Part III: Christianity and Science

8 - Christianity and Reason: The Theological Roots of Science

"The way to see by faith," Benjamin Franklin said, "is to shut the eye of reason" [1]. This sentiment is also heard from the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:7, where he declares, "we walk by faith, not by sight." According to Dinesh D'Souza, however, these men are simply wrong. Christianity, he argues, was based on reason from the very beginning (p. 84). How does he figure this? D'Souza claims that Christianity is about creed and theologians are charged with using reason to understand the things of god. Although this is fairly true for the medieval era, where D'Souza derives his two examples from, it's not clear that Christianity was always that way (it certainly hasn't stayed that way). A look at the earliest accessible accounts of Christian doctrine - those in the New Testament - shows us a different picture.

Christianity has never been about reason. Human modes of thinking are discouraged in scripture, and only thoughts that conform to the narrow box of faith are tolerable (2 Corinthians 10:5). Reason is based on experience that includes our five senses, but we see such things frequently derided in the bible, as in Paul's declaration of walking by faith instead of sight, the warning to "lean not on your own understanding" in Proverbs 3:5, and many other passages that stress strict and blind obedience to god in place of human reason. Paul admits that the ways of Christianity are considered "foolishness" by the rest of the world, because they are discerned spiritually, not by reason (1 Corinthians 2:14-15). Would the ancient Greeks or Romans have really found it so foolish if Christians were advocating faith tempered by reason? The beliefs of the Greeks and Romans were exactly that! What they found foolish was the Christian encouragement to abandon reason and trust solely in one god.

At several points in chapter eight, D'Souza makes demonstrably ridiculous claims about Christianity's uniqueness among other religions. There are "no theologians in Hinduism and Buddhism," he states (p. 84). In fact, Hinduism has a long-standing tradition of theologians going back to the medieval ages and before, with figures like Ramanuja Acharya, Adi Shankara, and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, who each contributed varying ideas about the nature of the Hindu deities, the relationship of the human and the divine, and other markedly theological concepts. Buddhism, as a non-theistic religion, doesn't really have a "theos," or god, on which to structure a theology, but some Buddhist scholars have nonetheless argued for a Buddhist theology. What D'Souza aims to get at, though, is the uniqueness of Christian theology in its use of reason.

To make his case, our author calls upon the medieval Christian theologians Anselm and Aquinas. Aquinas' cosmological argument is used as one example of reason within Christianity. The cosmological argument postulates that every thing which exists has a cause, that nothing can be its own cause, that there cannot be an infinite chain of causes, and that the universe must therefore have a first uncaused cause. D'Souza briefly mentions one objection of the New Atheists: that god should not be exempt from requiring a cause. Dinesh attempts to knock down this rebuttal by saying that Aquinas' argument only applies to things that exist "in the universe" (p. 86), and because god exists outside of the universe, there is no need for god to have a cause.

There are two significant problems with D'Souza's response. First of all, a "cause" that exists outside of the universe, and thus outside of time, cannot be the cause of anything in any sense. Causality is rooted in time, because cause and effect are both events. If Aquinas' argument truly applies only to what exists in this universe, then it can't possibly get us to where it intends. D'Souza uses the example of an author who "causes" some crisis among his characters in the fictional world of his making. Contrasting this to god, it is argued that god is like the author - a cause on a "different level." But is the author of a story really causing discord among his characters? There is no event that I bring into being when I say that Jane slapped Michael. Rather, you understand this relationship of causality based on the words I use and their analogy to what we experience in the real world. The cause is illusory; only the words exist.

The second problem is with the contention that something cannot cause itself to exist. At the subatomic level, virtual particles can pop in and out of existence. Though some have questioned such bizarre science, there are observable effects to virtual particles, and their properties and consequences are well understood in quantum mechanics [2]. More importantly, however, is the issue this sets up for an eternal god. If something can't cause itself to exist, how does god exist? D'Souza has already ruled out the suggestion that something else might be the cause of god. What's the alternative, except that god causes himself? But once again we're left with the incoherency of a cause that is outside of time.

Moving on, D'Souza brings up Anselm's ontological argument for god. According to the argument, we can imagine a being that is greater than anything else. Because it would be greater for this being to exist both in reality and the mind than only in the mind, it must be that this greatest imaginable being really exists, and it is god. I cover this claim more in-depth in my article on The Ontological Argument, so I will not focus on it much here. But I do want to point out one extremely presumptuous statement made by D'Souza. "[E]ven an atheist," he says, "should have no problem" with Anselm's idea of god as the greatest conceivable being (p. 87). Hang on there, D-Pain! I certainly do have a problem with Anselm's definition of god, because it's not clear that any of us actually understand what the greatest conceivable being means.

