New Essay Critiquing Dawkins Now On-Line at Religion Dispatches

Readers of this blog may be interested to read my new essay published today on Religion Dispatches, "Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?" The essay looks at a recent caricature of Christianity offered by the world's most renowned atheist, Richard Dawkins. The essay challenges critics of religion to focus on real versions of Christianity rather than on soulless caricatures.

The Principle of Charity and Some Other Brief Technical Points

I want to breifly discuss here two "technical" points, that is, points about philosophical terminology and the philosophical methodology to which it is related. My reason it to give readers of my blog a better understanding of some of the things I say, and a better sense of the argumentational etiquette that I strive (not always successfully) to adhere to and that I value in others.

First, and most significantly, in philosophy there is something called "The Principle of Charity." This principle is not, mainly, about being nice or kind to those one is debating with. It's not about sugar-coating what you say, and it is entirely consistent with being blunt about the perceived failures of their reasoning (although there are other reasons why, in philosophy, we should avoid being nasty--name-calling and put-downs often take the place of sound reasoning, and so interfere with the progress of an argument).

So what is the principle of charity about? It is about how we should strive to interpret and explicate the often ambiguous, usually incomplete, arguments and ideas expressed by others. The principle can be roughly stated in the following terms: "If an argument (objection to an argument, theory, etc.) can be interpreted in more than one way, pick the most favorable interpretation, that is, the interpretation which makes the argument (etc.) the most convincing or plausible that it can be."

If and when in this blog I talk about interpreting what someone says charitably or uncharitably, this is what I have in mind. The rationale for making use of this principle in philosophical discourse is that it does the most to advance the discussion. That a weak version of an argument fails is less interesting than that a stronger version fails, and that a weak interpretation of someone's argument is a failure does not tell us whether a stronger version fails as well.

Using the principle of charity does not entail that you will always figure out what another person meant to say. Your interpretation might still be wrong. Human beings are, after all, inevitably fallible. Interpreting correctly what others mean to say is hard work. Even the clearest and most careful writers are misunderstood routinely, and sometimes by the most careful thinkers. But when one really sits down and tries hard to fully understand what another person is attempting to say, the rate of misunderstanding decreases. It is part of the principle of charity that one engage in this interpretive work--preferably BEFORE commenting on their thinking. And it also means that if there is an obviously silly interpretation of what they are saying and one that is obviously less silly, you choose the less silly one.

Of course, people sometimes differ in their judgment about what is silly, so someone can be seriously trying to follow the principle of charity and be perceived as ignoring it. But the more participants in a discussion who make a sincere effort to follow it, the more likely it is that the discussion will go more smoothly, with fewer parties talking past one another, fewer parties needing to say, "That's not what I meant at all," etc. Such misunderstanding is inevitable, but the principle of charity helps to minimize it.

In a context like a blog, one way in which the principle of charity has to be invoked is in the following way: Since not every argument can be fully developed and defended in a brief comment, those who post on a blog site will often gesture towards some arguments that they don't develop, as well as developing other arguments more fully. Readers need to be sensitive to when a person is merely gesturing, and when they mean to be developing something more fully.
And, of course, there are degrees between a full development of an argument and a mere gesture. One might offer the main premises of ones argument without defending these premises, or one might defend one of them, or one might defend all of them but only against the most obvious objections one might anticipate. How in depth one goes depends on context and available time and space.

It is rarely helpful to accuse someone of offering an inadequate argument simply because it is less fully developed than another discussant wishes it would be. It is far more fruitful to ask for a fuller development of an argument of interest (or for a source where the argument is developed more fully), or to ask for a defense of a premise that wasn't defended in the original treatment of the argument, or to offer a specific objection to a particular premise of the argument and ask the author what they think of the merits of the objection. Authors often have thought about a variety of objections that they don't have the space to adequately address. It is far more charitable (that is, far more likely to promote fruitful dialogue) to say, "What about this counter-argument?" than to say, "You FOOL! You didn't think of THIS! Gotcha!"

Second, briefer technical point: There is an enormous difference between a pragmatic argument for or against a view and the genetic fallacy. The genetic fallacy is the fallacy of rejecting what someone thinks by virtue of what caused them to think it. A pragmatic argument against a view is, roughly, one that operates from the premise that an important measure by which a belief can be evaluated is in terms of its "fruits," that is, its pragmatic implications for how adherents to that belief live their lives. One asks, in effect, how useful the belief is in living one's life more successfully.

There is a school of philosophy that takes this pragmatic approach very seriously, and it is a school of thought that has influenced me. I am particularly influenced by William James. This is not to say that I identify as a pragmatist. I have yet to find one with whom I agree completely even methodologically. One of the key difficulties with applying the pragmatic method has to do with the criteria whereby the behavioral implications of a belief are to be assessed--it is a species of "the problem of the criterion" with which philosophers are continually wrestling.

