Re: [asa] EU proposed regulation of creationism and ID

> Granted these guidelines may not have turned out to be as nefarious as the
> first alarmist reports indicated, but I think it is naïve to assume that the
> trend of reducing the wonder and awe of our observable universe down to only
> natural causes is so innocent.

True, but there's serious confusion between finding natural causes and
reducing to only natural causes. The former is perfectly legitimate;
there aren't assorted gods and monsters out there that could disrupt
God's ordering of the world, and everything is God's creation. He
specifically made us to rule over creation, which requires being able
to predict how it will behave. Thus, we can expect things to
generally work by "natural" causes, while recognizing both that God is
at work in and behind natural causes and that He occasionally works
without them. _Only_ natural causes is, as Ecclesiastes (especially
3:19ff) points out, the assumption and conclusion of an atheistic or
purely material study.

Such confusion is seen on the atheistic end where Dawkins et al.
misrepresent scientific explanations as entailing atheism and at the
YEC and ID end where scientific explanations are misrepresented as
entailing atheism.

There's also a widespread misperception that a miraculous explanation
is more desirable. Cf. my father's student who told him he ruined the
hearing of the sea in a shell when he demonstrated that a similar
sound can be heard if you cup your hands around your ear. In the
context of evolution and faith, this misses the doctrine of
providence-God is just as much at work in, e.g., making wine via
grape vines and yeast as in making it instantaneously form water.

> I think ID is correct in recognizing that the power vacuum created by the
> church losing its influence in society is largely being filled by a
> competing atheistic philosophy. Granted the way to counter this is not
> misrepresenting philosophy as science, but ID is at least right in
> recognizing the growing threat of this ascendancy of atheism in our culture.

Yes, though there are numerous complications such as the idealizing of
the past (including misrepresenting prominent figures in the past as
holding your views), getting entagled into other political agendas,
etc. Another problem is that ID and YEC tend to buy into modernism by
claiming that scientific evidence is better than other evidence.
While they often correctly identify that as an error (unfortunately
often in the context of trying to ignore science that contradicts
them), their determination that honesty will not stand in the way of
sounding like they have scientific merit and the insistance that the
Bible, to be true, must be a modern scientific document show that they
have fallen under scientism's influence.

> Sometimes I get the impression here that if only all the creationists and
> IDer's would get their science right and apologize for all the confusion and
> harm they have caused over the years, then all the conflict between science
> and faith would vanish and we would all live happily ever after. There is a
> double standard in putting the onus of this problem solely on the likes of
> Denyse and Behe but Dawkins and PZ Myers get passes.

A few factors that may misleadingly contribute to that impression:
At the moment we seem to have scared off all the atheists from this
email list, whereas some ID sympathizers are currently sticking it
out. Thus, the topic is raised more.
We may have higher expectations for those who profess to be Christians
than for those who don't.
We may be particularly concerned for the church, which is generally
unlikely to think Dawkins is credible but seems quite ready to fall
for Wells.
Obnoxious atheism seems more inclined at the moment to misrepresent
religious extremism as normal than to attack a TE-type position. YEC
and ID do a lot of attacking of TE, which is likely to provoke a
response.

At the same time, as chemistry reminds us, if you're not part of the
solution then you're part of the precipitate. Dawkins et al. are just
as much part of the problem as the bad theology and bad science of
antievolutionism. The two camps largely agree on the bad theology and
argue about the science.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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