Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (48 page)

26.
Well, not quite. The relevant pathways through organic space need not be such that each step is a step towards the human eye; there could be brief regressions, feints in irrelevant directions, and so on; the process need not be entirely monotonic, to use Elliott Sober’s term.

27.
Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
, p. 78.

28.
Behe,
Darwin’s Black Box
(New York: The Free Press, 1996);
The Edge of Evolution
(New York: The Free Press, 2007).

29.
Goodwin,
How the Leopard Changed its Spots
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. ix.

30.
Russell’s “Is There a God?” was commissioned by
Illustrated
magazine in 1952, but never published; see Dawkins,
The God Delusion
, p. 52.

31.
Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
, p. 140.

32.
Suggested in conversation (but not necessarily endorsed) by Sharon Street.

33.
Dawkins,
The God Delusion
, p. 109.

34.
Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
, p. 7.

35.
Although others also vie for that dubious distinction: among them are Sam Harris (
The End of Faith
(New York: Norton, 2004) and Christopher Hitchens (
God Is Not Great
(New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007).

1.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
(New York: Simon & Shuster, 1995).

2.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, pp. 50, 59.

3.
Dennett,
Breaking the Spell; Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
(New York: Penguin, 2006).

4.
Locke,
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
IV, x, 10.

5.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, p. 46.

6.
Review of Maitland A. Edey and Donald C. Johanson,
Blueprints: Solving the Mystery of Evolution
(Boston: Little Brown, 1989).
New York Times
, April 9, 1989.

7.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, p. 203.

8.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, p. 203.

9.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, p. 516; emphasis in original.

10.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, p. 519. But what if they
do
insist on teaching these heresies to their children? (Baptists will be Baptists, after all.) Will we be obliged to remove Baptist children from their parents’ noxious influence? Will we have to put barbed wire around those zoos, maybe check to see if there is room for them in northern Siberia?

11.
Russell,
Why I am not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
, ed, with an appendix on the “Bertrand Russell case,” by Paul Edwards (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957). The lecture was first given in 1927 to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall.

12.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, p. 315, emphasis in original; also p. 319.

13.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, p. 27.

14.
He could do so, for example, by causing the right genetic mutations to arise at the right time, (see chapter 4) or by preserving a genomic feature that isn’t fitness-conferring, or in still other ways. He could do so either by “frontloading,” i.e., selecting initial conditions he knows will issue, for example, in the mutations he wants, or by causing these mutations at the time they are needed (see chapter 4, part IV for more on these possibilities).

15.
Going back to St. George Mivart (1827–1900), a contemporary of Darwin.

16.
But what about such empirical evidence as the fossil record, the homologies, the relations demonstrated by molecular biology? This is clearly evidence for universal common ancestry and for the proposition that the living world has developed by virtue of a process of descent with modification. It is not, just as such, evidence for the proposition that what drives the whole process is natural selection;
a fortiori
, it is not evidence for the claim that what drives the process is
unguided
natural selection.

17.
Swinburne,
The Existence of God
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979; new edition 2004).

18.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, p. 154.

19.
See Mavrodes’s “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” in Robert Audi and William Wainright,
Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); Adams’s “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief” in The
Virtue of Faith and other Essays in Philosophical Theology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press); Craig’s
The Kalam Cosmological Argument
(London: The Macmillan Press, 1979) and “In Defense of the Kalam Cosmological Argument” in
Faith and Philosophy
14, no. 2 April 1997; and my “Two Dozen or so Good Theistic Arguments” in Deane-Peter Baker, ed.,
Alvin Plantinga
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

20.
See my
God and Other Minds
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), part III.

21.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, p. 154.

22.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, p. 155.

23.
See, e.g., Plantinga and Wolterstorff,
Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God
(Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1983) and William Alston,
Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Belief
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). See also works by William Abraham, Richard Gale, Richard Swinburne, Eleonore Stump, Peter van Inwagen, and many others.

24.
Apparently some of the dreaded “New Atheists”
do
think serious discussion is out of place in this area. Here is Richard Dawkins’s suggestion for dealing with those religious people he disagrees with: “We need to go further: go beyond humorous ridicule, sharpen our barbs to a point where they really hurt” (comment # 368197 at Richard Dawkins.net, comment 16 Wednesday, April 22, 2009). Fence sitters, he says, “are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt.” Maybe so. Of course some might also find this attempt to replace argument and reason with contumely and contempt less intimidating than mildly amusing. It is more appropriate, however, to view with melancholy the spectacle of discourse in this area lowered to a level beneath that of political discourse at election time, and to feel compassion for those who thus lower it.

25.
Among the authors mentioned in footnote 23, see in particular Alston,
Perceiving God
, Plantinga and Wolterstorff,
Faith and Rationality
, and Plantinga,
Warranted Christian Belief
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

26.
Indeed, it isn’t even part of reason to claim that there couldn’t be a source of truth whose deliverances were (to some degree)
contrary
to the teachings of reason.

