This video has been very popular on Youtube recently, with over 6 million views:
I've blogged about this before, and this is the drum that conservative commentators like Mark Steyn have been beating for years. However, projecting long-term cultural change from current demographic data is always a tricky business. Cultural and demographic changes are often the results of numerous processes and trends. It's true that fertility rates are a huge factor in projecting these types of cultural changes, maybe even the biggest, but there are other factors to consider. The Network for Strategic Missions has a few quotes up by missions researchers about the video. Hence Jason Mandryk of Operation World:
One element that we cannot possibly accurately estimate (at least I cannot see a mechanism for accurate estimation) is the secularizing effect of European society on immigrants with a religious affiliation and on the children of religion parents . . . Can we have ANY idea about how effective secular materialism will be in converting Muslims, Hindus, non-Western Christians, etc to non-religion? I don’t know, but on an anecdotal basis, the large majority of the Muslims I know in the UK – which would consist of about 40 people, predominantly male and Pakistani and under 35 years old – demonstrate high degrees of nominalism and almost all of the same traits which have seen the exodus of a younger generation from Christianity to non-faith in the last 10-20 years. Many younger Muslims in the UK (and in other Western nations) show the same social values that nominal Christians do - and as great a personal commitment to secular materialism as to their religion - and as such, make for perfectly acceptable and indeed welcomed citizens of a pluralist society.
And Peter Crossing of the World Christian Database questions some of the stats used in the video:
The grain of truth that the Muslim population percentage is increasing in Europe is correct, but WCD projections show Europe overall at 7% by 2050. It may partly be the difference between a straight mathematical extrapolation, and a projection which includes factors that change current growth. (Large growth rates are only sustainable for small populations and inevitably level out as the percentage increases. ie. it’s easy for a population to increase from 20 to 40, but much harder from 20m to 40m).
The base data too, from which the extrapolation is calculated, is very different to WCD:
e.g. Britain Muslims (WCD)
1970: 635,000 1.14%
2010: 1,680,000 2.73%
(as against YouTube’s something like 80,000 in 1970 to 2.5m in 2009–big difference in the extrapolation!)
WCD has 2050: 2,850,000 4.15%
And, by the way, it just seems really unlikely that 1m Muslims in the Netherlands are having the same number of children as 15m non-Muslims. UN says 180,000 births per year, which would mean 90,000 Muslim births. There are 500,000 Muslim females, but say 250,000 at a stretch of child-bearing age–that’s almost every second female giving birth, every year.
If I were a betting man, I'd say the demographic shift described in the video is definitely happening, but not quite at the drastic rates reported. I'll remain skeptical about any supposed certainties that such demographic numbers can deliver about the future. However, it's definitely something to think about. If the numbers about European and American birth rates are even close to correct, then it seems clear that the combination of secularism and affluence is poison to a culture's ability to reproduce itself.
[HT: My mom for the video, Andrew Jackson for the responses of missions researchers]
If the unlikely scenario ever arises that I am commissioned to write an encyclopedia entry on "hyperbole", I think I might include the following words of this atheist blogger as an illustration:
Over the last decade or so, the religious right has exercised virtually untrammeled power in America. They've commanded the allegiance of a majority of the population and have enjoyed tremendous influence and near-unchallenged power in popular culture, in the media, and especially in government. They have had abundant opportunity to make it clear to everyone what they most care about and what principles they advocate, and they have done so. And as their electoral fortunes waned, they have only become louder and more vehement.
There have been times these past few years when it was frustrating to be an American. While the religious right loudly proclaimed their intent to dismantle the Constitution's safeguards and impose their rigid, antiquated views on the rest of us, the traditional media was somnolent, and the populace seemed apathetic. I believe the religious right became so bold, so brazen in announcing their desires, precisely because they assumed the lack of resistance meant no one was paying attention.
Maybe such a statement would better fit in an encyclopedia entry on "howler" or, perhaps, "inscrutable poppycock." But enough of my jibes: let's analyse the above statement for accuracy.
Perhaps the most pervasive example of how easily wanton speculation and oversimplifications dressed in the stolen garments of science dupe us into false knowledge, is the instant authority we grant to the "study," the ipse dixit of the modern world. Anytime a sentence is prefaced with the phrase "studies have shown," you can be sure to hear either some truism ponderously restated, or some half-baked oversimplification the authors of the study already believed to be true before they ever began. And when the "study" purports to prove some truth about that intricate, complex, quirky, unpredictable, unique creature that is a human being, then you can be equally sure that its conclusions add one more disease to the syndrome of false knowledge.
