Reviewed by Jeffrey Stueber
There have been some intellectual heavyweights written and published over the years: the Koran, the Bible, Das Kapital, Marx and Engel's Communist Manifesto, the Humanist Manifesto, and a host of others. Something doesn't have to be rather large to be an intellectual heavyweight; some of the most profound and far-reaching works of literature have been short and concise. Conversely, some of the largest books will not go down in history as being world-moving works. William Gairdner's The War Against the Family (1) is an over-600-page mammoth which is useful in anyone's library but will most likely be forgotten in the annals of the "classics."
Mere Creation is at times a tremendous disappointment and at times an encouraging sign of creationist scholarship to come. I say "disappointing" because I expected the whole book to advance creationist arguments alone. William Dembski, in his introduction, states that the "mere" in the title should be understood in the same sense as it is used in C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Lewis would tell us, in his so famous book, of the mere (essential) beliefs one must have to be a Christian and Dembski's book would purport to tell us the mere aspects of creationism one must hold to be a creationist. Yet, there are those essays which tell us nothing, or next to nothing, about the "mere" aspects of creationism. They are, instead, polemics against Darwinism. This is no surprise to me as creationists are better at criticizing Darwinism than stating a scientific case for creation, mostly because for decades and centuries Judeo/Christian creationists have relied on the Biblical word and it's version of divine wisdom and revelation as evidence for the truth of Judeo/Christian beliefs. Darwinists have from the beginning focused on Darwinism seen through the lens of "science," which is, of course, seen through a naturalistic lens. Religion is "revelation" and hence untestable like science and also subject to "faith," a realization all too many atheists have taken as evidence that religion and creationism have nothing to do with reality. It's easy to criticize your opposition when your opposition is weak but perhaps difficult to present your own case for your beliefs if you have no case. It's as if creationism was like a boxer with only one arm: with one arm you can punch your opponent but two arms allow you to mount a better offensive and also guard against your opponent. Creationism has been, for years upon years, like a one-armed boxer hitting evolution hard but unable to mount a successful attack because it had no science of its own to replace Darwinian science and therefore had no guard against those who would ask what offense it had to offer when impressing intellectual "heavyweights."
For those essays that were somewhat disappointing, I refer the reader to Nancy Pearcey's essay "You Guys Lost" in the section on design theory. The "you" in the title refers to Darwinists who believed they had an airtight case for naturalism, but really didn't. To one's surprise, as Pearcey tells it, many naturalists did not accept Darwin's explanation for life's origins and even "Darwin's bulldog" Thomas Huxley understood the paucity of the evidence for Darwin's theory. Nevertheless, Huxley remained a staunch Darwinist, a "pseudo-Darwinian" as P. Bowler would call him. Huxley remained a Darwinist because of his "empiricist philosophy". Pearcey concludes, as did Phillip Johnson in his first book critiquing evolution, that Darwinism survived more because the debate was "rigged." In a brief few paragraphs before the end of her essay, she presents a few arguments against the concept of design which she says have not been answered by design theorists (this is not necessarily true as I have seen them answered before this book was published). Pearcey could have spent more time on one of these or all of them, but instead chose to rehash the failures and biases of the politics of Darwinism.
The second essay I refer to which is somewhat a disappointment to me is Jeffrey Schloss' chapter on evolutionary accounts (explanations) of altruism (the tendency to do good to others). Schloss does a tremendous critique of naturalistic accounts which reveal how bankrupt are the evolutionary explanations of this tendency. In fact, evolutionary explanations are so bankrupt that it has been proposed that people do good to others because either they secretly know they're getting something in return or really don't know it - as if we somehow thought we were obligated to do good but our biology was fooling us. These explanations are obviously totally at odds with reality.
What Schloss offers us in place of evolutionary explanations is a good paradigm, but one which is poorly developed in relation to his exposition of evolutionary explanations of altruism. "If one believes human beings are designed to be loving organisms, then it is reasonable to hypothesize that behavior which is generous toward others might actually increase fitness - and not because it increases social status and therefore improves access to resources but because even if resources are relinquished, it may improve utilization efficiency or result in psychoneurological states that promote immunity, learning, vitality or others aspects of well-being." That sounds like a load of psychobabble and takes a bit to digest, but I suspect it has something to do with actions which are not necessarily selfish (i.e. not "disinterested behavior"). In other words, perhaps it's the truly unselfish behavior that increases fitness. The commandment "love thy neighbor as thyself" may run contrary to the survival of our genes, but may nevertheless promote peace and serenity. Not only that, but faith in some transcendent god or hope may do the same thing and evolutionists would have a difficult time explaining this through naturalistic assumptions when naturalism is supposed to explain away the need for any transcendent heaven, god, or purpose - that is, without making it unfalsifiable. Schloss could expand on this in detail, but does not and researchers like Patrick Glynn (2) have done more of a substantial job of documenting the relationship between health, fitness, and faith. Perhaps the lack of depth in essays like this is what Dembski means when he emphasizes the "mere" aspect of Mere Creation.
Yet, there are those essays that do provide an aggressive foundation upon which to build a creationist scientific framework, essays which do more than just criticize evolution. Dembski's idea of the "explanatory filter" is useful and capable of keeping out ridiculous ideas of divine action, such as those purported by pastors and priests who insist that, upon the cessation of a brief drought after a Sunday prayer, God must have intervened to make it rain again. If an event (like that of a rain) can be trapped by the portion of the filter that will rule something a natural event, then it never gets to the part of the filter that might ascribe an event to divine causes. Hugh Ross' evidence for the fine tuning of the universe will provide increasing evidence that a transcendent being did intervene in history. William Lane Craig's reasoning in his cosmological argument begins on the premise that "whatever begins to exist has a cause" and proceeds to the notion that whatever brought the universe into being was an unembodied mind, and is clear and compact enough for anyone to understand. There are others, of course, that demonstrate they can reason via empiricism to creation without propping up creation by only criticizing evolution. That being said, I suspect this book is worth reading for timely critiques of Darwinism and a feel for what passes as creationist science. The authors have a long way to go before they convince a very skeptical public that creationist science can stand on its own as not only a reliable explanation for the world but a predictor of the course of science and a guide for what scientists should do and for what they should look. At present, creationism is like a boxer in training, with only one arm. He's growing another and getting better, but who he really has to convince is the public who remains skeptical of his talents. Can he go undefeated? Can creationism live up to the expectations as a prize-fighter of science? One thing is certain: they, and we, have a long way to go.
Notes:
1. William Gairdner, The War Against the Family: A Parent Speaks Out, 1992, Stoddart Publishing: Toronto, Canada
2. Patrick Glynn, God: the Evidence: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World, 1997, Prima Publishing