I am going to reply below to the rant DaveScot has put onto UCD a few days ago. It's quoted (accurately) by Dennis here?
>>> Dennis Venema <Dennis.Venema@twu.ca> 6/17/2008 4:26 PM >>>
DaveScot weighs in:
³TEıs arenıt loonies. Theyıre spineless appeasers. They know wearing on
their sleeve a belief in a personal living God who can make miracles happen
with a wave of His hand will make them look like superstitious fools among
the ³higher² scientists. National Academy members, the higher scientists,
are 71% positive atheists, 22% agnostics, and just 7% who profess a faith in
God. Plain and simple, TEıs are caving in to pressure from the majority of
the most accomplished scientists. Wimps. If Judas was alive today heıd be a
TE.²
Thanks, Dave.
Actually, taking the ID route at a Christian institution would be the easy
way out. Itıs much harder to be a TE than an IDer in evangelical settings.
**********
Ted now responds:
First, after this post appears on the ASA list, I will forward it to Denyse O'Leary and Bill Dembski, asking them in turn to do one of two things with it. Either (1) put it unedited on UCD; or (2) forward it to DaveScot (whose email address I don't have) and invite him to reply here, on the ASA list.
To begin with, IMO DaveScot has given voice to a view that is rather widely held among advocates of ID--though I want to point out right away that I know several leading ID advocates, including fellows of TDI, who simply do not share this view and indeed who would repudiate the tone and lack of discernment that the quoted paragraph contains. DaveScot speaks as an individual, and his views on this are not shared by at least several people who are considered leading ID advocates. This is my post, and I'm not going to drag those folks into this, but they exist, and there may be more of them then DaveScot would want to admit. They are not figments of my imagination.
I have however interacted with a number of ID advocates who agree with DaveScot that TEs are "spineless appeasers." In a few instances this might be an accurate assessment, but as a blanket statement it's both highly inaccurate and insulting. DaveScot certainly knows it's insulting, and he probably doesn't care how accurate it is.
It isn't even original. DaveScot said the same thing on UDC back in May 2005, less than three weeks after I had responded to this particular sentiment--using highly similar language. My comments were posted to a very large private list for ID supporters and some others (such as myself), and I would not be surprised if DaveScot was present there to see them (I do not know for a fact that he was).
Instead of writing a brand new response to him now, I will edit the one I made 3 years ago, in order to remove a few specific references that were specific to persons on that list and to keep on focus here. Most of what follows below is taken directly from my comments at that time. Again, the larger context was that I resented the generalization that TEs lack backbone--that they are just seeking acceptance from secular academics and smothering their religious views to gain that acceptance. The image in my own mind was of Churchill, in parliament in 1931, seeing the "boneless wonder" in front of him in the person of Ramsay MacDonald. A famous speech, obviously, and it captured well the impression I was forming of how some ID adherents were seeing TEs in general. The immediate context was the editorial that "Nature" ran about ID, accompanying the article on the Dover trial that was its cover story in April 2005.
What did I tell my friends on that list, at that time? Here is the edited (see above) text:
Nature is absolutely right, IMO, that it is religious scientists (the noun here leaves me out, unfortunately, or I'd happily include myself) who are vitally important in this conversation. To be perfectly frank, a lot of the ones I know who might otherwise be more sympathetic to giving helpful comments about ID in their classes, have been alienated from the ID movement by the type of rhetoric we find above [I was responding to similar comments by someone other than DaveScot]. In 1922, Bryan referred to TE as "the anesthetic that dulls the pain while the faith is removed," thus in a few words shortcutting any serious attempt to have productive conversations with most religious scientists at that time. (And the early 1920s were the watershed years for this type of conversation, with Warfield and Strong and Orr and other more thoughtful people passing from the scene and with the militant anti-modernism of the self-styled "fundamentalists" coming on strong.) I'm not claiming!
that ID is responsible for Bryan, but it isn't hard to find similar kinds of comments, foreclosing conversation with many Christian scientists who are TEs and who are not afraid to speak about their faith on their highly secular campuses.
The type of personal and intellectual trivialization depicted [in your post] is obviously not helpful to anyone; we surely agree about that. But IMO both as a Christian scholar and as a scholar who does specialize in studying Christianity and science, the religious scientists on secular campuses are the key people in this conversation. I have met one or two who might fit your [description], or Churchill's description of the "spineless wonder" sitting before him in Parliament. Nearly all of them do not.