Surely Thornton is overstating here. Are all studies worthless? It's true that there is a large sub-population of the species that are no more than the type of codswallop in academic dress-up that Thornton describes, but it would be brash to discount all of them in this way. Perhaps his point is that our culture concedes far too much authority to such studies and that thus we should treat their results with suspicion until they are verified beyond doubt. Still, I fear Thornton is largely right. Competing "studies" can come to conclusions that are diametrically opposed to each other. See here for an example.
Here is David K. Naugle on the late Pope John Paul II's vision for a Christian transformation of human culture:
Given that culture is the history-shaping outcome of humanity's native philosophical and religious impulse, in order to alter human experience for the better, a radical transformation must take place at the cultural level and in the set of basic ideas that make it up. The pontiff's settled solution, therefore, to the modern problem of human pulverization is through the instrumentality of culture change, and indeed a change in its underlying philosophy and religion as the ultimate sources from which it springs. While there may be a place for active resistance against the forces of terror, it seems that for Wojtyla such efforts deal only with the symptoms, not with the root causes of the political and social disease. Change at the most primordial level, therefore, requires a metamorphosis in ultimate meaning through words - both human and divine - that conceptualize reality and frame human existence. Hence, in taking aim at this deeper level of reality, Wojtyla seeks to displace the well-ensconced ideologies responsible for the miseries of contemporary man through the proclamation and practice of a vibrant Christian humanism grown in Catholic soil. He has offered this fresh, comprehensive vision of life as a new basis for Western culture and as the wellspring of genuine hope.
Naugle, a Baptist philosopher, keeps up this congenial tone in his whole section on John Paul's concept of a Christian worldview. I've never given much serious consideration to the thought of the late pope (AKA Karol Wojtyla), but according to passages like this one he was a formidable thinker who proposed an inspired Christian vision for the renewal of human culture.
Christian blogger Doug Wilson is always a treasure chest of intelligence and wit. He recently posted two "letters" to Sam Harris, the militant atheist who has written two popular anti-religious books, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. Wilson's "letters" can be found here and here. In the first post Wilson has this to say to Harris:
You want Christians to quit behaving in certain ways. But why? You want them to write nice letters, and you want them to stop turning America into a big, dumb theocracy. But why? If there is no God, what could possibly be wrong with theocracies? They provide high entertainment value, and they give everybody involved in them a sense of dignity and high moral purpose. You get to wear ecclesiastical robes, march in impressive processions to burn intransigent people at the stake, you get to believe you are better than everybody else, and, at the top of the doctrinal heap, that God likes you. Further, the material universe doesn't care about any of this foolishness, not even a little bit. So what's wrong with having a little bit of fun at the expense of other bits of protoplasm? Hitler, Ronald Reagan, Pol Pot, Mother Teresa, Mao, Nancy Pelosi, Stalin, Ted Haggard, and the Grand Inquistor are all just part of a gaudy, and very temporary, show. Sometimes the Northern lights put on a show in the sky. Sometimes people put on a show on the ground. Then the sun goes out, and it turns out nobody cares.
I think all this is just Wilson's tongue-in-cheek way of expressing a more sober philosophical statement: On the assumption of atheistic naturalism, moral values have no objective ontological status and thus one moral position is as good as another. There are certainly atheists who dispute this, but I think it's correct. Like Wilson, I'm mystified by the monolithic moral agenda being advanced by men who are champions of a worldview in which monolithic moral agendas are meaningless.
In a punishing review of Richard Dawkins' latest anti-religious diatribe, The God Delusion, Terry Eagleton of the London Review of Books writes the following:
Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster ... The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.
Eagleton himself is hostile to any form of traditional or conservative religion, and yet he recognizes that for all his self-important posturing, Dawkins makes a weak case for his brand of hellfire-and-brimstone atheism. He points out that Dawkins is like "a bumptious young barrister" who believes he "can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case."
