 |
| Book cover for "The Case for a Creator" |
So I was at a used book sale and saw this: The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel, and snatched it up. Because I used to be an apologetics nerd, and I used to be a creationist, and I read Strobel's books "The Case for Christ" and "The Case for Faith" when I was in high school. But then, years later, I read atheist responses to them, and realized that those books came across like "we have such solid evidence for our faith, atheists don't even know what to say", but it's not true, atheists in fact have a lot of things to say. I got really turned off of apologetics after reading atheist responses. The atheists make some good points. Good for them.
Anyway I saw this book, "The Case for a Creator," (published in 2004) and I was like "ooh a creationist book, I wonder how it will come across to me now, since I'm in such a different place than when I read Strobel's other books."
So here's my review of the book, and also some opinions about apologetics in general.
---
This is an intelligent design book
First of all, I assumed this was a creationist book, but I was wrong. Actually, this book helped me to clearly understand the difference between creationism and intelligent design.
Long ago, when I was a creationist, I kind of viewed intelligent design as creationism but with the religious parts taken out. Like, we're not allowed to push creationism in schools because it's religious, but how about we sneakily call it "intelligent design" instead? I thought creationism and intelligent design were the same thing, but when we call it intelligent design, we have to say "well it looks like ~~~somebody~~~ created this. Not gonna say who, but somebody. *cough* it's the God of the bible *cough*"
But reading this book, I get the difference. Intelligent design is about pointing out things that seem to be too precise or complex to have a natural explanation. And then you just kinda stop there, without getting into the details about what kind of designer made the world, and questions like where, when, how, etc. (Okay, yeah, "The Case for a Creator" *does* make claims about the nature of the creator, but I found those to be such logical leaps that it's not even worth talking about them.) But I'm wondering, what's the point of it? If you point out "hey this scientific thing is really complex", well, it is, that's true. The atheists aren't gonna disagree with you on that. And then you say "must have been an intelligent designer"- but okay, what do you do with that, as a scientist? It doesn't lead anywhere. At that point, it's not about doing science.
I guess if you really wanted to do science, as an intelligent-design advocate, you could speculate and look for evidence related to questions like "When exactly did the intelligent creator create DNA? Did it just poof it into existence, or did it bring together already-existing components? Did this intelligence intervene just 1 time, or 1 time per species, or what?"
But the scientists interviewed in "The Case for a Creator" just seem to be doing research into how complicated the universe is (which any scientist could do, regardless of whether they believe in intelligent design), and then stating their opinion that it must have been designed by God. (Which is fine if that's what you think, hey maybe it's even true, but it's not science.)
Basically, "The Case for a Creator" is about aspects of the universe/ the earth/ biology/ DNA/ etc which are very fine-tuned or complex, and therefore seem to imply that there was an intelligence that created them that way. Things where it seems impossible that they could have arisen naturally.
That's all. So I'm like, wow, I get it now- that's what intelligent design is. It's just skepticism about certain aspects of natural explanations, but it doesn't make any commitment to a religious system that offers an alternative explanation.
Creationism, on the other hand, is more like this: Your religion tells you a story about how God made the world, and then you try to make arguments that the scientific evidence supports that story. Obviously a much more difficult thing to do, because the story your religion gives you may have a bunch of weird quirks which don't line up with the scientific evidence at all. For example, young-earth creationism says that the universe is only about 6000 years old (based on a straightforward reading of Genesis 1). Now, if you want to argue that science tells us the universe is only 6000 years old, there are a lot of obvious problems. There's plenty of evidence that the earth is way older than that.
But intelligent design is like, wow a bacteria flagellum [or whatever other thing] is really complicated, seems like the kind of thing that would have been designed by an intelligent creator. And that's pretty much it. That seems to be the entirety of intelligent design ideology. But noticing "stuff is complicated" is not gonna get you all the way to the creation story presented in the bible.
I feel there's a bit of sleight-of-hand in this book. Most of the book is about how science has discovered that a lot of things are complex or fine-tuned, which kinda maybe implies a creator. And then there's just a little bit of an argument that this vague "creator" is the God of the bible, sort of tacked on the end. Feels like quite a logical leap to me.
You know what it feels like? It feels like it's written for an audience of Christians who want to be told that they're already right. Like, you read Genesis 1, and whatever picture you had in your mind while reading it, yeah sure that's what the science points to. It's pretending that "things in the natural world are complex, therefore there is a creator" is the same thing as saying the creation story in the bible is true.
You know what it feels like? Like Christians want to tell themselves "we're winning the fight against those atheists- look how big our pile of evidence is." Add this book to the pile of evidence for "our side." Like anything that makes any kind of argument against any aspect of evolution is a point for "our side"- but nobody considers whether those different arguments are even compatible with each other, or the implications about what kind of God we believe in.
(I was SHOCKED at the parts of the book which easily talked about how this or that thing happened 300 million years ago, like just totally fine with the millions-of-years timescale accepted by mainstream science. No acknowledgement at all of young-earth creationism. Like the book doesn't take any position on that at all, but is just happy to go along with anything, as long as it's a point for our side.)
What I'm saying is, intelligent design is not the slam-dunk they think it is. Sure, you can find plenty of things in the natural world where people would say "this seems like it must have been designed." Sure. But that's not an argument for your religion's specific take on the creation story.
---
The overall tone is "let's fight those atheists"
The whole book is about how atheist scientists have convinced everyone that the scientific evidence shows the universe came into being without God, but those atheists have misrepresented the scientific evidence, and we are fighting back now!
