Category: Science & Technology

Categories
Culture Science & Technology

Microsoft, Google, and White Spaces

Microsoft, Google and other information technology and electronics companies are lobbying the FCC for access to the expanded “white spaces” between digital television broadcast signals. White spaces are buffer zones that prevent signals for different television channels from interfering with each other. They offer the potential for gigabit-speed Wi-Fi access. Existing Wi-Fi technologies, however, cannot exploit this space without creating interference with television signals. Television broadcasters therefore are resisting the approval of white space Wi-Fi devices.

This presents some interesting questions about the information infrastructure commons. Television broadcasters and equipment manufacturers have invested heavily in what could be considered pre-infrastructure — broadcast equipment, programming, and television sets — for use on the digital broadcast spectrum infrastructure. Does that investment privilege television use of the spectrum infrastructure over Wi-Fi use? Are television and Wi-Fi truly separate uses given the convergence of video with Wi-Fi? Will my neighbor’s video conference call interfere with my sacred right to wach “Lost” in high def?

Categories
Science & Technology Spirituality Theology

Kicked off of Uncommon Descent Again; an Open Letter

An the ASA list, we have been discussing a post by Denyse O’Leary, on the Uncommon Descent ID blog maintained by her and Bill Dembski, which quoted from another thread on the ASA list.

I was very upset by Ms. O’Leary’s blog post because the thread it referred to from ASA list was started by someone with some honest doubts and questions about the relation of faith and science. Several people on the ASA list, including myself, tried to respond to that person in ways we thought might be helpful (and indeed I still hope they were helpful). Hey, we’re all in this exciting but sometimes nerve-wracking boat ride together.

I posted a comment on Uncommon Descent expressing my concern about this (actually my comment got unintentionally triple-posted because it was originally stuck in a spam filter). My biggest concern was what I perceived as a lack of sensitivity to the person who orginally was some thoughtful and troubling questions of us here on the ASA list. I then followed up on a couple of other comments relating to Aquinas and secondary causes.

My reward for this was to be summarily banned from Uncommon Descent — once again.

I would be lying if I were to say that I don’t care about being banned from Uncommon Descent. I do care, mostly because I’m an intense and competitive guy with an overly active sense of fairness. In another sense, I don’t really care — like the rest of us, I really should spend my time on more productive things than arguing with people on blogs (or email lists) anyway. So, yes, I’m ticked — but I’m not crying in my milk. I’ve been kicked out of fancier joints, I guess.

But what I care about most is Truth and the Kingdom of God. I don’t claim any great insight into either except for whatever grace God has given me. And in my humble estimation, the kind of thing represented by Denyse’s “Letter” and the resulting hoo-ha in the comments thereto advances neither.

I’ve no desire to step into yet another online culture war spitting match. Yet, I’d like the record to reflect my requests and thoughts about this to Ms. O’leary and Bill Dembski. Hopefully someone will take them to heart. So, I offer below for the record the comments I offered to them.

In doing this, I also append a little disclaimer: I do not consent to the quoting or reproduction of these comments in any forum unless they are reproduced in full. To do otherwise would be dishonest. Hopefully that’s scary coming from a lawyer.

Herewith the text of my letter:

Denyse and Bill,

I would love to have the opportunity to continue commenting on UD, but it seems that Bill has permanently banned me. Bill, I’d be most grateful if you’d remove that ban, or at least explain to me why it was made. I was certainly critical of Denyse’s post, but I think my criticism was fair and justified. Further, I think the point about secondary causes and Aquinas was a fair one.

I would at least like the opportunity to continue the discussion on secondary causes, which I think is an important one. Given your own recent post about “directed evolution,” Bill, I’d think you’d agree that the discussion of secondary causes and Aquinas could be helpful. You’ve stated publicly that people who believe in “directed evolution” are ID people. I, then, am an ID person, for that is what I believe, within the specific framework of Christian theology as informed by Aquinas and mediated by folks such as Torrance and McGrath.

