The petri dish refuses to give me a hug
It’s a Sisyphean task keeping track of the…surprising arguments of Karl Giberson, BioLogos’s ubiquitous “science-and-religion scholar” (as they always call him). I’m barely recovered from his explanation of the profundity of the middle ground at Huffington Post and now here he is again, back at BioLogos, setting himself up as demolishing “strawmen,” complete with mocking picture of same. His demolition is not entirely convincing.
The final straw man I want to torch in this series is the claim that science uses evidence and religion uses faith…
Well that seems like a tall order. How will he manage that, one wonders.
He notes that evidence is more abundant in some fields than in others. True. But then he says that the kinds of inferences made in for instance evolutionary biology “look very much like little leaps of faith.” But inferences are provisional; real leaps of faith are not. Giberson is stacking the deck already.
He notes that economics is fuzzy, then he says “Religious reflection is more like economics than it is like chemistry.” Ah it’s reflection we’re talking about, is it? No actual firm faith-based claims at all? Now he’s moving the goalposts.
But no, it turns out he’s not. Or he was, but then he immediately takes it back.
There is evidence for the claims of the economist and for the chemist and there is evidence for religious truth claims. This is a simple fact. The New Testament contains several documents written about Jesus by smart people in the first century. These documents are evidence.One can disagree with the documents and reject the evidence as weak or inadequate in some way. Or one can accept the evidence and be a Christian. But what one cannot do is claim that there is no evidence or dismiss the evidence because it fails to meet the standards of the chemist.
Oh no no no no no no. The “evidence” fails to meet any standards at all. The “documents” are not primary, and they are fiction in any case. They are no more “evidence” for religious truth claims than an edition of Hamlet is evidence of events in medieval Denmark. They are evidence for the mythography of Jesus, evidence which requires a lot of interpretation and inference, but that’s not what Giberson is claiming; he said they are evidence of religious truth claims. Not religious values, not moral claims, but religious truth claims. They’re not. If he doesn’t know that, he must be remarkably sheltered. If he does – well he’s just making a loopy argument.
The far more significant difference, of course, relates to the dynamic character of religious investigation. When Isaac Newton “leaped to the conclusion” that gravity ruled the universe, gravity did not respond by embracing Newton and healing his brokenness. When believers make their leap of faith to embrace God, God responds by entering into relationship with believers, often with transformative consequences. There is no counterpart to this response in scientific or historical investigation.
No indeed – because scientific and historical investigation are not about healing brokenness or embracing or any similar kind of self-deluding emotive trance. “Dynamic” here is just a dressy word for wishful thinking. There’s a good deal of impertinence in pretending that that is strawman-demolition.
Mythography/propaganda – and by what standards can the authors be considered intelligent? Where’s the evidence for that?
Only in the minds of the believers: it’s their own fantasy. I am passionate about some of my favourite historical and literary characters, but I don’t delude myself into thinking that they have any relationship with me, outside my imagination. And yes, fantasy and the imagination can be transforming – but it’s dangerous to confuse their workings with external reality.
I find it revealing that Christians tend to fixate on “healing brokenness”: it’s the underlying obsession with Original Sin, the idea that humans are all essentially ‘damaged goods’ in need of fixing/’redemption’. It’s a nasty, negative mythology.
Karl:
A regular commenter on Jerry’s blog posted about this a while back; I can’t remember who it was (sorry about that), but she/he made the very astute point that there is now widespread misuse of the “strawman” idiom. Morons far and wide are now using “strawman” to mean any argument they think is weak. That ain’t what it means. A strawman fallacy is a very specific thing: it’s when you misrepresent your opponent’s position, then attack the (weaker) misrepresentation rather than the actual argument. Hence, it’s sort of like knocking over a man made of straw instead of a real man. Nice to see that Karl has based an entire series of essays on his own misunderstanding of this term. Of course, as Bart Simpson says, what this guy doesn’t understand could fill a warehouse.
Whether these people were smart or not has no bearing on if what they wrote is evidence.
As an old fortune says:
Steve:
Exactly!
This got to me more than anything:
So…basically you’re saying scientific investigation is not religion? Well shit Karl, that’s what we’ve been telling you!
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: The petri dish refuses to give me a hug http://dlvr.it/8jMXh […]
I prefer the analogy to Stephen King: any number of his novels realistically depict real places in Maine, and reference verifiable historical figures (JFK, or Creedence Clearwater Revival). The main characters are generally recognizable as realistic 20th century humans acting in a believable manner — sometimes kind, sometimes cruel, often petty. But each book also contains a supernatural element that is pure fiction.
I can read “It” and conclude that scared children are better off if they group together. That’s one message, and it works. On the other hand, if I read “It” and conclude that a supernatural spider/clown lives in the Maine sewers, I’d be sadly mistaken.
About the only thing generally agreed upon is that the earliest of the documents in question were written a good 40 years after the most recent of the events they allegedly describe. There were historians at work while those events were supposedly taking place and none of them ever mentioned the man or any of his deeds, let alone resurrections or mass openings of graves. If the earliest documents describing the Holocaust could not be dated earlier than 1985, would Holocaust-denial be considered unreasonable? It’s true that any figure written about a great deal tends to attract legends and make their separation from what actually happened difficult. But that’s not the same as having a figure whose very existence is attested to for the first time in writing only several decades after his death. I wonder where Giberson stands on King Arthur and Robin Hood.
Andy – ha – exactly. (Nice juxtaposition of Andy Dufresne and Stephen King and Maine, come to think of it.) Giberson is always admitting things that underline what Jerry says and totally undercut what Giberson and BioLogos want to say. Like that admission about Mohler preferring a young earth for “widely accepted theological reasons” – well exactly, and this is our whole point! Theological reasons motivate people to do that and that is not compatible with science. Der.
