Young Earth Creationist and biologist, Todd Wood, gives a mostly positive review of Jason Rosenhouse's book, Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line.
UPDATE:
I thought I should add a passage from Wood's review:
"... I also detect hints of a humanitarian decency about him [Rosenhouse]. Early in the book, he confesses that interacting with creationists changed his outlook. “They are no longer defined by a few odd beliefs you have heard that they hold. They become actual people, with depth and personality and reasons for the things they believe” (p. 15)."
I think this passage reveals the chief problem with internet exchanges: We lack the normal interaction one has with people of different persuasions. We do not see their faces. We do not hear their voices. We are left only with what they write. So we see and read the part of them that is the most difficult to accept. And we react in negative or hostile ways that we would never use if we were talking with them in person.
Does Todd Wood ever do anything other than talk about how creationists, ID proponents, and theists generally are wrong, and atheists are not only nice, but smart, and right on various topics?
ReplyDeleteI ask this seriously. Whenever I hear about a Todd Wood link, it's exactly that. And I find his treatment of theistic evolution not only lacking, but holding up - of all people - Francisco Ayala as representative of the TE position is borderline dishonest, even for a review. He could have at least mentioned that Ayala doesn't even call himself a theist or religious believer.
I haven't been reading Todd's blog for that long, so I'm not that familiar with all his positions. However, if I understand him, he believes that Christianity and Evolution are incompatible. So when atheists argue that Evolution disproves Christianity, I think Todd is likely to agree with them. I imagine he thinks that if a Christian accepts Evolution, then it leads to a view more like Ayala's.
ReplyDeleteLet me add that I'm looking forward to more of Todd's discussion of this question.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that he holds Ayala up as a good example of theistic evolution, when that couldn't be further from the case. Ayala's TE is evolution that is utterly unplanned, unguided, and God Himself didn't know the results - and Ayala isn't even a Christian, or won't identify as such.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't able to find posts on Todd's blog where he holds Ayala up as a good example of theistic evolution. Could you direct me?
ReplyDeleteHe seems to do it in that very review.
ReplyDelete"On the subject of theistic evolution, Rosenhouse expresses some of my own reservations. For instance, Rosenhouse finds evolutionary theodicies convoluted and unconvincing. This is especially the case with Francisco Ayala’s theodicy, which drew my attention only because of the boldness with which Ayala asserts that evolution is a gift to theology. Ayala’s theodicy would putatively relieve God of responsibility for natural evil by making death and suffering an unavoidable consequence of the evolutionary process of creation. According to Rosenhouse,
ReplyDeleteI fail to see … how Ayala’s suggestion advances the discussion at all. Identifying the suffering in nature as a side consequence of the creative process God employed only absolves Him of responsibility if we can show that a more benign process is not possible. But that is precisely the problem with which we began (p. 151).
That seems like such an obvious deficiency. One wonders how such theodicies persist."
This is the only passage I found regarding Ayala. Wood is agreeing with Rosenhouse's critique of Ayala. I also think Rosenhouse makes a good point.
This is the only passage I found regarding Ayala. Wood is agreeing with Rosenhouse's critique of Ayala. I also think Rosenhouse makes a good point.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely, Ayala's view sucks. The problem is that A) Ayala's view is fringe even from TE perspectives, and B) it's offered up without Wood mentioning that Ayala's view is not only fringe, but that Ayala himself doesn't even say he himself believes in God.
On Ayala's view, evolution was 'unsupervised' to the point that God didn't even know what the outcomes of evolution would be, or even what would likely transpire. It's hardly discussed by anyone but Ayala or (say) Michael Ruse. But Wood, and apparently Rosenhouse, treat this as the representative TE view.
Wood doesn't even note this in passing.
I don't think Ayala's view is as fringe as you think. That is frequently the view expressed by TEs such as Francis Collins and Darrel Falk or John Haught. The idea seems to be that God has endowed Nature with free will and therefore He must let Nature commit all kinds of evil in order to bring us about.
ReplyDeleteBilbo,
ReplyDeleteAyala, yes. Haught? No. Haught takes a very different approach, talking about 'multiple levels of explanation', and never limits God's omniscience. Collins has never advocated the view Ayala speaks of - there's a reason it's attributed to Ayala and Ayala alone. Falk, likewise, is silent on the matter.
Go ahead and try to find anyone but Ayala endorsing that view. Even when Falk speaks of 'freedom' in Nature, he never puts it like this.
I haven't found Falk's essay, yet, but here is Kathryn Applegate's essay saying that natural evil is the result of the freedom that God has allowed to Nature:
ReplyDeletehttp://biologos.org/blog/gods-sovereignty-and-natures-freedom
And here is Falk's essay;
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.beliefnet.com/scienceandthesacred/2009/09/on-reducing-irreducible-complexity-part-ii.html
The idea is the God has allowed freedom to Nature, which explains natural evil.
And here is Karl Giberson's essay expressing the same concept:
ReplyDeletehttp://biologos.org/blog/jerry-coynes-insufferable-argument
And in each of those three cases, the problem is the same: they are extraordinarily vague. In fact, Giberson briefly talks about theodicies which 'limit God's power', and then concludes they don't work. But Ayala says it *does* work.
ReplyDeleteThe three links talk of Nature's 'freedom'. They say nothing, zero, zip about God's knowledge with relation to that freedom. To use a comparison, Plantinga talks about free will playing a role in the existence of evil - but Plantinga never saws that God did not foreknow the actions man would take. God granting freedom while still knowing what the results would be, or determining some but not all of the results, would be in a completely different ballpark than Ayala.
Ayala *does* talk about this, and he makes it clear that the God he's talking about is a God who had no idea what the outcomes of evolution would be. Ayala *does* refuse to say whether he's even a theist. These things should have been mentioned by Wood. The omission is as bad as using William of Ockham's view of God and holding it up as 'the Catholic, scholastic view' on the grounds that Ockham was a Catholic and Scholastic.
But Rosenhouse's and Wood's objection to Ayala's view doesn't seem to be that it limits God's foreknowledge. It's that it's an attempt to limit God's responsibility for natural evil. And that is the thrust of Falk's, Giberson's, and Applegate's essays.
ReplyDeleteBut Rosenhouse's and Wood's objection to Ayala's view doesn't seem to be that it limits God's foreknowledge. It's that it's an attempt to limit God's responsibility for natural evil. And that is the thrust of Falk's, Giberson's, and Applegate's essays.
ReplyDeleteAnd that simply doesn't matter. Not a one of them endorse Ayala's view. Not a one of them lay out a detailed theodicy beyond a vague gesture in the direction that 'nature has freedom'. Ayala does present a theodicy - namely, God has no idea what evolution's results or paths would be. He does get into specifics. And Wood was wrong to present Ayala's view as if it was the mainstay TE view, or as if Ayala is even a Christian.
He could point out broad problems he sees with TE theodicies as much as he likes for all I care. But presenting Ayala as the mainstay response without heavily qualifying it was a mistake, and borderline dishonest.
It could be that Wood didn't realize that Ayala went into that much detail. I certainly didn't realize it.
ReplyDeleteAnd again, I don't see how the question of whether God foreknew what the results of evolution would be matter to Rosenhouse's or Wood's objection.
ReplyDelete