Denyse, my biggest problem with your post was that it seemed terribly insensitive to the person who originally asked a genuine question about doubt on the ASA list. You apparently didn’t read the ASA list carefully enough, because half of what you attributed to George Murphy came from the person struggling with doubt, not from George. A number of people on the ASA list tried to offer helpful comments to this person, including myself, as my post on UD shows. Whether George’s specific comments were good or not could be debated (personally I very much appreciate George’s kenotic perspective on creation), but you did a grave disservice to everyone involved by simply yanking out a few lines as you did.

Do you have any problem, Denyse of Bill, with the resources I proposed to the doubting person? Do they suggest in any way the sort of capitulation to materialist philosophy or theological softness that you attribute in your post? Does recommending Angus Menuge’s book “Agents Under Fire” in any way suggest that I have even a tip of my big toe in the materialst’s camp?

Denyse, my second biggest problem with your post was that you did absolutely nothing to help the doubting person while she was on the ASA list. Where were your recommendations to her? What counsel did you give her? It strikes me as arrogant in the extreme to cherry pick from a discussion with a hurting person, to which you didn’t even contribute, and then to twist it into some false accusation about how the Church is going to pot. I have a major moral problem with that kind of opportunism.

Denyse, you suggested to me that I’m afraid of stating in public that I believe in a desiger-God; that I’m shying away from ID out of some concern for my career.

Denyse, I don’t know who you think you are to make a statement like that to me. You don’t know me at all. I’ve been an evangelical Christian for over 30 years; I graduated from an evangelical college; I was a litigation attorney in a major firm for 13 years, and now I’m a law professor. I have never hidden my faith; indeed, I’ve always proclaimed it openly in what I say, write and do.

You may note that I never use a psuedonym when I write online; that’s because I believe in letting my “yes” be “yes.” Visit my blog sometime ( http://www.tgdarkly.com/blog ) and tell me if I seem to be timid about proclaiming my faith in the gospel to a hostile world. More than that, as a worship leader in a local church, I spent hundreds of Sundays, one after the other, standing in front of groups of 800 or more people, mostly strangers, visibly and openly proclaiming that Jesus, the logos who made us, is Lord. Who are you to question my faith commitment when you have no idea whatsoever how I have publicly lived it out?

Trust me when I tell you that I’ve taken my professional and personal lumps for being open about my belief in Jesus and in my affirmation that there is “one God, the the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” For you to suggest that I’m somehow afraid of expressing my belief in a designer-God is unwarranted. If God wills for me to suffer for my faith in Christ, that ultimately is something I will rejoice in.

Finally, your unwillingness to engage the deeper theological questions arising from what “evidence” of design means is gravely disappointing. I’m sure you know — or maybe you don’t know — that the question of “natural theology” has been debated for centuries. It is NOT a capitulation to materialism to suggest that natural theology reveals little or nothing about the designer to unregenerate minds. I consider myself within the broadly Reformed tradition; plenty of great minds in that tradition, Barth not the least, have been leery of natural theology. And it is NOT a capitulation to materialsm to suggest that God ordinarily works through secondary causes — this, indeed, is a classical theistic position that ultimately is a defense against atheistic claims that God is the author of evil. Again, read Aquinas, particularly his Summa Contra Gentiles.

Bill and Denyse, I think the way you are handling your blog is a terrible shame. We could be having productive and interesting high-level discussions about things like Aquinas and Barth and the doctrine of creation, in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Instead, we get nastiness, misprepresentations, and censoring even of fellow Christians who affirm the reality of a designer-God!