In any event, I sometimes use quasi-technical philosophical language in this blog ("charitable interpretation," "pragmatic assessment") out of habit, forgetting that non-philosophers don't necessarily know what I mean. I hope this little post is of some help, and can maybe offer some guidance for understanding the argumentational etiquette with which I operate.

My promised post on biblical authority without inerrancy will come later in the week, depending on how much time I have between grading papers.

Dissecting and Assessing a Pair of Arguments for Biblical Inerrancy

In two comments in response to the previous post, Craig offers several arguments in support of a doctrine of biblical inerrancy. In this post, I want to try to develop and then evaluate the two arguments that Craig gestures towards in the following passage:

“…by insisting that the Bible contains errors you are anthropomorphizing God. The God I know (and love) would not willingly allow errors to enter His sacred text and is powerful enough to ensure that this does not occur by communicating with (breathing into the minds of) the authors.”

I think there are two related arguments here. The first is mostly undeveloped but implicit in the opening sentence of the quote. The second is a bit more developed, and is suggested by the remainder of the quote. The first argument, which I’ll call “A” (for Anthropomorphizing God), might be charitably developed in the following terms:

A1: The Bible is the revelation of God.
A2: So, if you adopt the view that the Bible contains errors, you are adopting the view that God’s revelation contains errors
A3: If God’s revelation contains errors, then God has human-like failings.
A4: So, if you adopt the view that the Bible contains errors, you are adopting the view that God has human-like failing
A5. To adopt the view that God has human-like failings is to anthropomorphize God.
A6. So, if you adopt the view that the Bible contains errors, you anthropomorphize God.
A7. It is a mistake to anthropomorphize God.
A8. So, it is a mistake to adopt the view that the Bible contains errors.

Note that this argument starts with the premise that the Bible is the revelation of God. Take that away, and I don’t see how we will get to the conclusion. But my discussion in the previous post is precisely about whether God would choose to reveal Himself primarily in a text (the Bible or some other text, such as the Koran or the Book of Mormon or the Vedas or any of the other texts that some have claimed to be the revelation of God). As such, this argument begs the question at hand—it assumes what needs to be proved.

The second argument, which I’ll call “S” (for “Sacred Text”) basically has a form similar to what we find in the argument from evil. It might be formulated as follows:

S1. The Bible is the “sacred text” of a God who is perfectly good and almighty.
S2. God, being perfectly good, would want His sacred text to be free from errors, and so would guarantee this result if He had the power to do so.
S3. God, being almighty, has the power to do so—specifically, He can inspire the authors of the Bible in such a way as to guarantee that they write without error.
S4. So, the Bible must be free from error.

Now, if we define “God’s sacred text” to mean “the text through which God has revealed Himself to the world,” we see that this argument once again begs the question at hand, assuming what needs to be proved. But perhaps Craig means something else by “God’s sacred text.” Perhaps we should take “God’s sacred text” to mean something more vague--perhaps something like “A text in which God has a special interest and which He makes use of in a unique way to guide humanity towards a state in which we all love God with our whole heart and mind and love our neighbors as ourselves.”

If we assume some sense of "sacred text" other than "a text that is the perfect and inerrant revelation of God," then premise S1 need no longer beg the question. But is the argument sound? Here, of course, much hinges on precisely what "God's sacred text" is taken to mean. But rather than run through all the possible options and evaluate the argument with each possibility in place, let me approach this in a different way.

Recall that something I pointed out when I first laid out argument "S"—namely, that the form of “S” is similar to what we find in the argument from evil. But there is a crucial difference as well. To see that difference, we need to turn to the argument from evil.

The argument from evil has been formulated in very many ways, but let me offer a formulation that makes the parallel to the above argument clear. We’ll call this argument “E”:

E1. Assume for the sake of argument that the world was made by a God who is perfectly good and almighty.
E2. God, being perfectly good, would want the world He made to be free from evil, and so would guarantee this result if He had the power to do so.
E3. God, being almighty, has the power to do so—specifically, He can make the world in such a way that there is no natural evil (disease, starvation, natural disaster) and can influence people in such a way as to guarantee that they never do evil.
E4. So, given our assumption, E1, the world must be free from evil.
E5. But, there is evil in the world.
E6. So, E1 must be false—the world was not made by a God who is perfectly good and almighty.

This argument differs from “S” in that it is formulated as a reductio ad absurdum argument—that is, it aims to show that an initial assumption leads to a false conclusion, and so must itself be rejected as false. What is revealed here is that the very same line of argument can cut in two different directions. Consider a modification of “S” along the following lines (we’ll call it argument “SR,” for “S reductio”):

SR1. Assume for the sake of argument that the Bible is the “sacred text” of a God who is perfectly good and almighty.
SR2. God, being perfectly good, would want His sacred text to be free from errors, and so would guarantee this result if He had the power to do so.
SR3. God, being almighty, has the power to do so—specifically, He can inspire the authors of the Bible in such a way as to guarantee that they write without error.
SR4. So, given our assumption, SR1, the Bible must be free from error.
SR5. But, the Bible is not free from error.
SR6. So, SR1 must be false—the Bible is not the sacred text of a God who is perfectly good and almighty.