A monk named Gaunilo, who lived in Anselm's time, pointed out that understanding the concept of a perfect lost island would not mean the lost island must exist. Gaunilo also questioned our ability to understand such a perfect island, because even though we might think of an island with many riches, an abundance of food, and so forth, how do we know that what we're thinking of is the most perfect island conceivable? And what if different people conceive of different degrees of perfection? Which person's conception is closer to the truth? Interestingly, D'Souza does mention Gaunilo, but neglects to include any summary of his perfect island analogy. I wonder why that might be.

Dinesh begins and ends the chapter with remarks about the uniqueness of Christianity in terms of science and reason. Science, "as an organized, sustained enterprise," he explains, "arose only once in human history," in medieval Christian Europe (p. 83). Note how D'Souza qualifies what is meant by "science." It's not just the scientific method or the study of the natural world, but the "organized, sustained enterprise" of science. This is because D'Souza knows that Christians were definitely not the pioneers of science in those respects. He has to define science as a massive, collaborative effort in order to implicate Christianity as its origin. I would argue that this is quite irrelevant, though, because, once the foundations are laid, growth relies on little more than luck, persistence, and climate. If we should praise Christianity for promoting science into the widespread discipline it is today, then we ought to also praise the Roman Empire for promoting Christianity into the widespread belief it is today. Let's see D'Souza advocate that!

For the final comment on this chapter, I want to address the assertion that reason and science are predominantly Christian. The heroes of medieval Christian Europe exalted by D'Souza were beat to the punch in many ways by Islamic thinkers. The 10th century Muslim scientist Alhazen experimented with optics and published a seven-volume work on the subject long before Newton. Avicenna, another 10th/11th century Muslim, wrote a cosmological argument for god that is strikingly similar to Aquinas', but pre-dates his by a century or two. Some have also argued that it was the culture of Islamic Spain that gave Christian Europe its foundations for achievement after the Catholic Church finally reclaimed Spain [3]. The Islamic Golden Age was itself fueled by the works of ancient Greeks like Aristotle and Plato. In short, Christianity's progress was only one further step in a line of reason and science descending back several centuries, through different religions and cultures.

9 - From Logos to Cosmos: Christianity and the Invention of Invention

Chapter nine is another laundry list of noteworthy Christians, this one made up of men who contributed major scientific discoveries. D'Souza asks where modern science would be without the likes of Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and others (p. 97). As with his musings about Christian art, there's just no way of telling what might have happened without Christianity. Perhaps those men would have found some other source of inspiration? Perhaps we would have made those discoveries sooner, without the Catholic Church to impede controversial studies? We can speculate all we wish, but we cannot simply assume that modern science would have slowed to a halt, or even a crawl, if Christianity had never existed. Many of Isaac Newton's contributions to chemistry were the result of his interest in alchemy. Does that mean that without alchemy we would have no modern chemistry? Does it mean we should revere alchemy, as D'Souza expects for Christianity? Who knows what other institution(s) could have arisen to promote science?

The only other claim worth addressing in chapter nine is the accusation of faith in a rational universe that is said to be at the heart of science (p. 91-92). D'Souza argues that the orderliness and sensibility of the universe is unprovable. This strikes me almost as a weird subset of solipsism. Though we are capable of observation, testing theories, making successful predictions, and other means of establishing coherent and largely reasonable explanations within science, D'Souza wants us to suppose that the scientific method and our experience might be illusory. Why? Just so that he can find something in science to label as faith, allowing him to flaunt it to the New Atheists, who rely so greatly on science in their criticisms of religion.

Science is about finding the most reliable way to study the world around us. The best method for investigating the natural realm in an objective manner is reason. Nothing else has come close. Supernatural explanations have succumbed to reason time and time again. When we interact with and study the world, we find that it responds in a rational way. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Continued observation has found this to be true - we have not seen an action with no reaction. If the universe were irrational, we might expect it to be unpredictable, incomprehensible, and unstructured. Yet this is not what we find. When we say the universe is rational, all we mean is that it appears to be directed by laws which are understandable to us. These laws are not prescriptive, like rules or commands, but they are descriptive - they are observed and interpreted by us.