And let me add this final thought, Bill: I’ve no illusions about my own influence in the world. You’ve never heard of me, and you don’t care who I am, so I’m another buzzing fly to be swatted away. But, I’d humbly suggest that I’m exactly the kind of person you should want to engage. I’m not one of the misanthropic blog trollers who often populate blog comments. I have deep evangelical roots, a fair amount of theological education, and as a law professor at a very good law school, over time, Lord willing I will have an opportunity to influence students and to serve as “salt and light” within the academic legal community. Do you think people like me will have any interest in supporting your ideas or work when we can’t even have a civil discussion about Aquinas and causation?

For what it’s worth,

Sincerely,

David W. Opderbeck
http://www.tgdarkly.com

Categories
Science & Technology Theology

Landauer and the Ontology of Information

This continues the discussion on the ontology of information. Someone suggested that “information” has been shown by Rolf Landauer to be physical, and therefore not a thing-in-itself. I happened to have been reading some of Landauer’s work before this theological discussion for a law paper I’m working on right now relating to the legal regulation of information through intellectual property law (thrilling, I know).

The problem I see with using Landauer’s view of information is that it seems inseparable from a materialist metaphysics. Here is Landauer’s opening salvo in “The Physical Nature of Information,” Physics Letters, July 15, 1996:

“Information is not a disembodied abstract entity; it is always tied to a physical representation.”

He continues:

“our assertion that information is pysical amounts to an asertion that mathematics and computer science are a part of physics.”

Later, explicitly contrasting his view to (what he perceives to be) Christian theology and earlier scientific views derived from theology, he says:

“Our scientific culture normally views the law of physics as predating the actual physical universe. The law are considered to be like a control program in a modern chemical plant; the plant is turned on after the program is installed. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John I, 1), attests to this belief. Word is a translation from the Greek Logos “thought of as constituting the controlling principle of the universe.”

He concludes:

“The view I have expounded here makes the laws of physics dependent upon the apparatus and kinetics available in our universe, and that kinetics in turn depends on the laws of physics. Thus, this is a want ad for a self-consistent theory.”

Given the argument here in “The Physical Nature of Information,” which follows up on his “Information is Physical” (Physics Today May 1991), it seems to me that Landauer clearly is proposing a materialist metaphsics. I can’t reconcile that entirely physical view of “information” with the belief that, as we in the ASA have put it, “in creating and preserving the universe God has endowed it with contingent order and intelligibility, the basis of scientific investigation.”

Categories
Science & Technology Theology

Information and Natural Theology

I’ve been discussing with various people the nature of “information” and how the ontology of information relates to natural theology and intelligent design. Someone suggested that “information” should be understood as a thing-in-itself apart from matter and energy. He used money as an analogy: money is separable from the commodities it can purchase.

I thought that was an interesting analogy, but for the opposite point: that “information” is not a thing-in-itself, a given aspect of creation, but rather is socially constructed. Here are the preliminary thoughts I had about that, and about how it realtes to natural theology:

Wealth as an analogy for information is very interesting. It gets right to the heart of how I’m trying to think about this. Wealth, or better, a medium of market exchange, isn’t a thing-in-itself in the same sense as matter and energy. God created matter and energy such that they are fundamental properties of the created universe. He didn’t create “wealth” or any medium of market exchange in the same way.

Rather, wealth and currency are socially constructed by people. The only reason a dollar has any value is that society agrees that it has such a value. Absent the social contract, a dollar is a worthless piece of paper. God didn’t create money in the sense that he created matter and energy; He created people who in virtue of bearing His image are social beings; and in virtue of being social beings, people construct social realities that can include things like money. But those social realities aren’t a given in the way that matter and energy are givens. People couldn’t “agree” that matter and energy no longer exist and thereby make it so; but people could (and often do) agree to construct markets without currency, and thereby make it so.

I am beginning to think of “information” the same way: as a social construction, not a given fundamental property of the universe such as matter and energy. We can only properly speak of “information” in the universe in the context of its construction in social relationships.

