Those darn Christians and their pseudo-intellectual anti-science nonsense!

As I have argued many times, only Christians can harm Christianity. Atheists can’t harm Christianity. Proponents of other religions can’t harm Christianity. The government can’t harm Christianity. COVID-19 can't harm Christianity. No, the church of Christ is immune to all save self-inflicted wounds.

Among the most dangerous are: legalists who sacrifice the gospel for a yoke and demand that we live as if Christ never freed us from bondage, cultural warriors who think our living the correct way for a Christian means that we are obligated force unbelievers to live the same way ^[1], and those who apply highly fallible human philosophy to theology, and especially when they do it with an anti-science agenda. The latter group is far more dangerous to sound doctrine than the scientist-Christian. Well, at least I think so.

Human philosophy is nothing at all like science. Virtually every scientist agrees that quantum mechanics is the best description of the microscopic world, that Maxwell’s equations are the way to describe electromagnetism, and that General Relativity is our best theory of gravity. There are not Maxwellians and non-Maxwellians as there are stoics and epicureans and Aristotelians and Platoists and neo-Platoists. The complicated taxonomy of human philosophy testifies to its uselessness for anything but, well, idle-philosophising.

If we are generous and give credit to philosophers for the Law of noncontradiction^[2]—well that is about as far as it goes. It was all down-hill after that. The garden-variety philosopher-theologian writes pseudo-intellectual word-salad, which would be easily dismissible except they tend to have the credentials and jargon-speak that cause others to take them seriously.

I recently saw this from a philosopher-theologian on twitter: ^{[3], [4]}

Tbc: I reject Darwinism totally. It is bad sc. resting on worse metaphysics. I'm tired of wild-eyed schemes for integrating it into Xian theology. We ran that experiment & it led to pantheism. [Rolls eyes]

I replied:

This is nonsense and a form of lying for Jesus. Darwinism (I think he means evolution) might turn out to be wrong or like most science incomplete, but it is not bad science. Human Philosophy is more of a risk to sound Christian doctrine than science.

To rephrase my response, since this is not twitter: Evolution is the best scientific theory we have to explain the diversity of life. While like all science it will undergo refinement, it is not likely to ever be proven wrong in a global sense, unless the fossil record is afforded a better scientific explanation or anachronistic fossils are discovered.

I would like to think that if I found the theory of evolution incompatible with scripture (I don’t) I would take one of these two approaches:

1. I don’t care, I believe the bible.
2. I believe evolution is wrong, and I going to study it with all my ability and demonstrate in the lab how it is wrong.

I hope that I would not pretend that I could trivially dismiss the theory by dropping some nonsensical pseudo-intellectual jargon.

You know,  I believe that, with little effort, much philosophy applied to theology could be Sokal-hoaxed as easily as post-modern drivel.

---

^[1] There was like a zillion opportunities in the New Testament for a teaching moment that would justify the Christian engaging in the culture wars. The Holy Spirit availed himself of none of them. Just saying.

^[2] In truth credit should go to Logicians, as should credit for enumerating the logical fallacies.

^[3] This philosopher thinks it is clever to use the phrase Darwinism instead of evolution. Insistence on using that term, which is completely inaccurate, is a red flag. Darwin’s theory is not the modern theory of evolution, for one thing he knew nothing of genetics. I heard something similar in a different venue the other day: “Evolution has not changed much since Darwin”. Why do Christians say things like that, things that easily fact-checked and demonstrably false? Saying you don’t believe in evolution because you find it incompatible with scripture—while I would disagree I would and do respect that position. But just making up stuff that isn’t true—that I cannot condone.

^[4] Later in the twitter exchange, this philosopher argued that philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism were a distinction without a difference. That is total nonsense. The former argues that the natural world is all there is and everything we really know is through science. That latter argues that the study of the natural world is through science—it is basically the philosophical backbone of the scientific method. The former is incompatible with Christianity, the latter is not. That is not a distinction without a difference.