There were many places throughout the book where it said something along the lines of [my paraphrase, not an exact quote] "the evidence that's been discovered in the past few decades should make theists feel more confident, and atheists feel more panicked." I just... what are we doing here? It's like, hooray, the latest scientific evidence says I'm already right about everything, and I don't have to learn anything, let's point and laugh at those atheists.
I do not like this.
It seems like this book is not about actually finding truth. It's about learning some arguments you can use the next time you meet an atheist.
---
The chapters all hit different
The structure Strobel uses for his books is that each chapter is an interview with a different expert. It really surprised me how different all of the chapters feel, in terms of how dishonest that chapter's expert is about atheism.
So let me just run through these different chapters and tell you what I thought about them.
Chapter 3:
Chapters 1 and 2 are just kind of intro stuff, and the first expert to be interviewed was Jonathan Wells in chapter 3. This chapter was about the "icons" of evolution, the images that stick in your mind when you see them in biology class or in pop culture. Wells's position is that these "icons" have been misrepresented- people view them like they're rock-solid evidence for evolution, but that's not what they are at all.
Oh geez, this chapter felt so dishonest to me. Taking these pop-culture misconceptions about evolution, and acting like that means the actual scientific theory of evolution is as bankrupt as whatever somebody off the street thinks when they see a picture of Darwin's tree of life.
About the "tree of life" diagram: Wells says that the fossil evidence we have does not match the way the tree of life shows organisms gradually changing over time. But then, when he elaborates on this, all he talks about is the Cambrian explosion. (Definition from wikipedia: "The Cambrian explosion (also known as Cambrian radiation or Cambrian diversification) is an interval of time beginning approximately 538.8 million years ago in the Cambrian period of the early Paleozoic, when a sudden radiation of complex life occurred and practically all major animal phyla started appearing in the fossil record.") I just, what? The Cambrian explosion, if you were going to locate it on a "tree of life" diagram, is way at the beginning, before any mammals, before any animals that we are familiar with. If you were going to draw a tree of life, but with a discontinuity at the Cambrian explosion, it wouldn't really look that different. The tree of life is about how species have been changing, slowly, over many generations, millions of years, for as long as living species have existed, they are evolving- oh but what's this, the Cambrian explosion is here to point out that there was one short window when a whole bunch of completely different families of living things suddenly appeared. So? That doesn't really have anything to do with the overall idea of the tree of life.
 |
| Tree diagram which shows just the Cambrian explosion. Image source. |
The phyla of living things that appeared during the Cambrian explosion- we're talking like, earthworms and sea sponges and things like that. Like, we're nowhere near the point where vertebrate animals appeared. It's impressive that they all appeared so suddenly, yes. But the idea that the Cambrian explosion somehow disproves the idea that species evolved gradually over hundreds of millions of years, like we see in a "tree of life" diagram- what? The vast majority of the "tree of life" happens after the Cambrian explosion.
And if you want to say the Cambrian explosion is evidence for God, what kind of God are we talking about here? A God who created a bunch of different tiny little weird-looking organisms, this one time, long ago, and then kinda sat around and did nothing for millions of years while they gradually evolved into the species we have now? The Cambrian explosion is not the stellar argument for the bible that you think it is, man.
And *all* the "icons" mentioned in this chapter are like that. All of them are like, biology students see a picture of a thing, and assume all kinds of stuff about what the picture means, but their assumptions are wrong (and actual scientists know it's more nuanced than that), therefore there is no evidence at all for evolution.
This whole chapter talks like the evidence for evolution is paper-thin, and the scientists are all panicking and hoping no one will notice. Like this quote from page 77:
"There is no encompassing theory of [human] evolution," conceded Berkeley evolutionary biologist F. Clark Howell. "Alas, there never really has been."
I've googled around trying to find what Howell was actually saying here- because in this intelligent design book, it's presented like he's saying, [my paraphrase, not an actual quote] "We really have no idea how humans evolved- probably whatever the average churchgoer thinks when they read Genesis is a better hypothesis than anything we've been able to come up with. We've just got nothing." I have my doubts about whether that's what he really meant!
So I've found that this quote come from the book, "Contemporary Issues in Human Evolution (Memoirs of the California Academy of Science Series Vol 21)" but I haven't been able to get the actual text. But anyway, I highly doubt that this quote means what "The Case for a Creator" is spinning it to mean.
Sometimes creationists take quotes from scientists debating the exact details of some specific mechanism of evolution, and they present these quotes like they mean the whole theory of evolution is about to collapse.
Really not a fan of chapter 3.
Chapter 4:
Well, this chapter was much better than chapter 3. (Chapter 3 set the bar pretty low though.) When I was reading this, the difference between the 2 chapters was so stark and obvious- and it made me think about how, back in the day when I was really into apologetics, I wouldn't really have noticed a difference. Both of these chapters are within the normal range of what apologetics books talk about. From "can you believe how dumb those atheists are" to cool facts about science- every apologetics book is some mix of that, though the proportions vary.
Chapter 4 was an interview with Stephen Meyer, who mentioned a bunch of different topics, which will be explored in later chapters of the book. A bunch of topics, and I didn't find any of his views to be "dishonest" like I did with Wells, but they did kinda feel one-sided.
For example, his take on "bad design." By "bad design" I mean that evolutionists point out biological structures that seem to be "badly designed," as an argument that there is no intelligent being guiding evolution. Meyer takes a few examples of this and tells us why he thinks these examples are not "bad design"- I say it seems "one-sided" though, because there are plenty of other examples he didn't talk about (I remember Dawkins had some examples in his book "The Greatest Show on Earth" which I reviewed here), and because I don't think you can get at the core of the "bad design" argument by just eliminating individual examples.