I think this social view of information has implications for natural theology, but I haven’t really worked this out. In short, if information is a social construction, we should not expect to be able to separate a message from its social context. God may be communicating something about Himself to us through nature, but we will only truly recognize that message in the context of relationship with Him. We can’t speak of “information,” then, as an independent property of the universe that could be detected and measured by just anyone, like matter and energy. “Information” can only be constructed in a social context; genuine information about God can ultimately only be constructed in a social context appropriate to that sort of exchange — the Church. Any effort to construct a natural theology apart from the presuppositions of faith expressed in the community of the Church will therefore fail.

Does anyone have a more “objective,” non-social view of what “information” is as a thing-in-the-universe? If so, can you think of a better, non-social analogy (other than something like money)?

Categories
Miscellaneous News Science & Technology

Davis on Gingerich

Any ROFT’ers (“Readers of First Things”) here might like to know that Ted Davis’ excellent review of Owen Gingerich’s book “God’s Universe” appears in the current issue of First Things (though there is always a delay before print version goes to web). Good to see an ASA leader’s voice in this important journal! I’ve not read all of Gingerich’s book, but from what I’ve read, as Davis notes in his review, Gingerich’s book is a delight. Gingerich affirms the compatibility of faith and science and supports the classical Christian notion of design, while carefully distinguishing some aspects of the “strong” ID program and avoiding polemics.

There is also, BTW, an interesting discussion going on at the FT website concerning physicist Stephen Barr’s (and others’) observations about quantum indeterminacy and free will. Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith is likewise a delight.

And, if you’re not a ROFT’er, you should be!

Categories
Law and Policy Science & Technology

One Reason I No Longer Jump in to Defend Intelligent Design

A year or two ago, I was much more sympathetic to Intelligent Design than I am now. Part of my waning enthusiasm for ID is that, as I’ve studied the arguments, some of the “proofs” ID uses don’t really seem all that compelling. Of course, I still believe in design. More than that, I think some arguments that are classified as “design” or “ID” arguments remain very strong, particularly when they are used in the classical sense as part of a broader framework of “faith seeking understanding,” rather than as formal, rationalistic evidences of breaks in the created order.

What has really turned my stomach sour about ID, however, is the increasingly politicized tone of some of the ID leadership. Exhibit No. 1 here is Bill Dembski’s blog, Uncommon Descent. I’ve read some of Dembski’s books, and his tone in that kind of writing tends to be erudite and scholarly. On his blog, however, he and some of his guest posters come across, at least in my mind, as strident and angry. They make the political motivations for ID transparent, particularly when they go off on rants about things that are completely irrelevant to the question of design, such as global warming. Dembski’s blog, for me, damages the credibility of ID as a scientific or even generally scholarly enterprise — which is a shame.

Here is what gets my ire today. I participate actively in the American Scientific Affiliation discussion list. One of the friends I’ve made on that list, whom I’ve never met in person but hope to some day, is Ted Davis, a professor at Messiah College (a Christian liberal arts college). From what I’ve seen of Ted’s work, he is a model to me of what a Christian scholar should be like. I may not always agree with Ted (though I usually do), but I can always say that Ted presents his case in a calm, reasonable way.

For some unknown reason, Dembski decided yesterday to attack Ted on Uncommon Descent. This attack was particularly ridiculous because the comments Dembski refers to were in the context of Ted’s criticism of a strident anti-ID commentator who was trying in some absurd way to defend Richard Dawkins. This kind of thing makes it hard for me to trust what Bill Dembski says — which again, is really too bad, because alot of what he says in his more scholarly work is interesting and worthy of careful discussion.

Here is what I wrote in the comments on Dembski’s blog, which undoubtedly will get me flamed over there:

I am the “David” to which Ted Davis refers and whose earlier comments Ted “echoes” in the discussion thread from the ASA email list which Dr. Dembski has referenced. The context of that thread was a discussion of Richard Dawkins’ recent “Fresh Air” interview.

