Year: 2010

Further developments in saga of YNH – William – bilbo – Milton C – PollyO – and “Tom Johnson.”

“Tom Johnson” was also another alias, although his story was loosely based on things I had heard other general students say. The conference context or whatever was, as already mentioned, obviously false. When Chris contacted me, I made up a story about being a grad. student as an explanation about where the story came from because I didn’t want the Tom character to get exposed as false.

Chris Mooney commented on that confession. He said he was shocked and appalled.

However, he has not bothered to apologize to, for instance, me. He or he and Sheril Kirshenbaum banned me from commenting at The Intersection soon after I began trying to get them to do a better job of justifying their claims and to criticize their energetic and often inaccurate bashing of new atheists. Commenters who agreed with them were not banned or even moderated, no matter how abusive their comments were. One “bilbo” repeatedly called me a liar after I posted a list of questions for M and K. Note what William just said:

I posted most often as “milton c.” and “bilbo.” I also appeared as “seminatrix” and “philip jr.,” and I believe I posted as “petra” on the value of science blogs thread. My posting under multiple names on the intersection was much like YNH: out-of-context sniping and trying to make a chorus of agreement when I was challenged.

Yet Mooney and Kirshenbaum found that perfectly acceptable, while I was banned. The ban is still in effect, despite what they have just learned. These are not honest people. We knew that, but boy does this underline it. These are shockingly dishonest people.

BioLogos, it tells us, “explores, promotes, and celebrates the integration of science and Christian faith.” Here it is doing that.

Just as we can maintain the created order is God’s good creation warped by the fall, in a similar way we can maintain that Scripture—given through and to a fallen world through fallen men—is both beautiful and broken. No less than the creation, Scripture’s human authors, and the book that they wrote, stands in need of redemption.

That’s the integration of science and faith. Except for the science part.

BioLogos says it really does want to connect and join and link up the two.

BioLogos addresses the escalating culture war between science and faith, promoting dialog and exploring the harmony between the two.

But then it publishes material like “After Inerrancy” which is bound to be anathema to most scientists, so what do they mean by it? How do they think handwaving about how to read “Scripture” is promoting dialogue between science and religion? In what sense is it exploring the harmony between the two?

BioLogos represents the harmony of science and faith. It addresses the central themes of science and religion and emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with scientific discoveries about the origins of the universe and life.

Maybe that gives us a hint. 

It does it by limiting science to discoveries, while carefully not mentioning methodology and epistemology. It’s ok – there are just some Discoveries, and believers can chew them carefully one hundred times and then digest them without perturbation. Discoveries are discrete and fenced-off and can be manipulated until they no longer seem to interfere with cherished beliefs. How to discover discoveries, and how to evaluate discoveries and purported discoveries – that’s another story; that could lead to unpleasant questions about the “discoveries” that underlie religious beliefs. So BioLogos doesn’t go into all that. At least not on the About page it doesn’t.

Jerry Coyne discussed this yesterday.

I’ve just watched that BioLogos video of a pastor at a Florida church explaining – in a rather photogenic, sonorous, and otherwise superficially convincing way – why one has to be very careful about…everything. I say superficially convincing because he doesn’t look or talk like a hayseed or a loon; he looks like any insurance executive or motivational speaker or real estate agent. Yet what he says is pitiful. It’s all about the anxious contortions one has to perform in order not to upset any apple carts or frighten any horses or insert any cats among any pigeons. It’s very fretful, close work, because on the one hand you don’t want to upset these, but on the other hand you also don’t want to worry those, and yet again you don’t want to look like a fool to the others. In short you want to square the circle, so it’s very tricky, and actually all you can do is put on your most sonorous voice and talk very slowly as if you’re thinking hard and hope nobody notices those four corners poking out of the circle.

It’s sad that grown-up non-stupid people feel obliged to do this kind of thing. It’s sad that it’s what’s expected of them, it’s sad that BioLogos treats them as somehow exemplary. It’s sad that they waste a perfectly functional intelligence this way.

I have the same thought reading Darrell Falk’s BioLogos post for today. He has the same problem (of course – they all do, in the nature of the case – that problem is what BioLogos is about) and he betrays it in his words.

The BioLogos Foundation exists in order that the Church, especially the Evangelical Church, can come to peace with the scientific data which shows unequivocally that the universe is very old and that all of life, including humankind, has been created through a gradual process that has been taking place over the past few billion years. BioLogos exists to show that this fact (and it is a fact), need not, indeed must not, affect our relationship with God, which comes about through Jesus Christ, and is experienced by the power of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling presence.

Emphasis added. The church is not at peace with the scientific data, BioLogos exists to help it get there. Well why is the church not at peace with the scientific data? Obviously, because they suspect that the data get things right and the church does not get things right. That’s what “peace” means in this context: not worrying that the data get things right and the church gets things wrong.

To an outsider, this is obviously a foolish endeavor. When there’s a conflict between scientific data and a story, it just seems kind of futile to struggle to manipulate things in such a way that one can go on taking the story as true despite its conflict with the scientific data. To an insider, however, it’s all-important. But that’s what’s so sad – people frittering away their talents and energy on this sort of futility.

Falk is caught between (as he explains it) Dawkins and the selfish gene, and Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Mohler doesn’t have this anxiety problem, he just dismisses Dawkins and BioLogos. But Falk has it in spades. We can’t help him, because

We at BioLogos believe that Jesus, fully God and fully man, walked on this earth 2,000 years ago in order to show humankind how to live life to the full.

But we would if we could.