Now there are many who argue precisely along these lines, by pointing out apparent contradictions in the Bible, or by identifying claims that sound as if they were intended by their authors to be factual assertion but which are at odds with the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence, or by highlighting moral injunctions that have every appearance of being horrifically at odds with our deepest intuitions about morality.

Since these ordinary forms of evidence contradict what is in the Bible, it is concluded that the Bible is not inerrant—and if the first part of the argument is embraced as sound, it is further concluded that the Bible is not God’s sacred text in any meaningful sense.

Now I find arguments along these lines important and worth serious reflection, but there is a difficulty with all of them. For every “error” that is identified by the measuring stick of logic or science or moral intuition, the biblical inerrantist can assert that it is logic or science or moral intuition which are in error. And this creates a kind of standoff between those who start with these ordinary forms of evidence and conclude that the Bible is not to be trusted, and those who start with a very high view of the Bible and conclude that these ordinary forms of evidence are not to be trusted.

Still, something important has been demonstrated if we come to see that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy forces its adherents to reject the evidentiary significance we would otherwise attach to logic and science and moral intuition. We are led to the conclusion that allegiance to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is not an innocuous thing. If the doctrine is wrong, the consequences of being wrong on this doctrinal issue are a rather systematic alienation from ordinary ways of knowing, and hence a greater likelihood of being wrong about many more things.

But let me set this issue aside for the time being, since it has so often led to a kind of ideological impasse. What I want to focus on is the first part of argument SR, the part which moves from the assumption that the Bible is “God’s sacred text” in some meaningful and important sense, to the conclusion that the Bible must be inerrant.

In philosophical discussions concerning the problem of evil, it is the parallel portion of argument “E” that most theists challenge. That is, they don’t deny that there is evil in the world. Rather, they argue that there are good reasons why a perfectly good and almighty God would allow the world that He created to be marred by evil. An account of such reasons is called a “theodicy.” Likewise, someone might argue that there are good reasons why a perfectly good and almighty God would allow His sacred text to be marred by error. Call it “a theodicy of biblical errors.”

Of course, the most common theodicies appeal to free will. Since my focus in this post isn’t on the problem of evil, I can’t do full justice to the problem and the various proposed solutions, but the rough gist of a free will theodicy is this: human freedom is so important that God is morally bound to allow it unimpeded expression even when it results in such horrors as the Holocaust.

Let’s consider what would follow if we took this idea seriously in the domain of the argument from evil, and then applied it to argument SR. If genuine human freedom is so deeply important to God that He would permit moral horrors of enormous proportion rather than interfere with the expression of such freedom, would there be any way that God could guarantee inerrancy in a holy book written by human authors?

If the human authors of God’s sacred texts are afforded by God the freedom to ignore divine inspiration, then God could not at the same time guarantee that they never ignored that inspiration in favor of their own cultural prejudices. Likewise, if the human beings who selected among the various writings to assemble the canon of the Bible were afforded the freedom to ignore divine inspiration (which was, say, telling them that the Book of Revelation wasn't divinely inspired at all), then God could not at the same time guarantee that they never ignored that inspiration in favor of their own fallible judgments. And so, if preserving freedom is so important that God is willing to allow millions to die in gas chambers out of respect for it, it might well be plausible to conclude that He must also regrettably allow His chosen authors to mangle and misrepresent His revelations.

Now I don’t spell out this particular “theodicy of biblical errors” because I believe that God was trying to create an inerrant text but was foiled by willful human authors whose freedom was so important to God that He had to allow them to misrepresent Him. I sketch out this theodicy of biblical errors simply to highlight the kinds of issues that need to be explored before anyone can say with confidence that God would have created an inerrant text.

My own view, as I’ve sketched it out in this blog and in my book, is that there are good reasons to conclude that God would pursue revelation in an entirely different way than through a text, and that the Bible is therefore better understood as a human testament to divine revelation rather than as the revelation itself. And I do not think that we should expect God to intrude on the freedom of human authors to prevent their testament from containing errors—not because human freedom is sacrosanct (although I do think human freedom is important), but because God’s plans are better served without the existence of a text that is inerrant in every detail.

I guess underlying all of this is an essentially Lutheran theology of grace, which holds that we cannot save ourselves—either by doing the right things or by getting all of our beliefs right. Only once we admit this will we let go of the effort to save ourselves by our own works and so let grace flood in. An inerrant text would inspire too many to think that they can get it right, if only they follow the rule book and believe everything it says. And so such a text might prove an impediment to the flow of grace.