"Bad design," in my view, is more like... we have all these different animals competing with each other. Predator and prey animals, for example. You could say "oh it's good design how God gave rabbits this body structure so they can run fast, and eyes on the sides of their heads say they can keep a lookout for predators" and "oh it's good design how God gave wolves this kind of body structure so they can run fast and hunt rabbits"- but is it really good design to be, uh, playing both sides like that? This is a zero-sum game- what is God's goal? God wants to make rabbits really good at being rabbits, and make wolves really good at being wolves? Why? I guess you could say something about having a "balanced" ecosystem, maybe that's what it means by "good design"?
You can point to some specific feature that some species has, and say it's "good design" or "bad design"- but you're making the assumption that God's goal is for this animal to be successful and survive, and They designed it in that way. But why do we think that's God's goal? This argument is all about "assuming your goal is to design a body structure that enables this animal to do [some thing], would it be a good idea to design it this way?" (And each person who shows up to debate this can have a slightly different take on what the [some thing] is.) But this sets up the scenario in a very artificially-narrow way. *Why* are we assuming the goal is to design a body structure to do well at some certain thing? I mean, from a natural selection perspective, the "some certain thing" is for the organism to have more offspring and pass on its genes. But in a "design" paradigm, how do you even define what the goal of the design would be? And nobody is even asking that question, it's just assumed that, for example, eyes are for seeing, and having a blind spot due to the placement of the optic nerve makes the eye less effective at its intended task of seeing (or, as Meyer argues, it doesn't really)- but why are we even accepting this framework to begin with?
(Or, to spin this another way: Intelligent design advocates can always counter any individual example of "bad design" by saying "if the purpose was to do [some thing] then this would not be a good way to do it. But ACTUALLY the purpose was [some slightly different thing], and this body structure IS optimized for that." Who can say what the "purpose" of any biological structure was supposed to be? Why are we assuming God's intention was to make this or that animal good at some certain thing, as if it's just obvious? Don't we need to think about what that says about God?)
And, like, the biology version of the problem of evil- there are so many species of animals which give birth to a huge bunch of offspring, and only a small proportion of them survive. Is that "good design"? There are animals which are cruel to each other- and not just in a regular predator vs prey way, but like... like male lions killing the offspring of other male lions.
You ever see an injured dog that was rescued off the street, it looks all scraggly and nasty, skinny, covered in bald spots and infested with bugs, and someone gives it a loving home, food, medical care, etc, and in just a few months, the dog looks so much better, all fluffy and happy and cute? The before-and-after pictures can be stunning. You give an animal the resources to allow it to have a good life, and it will thrive. But the reality of the world is most animals don't get those resources, and they have so much potential that never has a chance to grow into anything. That's how nature is. The environment literally doesn't have enough resources for all animals who are born to thrive to their fullest potential. Did God "design" it that way? IS THAT "BAD DESIGN"?
So sure, okay, you can say "this specific example is actually *not* bad design, because of these reasons" but there's so much more to it than that. I understand that this is the argument that creationists/ intelligent design proponents would make, and maybe they have some good points, but there are some obvious counterarguments that are not brought up at all in the book. That's why I say it came across as one-sided.
Chapter 5:
Chapter 5 was an interview with William Lane Craig about the big bang theory. And oh wow I did not like this chapter.
First of all, Craig talks about the big bang theory like it's keeping atheists up at night, they're so distressed because if the universe began to exist, it must have had a cause, and what could that cause possibly be besides God? (I've read plenty of atheist stuff and I've never seen them getting worked up about this. I think they're fine with the big bang theory.) Talking about the big bang theory like it's good news for Christians and bad new for atheists. This really surprised me because years ago, the first time I heard about the big bang theory, I thought it seemed like the kind of thing that Christians would *not* believe in. It doesn't bear any resemblance to Genesis 1. But I guess we've moved the goalposts, and now as long as the bible is on the correct side of "did the universe begin to exist, or did it always exist?" then it's a win for us, wahoo.
What caused the big bang? Clearly must be God, right? I mean, whatever it was, you can call it "God" but it's not at all the same thing that people mean when they say "I believe in God." The big bang theory is not really evidence for God, as They are conventionally understood. It's evidence that something must have caused the universe to begin. But in this chapter we're just pretending that's the same thing as "hey Christian readers, whatever you already think about God is true."
This chapter spends a long time talking about how atheist scientists keep trying and failing to come up with some alternative to "the universe had a beginning." I find it hard to believe that atheists really treat this as such a huge issue that needs to be argued against. (Perhaps they did, back in 2004, and I missed it??? ... I find that unlikely.)
And wow, so much of this chapter was like "here's another idea that some atheist scientists came up with, just because they're so biased and unwilling to accept any supernatural explanation. [Gives a very short overview of some idea about the expansion of the universe, etc.] But, that makes no sense because [Gives a very short explanation about why it's wrong.]" (Craig even brings up Stephen Hawking, and mentions some idea of his, and tells us why it's wrong- I am mad about this disrespect for Hawking.) It's like, the point of this is not for the readers to learn something, the point is to reassure us that we don't have to pay any attention to what physicists say because they're all wrong. Just bring up some scientific hypothesis, and shoot it down immediately. Why are we doing this?
Craig says some words about complicated physics concepts like the expansion of the universe, but this isn't for readers who want to learn more about physics. This is for readers who don't care about understanding the science, but just want to be reassured that some very smart person says you're already right about everything, and those atheists are wrong.
And OH MY GOODNESS, there's one section from the William Lane Craig interview I have to post here because it was just that bonkers. From p 134-135:
Craig leaned back into his chair. "There are two types of explanations-- scientific and personal," he began, adopting a more professorial tone. "Scientific explanations explain a phenomenon in terms of certain initial conditions and natural laws, which explain how those initial conditions evolved to produce the phenomenon under consideration. By contrast, personal explanations explain things by means of an agent and that agent's volition or will."
