Saturday, March 11, 2006
D(T)I
Intelligent design proponents have conceded the superiority of the scientific method to faith. They know that an assertion based on scientific research is more credible than an assertion based on faith. So they have endeavored to promote their creationist beliefs as scientific.In response, the creationist claimed (as close as I can reckon -- you have to go see the original to understand the caveat) that faith is, in actuality, based on the correspondence of the Bible to reality or, in other words, on whether the Bible is shown to be literally true. Idly casting about for definitions of "faith" led to me to this from the Correspondence section of Nature (435, 275-276, 19 May 2005):
Seeking evidence of God's work undermines faith
Douglas W. Yu
. . . In the Bible (John 20: 25-29), Thomas doubts that the man speaking to him is the resurrected Christ until Jesus reveals his wounds. Thomas then believes, but Jesus says: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed".
The Bible throughout teaches that faith is more valuable when expressed in the absence of evidence. For a Christian, when science is allowed to be neutral on the subject of God, science can only bolster faith. In contrast, and I imagine without realizing it, ID proponents have become professional Doubting Thomases, funded by Doubting Thomas Institutes. When advocates of ID use the vocabulary of science to argue for God's presence in cellular machinery or in the fossil record, they too poke their fingers through Jesus' hands. In so doing, ID vitiates faith.
But the image of William Dembski with his fingers up inside Christ I could have lived without.