Let me suggest a few of the reasons why many religious scientists do not support ID on their campuses. (And yes, I realize that there are also other religious scientists on secular campuses who do support ID but are literally afraid to say so b/c they haven't got tenure yet, or b/c they want to keep getting NIH grants. I am not pretending that they don't exist, they clearly do and some are on this list. Nor do I mean to imply that they are the real spineless wonders, for they are not.)
This is what I am hearing from those religious scientists on secular campuses who do not support ID. These are the main things I hear, in no particular order:
(1) Evolution is a valid theory, or "true". By this they usually mean that common descent is a reasonable scientific conclusion from the evidence--esp the historical evidence, which some IDs tend to ignore b/c ID officially brackets the age/historical sequence question. Age for these folks is just not negotiable or bracketable, it can't be put aside for discussion at a later date. It's a fact that shapes our interpretation of other facts.
(2) It is unclear how one would do science differently with ID, when it comes to working in laboratories and observatories and in the field. There is no "there" there, in terms of an alternative theory for contextualizing stuff. Keep in mind the historical comment above--in the historical sciences, history is foundational. And in some sciences that are not strictly speaking historical--particle physics would be a nice example--what we know historically (e.g., that the heavier elements have been built up from H and He in the interiors of stars over billions of years, or that the cosmic background radiation matches perfectly with theoretical blackbody radiation from the big bang) makes sense in light of what we know when historical questions are not directly considered.
(3) Theodicy. This is perhaps the number one reason why secular scientists do not believe in God. As long as ID brackets conversation about theodicy and other theological issues, people like Jack Haught (whose theology I do not embrace) and John Polkinghorne (whose theology I generally do embrace) are going to make a lot more sense to the religious scientists who talk to secular scientists. These religious scientists are not embarrassed by their faith, and they are quite willing to talk about it openly. They simply recognize that this is a conversation at the level of theology and metaphysics, not at the level of science. And they tend to believe that conversations of that type do not produce knock-down arguments that an unbiased, rational person has to accept.
(4) ID smells a lot like YEC to many religious scientists. A good number of religious scientists have come from very conservative religious backgrounds. For various reasons that I won't spell out here so as not to offend some on this list [I was thinking here of some YECs], they have had some tough personal struggles with some baggage relative to science, and they don't want to relive those experiences. I know that ID is not YEC, and I think you know that I know that. But the tone of some ID stuff, with its highly negative comments about evolution and its alleged cultural consequences, only echoes the tone of the stuff they have left behind. Mike Behe, they might find reasonable and even a little persuasive; but [others] they find unreasonable and even offputting. Throw in the rhetoric about "dancing on gravestones" (claims that we're living in the last generation of evolution, claims that sound like the Millerites waiting for the second coming), and they start looking!
for the exits.
(5) Different views of science as a religious vocation. This isn't usually phrased as I just phrased it, but that's what is meant when people talk about discipling their graduate students while helping them to write publishable papers. They aren't encouraging their students to challenge "Darwinism," rather they are encouraging their students to live strong religious lives while doing quality mainstream science. They haven't been convinced that this constitutes a contradiction to or betrayal of their religious commitments, and they don't appreciate efforts in the popular religious press to paint them as spineless wonders. The biggest problem with such efforts is not so much the insult (although that is real and noticed), it's the fact that these very faithful servants (as many of them are) are having their vocations written off. That isn't how one gains support from people who share some of one's concerns.
I do not see the Nature editorial as an invitation to "treachery." [I quoted here someone I was responding to] Rather, I see Nature's call for a broader conversation as an opportunity for IDs to call for an even broader conversation. The problem you may find, however, is that the broader conversation is *openly* about theology and metaphysics, not simply explanatory difficulties of "Darwinism" in accounting for flagella and Cambrian phyla. And that's just where many of those religious scientists already are. Fact is, the Brits (Nature) can take this angle more easily than we Americans can, b/c they aren't constrained by a First Amendment that is being misapplied to public education. But at the college level, at least, even a Eugenie Scott admits that serious conversation about religion is permissible. Why not take them up on their suggestion?
Ted
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Received on Wed Jun 18 12:44:30 2008
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