27.
Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, p. 154.

28.
See Alston’s
Perceiving God
(Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 234.

29.
Smith, “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,”
Philo: A Journal of Philosophy
vol. 4, no. 2, p. 196.

30.
For further discussion of the bearing of evolutionary science on theistic religion, see Daniel Dennett and Alvin Plantinga,
Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

31.
Paul Draper, “Evolution and the Problem of Evil,” in
Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology
, 5th ed., ed. Louis Pojman and Michael Rea (Belmont, California: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008).

32.
Draper, “Evolution and the Problem of Evil,” p. 208. In this article he also cites, as such known facts, the ways in which pain and pleasure are distributed in our world, and the ways in which pain and pleasure are connected with survival and reproductive success. Here I’ll address just the claim mentioned above in the text; in section IV I’ll consider Philip Kitcher’s claim that the waste, predation, and pain involved in evolution is evidence against theism.

33.
Draper, “Evolution and the Problem of Evil,” p. 209.

34.
Miller,
Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul
(New York: Viking, 2008), p. 12.

35.
Though they do tend to scoff when apprised of such consequences of relativity theory as that the faster you go, the heavier you get, and if you accelerated all the way up to the speed of light, you’d gain an infinite amount of weight.

36.
Still another example: until 1997 the National Association of Biology Teachers officially described evolution (on their website) as “an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process.”

37.
It’s worth noting that many biology textbooks indeed present evolution as unguided, and hence as incompatible with theistic belief. For a list of such textbooks, see Casey Luskin, “Smelling Blood in the Water” in
God and Evolution; Protestants, Catholics and Jews Explore Darwin’s Challenge to Faith
, ed. Jay Richards (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2010), pp. 88–90.

38.
Kitcher,
Living With Darwin
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

39.
Kitcher,
Living With Darwin
, pp. 122, 123.

40.
See chapter 1, section I.

41.
Kitcher,
Living With Darwin
, p. 123. For a powerful book-length treatment, see Michael Murray,
Nature Red in Tooth and Claw
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

42.
Kitcher,
Living With Darwin
, p. 127.

43.
For example, there is Peter van Inwagen’s “massive irregularity” defense; see his
The Problem of Evil
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), Lecture 7. Of course a very great deal has been written about the problem of evil. For a sample, see
A Companion to the Problem of Evil
, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder and Justin McBrayer (London: Blackwell, forthcoming);
The Problem of Evil
, ed. Robert and Marilyn Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);
God and the Problem of Evil
(London: Blackwell, 2001).

44.
See my “Supralapsarianism or ‘O Felix Culpa’” in
Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil
, ed. Peter van Inwagen (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005).

45.
See C. S. Lewis’s space trilogy:
Out of the Silent Planet
(London: The Bodley Head, 1938),
Perlandria
(London: The Bodley Head, 1943), and
That Hideous Strength
(London: The Bodley Head, 1945).

46.
See my
Warranted Christian Belief
, chapter 14.

47.
Kitcher,
Living With Darwin
, p. 134.

48.
See, e.g., Justin Barrett, “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion,” in
Trends in Cognitive Science
, 2000, vol. 4 and
Why Would Anyone Believe in God
(Alta Mira, 2004); and see chapter 5 in this volume.

49.
See the early chapters of Calvin’s
Institutes of the Christian Religion
; Plantinga’s
Warranted Christian Belief
, chapter 6; and Aquinas’s
Summa Theologiae
I, q. 2, a. 1, ad 1.

50.
See my
Warranted Christian Belief
, chapter 13; Pagels,
Beyond Belief
(New York: Random House, 2003).

51.
Bodin,
Colloquium Heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis abditis
, written by 1593 but first published in 1857. English translation by Marion Kuntz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 256.

52.
See my
Warranted Christian Belief
, chapter 13.

1.
Question 27.

2.
Peter van Inwagen suspects this requirement of concurrence is no more than a matter of paying God superfluous metaphysical compliments; why add this to all the rest? One possibility is that conservation is a matter of sustaining a substance in existence, while concurrence is a matter of conserving a particular causal power in the conserved substance. Another possibility, one that no doubt was not foremost in the minds of the medievals, is that concurrence can be useful with respect to the so-called pairing problem: see John Foster,
The Immaterial Self: A Defence of the Cartesian Dualist Conception of the Mind
(London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 163ff; Jaegwon Kim, “Lonely Souls: Causality and Substance Dualism” in
Soul, Body, and Survival
, ed. Kevin Corcoran (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 30–43; and my “Materialism and Christian Belief” in
Persons: Divine and Human
, ed. Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 130ff.