James Kidder, a Christian paleontologist, comments on Al Mohler’s most recent critique of BioLogos. Mohler’s view of science seems to rest on an “appearance of age” argument. According to Mohler, “given a plain reading of Scripture, there is every reason that Christians should reject a uniformitarian presupposition.”
Big words like “uniformitarian” and “presupposition” make this idea sound smart. It is, however, profoundly anti-intellectual. I mean “anti-intellectual” here not in the sense of opposing the “academic elite” as a class. I mean it literally: adopting Mohler’s epistemology destroys our ability to “known” anything. It is, in fact, a relativistic, Gnostic and nihilistic world view, which is not at all compatible with Christianity.
Mohler effectively sells out a Christian realist view of the universe to Descartes’ Demon. Descartes was troubled by empiricism. How can I really know for certain, he wondered, whether the things I observe with my senses are “real?” I can’t prove, he reasoned, that the apparent reality I observe isn’t just an illusion created by a malevolent demon to keep me deluded. After all, whatever proofs I might offer would be part of the illusion. Thus he resolved to the one fact he thought could not be an illusion without self-contradiction: that of his own existence. “I think, therefore I am.”
Mohler’s epistemology says that Descartes was right to be afraid after all. The world that we think we observe, with its distant starlight, its layers of fossils, its rates of radioactive decay, and so on, is illusory. It may “appear” to be very old, but it is in fact something very different.
But, Mohler would say, Descartes’ Demon is vanquished because a “plain reading of scripture” tells us what really happened. Here is the insurmountable problem: a “plain reading of scripture” depends on “uniformitarian” assumptions about history. It assumes that the text we now have is really an ancient text, created thousands of years ago. It assumes that there really was a Jewish community and subsequently a Christian Church that existed in the past and preserved and handed these documents down as scripture. It assumes that people in the past used certain words that have meanings that can be known with a high degree of certainty through historical study.
If Mohler’s view of history is correct, then all of his assumptions about scripture are up for grabs. Absent a “uniformitarian” view of history, there is no way to be sure that what we now think of as “scripture” wasn’t poofed into existence with the “appearance of age” only moments ago. There is no way to know with any certainty what the “plain meaning” of these documents might be or whether there is any “language” with meaning at all. Indeed, there is no way to know whether Jesus really lived and truly rose again.
If your world view causes you to deny that history is real, that is a sure sign of trouble. Without history, there is no meaning.
4 replies on “Al Mohler's Ephemeral Epistemology”
“It is, in fact, a profoundly relativistic, Gnostic and nihilistic world view”
Yup. Fundamentalism in a nutshell.
This is also illustrated by the oft-heard idea that only an instantaneous Adam is a “special” creation. As if somehow the stunning kaleidoscope of evolved life is somehow NOT special. Or the fact that my daughter took 9 months to form, rather than 1 second, makes her NOT special.
It really flirts with Manicheanism, when you think about it. Unless things are spiritual, airy, and direct from the hand of God, they are somehow dirty and “material”.
You may have misunderstood the jargon “special”. It doesn’t mean “remarkable” or “spiritual”; it means “according to species”. In other words, he believes that the creation of Adam was the creation of the human species.
Of course, as jargon, this leads to easy misunderstanding.
-Wm
Good to know. Thanks.