source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17203-christians-battle-each-other-over-evolution.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

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Christians battle each other over evolution

• 02:21 28 May 2009 by Amanda Gefter

The Discovery Institute – the Seattle-based headquarters of the intelligent design movement – has just launched a new website, Faith and Evolution, which asks, can one be a Christian and accept evolution? The answer, as far as the Discovery Institute is concerned, is a resounding: No.

The new website appears to be a response to the recent launch of the BioLogos Foundation, the brainchild of geneticist Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project and rumoured Obama appointee-to-be for head of the National Institutes of Health. Along with "a team of scientists who believe in God" and some cash from the Templeton Foundation, Collins, an evangelical Christian who is also a staunch proponent of evolution, is on a crusade to convince believers that faith and science need not be at odds. He is promoting "theistic evolution" – the belief that God (the prayer-listening, proactive, personal God of Christianity) chose to create life by way of evolution.

It sounds like a nice idea, but to my mind any time you try to reconcile science and religion by rejecting Stephen Jay Gould's notion of "non-overlapping magisteria" and instead try shoehorning them into a single worldview, something suffers. My concern is that science will take the hit – and Collins's speculative arguments about divine intervention via quantum uncertainty seem dangerously poised for the punch. The Discovery Institute's concern, on the other hand, is that Christianity will take the hit. "For Christians," they write on their website, "mainstream theistic evolution raises challenges to traditional doctrines about God's providence, the Fall and the detectability of God's design in nature." For them, reconciling evolution and religious faith is simply a hopeless endeavour.

I think it's interesting that the Discovery Institute – which has long argued that intelligent design qualifies as science – seems to have given up the game and acknowledged that their concerns are religious after all. It's equally interesting that the catalyst doesn't seem to be someone like Richard Dawkins pushing atheism, but Francis Collins pushing Christianity. Perhaps the Discovery folks realise that Dawkins's followers are never going to be swayed by intelligent design; Collins, however, might very well cut into their target audience of scientifically-curious evangelicals.

The Discovery Institute has now made it crystal clear that they have no interest in reconciling science and religion – instead, they want their brand of religion toreplace science. Which makes it all the more concerning when their new website includes resources and curricula for high-school biology classes, and promotes the pseudoscientific documentary film "Expelled" as part of their campaign to introduce non-scientific alternatives to evolution under the banner of "academic freedom".

Watching the intellectual feud between the Discovery Institute and BioLogos is a bit like watching a race in which both competitors are running full speed in the opposite direction of the finish line. It's a notable contest, but I don't see how either is going to come out the winner.

This work by crabsallover is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

TIME: Dawkins vs. Collins

TIME magazine this week has an interesting discussion between Richard Dawkins, author most recently of The God Delusion, and Francis Collins, author of The Language of God. It is worth reading. Two observations:

First, I just can’t figure Collins out. Dawkins says the question of God is a scientific one for which there could be evidence.

Collins, on the other hand, says the question of God’s existence is not scientific but “outside of science’s ability to really weigh in.” That said, Collins also claims he does not like Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of NOMA where science and religion do not overlap. But then Collins uses evidence for the fine-tuning of the laws of physics to argue for God’s existence. So apparently scientific evidence can weigh in on the question of God. I’m not sure what I am missing here. But I guess the take home point is that in practice Collins does think scientific evidence can point toward design (for him, God) and away from chance.

Dawkins’s comments on NOMA are spot on. Say what you want about Dawkins, but he’s not afraid to call a spade a spade. “I think that Gould’s separate compartments was [sic] a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it’s a very empty idea.” He thinks there are “plenty of places” where religious and scientific questions overlap. Except for the equation of Darwinists with “the science camp,” I concur.

Second, while Dawkins started off the debate claiming that the question of God was a scientific one for which there could be evidence for or against, later on, his argumentation contradicted this assertion—and Collins had the sight to call him on it. Just as noted philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote recently, Dawkins essentially eliminates a Designer for the universe not on evidential grounds but a priori. He claims that one cannot invoke God as an explanation because God is improbable (and who knows what magic calculus Dawkins is doing in his head to determine this improbability). The obvious problem, then, is that evidence for or against design doesn’t really matter. One could never be justified in inferring design—regardless of how good the evidence for it is! This is clearly a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose argument.

Collins spots this and says that science should by all means keep exploring the multiverse hypothesis and other materialistic alternatives to a designing intelligence for the fine-tuning of the universe, but he objects “to the assumption that anything outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation…you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world….” One might say that Dawkins ends up with a zero probability before examining the natural world.

In other words, Dawkins says one cannot infer that the universe was designed because one cannot invoke an improbable entity like God. So the evidence doesn’t matter. Only Richard Dawkins’s calculation of God’s improbability matters; and no evidence for the design of the laws of physics is going to change this.

To see this same fallacy at work in another debate over God, check out philosopher William Lane Craig's dismantling of arguments by the popular historian of religion Bart Ehrman.