Certainly our observations and interpretations can be inaccurate, and it may one day turn out that the universe is a lot less rational than we suppose. But until something overthrows this theory, reason is currently the best way of understanding the world around us. It is not an article of faith, since it is supported by experience and evidence. Until an argument is presented for why these are not reliable means for assessing the rationality of our universe, D'Souza's assertion is baseless.

On the other hand, Dinesh's universe is arguably not a rational one. His world is populated by invisible and immaterial beings that are somehow capable of affecting material reality. At certain moments in history, a being outside of our universe has reached into ours, disrupted the rational laws of the cosmos, and performed wild, unnatural effects that have no cause (remember that causality doesn't exist outside time). These uncaused effects are called miracles, and among them are such things as raising the dead to life and stopping the sun in the sky. D'Souza's view of the universe is not as rational as he'd like to think, because if the orderly function of the natural laws can be interrupted at any time by miracles, then the universe is truly unpredictable and can become unstructured in those moments. A space-time universe where timeless immaterial beings can pass through is also incomprehensible, it could be claimed. A world that features divine intervention is not a rational world.

10 - An Atheist Fable: Reopening the Galileo Case

Have you heard the story about the Catholic Church persecuting Galileo for his crazy theory that the earth orbits the sun? If you have, Dinesh D'Souza is going to set you straight on the 'real scoop' that you may not have heard. In chapter ten, we get a defense of the Catholic Church's treatment of Galileo. Yes, you read that right. D'Souza strives to dissolve the "myth" of a conflict between science and religion by exposing what really happened with the Galileo affair. Some of the things pointed out are correct, such as the fact that Galileo was never actually tortured, and that he never whispered under his breath, "Yet it moves," after being made to recant. These myths are debunked by practically all serious scholars on the subject. D'Souza still manages to recast the story in a way that is not entirely accurate, however.

For context, let's talk about Galileo. In Galileo's time there were two competing astronomical models: geocentrism and heliocentrism. Geocentrism was the view that the earth is stationary and orbited by the sun. This view had held sway over most of the world for centuries, and was initially proposed by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Heliocentrism argues that the sun is the stationary body, orbited by the earth and the other planets in our solar system. Copernicus had advanced this view with the publication of a book in 1543, and when Galileo's improvements to the telescope gave him new observations of the cosmos, he rallied behind the Copernican theory. As heliocentrism began to acquire support, the Roman Inquisition decided to investigate the two models in 1615.

When the Inquisition received reports of Galileo's involvement, Cardinal Bellarmine ordered him not to hold or defend the heliocentric position, and issued a certificate signed by the cardinal himself, explaining the agreement and exonerating Galileo of slander [4]. The certificate states in no uncertain terms that heliocentrism "is contrary to Holy Scripture and therefore cannot be defended or held." For several years, Galileo respected the cardinal's order, until Pope Urban VIII ascended to the papacy. Before his election, the new pope had been a champion of Galileo's work, and so Galileo felt the time was right to publish his argument in 1632. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was authorized by the Inquisition and the papacy, with Pope Urban VIII requesting a balanced presentation of both astronomical models, and also for his own opinion to be included.

Galileo honored the pope's request for his opinion to be in the book, but did so in a discrete way. The dialogue of the text occurs between a heliocentrist figure, obviously modeled after Galileo, and a geocentrist critic named Simplicio, through whom the views of Pope Urban are espoused. D'Souza notes that Simplicio means "simpleton" in Italian, and the character seems to be portrayed as a fool in some of his questions and statements. However, what we are not told in D'Souza's account is that Galileo himself explained in the preface of his book that Simplicio was modeled after Simplicius, a famous Aristotelian philosopher who advocated geocentrism. In fact, most historians believe this was Galileo's true intent, that he was not arrogantly trying to embarrass the pope [5], as D'Souza implies.

At the ripe old age of 70, Galileo was tried by the Inquisition and forced to recant his theory, under extensive interrogation and threat of torture [6]. D'Souza agrees that the church should not have tried Galileo, but still seems willing to defend them. The factual inaccuracies in the Dialogue, the controversy with Simplicio and the pope, and the inclusion of Galileo's opinions on scripture all testified against him, according to D'Souza (p. 108-109). Of course, these are no moral grounds for threatening someone into recanting their beliefs. D'Souza's urge to downplay the role of religion in Galileo's trial should tell us something about his agenda in What's So Great About Christianity. While he attempts to disspell some imaginary atheist propaganda version of the tale, he offers a relatively whitewashed Christian version. But who was it that outlawed the belief in heliocentrism on scriptural grounds, and banned Galileo's book until 1758?

