Volume 15: Number 20 (1,025)

May 26, 2010

In this issue:

ORIGINS – Bruce Waltke resigns over evolution statement

RELIGIOUS PLURALISM – Stephen Prothero exposes “pretend pluralism”

ROMAN CATHOLICISM – estimating the sex-abuse scandals’ damage

SCIENCE – psyc prof warns “soft science” fields: Beware “the problem
of hubris”

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Apologia Report 15:20 (1,025)
May 26, 2010

ORIGINS
“An evolving story or not?” by Sarah Pulliam Bailey — “Almost
immediately after posting a video that included [his statement that
‘If the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that
reality will make us a cult – some odd group that is not really
interacting with the world’] on the Internet three weeks ago, [a
leading evangelical patriarch of Old Testament theology, Bruce]
Waltke was labeled a heretic, and called ‘anti-Christian.'” Bailey
notes that “The odd part about this quote is that while the web
version posts this full quote, the [ABC] television version cuts out
the ‘if,’ which Waltke said later is an important distinction. …
“Even though Waltke had the video that supported evolution pulled
down, and repeatedly explained that he believes one can believe in
both evolution and biblical inerrancy (the position that the Bible
is accurate), the attacks have kept coming.
“After deciding he’d had enough, two weeks ago Waltke resigned
from the Reformed Theological Seminary in Florida where he’d taught
for more than a decade. …
“Peter Enns, who lost his job at an evangelical seminary in
Philadelphia under similar circumstances, says a refusal to accept
evolution is likely to turn away future generations of Christians.
…
“Moderate evangelical Randal Balmer says conservative
evangelicals are starting to close ranks in the face of mounting
evidence supporting the theory of evolution.
“It’s unclear why the reporters interviewed Peter Enns, whose
departure from Westminster Theological Seminary didn’t have anything
to do with evolution and focused on whether his book [1] adhered to
a specific confession of faith that faculty must sign. The ABC story
should have at least disclosed that Enns now works for the Biologos
Foundation, which was the same group that posted the video of
Waltke.”
There are significantly more complexities to this debate than
what you see above. Bailey provides a helpful service by detailing
many of them. GetReligion, Apr 20 ’10,

—

RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
“All Religions Are Not Alike” by Rich Barlow — “How does a religion
teacher get an invitation to appear, in June, on Comedy Central’s
The Colbert Report? By writing a book saying that Gandhi, the Dalai
Lama, and others have preached about the shared, benign beliefs
unifying all great religions – and then dismissing that message as
garbage.
“Stephen Prothero’s God Is Not One [2], which hits bookstores
today, argues that the globe’s eight major religions hold different
and irreconcilable assumptions. They may all push the Golden Rule,
as progressives like to point out, but no religion really considers
ethics its sole goal. Doctrine, ritual, and myth are crucial, too,
and on these, writes the College of Arts & Sciences professor, there
is no meeting of the religious minds. …
“The notion of ‘pretend pluralism,’ as Prothero derides it, may
be nobly intentioned, but it is ‘dangerous, disrespectful, and
untrue.’ It blinds us to understanding, and therefore solving”
religiously-driven political conflict, for example.
“Harvard’s Harvey Cox, gives Prothero qualified support. ‘Steve
is right that the ‘unity’ of religions has been exaggerated,’ says
Cox ‘He helps us all see that in interfaith dialogue, we converse
with a genuine “other.” What he may overlook is that religions are
changing, sometimes quite rapidly – the lines between them are
becoming more porous – and that a considerable amount of borrowing
back and forth has been going on.” …
“So how, at this point, to defang religious animosity? The book
argues that understanding their differences is the start of
accepting them.
“The book cites only one example of Prothero’s strategy:
Chicago’s Interfaith Youth Core, which assembles young people from
diverse religions to rub shoulders on community service projects.
“‘I don’t give many examples because there aren’t many examples,’
he admits. He acknowledges that homicidal fanatics like Osama bin
Laden aren’t open to embracing differences and must be forcibly
stopped. But he’s convinced that we’ll never stop the crazies by
following what he calls ineffectual na ƒ ¯fs cawing about religious
solidarity. His Third Way, whether extremists can accept it or not,
is humility about one’s views….” BU Today (Boston Univ.), Apr 20
’10,

