Illegal Border Crossings: Evolution and Intelligent Design

It has been almost a year since Hunter Rawlings gave his important speech on intelligent design and evolution. But the issue is still being widely discussed at Cornell.

As a Christian, I believe that God is the Creator of heaven and earth, including human beings. At the same time I consider evolution to be the best scientific theory we currently have for explaining the origin of species, and I do not think intelligent design (“ID”) qualifies as legitimate science.

How these two assertions fit together I shall not address here. Suffice it to say that the relationship between science and religion is complex. A legitimate border separates science as a discourse from other, broader kinds of knowledge (such as theology); however, this separation is not absolute, but more like a semi-permeable membrane.

Any discussion of intelligent design and evolution in a science curriculum must consider the basic questions (1) What subject matter constitutes legitimate science? and (2) Are some pronouncements, in effect, “illegal border crossings” between science and religion? Since I believe ID is not legitimate science, including it as an integral part of a science course appears a clear case of such an illegal border crossing.

Although it certainly is appropriate for the Arts College faculty to discuss why including ID in high school science courses is improper, this concern is highly selective and perhaps a bit hypocritical. A far more serious problem at Cornell and at most universities is the many illegal border crossings that go on in the opposite direction: claims made by scientists, speaking as scientists, that are really theological, philosophical or ethical claims, rather than scientific ones.

An egregious example from the past 20-30 years was Cornell Prof. Carl Sagan’s bold declaration (the first sentence in his popular book Cosmos) that “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Whether Sagan’s claim is true or false may be debated, but it’s clear that in making it, he was not speaking properly as a scientist, but as a philosopher or theologian. Science is incompetent either to confirm or to disprove such comprehensive metaphysical or religious claims.

Modern science is “naturalistic”: it deliberately ignores moral, religious and aesthetic aspects of reality and studies the world as if nothing exists but physical phenomena. However, this is a methodological, not a metaphysical naturalism; it is adopted for the limited objectives of science, not as a total world view. Science may provide evidence that makes it easier or more difficult for a person to believe in God; but strictly speaking, the question of God’s existence or nonexistence, or how God relates to nature and human beings, is outside the domain of legitimate scientific inquiry.

Carl Sagan has by no means been the only illegal border crosser among prominent scientists and science teachers; many others constantly make the same mistake. Richard Dawkins, for instance, not only claims that Darwinian evolution entails the belief that there is no God, but proclaims this religious belief with evangelistic zeal. My friend and Cornell colleague Will Provine believes — if I understand him properly—that science teaches us that humans lack free will and thus are essentially robots (though I’m not sure he would approve this way of putting it).

Science gives us one very valuable and powerful kind of knowledge. But when scientists or others claim that it is the only valid or publicly appropriate kind of knowledge, this is scientism, not science.

At one time, the school of philosophers called logical positivists attempted to give such unique validity to scientific knowledge. They promoted the so-called “verification principle”: the claim that only knowledge resting on empirical data or sense experience constitutes valid knowledge. Of course, these philosophers overlooked the fact that the verification principle itself could not meet its own criteria for legitimacy. It is well understood today that this philosophical project failed.

Social scientists may be even more prone to illegal border crossings than natural scientists. During my 30-plus years at Cornell, I’ve frequently witnessed social scientists using the design and content of courses and public lectures to press on students and colleagues various doctrines that could not be justified by their social science as such but rested on normative religious and philosophical judgments. Examples are multiculturalism; moral relativism; non-traditional views of marriage, divorce, family, male/female roles, sexual morality, homosexuality; etc. These are big-time illegal border crossings, but sadly, Cornell’s academic culture shows little interest in curbing them. Instead, faculty self-righteously condemn high school science teachers and state boards of education for the slightest tendency to traffic in the opposite direction.

If we at Cornell really want to maintain disciplinary integrity, we might well focus on putting our own house in order. Rather than worrying so selectively about intelligent design and its failings, we might address flagrant illegal border crossings of all kinds.