I interrupted to ask Craig for an illustration. He obliged me by saying: "Imagine you walked into the kitchen and saw the kettle boiling on the stove. You ask, 'Why is the kettle boiling?' Your wife might say, 'Well, because the kinetic energy of the flame is conducted by the metal bottom of the kettle to the water, causing the water molecules to vibrate faster and faster until they're thrown off in the form of steam.' That would be a scientific explanation. Or she might say, 'I put it on to make a cup of tea.' That would be a personal explanation. Both are legitimate, but they explain the phenomenon in different ways."
So far, so good. "But how does this relate to cosmology?"
"You see, there cannot be a scientific explanation of the first state of the universe. Since it's the first state, it simply cannot be explained in terms of earlier initial conditions and natural laws leading up to it. So if there is an explanation of the first state of the universe, it has to be a personal explanation-- that is, an agent who has volition to create it. That would be the first reason that the cause of the universe must be personal."
There are exactly 2 types of cause- scientific and personal- uh, since when???? Did he just make that up? I mean, it's true that if you ask *why* something happened, that could be interpreted in many ways, but this argument that since whatever caused the big bang is outside of our physical universe, that must mean that there was a *someone* who made a *choice* because they *wanted* to create the universe- what? It really doesn't follow from that.
Chapter 6:
Chapter 6 was an interview with Robin Collins about the fine-tuning argument, ie, the universe must have been created by an intelligent designer, because the fundamental constants of the universe are so fine-tuned, and if they were just a tiny tiny bit different, life could not exist.
And yeah, this is true. It's true that if big important constants like the force of gravity were a little bit different, life as we know it could not exist. The stuff in this chapter is really pretty amazing to learn about.
But I feel this is one-sided, because there are some counterarguments that someone familiar with this topic would bring up, and they're just not mentioned here at all- it's talked about like atheists have no answer to this at all.
First of all, even though life as we know it could not exist if these fundamental constants were slightly different, perhaps some completely different kind of universe could exist, with life forms whose biological processes are completely different from what we know from our universe. We have no idea. Changing the fundamental constants of physics- well, obviously it would mean our own universe would not be possible, but, then what? There could be something different.
And also, if you say the constants must have been fine-tuned by an intelligent creator, what kind of creator are we talking about here? From what we've seen in this book so far, here's what the creator did: It worked very hard to precisely calibrate the constants of the universe. Then it caused the big bang. Then it sat around and did nothing for billions of years, I guess? Then it created the first tiny little organisms on earth. Then continued to sit around and do nothing, for millions of years. And then it caused the Cambrian explosion on earth. Later in the book, it is argued that the creator also made DNA, and intricate little biological structures in living cells. Okay, so, when you say you believe in God, is that the God you mean? A God who is not very involved at all, and when it does intervene, it's doing things that you need years of experience in advanced science to even understand what they are?
Again, this is not the stellar argument for the God of the bible that they're making it out to be.
I think if you put yourself on the "intelligent design" side of this debate, you have to face this. The fine-tuning argument is an argument for some kind of intelligent thing- if you say you believe in God because of the fine-tuning argument, you should do the work of challenging your pre-existing religious beliefs, and changing them so they match what the fine-tuning argument says.
Maybe what it means is, the way Christians understand God is just one tiny slice of Who God is. Our beliefs are some kind of a projection through our own biased, self-centered lens. If you remove that lens, you have to recognize that God has spent way more time dwelling in the cold expanse of space, for billions of years, than They have spent interacting with humans. What does this mean about who God is? Yeah, some Christians would answer this by saying that the whole entire purpose of creating the cold expanse of space was that somewhere in that expanse would be the earth, and eventually humans would be created on that earth, and there, finally, that was God's goal all along, humans are the pinnacle of God's creation. But, really? If you really try to understand how vast these distances and timescales are... God has a lot going on besides our human existence on earth.
Do Christians who read this book really get that, or is it just about "oh, good, I'm right and the atheists are wrong"?
Chapter 7:
Chapter 7 was an interview with Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards, about how the earth's position in the universe is special. It's very difficult to find a region of the universe that would allow for an earth-like planet, it's very difficult to find a star that's the right size, it's very important that the moon exists and is the right size, etc.
This chapter was the best one in the whole book! It was very well-done. It went into a lot of detail about astronomy and what sort of conditions are necessary for a planet to be able to support life. And it did NOT talk about how atheists are losers because they keep trying and failing to come up with naturalistic explanations. No, it just talked about how rare the conditions are to have an earth-like planet- which is true- and you can kinda draw your own conclusions from that.
Good job! Wish all the chapters could have been like this!
Chapter 8:
Chapter 8 is an interview with Michael Behe, where he talks about tiny molecular structures in cells. For example, cilia. Flagella. These structures are incredibly complex, even though they are tiny, we can't see them, and most people have no idea they exist. And, Behe says, the more that scientists study organisms on a microscopic level, the more that they find complex structures which are unlikely to have come about by natural processes. Must have been a creator.
A cell is not just a blob of organic material bunched together. It has little structures that work together and have to be a certain way.
I find this really fascinating. It's really cool that there's so much going on that we don't even know about, and that these complex microscopic structures are necessary for life as we know it to exist.
Behe goes through a few possible natural explanations, and says they don't make sense. I felt this was kinda one-sided, by which I mean, I bet there are other scientists who would have some ideas on how these structures may have arisen naturally. I bet it's not as straightforward as 'well there just isn't any good natural explanation.' I'd like to learn more about this actually.
