Michael Spencer of iMonk fame has asked for responses on a great open thread:

This thread is for this question: How have you resolved the tensions in your own life and thinking between science and your faith? What has been your journey? What was particularly significant in that journey?

I’m especially interested in those who were brought up in conservative Christian environments with typical conservative assumptions about the Bible.

The thread has attracted numerous interesting responses, some from professional scientists. The comments represent numerous perspectives, but almost all of them are from believers who have realized there is no substantive conflict between Christianity and the deliverances of science. Here's a sample from "Theo":

I didn’t encounter much tension between my faith and science growing up. We went to a Baptist church that occasionally taught on creationism and such, but they didn’t really shove it down our throats or make any “you must believe this or else..” sort of statements. My high school AP physics teacher was also the Bible club sponsor. I attended a Christian affiliated university (Baylor) and all my professors were Christian (or at least signed a statement of faith to get their job). So I breezed all the way through college with a masters in physics without ever having really been challenged in my faith as a scientist.

Now I am at a state university working on my Ph.D. My thesis adviser and many people that I work with are openly hostile toward Christianity. It is certainly a more challenging environment, but having known so many Christian scientists (not those kind) has left me with a confidence that I’m not alone in my faith.

Just one observation on the evolution debate. As an experimental physicist, I deal with exact equations and extraordinarily precise, repeatable measurements. All that is required of an evolutionary biologist is the ability to tell a good story (”the shape of the pig’s snout evolved over millions of years to be just the perfect tool to hunt out truffles”, or whatever.) I know they are doing their best with the facts they have available (and there is a bit more to it than just a story), but I find it humorous that it gets equal billing under the single term “science” along with physics or chemistry.

There are some great responses in the thread. I recommend reading through them if you're interested in the relationship between Christianity and science.

First Things has a good introductory essay to quantum theory by physicist and theist Stephen Barr. If you're a quantum physics noob like me you will find it helpful.

[HT: Verum Serum]

My friend Aaron Hernandez, who has degrees in both biology and philosophy, recently took offense with me for something I said in this post:

Biologists do not often make good philosophers, and vice versa.

Alright Aaron, I grant the point. This statement doesn't seem fair. There is nothing in the intellectual makeup of biologists qua biologists that prevents them from being good philosophers. Indeed, intellectuals cross over disciplines quite often and have valuable things to say. So perhaps I should qualify my statement a bit, and say rather that a professional biologist, untrained in philosophy, is not as likely to make as good of an argument on any philosophical subject as a trained philosopher is. Likewise, a professional philosopher, untrained in biology, is even less likely to do biology successfully than a trained biologist.

The context of this statement was Richard Dawkins' critique of theism in his book The God Delusion. Dawkins fancies his arguments against belief in God as being devastating to theism and unanswerable by theism's proponents. But Dawkins, as I hope to show in a paper I'm writing, fails at this Herculean task he has set out for himself. His infamous '747 Argument' against God's existence is interesting, but lacks the logical potency that he thinks it has. The theist has multiple avenues of response, and I think most of us are justified in passing right over it as not being especially compelling.

So, again Aaron, I apologize for the statement. I needed to clarify what I meant, that it was the likes of Dawkins and P. Z. Myers that I was criticizing, not biologists who actually know something about philosophy.

Alvin Plantinga's article on "Religion and Science" went live this week at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Plantinga is the best on this subject, and it makes for a good read.

[HT to Trent Dougherty at the Prosblogion.]

You can hear one "Dr. Terry Tommyrot" discussing his new book The Dawkins Delusion here. Dr. Tommyrot is not convinced of the existence of Richard Dawkins. He also believes that Dawkinsianism and its radical followers are forces for great evil in the world.

Here is a transcript and here is the original, but you really should hear the fascinating interview.

[HT to Uncommon Descent]

Here is the transcript of an informal radio debate between Richard Dawkins and an Irish Catholic theist. The theist puts it to him pretty well, I think, on a number of key issues. And I promise I will quit blogging about Dawkins one day. The day he dies.

[HT to John DePoe]

In a brief commentary at NewScientist.com, Jeff Hecht laments the fact that Americans are among the most stubborn at accepting the theory of evolution. This is not surprising, but I was surprised at one of the remedies Hecht recommends to solve this situation, which he believes to be a terrible problem. Many Americans reject evolution

despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice.

Hecht interviews Jon Miller of Michigan State:

Miller thinks more genetics should be on the syllabus to reinforce the idea of evolution. American adults may be harder to reach: nearly two-thirds don't agree that more than half of human genes are common to chimpanzees. How would these people respond when told that humans and chimps share 99 per cent of their genes?

I have heard this line of reasoning before, and the general argument is that genetic similarities between species is good evidence for the truth of evolutionary theory. Hecht and Miller believe that widespread rejection of evolution could be combatted with more education on genetic similarity.