Part IV: The Argument from Design

11 - A Universe with a Beginning: God and the Astronomers

For the next four chapters, D'Souza struggles to take on the argument from design. He begins boldly in chapter eleven, declaring his intentions to accept the challenge of E.O. Wilson, who said: "If any positive evidence could be found of a supernatural guiding force... it would be one of the greatest discoveries of all time" (p. 115-116). This statement will be an important one as we look at the trail of premises with which D'Souza attempts to justify his predetermined conclusion. First among them is the suggestion that the Big Bang theory implies a beginning to the universe. Confirmed by general relativity, by Edwin Hubble's famous observations, and by the presence of cosmic microwave background radiation, the Big Bang theory proposes that the universe expanded from an infinitely dense point, called a singularity, around 13.7 billion years ago. According to our author, this event was the beginning of the universe.

Now, D'Souza cannot take all the blame for the wrongfulness of this idea, because he does offer the statements of several scientists who also speak of the Big Bang as the origin, or beginning, of the universe. Unfortunately, scientists are not always clear in explaining advanced concepts, and they have been known to wax poetic on several occasions, including the misleadingly named "Mitochondrial Eve." Yet D'Souza can be held accountable for failing to do his research, and he leaves out a significant part of modern Big Bang cosmology from his discussion of it.

When we trace back the expansion of space-time in the Big Bang, there is a point at which the universe is so small that general relativity is no longer useful in explaining things. Even by 1977, physicists had known of this problem, as Robert M. Wald explains:

In other words, we still don't know if the universe has a beginning or not. We can get back to a moment in time where things were extremely, incredibly small, but we can't yet say for sure what is beyond that time. Some have speculated that, once we are able to merge quantum mechanics and general relativity into a theory of quantum gravity, we will find a first point in time. Others have suggested that the singularity itself might be the result of some quantum mechanical effect, that time may be infinite after all. A third option would, of course, be that there is some entirely new explanation that is currently unknown to us. The main point here is that D'Souza is wrong to say that a beginning of the universe has been scientifically demonstrated.

However, even if we proceed with D'Souza's assertion, purely for the sake of argument, we can still see that he makes many hasty claims. One of these is that, "If you accept that everything that has a beginning has a cause, then the material universe had a nonmaterial or spiritual cause" (p. 116). Nonmaterial things are conflated with spiritual things, but the two are not the same. Ideas and emotions are nonmaterial, because they are not physical objects, and yet I think D'Souza would agree with me that socialism is not a spiritual thing, nor is sadness spiritual in itself. He might well believe that socialism and sadness can have a spiritual cause behind them, but this just goes to show that there is a distinct difference between what is nonmaterial and what is considered spiritual. The notion that something may have an immaterial cause does not mean that the cause is also spiritual.

This leads to a great point about the problem of defining the spiritual and supernatural. D'Souza supposes that "supernatural" merely means nonnatural, as in anything that is outside the natural universe (p. 126). What is a supernatural agent that acts in the natural world then? Does an angel or demon become a natural being by entering the material plane? How else could it interact with our realm? Monists believe that the supernatural, rather than being nonnatural, is another part of nature that is just not understood by methods like science and philosophy. The implication that anything outside nature is supernatural by fiat is a highly suspect one, and the understanding of spiritual is even worse, as it varies widely from person to person. If D'Souza wishes to claim that a "cause" outside our universe is supernatural in the way he has defined it, I won't stop him. By these loose standards, some immaterial quantum weirdness could be the cause - something quite the opposite of D'Souza's personal god. Of course, there still remains the difficulty in understanding how causality can exist outside of time, and for this paradox our author has offered no solution whatsoever.

D'Souza makes a few additional statements in chapter eleven that are worth critiquing. The bible, he alleges, is "unique among the documents of ancient history in positing an absolute beginning" (p. 122). Once again, Dinesh appears to have little to no knowledge of other religions. Creation out of nothing is positing an absolute beginning to the universe, and many religions of antiquity, like the Egyptians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and some animistic Eastern groups, all had such creation accounts [8]. D'Souza's belief that the bible speaks of six day "periods" in its creation account (p. 122) is not supported by the facts. The Hebrew word for "day" in the Genesis creation story is yovm, and although some liberal theologians have argued that the word can mean "age" or "years," not just a literal 24-hour timespan, the instances of these alternate usages are reliant on derivative words (i.e. yamim or baiyamim), not simply yovm, as it is found in the Genesis account. D'Souza's invocation of 2 Peter 3:8 is also arguably irrelevant, since it refers more specifically to how god experiences time, not how he represents it to his people in scripture.

