David Heddle on Biblical literalism

David Heddle is having a field day. He starts off by making the point that (some) atheists have a tendency to regard any diversion from Biblical literalism from the part of Christians as hypocrisy, and as a concession to science:

In the seedy e-ghetto that I traverse, the person making this argument always has a goal: they want to show that science and the bible are incompatible. So, in their laziness, they demand that you except a vulnerable position or be declared a hypocrite. Anything else requires too much homework.

Sadly, YECs often play the useful idiot in this game. They will delight in trumpeting the fact that anyone with any credentials of note claims that their interpretation of Genesis is the only legitimate one, even if the person making the argument only wants, ultimately, to demonstrate what fools they are.

And then a Dave Mullenix wanders into the comment boxes apparently determined to prove Heddle's point:

We atheists prefer to deal with the actual Bible, not ad hoc, intellectually shabby stories that never even would have occurred to anybody if the Bible wasn't so clearly at odds with reality.

(...)

But who has done the jettisoning? Not the atheists. It's the more sensible of the Christians who re-wrote the Bible because it clearly dates the creation of the universe to about 4000 BC.

And after David Heddle gladly points out that non-literal interpretations of Genesis (thus not equating a "day" with 24 hours) were current among the early Church fathers, such as Irenaeus and Augustine, Mullenix continues:

Yep, Christians have been re-writing the Bible since Augustine's day. Probably sooner. If you find something in the Bible you can't stomach, either scientifically, historically, doctrinally or morally, just use your human judgement to re-write Scripture and explain what the words really mean. Who needs God or His Word?

Talk about building on sand.

The point is that, first of all, as David Heddle points out, Biblical literalism was current enough for Augustine to polemicize against, chiding Christians who would assert literal interpretations of Genesis in discussions with Pagans educated in natural philosophy, and thereby making fools of themselves. But even back then, it never was orthodox. Biblical interpretation in medieval times was very free, with allegories and metaphors pointed out anywhere. Biblical literalism is a quite recent phenomenon, and basically the flip side of Enlightenment modernism and its tendency to regard only empirically verifiable truths about things located in space and time as worth talking about. Biblical literalists and YEC Christians share the mentality while disagreeing about the nature of the truths, instead seeking in a constrained fashion to fit scientific, empirical truths about the world in a Biblical framework. And they're making fools of themselves (much like the philosophically ignorant Christians Augustine railed against). But historically, Biblical literalism has no claim to primacy.

Worse, it's highly dubious to assert a literal interpretation as some kind of neutral case, with non-literal interpretations needing special justification. Genesis is just not that kind of text. It's not intended to give some kind of neutral, objective view on how the world came about - the whole idea would be alien to the people who wrote it. Instead, it provides us with an analysis - in mythical language - of the human condition; of our nature as creatures with knowledge of good and evil situated in a violent natural world - yet spiritually disconnected from it. As such, it's very powerful.

Reading a text metaphorically is not "intellectually shabby". Philologists, linguists and scholars in literature have done it in an academically responsible manner for centuries. On a more basic level, anyone who enjoys reading poetry does it. An atheist or a YEC Christian who claims to deal with "the actual Bible" is not dealing with some kind of uninterpreted, neutral set of naturalistic, empirical claims somehow "really" there. He would also be dealing with an interpretation. And a pretty poor one, at that.

As Heddle points out, there's a highly disingenuous intellectual move going on. Biblical literalism is asserted to be the real thing, allowing the atheist to shoot fish in a barrel and have a cheap laugh at the benighted fundamentalists, while non-literalists interpretations of the Bible (which, to recap, have been mainstream throughout the history of Christianity) are done away with as hypocritical and as inherent concessions to "science" (of course science as a set of philosophically neutral empirical claims is confused here with science as an unconsciously philosophical worldview). Why, if a Christian departs from a literal reading of the Bible because of its incompatibility with empirical truths, surely, if he were to face facts coldly and rationally (as atheists are wont to do) he would surely abandon religion as a whole!

