Dembski, devout, faithful...and yet reasonable!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; ID guru William Dembski not
only gives every impression of being a nice guy but I think the implications of
his work deserve serious attention. However, like some of the other nice guys
I’ve mentioned in my blogs (see
here,
here
and
here)
Dembski has ended up getting the rough end of the deal. If my reading of the situation
is right then poor Dembski has fallen between two stools: It seems that the
respected Baylor Baptist University found him “too fundamentalist” whereas more
recently his ex-employer, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) in
Fort Worth, Texas found him not fundamentalist enough with the consequence that
Dembski has swung away from fundamentalism. (That’s not such a bad thing!). Wiki
has an item on
the Baylor
controversy, but the details of the later contention at SWBTS have only surfaced recently in
a post on Dembski’s blog entitled “
Disillusion
with Fundamentalism”. I would say that
Dembski is now as conservative an evangelical as I once was; but he is not a
liberal by any stretch of the imagination, although I would call him an
intelligent and reasonable evangelical. Below I quote from Dembski’s blog with
my comments interleaved.
But before I continue I must qualify my position on Dembski. Although I
believe his work should receive more attention, I would nevertheless not accept
the constructions that some of Dembski’s interpreters on the Christian right
have placed on his work. They (and perhaps even Dembski himself - although
see
here) have read a “
God of the Gaps”
meaning into Dembski’s conclusions probably as an outcome of their a priori
naturalism vs intelligence paradigm.
This is something I have argued against. (See
here
for example) and will continue to argue against in future articles. But that is
by the by. What I would like to focus on here is the oppressive fundamentalist atmosphere
from which Dembski eventually managed to extricate himself. To me Dembski’s
story has some similarities with that of
Raymond Franz, ex-Watchtower
(Jehovah’s Witnesses) governing body member who was disfellowshipped by the organisation
in 1981. (A story that can be read in Franz’s book “
Crisis of Conscience”)
The trouble at SWBTS started for Dembski after the publication of his
book The End of Christianity, which according
to Wiki:
…. argued that a Christian can
reconcile an old Earth creationist view with a literal reading of Adam and Eve
in the Bible by accepting the scientific consensus of a 4.5 billion year of
Earth.[43] He further argued that Noah's flood likely was a phenomenon limited
to the Middle East.[44]
In Dembski’s words:
My solution is to argue that the
Fall had retroactive effects in history (much as the salvation of Christ on the
Cross acts not only forward in time to save people now, but also backward in
time to save the Old Testament saints).
My Comment: I don’t accept the aggrandised cosmic status that the
fall of humanity has in evangelical theology. Briefly: If the serpent of
Genesis is to be linked with Satan in some way then it is possible to take this
as evidence of a fall prior to the fall of humanity. In fact in an article entitled “Who was the Serpent?” the fundamentalist ministry Creation Ministries International identifies the serpent as the
agent of Satan (See: http://creation.com/who-was-the-serpent)
and then goes on to talk about Satan’s fall (My emphasis):
[Satan] fell through pride (1
Timothy 3:6), and we deduce that this event must have been after the sixth day
of creation, when God ‘saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very
good ’ (Genesis 1:31), and before the
Fall of man, recorded in Genesis 3.
So here we have a fundamentalist ministry admitting some kind of
imperfection prior to the fall of man, but CMI rightly admits:
God has chosen not to tell us
very much about the origin and apostasy of Satan.
That is, we can’t draw comprehensive conclusions about cosmic
“imperfection” being exclusively down to the fall of man. It is also possible
that the presence of imperfection implicit in the serpent story is actually intrinsic
to the creation itself rather than being introduced at some point. After all, the propensity
for an agent, whether man or Satan, to fall is in itself suggestive of an
a priori performance
vulnerability. Moreover, Genesis 1 uses the word “good” as opposed to “perfect”,
a word
that
Denis Alexander says actually meant “
fit
for purpose” and therefore shouldn’t be confused with “perfection”. There
is also the ambiguous expression of the origin of cosmic weakness and vanity in
Romans 8:20-22. The upshot is that even on evangelical terms there
isn’t an obliging theological case for Dembski’s retroactive effects of the
fall; imperfection predates man.
