"Two Books"

I’m now going to comment on chapter 8 of Dembski’s new book. I didn’t cover that in my general review because, while the issue he raises is important in its own right, that’s something of a side-issue in relation to his main thesis. So it’s best to treat that separately.

“To undermine the constancy of nature for theological gain preserve the integrity of neither science nor theology,” The End of Christianity” (71).

While this is true up to a point, it needs to be qualified:

i) The constancy of nature is a scientific presupposition, not a scientific discovery. A metascientific axiom by which science infers causes from effects.

Without a doctrine of divine creation and providence to ground this assumption, induction is viciously circular.

ii) Moreover, Dembski believes in creation ex nihilo as well as miracles.

“God gave humanity two primary sources of revelation about himself: the world that he created and the Scripture that he inspired. These are also known as the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture…God is a God of truth. As the author of both books, he does not contradict himself (71-72).

Unfortunately for Dembski, this hoary metaphor is fatally equivocal in two fundamental respects:

i) Nature is not very bookish. A book generally contains verbal assertions or propositions. While not every sentence is assertive (i.e. questions, commands), most sentences are assertive. And in the case of non-fiction, they make factual claims. They have truth-value.

By contrast, nature makes no assertions. Nature contains no propositions. Nature doesn’t say anything. Nature is a fact, not a factual assertion. Nature doesn’t assert anything to be the case. Therefore, it’s strictly nonsense to characterize the issue the way Dembski does.

We simply draw inferences from nature. We try to infer causes from effects. Sometimes all we have is trace evidence. We have to interpolate. Fill in the blanks as best we can.

ii) Moreover, to say that nature is revelatory hardly means that nature is self-revelatory. If nature is a medium of God’s self-revelation, this doesn’t mean that nature was designed to reveal anything about itself, such as the age of the universe.

Now, this doesn’t rule out the possibility that nature contains evidence sufficient to date its point of origin. But that’s not a valid inference from Dembski’s premise. That doesn’t follow from the status of nature as a mode of divine revelation. Dembski would need to mount a separate argument to yield that conclusion.

“As distinct witnesses to the work of God, these books can be read individually or together. When read individually, they have an integrity of their own that must not be undermined by using one to invalidate the other” (71).

i) I don’t know how far Dembski intends to take this. Is nature self-explanatory? Is nature its own commentary? Why did God reveal Gen 1-3 if nature is self-interpreting?

Indeed, in Bible history we see an alternation between event-revelation and word-revelation. God’s words interpret God’s deeds. So general revelation is not autonomous.

It’s like looking at a painting. You can learn a lot about a painting just by studying the work of art. But, at the same time, there’s only so much you can learn about it from the artifact itself. It helps to know something about the painter. About his time and place. About his values. You can’t necessarily infer artistic intent from what you see on the canvass. Correct interpretation requires some knowledge of the painter as well as the painting.

ii) I’d also add that there are obvious hazards to scientific autonomy. Science is no better or worse than its practitioners. Science can be politicized. Become a tool in the hands of social engineers–from behaviorists and Social Darwinianist to climatologists, sociobiologists and transhumanists. Should we really deliver ourselves into the hands of anyone who calls himself a scientist?

“Theology may led us to question certain claims of science, but any refutation of those claims must ultimately depend on scientific evidence” (71).

Seems to me that’s overstated. Any scientific refutation depends on scientific evidence. But in some cases it would be possible to refute a scientific theory on philosophical grounds–to take one example.

“Likewise, science may lead us to question certain claims of theology, but any refutation of those claims must ultimately depend on exegetical evidence” (71).

Agreed.

“Theology requires metaphors and concepts that come from our understanding of nature and therefore form science. How can we understand that Jesus is the ‘Lamb of God’ without knowing something about biology. How can we understand that God is light without knowing something about physics?” How can we understand that faith can move mountains without knowing something about orology” (73).

This is a half-truth. Once again, it suffers from a fatal equivocation.

You don’t need to understand modern science to understand Biblical metaphors. These metaphors are prescientific. They simply depend on ordinary observation and experience–as well as a cultural and literary tradition. No scientific theorizing, which goes beyond and behind ordinary perception, is required.

“The history of biblical interpretation includes cases where interpretations of Scripture once universally held were later abandoned–and for scientific reasons no less! For instance, at the time a young earth was unquestioned, the Church also taught that the earthy was stationary. Ps 93 states that the earth is established forever and cannot be moved. A face-value interpretation of Psalm 93 seems to require geocentrism. And yet young-earth creationists accept the Copernican Revolution. We read this psalm today as endorsing not geocentrism but the stability of God’s works” (75).

Two problems:

i) While I agree with Dembski’s interpretation of Ps 93, he doesn’t bother to argue for his interpretation on exegetical grounds. So, as it stands, his paradigm-case is question-begging.

ii) Actually, I don’t think that a “face-value” interpretation of Ps 93 seems to require genocentrism. That’s quite deceptive. Dembski isn’t coming to this text with the mindset of an ancient Israelite. Rather, his impression of the text is filtered through later scientific theories and controversies like Ptolemaic astronomy. Geocentrism is a system of celestial motions. Celestial mechanics.

Ps 93 doesn’t teach a system. It doesn’t discuss the relative position of the earth. There’s nothing about the position of the earth in a dynamic system involving the sun. It doesn’t attempt to situate the earth at the crossroads of time and space.

That’s a theoretical grid which postdates Ps 93. It reflects the synthesis of Babylonian star charts with Greek mathematics.

Because the modern reader is a child of science, there’s danger of seeing so much more in the text than is actually there. Reading the text through the subsequent history of science.

“Charles Hodge faced the challenged of balancing the science of his day with the interpretation of Scripture” (76).

But, of course, that example cuts both ways. If you read Hodge’s attempt to harmonize Scripture with science, the exercise is hopelessly obsolete. So that example accentuates the peril of reinterpreting Scripture in light of the “cutting edge” science of the day. We have to revise our interpretation every decade or so–in which case our interpretation is external to the text rather than internal to the text. An extraneous gloss which we superimpose on the text, rather than finding that explanation within the text itself–or the historical horizon of the target audience.