As intellectual method goes, it's not very pretty. It shies away from taking the opponent's positions at face value and trying to undermine them on their own ground in favour of focusing on the weakest representatives of the opposing position. There's a lot of intellectual laziness and rationalizing of intellectual laziness going on here (see also my previous remarks on the "Courtier's reply" move somewhere below). I'm all too sure that similar stuff goes on among Christian detractors of atheism. However, I hold atheists who often make a lot of science and what science means to a slightly higher standard.

Denialism?

I'm peeved at this word "denialism" that I see springing up here and there and other places. It must be new. I certainly didn't see it very much two or so years ago.

I guess I'm a denialist on some issues. I suppose I'm a global warming denialist (I think the earth is warming; I think humans have got something to do with it, though I do not know how much; I think we're better off stimulating technological development in the third world than enacting futile CO2 restriction schemes - as the former will help us if, God forbid, the warming trend will reverse at some point in the future. I guess that makes me a "denialist"). I guess I'm a second-hand smoke denialist as well (though not a first-hand one). Perhaps I'm both an evolution and a creationism denialist (I believe biological species have evolved from simpler forms by natural processes, but that's about where I stop).

Hmmmm... Thinking further, I'm an eliminative materialism denialist, a Biblical literalism denialist, a very fervent and rabid memetics denialist...

But there's of course the one particular kind of denial which (justifiably) places the denialist out of the realms of civilized discourse - which is Holocaust denial. And I have an unpleasant feeling that the whole industry of labelling various divertions from scientific and Leftist* orthodoxy - on global warming, on the HIV-Aids connection, etc. - as "denialism" is a rather transparant ploy to link the latter with the former. Am I being uncharitable here? I don't think so - as Frank Furedi points out, the almost unthinkably hyperbolic and obscene equivalence between Holocaust denial and "global warming denialism" has in fact been explicitly made.

The issue is of course that, where there had been genocides, mass murders, and concentration camps before, there was something uniquely evil in the technological sophistication and sheer single-mindedness with which the Nazis went about it. Spending extraordinary amounts of time and energy to kill those last Jews that would otherwise have been forgotten, even when the Soviet tanks were knocking on their doors. So justifiably the Holocaust becomes a symbol for human evil.

It also becomes a standard against which other human evils are measured against. So the issue of whether Hitler or Stalin was more evil becomes an issue for historians to polemicize about. More sinisterly, military interventions proclaimed to be undertaken in order to avoid new Holocaust become virtually beyond criticism. It allowed those who doubted the propagandistic claims of NATO during the bombing of Yugoslavia to be compared to "Holocaust deniers".

It would be one thing if Holocaust denialism were a largely irrelevant argument about a particular historical event - but the place the Holocaust takes in our cultural memory guarantees it to be more than that. Holocaust denial is a tool in the hands of those seeking to whitewash and legitimize the Nazi regime - whether these are Neo-Nazis such as David Irving or Islamists such as Ahmadinejad.

Note that I agree with Deborah Lipstadt that Holocaust denial should be defeated in the arena of ideas, rather than censored. I'm principally opposed to the curtailing of free speech - even that of Neo-Nazis and Islamic anti-semites. Besides, I don't trust those who would censor Holocaust deniers to stop at them.

But it is for reasons such as these that I doubt the human decency of those who use the word "denialism" for people whose ideas divert from scientific orthodoxy. Whether it be tobacco, global warming, evolution or the HIV-Aids link. The opponents of such various "denialisms" are either extraordinarily, and incredibly, naive about the connotations of the term, or they consciously abuse the force of those connotations. Which is the rhetorical equivalent of taking a shit on the kitchen table. I take a dim view on such things.

It is bordering on the immoral to, for people ostensibly caring about "science", place divergent opinions outside of the realm of scientific discourse in that way. No matter whether those opinions are wrong. The attitude behind the polemics against "denialism" are antithetical to the reflective and cautious attitude that the scientific enterprise inspires one to take against reigning orthodoxies.