This reminds me of the episode of Seinfeld when Jerry, Elaine, and George were surprised to find that Kramer had excelled to the top of his karate class after only a very short time of training. Cut to later in the episode when Jerry and Elaine decide to witness the kung fu dynamo in action as he whips up on his classmates, only to find that said classmates are a bunch of little kids. So in addition to his occupation as rabid atheist evangelist, Dawkins can now moonlight as an eccentric hipster doofus.
Eric Kaufman of the UK's Prospect magazine offers a more nuanced view in the continuing debate over the impact of low secular birth rates for the future of the West, especially European nations (see here, here, here, and here for previous posts and links on the subject). Kaufman points out that the low birth rates for secularists in the West do not necessarily mean they will be outnumbered by the devoutly religious in the next century, simply because the gap in birth rate is often counterbalanced by the apostasy rate. In other words, religious parents may have more children than their secular counterparts, but those kids may abandon the faith of their parents at an equally high rate and become secular themselves.
However, Kaufman makes a convincing argument that within this century the birth rate gap will outpace the apostasy rate, and Europe will take on a more conservative religious flavor:
Western Europe will initially emerge as a more religious society, but not a fundamentalist one. Even so, religiosity—as belief rather than attendance—significantly predicts a more conservative ideological orientation. Though we are unlikely to see the rise of evangelical Christian politics in Europe, we may find a long-term drift towards more conservative social values. Europeans will become more "traditional" on moral issues like abortion, family values, religious education and gay marriage. Inter-faith co-operation between Christians and Muslims on these issues is quite possible since ecumenical structures are already in place in most countries to facilitate it. The ease with which conservative Protestants and traditionalist Catholics and Jews have co-operated in the US may be taken as evidence. Much will depend on how these ideological synergies are channelled by parties and electoral systems in different countries, but by the mid-21st century, the peak of secular European politics will be long past.
Kaufman also makes the claim that it is not mass conversions or religious revivals that really move a society toward religion, but higher birth rates. Interestingly, many American Christians are catching on to the importance of demography for spreading the influence of their faith. Mark Driscoll, for example, teaches his church that one of the best ways they can turn Seattle into a Christian city is to simply have more babies than the non-religious people there, which isn't very hard. Be fruitful and multiply, indeed.
Wired magazine takes a look at the recent upsurge in the rantings of militant atheists who claim any and all religion is "evil." The writer of "Battle of the New Atheism" focuses on Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. Dawkins has been saying some crazy things recently, and his interview with Wired is no exception. Consider this bit of big-hearted humanitarianism:
"How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?" Dawkins asks. "It's one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?"
And the Christians are "theocrats" because they want intelligent design to be included in public school textbooks alongside evolution. Well, I guess this makes Dawkins an "atheocrat."
The writer of the Wired piece is very hostile to religious claims himself, but in the end he rejects this new version of ideological jihad:
Where does this leave us, we who have been called upon to join this uncompromising war against faith? What shall we do, we potential enlistees? Myself, I've decided to refuse the call. The irony of the New Atheism -- this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism -- is too much for me.
Here is wisdom from someone I disagree with on even the very basic issues of life, but we agree enough to recognize that such atheistic fundamentalism is unwarranted, unhealthy, and downright comical.
As a side note, I should say that I do not find the arguments of Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett to be very persuasive. They are popular level atheistic apologists, and in my opinion their arguments do not carry the weight of more clear-headed atheist philosophers like Quentin Smith, Michael Martin, or the late John Mackie. This makes it all the more peculiar that they are the most vocal about the indestructibility of their worldview. But this is often the case, even with Christian apologists: those with the most shaky logical foundations are sometimes the most adamant about the strength of their arguments. Strange.
In an opinion piece at the Dubliner, the atheist bulldogmatist Richard Dawkins makes the following claim:
Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place.
So in Dawkins' worldview, raping kids is morally superior to teaching them to sing "Jesus Loves Me." I think it's safe to say that Dawkins can no longer be taken seriously. Such misguided fanaticism does not deserve a shred of respect, especially academic respect. I believe that after these comments all reasonable people - atheist, Christian, and Darwinist alike - are justified in labeling Dawkins a myopically-inclined idiot.
And yes, I did just coin the term "bulldogmatist." Maybe I'll get a patent for it.
