only a theory?

During Bo & Ashley's Ipod & Philosophy presentation yesterday, the old "evolution is only a theory" canard snuck into the discussion. Once again, the popular equivocation between scientific, philosophical, and colloquial senses of "theory" created a muddle. Fact is, evolution's as factually solid as tables & chairs & trees & stones & gravity & the sunrise. Bishop Berkeley and David Hume notwithstanding, that seems pretty solid to me. And to Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Ken Miller...

God and science together

It is unfortunate that recent polemics have been pitched as a contest to the death between science and God. Time Magazine sponsored a debate under that heading ("God vs. science") a couple years back between Richard Dawkins and genome project leader Francis Collins (author of The Language of God, now head of the NIH). Fact is, having your science and God too is not disallowed by the logic of atheism.

Collins is not the only Darwinian who believes in God. Darwin himself believed in God for most of his adult life, or at least did not actively challenge that inherited belief; and even when he seemed to lose his own faith, after the death of his little girl Annie, he continued to defend others' faith. He was a Jamesian ahead of his time.

I've mentioned "theistic evolutionists." Ken Miller (Finding Darwin's God) is one...

Theistic evolution

Dad's calling himself a "theistic evolutionist" was comparatively quite enlightened, none of his peers seemed to know what it meant or that it was an improvement on the old-time fundamentalist Know Nothing religion. He said he got the idea from a Baptist minister who probably didn't cotton to it himself, but Dad ran with it as an acceptable reconciliation of the handed-down faith of his fathers and the medical science he learned in vet school. His sense of loyalty to forebears and gratitude specifically to his good-hearted pious midwestern mother took atheism and agnosticism off the table for him, though he was still a free-thinker by the standards of that time and place.

I remember him plucking Ken Miller's book Finding Darwin's God from my shelf once and musing that he didn't understand why there was any controversy at all on this topic, among the devout: of course religion and science are compatible, of course a God should be expected to work His will through the laws and processes of a rationally ordered nature. "Intelligent Design" does not have to descend to anti-intellectualist Young Earth Creationist nonsense, though as a matter of fact it has tended to do just that in the debates of recent years, in the hands of rigid partisan pious zealots.

There's plenty of intolerant fire coming fron the other camp too, among evolutionists who insist that science moots religion entirely, and do not welcome any alliance with the likes of Miller. P.Z. Myers is one of those.

I understand where they're all coming from. There really should be room in a corner of the tent for at least those theists who aspire to scientific respectability even if their synthesizing project is doomed to fail. You don't have to agree with them, endorse their faith, or even respect it, P.Z. But you should respect them. A fundamental respect for the humanity of our fellow human beings should not depend on their falling in lock-step with our respective worldviews. I learned that from my Dad.