The Question of Biblical Inerrancy: Comments Posted on Another Blog

Some days ago, a religion professor posted on his blog the following quote from one of my articles (the RDPulpit piece on same-sex marriage):

"[T]he doctrine of biblical inerrancy has the effect of inspiring its adherents to pay more attention to a text than to the neighbors they are called upon to love. Sometimes it even inspires them to plug up their ears with Bible verses, so that they can no longer hear the anguished cries of neighbors whose suffering is brought on by allegiance to the literal sense of those very texts."

The quote triggered a lively discussion on biblical inerrancy—as of this moment 85 comments and counting. After reading quickly through the highlights, I decided to post a comment of my own to provide some context for the quote. Since readers of this blog may be interested, here is what I wrote:


It's rewarding to see that a quote from me can stimulate such a lively discussion.

For even broader context than my RD article provides, it may help to locate the quote within my ongoing work on the nature of divine revelation. Some of that work is summarized in Chapter 8 of my book, Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion's Cultured Despisers, especially on pp. 175-177. But the full development of my ideas here has yet to be published.

The gist of it is this: a God whose essence is love would not choose, as His primary vehicle of revelation, a static text. We learn most about love through loving and being loved. And it is persons whom we can love, as well as who can love us. And so it is in persons and our relationships with persons that the divine nature is made most fully manifest.

Christianity affirms this when it maintains that God's most fundamental revelation in history was in the person of Jesus. And Jesus was, if nothing else, a model of agapic love. His core message was love. And He never wrote anything. Instead, He made disciples--persons--whom He sent out into the world.

In this context, a text that collects human testimony concerning divine revelation in history, especially one that reports on the life and teachings of Jesus, is going to be invaluable. But it will cease to be valuable if we come to pay more attention to this text than we do to our neighbors. Jesus Himself declared that He is present in the neighbor in need, and the community of the faithful is called "the body" of Christ, that is, the place where Christ is present, embodied, on Earth today. Not in a book. In persons.

When the biblical witness is treated as the proxy voice of persons who lived long ago, and we listen to the voices of those persons as we do the other members of the body of Christ, then the biblical witness becomes an invaluable partner in our efforts to understand what God is saying to us--that is, what God is communicating through the web of human relationships and the spirit of love that moves within that web.

But when the biblical witness is treated as inerrant in a way that no human being is inerrant, it trumps the voice of the neighbor and is used as a conversation-ender. It becomes an excuse not to listen to the lived experience of the neighbor. Or it becomes a measuring stick for deciding which neighbor should be listened to (their experience conforms with the biblical template) and which should be dismissed (because their experience does not conform).

And since compassionate listening is one of the most essential acts of neighbor love, it follows that a doctrine of biblical inerrancy is an impediment to such love.

Therefore, I conclude (contrary to what Craig argues here) that a God of love would not create an inerrant text.

As far as 2 Timothy 3:16 goes, let us recall that at the time this letter was written, "Scripture" referred to what Christians today call the Old Testament. The author of second Timothy says that these Hebrew writings are "God-breathed and...useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness."

Now we can ask two questions here. First, was the author of second Timothy right? Second, if he was, what does that imply about how we should approach these Old Testament Scriptures? Focusing only on the second question, we can reasonably ask what we have to believe about the Old Testament Scriptures in order to affirm that it is useful in the ways mentioned? And we can reasonably ask about the different possible senses of "God-breathed."

On both questions, Karen Armstrong's The Bible: A Biography offers a concise historical account of the numerous different answers through both Christian and Jewish history. There is, in short, not a single, incontrovertible interpretation.


This post generated some responses, one of which was rooted in a misunderstanding I felt compelled to clear up. And so I posted the following follow up:


I wasn't going to post here again since I have so much else to do, but it's obvious I need to clarify a point. Craig quotes something I say and then comments on it in a way that he seems to think constitutes a refutation. Here's what he says:

".....But when the biblical witness is treated as inerrant in a way that no human being is inerrant, it trumps the voice of the neighbor and is used as a conversation-ender..... Ive never contended that humans are inerrant only that God is omniscient and omnipotent. and that His word is God-breathed and claims to be God-breathed."

I know that neither Craig nor any other biblical inerrantist maintains that humans are inerrant. That's my point. When a person takes a text to be inerrant, given that no human is taken to be inerrant, it follows that the person will pay more attention to the text (which is assumed to be inerrant) than the neighbor (who is assumed to be fallible).

This is what I think is dangerous. We learn how to love by getting on with the messy business of loving one another. And one of the most fundamental features of loving one another is really paying attention to one another. But why pay attention to fallible people when you think you've got an infallible book? Why listen to them when they share life experiences that are in tension with the most obvious meaning of the book? The tendency is to silence them by quoting chapter and verse: "It's says so here. It's never wrong. So you must be wrong. Now shut up."

The fruits of the doctrine of inerrancy are particularly vivid in the case of homosexuality: the anguished cries of gays and lesbians who are excluded from full participation in the life of the community are ignored in favor of Romans 1:26-27. For a vivid sense of how poisonous these fruits can be, the documentary For the Bible Tells Me So offers a dramatic example.