And I found myself thinking, if we believe this argument that these tiny molecular structures are so complex and must have been designed by God- well, what conclusions can we then draw about the character of God? How does this fit with our existing beliefs about God, and how does it challenge them? Let's not just throw it on the pile of evidence for "our side" and stop there. What does it mean, that our God has spent a lot of time thinking about cilia and how all the different parts of the cell should perform their functions? Also, if we say these structures were designed, does that mean God poofed one into existence one time, and then nature took over from there? Or God did this many times, across different species? Or God is constantly sustaining the processes that go on in every cell of every organism?
I personally do not feel comfortable saying I agree with any of these intelligent design arguments, because I truly believe the implications about the character of God are challenging and I would need to really reckon with them. This isn't something we should just say "yay it's a win for our side" so easily.
Chapter 9:
This chapter featured Stephen Meyer again, and it was about DNA. DNA contains all the information needed for the development of a living organism. It is very complex, and so the question of where DNA came from is very difficult. Intelligent-design advocates like Meyer claim that it must have come from an intelligent being.
Meyer goes through a few different explanations of how DNA might have arisen through natural processes, and for each one, he tells us why it doesn't make sense. As I've said about the other chapters, I find this format to be kinda suspect, because I can't trust that he's giving an honest description of these various natural explanations. I think it would be useful to go read about them from sources written by the actual scientists who are working in this area.
It would be very cool to learn more about this! But the impression I get is that this chapter is kinda one-sided.
Also, if God created DNA, what does that mean exactly? Did God make DNA 1 time, in 1 species, and that species became the common ancestor of every living creature? Or did God make a bunch of different species?
Also, I know that young-earth creationist organization Answers in Genesis uses a weird definition of "information" when they talk about DNA- how DNA contains "information" but random gene mutations can't add "information." And they present this as their big slam-dunk argument (or at least they did around 2006 or so, when I was reading a lot of their material). But they're defining "information" as something intentionally put there by an intelligent creator. If you're using that definition, then under the theory of evolution, DNA does not contain "information."
That wasn't addressed at all in this chapter of "The Case for a Creator"- and AiG is explicitly a young-earth creationist group, a very different thing from the scientists in this book promoting ID- but I always get a little suspicious when someone is talking about DNA and information in the context of arguing against evolution.
Chapter 10:
This chapter is an interview with J. P. Moreland about human consciousness. Basically how humans have a mind or spirit, which is sort of in addition to our physical bodies. Moreland argues that our consciousness is from God, not something that simply arose from the physical structure of our brains.
I have 2 things to say about this chapter:
- Actually, yes, I do view human consciousness as directly tied to the existence of God. I believe we are made in God's image, and there's something more to us besides just the physical structures of our bodies- there's a soul, which will continue to exist after we die. Our consciousness is sort of an aspect of that soul. I *do* think it's evidence for the existence of some kind of spiritual world.
- BUT WOWWWW I did NOT like this chapter.
Oh MY GOODNESS, this chapter. This chapter was full of half-baked gotchas, like, ugh, let me give some examples:
[Moreland talking about the implications of 'physicalism':] "The second implication," he continued, "is that there would be no free will. That's because matter is completely governed by the laws of nature. Take any physical object," he said as he glanced out a window, where the fog was breaking up. "For instance, a cloud," he said. "It's just a material object, and its movement is completely governed by the laws of air pressure, wind movement, and the like. So if I'm a material object, all of the things I do are fixed by my environment, my genetics, and so forth.
"... This is one of the reasons we lost the Vietnam War."
I was following him until that last statement, which seemed oddly incongruous to me. "What has this got to do with Vietnam?" I asked.
Moreland explained: "I heard a former advisor to the president say that B. F. Skinner's behaviorism influenced the Pentagon's strategy. Skinner believed that we're just physical objects, so you can condition people, just like you can condition a laboratory animal by applying electric shocks. Keep doing certain things over and over, and you can change behavior. So in Vietnam, we bombed, we came back, we bombed, we came back, we bombed, and so forth. We assumed that after we gave the North Vietnamese shock after shock, pretty soon we could manipulate their behavior. After all, they're just physical objects responding to stimuli. Eventually they had to give in."
"But they didn't," I said.
"That's right. It didn't work."
"Why?"
"Because there was more to the Vietnamese than their physical brains responding to stimuli. They have souls, desires, feelings, and beliefs, and they could make free choices to suffer and to stand firm for their convictions despite our attempt to condition them by our bombing."
... dafuq did I just read? Some American leaders in the Vietnam War had an incorrect understanding of human behavior, and therefore free will exists, thus disproving the idea that the physical world is all there is????? What? What on earth? Like, why on earth would it be the case that if free will does not exist, then the obvious result is that people will quit fighting back if you bomb them enough? What? Where is this even coming from? What is the supposed "logic" here???
And this part where Moreland talks about how near-death experiences are evidence that there's more to us besides our physical bodies:
"This happens in near-death experiences. People are clinically dead, but sometimes they have a vantage point from above, where they look down at the operating table that their body is on. Sometimes they gain information they couldn't have known if this were just an illusion happening in their brain. One woman died and she saw a tennis shoe that was on the roof of the hospital. How could she have known this?"
No citation is given for this "tennis shoe on the roof" anecdote. Is this an urban legend, or what? Why are Moreland/Strobel bringing this up with no source given, like it's just another thing to add to the pile of evidence for "our side," without any attempt to check if it's actually true or even makes sense? (OR IS EVEN CONSISTENT WITH THE BIBLE?????)
