Hi, Joshua.
I agree that correctives are needed to the excesses of all sides in these debates (TE, ID, YEC, New Atheism, etc.).
The reason I spend so much time correcting TE rather than ID folks is that TE folks, unlike ID folks (who purport to be doing only design detection, not theology) are, as Jon Garvey has recently said well on this site, explicitly theological in their purpose. Especially BioLogos, which in its very inception announced the vision of harmonizing Bios (the living world, and its science, biology) with Logos (the divine world, and its science, theology), claims not only to have scientific evidence for evolution, but also a reasoned position showing that evolution is not incompatible with traditional evangelical theology. So they can’t duck detailed theological discussion, yet they often do; and when they do venture spotty theological remarks, they are often incorrect, shallow, or undocumented from traditional texts. My own field being religion and theology (though I started out on a science scholarship), I’m naturally enough more focused on the position which makes theological claims.
That said, ID could also stand in need of improvement. One of the biggest defects in ID, from my point of view (and by the way, I came to ID as a historian of ideas who had studied teleology in nature, natural theology, etc., not as a fundamentalist or Biblical literalist trying to defend the Bible against science), is its inconsistent self-representation. Its formal definition I have no problem with: it seeks to investigate the evidence for design in nature. That’s an old idea with an honored place in Western intellectual history, among Christian and pagan alike. And that position is not in itself necessarily anti-evolutionary. Discovery itself has conceded this, many times. Yet often the rhetoric in some (not all) ID writers is anti-evolutionary, as if ID is intrinsically opposed to evolution. So I think the public gets confused: are these ID guys anti-evolution, or not? The confusion leads many to identify ID with creationism, which it isn’t; but the ID writers themselves sometimes invite this inference by the way they write.
Behe is clear, because he almost always qualifies the term “evolution” with “Darwinian” or “neo-Darwinian”; so one knows that he is not rejecting “descent with modification” but only criticizing certain proposed mechanisms for how that descent can be accounted for. But several ID writers seem to use “Darwinian” and “evolutionary” interchangeably, which muddies the waters.
Another place where improvement could be made: In my reply on the Hump to your review of the Crossway book, I pointed out that while the Crossway book gives a good sample of part of ID, it doesn’t give a sample of all of ID. I mentioned that none of the explicitly evolutionist ID writers had essays in that book. In fact, the book, while it has some good contents (I like the philosophy section the best, though there is good material in some chapters in the other sections as well), really represents OEC-ID and YEC-ID, completely leaving out evolutionist-ID.
In the Biblical section of the Crossway book, while many points are made about the Bible and theology that I agree with, the general leaning (and here I concur with Jon Garvey) is toward a literalist understanding of Genesis that I don’t share. In their bending over backwards to oppose what they see as the errors of liberal evangelicalism (at BioLogos), they tend toward the opposite error, i.e., that of mechanical fundamentalism. The pendulum swings too far.
There is also from time to time a sort of edgy, crusading tone in the Crossway book. I don’t say all the writers employ this tone, but two or three of them do. I know where the edginess comes from: there are long-standing quarrels between the ID and TE/EC camps, much of them reflecting battles going back to the 1960s and 1970s when evangelical scientists were dealing with the scientific claims of Gish and Morris. The TE/EC folks are often shrill against creationists (and against ID folks whom they often equate with creationists) because many of them (Falk, Giberson, Venema, Isaac and others) used to be creationists, and one is often the most militant and uncompromising against what one used to be – that seems to be a fact of human psychology, in religion, politics, or anything else. And the creationists within the ID movement see the formerly creationist TE/EC leaders as defectors, as liberals, as apostates from true Biblical faith, etc., and that leads them to adopt a militant tone. So from the outsider’s point of view, the person (like myself) who didn’t grow up inside the fishbowl of the evangelical/fundamentalist world, this looks like an angry family spat, and it is as uncivilized as such spats often become. I grew up in more middle-of-the-road Protestantism, where neither evolution nor Genesis literalism were topics that preoccupied ministers or congregations, and the fury of these debates did not exist in my environment.
So my recommendation to some ID writers would be to turn down the volume a bit, watch the tone a bit more. I think that on both sides there is a sense of hurt and betrayal, but trick is to try to find some constructive common ground. Among the ID proponents, I find Paul Nelson to be very good at sticking to the theoretical issues regarding design and evolution and not making personal digs at the religious or theological beliefs or motives of his opponents. I think his own writing and speaking is a better model for ID folks than that of some other ID writers who seem to enjoy polemics against TE/EC folks.
That doesn’t mean that one can’t give vigorous arguments. I think that many BioLogos and other TE statements about theology are egregiously wrong or one-sided, and I hit hard, intellectually, against such statements. But I try not to question the motives of those who make them. For example, I think that Jim Stump, Brad Kramer, Kathryn Applegate, Darrel Falk, Francis Collins and most other TEs are very sincere Christians and I don’t doubt their commitment or their good intentions. (I have expressed some doubts about the commitments of some pseudonymous commenters on BioLogos, but that is another matter.) I try to keep my theological critiques of these people on the subject-matter (texts, historical confessions, etc.) and not on the subject of their motives. If I occasionally fail, I don’t mind people pointing out to me where I have slipped from theological critique into charges of bad motives. My goal is to keep the discussion on substance rather than personalities. That is sometimes difficult, because when one is confronted with obtuse behavior (e.g., someone uses the term “providence” but won’t define the term or give her source in the tradition for her usage, and when challenged ducks out of the discussion), one is inclined to start formulating hypotheses about motivation. But overall, I try to stick to the issues. I wish everyone in all camps would strive to do that.
I would like to see the emergence of a theological position which ( a ) is open to evolution understood as descent with modification, but also open to various widely-differing accounts of evolutionary mechanisms, i.e., non-dogmatic regarding mechanism; ( b ) non-mechanical in its reading of Biblical texts, paying proper attention to their literary character and the difference between the ancient religious mind and the modern secular mind; ( c ) Christian in the sense not merely of Biblical but in the sense of informed by two millennia of deep theological reflection upon notions such as creation, sovereignty, providence, nature, image of God, etc.
On the last point, I would emphasize that in order to carry it out properly, American evangelical Christianity might have to become more informed about Christian writings more than 50 years old, especially writings from England, from the European Continent, and from the Eastern Christian world. Too often these debates have been parochially “American Protestant evangelical”, and have suffered as a result, becoming shallow and focused on the inessential rather than the essential. Large doses of reading of Christian theologians and other writers who aren’t American-bred, or who date from centuries before America was even founded, can help restore needed perspective here.