I’m having a really good time on Science and the Sacred, the new blog created by Biologos. Since I’m now somewhat affiliated with Biologos via the President’s Circle, I will probably be spending most of my blogging time over there — both as a guest contributor and as a commenter. The following is recent exchange between me and a fellow named Charlie, who I believe is an agnostic or an atheist, or perhaps a doubting Christian. At any rate, he asks some really good questions — questions that I think we all must be ready to answer honestly. Enjoy!

Can you please explain your reasoning for differentiating between believing in UFO’s and believing in God? You say “Yes, there are many unanswered questions. But not being able to explain exactly how primitive man built these great megaliths is NOT evidence that aliens intervened in human history. All it means is that our understanding of these ancient civilizations is still immature, and we have a lot more to learn.”

This is a great example for why we cannot say aliens exist, but can’t the same apply to God? Yes we don’t know how the origin of life or the universe came to be, but “…our understanding…is still immature, and we have a lot more to learn.”

Indeed the same could be said of our belief in a Creator. This is why such things as the fine tuning argument, the existence of immaterial absolutes, the uniformity of nature, etc. are not proofs of God per se. They are data points by which the faithful can draw a trajectory that points to a Creator, but they are not arguments of logical necessity.

And neither should our faith in God be contingent on those things that still defy a naturalistic explanation, like the Big Bang or the sudden appearance of life on earth. Our position as Christians should be that could have had done any of these things through ordinary or special providence. I prefer to think that God endowed His creation with all the requisite properties for complex life to self-organize, but if He couldn’t quite get it done this way, I’m also at peace with God working in “manual override” mode.

The problem I have with Intelligent Design is that they start with a position that arbitrarily limits God’s power: EVOLUTION IS PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. And then they strive to demonstrate why “manual override” mode was God’s only option. I just don’t get it.

You said “I prefer to think that God endowed His creation with all the requisite properties for complex life to self-organize, but if He couldn’t quite get it done this way, I’m also at peace with God working in “manual override” mode.” Is this belief in faith alone? (no evidence to support God’s existence/intervention with the world).

There are things we know and things that are unknown about the world. Fortunately, our knowledge continuously grows. Is it your stance that God explains what we do not understand or that, regardless of what we have discovered as fact, God is responsible for it? If your stance is the latter, why do you believe that?

I believe that faith must have a rational basis. So if the data can be interpreted in such a way that points to a transcendent Creator, faith permits us to make the final jump to belief. This jump is not something done in spite of the evidence, as some might think. Rather, it merely extrapolates beyond the evidence. Faith is the evidence of things unseen (Heb 1), not an excuse to believe something demonstrably false.

As I previously said, proofs for God’s existence are not proofs of logical necessity (like those deductive proofs we see in mathematics). Since inductive reasoning can only take us so far (and always leaves room for doubt), faith is a necessary condition for belief. You will hear all sorts of pompous answers as to why one believes or doesn’t believe. But at the end of the day, it all boils down to a personal choice, based on a combination of rational and non-rational factors.

Also, how can you distinguish “manual override” from not yet understood processes that follow the natural laws? Isn’t manual override kind of the same thing as saying that the process is irreducibly complex?

Jesus turning water into wine, the dead rising, the seas parting, etc. But even these could be based on physical processes that are not yet understood. There is no way to know for sure. In terms of natural history, manual override might leave some sort of physical discontinuity, or singularity — an observable break in the ordinary chain of material cause and effect. Such a physical discontinuity might manifest itself as incoherent, anomalous or missing data. But these could just as easily be evidence of some yet unknown physical process. That’s why it’s best to stick with methodological naturalism when doing science. At least with naturalism yow won’t shut down the investigation prematurely.

I think that “manual override” and “irreducible complexity” are independent of one another. For starters, nobody can even demonstrate that irreducible complexity is incompatible with ordinary (non-intelligent) causality, unless one wants to assume that we know everything there is to know about the forces of nature and how they act on ordinary matter. Even a common hurricane, for instance, could be a complex machine designed to take heat energy from the tropics, convert it to mechanical energy (wind) and latent heat (water vapor) and transfer it to the coast. If this is its intended purpose, then it also meets the criteria of specified complexity. The eye wall has no purpose apart from the low pressure eye, the internal convection cells would not function apart from the eye wall, etc… Not even man can design and built a machine that transfers and distributes a comparable quantity of energy over thousands of miles in a 1-2 week period. And yet the entire thing is self-organizing. No manual override necessary — based on our very limited understanding of atmospheric phenomena. So it is quite a presumptuous thing to assume that just be we finite creatures can’t understand how something works (abiogenesis for example), that it necessarily requires manual override.