Such discipline might well contribute to more open and honest dialogue across disciplines. It would also help us understand that Cornell founder A.D. White’s famous phrase “the warfare between science and theology” is at best misleading. Most conflicts we face today are not between science and theology (or religion) but between divergent moral, religious, philosophical, and political visions of what it means to flourish as human beings.

Remember, there was a long time between Adam and Eve and Israel...........we have Abraham and Ishmael (abraham - Israel) (Ishmael - Arab) you may wish to study this to see if it's true. Israel , as promised to Abraham, was selected to be God's chosen people. He would indeed be their God but this had favorable and unfavorable results. At the time when Moses went to receive the 10 commandments from God and his return down the Mt. S., Israel had already returned to worshipping false gods. Remember the breaking of the stones?
None of this means that God was a simple tribal god. This is the same God that created the world, all within it and man and woman. He chose Abraham as the favored line from which Christ would come as our Savior - the throne of David. If you would take the time to study this, you will find it historically true. But obviously, we still have Satan in the world - he is called the Prince of the Earth and although all of us are born with knowledge of the miracle of creation, false religions grew but God said He would reveal himself thru Israel. Indeed He did!!!
If you would like to do a short biblical study of this question, go to the site i'm providing. At the bottom of the page, you will see scripture verses and follow their links for a biblical study of those verses that will tie up the original inquiry.

http://www.dabhand.org/Essays/False_religion.htm

I read the website that you sent me to and I found it to be pretty interesting. A few thoughts...

The website, and the crux of your argument, is that although there are clear parallels between the mythology of the OT and much earlier mythologies, that your mythology is somehow "truer" than those. This idea, the "brotherhood" concept, is present in many mythologies. Now brotherhood in most of the myths I know of is confined to a bounded community. In bounded communities, aggression is projected outward. For example, the ten commandments say, "Thou shalt not kill." Then the next chapter says, "Go into Caanan and kill everybody in it." That is a bounded field. The myths of participation and love pertain only to the ingroup (in your case, the "chosen"), and the out-group is totally other. This is the sense of the word "gentile"-the person is not of the same order.

Second, I assume from your post that you are a Biblical literalist - i.e., you belive the stories of the Old and New Testaments are literally based in history and are in no way allegorical. If I have misinterpreted your stance then I apologize, but your attempt to connect an actual historical lineage from Adam to Jesus through David as well as your insistance on the historical validity of the Flood, seem to indicate this. Now most cultures do create mythologies as fact, and this is an important point: they were saying it is as if it were thus. The notion that somebody literally made the world - that is what is known as artificialism. It is the child's way of thinking: the table is made, so somebody made the table. The world is here, so somebody must have made it. There is another point of view involving emanation and precipitation without personification. A sound precipitates air, then fire, then water and earth - and that's how the world becomes. The whole universe is included in this first sound, this vibration, which then commits all things to fragmentation in the field of time. In this view, there is not someone outside who said, "Let it happen."

In most cultures there are two or three creation stories, not just one. There are two in the Bible, even though people treat them as one story. You remember in the Garden of Eden story of Chapter 2: God is trying to think of ways to entertain Adam, whom he has created to be his gardener, to take care of his garden. That is an old, old story that was borrowed from ancient Sumer. The gods wanted somebody to take care of their garden and cultivate the food that they needed, so they created man. That's the background of the myth of Chapters 2 and 3 in Genesis. But Yahweh's gardener is bored. So God tries to invent toys for him. He creates the animals, but all the man can do is name them. Then God thinks of this grand idea of drawing the soul of woman out of Adam's own body, which is a very different creation story from Chapter 1 of Genesis, where God created Adam and Eve together in the image of himself as male and female. There God is himself the primordial androgyne. Chapter 2 is by far the earlier story, coming from perhaps the eighth century or so B.C., whereas Chapter 1 is of a so-called priestly text, of about the fourth century B.C., or later. In the Hindu story of the Self that felt fear, then desire, then split in two, we have a counterpart of Genesis 2. In Genesis, it is man, not the god, who splits in two.