To add one last criticism, our author claims that when god creates the light before the sun in Genesis, what we have is not actually a mistake, but a report about the "explosion of light" that was the Big Bang (p. 123). This sort of wishful thinking doesn't really demonstrate anything about the intent of passages like Genesis 1:3. All it demonstrates is a deep-seated desire to find amazing and miraculous confirmation of one's faith in the bible. D'Souza says he accepts that the bible is not a science textbook (p. 124), but he simultaneously asks us to believe that it contains accurate scientific information written in by bronze age nomads, and only recently discovered by humanity in the last century or two. The sole argument he offers for this is similarity; light comes first in Genesis, light came first with the Big Bang. Once more, D'Souza fails to understand that apparent similarity is an insufficient basis to rest a conclusion on.

12 - A Designer Planet: Man's Special Place in Creation

Chapter twelve invokes the anthropic principle to argue for the evidence of design in the universe. The anthropic principle is a philosophical statement about how observations of the universe are compatible with the conscious beings that observe it. D'Souza takes this principle to mean that the "entire universe with all its laws appears to be a conspiracy to produce, well, us" (p. 129). This is only one interpretation, however, and it's not even the most common one. To see the other side of the coin, let's turn to Douglas Adams:

As Adams explains, it is not that the universe is tailor-made to fit us, but rather that we are tailor-made to fit the universe. The puddle of water ignores the more likely alternative that it formed according to the specifications of the hole, and D'Souza and other design advocates ignore the fact that the universe's conditions are what formed us. None of the examples used about the habitable zone, the strength of gravity, or other fine-tuning parameters (as they're sometimes called) even need to be discussed, because D'Souza has reversed the implications of the anthropic principle completely back-asswards.

Dinesh mischaracterizes this position as "luck"; all the fine-tuning parameters just happened to be what they are. But this is an extremely dishonest portrait of the alternative, and our author knows it. D'Souza is well aware that the New Atheists think evolution accounts for much of the appearance of adaptation in our world. It is not blind chance that steered the development of human beings, but a process of natural selection aimed at assisting in survival. D'Souza forgets that most of our own planet is uninhabitable, covered by water and ice. If we were to venture into many parts of the world without the technologies we've created to adapt to certain environments, we would die in a short time. Outside of this little planet, the chance of surviving without technology is zero. Does it really seem like the universe is fit to our existence, or that we're fit to the universe in only one small portion of one small planet within the grand scope of things?

It took no less than nine billion years in the history of the universe before the earth was formed. Our emergence on the scene is a tiny fraction of the 4.5 billion years the earth has been around for. If a grand designer was behind the creation of the universe, and his primary focus on creating it was for us to exist in it, then why wait so unimaginably long? The universe was in no hurry to bring us into being. D'Souza wants to pretend that the conditions that eventually developed and allowed for our formation somehow point to a benevolent designer that's looking out for humanity. But in reality, we are the only ones who have ever kept a vigilant eye. Now that we live in luxury with our air conditioning, medicine, and cars, thanks to untold millennia of toil and suffering on the part of our ancestors, we look around and arrogantly proclaim that it's all been made for us? So much for Christian humility.

13 - Paley was Right: Evolution and the Argument from Design

If you found Dinesh D'Souza lying down in the middle of a forest, would you think that nature made the D'Souza, or that an intelligent designer had designed and placed him there? Personally, I would assume that D'Souza grew from the weeds in the forest, fashioned by evolution into some bizzare plant monster like we read of in science fiction. In case you couldn't guess, the watchmaker argument of William Paley is the subject of chapter thirteen. The argument, put briefly, supposes that if we find a watch in a forest, we will recognize it as the product of design, based on the complexity and order evident in the watch. D'Souza only addresses one objection: that evolution makes the design argument superfluous.

