Perversions of Evangelical Christianity

Wednesday I went to a program on Intelligent Design put on by a Christian organization on campus. I’m afraid that many of my worst fears about what the talk were confirmed, and I was witness to a spectacle of Christians unabashedly talking trash about evolutionary biologists. This experience, besides upsetting me greatly (it was extremely hard to control myself), has made me think about the problems I have with evangelical Christianity, and why I have left the movement. So I thought I would attempt to show some of my precise reasons, giving by no means anything exhaustive list but demonstrating what I have a problem with. I will warn the reader up-front that this is in essence a rant, and may contain offensive content.

I. Anti-intellectualism

Mere ignorance is simply that: a lack of knowledge. But anti-intellectualism goes well beyond incidental ignorance to embracing it. Knowledge that challenges previously held assumptions is viewed as a threat, not a learning opportunity; ignorance is viewed as safety, and so anti-intellectualism fosters an environment of not just circumstantial but willful ignorance.

Though this is evident in a wide number of arenas of evangelical life, Intelligent Design is a particularly potent example. From the ID materials I’ve been introduced to, as well as from the talk I went to, the movement is flagrantly unscientific and abusive of scientific methods.

The thesis of Intelligent Design is that the mechanisms of life are too complex to have arisen naturally and without an intelligence actively designing them. The first thing to notice about this is that it is not a scientific claim, but a philosophical one. Science is the investigation of the natural world, producing theories and hypotheses that can be tested and disproved. Intelligent Design’s entire thesis – that something is too complex to be randomly assembled – and all its derivative claims neither provide testable hypotheses (predictions about unobserved phenomenon) nor offer the chance to be disproved. Quite contrary to this, evolutionary biology makes predictions (which have largely yielded themselves to be true) and can be quite easily disproved (for example, finding a rabbit in a layer of Cretaceous rock). So the claim that Intelligent Design is a scientific hypothesis is false: it fails to produce the two chief requirements of a scientific hypothesis.

Often used to support the claim of “too much complexity” are two arguments: probabilistic impossibility, and irreducible complexity. The former is easily deconstructed by examining at the presumptions used to come up with the numbers. The gentleman whose talk I attended claimed that the chances of an environment arising which is suitable for life is 10 to the minus 388 (several orders of magnitude above the number of atoms in the universe). The number, however, is misleading. It was calculated for a planet being a certain distance from the sun (earth’s distance) and a certain size (earth’s size) around a star of a particular heat (the sun’s heat) with an oxygen-rich atmosphere (like earth’s), and so on. The calculation does not take into consideration that a star hotter than ours with a planet a little further away may also be inhabitable; or that a larger planet with greater amount of greenhouse gases could survive outside the so-called “habitable zone”. That is, this calculation treated interdependent variables as if they were independent, and in fact was not a calculation for the chances of a habitable planet, but for the chances of a planet in every way exactly like earth. Besides the smuggled-in assumptions to make the number bigger (such as an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which is a byproduct of living unicellular organisms, mostly phytoplankton, and not natural to a lifeless earth), the assumption that such a number is even calculable is manifestly false. I asked the speaker if he was familiar with the Drake equation, to which he assented that he was. The Drake equation is supposed to calculate the number of expected civilizations in our galaxy, and it is more a statement of our ignorance about the universe than anything else. The equation contains 7 constants, only one of which is known to any degree of certainty (the rate of star formation). The second constant – the fraction of stars containing planets – is only just now beginning to become known, and the other 5 are a mystery (included among them: what a habitable planet is and is not, and the chances of life arising). To give a number calculating the chances of life boldly and arrogantly goes against the known limits of current human knowledge. This behavior I would label anti-intellectual not because it is ignorant but because it selectively chooses parts of human (scientific) knowledge while ignoring others in order to appear as if it is intellectually rigorous, when in fact it is not.

The second argument – that of irreducible complexity – rapidly devolves into an appeal to prima facie reasoning. The argument goes something like this: because a phenomenon is too difficult to conceive of being produced gradually, and it is impossible for us to now understand how pieces of it are independently functional, it could not have come into existence gradually. Favorites of ID proponents are bacterial flagella – now being slowly debunked – and woodpecker tongues. While I feel the issue of complexity is a completely valid point to raise, I would not base any theory on an inability for current knowledge to explain something (I very much doubt ancient peoples could fathom how lightning was generated). At the end of the talk, the presenter showed us a video of an AI project called BigDog and asserting to us that we all accept it as designed, and yet real dogs are more complex. The insinuation was that it is impossible to say that the one is designed and the other is not. This is an appeal to snap judgments without looking at the matter more carefully, and is a favorite tactic of evangelicals. “Let’s abstract complexities away and go with what seems most obvious.” By the same token I could take time-lapsed videos of the sun, moon, and stars moving across the sky, compare that to people moving through a busy city, and say, “Isn’t it obvious in these what is actually moving? The people are moving… and so is the sun!” First blush, this is what it looks like, but we all know that that reality is more complicated than this, and cannot be determined by snap judgments of it.