The Greek legend that Aristophanes tells in Plato's Symposium is another of this kind. Aristophanes says that in the beginning there were creatures composed of what are now two human beings. And those were of three sorts: male/female, male/male, and female/female. The gods then split them all in two. But after they had been split apart, all they could think of to do was to embrace each other again in order to reconstitute the original units. So we all now spend our lives trying to find and re-embrace our other halves.

To further expound on the idea of Biblical literalism, we must consider other mythological traditions. In the other mythologies, one puts oneself in accord with the world, with the mixture of good and evil. But in the religious system of the Near East, you identify with the good and fight against the evil. The biblical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all speak with derogation of the so-called nature religions. The shift from a nature religion to a sociological religion makes it difficult for us to link back to nature. But actually all of those cultural symbols are perfectly susceptible to interpretation in terms of the psychological and cosmological systems, if you choose to look at them that way. Every religion is true one way or another. I t is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

So what is the metaphor? A metaphor is an image that suggests something else. For instance, if I say to a person, "You are a nut," I'm not suggesting that I think the person is literally a nut. "Nut" is a metaphor. The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing. If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu. For example, Jesus ascended to heaven. The denotation would seem to be that somebody ascended to the sky. That's literally what is being said. But if that were really the meaning of the message, then we have to throw it away, because there would have been no such place for Jesus literally to go. We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy. Astronomy and physics have simply eliminated that as a literal, physical possibility. But if you read "Jesus ascended to heaven" in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward-not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body's dynamic source. By now you might be questioning my approach: "Aren't you undermining one of the great traditional doctrines of the classic Christian faith-that the burial and the resurrection of Jesus prefigures our own?" That would be a mistake in the reading of the symbol. That is reading the words in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry (remember the menu?), reading the metaphor in terms of the denotation instead of the connotation.

My 2 cents anyway, hope I didnt bore you!

I don't have the time to respond to alot of your conversation right now. However, again,I believe in the literal creation of Adam and then Eve.....so since they were the first humans and since this is indeed a Biblical fact, your points of other cultures, religions or whatever do not prove anything to me. Again, I believe that your examples of various creation stories, etc. are mythologies of the true Genesis account.

Again, some scientific analysis of why Jesus could not have ascended into heaven (because there is no heaven) is obviously part of your faith - not mine.
Again, yes I do believe the only way to intrepret God's Word is thru the literal/historical method. When one starts down the road of intrepreting God's Word according to the latest literary criticism fad, then one is simply pleasing oneself rather than to know God or the gospel.
I understand metaphors and yes certainly metaphors and other literary tools are used in scripture but these symbols or metaphors have specific meanings if one studies scripture . Living water does not literally mean "living water" but means Christ...and obviously that's fairly straight forward....there are others that definitely take more time to "search the scriptures and understand."
Again, all prophecy thus fulfilled is fulfilled literally and I expect the end-times prophecy to be fulfilled literally as well.
There is also more evidence for a world-wide flood than there is for global warming.....
I'll leave you with another link that I found that if you take the time to see what it offers and validade the truth, it might answer some questions.

Mainly what you write in response to me is simply philosophical mumblings and man looking anywhere but to Scripture to understand our beginnings, our nature and our ultimate future.
If one studies Israel, the Jewish people, it is more than adequate to defend the prophetic testimony literally being fulfilled to this day.
Try this......http://www.christiananswers.net/dictionary/prophecy.html

There are excellent theological books and studies that are of high scholarship that can give answers to your questions but one has to know the quality and approach of the scholar.
I am a big fan of some very reliable theologians and would be happy to give you some names and recommend some books. Again, i'm a independent baptist - not a catholic- not part of any reformational church - but from a group called the anabaptists who never joined Rome.

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