The person to whom Ted is directly responding in that discussion, Pim van Meurs (of Panda’s Thumb), was suggesting that Dawkins’ main target is ID rather than religion generally. Pim seemed to be defending Dawkins as a champion of Science. I reacted strongly to that, and others jumped into the fray, including Ted.

The suggestion that Ted’s post “is written to Pim van Meurs, as a mentor would write to his disciple” is patently absurd, bordering perhaps on defamatory. If you read through the whole thread, and indeed if you were to participate regularly on the ASA list, you would immediately see that nothing could be further from the truth. Ted never hesitates to call out over-the-top nonesense like a defense of Richard Dawkins as a reasonable chap who is just concerned about ID.

Indeed, in my many online conversations with Ted, I’ve come to appreciate deeply his somewhat moderating stance between TE and ID. It is true that Ted also doesn’t hesitate to criticize what he sees as the flaws in the “strong” ID program. But at the same time, he often defends the basic notion of design from excessive criticism by TE’s, and the historical context he is able to provide to these discussions invariably is invaluable.

Above all, Ted is a gentleman as well as a scholar. From what I’ve seen of Ted’s writing and of his leadership in the ASA, he has refused to allow the politics of ID to overwhelm careful scholarship and calm, reasoned discussion.

It is a shame that we can’t say the same for everyone involved in this discussion, particularly for those who publicly identify themselves as followers of Jesus. Personally, I used to be much more sympathetic to ID than I am now. One of the main reasons for my increased skepticism about ID is that nasty, strident, politicized tone of many ID leaders — as exemplified by this unfair attack on a fellow Christian scholar. You may think you are winning a battle here and there, but you will lose the war if you keep going down this track. The shame is that it isn’t really your war to fight, and the tools you’re using to fight it are not those of the Kingdom all of us Christian scholars are supposed to represent.

I am a law professor, a Christian scholar along with Ted and Dr. Dembski, though not possessed of anywhere near their achievements, influence or stature. We who are called to serve the Church with our teaching and scholarship, perhaps more than anyone else, ought to model patient, careful, deep and reasonable discourse. We together name Jesus as Lord and agree that all Truth is God’s Truth. Our bond in those facts should transcend this sort of petty sniping.

(And now, let’s see with what love and grace everyone here treats me for daring to defend my friend Ted Davis).

Categories
Academic Books and Film Science & Technology Spirituality Theology

Incarnational Humanism and "The Passionate Intellect" — Book Review

The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education

By Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmerman
Baker Academic (2006)
ISBN 0-8010-2734-9

This book is explores the themes of whether, and how, Christians can develop a rich and passionate life of the mind. Although it is written for Christian students bound for university, it is useful for any Christian who is serious about the intellectual life.

One of the authors’ goals is to defuse the “warfare” mentality concerning faith and “secular” learning that some Christians, particularly those who are not very mature in the faith, often seem to develop. They propose to do this through the model of “Incarnational Humanism.”

“Incarnational Humanism” takes the incarnation of Christ as a starting point for a Christian approach to learning. “In Christ,” the authors state, “all fragmentation ends and a new humanity begins, a new creation in which all knowledge is united (or taken captive, as Paul puts it) under the lordship of Christ because in him the divine and the human are firmly joined forever.” The pattern of the incarnation suggests that we should expect to find that truth is not “an abstract, timeless concept,” but rather is mediated through human language, culture, and tradition. Therefore, Christians should not be afraid of truth located outside the hermetically sealed world of our particular religious subcultures.

In short, the authors place a Kuyperian notion of “common grace,” as mediated for generations of Christian college students by Arthur Holmes’ famous dictum that “All Truth is God’s Truth,” into the postmodern context. While the authors thus acknowledge the postmodern turn, they firmly deny the destructive Nietzschean postmodernism, evident in figures such as Michael Foucault, that rejects any notion of classical humanism in favor of a heuristic of power relationships.

