I wasn’t surprised that Roy Spencer wrote this blog entry, Science and religion: Do your own damn Google search, expressing his feelings at being treated shabbily in an article, What Catastrophe?: MIT’s Richard Lindzen, the unalarmed climate scientist , which describes “less credible skeptics, such as climatologist Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama (signatory to a declaration that `Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence—are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting’)”. I’d already read that article at The Weekly Standard, having been referred there by some link out there in the World Wide Wilderness.
I have problems with the viewpoints typically labeled as “intelligent design,” but—a big but—the real crime committed by Professor Spencer is likely—he thinks certainly—that he is audacious enough to actually believe in a world created by an all-powerful God who remains active in His own Creation. I stand on that common ground with most Intelligent Design advocates, while feeling that God as Creator of all that is not Him doesn’t need to play the role of a Zeus to tell the story which is this world; at the same time, I also don’t think a true theist could ever rule out the possibility of the Creator acting more directly in this world. A Christian has to believe He did act directly in the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
In any case, notice there is no indication that Spencer’s scientific work has been at all affected by his acceptance of some set of beliefs labeled as `intelligent design’ in a statement he signed. His scientific arguments against any certainty, but not against any possibility, of man warming the atmosphere with greenhouse gases have to do specifically with lack of direct cause-and-effects and cloud cover (the IPCC models `warm’ the earth’s atmosphere by way of cloud cover being changed by greenhouse gas levels which are not nearly at a level where they can warm the earth’s atmosphere much by direct `greenhouse’ effects). I’m not trying to make any independent scientific argument but only pointing out that the IPCC models are efforts to encapsulate a complex and chaotic system or set of systems and, having recently read several books on modeling written by experienced mathematicians, there is great reason to be skeptical on principle, or regarding specific details, of such models.
Let me switch to talk a little about what the Intelligent Design community gets right. First, I’ll repeat a claim I, along with many others, have often made: Western Civilization and all its great accomplishments rest upon Christian belief in an all-powerful God who chose freely to create this universe and all else which might exist in Creation. Those great accomplishments include science and historical analysis and modern technology and other fields of human endeavor which have stressed greatly the Christian faith of Westerners, a faith apparently far weaker than might have been thought even a century ago. God clearly seems a bit far from His own Creation even to many who still actively practice their Christian faith; many others have simply decided that modern knowledge and human attitudes have at least made the God of Jesus Christ, maybe all possible Gods, implausible.
To be sure, Newton himself made it possible for his followers to believe in a God who created a world which mostly worked without His involvement—this view of God sends the Almighty to some distant realm but allows Him to operate in the gaps or interstices of a world largely determined by laws which can be expressed in mathematical form. (It’s far from clear, from what I understand, that Newton really advocated a “God of the gaps”.) More recently, the God of the gaps has moved on to the frontiers of modern cosmology and become the God who operates at singularities—see Not the God of the Gaps Nor the God of the Singularities for my discussion of this issue in the form of a favorable response to Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes by John Earman, a philosopher of science, who wrote, “Speaking purely personally now, it strikes me as bordering on the sacrilegious to see God’s creative force as able to operate only at a singularity or ideal point.” More importantly for this line of discussion, and stated in my words from that essay, “There are philosophically distinct forms of cause-and-effect,” and God can act by way of cause-and-effects well beyond the possibilities of God as conjectured in Intelligent Design Theory.
As much as I disagree with some of the tenets of Intelligent Design as currently understood, I’d say that its advocates hold far lesser errors than many of their opponents, including many who formally—and perhaps only formally—hold a version of the Christian faith closer to what I support. That is: it is a far lesser error to misunderstand the relationship of Creator to Creation than it is to advocate, or act under, the view that God has been aloof from His Creation since that instant (or non-instant in my view) when He brought something into existence from nothingness, that something being Creation. It is certainly far less an error, even in the secular streams of Western Civilization, to propose or to even speak as if God doesn’t exist or as if He were not all-powerful. Many who attack advocates of intelligent design, including those such as Professor Spencer who don’t seem to have any improper behavior in their scientific work, are some variant of atheist, and not always an intelligent variant.
Let me address the issue of Intelligent Design by first pointing to the common beliefs of all Christians, beliefs which in their specificity have to be suspended at times when biologist or Biblical exegete does their work. I would say they have to be suspended, not because we can or should, suspend at any instant our belief in the God of Jesus Christ, but rather because any specific form of that belief is conditioned by empirical matters of culture and personal thinking styles and so on. We should realize this is an age when nearly all Christian understandings of Creation rely on such rags as pagan views of a decline from a Golden Age, Medieval physics and biology, and ancient understandings of infinity.