(This does not even bring up philosophical problems with Intelligent Design - namely, if something that is complex necessitates an intelligence sufficiently complex to have created it, doesn't the creating intelligence necessitate a creator, and so on forever.)

But this last point of prima facie reasoning is I feel the most crucial and problematic part of anti-intellectualism. The philosophy asks its followers to ignore complex arguments and reality not because they are wrong, but because they are complex. This argument riddles evangelical analysis of the Bible: how often have you heard the plea to follow the clear word of God? What if reality isn’t so clear? What if the word of God isn’t always so self-evident? What if it’s muddy, and what if it’s difficult to determine? Such questions are ignored in preference of simple answers. And for these reasons evangelical Christianity has historically been troubled by matters of science and textual criticism, and will continue to be troubled by them so long as it continues to adopt a strain of anti-intellectualism in its reasoning.

II. Appeal to Sensationalism

The talk included a plug for a new movie coming out called “Expelled”. The movie purports to be a documentary of scientists unjustly losing their jobs for questioning Darwinism. I have no doubt that many of the injustices they bring up are real and inexcusable. The problem I had with the film was not this, but its appeal to emotion and sensationalism to elicit a response from the audience: an image of a cheetah devouring a meal as the narrator (Ben Stein, of all people) talks about Darwinian theory in the classroom; appeals to Nazi Germany as an example of the outworking of believing in Darwinian evolution; chalkboard writing and scared looks by Ben Stein as if a grown man is being unduly punished as a schoolchild; etc. You can watch the trailer for it here. The most ironic part is probably the mention of Darwinists believing human beings are “nothing more than mud animated by lightning”, when we know our Jewish narrator’s own Scriptures say something about human beings created from mud animated by breath, or at least from some sort of dust that at one point had to get wet.

I would pass this by as particular to the ID issue, but it is not, as groups like Focus on the Family will appeal to sensationalism as reasons against gay marriage, or abortion, and so forth – and I have personally found this to be quite common in evangelical churches when it comes to hot-button topics.

III. Demeaning one’s Opponents

The last and most damning portion of the talk, following the plug for “Expelled”, was a guffawing and mockery by the people present of popular atheists and evolutionary biologists. The gentleman giving the talk spoke about how he thought it not at all a problem to have these atheists get their come-uppance. One prominent critic of ID attended a preview of “Expelled” in a not-at-all confrontational manner, and yet he was kicked out of the theater. The gentleman giving the ID talk said he was fine with this atheist getting “to know what it feels like”. This was followed by more laughter, derision, talk about court cases, and so forth. It all felt a bit like the Two Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s 1984, only lasting for much longer than a mere two minutes.

In most evangelical circles, a demeaning attitude is not so blatantly hateful. Nevertheless, those who disagree with the evangelical line are often looked on with pity, as not being able to come to grips with (either spiritually or mentally) with truth. Be that as it may, it is one thing to believe you are correct in your beliefs and another to allow this to cast doubt on your neighbor’s capacities. I remember being told in church to have compassion on non-Christians because they need Jesus just as much as any of us. In real life I have too often seen this worked out as a sort of patronizing sympathy, with the Christian not being able to treat his non-Christian neighbor in spiritual or philosophical matters as a coherent human with just as much dignity and consideration to be given him as to a Christian.

IV. Disregard for the Poor

I couldn’t help but wonder what the purpose of this gathering was. After the presentation of Intelligent Design, there was a foray into when exactly a soul is imparted to a human embryo. Besides the presumptions laden in such a question, what good would it do to be able to determine such a thing? The same gentleman and his wife who did the ID talk did a discussion on biblical gender the next day (I was unable to force myself to attend). These are the serious matters of import which this Christian organization is facing. And my answer to this is: are you shitting me? No, evangelical Christianity, seriously: are you shitting me?

This is from the 2007 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. It is on the country of Rwanda. Here are some quotes:

Small numbers of impoverished girls, typically between the ages of 14 and 18, used prostitution as a means of survival, and some were exploited by loosely organized prostitution networks.

Due to the genocide and deaths from HIV/AIDS, there were numerous households headed by children, some of whom resorted to prostitution to survive.

The law does not specifically prohibit domestic violence, and domestic violence against women, including wife beating, was common.

Where is the Christian outcry against this and efforts to improve it, or countless similar cases all over the world? What about poverty in the US which, while not so extreme, also destroys lives? And we sit here talking about the evils of evolution and women pastors and wonder when a fetus gets a soul? Let me confess something: I live daily in the sin of almost total indifference to poverty and suffering. I need help; I need to be more like Jesus, a Jesus who cared for and cured human horrors. I need a radical change not just in my heart but in my actions, and I fear I am too weak to do it on my own. But any religion or religious movement which does not concern itself with real, physical human need is not one that I have a desire to be a part of.