The answer the authors suggest to Nietzsche and Foucault, however, is not a resurgent Christian rationalism dusted off from the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Rather, they hearken back to the sort of humanism that is evident in many of the Church’s great minds, such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, prior to the Enlightenment. In this classical Christian humanism, truth is more than power – indeed, truth in many ways is the antithesis of power – because the divine Truth became man and gave himself for us.

There are many riches in this book. The phrase “Incarnational Humanism” is a beautiful one that deserves broad attention, and it is high time that “All Truth is God’s Truth” be given a postmodern reading. There is also, however, a glaring weakness in the authors’ arguments: they do not deal adequately with the effects of sin. A model of truth that hearkens back to Augustine, but that glides over any reading of Augustine’s thoughts on sin, will not present a thoroughly Christian humanism.

I wish the authors had acknowledged the tension between the incarnation and human sinfulness, and had contextualized it, as scripture and the Christian humanist tradition do, within the “already / not yet” of the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless, this is a valuable addition to the literature on the intellectual life as a Christian vocation. Let us hope that a holistic, incarnational understanding of faith and learning once again infuses the Church, rather than the rationalist, atomistic, confrontational approaches that so often seem to dominate our thinking.

Categories
Science & Technology

The Neurology of Morality and the Politics of Science

There is an interesting article in this month’s Economist that illustrates, I think, some of the problems with social Darwinism, particularly when it is linked to a particular political outlook, as seemingly inevitably is the case. The article reports on a study of six people who have suffered damage to a part of the brain (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC)) that is involved with social emotion. The study showed that these people were more likely than a control group to provide a “utilitarian” answer to the “runaway train paradox.”

The “runaway train paradox” involves two dilemmas — in one, you must decide whether to push a person in front of an oncoming train in order to slow the train before it hits five other people further down the line; in the other, you must decide whether to switch the track so that that train will hit only one person further down the line rather than hitting five people. Most people will hesistate to push a person in front of the train to save five lives, but will not hesistate to switch the track so that the train hits one person further down the line instead of five. The six subjects with damaged VMPC’s felt the same about both possibilities — they would not hesitate in either case to sacrifice one person in order to save five.

The article explains that “In these cases it seems that the decision on how to act is not a single, rational calculation of the sort that moral philosophers have generally assumed is going on, but a conflict between two processes, with one (the emotional) sometimes able to override the other (the utilitarian, the location of which this study does not address).” This yin-and-yang of emotional and rational responses, the article says, “fits with one of the tenets of evolutionary psychology…. This is that minds are composed of modules evolved for given purposes…. The VMPC may be the site of a ‘moral-decision’ module, linked to the social emotions, that either regulates or is regulated by an as-yet-unlocated utilitarian module. “

So far, perhaps, so good. All of this seems very speculative, and a sample size of six people with brain damage hardly seems adequate, but nevertheless, it wouldn’t be surprising that the emotional and rational aspects of moral reasoning relate to different parts of the brain, and it doesn’t problematic per se if those parts of the brain developed over time through evolutionary processes. The kicker is in the article’s concluding paragraph: “This does not answer the question of what this module (what philosophers woudl call ‘moral sense’) is actually for. But it does suggest the question should be addressed functionally, rather than in the abstract. Time, perhaps, for philosophers to put away their copies of Kant and pull a dusty tome of Darwin off the bookshelf.”

It seems to me that in this paragraph the article crosses from descriptive to prescriptive; from science to metaphysics. This is particularly so in that, as a devoted reader of the Economist, I’m well aware of that magazine’s pragmatist / libertarian political philosophy and its slant towards materialist metaphysics. In a very subtle way, this is an example of the materialist / pragmatist saying: “See there … all that ‘moral sense’ and whot is in your head. We shall move beyond this and learn to develop our utilitarian modules.”