Dembski says the following about his book:
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| Don't ask questions! |
The book is a piece of
speculative theology, and I’m not convinced of all of its details. It’s been interesting,
however, to see the reaction in some Christian circles, especially the
fundamentalist ones. Ken Ham went ballistic on it, going around the country
denouncing me as a heretic, and encouraging people to write to my theological
employers to see to it that I get fired for the views I take in it.
At one point in the book, I
examine what evolution would look like within the framework I lay out. Now, I’m
not an evolutionist. I don’t hold to universal common ancestry. I believe in a
real Adam and Eve (i.e., an original human pair) specially created by God apart
from primate ancestors. Friends used to joke that my conservativism, both
politically and theologically, put me to the right of Attila the Hun. And yet,
for merely running the logic of how a retroactive view of the Fall would look
from the vantage of Darwinian theory (which I don’t accept), I received email
after email calling me a compromiser and someone who has sold out the faith
(the emails are really quite remarkable).
My Comment: Here we can actually see evidence of just how
conservative Dembski’s evangelicalism actually is and yet the fundamentalist heretic
hunt started in earnest once his book had been published. Having had
first-hand experience of fundamentalism I could have told Dembski that he was
never going to put the nasty genie back in bottle unless he recanted. We all know about Ken Ham going into “
Hell
and Hamnation” mode and the only way to stop that is to concede the Divine
authority of Ham’s opinions. Contrast that with Dembski’s very admirable self-critical
attitude: Viz: “
The book is a piece of
speculative theology and I’m not convinced of all of its details” Excellent!
Notice also that fundamentalists just didn’t understand Dembski’s very
intellectual approach of studied detachment: He was able to work through and explore the logic
of a case he was not necessarily committed to. But Fundamentalism in its
intellectual bankruptcy just doesn’t allow this kind of exploratory detached intellectual inquiry. Not surprisingly Dembski has turned against
fundamentalism and goes on to condemn fundamentalism as follows (My emphases):
There’s a mentality I see
prevalent in conservative Christian circles that one can never be quite
conservative enough. This got me thinking about fundamentalism and the bane it
is. It’s one thing to hold views passionately. It’s another to hold one
particular view so dogmatically that all others may not even be discussed, or
their logical consequences considered. This worries me about the future of
evangelicalism.
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| Don't think! |
My Comment: Strong fighting talk! Although I’m not an evangelical
I do have a lot in common with the kind of intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, self-critical
evangelicalism that Dembski represents.
What’s behind this is a sense of
beleaguerment by the wider [fundamentalist] culture and a desire for simple,
neat, pat solutions. Life is messy and the Bible is not a book of systematic
theology, but to the fundamentalist mentality, this is unacceptable…… The
reaction of fundamentalists was to me surprising, though in hindsight I
probably should have expected it.
My Comment: Yes, Dembski should have expected it
especially as it ought to be clear that the simple, neat, pat solutions offered
by fundamentalists constitute their fearful over-reaction to the epistemic
insecurity inherent in life’s messiness. I have worried this very question many
times:
and so on….
Why was it surprising to me? I
suppose because during my time at Princeton and Baylor, I myself was always
characterized as a fundamentalist. “Fundamentalist” is typically a term of
abuse….. But I intend fundamentalism here in a very particular sense.
My Comment: This is a reference to Dembski’s Baylor days
when he was viewed as too fundamentalist. On what Dembski now understands by “fundamentalist”
he says (My emphases):
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| Be unreasonable! |
Fundamentalism, as I’m using it,
is not concerned with any doctrinal position, however conservative or
traditional. What’s at stake is a harsh, wooden-headed attitude that not only
involves knowing one is right, but refuses to listen to, learn from, or
understand other Christians, to say nothing of outsiders to the faith.
Fundamentalism in this sense is a brain-dead, soul-stifling attitude. I see it
as a huge danger for evangelicals.
My Comment: You mean Bill you've only recently noticed that? Now that’s what I call a very strong definition of
fundamentalism! It's a sign that Dembski was well and truly put through the wood
chipper
as fundie Mark Driscoll would say! But if that’s Christianity in action who wants it! Yes, it's a huge danger
for all Christians. As I have said before, fundamentalism is one part doctrine and two parts attitude;
something of that attitude comes out in what Dembski describes above and I interpret
this attitude as
a fearful
paranoiac reaction against epistemic insecurity; the result is that Fundamentalists do not draw with light impressionistic lines, but with deep heavy bold black outlines that detract from the whole for the sake of the individual black and white demarcations that are so important to fundies for their certainty and in their heretic hunting.