First of all, I have to commend our author for a change, because he offers a relatively decent explanation of the evidence for evolution, and also contends that evolution does not have to be incompatible with religion. However, D'Souza draws a distinction between evolution and "Darwinism," the latter of which he defines as "a metaphysical stance and political ideology" (p. 152). In support of the distinction, he quotes a number of biologists on the subject of evolution's implications about religion (p. 142). To be sure, there are many who believe that evolution and religion are incompatible, but does that really constitute a metaphysical and political ideology, as D'Souza suggests? Creationists believe the two are incompatible, often for some of the same reasons that "Darwinists" do. While there may be individuals who are ideologically driven on both sides of the debate, D'Souza's concept of Darwinism is vague and undemonstrated.

As one example, consider the 'limits' delineated for evolution. Darwin's theory cannot explain the origin of life, the origin of the first cell, consciousness, or rationality, D'Souza claims (p. 147-149). "Any theory that cannot account for these landmark stages," he says, "can hardly claim to have solved the problem of origins, either of life or of the universe" (p. 150). According to Dinesh, this is where the New Atheists make their unwarranted assumptions and expose their Darwinistic ideology. The problem is, however, only in D'Souza's mind, because evolution does not need to account for these things. Evolution is a theory on the diversity of life, and questions about the origins of life and the universe are handled by another theory called abiogenesis. That evolution may not currently have an absolute understanding of consciousness or rationality is hardly relevant either, since one can conceive of many possibilities for how they aid in our survival.

D'Souza says he's not posing a "God of the gaps" fallacy, but that he wants to avoid "atheism of the gaps," which he explains as the belief that a natural explanation for an unknown phenomenon is forthcoming (p. 150). This mock retort is so full of absurdity that I don't quite know where to begin. I guess for starters I can point out that ANY religious believer can believe that a natural explanation will eventually be found for consciousness. If human beings could have evolved from ancestral apes and still be considered part of god's plan, why can't we have evolved consciousness and still be considered part of god's plan? The fact that a theist could accept the likelihood of a natural explanation eviscerates D'Souza's unimaginative wordplay of "atheism of the gaps." Now for a lesson on why god-of-the-gaps arguments are a fallacy.

The god-of-the-gaps argument is a form of the argument from ignorance - it points to some current gap in our understanding of the natural world and then declares that "god did it" must be the explanation. The flaw is not with venturing to speculate, but with making an unwarranted assumption. Atheists who believe that some unexplained phenomenon will eventually be explained naturally are not just making a blind guess. Natural explanations, as I've said many times, have supplanted supernatural ones, but never the other way around. Then there is the evidence of great apes and dolphins that show the signs not just of consciousness, but even of metacognition [10]. God-of-the-gaps is a fallacy because it makes the unwarranted assumption that a deity must be behind what we don't understand. When we're dealing with the things of nature, it is not unwarranted to suppose that a natural explanation may be found.

Finally, let's look again at Paley's design argument. I will agree with D'Souza that evolution does not undermine the argument, because one could still claim that the mechanism of natural selection itself is complex and orderly in a way that implies design. There are, however, other objections that do undermine the argument from design, and none of these receive any attention from D'Souza in the book. The most obvious of these is that Paley commits a fallacy in his analogy known as begging the question. A watch is a designed object by definition, so Paley (perhaps unwittingly) assumes the truth of his conclusion in the premise of watch. It is for this reason that we recognize the watch as designed, not because of its complexity or orderliness, as Paley believes.

Following on that last thought, the major undemonstrated assumption behind the design argument is that complexity and order imply design. Nature gives birth to complex and ordered things all the time, though, such as snowflakes and crystals. We don't automatically think some being had to have designed them, and this is because design is a concept present in a mind, not something inherent to certain objects. What intelligent design advocates point to are the effects of design, but design itself is a cause. Order and complexity are ideas we use to express the sorts of design plans we formulate, while disorder and simplicity are usually defined as what is not commonly in keeping with our plans. Thus, design proponents cannot argue for the effects of design in the universe without first demonstrating their assumption that a mind exists which has designed these effects. Otherwise, all we have is the mere appearance of design, and, as it's often said, looks can be deceiving.

14 - The Genesis Problem: The Methodological Atheism of Science

The fourteenth chapter is another puzzlingly mixed bag of claims. While D'Souza states that there is a "dogmatic" aspect of modern science that has led to the denial of empirical evidence based on fear of supernatural implications (p. 157-158), he also says he understands and approves of the methodological naturalism employed in science (p. 161-162). Not surprisingly, no sources or citations are given for the former statement, so once again, D'Souza seems to trust that we'll just take his word for it. Yet the quotes he provides to argue that atheist scientists are out to deny all supernatural implications are weak and highly suspect.