Stewart:
The Arthurian mythos meant far more to me than Christianity in my upbringing.
Ah – interesting – same here, via T H White’s The Once and Future King, a brilliant and under-rated retelling. It’s what Harry Potter wants to be and isn’t.
Ophelia:
No, I didn’t like White at all: too much based on the mediæval French romances, as translated and adapted by Malory. I prefer the older versions: the fragments of Y Troiedd Ynys Prydein, Geoffrey of Monmouth, even the Alliterative Morte Arthure… Basically, all the pre-Lancelot stuff: Gwenhwyfar’s original lover was Medrawd (my favourite character – even Malory allowed him an extraordinarily heroic end, so I hated White for turning him into some kind of Nazi). Of modern retellings, Joy Chant’s The High Kings and Arden and D’Arcy’s The Island of the Mighty are my favourites. When I was about 16, I began writing a verse epic on the subject, but it never quite took off.
Even if the gospels did satisfy some definition of evidence, they wouldn’t support the claims of any variety of Christianity known to me. The doctrine of the trinity, for example, is somewhat undercut by the account of Jesus’s baptism, where God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost appear as three physically distinct beings.
Furthermore, the gospels seem more like consensus documents put together to satisfy the different beliefs of different groups of Christians and to reconcile differences in different oral traditions — Jesus reprises the miracle of the loaves and fishes, for example, probably because there were two oral accounts that differed in detail. And then there are the competing claims that Jesus was immaculately conceived and that he was descended from David through Joseph. Something for everyone.
As for the epistles, they have the same status as B-XVI’s story that he feels sorry for the children abused by priests.
Actually, what’s most fun about this is what’s missing: Giberson doesn’t tell us how he knows the people in question to be smart, but, better yet, he doesn’t even claim to know they were honest.
Doc M – not even the first book, with all the anachronistic jokes, and Merlin, and the owl, and all the transformations? I’m not so crazy about the later books myself now – the misogyny bugs me, for one thing – but the first one remains brilliant.
Stewart – well he knows they were smart because they wrote books! Not just enny fule can do that, you kno.
They just weren’t so smart that they could make up the contents of the books; they had to stick to plain old boring literal truth.
He notes that economics is fuzzy, then he says “Religious reflection is more like economics than it is like chemistry.” So one mythology is more like another mythology than it is like science? How does comparing two mythologies, religion and economics, validate religion. Oh I see, it’s just “another way of knowing”.
Not sure if you’ve seen the latest on Templeton – (http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2010/11/the_templeton_foundation_lie_d.php)
Nice foundation, that one.
sailor1031:
It’s a little harsh to call economics a mythology. For one thing, there is such a thing as experimental economics and economics has a firm tradition of empiricism through statistical treatments of observational data.
Badger3k, to be fair its not the Templeton Foundation that is funding the climate change deniers, rather it is Templeton junior himself that does so. It may be a distinction without a difference but it is at least some basis for plausible deniability.
On the other hand the story of a philanthropist like Templeton Junior funding such a shady organization might be a good story for, say, a young science journalist who is interested in the intersection of science and politics. Perhaps one who has a background in climate change science and politics. Maybe even one who has done work in the past on the war on science carried out by right wingers pushing an agenda. Perhaps, and I guess this is too much to hope, a journalist that is familiar with the Templeton organization itself?
Any names come to mind?
Thus Karl Giberson. BTW, those Christians who hold that the Earth is only a few thousand years old do so on the basis of the very best of Christian evidence. After all, Bishop Ussher based himself mainly on the genealogies of the Old Testament in order to determine that creation took place on Sunday October 23, 4004 BC. While many have disputed Ussher’s assumptions, no scholar to my knowledge has disputed his genealogical arithmetic.
But Giberson is defending religious people of all faiths against the alleged charge levelled against them by Jerry Coyne and his gnath ilk. We are witnessing here yet another religious call both for a truce in the traditional campaign of religion against religion, and for a united campaign against an enemy which in the long run could inflict far greater damage on all of them than they are able to inflict on each other.
But for all but a few, these religions are something the respective believers were born into and inherited culturally. It is a matter of faith of and from our fathers, not faith in the best-looking hypothesis. Propagandists like Giberson are stuck with trying to justify an (ever-evolving admittedly) doctrine after the fact. That is, the fact of it having been delivered to them on a plate by others, with the command “eat this.”
So they swallowed it.
James K: Any field which tolerates “austrian economics” is obviously not founded on science. It is as if creationism were considered a legitimate area of biology, geology, paleology etc.
If economics were indeed a science we’d have some methods of getting out of the curent economic mess; still better, if economics were science we’d never have gotten in the mess in the first place. And we wouldn’t have opposing forecasts, opposing analyses of what happened, opposing econometric models, opposing schools of thought and the constant incorrectness of economic predictions. In science valid theory leads to valid predictions. The obvious conclusion is that economic theories are largely not valid :)
What a good idea, Sigmund. :- )
Ophelia:
The first book is one of my least favourites. You’re right about the misogyny. There’s also the bizarre imposition of anti-Celticism on to what was originally Brythonic material.
sailor1031:
Economics operates in an environment with very low quality data, that means you get a lot of arguments and few definitive or semi-definitive conclusions. This is especially true of the parts of macroeconomics that most members of the public think of as “economics”. There are many points of broad agreement among economists, it’s just that they get very little coverage because those points of agreement would lead to doing things that are politically unpopular.
Also, for the record Austrian Economics is not considered part of mainstream economics. There are probably a few ideas in the Austrian school worth investigating, but their anti-empirical stance is not one of them.
I for one eagerly await the moment when a human being accepts God and God then heals their broken body. Not spirit, but broken body.