Instead, the underlying attitude becomes symptomatic for a situation in which a given scientific view becomes a symbol for a given outlook on politics, society, etc. The "correct" view on global warming becomes symbolic for those who self-identify as progressive, caring about the planet, against Bush, etc. The counterposing view becomes symbolic for rednecks driving around in gas-guzzling SUVs with their cherished guns to shoot Bambi.

And that's a very dangerous situation. In past posts, I argued that positions that seem "outlandish" may be outlandish only on the basis of (unspoken and unexamined) philosophical views. The way in which cheap and despicable rhetoric on the part of anti-denialist political activists is aimed at making a given position beyond the pale in public discourse in similar fashion leads to a given position becoming an unquestioned and unexamined orthodoxy.

It's for reasons such as these that I am also leery of "skeptics" who proudly dub themselves as such. Because, all too often, you will find people there to whom science is a set of philosophically highly porous positions, rather than a method. This said, professional skeptics do perform an invaluable service in examining the claims of frauds and snake-oil merchants. It's just that I do not really have confidence in their ability to sort the odd outlandish, extraordinary, yet valid claim from the frauds and snake-oil merchants.

I wonder to what extent the particular political divisions in America impress upon which positions are, worldwide, accepted as orthodoxy and heresy. Of course, some of the shrillest rhetoric comes from Britain instead. Yet I think it is the generally Leftist* outlook in American academia and the curious position of Bush as a figurehead of all that is evil (from Christian fundamentalism and creationism to global warming to whatever) that it an important catalyst to the anti-denialism industry. It always struck me that, for all the alleged behind-the-scene roles of Bush and republicans and oil money behind "global warming denialism", quite a few global warming "skeptics" and, more widely, people taking a nuanced position on the dangers of global warming, are Canadians, Brits, Germans, Dutch and Australians.

*Endnote: I have always self-identified as on the political Left, or, more precisely, as a Socialist with a libertarian outlook on freedom of speech and sexuality. I'm strongly anti-censorship, in favour of universal health care and cheap public education, wide-ranging social security, and while we're at it, I wouldn't quite mind a little workers' ownership of the means of production. This said, I'm very much "Old Left", with more than a bit of sympathy towards the Christian socialist movements of the 20th century. And I find it increasingly difficult to identify with what goes as progressive or "liberal" particularly in the U.S. sense of the word.

PZ Meyers vs. Alister McGrath

PZ Meyers shows a somewhat tenuous grasp on philosophy of science while dealing with an interview with Alister McGrath. The nice thing about PZ Meyers and his Pharyngula blog is that he tends to be wrong in a remarkably clear and consistent way. No difference here.

McGrath remarks, quite correctly, that:

I think Richard Dawkins approaches the question of whether God exists in much the same way as if he’d approach the question of whether there is water on Mars. In other words, it’s something that’s open to objective scientific experimentation. And of course there’s no way you can bring those criteria to bear on God. I think Dawkins seems reluctant to allow that God may not be in the same category as scientific objects. That’s an extremely important point to make in beginning to critique him.

PZ Meyers proves his point by stating that:

He's actually right on one thing: we are approaching the question of god as a scientific problem, and the question of water on Mars is a pretty good analogy. We can't see it here, we aren't there, we have to build a case on inference from evidence and we have to design tests to evaluate the possibilities. That's been an eminently successful strategy for humanity. So why can't we bring them to bear on the god question? I've highlighted his answer: he says we just can't. He doesn't say why we can't, it's just a dogmatic assertion. Keep this in mind, though, because he's going to contradict himself in a moment.

Also, I'd like to know what he means by this category of "scientific objects". Everything is a scientific object, from distant stars to grains of dirt, from the first picoseconds of the Big Bang to pillow talk between lovers. If we can ask a question about it, it can be science. McGrath may think this is a useful strategy for a critique, but all it amounts to is setting up his premises as unquestionable. We simply do not have to accept that.