It's particularly ironic that D'Souza mocks the view of Francis Crick that aliens seeded life to Earth (p. 159). Aliens are at least a real plausibility, whereas D'Souza's alternative is that an unverifiable being that lives beyond our universe created us. Crick's idea is a hypothesis, but D'Souza's isn't even that. Secondly, it is suggested that Richard Dawkins thinks "absence of evidence is itself proof that the theory [of evolution] is correct" (p. 159). D'Souza refers to Dawkins' explanation of how the perceived gaps in the fossil record are actually what we should expect to find with evolution. Even William Lane Craig has noted that absence of evidence is only evidence of absence when we should expect to find evidence of something. This means that if we should not expect to find a complete fossil record, then Dawkins is justified in his statement and D'Souza is mistaken.

But more importantly, our author seems to have engaged in some misleading quote mining. Here is the actual quote from Dawkins, with a bit more context:

D'Souza omits the quote markings around "gaps," and fails to explain that this passage is part of a discussion on the theory of punctuated equilibrium proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. Dawkins is not admitting to any gaps in the modern fossil record, but only to the appearance of gaps in Darwin's time, before we found many of the transitional forms we have since discovered. Far from basing his argument on "absence of evidence," Dawkins offers two good reasons for why some regions don't have many intermediate fossils: (i) evolution happens rapidly at times, according to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, and (ii) most of the fossils we find in one specific location are from migrations, not the evolution of local species. With this quote back in the proper context, we can plainly see that D'Souza misrepresented Dawkins. Interestingly, no page number is given for the quote in What's So Great About Christianity. D'Souza seems to be no fan of readers checking his sources.

One admittedly disturbing quote in the chapter that does appear to be legitimate is a comment from Richard Lewontin, that scientists are "forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation" and "that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door" (p. 161). As Lewontin sees it, scientists apparently have a duty to defend metaphysical naturalism for the sake of keeping supernatural explanations out of science. Although I believe methodological naturalism is all that's necessary to science, I can sympathize with the concern about religion infiltrating it. Even so, Lewontin does overexaggerate the importance of this, and he is known for being a man of strong opposition, not only to supernaturalism, but even to genetic determinism.

Take note from these references the small sample set of views that D'Souza has provided us with. While he wants us to see that there are two sides to theism (creationist and evolutionist, literalist and non-literalist), he gives no balanced account of atheism. What's more is that some of his references are out of context or interpreted presumptuously. Is this not sad hypocrisy from someone who wants to combat what he sees as a one-sided presentation of Christians by atheists? "The theist does not deny the validity of scientific reasoning," D'Souza boldly states (p. 163), conveniently ignoring the many who have openly professed reliance on faith while rejecting science. D'Souza's game is clear, and the deck has been rigged from the beginning.

Go to Part V: Christianity and Philosophy.

1. Franklin, B. (1758) Poor Richard's Almanack. p. 189. Often misinterpreted as an anti-faith statement. The following sentence, "The morning daylight appears plainer when you put out your candle," reveals intent that is actually pro-faith.
2. Kane, G. (2006) Are virtual particles really constantly popping in and out of existence?. Scientific American. Retrieved Sept. 10, 2011.
3. (2007) Cities of Light: The Rise & Fall of Islamic Spain. PBS. Retrieved Sept. 10, 2011.
4. Finocchiaro, M. (1989) The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History. University of California Press: Berkeley.
5. Drake, S. (1978) Galileo At Work. p. 355.
    Langford, J.K. (1966) Galileo, Science and the Church. p. 133-134.
    Koestler, A. (1959) The Sleepwalkers. p. 483.
6. de Santillana, G. (1955) Papal Condemnation (Sentence) of Galileo. The Crime of Galileo. Retrieved Sept. 10, 2011.
7. Wald, R.M. (1977) Space, Time, and Gravity: The Theory of the Big Bang and Black Holes. p. 53. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
8. Leeming, D.A. (2010) Creation Myths of the World. p. 1-3, 153.
9. Adams, D. (1998) Speech at Cambridge for Digital Biota.
10. Couchman et al. (2010) Beyond Stimulus Cues and Reinforcement Signals. Journal of Comparative Psychology. Vol. 124, No. 4. 356-368.
11. Dawkins, R. (1987) The Blind Watchmaker. 2nd ed. p. 240. Norton: New York.