My good friend William Dembski, the leading proponent of Intelligent Design Theory, is in hot water–a particularly appropriate metaphor, as you will learn in a moment. Bill is a faculty member at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Last year he published a book, The End of Christianity, in which he suggested that Noah’s Flood was not worldwide but possibly limited to just a patch of the Middle East. This brought down the wrath of the authorities at SBTS and the threat of firing. Dembski has smartly stepped back into line.
“In a brief section on Genesis 4–11, I weigh in on the Flood, raising questions about its universality, without adequate study or reflection on my part. Before I write on this topic again, I have much exegetical, historical, and theological work to do. In any case, not only Genesis 6–9 but also Jesus in Matthew 24 and Peter in Second Peter seem clearly to teach that the Flood was universal. As a biblical inerrantist, I believe that what the Bible teaches is true and bow to the text, including its teaching about the Flood and its universality.”
Now at the risk of sounding like someone condoning a belief in the scientifically absurd and the theologically nutty, I have a certain sympathy for Bill. He is a very good mathematician who wrote a book which may have been wrong but in its discussion of probability as such (not the theology in which he embedded it) was pretty stimulating. If he had been prepared to play safely, he could have gotten a job at a regular, good university, got tenure, and then started to reveal his hand. After all, Alvin Plantinga believes in Intelligent Design Theory and it certainly never stopped his career. But Bill went public, hard-line, early, and his career has been fraught, to say the least. And now here he is with a wife and kids to support and the threat of the sack.
Sympathy is not agreeing or condoning. I draw a strong distinction between Dembski’s problems at SBTS and the problems I wrote about in an earlier blog, those of John Schneider at Calvin College. You will remember that the latter is in trouble with his president for suggesting that the earliest humans were not a single pair, Adam and Eve, but a group of evolved apes. Schneider has argued that perhaps rather than taking an Augustinian line on original sin, seeing one mistake by the original pair as the reason for death and destruction in the world, we should follow Irenaeus of Lyon in seeing sin as part of the original human condition along with our inclinations for good.
My distinction is based simply on the fact that Schneider is letting himself be guided by evidence and reason, otherwise known as science, and recognizing his theology must work with that. Dembski is letting himself be guided by theology and let the science pick up the bits and pieces, wherever they fall. Apart from anything else, Dembski (not to mention the President of Calvin College) is flying in the face of almost two millennia of Christian theology, dating at least back to Augustine. Using reason supported by empirical evidence is not heretical, but using those very gifts that make us in the image of God. If science is definitive, and if it isn’t definitive on the non-universality of the Flood I don’t know what it is, then we must read the Bible metaphorically or allegorically.
One final point. I am sitting in a hotel room in Chicago waiting to go to a memorial meeting in memory of my friend David Hull. As usual, when I travel I don’t sleep very well. Without a wife under the covers and a couple of Cairn Terriers on top, I feel very lonely and unloved. So, as often, I find myself in the middle of the night reading the only reading matter available, the Gideon Bible. Nothing like tales of ethnic cleansing in the Middle East for getting a chap back to sleep.
I turned to Genesis 6 through 9, the story of the Flood, and again it struck me how deep and true a story it is. It is not about hydraulics and the problems of sanitation when in confined spaces. It is a story about the futility of simplistic solutions. God is dissatisfied with the world, so he cleans it out, in order to start again. And what happens when he has done this? Noah, the one who “found grace in the eyes of the Lord,” gets stinking drunk and one of his kids laughs and sneers at him. We are right back to square one.
Complex problems are going to need careful and thoughtful solutions, probably taking much time and effort. If only those good Christians George W. Bush and Tony Blair had read their bible before they marched into Iraq. If only the Tea Partyers would read their bibles before they propose their instant remedies for the country. Abolishing legal abortion and giving all of our money to the rich is not going to solve the unemployment problem. What is wrong with Christians? Instead of spending time trying to get the rest of us to accept their religion, why don’t they start by accepting the religion themselves?