Later on in the interview, McGrath states that:

As someone who has studied the history and philosophy of science extensively, I think I’ve noticed a number of things that Dawkins seems to have overlooked. One of them is this: One of the most commonly encountered patterns in scientific development is seeing a pattern of observations and then saying, in order to explain these observations, we propose that there exists something that is as yet unobserved but we believe that one day will be observed because if it’s there, it can explain everything that can be observed.

Of course, if you’re a Christian you’ll see immediately that that same pattern is there in thinking about God. We can’t prove there’s a God but he makes an awful lot of sense of things and therefore there’s a very good reason to suppose that this may, in fact, be right.

At which point PZ Meyers charges him with a contradiction:

Whoa. What happened to "of course there's no way you can bring those criteria to bear on God"? What about "God may not be in the same category as scientific objects"? One moment he's claiming you can't study god like you would the possibility of water on Mars, and next he's claiming the validity of using observation and theory to justify the existence of the remote and directly unseen. How … inconsistent.

Except that he's not. McGrath was talking here about an inference to the best explanation, or about what Peirce called an abductive inference - which by itself is only half the scientific method. The explanation would potentially fall within the domain of science if the explanandum could be observed and studied in an empirical fashion. But in the case of God, the kind of explanandum you'd be dealing with are not scientifically observable things but things which are the preconditions for us making any (scientific) observation at all - the existence of laws of nature (if indeed they are laws of nature - which in itself is not a scientific question); the problem of universals; the existence of mind, etc. There is no scientific proof for the existence of mind in addition to matter. It's highly reasonable to assume there is such a thing (as we have direct experience of mind, and only very indirect of matter, for one) but no empirical proof. Given a world-picture in which both mind and matter are co-existing, one could (reasonably- but without scientific proof) argue mind to be primary, and extrapolate from this to the existence of God. But this is not science.

For McGrath to argue that God is amenable to scientific study, he would have to argue not only the existence of God as the result of an abductive inference, but to argue empirical observables under the operation of regularities of nature - which are thereby falsifiable, and predictable. In other words, even a miracle would not do as a scientific observation, as miracles are pretty much by definition one-off breaches of the laws of nature. In natural science, of courses, empirical observables are automatically assumed to be subject to natural laws as the whole method (of prediction and experimental verification) depends upon it. So supposed empirical facts which, to the believer, call for the activity of God as an explanation, are by definition either outside the realm of science or, to an atheist, no proof of anything except the normal workings of the universe. However, it would not be a justification of atheism without a defense of some kind of empiricism as an underlying metaphysics.

Now, charitably, PZ Meyers could have used science in the sense of "natural science, the humanities, philosophy, and rational discourse in general" which does indeed just about envelop anything we can ask a question about. But he would be very wrong to do so - and I don't think he is.

What has happened here is that PZ Meyers bases his own reasoning upon a philosophical outlook - some kind of very naive, scientistic empiricism - without allowing for the possibility McGrath does not share that outlook. Which is a pattern I've seen a lot of atheists fall into. They start arguing that they are under no obligation to believe in God just as they are under no obligation to argue in the existence of a teapot circling Saturn. At which point one may counter that God is not a spatially and temporally bound object like the teapot, that God is not "in" the universe but rather the other way around, and that God is not subject to the laws of nature but rather the basis of them. And that, therefore, arguments on the existence of God need to take place in philosophical rather than scientific discourse. Usually the atheist will counter that there is as little need for him to acquaint himself with philosophy of religion as there is for goblinology or Saturnian teapotology - and we're back to square one. The atheist might even invoke the Courtier's reply which is another way of stating that the atheist is under no obligation to acquaint himself with what he's arguing against. When an atheist does this, it is of course a sign of the atheist's superior Reason. If a creationist fighting to remove evolution from the classroom were to make the same move, it would obviously be a symptom of the creationist's redneck anti-science idiocy.