Ten Question Interview

A ten question "interview" with me about my book is the featured article in today's Religion Dispatches, accompanied by a review of the book. Check it out here.

The News from Buffetville

Just yesterday, a loyal (if fictitious) follower of my blog sent me the following fabricated clipping from the Buffetville Scallion-Picayune. I thought it worth sharing with other followers of my blog, and so I reproduce it here.

Kansas Church Protests at Easter Services

By J.J. Loganberry
Senior Staff Reporter

This past Sunday, Easter services at Buffetville Baptist Church were disrupted when the congregation of Kansas-based Eastburro Church, led by Pastor Phred Fleps, came to Buffetville.

Lining the easement surrounding the Buffetville church, Fleps and his congregation of relatives greeted approaching families with jeers, derisive laughter, and signs declaring “New car owners die, God laughs!” and “New car owners burn in hell!” As services began, the Eastburro group began chanting, “God hates new car owners!”

Lilly Thesbit, a retired school teacher who has been attending Buffetville Baptist Church all her life, was distressed by the group and its message. “I don’t understand it,” she told reporters. “They’re ruining my Easter. Nobody even noticed my new hat.”

Others were equally dismayed. “I don’t know why they have to come here on Easter Sunday of all days,” said 17-year-old Joey Dick. “I mean, if they’ve got a problem with our pastor’s new Acura, why not protest it on the third Sunday in Pentecost or something? Why Easter?”

The offending vehicle, which Pastor Bill McCune of Buffetville Baptist Church purchased less than a month ago, was parked throughout the protest in the designated pastor’s space behind the church. Police were on the scene to make sure that none of the protesters vandalized the car.

“It’s bad theology,” declared Pastor Bill. “They read a few scattered passages in the Bible that say we should care for the poor, and they interpret it to mean I can’t enjoy a new luxury car with my hard-earned money. I mean yes, technically I could make do with a used car, and technically the money I saved could be sent to Oxfam and would help save the lives of a few thousand malnourished children. But come on. I really liked the leather seats!”

Fleps has a different view. “Jesus tells us that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And you remember what he told the young rich man who asked about what he needed to do to earn eternal life? Jesus told him to sell all his possessions and give it all to the poor.”

“It’s not just about the pastor’s new car,” Fleps continues. “That’s a symbol of a bigger problem. Just look at all these people flouncing into church in their brand new outfits. Look at all those fancy cars in the parking lot! These people who claim to be Christians are spending money on luxuries while children are starving! It’s an abomination! The least he could've done is gotten himself a hybrid car.”

But Steve Lisp, one of the deacons at Buffetville Baptist, thinks that for Pastor Bill to keep driving that six-year-old Cadillac “would give the wrong message.”

“We’re not one of those poor churches that can’t afford to pay our pastor a nice salary,” insists Lisp. “Half our congregation belongs to the country club!”

“I don’t understand why they can’t be like those Wetsboro folks, and protest real problems like gay marriage,” says Pastor Bill. “I mean, the homosexuals are destroying this country, right? The Bible’s full of stuff that condemns those homos. Me, I’m just living the American dream. God wants his obedient followers to have nice things.”

“For a pastor,” says Fleps, “Bill doesn’t know his Bible very well, does he? Jesus never mentions homosexuality. And aside from a couple of verses in Leviticus, a book that no Christian today treats as authoritative, the only unambiguous mention of same-sex acts is a passing comment in Romans. But the Bible is obsessed with caring for the poor. Let’s face it, if you’re going to be biblical about things, the controversy shouldn’t be about gay pastors, but about pastors who enjoy luxuries while there are people in the world who go to bed hungry. That’s why we’re here.”

But little Jenny Fisher, who attends Buffetville Middle School, knows the truth of the matter. “They just want attention. I mean look at them. They’re dressed like the nerd contingent at my school. They weren’t popular in school, and now they’ve found a way to get people to pay attention to them.”

As this reporter’s mother used to say, “From the mouths of babes…”

Same-Sex Marriage Essay at Religion Dispatches

My blog post for this week--a reflection on the recent developments on the same-sex marriage front--was picked up by Religion Dispatches, and so can be read by clicking on this link. Enjoy!

The Grandfield Project

It’s interesting to consider what kinds of events are likely to awaken a town from its “dogmatic slumber,” forcing the citizens to reflect on their local culture and the values they’re endorsing. I want to consider two towns, both driven to engage in such reflection. The towns are connected, and their struggles similar. In many ways, the struggles of one town were caused by the struggles of the other—but only indirectly, through the influence of a play.

The first is the town of Laramie, Wyoming. I have a thread of a connection to that town, since my uncle went to the university there. At the time, it seemed an innocuous little western town, one that few people had heard about. But my uncle enjoyed his time there. He thought it was a nice, quiet place, a friendly town and a good place to go to college. Once, in the ’80’s, I was passing through Laramie with relatives and we bought a T-shirt sporting the words, “Where the hell is Laramie, Wyoming?” We gave the T-shirt to my uncle, who groaned good-naturedly as he held it up.