Yet wherever they began their individual walk with Christ, and however they choose to outwardly identify themselves within the subculture, members of this movement all talk about a meaningless and bankrupt society; a world that offers no anodyne culture outside their faith. Their lives are in fact a criticism of our own. This youth movement isn't one that merely defines itself against its parents' generation; it exists in opposition to all culture and history that excludes evangelicalism.
To young evangelicals, our secular world is devoid of the type of love they seek, not parental love or fraternal love or even erotic love, but an even bigger love -- a love called agape. When Christians describe God's love for his children this is the word they invoke, a love so powerful one is moved to proclaim it on car bumpers and coffee mugs. Hand in hand with certainty, agape is what this generation longs for today -- a love that will soothe the pain of breakups and breakouts, heal the wounds from shattered families, make bearable the awareness that we are each a solitary speck in an illimitable world. It's the emotion that secularism, enraptured by its logic and empiricism, refuses to engage.
The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in unseen warfare. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by opponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone.
Phillip Longman has an opinion piece in USA Today called "The Liberal Baby Bust." Here's a quote, emphasis mine:
What's the difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? There are many differences, of course, but here's one you might not know. In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs.
This curious fact might at first seem trivial, but it reflects a much broader and little-noticed demographic trend that has deep implications for the future of global culture and politics. It's not that people in a progressive city such as Seattle are so much fonder of dogs than are people in a conservative city such as Salt Lake City. It's that progressives are so much less likely to have children.
It's a pattern found throughout the world, and it augers a far more conservative future — one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default. Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families.
I posted extensively on this phenomenon back in January, particularly as it affects the future of Europe. See those posts here, here, here, and here. The fact is that not only do the more conservative strata of society have children at a faster rate, societies that accept secularism wholesale - like Europe - actually achieve birth rates that will lead to rapid population decrease, simply because there aren't enough babies being born to replace the current population. America's rate is currently at replacement level, but the more liberal we get, the less babies we will have, and we'll be the next Europe: a dying husk of a once great society, simply because we like our rugged individuality more than we like having the responsibility of a family.
The interesting thing about Longman's article is in the last paragraph, emphasis mine:
Many will celebrate these developments. Others will view them as the death of the Enlightenment. Either way, they will find themselves living through another great cycle of history.
I posted in January about how these developments in Europe could portend the failure of the Enlightenment. I guess that idea has occurred to Longman as well, or else he's been reading my blog. I highly doubt the latter is the case.
This issue is barely mentioned in discussions of the "culture wars," but I think it may be the most important factor in determining the future direction of a society's cultural makeup. The real winner of the culture wars may not be the side that outthinks, outworks, or outvotes its ideological opponents. It may simply have to outbreed them.
I received the following e-mail this morning from Dr. Mohler:
Dear Southern Seminary Family:
Dr. Ronald Nash went to be with the Lord today, and I know you join me in praying for his wife, Betty Jane, and the entire Nash family.
A private funeral is to be held this week in Tennessee, and a memorial service will be held next Saturday in Orlando. Dr. Nash was a brilliant and bold defender of Christian truth, and he found great joy in teaching students who were training for Christian ministry. We will inform you of further developments, and tell you how you can send an expression of prayer and concern to the Nash family.
Faithfully,
R. Albert Mohler, Jr., President
I did not know Dr. Nash personally, and due to my work schedule I was never able to take one of his classes while he was at Southern. Dr. Nash was an ardent defender of the rationality and intellectual integrity of classical Christianity, and he was a prolific writer. Long before I entered seminary or even knew who Dr. Nash was, I was looking to buy a book for my wife, who was getting a degree in elementary education. I wanted something that would give a Christian perspective of the faults in liberal, Dewey-esque education philosophy, and I stumbled upon Nash's The Closing of the American Heart: What's Really Wrong with America's Schools? Dr. Nash wrote widely, on a variety of philosophical and theological topics. Some of his books have been extremely helpful to me in my development as a Christian thinker and (hopeful) philosopher. For anyone who wants a basic grounding in Christian philosophy I would very much recommend his Faith and Reason: Searching for a Rational Faith and Life's Ultimate Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy. Ironically, in the post below this one I had just written a review of the latter, with absolutely no knowledge that he was near death due to a stroke he had last year. His presence in the evangelical community will be missed, and I trust that God will raise up Christian philosophers to match his achievements. For a perspective from someone who took classes under Nash, see this post by Alex Forrest.
Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost recently posted on why he thinks postmodernism is really just "hyper-modernism":
I can’t recall ever meeting a true postmodernist. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met two people who could define the term in the same way. Ask a philosopher, an artist, an English major, an emergent church leader, and the pizza delivery girl how postmodernism differs from modernity. Assuming they can do more than stare blankly in befuddlement at the question, the responses will likely be at complete variance from one another.
And:
No one seems to be able to intelligibly define what constitutes postmodernism yet almost everyone thinks they “know it when they see it.” The question, though, is why do we assume that the “extra push over the cliff” is anything but a faster, louder version of modernism? How do we even know that modernism has ended?
His point seems to be this: It isn't right to refer to postmodernism as a formally distinct movement from modernism since all it really is is modernism to the tenth power, so to speak. That is, it only takes modernism to its extreme logical ends.
Now before assessing whether old Joe is right or not, we have to admit that this whole business of classifying and describing intellectual movements can be a bit tricky, if not downright frustrating. When a historian refers to the "Enlightenment" for example, what exactly is she saying? Is she saying that Enlightenment ideals characterized all strata of European society in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, with clear lines of demarcation signifying when the Enlightment ended and began? Not really. But some folks have a view of history that disdains any talk of an Enlightenment simply because these ambiguities exist about the extent of the movement. But what the historian is really saying is that, "there existed in history a movement of ideas and principles, held by some influential people, that had a significant effect on history and culture."
So sometimes it's hard tell what objections to the concept of an "Enlightenment," like the objections to the existence of a distinct "postmodernism," are actually about. For surely something is happening that would warrant a discussion about a change in the first place. Historians and philosophers don't just pull the concept of the Enlightenment out of nowhere (they don't create it ex nihilo, so to speak). So what is Carter's objection to the concept of postmodernism? I think it rests on three points: (1) He believes that postmodernism is seen as too monolithic. That is, it is seen as having much more influence on society and the academy than it actually does. (2) Postmodernism shouldn't be given distinction for the above-mentioned reason that it is only a modified version of modernism. (3) It's so ridiculously hard to even define what it is that it makes no difference anyway.
The objection from (1) is probably true, but of course when we are talking about significant historical movements it makes little difference how monolithic they were at the time, but how much influence they had on the direction of history. In eighteenth century Europe, for example, Enlightenment ideals were barely prevalent with the man in the street. There were of course some people who agreed with the Voltaires and the Humes, but for the most part people kept chugging along with their commitment to religion as usual. It was only after a century or so of what we call the Enlightenment that it filtered down through the rest of society, resulting in the cultural earthquake that was the French Revolution. But even in Britain and the rest of the continent there was never anything quite that drastic. The Wesleyan revival in England, for example, not only represented a significant counter-Enlightenment, but was influential in its own right, as it laid the foundations for much of the modern evangelical movement, particularly as it is embodied in Pentecostalism and Charismatism.
But all of that is beside the point. Like the Enlightenment in its time, no one is saying of postmodernism that everyone holds to postmodern ideals, or that even a majority of people do. In fact the people that can even come up with some rudimentary definition of postmodernism - as opposed to actually being postmodernist - is probably ridiculously miniscule. Well, so what? The people that do hold to it are often those with a lot of influence over the direction of society.
And as far as (2) and (3) are concerned, it seems to me that (3) removes much of the force of (2)! That's because one of the key features of modernism is its desire for true knowledge. It wants to seek out the limits of what we can and cannot rightly say that we know to be true. The very fact that postmodernism is hard to define is an indicator that it has made a significant break with modernism by seeking to erase, blur, or otherwise mystify definitions of truth and reality. Indeed, when reading some postmodernist writings, it is difficult to make sense at all out of what the author is saying, and often it seems like downright nonsense. Additionally, the fact that modernism led to postmodernism does not mean that they are both versions of the same thing. There is a sense in which Platonism led to Aristotelianism as well, since Aristotle was working on much of the foundation laid by his teacher, but no one would really say that Aristotle's work is only a modified version of Plato's. Like the legitimate distinction between modernism and postmodernism, there is a significant discontinuity between the two to warrant separate definitions.