Anyway. All this nicely illustrates the dangers of unconscious empiricism (an empiricism that does not know it is one).

And many principles which are quite appropriate for science and empirical inquiry are abused by cajoling them into philosophical service when used as arguments for atheism. Such as Occam's razor - which is just about unusable, as the relative parsimony of atheistic and theistic explanations is hardly statable. The explananda are often not even quite the same. Another is Sagan's claim that "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence". Which tends to make my blood boil, as I've hardly ever seen appropriate use of it. In the normal process of science, scientists are usually quite justified to not abandon the theories they work with unless there is a lot of proof that they are indeed wrong. Suppose a well-argued and superficially plausible claim were to be made that the Americas were colonized out of Polynesia rather than the Bering land bridge. A "wait and see" approach would be very appropriate. This makes the scientific process somewhat conservative, which is probably a good thing.

The principle is, however, wholly inappropriate if used to evaluate "extraordinary" claims which do, in fact, contradict no established scientific theories. Which is the way it is commonly used by professional skeptics. The claim for the existence of ESP needs evidence, but no "extraordinary" evidence. Claims for the existence of God need argument (rather than evidence) but certainly no extraordinary evidence.

Because the problem in the latter cases is that we have no scientific grounds to state that a given claim is extraordinary. Based on the scientific consensus concerning the origins of Native Americans, and the chronology of the colonization of Polynesia, a proposed Polynesian origin would be very extraordinary. However, whether one finds ESP or God extraordinary depends on one's philosophical presuppositions. ESP may well fit easily in the philosophical framework of a dualist or a panpsychist, but would be somewhat more troublesome for a philosophical materialist. Similarly God.

Using heuristic or pragmatic principles such as Occam's razor or Sagan's "extraordinary claims" as principles to evaluate philosophies, world-outlooks, or things quite beyond current science, usually shows some kind of underlying naive empiricism. The problem with philosophical outlooks that are hidden from view is that they cannot be evaluated, and they cannot be criticized. In this sense, the explicit, reflective theist is usually in better intellectual health than the "pro-science" atheist.

Chris on Metaphysical Pragmatism

Chris at Mixing Memory has a worthwhile post criticizing what he calls "metaphysical pragmatism", the idea that, because of the successes of science, philosophical knowledge can be based on scientific knowledge in a way which obviates metaphysics. A commenter makes the point that the pragmatism involved was not the pragmatism of Peirce. Based on my (limited) knowledge of Peirce, I agree - and in one passage he minces no words in criticizing the metaphysical pragmatists of his day:

"The psychical sciences, especially psychology, are, if possible, even more necessitated to assume general principles that cannot be proved or disproved by their ordinary methods of work. The philosopher alone is equipped with the facilities for examining such "axioms" and for determining the degree to which confidence may safely be reposed in them. Find a scientific man who proposed to get along without any metaphysics - not by any means every man who holds the ordinary reasonings of metaphysicians in scorn - and you have found one whose doctrines are thoroughly vitiated by the crude and uncriticized metaphysics with which they are packed. We must philosophize, said the great naturalist Aristotle, if only to avoid philosophizing. Every man of us has a metaphysics, and has to have one; and it will influence his life greatly. Far better, then, that that metaphysics should be criticized and not allowed to run loose. A man may say "I will content myself with common sense." I, for one, am with him there, in the main. (...) But the difficulty is to determine what really is and what is not the authoritative decision of common sense and what is merely obiter dictum. In short, there is no escape from the need of a critical examination of "first principles"." (CP 1.129)

It's coming from the feel that it ain't exactly real

(Or it's real, but it ain't exactly there).

Something is bothering me. I've been working on a paper dealing with historical linguistics and Whitehead's process philosophy. It's something I've been working on for some time: I had a go at it in my Ph.D. thesis but looking back, the idea seems quite half-baked and impressionistic as I presented it there. Things are a lot more clearer right now.