6 Responses to Noah’s Flood
t_paine - October 24, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Dr. Ruse,
First of all, I never travel (or even go to a faculty meeting) without a book and I don’t believe for a minute you do either, but I concede you the literary device in your post.
Dr. Dembski has made a Faustian bargain if there ever was one, selling his heart and soul to the Christian Church, recanting on his knees like Galileo. I’m sure he was shown the Instruments, in this case the wife and children you mention and a tanking career were sufficient.
I wonder how the men who broke him can hold their heads up.
ledzep - October 25, 2010 at 12:18 am
I cry foul on the insinuation that Alvin Plantinga dissimulated in order to secure his academic career. It hardly needs saying that this is complete balderdash. A glance at Wikipedia makes it clear that this is rather nasty balderdash as well, given that Plantinga wrote the Chronicle earlier this year – in response to a similar earlier remark from Ruse, and had this to say:
“Like any Christian (and indeed any theist), I believe that the world has been created by God, and hence “intelligently designed.” The hallmark of intelligent design, however, is the claim that this can be shown scientifically; I’m dubious about that”
Wow, Prof. Ruse seems so charming in his posts. I wouldn’t want to get on his bad side, though. The idea that Plantinga’s success as an academic is due to dissimulation – I don’t really know what one can say to that. At every stage of his career he has articulated un-popular and uncomfortably-devout positions, and he has had the analytic skill to develop philosophical accounts around his basic commitments, to the point that some of his achievements (in epistemology, for example) are almost universally recognized as such, even by those who disagree wildly with his general outlook and religious beliefs. For the record, I don’t agree with most of his positions, either. But in light of the above, this remark of Prof. Ruse’s is nothing other than a calculated smear, strategically placed in a throwaway line to avoid criticism.
drj50 - October 25, 2010 at 12:24 pm
We all tend to view data through our presuppositions, whether we are Christians reading the Bible, Hitchens looking at the role of religion in history, Marxists (or capitalists) looking at economic data, etc. We also like simple answers, even if the questions are complex. I am not persuaded that evangelical Christians, even those who take less nuanced positions, are that different from liberal Democrats or university faculty who see all administrators as self-absorbed leeches. That is a principal reason that we in higher education need to do a much better job of teaching (and, based on a number of posts in the Chronicle, modeling) good reasoning and critical thinking.
I am grateful that I was taught, at an evangelical Christian institution, that when my reading of the Bible and my reading of the natural world appeared to conflict, I was reading at least one of them wrong, and that the wisest course was not dogmatism (on either side), but a degree of suspended judgment until I was able to find additional data and/or determine exactly where I had gone wrong.
Suspended judgment, however, — whether about biblical interpretation, politics, or anything else — seems now to be a quaint intellectual virtue few choose to practice. Humility will get you ignored; demonizing those who think differently is a much better way to gather a following. Why is it comedians (rather than, say, academics) who have scheduled a march on Washington “to restore sanity”?
nowarforisrael - October 27, 2010 at 4:30 pm
The architects of the War on Iraq were not Christians. Feith, Frum, Abrams, Wolfowitz, Pearle, Ledeen, Zakheim, Krauthammer, Kristol, PNAC, JINSA, and the AEI. Ruse knows that he will never work again if he said this so he picks on the Christians in the person of Bonesman GW Bush.
frankschmidt - November 10, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Actually, Dembski’s understanding of probability is pretty shallow too. The Mathematics faculty at UC should be ashamed that they let this drivel pass.
rbh_iii - November 12, 2010 at 12:05 am
It’s noteworthy that Dembski says “Before I write on this topic [the universality of Noah's Flood] again, I have much exegetical, historical, and theological work to do.” Noteworthy by its absence from Dembski’s list is geology, the actual science that addresses the issue. But then, apologetics never did have much use for actual science.