On this: do you actually find that a lot of students specifically have been told that ID is true, or is it more that they’ve been told that creationism is true and have learned some of the ID arguments along the way? My impression is that most creationists don’t really differentiate – ID always was, before it was a “thing,” one of the principal arguments for creationism. And do you find that students are familiar with ID-specific authors?
Also, I’m curious: “other professors”? Do you really have an in-house struggle with people in other disciplines who are telling students that? I have been intrigued by the idea of half-wit humanities professors – Robert Shedinger at Luther College, who wrote the horrid “The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms,” comes to mind – at religious colleges glomming on to this stuff, but would have hoped that most of them, unlike Shedinger, would have had the good judgment to ask a colleague like you about this first…
I don’t agree with that assessment. And I’m not assuming it, as the evidence appears to be entirely compatible with that conclusion. We simply have no statements from Richard Buggs about what he actually believes himself, so him being an evolutionary biologist, when he is also an ID’er and is writing blog posts and recording youtube videos exaggerating the issues with phylogenetic analysis at best just makes the data be ambiguous.
I found this video on youtube where Richard Buggs debates (of all things) the concept of trinity with a muslim apologist, and he actually gives some hints that he really might be a young Earth creationist:
Here are some key takeouts: Listen from 21:50 on and this is what he says:
Richard Buggs: But I would just like to say something about this argument that has to do with logic and rationality. Because there are some things which are true which our rationality struggles to understand. For example the nature of light. You can see me because of light, and the first thing God created was light. God said “let there be light” first day of creation. But we know, physicists know that light is both a wave and a particle. It’s both a wave and a particle. Some of it’s behavior can only be modeled as a wave and some can only be modeled as a particle. And that’s a paradox that none of us can properly grasp. It seems irrational that something so fundamental to our existence can be both a wave and a particle. But it is true. Einstein said this is something we can’t get our head around. It seems illogical but we have to believe it because that’s what the evidence from physics is pointing to. Indeed that’s not true just of light but of all other fundamental particles as well I gather.
Now of course, we haven’t known that for a long time, we only realized that light was both a wave and a particle for the past few hundred years. But light has been around since the beginning of creation, as I said. But the light that was there at the beginning was light that could be modeled both as a wave and a particle even though Adam would not have known that that was the case, that the light that he saw was the same light that we saw.
These things in bold strongly indicates Buggs is a literalist and believes in a 6-day creation story.
But it gets much worse later. At 56:40 Richard begins like this:
Richard Buggs: I’m particularly disappointed that he criticized me for reading to you from God’s word. And that he was willing to promote his own rationality above God’s revelation and place more emphasis on what he thinks is rational and understandable - rather than submitting to God’s revelation in His word. And that’s what I’m trying to do as a Christian. Uhm, to me reading from the Bible is in itself an argument because that is actually our only authority. If I try to place my own mind and my own rationality above God, then I’m really committing a blasphemy because God is so much greater than I am. You know, my thoughts and my logic obviously cannot know by themselves God. I need God to reveal myself[sic]. If logic alone could lead me to God then we wouldn’t need any revelation from God at all. We could just sit quietly and think and come up with a beautiful idea and write it down and say well this is what I think God should be like. I think God should be like this because that fits into my own small brain.
(…)
When we start to learn about God through God’s revelation we have to start to wrestle with things which are very very hard for us to understand. And they’re not irrational but supra-rational - they’re above our rationality. And that is the case with the trinity. And it’s in submission to the Bible as God’s word that I believe in the trinity. Of course if I was making up a religion for myself I would not invent the trinity I would say yes there’s just one God. That seems simple to me. But I’m not making up my own religion I’m trying to understand what God has revealed himself to us in the Bible. So we have to look at the evidence within God’s revelation to us and try to come to an understanding of that - we can’t just rely on our own logic.
Turns out Buggs might actually also be a presuppositionalist. The Bible over reason even if it doesn’t make sense. I have no trouble positing that Buggs can be a phylogenetic-tree publishing biologist and be a young Earth creationist too. He’s tossed reason and logic out the window.
This may not be an easy question to ask, but are your reservations about evolution mainly due to the difficulty you might have reconciling it with your religious views? Or do you think there are genuine scientific difficulties with the theory that make it less certain than other areas of science that are generally accepted?
That is to say, if you could imagine yourself as an atheist, do you think you would still have reservations about evolution?
This is strange. After three attempts I still don’t know what you mean by “old-earth creationist”. Is it possible that you have no settled meaning for the term, and furthermore you don’t know whether you are one or not?
I would say that most of my students grow up YEC and pick up ID along the way. A lot of them don’t totally buy into YEC and see ID as a good compromise position - they see it as having the respectability of science that YEC lacks while fitting their narrative of Christians being persecuted by atheist scientists out to disprove God.