That T-shirt wouldn’t be funny today. Laramie is no longer an unknown college town somewhere in Wyoming. In the public consciousness it’s become something else: the place where Matthew Shepard, a college student, was brutally murdered by two young men--Laramie natives--who targeted Shepard because he was gay. According to the evidence, they relentlessly beat him with a pistol before tying him to a fence post. Shepard was in a coma when he was discovered, but later died from severe head trauma.

And in case that wasn’t enough to shock a quiet little town out of its routine, Shepard’s funeral was picketed by the gay-hating congregation of Westboro Baptist Church. They carried signs bearing such messages as “Matt Shepard is burning in hell” and “God hates fags.” Fred Phelps, pastor of Westboro (whose congregation is made up mostly of Phelps’ relatives), also sought unsuccessfully to erect monuments in Wyoming indicating the date at which Matthew Shepard “entered hell” for defying God’s law.

These events and the trial that followed brought the town of Laramie into the national spotlight. And the citizens of Laramie, or many of them, couldn’t help but reflect on the meaning of these events. How could a quiet little college town give rise to such hatred and brutality? Was this act of horrific violence an aberration, or was there something in Laramie’s culture, something dark, that helped to give it birth? What did it mean that Laramie was no longer this unknown little community, but had become the scene of one of the most publicized hate crimes in American history?

It was this internal questioning that became the focus of the play (made into an HBO movie) called “The Laramie Project.” The play drew on news reports and extensive interviews, and it depicted a town’s efforts to understand itself in the light of such a horrific defining event. “The Laramie Project” has been widely used as an educational resource in schools and other venues, largely because of its capacity to inspire critical reflection on ideological hatred, homophobia, hate crimes, and the role that community attitudes can play in giving rising to explosions of violent hate.

Recently, a teacher in Grandfield, Oklahoma, decided to use “The Laramie Project” for just such a range of purposes in her “Ethics and Street Law” class. In addition to showing the HBO film, she had students work on developing scenes from the play that they’d then film and show each other in class. The teacher, Debra Taylor, had sought and received approval from the principal to pursue this activity.

Much of what happened next is a matter of controversy. What isn’t controversial is that Ms. Taylor was instructed by the school superintendent, Ed Turlington, to stop teaching the material. She complied, but not before pursuing one final activity: a kind of “funeral” for the play in which students went to a park across the street from the school and released balloons containing favorite lines from the play. This was, reportedly, a way to help students find closure after the disappointment of being told they had to stop work on the play.

Ms. Taylor was subsequently suspended, and shortly thereafter resigned under pressure.

Other details of the case are more contested, including the reasons why Ms. Taylor was instructed to stop teaching “The Laramie Project” and the justification for her suspension and forced resignation. I’ve immersed myself for a couple of days in various online reports and articles on the subject, but what really captured my attention was an online conversation—often angry and full of venom—that emerged among Grandfield students and other Grandfield natives in the form of comments on an Austin-based web article by Frederick Reinhardt.

The article was a brief, early report on the events surrounding Ms. Taylor’s suspension, but the hundred-plus comments that followed offer a portrait of a community in conflict, a town that, like Laramie, had been awakened from its dogmatic slumber and forced to reflect on itself and its values (although many of the comments were really an effort to shout the town back to sleep, to end the process of reflection). I don’t doubt that this online exchange could be effectively mined by a talented playwright to create a script. We might call it “The Grandfield Project.”

According to several Grandfield High students who posted on the site, the recent events in Grandfield were largely driven (surprise!) by homophobia. A number of students reported that Superintendent Turlington came into the classroom of his wife, an English teacher at the school, and delivered a “rant” against gays in which, among other things, he blamed them for AIDS. At least one student indicated that the action against Ms. Taylor first occurred only after the superintendent’s wife, Mrs. Turlington, heard from some students that Ms. Taylor was teaching a “gay play.”

Officially, the administration claims that the decision had nothing to do with homophobia and everything to do with offensive language in the play--and Ms. Taylor’s termination had everything to do with insubordination.

Given the number of students who have corroborated the superintendent’s alleged classroom rant against homosexuals, my inclination is to believe that this event actually occurred. And for a number of reasons, it seems to me unlikely that the bits of profanity in “The Laramie Project” were really what inspired a moratorium on teaching it. After all, the play does not celebrate the profanity that its characters, for reasons of authenticity, occasionally use. As a number of Grandfield students noted, they hear far worse in the school cafeteria. And there’s profanity at least as bad in numerous works of literature that are routinely taught in classes without commentary or intervention.

I’m not a playwright, and I’m hardly qualified to even attempt to create “The Grandfield Project” from the substance of the comments posted on the Austin-based site. But after reading through the angry name-calling, the urgent story-telling, the impassioned pleas and the harsh accusations, I emerged with my own picture of what happened in Grandfield, Oklahoma. For what it’s worth, I want to share it.