The attraction to the idea is that it might enable one to hold both a Platonistic view on linguistic structure with a thoroughly diachronic, historical view on language-as-such. The basic dichotomy Whitehead draws is between universals or "eternal objects" which are, in and of themselves, pure potentials, and events or "actual occasions", in which universals may actualize. Space and time is not given: an actual occasion or event gains its spatiotemporal location during its "becoming", during which it essentially relates to its whole relevant universe (past events, universals inferred from those, etc.).

Whitehead has been applied to language by, to my knowledge, only Michael Fortescue (2001, "Patterns and Process"). He basically regards language as a complex "eternal object" and defines the linguistic equivalent of an event with a "moment of linguistic cognition". I happily follow him here. Fortescue's book is a bit smorgasbord-like, though: virtually all of linguistics from discourse studies to language change and acquisition is dealt with, and historical linguistics relatively briefly.

Now, the problem.

I think there are compelling reasons to hold some kind of linguistic Platonism, either a Whiteheadian version, or a non-Whiteheadian one as has been developed by Jerrold Katz. By doing so, we avoid hypostasizing grammar, i.e. regarding the work of theoretical linguistics as relating to a "language organ" or to linguistic cognition, etc. Autonomous linguistics would be autonomous linguistics; neurolinguistics would be neurolinguistics. We would avoid subordinating linguistics to some kind of "first order" discipline. Also, I think there are very good reasons to hold that language is a normative system analogous to mathematics, logic, etc.: it's about "correct" and "incorrect" rather than "is" or "not-is".

There's a bit of a snag, though, when we try to account for (historical-)linguistic labels such as "Uralic", "Indo-European" or "Finnish" on such a conception of language as a Platonic object. Because "Finnish" refers to a determinate spatiotemporal location. OK, so we regard the phonology, morphology, etc. of Finnish as a Platonic object which exists eternally (as a potential or in some kind of Platonic realm) but state that it becomes Finnish only due to its actualization at a certain time and place in the actual world of events. Problem with that it of course that "Finnish" as a historical, linguistic entity has a lot of "temporal smear", has undergone quite a bit of change during its history, and the issue of genetic identity, i.e. on what grounds do we issue a label such as "Finnish" or "Uralic" on a spatiotemporally extended community of "linguistic events" which does not embody exactly the same structures through space and time?

An obvious solution would be to use Popper's World 3 - but I dislike it. It's too obvious, and I can't help thinking that regarding historically specific things as for instance Mozart's requiem (and by extension, a given language) as World 3 objects is a bit confused. (Rather, Mozart's requiem would be a Platonic object which happened to be discovered and actualized by Mozart, as well as in subsequent performances, etc.). Also, I believe it merely displaces the problem of genetic identity and genetic relationships.

I think Whitehead referred to this problem when he wrote that:

"(...) the complex nexus of ancient imperial Rome to European history is not wholly expressible in universals. It is not merely the contrast of a sort of city, imperial, Roman, ancient, with a sort of history of a sort of continent (...). The nexus in question does involve such a complex contrast of universals. But it involves more. For it is the nexus of that Rome with that Europe." (Process and Reality, p. 324).

A "nexus" in Whiteheadian is a spatiotemporally extended community of events, which exhibit the same universals through their relationships with each other. It's also part of my currently favoured solution to the problem mentioned above. Linguistic structures would exist Platonically but without any reference to their "togetherness", not to speak of labels such as "Finnish": this togetherness emerges in actual usage, and in the presence of linguistic events "in" each other (my comprehension of an utterance by another person would be a past linguistic event immanent in a present one: and the diachronic dimension created in such a manner, with the actualization of the same linguistic structures in both events, would account for genetic relationships).