But I don't really see how this could be the case. I am one person in the (apparent) minority who is aware that humans and chimps are 99% identical when it comes to their genetic structure, but I don't see how that knowledge is supposed to ensure that I will believe in evolution. I suppose the implication is that this knowledge of genetics somehow militates against opposing views, such as theistic evolution, intelligent design, or fundamentalist six-day creationism. But this is just plain bad logic.

In order for this line of reasoning to work, the evolutionist would have to show that genetic sharing is somehow incompatible with any other theory of origins. As it stands, all he is doing is making an argument that runs something like this:

Theory E predicts that state of affairs g should obtain.
State of affairs g obtains.
Therefore E is true.

But this is silly. The conclusion does not follow from the premises. A more justifiable conclusion would be:

Therefore belief in E is reasonable.

But of course in this case the truth of E may not be necessary or even highly probable. Belief in E may be justified (depending on which definition of "justification" one adheres to), but even then it is only justified if there is not some other theory that better accounts for g and all other background knowledge.

So there may be a competing theory that either expects or allows for state of affairs g to obtain. Even if we ignore the issue of other background knowledge, this puts paid to the idea that E is the only alternative. In this case, the major alternative, intelligent design, has no problem whatsoever with the problem of genetic sharing. Even ignoring for now the question of whether ID arguments have any merit or should be called "science," the fact is that ID, theistic evolution, and all forms of creationism have no problem accounting for the fact that chimps and people share 99% of the same genetic material. Therefore the thinking of Hecht and Miller is not very good, and if the evolutionists believe that spreading the word on genetic sharing will combat American skepticism about Darwinism, they should think again.

Postscript: Ironically, the man who was the chief architect of mapping the human genome, Dr. Francis Collins, is an orthodox Christian and a theistic evolutionist. Read a recent L. A. Times article about him here.

There's a good article at Science & Spirit called "Reasonable Doubt: Why naturalism might not be able to solve the problem of consciousness" by Anthony Matteo. The article gives a great overview of the problems that naturalism has in defining and understanding consciousness and all its attending factors, such as intentionality, free will, moral responsibility, etc. Of more importance is (1) whether reliable belief-forming faculties could ever be produced by evolution and (2) how, exactly, we could know whether they are reliable or not. Theists claim that the only way (or at least the most probable way) that our cognitive faculties could be ultimately reliable would be if God gave them to us. This would provide a way in which our cognitive faculties could be reliable and with a way of knowing that they were reliable. The author points to C. S. Lewis' early version of this argument:

Lewis went on to assert that, as a rule, no thought can be valid if it can be fully explained as the result of non-rational causes. What Lewis has in mind here is that valid beliefs are the result of logical and inductive inferences based on arguments and evidence. At a phenomenological level, we experience these operations as mental processes that guide us in making intelligible sense of the world around us. In other words, the formation of valid beliefs seems intimately dependent on conscious, mental processes. We assiduously analyze the arguments, weigh the evidence, and on that critical basis come to decisions as to the explanatory worth of individual beliefs and more wide-ranging theories.

The mystery is how, on the purely naturalist or physicalist account to which evolutionary epistemology is committed, such mental causation producing valid inferences could have arisen. If we are committed a priori to an explanatory model in which mental causation is reducible to the physical causality of the brain, it is hard to see how processes such as logical inference and induction can have any true causal power in our intellectual reckonings. In this context, Lewis quoted British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true … and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”

Matteo points out that naturalists have a few responses. One is to say that our cognitive faculties are reliable because their reliability has adaptive value. Another is to simply admit the difficulties and expect a future answer from science. I find both of these problematic. Matteo highlights the difficulties with the first response, and I'd like to expand on the difficulties he sets forth for the second.

I think there's a self-evident problem with expecting science to solve this mystery at some unspecified future date by filling in the gaps in scientific knowledge about consciousness (call it the "future-theory-of-the-gaps"). The problem is this: the naturalist is a physicalist. That is, she believes that all that ultimately exists in the world are physical entities: quarks, mountains, heat waves, Spaniards, etc. But consciousness is a non-physical entity. Think of your own experience of being conscious, of what is like to actually have a mind. Your mind has no weight, no mass, no extension, no color, no smell, etc. It shares virtually no properties with other physical entities. How then could the physicalist scientific paradigm ever explain it? It seems the only options for the physicalist are to admit ignorance or to become an eliminative materialist.

But of course there is always the theistic option. In the Christian view these problems do not exist, or at least they are severely minimized as to be inconsequential. The Christian sees human consciousness as being patterned after the ultimate conscious being, God Himself. Even though our minds have been damaged by sin, our belief-forming faculties are significantly reliable because they were made that way by the One whose belief-forming faculties are perfect and complete.