This is, of course, a bit presumptuous, given that I don’t know any of the players involved. But sometimes what is needed is an outside perspective, someone who can look at the tangle of individual stories and perspectives that make up the fabric of a story, and can stand back far enough from it all to see the pattern. And I’m not exactly unfamiliar with the kinds of interpersonal dynamics I find myself observing as I pore through the blogged monologues of Grandfield students and residents. My version of the story emerges as I bring these personal experiences to bear on this messy tapestry of conflict and accusation and impassioned narrative.

To start, I should say that, while I doubt Superintendent Turlington had carefully read “The Laramie Project” before he made his decision, I suspect he knew something about it. He surely knew it had something to do with Matthew Shepard, that gay college kid who was murdered. He probably had some suspicion that the play didn’t just condemn the acts of the murderers, but was trying to make a broader point. And I suspect Ed Turlington knew or guessed enough about the play to find it a threat to the kind of ideology he embraced, one which was strong in his community, an ideology which he wanted to preserve.

In “The Laramie Project,” pervasive cultural homophobia emerges as a dangerous force that can help to spawn brutal violence. What does such a message say about those who vilify gays and lesbians as a group, who blame them for AIDS, who endorse an “in-group/out-group” dichotomy according to which part of being a good citizen involves being straight and seeking to marginalize those who are not?

The play is intended to deliberately challenge the bright line that so many of us draw between cultural attitudes and individual actions, between widespread community sentiments and the extreme actions of a few.

When someone says, “I’m condemning those sick people who practice this AIDS-producing lifestyle offensive to God, but I don’t think anyone should beat them up or kill them,” the play responds in the following way: “Hate is a volatile power. It is something that flows in the bloodstream in a community, and one never knows when and where it will concentrate itself, when and where it will become so potent that it explodes outward with deadly consequences.”

When someone says, “I’m condemning the sick, depraved things that those sinning homos do, but of course I love the sinner,” the play replies in the following way: “The line you wish to draw is hard, especially when being gay is as much an identity as it is a pattern of behavior, and especially when condemning this behavior amounts to saying to gays and lesbians that they are denied any legitimate expression of their unchosen sexuality.”

In short, my theory is that Superintendent Turlington sensed or suspected that Ms. Taylor was teaching a play that challenged the legitimacy of some of his community’s values, calling into question an ideology that he and many in his community endorsed. At least on some visceral level, Turlington knew that the play’s message accused him and others in Grandfield of fostering the conditions that breed hate crimes.

And because he saw neither himself nor his community as evil, he responded with defensiveness and outrage…and expressed those feelings in two ways. First, he went to his wife’s classroom and preached to her students the very ideology that the play was challenging. Second, he exercised his authority as superintendent to shut down the teaching of the play. He was, in a real sense, “defending community standards” by stopping something whose message was, in effect, that at least some of his community’s standards were dangerously wrong.

It would be a mistake, I think, to treat the message of “The Laramie Project” as a blanket condemnation of Laramie or communities like it. But it is quite possible that the superintendent made this mistake. Mr. Turlington’s love of the town in which he lived may have become wedded to his own attachment to certain community values, and he may therefore have treated an attack on those values as amounting to an attack on Grandfield.

The truth is, of course, more subtle. Like most communities, Grandfield is surely a rich mixture of virtues and vices, wisdom and foolishness. To say there is a streak of ideological homophobia in Grandfield, just as in Laramie and so many other places, is not to say that the citizens of Grandfield approve of brutal violence against gays and lesbians. And it’s certainly not to deny the reality of neighborliness, of a widespread mutual concern, of community traditions that give many a sense of belonging, of institutions that help support families, of real friendliness and solidarity.

Rather, it is to say that these virtues do not extend to everyone. It is to say that if you’re gay in Grandfield, OK, you’ll feel as if you’re standing at the margins, looking in like the little match girl in H.C Anderson’s fable: alone in a dark alley, cold and hungry, while just beyond the wall a family gathers for the Christmas feast.

If you’re gay in Grandfield, you’ll never fully experience that sense of belonging that others take for granted. You’ll know that the community can’t fully accept you as you really are. You’ll know that the full experience of Grandfield’s friendliness and neighborliness comes with conditions of membership.

Mr. Turlington was a defender not merely of the community, but of those very conditions of membership. He thought that the marginalization of gays and lesbians was a good thing. It was something to be defended.

And how did Ms. Taylor respond to this effort to defend these “community standards”? By treating what Turlington had shut down as a loss to be grieved. What Turlington called bad and wicked, Ms. Taylor called valuable. And she invited her students to do the same. With a ritual in the park, she invited her students to say along with her, “Mr. Turlington is wrong to think that this play is evil, and to believe that the homophobic values in this community are worth defending even at the cost of shutting down an activity aimed at inspiring critical reflection.”

