a "super-naturalist" in the
sense that he is in effect demanding that God be brought into the domain of
material processes in the same way that the alien "souls" were in the Star
Trek episode. Pennock isn't the first one to notice this of course, but I
thought his analogy was clever and useful.
Jim Hofmann
Cal State Fullerton
-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Davis [mailto:TDavis@messiah.edu]
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2000 5:21 AM
To: Asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Pennock's book
In response to questions about Robert Pennock's book, Tower
of Babel: The
Evidence Against the New Creationism, I offer the following
comments,
reflecting views I will express in a review forthcoming in
the British
journal, Endeavor. I will not be posting the review itself
in advance of
publication, though I am seeking permission to reprint it in
the next
ASA/HPS newsletter.
(1) The book does cover "the whole range" of creationsim,
from YEC to ID.
TE is however not much mentioned. The "new creationism"
mentioned in the
title is ID.
(2) The objections given by Pennock closely parallel those I
have given in
my own review of ID in various venues mentioned several
times in earlier
posts; I won't repeat them here. Of course additional
objections are also
made, as one would expect in a book of this length. The
most original
objection, IMO, is the argument related to the book's title,
namely that the
evolution of human language is an example of evolution that
we can actually
observe in operation through the short span of known
history. A clever and
effective argument, IMO.
(3) The book's weakest feature, IMO, is its failure to
suggest a solution
to the educational problems that shows appropriate respect
for the citizens
who believe in various forms of creationism. Here my
comments are identical
to those made elsewhere, namely that we need to include
religious
perspectives within what counts as publicly funded
education. In other
words, we need to recognize that "separation" of church and
state is not
what the first amendment meant by barring the
"establishment" of religion.
In other words, parents ought to have the right to use their
own money (in
the form of their tax dollars) to send their children to
schools of their
own choice. I could go on at great length here but this
would be politics,
not sci/religion, so I'll give it a rest.
Ted Davis
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