—

ROMAN CATHOLICISM
“Catholics in crisis” (no byline) — asks: “How severe is the
[sex-abuse scandals] crisis?
“It’s ‘the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in
church history,’ says the National Catholic Reporter. …
“Since the 1960s, four American-born Catholics have left the
church for every one who has converted, according to a 2009 Pew
study. … More than 1,000 parishes have closed since 1995, and the
number of priests has fallen from about 49,000 to 40,000 during that
same period. Some 3,400 Catholic parishes in the U.S. now lack a
resident priest. ‘Catholicism is in decline across America,’ says
sociologist David Carlin. …
“In 1991, 84 percent of the Irish population attended Mass at
least once a week. Today the weekly attendance figure is less than
50 percent.”
On the other hand, “The African church has grown from 55 million
in 1978 to 150 million today. ‘The church has provided, in many
cases, the voice that stands on behalf of the voiceless,’ says the
Rev. Emmanuel Katongole, a leader in the Ugandan church. In Asia,
church membership increased 80 percent since 1978, while the number
of priests rose 74 percent. In fact, Africa and Asia now supply
priests to the rest of the world…. But the church faces problems
in the developing world, too. Evangelical Protestantism is making
inroads, and many African priests live openly with wives and
children, in defiance of the Vatican’s celibacy requirement.” The
Week, May 7 ’10, p11.

—

SCIENCE
“Hard Questions from ‘Soft’ Sciences” by Christopher F. Chabris —
with “soft” referring to fields less “rigorous and substantial” than
biology and chemistry, explains Chabris, who reports that “over the
past decade the study of human behavior has shaken off some of its
science-lite reputation and acquired a new cachet with the general
public.” As an example, Chabris notes that “some old baggage has
been jettisoned for good. In my own field of psychology, for
instance, the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the behaviorism of
B.F. Skinner have been replaced by cognitive neuroscience as the
dominant approach to understanding the human mind.” In addition,
“the experimental method has spread to fields such as economics and
political science, and even to anthropology. The net result is that
the proclamations of social scientists are becoming more
trustworthy, and more trusted.”
Recently, “Harvard hosted a conference on ‘Hard Problems in
Social Science’ [and] invited the public to propose and discuss new
problems, and ultimately to vote on what the hardest ones really
are. …
“Listening to the speakers, I was impressed by the range of their
ideas and by how much I was learning from them. But I was struck by
the nearly complete lack of overlap among their proposals. …
“There was at least one problem that went unmentioned at Harvard:
the problem of hubris. Social science is not immune to the general
decline of public confidence in science and scientists, and the
occasional arrogant disdain for lay people among scientists and
academics, that was illustrated by the ‘Climategate’ episode last
year. Compared to institutions like the government, organized
religion and the legal profession, science still retains tremendous
respect. Yet this precious commodity is in danger.
“Social scientists should be well-placed to figure out ways of
protecting their own credibility, and they might start by opening up
some distance between themselves and the political arena. They could
be more modest in their policy prescriptions, and they should do
some critical thinking of their own about whether ‘education’ is
really a panacea for social ills, and the hidden dangers inherent in
trying to engineer large-scale changes in human behavior.
“Mr. Chabris is a psychology professor at Union College and the
co-author of The Invisible Gorilla, and Other Ways Our Intuitions
Deceive Us.” [3] Wall Street Journal, Apr 16 ’10,

——-

SOURCES: Monographs

1 – Inspiration and Incarnation? by Peter Enns (Baker, 2005,
paperback, 208 pages)

2 – God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World –
and Why Their Differences Matter, by Stephen Prothero (HarperOne,
2010, hardcover, 400 pages)

3 – The Invisible Gorilla, and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us,
by Christopher F. Chabris and Daniel Simons (Crown, 2010, hardcover,
320 pages)

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