[HT: The Prosblogion]

Christianity Today has an intriguing article called "God by the Numbers." It deals with the fine tuning of the universe as evidence for God's existence, and particularly how the significance of certain intriguing numbers seems to be more easily explained in a theistic universe than in an atheistic one. Here's how it begins:

Math and theology have had a long and checkered relationship. The Babylonians and Mayans both associated numbers with God. In fact, both societies named their gods with numbers. The Mayans used 13 and the Babylonians used 60. In the Greek world, followers of Pythagoras prayed to the first 4 numbers and thought they were the creator. On the other hand, in the 18th century, the French mathematician Laplace told Napoleon he had no need of God even as a hypothesis, and in 1744, John Wesley confessed: "I am convinced, from many experiments, I could not study either mathematics, arithmetic, or algebra … without being a deist, if not an atheist."

No one knows what Wesley saw in 18th-century mathematics that he feared would lead him away from the God of the Bible, but today, many Christian mathematicians think that numbers point to God. Three numbers in particular suggest evidence for God's existence. They are 1/10¹⁰¹²³, 10¹⁶², and e^πi.

I'm about as good of a mathematician as I am a wood whittler, so I really don't have the ability to gauge these mathematical conclusions as true or not, and probably few people actually do. But if they are true, then I would have to say that they represent the best scientific evidence that can be mustered for theism.

Over at Evangelical Outpost Joe Carter has posted a good summary of why evolution would not likely form reliable belief-forming faculties. But we should give credit where credit is due here. This sort of doubt about evolution did begin with Darwin himself, but it was developed later by C. S. Lewis, and more recently into a full-blooded theory by Alvin Plantinga. You can read about Plantinga's "evolutionary argument against naturalism" here, or if you don't want to read that rather technical discussion, you can listen to him lecture about it here. And if you really want to engage all sides of the debate, read this volume of critical evaluations of Plantinga's argument.

I have no idea whether intelligent design is a legitimate science or not. The claims of ID make sense to me as an evangelical, but then again, I am not a scientist. I can read the works of Michael Behe and Bill Dembski and it all seems to work out well, but folks with much higher scientific pedigrees than I do can read the same works and scoff. Perhaps one day I'll take a few years to pore over all the tomes in the debate, but as of now that will have to wait.

What is interesting to me, however, is how those on the side of secular science have reacted to this new threat to their cultural hegemony. It seems to me that if, as the evolution crowd claims, the intellectual and scientific merits of the intelligent design movement are zero, then it would not be necessary to misrepresent the claims of the ID movement in the media. Yet it happens over and over again, and the point of misrepresentation is usually the same. Some highbrow scientist is giving his opinion of ID, and he or she invariably says something like, "One reason ID is illegitimate as a science is because it posits the existence of a Creator," or "God," or what have you. The latest example of this is from an MSNBC article about a story in the journal Science that lists the top scientific stories of 2005.

The offending quote comes from the journal's editor-in-chief, Don Kennedy:

“It’s a hypothesis that’s not testable, and one of the important recognition factors for science and scientific ideas is the notion of testability, that you can go out and do an experiment and learn from it and change your idea,” said Kennedy. “That’s just not possible with a notion that’s as much a belief in spirituality as intelligent design is.”

Now aside from the assertion that ID is not testable, a statement which many ID'ers would obviously disagree with, notice that Kennedy says that ID is a belief in "spirituality." If you get all of your information about ID from the media, as most people do, this kind of statement makes sense. But if you have actually read Dembski, or Behe, or Johnson, you would know - whatever their merits or mistakes - that ID never claims to support the idea of an infinite, personal, Creator-God. ID only posits a designer, but the identity of that designer is left open. It could be the Christian God, or Allah, or Vishnu, or space aliens, or the Great Spirit, or the Great Spaghetti Monster in the Sky, or Will Ferrell. In fact the proponents of ID do not even posit any divine qualities the designer might have. That is, he or she doesn't have to be infinite, or omniscient, or all-powerful, or anything like that. Furthermore, ID doesn't propose anything about how many designers it took. Instead of a single entity, for example, maybe life was created by an extremely powerful alien civilization, but a civilization that was decidedly finite. My point is that the ID'ers do not say, "The complexity of life implies design. Therefore God created the world." Rather, they say, "The complexity of life implies design. Therefore the most probably explanation is that life was designed." This is the extent of their scientific claim. As a corollary they usually make the admittedly unscientific statement, "As a Christian it makes the most sense to me that this designer is the Christian God." The key is that this second statement is never claimed to be scientific! In no way do the claims of ID entail a "spiritual" worldview, as Kennedy suggests.

It seems to me that if the scientific establishment is correct in its claim that the ID'ers are hopelessly ignorant backwater hicks whose real agenda is to set up the Ten Commandments in your living room and make all men go back to wearing powdered wigs, then it would not require this kind of misrepresentation of their views. But perhaps it's not misrepresentation, maybe it's actually ignorance of their views. I highly doubt Don Kennedy has ever actually read Dembski or Behe.