However, it seems to me intuitively difficult to hold a Platonic view on linguistic structure with an emergentist view on language as a social, historical system of rules, which emerges from linguistic usage, with language learners relating to their language as they would to rules, etc. I think the intuitive difficulty is only apparent, though, and resulting from somehow unconsciously holding Platonic objects to be more concrete than they really are. There seems to be no real contradiction between linguistic structure being a Platonic object; and it's actualization in space and time to emerge from language usage.

But this leads to something else, and quite unrelated to the specifically linguistic issue above: is the relationship between Platonic objects and their actualization in space and time something to be explained? Does it need an explanation?

Individual languages of course have a great deal of contingency due to the arbitrariness of the relationship between meaning and phonological form: it is only within a linguistic system in which we "cannot doubt" that a cat is called a cat and in which calling it tac would be wrong (in others it might be kissa, katt, mácska, etc.). But the impossibility of even conceiving 2 and 2 to be 5 is I think, an important ground for holding mathematics to be Platonic.

The thing is that mathematics, logic, reason all appear to be working very well in making sense of the world. Peirce seemed to feel this was worth mentioning a number of times, at one point regarding the validity of abductive reasoning as conditioned upon the "hope" that "there may be some natural tendency toward an agreement between the ideas which suggest themselves to the human mind and those which are concerned in the laws of nature" (CP 1:80), at another point stating that "(...) every scientific explanation of a natural phenomenon is a hypothesis that there is something in nature to which the human reason is analogous; and that it really is so all the successes of science in its applications to human convenience are witnesses. They proclaim that truth over the length and breadth of the modern world. In the light of the successes of science to my mind there is a degree of baseness in denying our birthright as children of God and in shamefacedly slinking away from anthropomorphic conceptions of the universe." (CP 1:316).

The issue is, obviously, religiously relevant. Nagel, in "The Last World", mentions that while he remained a metaphysical materialist, the irreducibility of reason does make us be more at home in the universe than secularly comfortable. But it should be handled carefully: the irreducability of Platonic objects (to which we respond normatively) to the empirical, physical realm says nothing about the impossibility or possibility of, for example, human cognition and all that evolving naturalistically. It would seem to me to be eminently possible for the normative (such as language) to emerge in a community of people predisposed to look for it - though I think mind itself (with intentionality, valuation, etc.) would be presupposed.

Mark Vernon on the growth of conservative religion

Mark Vernon places some pessimistic footnotes to a WSJ article detailing a possible reversion in the European trend towards increased secularization, noting that, while religion may well be on the rise again in Europe, the kind of religion that is on the rise is of a rather conservative (and market-savvy) kind.

It struck me some time ago as well that the kind of christian writers and intellectuals who still "do" apologetics, and who answer the challenges posed to them by their atheist critics, are all of a rather conservative bent. Alvin Plantinga is a conservative protestant, Alister McGrath an evangelical, and then there was of course C.S. Lewis half a century ago. I don't necessarily like the theology they represent (I think there are problems with the classical theology of, say, Plantinga; and I find Lewis rather bleak, though still refreshing with his emphasis that Christianity isn't necessarily fun fun fun) but they do provide clear and occasionally strong arguments. I think that arguments such as those relating to reason and morality in Lewis' writings are as strong as apologetic arguments go (meaning, they serve as a rational "scaffolding" of faith).

A philosophical proposition cannot of course be a substitute for the God of religion - but apologetic arguments, even if they are ultimately not very compelling in and of themselves (I don't think philosophical arguments can be: their acceptability relates rather to how they fit within a worldview as a whole) do give the atheist critic something to bite in. And they might help setting a process of thought in motion. I fear that the much more subtle and abstract ideas of God as the condition for existence, the ground of being, etc.; or those of reason and faith as relating to different domains are much more dependent on background suppositions concerning us, the universe and our place in it. And they can be very difficult to understand. They demand a mindset tolerant of ideas which are hazy, at the edge of our knowing, and never quite completely formed.