A Christian believes in the teachings of the Nicene Creed even if restated by a later tradition; those teachings are necessarily expressed in terms of human words and concepts which change over time. A Christian most certainly cannot believe in a God who is somehow apart from His Creation, who is uninvolved in the workings of that Creation. That leaves open a lot of possible territory for beliefs, though I’d say that some Christians, including most Catholic theologians and philosophers over the past 500 years or more, nearly all Protestant theologians and philosophers, have developed metaphysical views and sometimes scientific overviews of God’s work in Creation which are more compatible with pagan beliefs in a God who is effectively co-existent with that Creation, however much the first chapter of Genesis or the scientific story of the Big Bang are glorified—quite falsely—into a creation from nothingness. This error is likely one of the errors, along with the nearly universal misunderstanding of the human mind and how it forms, which have led to the lesser errors of the sort of Intelligent Design and the greater errors which limit the work of God to what is convenient to a particular ideology (or corrupted worldview), including that of, for one example, liberalism and its belief in a truly freestanding individual, standing free of all but voluntary and contractual relationships with other men and with human communities and sometimes even with God.
Let me break this flood of ideas down just a little by first referring to a short essay, What Do I Mean When I Say, “God Creates Truths”?, and a two-paragraph essay, Restricting God’s Thoughts to Freshman Mathematics, which I published back in 2008.
In that first essay, What Do I Mean When I Say, “God Creates Truths”?, I wrote:
In two earlier entries, The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 2. God as the Creator of Truths and The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 2. What is Mathematics?, I argued that God creates truths, though not in the sense that He could have created contradictions or the ‘truth’ of “1 + 1 = 3”. My claim is that the fundamental stuff of Creation is what I call the Primordial Universe, the manifestation of the truths God chose for Creation. It is the Primordial Universe which the Almighty brought into existence from nothing and other phases of Creation, including particular and thing-like phases, are shaped from that Primordial Universe.
I went on, essentially, to argue that we have not transcendental minds which can ascend to transcendental truths. We can only know what we can learn from the thoughts which God manifested in Creation. If God hasn’t put it into Creation, and we can rise to somehow see extraordinarily abstract levels of created being, and hasn’t revealed it to us in a necessarily hard-to-understand way, we don’t know it and can’t know it.
We should not underestimate the effort needed to figure out the thoughts of God in His freely chosen role as Creator whether we are theologian or philosopher or physicist or machinist. See my freely downloadable book, Four Kinds of Knowledge, where I explain there are only two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of God in His transcendence and knowledge of God in His freely chosen role as Creator of this particular Creation.
I’ll quote the entirety of the second of those essays from 2008, Restricting God’s Thoughts to Freshman Mathematics:
Those who belong to that school of thought labeled Intelligent Design typically describe themselves as Christian, sometimes Jewish, and sometimes there is only an impression of a vague Theism. In any case, most of these thinkers would likely claim to believe in a Creator who is an all-powerful and all-knowing God. Yet, they think to understand the Lord’s work and His thoughts using what can be readily learned in less than two years of modestly difficult college work—a little calculus and some probability and statistics, a little chemistry and some astronomy and physics.
Do these thinkers imagine God’s thoughts and the possibilities open to Him as a Creator to be so limited? Math is hard. Physics is hard. Philosophy and literary studies are hard. Understanding God’s acts of Creation is all of that plus one hell of a lot harder. Anyone who thinks the Creator’s thoughts and acts can be understood by simply applying a few equations from Probability Theory 101 is deluding himself and insulting God.
In other words I used above: “There are philosophically distinct forms of cause-and-effect,” and God can act by way of cause-and-effects well beyond the possibilities of the God (a Zeus of sorts) as conjectured in Intelligent Design Theory.
The immediately relevant point, drawn out of a complex mixture of points, is that belief in the God of Christ is a fundamental part of the same Western Civilization which has led to modern science and technology and the promises of better human communities which underlies the past 1500 years of history in Europe and in regions influenced strongly by Europe; yes, even those regions exploited, sometimes brutally, by Europeans or their offspring such as Americans. And the promises remain alive, though largely rejected by mainstream thinkers and leaders of the West and largely ignored by the United States which was the most plausible region for a new center for that civilization.