For a concrete example of
fundamentalism at its worst, consider how hyper-conservatives, pushing a
jaundiced view of biblical inerrancy, have treated my good friend, colleague,
and collaborator Mike Licona (we coedited a book titled Evidence for God: 50
Arguments for Faith from the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Science). Even
though he holds to the entirely traditional view that Jesus resurrected bodily
from the dead and is by any accounts conservative in his understanding of the
New Testament’s historical reliability, he isn’t quite conservative enough for
the hyper-conservatives…… In consequence, Licona has been ostracized by
much of the seminary world in which I used to teach and lecture.
My Comment: You
bet! Raymond Franz could no doubt tell us a similar story. Like Franz Dembski had to leave the
fundamentalist institution that was so oppressive of his courageous search for
truth:
Indeed, this entire incident left
so bad a taste in my mouth that I resolved to leave teaching, leave the
academy, and get into a business for myself, in which my income would not
depend on political correctness or, for that matter, theological correctness.
Sometimes I marvel at my own
naiveté. I wrote The End of Christianity thinking that it might be a way to
move young-earth creationists from their position that the earth and universe
are only a few thousand years old by addressing the first objection that they
invariably throw at an old-earth position, namely, the problem of natural evil
before the Fall. I thought that by proposing my retroactive view of the Fall,
that I was addressing their concern and thus that I might see some positive
movement toward my old-earth position.
Boy, was I ever wrong……..
Again,
we’re talking the fundamentalist impulse to simple, neat, pat answer
In any case, after the review of
Tom Nettles [apparently a very
condemning review - ed] appeared, I
sensed a seismic shift against me at Southwestern Seminary where I was
teaching. Previously I had been a golden boy, with my visage even being used to
advertise the seminary in publications such as World Magazine. Now, however,
fellow faculty showed a solicitude for me that I had not seen before, as though
I might be facing the gallows.
My Comment: The gallows? How about the heretic’s pyre? Poor
Dembski! Just like Franz he thought his sweet reasonableness might be catching and reciprocated. Big, big mistake and a big, big shock! Unfortunately for Dembski the cards were
stacked against him and the fundamentalists had him over a barrel as we see below. The
following is also reminiscent of Raymond Franz except that Dembski 's vulnerable circumstances were such that he was forced to fudge it:
I was to meet in the president’s office, and
those present would include the president, the provost, the dean of theology,
and one of the senior professors. I knew that I was not up for the Nobel Prize
or any honor that might warrant a meeting with such an august assembly. And so,
with a keen sense for the obvious, I concluded that I was in a heap of trouble.
Indeed, I was.
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| Therefore support your local gun dealer! |
….At the meeting with president,
provost, dean, and senior professor, the president made it clear to me from the
start that my job was on the line. “Job on the line” in this context does not
mean finishing out the academic year and giving me a chance to find another
academic job. My questioning the universality of Noah’s flood meant I was a
heretic, or at least not suitable for teaching at Southern Baptist seminaries,
and thus I’d need to be clearing my desk immediately—unless my theological
soundness could be quickly reestablished.
With a severely autistic son,
debts, and a family still upset about my experience at Baylor, I wasn’t about
to bare my soul and tell this second star chamber (my first being Baylor’s
External Review Committee) what I really thought. I therefore finessed it. You
can read the statement I wrote for yourself, especially paragraph three, where
I said just enough to keep my job, and just enough to give me room to recant,
as I’m doing here.
If I had been feeling less
vulnerable, if I had independent financial means, I would have said goodbye to
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary right then and there. This is one of
the things I find most destructive about fundamentalism, the constant threat
that at any moment one can run afoul of the orthodoxy du jour, and be thrown
under the bus because that’s the proper place for heretics.
This is a deeply unhealthy
situation for theological education, leading to a slavish mentality among
faculty, who must constantly monitor and censor themselves if they are to stay
in the good graces of the fundamentalist power structures.