The only students who are hard core ID are the philosophy majors who have taken classes with my iD loving colleague in the Philosophy Department. He spends a lot of time on it in his Intro to Worldviews course, a required course. He also teaches a “Religion and Science” course and an apologetics course… And he runs an apologetics website that has a lot of ID material. These students spout his lines verbatim. I’ve tried talking to my colleague about ID, but he has no interest in hearing anything that contradicts his views.
I’m careful about what I say about him in class.
As much as I would love to tell students how everything he says is total nonsense, that would be unprofessional. So if a students asks about something he said, I will say, “I’ve heard some people say that, let’s look at the data…” I do know that students will challenge him on his views using what they learn in my class. As you mentioned earlier, I don’t have time to do an indepth analysis of everything that’s wrong about ID, so I instill into them the basics of how to evaluate any argument: define terms, fact check claims, look to see if experts have offered any rebuttals, etc.
Other than this colleague, I get a lot of support from faculty and admin. My dean sees student complaints as a sign that I’m doing my job. The Bible faculty flat out tell students that Gen 1 shouldn’t be read literally and not to look for concordance. Other faculty are a mix of YEC and sort of “ID lite”: we can see God’s design in nature, but let’s not look too hard at the details. It doesn’t really come up in their classes, so it’s not an issue for me.
Those are some odd statements, to be sure. But I don’t think they clearly suggest creationism, certainly not to the extent that his scientific publications contradict it. I suppose someone could just ask him. Does anyone here actually know him?
I think this is an accurate assessment and lines up fairly well with the views expressed by the majority of my friends at church. Most of them have views on the subject that aren’t all that well defined. The general attitude is that the folks at Answers in Genesis make some good points but get a bit carried away with themselves by insisting that the earth is only six thousand years old, that ID’s claims about the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum sound plausible but they couldn’t articulate why, and that the whole debate is generally something of a foolish controversy that’s best not taken too seriously.
If they weren’t Christians they’d probably have different sets of views that tend to get regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community. UFOs, ancient aliens, crystal healing, homeopathy, aromatherapy and water divining, for example.
It would be unwise to expect an honest answer to this question from a member of the ID movement, since a major goal of that movement is to deny that creationism is creationism.
I’m sorry to say that clarity hasn’t arrived yet. Apologies if you’re trying to post from your phone and that’s why you can’t type more than one sentence. But what are you unsure about, exactly and in some detail?
Nah I wouldn’t go that far. Even though I think the politics of the movement in the US is a ploy to get around the constitution, I don’t believe any individual ID proponent would lie about what they personally believe if you were to ask them directly. At worst I think they’d just refuse to answer, but I would actually expect most of them to be forthright about their own beliefs if you just ask nicely. Heck, they might even say it with a certain amount of pride.
Not true. I’d say that at least half of the prominent IDers are up front about their beliefs. Nelson, Behe, Bechly, and Ross all come to mind. Meyer and Dembski are coy. ID is a big tent, but many of them are clear about just where in the tent they stand.
The essence of calling out the religious presuppositions of ID proponents who remain unmoved by the serious evidence for evolution is to show that their position is resistant to any form of sound evidence. There is no intention, at least for me, to change anyone’s mind.
The Origin(s) of life, universal common decent, the exact mechanics of evolution, How to exactly square design with evolution the. And I should provide a bit of background info Faith and science discussion has been an fascination of mine since high school I had it a point to learn the other side I don’t want to be overly dogmatic in my beliefs on evolution I listen to Biologos’s podcast The language of God I listened to the peaceful science podcast when it was a thing and occasionally Reasons to believe and discovery institute’s ID the future I read more than a few Intelligent Design books
But I want to read more evolutionary creation books as well, I want to be as well versed on this topic I just want to learn more about this topic
While one can learn a bit of biology from reading books which are about particular ways of fitting religious beliefs and biological observations together, it’s not the best way to go about it. The best course is to try to learn as much as you can about biology in places where religion is nowhere near the discussion: neither as something being disparaged nor as something being supported. Let biology speak for itself. Read a nice college textbook on the diversity of the vertebrates, or some such thing. Surely the facts of biology are what they are, whatever one might imagine the philosophical or theological implications of those facts to be. And surely those facts are where a correct understanding of the relationship between biology and religion, or indeed between biology and anything else, begins.
I say this because watching people talk about this stuff for years and years has led me to think that there are a lot of people who do not read anything by anyone who doesn’t have an axe to grind. Books about biology by biologists almost always have one mission: helping you understand the particular biological phenomena under discussion. There’s time to go into the spin room after, if one must, to figure out how to weave that particular thread into one’s own particular version of existentialism, Mithraism or whatever-the-hell later. But getting that thread right in the first place is very important.
I do not understand what this was a response to or what it means. Can’t you try to be clearer and more complete? Using complete sentences with subjects and verbs might help.
