For instance, he said in the 11/22/17 Briefing, “Millions upon millions of people, though indoctrinated into the worldview of evolution, aren't buying it. They certainly aren’t buying it as a sufficient explanation for the cosmos.” But the theory of evolution never purported to explain the cosmos. If any science can, that would be cosmology, not biology. Darwinian evolution is a biological theory which explains the way life on earth has developed over a long period of time, by descent with modification, from simple organisms to the most complex. It does not explain how the universe got here. It doesn’t even explain how the first life on earth arose. (No single, detailed, well-supported scientific theory of life's origin yet exists.) Evolution explains the history of life by natural, not supernatural means, but that is not the same as saying the supernatural does not exist, or even that evolution is without purpose.
If you won the lottery tomorrow, would you let your knowledge that this came to pass by a random series of events – if they were not random, it would not have been a fair lottery – dissuade you from thanking God for His providence? Likewise, if you accepted that you came to exist as you are by “winning” a billions-of-years-long genetic and survival lottery described by the theory of evolution, this need not prevent you from viewing that long series of events as God’s gift and plan if you so chose, and this view would be perfectly compatible with the theory, though not part of it, and not necessitated by it. Or consider a hand of cards. No matter how well you shuffle the deck, so that the cards come up as random as you please, an omniscient God will have known the result before time began, and an omnipotent God will have intended it.
Catholics and liberal Protestants recognize this and accept evolution. It is only Christians like Dr. Mohler committed to a particular literal interpretation of scripture who are forced to pit themselves against one of the most successful and well established theories ever devised by man. It does not serve his listeners well to be told that evolution is the antithesis of everything they hold dear. The theory of evolution does fit well into an atheistic view of the world, because it allows atheists to understand the incredible complexity and design-like fitness of life on earth without appeal to the supernatural (something that was not possible before Darwin), but the theory does not deny the existence of the supernatural, and is compatible with versions of Christianity which make room for the well-established facts that life on earth is billions of years old, and has evolved by natural means from simple to complex.
Contrary to what Dr. Mohler claims, no number of fundamentalist Christians who choose a literal reading of the creation story over sound science are sufficient to cause people who know the science to be “intellectually insecure”, anymore than they will falter in their belief that the earth is round when confronted with the stubborn persistence of flat-earthers. Those who are pro-science are all for teaching critical thinking, and for confronting questions and doubts students have about evolution head on. (After all, if misconceptions are not corrected, the theory will not be properly learned.) It is only the suspicion that “critical thinking” in the science classroom is code for giving creationist teachers who are not trained in science-based answers to such questions free reign to introduce religion and pseudoscience into the classroom that makes us nervous.
Part II (added 11/24/17):
The ultimate subject of the “Retro Report” Dr. Mohler was discussing was the move by creationists to legislatively mandate “critical thinking” about evolution in science classes. Of course Dr. Mohler doesn’t claim to be a scientist or to be trained in science, but even so, the level of critical thinking about evolution he demonstrated in this Briefing I found to be extremely low. I had to wonder whether Dr. Mohler has any understanding of what science is, what it has accomplished, and how. Take this passage:
“I've mentioned on the Briefing the research that perplexes so many scientists indicating that young children are particularly resistant to the theory of evolution, or for that matter to materialism and naturalism. Why? Because they draw the inference from the cosmos that they draw from their house or from anything else that somebody made it. Somebody built the house we live in, somebody built the road we drive on, certainly, someone made the world, the cosmos we inhabit.” (The previous mention can be found here: “Promiscuous Teleology” — Is This Why So Many Reject Evolution? May 29, 2007.)First let’s note that the idea is completely ridiculous that scientists would be perplexed by the fact that young children find it more natural to believe the world was created as it is than that it evolved naturally without design. After all, since the first attempts in ancient Greece and Rome (by Epicureans like Lucretius) to imagine a non-divine origin of plants and animals, it took more than 2000 years before Darwin and Wallace found a plausible theory of how this could be. If its ideas came naturally to people, they would have come up with the theory long before.
Science has made a difference in the world precisely by discovering that what was always obvious is not necessarily the truth. Every child knows that the ground is stationary, and that the sun, moon and stars move around us. Every child knows that up is up and down is down, and it is the same up and the same down wherever you are, and things fall down, so anybody on the other side of the earth would fall off. Or at least they would know that if they thought about it, but then they would know something that wasn’t true. Every child knows that if a mountain is there, it has always been there, since the beginning of the world, because mountains don’t move around like people or cars or elephants, or grow like plants. And even if a mountain could rise out of a flat plain, certainly continents cannot drift through the oceans like ships!
It is natural to generalize from the familiar to the universal, from the local in time and space to everywhere and for all time, but however natural that step to the universal may seem, it is not logically valid, so it is bound at times to go wrong. Dr. Mohler says, “Somebody built the house we live in, somebody built the road we drive on, certainly, someone made the world, the cosmos we inhabit.” But that last jump is completely without logical ground. To criticize science, which proceeds by testing hypotheses on the basis of evidence, and then only placing confidence in a hypothesis when it is supported – to criticize such a scientific theory because it violates such a groundless inference, on the basis that the inference comes naturally to children, is about as far from critical thinking as it is possible to be.
Or take Dr. Mohler’s treatment of intelligent design:
“Intelligent design is an intellectual tool that says that the irreducible complexity of the cosmos cannot be explained by purely natural explanations. Their argument is that a simple, straightforward, honest assessment of the cosmos indicates that it was designed and designed by some intelligence, thus intelligent design. Now here we need to note that intelligent design is indeed a very useful and to Christians obviously true intellectual tool.”On the contrary, irreducible complexity is a claim that certain biological systems, in order to function, need all their parts, so that they could not have evolved piecemeal in service of that function. That is what “irreducible” means in this context: take away any part and the whole thing fails. This would be an argument for intelligent design if any biological structures were demonstrated to be irreducibly complex, and if it could be demonstrated that no OTHER functions could have driven evolution of the structure. As far as I know, no such examples have been proposed and sustained against counter-evidence.
The argument for intelligent design on the basis of irreducible complexity is a very technical argument which involves reasoning about subcellular molecular machines and how they could have arisen. It is a very far cry from Mohler’s purported “argument ... that a simple, straightforward, honest assessment of the cosmos indicates that it was designed and designed by some intelligence.” Mohler seems to be saying that if we’re honest, we simply know in a “straightforward” way (without reasoning or evidence?) that the cosmos was designed. But this isn’t an argument at all. It is an assertion that no argument is necessary, because if we’re honest we will admit that we simply know.
Why should this intuitive knowledge be trusted? Dr. Mohler offered a circular argument in the "Promiscuous Teleology" Briefing previously referred to:
"The hard-wiring for design these psychologists identify as the problem may well be yet another sign of the imago Dei — the image of God that distinguishes humanity from all other creatures...."That is, our intuitive knowledge that the cosmos was designed -- the "design inference" -- is trustworthy because it was designed into us.
Is this, I wonder, the kind of “critical thinking” that creationists want to see in science classrooms?
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