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| Blessed are the peace makers? |
Upton Sinclair once remarked, “It
is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon
his not understanding it.” In my own case, I would amend this to, “It is
difficult to get a man to admit his actual beliefs when his salary depends on
not admitting them.”
I was always up front with
Southwestern Seminary about my old-earth views. But over time it became clear
that I was increasingly in the minority and that the young-earth position was
the safer one to assume. But over time it became clear that I was
increasingly in the minority and that the young-earth position was the safer
one to assume. Ironically, I had not misrepresented my views on Noah’s flood
when I was hired at Southwestern Seminary—it simply didn’t come up. Indeed, the
Baptist Faith & Message 2000, to which I had to subscribe, makes no mention
of Noah’s flood, nor was I ever asked about it during my job interview and
hiring process.
My Comment: To have the control of one’s income in the
hands the enemies of free thought is an unenviable position to be in to say the
least. Yes, it is deeply, deeply unhealthy for many reasons not least to
intellectual life. This is the stale dank putrid air of fundamentalist
oppression and one of the precursors of cultism. Ironically it was the anti-ID biologist Andrea
Bottaro on Panda’s thumb who, according to Dembski, saw through the charade of
an apparent recantation by Dembki of his “heretical views” on Noah – it seems
that the "Star Chamber" managed to intimidate Dembski into some kind of recantation. Dembski’s blog quotes
Bottaro as follows (My emphases):
Dembski said he is an
inerrantist, not a literalist. I am not really up to speed with fundie
systematics, but I think that is a fairly significant difference (to them, at
least).
Also, I am pretty sure Dembski
had to be an inerrantist (or profess to be) in order to be hired to teach in
any Baptist seminary, so I think the big news, if any, is basically that
Dembski explicitly stated that at this time he actually believes in Noah’s ark
myth as it is described in the Bible. It’s a silly belief, and his groveling for forgiveness should be
brought up any time the IDists whine about academic freedom, but it still
doesn’t make him a YEC [= young-earth creationism, WmAD].
Dembski’s book (reportedly—I have
not read it) states that he believes that the evidence for an old earth is
strong and that this evidence is compatible with an inerrantist interpretation
of Genesis. Although he oh-hums on the topic in his recantation [i.e., my four
paragraphs in the White Paper, WmAD], he has not recanted it, and that alone
rules him out as a YEC. In fact, strictly speaking his current recantation also
leaves him open to later recant the recantation itself, because what he
actually says says is that the Bible “**seem[s]** clearly to teach” the
historicity of the flood myth, pending his “exegetical, historical and
theological” (and pointedly, not “scientific”) work on the topic.
My Comment: To me all this conjures up a picture not dissimilar
to that of Galileo who recanted under duress.
Dembski continues:
As much as I hate to admit it,
Bottaro got it exactly right. I would still regard myself as an inerrantist,
but an inerrancy in what the Bible actually teaches, not an inerrancy in what a
reflexive literalism would demand of the Bible. Have I, as Bottaro suggests,
left myself open to recanting the recantation? I have. Without the threat of
losing my job, I see Noah’s flood as a story with a theological purpose based
on the historical occurrence of a local flood in the ancient Near East.
To date, I have not done the
exegetical, historical, and theological work that I said I needed to do if I
were weighing in on this topic again. But I’m not weighing in on this topic as
a theologian or exegete or historian intent on making a rigorous argument.
Having left seminary teaching for good, I’m now a private citizen entitled to my
opinion.
My Comment: As a private
citizen Dembski doesn’t have to tow the line. He can now breathe the fresh air
of academic freedom, freedom from the fancied divine authority of opinions that
were in control his income. But I don’t think this is the last we will hear of
William Dembski; at least I hope not. Now that he is free of fundamentalist bullies his
work may have a renascence.
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| Yes, very right wing. |
Summing Up: What an indictment this affair is on
evangelico-fundamentalist educational institutions! It is in fact an all too
human story of religious prejudice. But it’s happened before. When I moved into Christianity the message of
Grace, forgiveness, repentance and new life seemed like something from another
world and it still does; for humans who instinctively think that merit with God is earned it is a very alien message and they resist taking it on board, especially fundamentalists. Fundamentalists of all flavours find it difficult to imagine
that this free gift of salvation is available to those who don’t follow the specifics of
their particular brand of spirituality. They just don’t get it. To them the elaborations
of the faith are all important non-optionals and one’s faith is suspect if one
doesn’t swallow whole and digest slowly all those non-optionals. See for example my own brush with
fundamentalist
Nigel Wright who ends his conversation with me quite sure that I need
converting - to his views of course.