So again, it’s better to stick with methodological naturalism when doing science. Trying to discern whether a given structure is the product of intelligent or unintelligent causes is only a distraction, and the answer to the question adds nothing to our material understanding of the object in question.

For your manual override examples, I find it difficult to interpret a lot of what the Bible says literally and I personally think such writings are symbolic. With Adam and Eve or the Ark with all the animals in the world aboard, most see these as symbolic. Do you see some stories as symbolic and some as truth? How do you decide which ones are truth?

First, allow me to apologize on behalf of those Christians who, in their zeal to defend the Bible, have created these false dilemmas by failing to read the Bible in its native context. Literary categories such as “symbolic” and “truth” are things we post-enlightenment moderns like to impose on ancient texts. But these neatly defined genres simply didn’t exist in the Ancient Near East as we know them today

The easiest way for me to explain this is to use a modern epic tale, like the story of Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack who moved westward across the U.S. taming the wilderness. Along the way, he battles giant creatures, cuts entire forests down and builds cities with his bare hands — his footsteps make craters large enough to fill as lakes and when the arid desert of the American Southwest started to wear on him such that he could only drag his axes across the desert floor, the Grand Canyon was created. I think he even lived several hundred years (sound familiar?).

This is a uniquely American mythology that communicates to children the challenges and difficulties of westward expansion. And the story uses larger-than-life characters to communicate these larger-than-life themes. Sure, one could still ask of this story, “is it symbolic or is it true?” — but the questions is nonsensical. For starters, the narrative makes no attempt to be factually accurate on the technical details. But the larger themes clearly relate to readers the grit and determination of the American Frontiersmen who carved a civilization out of the wilderness through trials and tribulations. The story is indeed TRUE on that level. It’s not as if westward expansion never happened, even though you would never find this version of the story in an Encyclopedia!

So the question a Christian must ask of any biblical narrative is not: “is it true or is it myth” but rather, “on what level is the biblical myth communicating TRUTH to us?” As Christians, we start with the assumption that the Bible is Truth, and then we study it to discern how it communicates this truth to us because truth can sometimes be communicated via details that are factually incorrect. Genesis communicates truth on an entirely different level than the Gospel of Luke, for example. We know from the large collection of comparative literature out of the Ancient Near East that this method of written communication was widely accepted. So the onus in on us (post-enlightenment moderns) to make the necessary adjustments in or epistemology when approaching these ancient texts. It is pointless for us to project our 21st century western scientific worldview onto the scriptures.

Regardless, do you know of any more modern manual override examples or examples that have been recorded from other sources besides the Bible?

As far as modern examples of “manual override”: personally, I’m not the most “sensitive” Christian when it comes to miracles. I’m naturally very skeptical, so I am prone to offer a natural explanation for things where other believers might be convinced that a miracle took place. I also think that there are many things God can accomplish without any large-scale manipulation of the cosmos. After all, the cosmos is indeterminate at the lowest levels, and it is also complex enough such that contingent events in the quantum domain might be amplified into perceptible events that appear “uncaused” to us via the butterfly effect.

I’m no John Polkinghorne, but when it comes to all of this stuff, we have to remember how little we still know about how the cosmos works. There is so much wierdness at every level of material organization, that everything we attribute to “spirit” could actually be emergent properties of ordinary matter. If this is true, which I suspect it is, it would ironically mean that even the most rigorous Christian evolutionist would still be guilty of employing “spirit” of the gaps arguments whenever he/she appeals to the transcendent to explain an answer to prayer, etc.

Also, what interpretation of data leads to the possibility of a transcendent Creator?

I like the fine tuning argument, especially when taken together with convergent evolution. But I would never offer this as proof of God. Others like the argument from natural law, but that one doesn’t really appeal to me so much.

You also stated there were rational and non-rational reasons for your belief in God establishing the universe and it’s physical laws. What are some of the reasons?

Another way to put it is “objective” and “subjective” reasons. In a nutshell, a subjective (non-rational) reason could simply be that I like being part of the Christian community. It is a network of individuals who (for the most part) sacrifice for one another, who give without expecting anything in return, who are motivated to care for and help others who might otherwise fall through the cracks. It’s fairly egalitarian in that it matters not what your social status is. In fact, it is geared toward those who might otherwise be on the margins of secular society, and is cautious of those whom the world readily embraces. I can tell you that my marriage would not be what it is today if it was rooted in “us” and not “him”. So these are all subjective reasons. Of course, all of this only holds true when Christians are following in the spirit of Christ. And it’s so easy to fly off tangents and personal crusades (eg: the Christian right in America). Others might have a horrible experience with Christians and vow never to darken the door of a Church again. That’s what I mean by subjective.

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