Categories
Science & Technology

Francis Bacon on Faith and Science

I’ve been reading Francis Bacon for a legal scholarship project on intellectual propertly law (focusing on how Enlightenment epistemology and views of progress influenced the instrumentalist basis of patent and copyright law). Coincidentally, I came across this passage from Bacon’s Magna Instauratio about the relationship between faith and science, which summarizes my present feelings quite well. It’s interesting that Bacon was wrestling in the early 1600’s with the same things we wrestle with today:

you will find that by the simpleness of certain divines, access to any philosophy, however pure, is well night closed. Some are weakly afraid lest a deeper search into nature should transgress the permitted limits of sobermindednes, wrongfully wresting and transferring what is said in holy writ against those who pry into sacred mysteries to the hidden things of nature, which are barred by no prohibition. Others with more subtlety surmise and reflect that if second causes are unknown, everything can more readily be referred to the divine hand and rod, a point in which they think religion greatly concerned which is in fact nothing else but to seek to gratify God with a lie. Others fear from past example that movements and changes in philosophy will end in assaults on religion. And others again appear apprehensive that in the investigation of nature something may be found to subvert or at least shake the authority of religion, especially with the unlearned. But these two last fears seem to me to savour utterly of carnal wisdom, as if men in the recesses and secret thoughts of their hearts doubted and distrusted the strength of religion and the empire of faith over the sense, and therefore feared that the investigation of truth in nature might be dangerous to them. But if the matter be truly considered, natural philosophy is after the word of God at once the surest medicine against superstition, and the most approved nourishment for faith, and therefore she is rightly given to religion as her most faithful handmaid, since the one displays the will of God, the other his power.

Categories
Epistemology Science & Technology Theology

Intelligent Design and Positivism

I participate in an email list concerning intelligent design, on which there’s been an interesting discussion about whether ID presupposes a positivist epistemology. I think that it often does.

By “positivism” I mean a philosophical / epistemological position according to which knowledge is authentic only if it is measurable and empirically verifiable — i.e., only if it is derived from the scientific method. See a Wiki here. It seems to me that ID often accepts this assumption by proposing, at least implicitly, that the doctrine of creation is in some sense measurable and emprically verifiable. The presense of specified complex information, for example, is supposed to be a filter through which we can empirically verify the activity of a creator. If not for some concession to positivism, however, why would we even need such an empirical filter?

The Bible says “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19), which I take to mean that all of creation reflects God’s glory. God is revealed in all of creation, apart from any specific scientific test we might propose for deducing his activity in some aspect of creation. Indeed, the pursuit of such a particular scientific test is misguided. The test is simply everything that exists.

I think this is different than the question of evidential apologetics. I would disagree with many opponents of ID who suggest that the creation we observe is as compatible with atheism as it is with theism. I think this stance is correct only if we’re back to presupposing a postivitist epistemology. If we presuppose positivism, then I think its correct that the existence of God can’t be “proven” one way or the other. But if the sense of wonder, longing and awe we feel when we reflect on the creation around us is more than some kind of reductionist biological / evolutionary impulse — if, as C.S. Lewis might put it, our experience of the numinous points to a reality outside our ordinary perception — then the positivistic atheist is merely dulling his senses when he denies the creator. As Romans 1 puts it, “their thinking [becomes] futile and their foolish hearts [are] darkened” concerning the knowledge of God.

Therefore, to a mind not entirely bound by a presupposition against the knowledge of God, the “ordinary” processes of creation seem reducible to physical laws and chance. It is only as grace begins to melt that futility and darkness that the evidences we can provide in support of the faith start to make sense. (Unlike very strict Calvinist presuppositionalists, I believe common grace plays an important role here and that glimpses of the numinous aren’t limited to the elect.) But it seems to me that the sorts of evidences we can provide are not taken from the positivist’s toolbox in the form of particular mathematical filters and proofs. They are rather the witness of all of creation, seen through the spectacles of faith. (For a good essay exploring some of these themes, see Michael Hanby, Reclaiming Creation in a Darwinian World, Theology Today 62(2006): 476-83).