Because, the pop-culture notion that your soul would "float" above your body and be able to "see" things- this doesn't make sense. Our sensory organs (eyes, etc) are part of our physical bodies. We experience the physical world through our sensory organs- actually, we don't experience the world as it really is, we experience the sensory data that comes from our eyes, ears, etc, and then our brains piece it together into a model of what the world is. And this happens without us being aware of it- we don't think to ourselves "well I am detecting light with wavelength 660 nm, that means there is a red light." To us, it *feels* like that's just how the world is- we aren't intuitively aware that our sensory organs and brains are filtering it.
So if you separate the soul from the body, and the soul "floats" up in a "near-death experience"- well, your soul doesn't have eyes, so how would you see things from your vantage point up there? The sensory processing that eyes do is actually really sophisticated- it's not nothing, it's not something you can just take for granted, as if a soul can see things just like eyes can see things.
Also this part:
[Moreland says,] "Furthermore, my consciousness is inner and private to me. By simply introspecting, I have a way of knowing about what's happening in my mind that is not available to you, my doctor, or a neuroscientist. A scientist could know more about what's happening in my brain than I do, but he couldn't know more about what's happening in my mind than I do. He has to ask me."
When I asked Moreland for an illustration of this, he said, "Have you heard of Rapid Eye Movement?"
"Sure," I replied.
"What does it indicate?"
"Dreaming."
"Exactly. How do scientists know that when there is a certain eye movement that people are dreaming? They've had to wake people and ask them. Scientists could watch the eyes move and read a printout of what was physically happening in the brain, so they could correlate brain states with eye movements. But they didn't know what was happening in the mind. Why? Because that's inner and private.
"So the scientist can know about the brain by studying it, but he can't know about the mind without asking the person to reveal it, because conscious states have the feature of being inner and private, but the brain's states don't."
??? What? He's saying that because we don't currently have a good enough understanding of the brain to read people's thoughts just by studying their brain activity, that means we *never* will have the scientific knowledge to do so, and therefore there's something to the mind besides just the physical brain.
I'm an engineer. I do computer stuff. Sometimes, somebody gives me some code, and I'm trying to figure out what it does. There are 2 ways to go about this- you could read the code and understand how it works, or you could just run it and see what the output is. Both of these methods are useful, depending on the situation.
And what Moreland is saying here sounds to me like this: We have this question about how people's brain states correlate with the thoughts in their minds. There are 2 ways to figure out people's mind state from their brain state: you could use your scientific knowledge of how the brain works, look at the data on their brain activity, and calculate what their mind state would be from there. Or, you could gather data on their brain activity, and then just ask them what was going on in their mind, and use their response to help you in your future research. Well, the first method is not really possible- we simply don't have the scientific knowledge to be able to "read minds" just by looking at people's brain activity. (We can't just "read the code" and understand what the program does.) So we have to use the second method- run the code and look at the result, as it is output in human-readable form (ie, by asking the research subjects about their thoughts), and see if that helps you understand the brain better. But apparently Moreland is claiming that because there's no obvious way to do the first method, that means there just simply does not exist any mapping from brain states to mind states. What? And he talks about it like the second method is a less-than-ideal workaround, when to me it comes across like an extremely normal way to do science. Like, you study people's brain activity, and then ask them questions about the thoughts in their minds, and Moreland is portraying this like you *should* just be able to *know* their thoughts from their brain activity, and since you don't automatically know that, that proves something about souls existing.
????????
(And I know this book was published 20 years ago and they didn't have this kind of technology then, but here's a link I found recently: These brain implants speak your mind — even when you don't want to. Don't be so sure that there will never be technology that can figure out people's thoughts by measuring brain activity.)
And this:
[Moreland says,] "There was a story on television about an epileptic who underwent an operation in which surgeons removed fifty-three percent of her brain. When she woke up, nobody said, 'We have forty-seven percent of a person here.' A person can't be divided into pieces. You are either a person or you're not. But your brain and your body can be divided. So that means I can't be the same thing as my body."
Yes, it's true that sometimes people have parts of their brains removed. This brings up really interesting questions about how it affects their mind, their personality, their self. It's an area of research which can help us understand the connection between the brain and the self.
Oh, but that's not what Moreland is saying here. He's using this as an oversimplified "gotcha"- like aha, nobody claims this patient is 47% of a person, therefore we're right about everything and we don't need to learn anything.
This case doesn't tell us that there exists a soul that's more than just the person's physical brain. It only tells us that whatever it is that creates the person's mind or self, it still exists even when 53% of the brain is removed [by a surgeon who knows what they're doing].
While I was reading this chapter, I was thinking about Captain Cassidy's blog posts about human consciousness and the physical brain, from an atheist perspective. Afterlife: How Captain Cassidy Let Go of a False Belief, Afterlife: When the Science Spoke At Last to Me, and Afterlife: Picking Up the Pieces After Loss of Belief. Here's a quote from the first of those links:
The final key, for me, was learning about our brains.
Such remarkable, beautiful, unspeakable power can be found in our brains, and yet holy cow, they are fragile.
And they are the only place we have ever found that makes us us.
If our brain gets harmed somehow, or gets sick, or is deprived too long of what it needs, then we can completely lose that us and never get it back. If we are born with brains harmed or deprived like that, we might never gain an us in the first place. A purely astonishing array of congenital conditions can do exactly that.
One of them, asparagine synthetase deficiency (ASD), causes a whole constellation of some of the worst congenital problems I’ve ever heard of. And all of this awful stuff for lack of an ability to make asparagine, a little bitty amino acid that human brains really need like whoa.