So I'm not sure whether the ascent of evangelical protestantism and conservative catholicism over their more liberal counterparts in Europe can be stemmed. The evangelicals and conservatives reach out. They, well, evangelize. Look for a Christian study group on a university campus and you'll meet them. Nothing wrong with that, mind you (I have my disagreements but also agreements with evangelicals, and the ones I've met are very pleasant people). And I guess I'm slightly more optimistic than Mark Vernon. If the evangelical movement is set to grow, I think it also might be set to become broader (see RightReason on the issue here.)

What is a "moderate religionist"?

This is a perhaps uncharitable little rant about the usage of "moderate" in connection with nouns such as "Christian" and "religionist". The usage should be known well-enough: it rears its head often enough in science vs. religion discussions whenever a non-fundamentalist theistic viewpoint rears its head. Connected of course is the position of non-Creationist Christians in the evolution vs. design struggle, dealt with by Ed Brayton here: Brayton and others want to stick to the program of keeping ID out of schools but do not have the interest in the eradication of religion of the "militant atheist" (the atheist counterpart of "moderate religionist" is "Neville Chamberlain atheist", a moniker proudly adopted by for instance Chris.

I'm in two minds about the whole evolution vs. design thing. Theologically, I can't make sense of anything but some kind of cosmological fine-tuning (and even that is somewhat troublesome). I don't believe any kind of scientific case for ID has been made. And I definitely don't think it belongs in schools as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. At the same time, I feel there is a tendency to overextend Darwinian models into areas where they clearly do not belong (such as cultural history, and the evolution of languages), and I am not at all sure whether the climate currently exists where ID hypotheses could be open-mindedly discussed, even if they were scientifically respectable. There is a kind of siege mentality among the pro-secular, pro-science American left. I like the nuanced stance taken by for instance the Telic Thoughts weblog, even if it hasn't convinced me yet that, as far as biological evolution is concerned, there is a respectable alternative to Darwinism.

My issue with the term "moderate religionist" is that it easily suggests that liberal Christianity is a diluted version of the "real" thing which is identified with some kind of fundamentalism or biblical literalism. And any departure from Biblical liberalism being regarded as a concession to "science". Historically, it's of course nonsensical. Biblical literalism is a very modern creature, and St. Augustine famously chided fellow Christians who clumsily sought to deduce natural knowledge from scripture. Also, there is nothing necessarily very moderate about non-Creationist versions of Christianity. Quite a few evangelicals accept evolution, and they are anything but "moderate" in the way they live their religion. The basic issue, I guess, is that the term itself suggests some kind of tribalism in which the most noisy and least bright outshout their more thoughtful fellows in both the "atheist" and "religionist" camps.

There is one important similarity between the reductionists and neo-positivists among the pro-science camp and their Biblical literalist detractors: both see only one domain of discourse, one which deals with propositions among empirically verifiable truths. For the one side, the lack of empirical proof for the existence of God is reason enough to reject it by analogy to teapots around saturn and fairies at the bottom of the garden; for the other, a discrepancy between our knowledge of nature and a literal claim from Scripture is reason enough to ditch the former. I'm not saying the two positions are equally sensible. The former is enormously more sensible than the latter. Nature and the processes that govern it stare us in the face every moment of the day: the seeming absence of a benevolent God is a problem for theology ever since the book of Job was written. But both seem to share some kind of naive empiricism, some kind of hostility to metaphysics, to propositions that do not relate to tangible evidence.

(This relates to an issue that has been bothering me. Should the many accounts of miracles in the New Testament be taken symbolically, literally, or both? Sometimes a symbolic meaning, for instance that of Jesus walking on the water, and Peter trying but failing, seems terribly obvious. The same goes for healing the sick, blind and crippled. At the same time, it seems to me that the reports of Jesus, and later the apostles, indeed healing the sick and the blind, written down mere decades after they occurred, are not just metaphors. Not to speak of the resurrection. A sign can literally occur, and yet be a sign).