There's an interesting debate over at Slate between one of their writers, Dana Stevens, and Steven Johnson, author of a book claiming that playing video games and watching hour-long TV dramas can actually make you smarter, at least in certain "cog-sci" areas like "attention, patience retention, and the parsing of narrative threads." Here's part of his claim:
I don't believe that these cog-sci definitions of intelligence are the only kinds of intelligence worth measuring. But certainly they're crucial ones. And they're not just limited to raw problem-solving skills. Take our ability to model social networks as an example: One of the things we do incredibly well as a species is create elaborate maps of social connection in our heads—we know that Bill is feuding with Bob, and that Amy is flirting a little with John, and just coming out of a relationship with Phil, and so on. That's a key part of our real-world intelligence, and some people are better at it than others. So, one of the things I show in the book is that the social networks in play in the average television show have grown much more complicated over the past 30 years—in a sense, training our brains to follow ever-larger groups of interaction.
I agree with Stevens, who views that sort of thinking as being a bit too hopeful and wishy-washy. Even though I haven't read the book, however, what I can garner from Johnson's argument about gaming (as opposed to TV watching) seems pretty persuasive. The stereotype of playing video games as a mindless, twitch-reflex, "instant gratification" activity just isn't correct. Complex (and sometimes very complex) problem-solving is often involved, especially in games of higher levels of difficulty. Some strategy games, for example, require the player to finely balance financial, religious, and military resources in order to keep their empire up and running. If you've ever played Rome: Total War, you know how difficult this can be, especially with barbarian armies massing at your borders, not to mention the battlefield decisions you have to make in order to beat said barbarians on the field. I don't think playing a video game is a superior intellectual activity to, say, reading Aquinas or parsing Greek verbs, but as a way to spend recreational time I think it beats sitting on your posterior and watching Desperate Housewives.
On a related note, I posted on the subject of Christians and gaming last month. Read it here.
It looks like an unfortunate church in Israel was the victim of a textbook example of religious intolerance recently. Although evangelicals get hammered as being "intolerant" for refusing to believe that God hands out free passes to heaven to everyone who has a religious or moral worldview, I don't think that's exactly fair. Suppose I simply believe someone is going to hell for his sins unless he repents and places faith in Christ, but I love him as an individual and respect his decision to disagree with my viewpoint. I have many friends and acquaintances who fall into this camp. I think they're wrong, and they think I'm wrong. What's the big deal? Why is that so intolerant?
To understand this a little more, I might classify two definitions of intolerance. We'll call one the politically correct definition of intolerance and the other the classical definition. Now let's define the definitions:
(politically correct) intolerance = a disagreement and/or statement of that disagreement with another on the nature of ultimate religious truth, specifically the belief that adherence to another religion will result in ultimate condemnation or hell for the one adhering
(classical) intolerance = denying practitioners of a competing religion their right to practice or believe that religion, usually through violent or coercive means
I thoroughly reject the feel-good, let's-all-get-along, fuzzy politically correct version, which itself is a sort of religious intolerance (according to its own definition) since it asserts a moral dictate about what kind of religious beliefs one can hold. I recognize that there is a virtual academic cottage industry devoted to this PC tolerance, where anyone who claims that their religion is the sole correct religion (or the sole path to heaven, or whatever) is vilified as a racist hatemonger. The obvious reply is, "So, the only legitimate religion I can hold is pluralism? Gee, that sure does wonders for cultural distinctives!"
So the classical definition is better, and much more compatible with a society that values religious freedom. True religious intolerance occurs when someone actually acts on that religious disagreement by harming the other person, or denying his right to religious freedom, or destroying his property, or whatever. For a lesson in how that's achieved, just take a gander at the behavior of those Orthodox Jews from Arad.
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.
In a punishing review of Richard Dawkins' latest anti-religious diatribe, The God Delusion, Terry Eagleton of the London Review of Books writes the following: 
I received the following e-mail this morning from Dr. Mohler:
It looks like an unfortunate church in Israel was the victim of a textbook example of religious intolerance recently. Although evangelicals get hammered as being "intolerant" for refusing to believe that God hands out free passes to heaven to everyone who has a religious or moral worldview, I don't think that's exactly fair. Suppose I simply believe someone is going to hell for his sins unless he repents and places faith in Christ, but I love him as an individual and respect his decision to disagree with my viewpoint. I have many friends and acquaintances who fall into this camp. I think they're wrong, and they think I'm wrong. What's the big deal? Why is that so intolerant?
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. 