By now, we’ve done a bunch of studies about stuff like traumatic brain injury (TBI) and know that these injuries sometimes lead to changes in personality and cognitive ability. Sometimes studies find small shifts, like this one did; at other times, studies find that affected people can change a lot. (The classic example here, of course, remains that of Phineas P. Gage.)
People surviving strokes often change in similar fashion.
One might also mention the barbaric, widespread trend of lobotomization in America in decades past. The mostly-women who endured this procedure experienced marked changes in personality afterward.
Or heck, we could even mention psychoactive medications. They can ease depression, mood swings, anxiety, and more. They often make an incredible and very positive difference in someone’s life — and yes, change our personality.
All this stuff comes down to the same central truth:
We are our meat. Our meat is us. If something happens to our meat, then our us can sometimes change radically.
Nobody’s ever found credible support for any other notion.
She mentions Phineas P. Gage- he was a railroad worker in the 1800s, who was injured in an accident where an iron rod went through his brain, and he survived and lived 12 more years, with part of his brain missing. It's a bizarre case which can give us insight into the connection between the mind and the brain. I feel like this is really fascinating to learn about- but it seems like "The Case for a Creator" isn't interested in learning. "The Case for a Creator" just wants to tell Christians we're already right, we're the winners. No need to think, no need to learn, no need to be challenged.
Another thing I was thinking about while reading this chapter was fetal development- at what point does the unborn baby gain consciousness? "The Case for a Creator" didn't touch on that at all, but I think it's very relevant to this. When a fertilized egg develops into a person, at some point along the way, consciousness arises- how? How does this happen? I suspect it happens gradually- but what does that mean, for the fetus to gain consciousness gradually- isn't it either conscious or it's not? How can there be an in-between state?
Maybe this wasn't discussed in the book because Moreland and Strobel are men who don't have direct experience with being pregnant and obsessing over the bizarre reality of the new baby growing inside one's own body, and so they haven't thought about these questions. Or maybe it's a big topic, and the book didn't mention it because then this chapter would have become too long (much like this blog post is too long). Or, maybe they didn't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole because the question of when a fetus becomes a "person" is so politicized in the anti-abortion debate. "Pro-life" people (like the Christians who are the target audience for this book) are so totally sure that "life begins at conception" and that a fertilized egg already has a soul (uh what about identical twins though?). I haven't seen "pro-life" people discuss the question of when it has *consciousness* though- I think it's obvious that a fertilized egg doesn't have consciousness, but a newborn baby does, and so somewhere during the process of pregnancy, it becomes conscious- but "pro-life" ideology can't handle that kind of uncertainty and gray area.
ANYWAY to sum up chapter 10. I actually do believe human consciousness comes from God. That on an individual level, God has personally given consciousness to each one of us. But OH MY GOODNESS this interview with Moreland was so bad.
-
So that's all the experts in this book. Like I said, the chapters all feel very different to me. The chapters with William Lane Craig, Jonathan Wells, and J. P. Moreland came across as dishonest to me. On the other hand, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards were great and didn't have anything disrespectful to say about atheists at all. They just wanted to talk about how cool astronomy is. Let's be like them.
I wonder, when Strobel was writing this, did he have the feeling that the different chapters were different? I know that way back in the day, when I was in high school and reading apologetics books, I totally would not have noticed these chapters are different. All of them are material to add to the pile for "our side" so whatever.
---
On not being allowed to read the other side
I mentioned that some of the arguments in this book come across, to me, as one-sided. What I mean by that is, the book presents some argument, and in my mind I have an idea of what a pretty good counterargument would be, but the book doesn't mention the counterargument. It just kinda goes along letting the reader assume that the atheists don't really have any good answers on these topics.
And normally, when you're presenting an argument with the intention to persuade people about something, it's not really a bad thing if you don't bring up counterarguments. You know your audience is also hearing arguments from other people who disagree with you- so you're not obligated to bring up those counterarguments out of a sense of responsibility for making sure your audience is informed. (But, it might be a good idea to bring them up, so you can respond to them- that might help convince people.)
But apologetics is different. Apologetics is... how do I put this... good Christians are not really allowed to go to atheist sources directly and hear what they have to say. So if apologetics material misrepresents atheist talking points, the Christians who read these apologetics materials will just never know.
No, you're not allowed to go read an atheist book. Because, what if you get "led astray"? Our minds are weak and sinful and we might fall into the trap of believing things that are wrong. It's not safe to make a little visit to atheist land to see what they're doing over there. Better stay over on "our side" and listen to trusted leaders who will always immediately supply a reason why some atheist idea is wrong, so you don't have to sit with that feeling of doubt and uncertainty and the possibility that you might be wrong.
I did read an atheist book, in college. I went about it very deliberately, taking careful notes as I read, so that I could think critically about everything it said, and not accidentally believe and internalize something without realizing. Also I prayed about it, trying to work closely with God to parse through what was true and what was not. Because, I was taught that to do this, to expose oneself to ideas from "the other side," comes with very real risk.
For Christian books, though, I never did that- I thought, since they're written by Christians, they must be right. No need to think critically, to challenge, to question things as you're reading.
Hey, here's an idea- maybe everything we read, we should think about it and not just automatically believe it?
Anyway, I got more and more bold back then, and ended up with no fear at all of listening to atheist arguments. I figured, if our religious beliefs really are true, then they are strong enough to handle any questions. We don't have to be afraid. (And this was back when I was still evangelical- yes, there are evangelicals that are fine with openly talking about these things, not afraid or offended by it. Not many though. I was very much pushing back against an evangelical culture which said "why would you be interested in atheism?" and shamed people for having doubts.)
---
What is the point of apologetics?
So all of this has me asking the question, what is the point of apologetics? But this blog post is already super long, so we'll save that for the follow-up post.