All told I’m reminded of my visit
to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem which I recount
here.
In that essay I quote journalist H. V. Morton who wrote of his own visit to the
church as follows:
The church gives an overwhelming impression of darkness and decay. ...
the decay everywhere of stone, wood and iron was fantastic. I saw canvases,
still framed, that were bleached white; the last fragments of paint had peeled
off, but they were still in position. There were ominous cracks and fissures in
stone and marble. I thought how odd that extreme devotion can have exactly the
same effect as extreme neglect. The church of the Holy Sepulchre wears its air
of shabby decay for the simple reason that re-hanging a picture, the repair of
a stone, and even a window assume such gigantic importance in the eyes of the
communities that they provoke a situation capable of indefinite postponement.
The first impression of the
church is of a series of treasure caves. It is unlike the most ornate Roman
Catholic church in Italy or Spain. Its richness and flamboyance are those of
the orient. It is as though the spoils of Asia minor, of Russia, and of Greece,
accumulating for centuries have been heaped in candle-light on the overburdened
altars. Art and vulgarity stand side by side; A priceless chalice, the gift of
an emperor, stands next to something tawdry and tinselly, that might have been
pulled from a Christmas tree.
....Calvary, the holiest place on Earth. I
looked round hoping to be able to detect some sign of its former aspect, but
that has been obliterated for ever beneath the suffocation trappings of
piety... I went away wishing that we might have known this place only in our
hearts. (from H. V. Morton's "In
the Steps of the Master")
Darkness and an air of shabby decay, extreme devotion, art and vulgarity
side by side, tawdry and tinselly elaborations and above all the suffocating trappings
of piety – I have found Morton’s passage the perfect metaphor for Christian fundamentalist
piety. Like Morton I wish I had only
known Cavalry in my heart and had never met the domineering and sometimes
downright tyrannical Christian fundamentalists!
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| The Cultural Logic of Late Fundamentalism |
Postscript: 20 June
I've said something like the following many times before, especially on my VNP blog: Fundamentalists believe that in the Bible they have an unequivocal unambiguous revelation about endless doctrinal minutia. They believe that through this "direct" revelation they have managed to all but bypass epistemic uncertainty, ambiguity and the fallibility of human inference. The hardened fundamentalist consequently closely identifies his opinions with God's opinions and vice versa.
Given this foundational epistemic the grim logic of the heresy hunt then quickly asserts itself: Because in their view revelation is received manifestly correctly and unquestioningly intuitively it follows that dissenters, whether they be liberals, moderate evangelicals like Dembski or one of the many other diverse fundamentalist groups (in fact especially other fundamentalists), they are all likely to be viewed by fundies as guilty willful heretics with a bad conscience. Hence, acrimonious rows very easily break out, especially between fundamentalists themselves where there is a lack of compliance on both sides. It is this logic of heresy which is probably at the bottom of Dembski's discomfiture: Because in the fundamentalist estimation he is likely to be seen as a willful heretic with a bad conscience then the protestant equivalent of excommunication (i.e. disfellowshipment) is a logical outcome, and in the fundamentalist's judgement entirely justified.
Human
beings, all human beings, have strong tribal proclivities, often closely linked
to their religion and these proclivities sleep a restless sleep in the wings.
They are easily awakened and especially so by failure to identify, a sense of
suspicion, distrust, paranoia and fear. After awakening they shuffle on the
scene ready to embrace decisive human leadership; after all, a leadership with
a real face is far more appealing than a faceless bureaucracy even though that
real face may hold some highly authoritarian and oppressive values. There is,
therefore, a significant minority of Brexitors who are no friend of democracy, progress or the freemarket; they prefer the fundamentalist language of authority and utter
certainty. It is no surprise that Donald Trump in the US and Katie Hopkins in
the UK, with their subliminal fascism, are Brexit sympathisers.
