I did. Scores of times, over about nine years on BioLogos, and in conversation with a good number of the BioLogos leaders, and with many commenters. It didn’t make any difference. They weren’t about to answer it from the point of view of science, from the point of view of faith, or from any other point of view.
To put it bluntly, you weren’t there. So you don’t know how the conversations went. But I assure you I was transparently clear, restating my question over and over again in various words, in order to cope with the remarkable talents of evasion of the BioLogos people. Jon Garvey was there; he will attest how slippery they were when it came to discussing their theological views about God’s omnipotence, sovereignty, providence, etc.
If by “carefully,” you mean “making proper intellectual distinctions, such as are normally made by people who actually know something about Christian theology,” I would be very satisfied with that. But if by “carefully,” you mean “deftly avoiding commitment by the tactics of the politician who wants to avoid alienating any possible voter,” then no, I would not be satisfied with that.
Absolutely nothing in the universe was stopping them from saying, in CAPS or bold if they liked, things like, “As a scientist, I cannot answer that question, but as a Protestant evangelical who holds to the confessions of the Presbyterian Church USA, I believe that God …” They could easily have guarded against any misconstrual of their answers. But instead, they preferred not to answer. Again, you weren’t there.
Yes, exactly. And he is not the only one.
I agree. But you are still not grasping the nettle firmly. I am talking about the public perception. That public perception does not come from “most scientists.” “Most scientists” don’t write blog columns; “most scientists” don’t debate on sites on like this. “Most scientists” aren’t visible to the lay public. To the lay public, most scientists are eggheads off in universities somewhere, studying esoteric things of a technical nature which they don’t understand. So their perception of what “science” teaches about origins, about the nature of man and his place in the universe, about the attitude of “science” to religion, etc., comes almost entirely from a loud minority of scientists who seek the limelight, who court public opinion. Would you not concede this?
If you concede this, then you can see why ID writers, when thinking about the actual way that the authority of “science” is used in our culture (as opposed to how it should be used, if all scientists were as scrupulous as you admit they should be), write with the loud minority of publicly influential scientists in mind. Prudentially and tactically, that is the right thing to do. In modern, mass-media cultures, hearts and minds are won by battles between opinion leaders, not by what sane, sober people of intellectual modesty think.
Dawkins’s book The Blind Watchmaker is a very well-written book, and very persuasive on behalf of classical neo-Darwinian evolution. Behe praises Dawkins as a writer of clarity and force. And he knows that Dawkins’s book sold like hotcakes, and was read by all kinds of people who were not scientists: politicians, lawyers, judges, journalists, schoolteachers, professors, and uncounted numbers of the sort of lay person who watches National Geographic or PBS specials popularizing science. So he took his case to the same audience that Dawkins was courting in that book. He knew that even then, before Dawkins had begun his more scaled-up public attacks on religion, that Dawkins and many others thought that the science presented in the book made the religious belief of many Americans untenable. So he felt it necessary to show that far from proving that there was no design in nature (but only apparent design, which was Dawkins’s point), science reveals things about nature that strongly point to design. In other words, the theological point which Dawkins was hoping lay people would infer from modern science was for Behe unwarranted by what the most recent science of molecular machines etc. seems to imply. So if Dawkins and his admirers were going to try to use science, particularly neo-Darwinian evolution, to try to influence people’s religious views, there is no reason why another scientist should not be allowed to negate that attempt at influence.
Was Behe trying to prove the existence God through science? No. He said explicitly to Stephen Barr, in a debate that is easily available on the internet, that his reason for pursuing ID research was to better understand nature, not to prove the existence of God. But since at least some scientists were using science to try to undermine belief in God, he had every right to state his view that modern science did not do that.
I’m not giving even a hint that atheist fundamentalists should not be “tolerated.” I believe in complete freedom of speech, in the arena of ideas. (Shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater where there is not an actual fire is another matter.) I think the New Atheists have every right to write their books. But if others think that their books offer bad science, or bad metaphysics based on the improper use of science, those others also have the same freedom of speech, and their books should be tolerated as well.
Well, many of us have. I’m against any proposal to mandate the teaching of ID in 9th grade biology class. (So is Discovery.) I’m against any proposal to remove the teaching of evolution from high school science. (So is Discovery.) I’m against any proposal to promote Christianity as the true religion, in science class or any public school class. (So is Discovery.) But there is nothing wrong with a “watchdog” activity on the teaching of evolution in the schools, to make sure that it stays within what Neil Rickert is calling the proper and legitimate bounds of science, and doesn’t try to slip little bits of materialism or atheism here and there, even subtly or between the lines. This watchdog activity would not be necessary if the culture we lived in were different. But given that the culture we live in is heavily influenced by atheist and materialist presentations of evolution, public alertness regarding how evolution is presented in schools that are supposed to be religion-neutral is a good thing.