---
"Evolution of the gaps"
When religious people explain scientific mysteries by saying "God did it," this often gets mocked by skeptics, who call it "God of the gaps." Your God is just whatever you don't understand about science, and then when science gets more advanced and answers those questions, your God gets smaller. It can cause religious people to oppose scientific advancement, seeing it as a threat to our beliefs. Yeah, it's not great to just say "God did it" and then show no interest in learning anything beyond that.
"The Case for a Creator" brings up a sort of opposite thing, calling it "evolution of the gaps"- ie, when scientists are trying to find a natural explanation for something, but they don't yet have such an explanation, and they say "there must be a natural explanation, we just don't know what it is yet." "The Case for a Creator" talks about this like it's just as bad as "God of the gaps." Like, some scientific phenomenon is so complex, and we don't have any explanation for how it could have come about by natural processes, and "God did it" is right there, staring us in the face as a possible explanation, but these bad atheist scientists just refuse to consider it. They just keep saying, irrationally, "no, it must be evolution." Evolution of the gaps.
No, I don't think these are equivalent. No, I don't think it's such a bad thing for scientists to keep looking for a natural explanation rather than accepting "God did it."
First of all, for the "God did it" people, this is about identity. They have staked their religious identity on the belief that scientists are not ever going to be able to come up with an explanation for this or that phenomenon. That's a really shaky foundation. There's a lot of fear there. You know, the sort of fear which motivates them to read apologetics books which bring up possible theories that scientists have proposed and then immediately shoot them all down. We say "God did it" because if another explanation was found, that would be bad news. That would be scary.
On the other hand, the "we don't have a natural explanation yet, but surely there is such an explanation" crowd- I don't get the sense that there's the same kind of fear there. I don't get the sense that they feel so threatened, that they're in a panic saying "we HAVE TO figure out the natural explanation for this, or else we'll be forced to believe in God!!!!" It feels more like... genuine scientific curiosity. Just genuinely wanting to understand the world. Not like... a terror that it threatens our very identity if somebody comes up with a better explanation than ours.
Second, if you say "God did it" then you stop looking for answers. But if you say "there must be a natural explanation" then that drives people to continue searching, continue learning.
If you don't believe "God did it" so you keep looking for another explanation, and you're wrong and actually God did it- what's the worst that could happen? Just wasted your time, maybe, if you came up with nothing- but I don't think you would literally come up with nothing- you would probably still learn about related questions, even if you can't find an answer for your original question. But if you say "God did it" and you stop looking for answers, and you're wrong... you miss out on truth, and you miss out on scientific advancement that could really help people.
I mean, I know the counterargument to this is "if atheists say there must be a natural explanation, and refuse to accept 'God did it', they'll continue to not believe in God, and live immoral lives and encourage others to do so too, and then go to hell." Conservative Christians believe that being wrong about these abstract religious beliefs carries very real consequences. I don't. I think it's fine for people to have different beliefs about religion and whether or not God exists. The important thing is how you treat people. As the apostle Paul said, all the commandments can be summed up as "love your neighbor as yourself." You get that right, it doesn't matter if you're right about God existing or not.
I don't want a "pile of evidence for our side." I want people to "love your neighbor as yourself."
---
What this book could have been
Maybe in some alternate universe, I would read a different version of this book and come away with this message: I'm a Christian. I believe in God. I believe that, in some sense, God made the world. And also, we know from science that DNA is very complex. (And also all the other things mentioned in the book.) So, do I believe that my God personally planned out the DNA of every family of living things? (Not each *species*- even creationists agree that many species descended from common ancestors by natural causes.) Or maybe They just did it 1 time and that's the common ancestor? Or They didn't, and DNA just came about by natural causes? And if I believe They *did* personally plan out the DNA of many different species, what are the implications of that for my beliefs?
Off the top of my head, here are a few:
We should take it extremely seriously when a species is threatened with extinction- extinction means that a masterpiece personally created by God is just *gone*. Actually, wait a minute, a huge proportion of the species that have ever lived are extinct- like the dinosaurs- and this happened before humans existed- what is going on with this? Did God want it to be that way?
Also, what does it mean, that my God has spent a lot of time thinking about the DNA of some termite species I've never heard of. Should I... like... go learn about termites, as a way to show God I care about Them and Their special interests?
What about the DNA for animal behaviors that come across as cruel, or that cause problems for humans? Did God want things to be that way? I wonder if God has other priorities besides just what's good for humans.
People who believe in God should actually think about these things. Not just think DNA being complex is a win for our side and nothing more.
---
Conclusion
Revisiting the land of apologetics, after being ex-evangelical for so many years, has helped me see some of the big problems with the entire apologetics ideology. Problems that I wasn't able to see, back when I was reading apologetics all the time, because they were so baked in to the way we thought about Christianity and atheism and evidence and debates and so on.
This book is based on some real facts- yes, DNA is very complicated, yes, a small change in the fundamental constants of the universe would mean life as we know it would not exist, etc. But it's packaged up in this "atheists are so dumb, they're so biased, they refuse to consider there's an intelligent designer even though it's OBVIOUS" and "this new evidence is a win for Christians- good news everyone, we don't have to think about our beliefs or change anything. We're already right." I think Christians would benefit from listening to atheists- they really do have useful things to say, and these questions aren't as cut-and-dried as apologetics books portray them. And don't just say that some scientific fact is a point for our side, but really think about the implications for our religious beliefs. If God intentionally designed the universe in such a way, what does that say about the character of God? Maybe we need to change our own beliefs, if we had a different understanding of the character of God.
---
Related
I used to be a young-earth creationist
No comments:
Post a Comment