And this was the “insubordination” that inspired her suspension, the threat of termination, and ultimately her forced resignation. Other things she might have done—taking students off school grounds without the proper paperwork (even if taking students to the park in this way was a common practice), allowing students to use iPods and pop popcorn while engaged in class projects, leading a class activity that involved the play after she’d been asked to stop teaching the play—these were merely excuses. The real problem was this: Ms. Taylor didn’t merely tell Superintendent Turlington and all those who supported him that they were wrong. She invited her students to do the same.

And many of them did. And, of course, they were right to do so.

And I don’t mean they were right to challenge Turlington’s allegiance to a homophobic ideology. I do think that, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. What I’m referring to is this: When people use their position of authority to shut down critical reflection on community values, they are using their position of authority to shut down one of the most crucial aims of education. If there is one thing that the best teachers teach, it isn’t some piece of knowledge or even an ability to read or do math. It is, rather, the willingness and ability to engage in sound critical reflection, a kind of thinking that does not take established norms (or their rejection) for granted but raises critical questions about pervasive ideologies.

After all, it is only through such critical reflection that we have any hope of improving the world.

The reason why a number of Ms. Taylor’s students and their parents have become so vocal in their opposition to what happened is precisely this: As they see it, Ms. Taylor was challenging and inspiring these students to learn and think in new ways. And the school superintendent shut that down. Rather than facilitating their education, he used his authority to block it. They are angry because that is the very opposite of what a school administrator is supposed to do.

And so battle lines have been drawn between those who support Turlington’s efforts to defend community values against the threat posed by a play, and those who condemn him for using his authority to pursue agendas directly at odds with the goals of a public education.

This, then, is my version of the story, a version I’ve teased out of a hundred and eleven passionate and often vitriolic comments, posted in response to Frederick Reinhart’s short article. It’s only one version, and I’d be fooling myself if I thought it was the whole story, or if it didn’t leave out important truths. But it’s a story that I think will resonate with at least a few of those who live in Grandfield and are therefore participating in the more complex story.

And it’s not the most flattering story. And that, of course, is the point of all of this. Communities often have a shared mythology about their town and what it’s like. And most of the time, that story goes unchallenged. But then something happens, and the happy myth is threatened. Outsiders start to scrutinize the community and tell new stories about it. People both inside and outside the community reject the myth or modify it, and the members of the community find themselves forced to ask whether these alternative stories have any truth to them.

It happened in Laramie. And, thanks in part to a play about what happened in Laramie, it is happening now in Grandfield, Oklahoma.

Baby's Big Adventure

I recently mentioned to my wife, Ty, that our new dog Max is kind of like Buddhist meditation on legs. When I said it, I was thinking about how I’m drawn into the present moment when he plunks his big black head on my lap. My usually racing mind stills itself, and for a little while I’m existing in the Now, just experiencing the presence of this furry Other. Worries and preoccupations fade away, and I get some inkling of what Buddhists mean when they talk about “mindfulness.”

But a couple of weeks ago, Max helped to give us all a different lesson, an “ethico-religious” lesson about responding to change and loss. With the help of Max and some good friends, we were all reminded of how minor tragedies can be transformed into something lovely and delightful.

You see, Max decided to turn Izzie’s home-made baby-doll, Baby, into a chew toy. He gnawed off her hair and punched some holes into the fabric on the side of her head.

This wasn’t wholly surprising, given Max’s penchant for chewing on things. It took us awhile to figure out that he wasn’t limiting himself to what we’d inadvertently left lying around on the floor. He was actually lifting the lid of Izzie’s toy box to extract what he wanted from inside. Since joining our family, Max has helped himself in this way to a number of toys. But chomping on Baby was more serious than some of his other offenses. To understand its full significance, a bit of history is required.

A couple of years ago, when Izzie was still a few months shy of her first birthday, we spent a weekend with friends at a rented cabin in an Arkansas forest. It was a wonderful occasion in which we had the chance to connect with old friends, walk in the woods, eat good food, and watch our children play together.

One of our friends, Leslie, brought everything that was needed to make cloth baby dolls. While my wife and a few others struggled to create baby dolls, Leslie made several, including one for Izzie. The result was Baby. It was the first doll Izzie ever became attached to, and it remains her favorite—although it was temporarily dethroned by a plastic Tinkerbell.

Incidentally, Max also chewed enthusiastically on Tinkerbell a few days after going to town on Baby’s scalp. We considered attaching a hook in place of Tink’s gnawed-off hand, but decided instead to buy surreptitiously a replacement. We didn’t want Izzie to start thinking of Max as The Favorite Doll Killer.

But Baby couldn’t be replaced so easily. It isn’t hard to imagine the sentimental value that all of us attached to this little doll made of brown cloth and black yarn. And it’s not hard to imagine how we felt when we came home to learn that Baby, of all Izzie’s toys, had become the target of Max’s separation-anxiety-induced destructiveness.

It would’ve been easy to turn on the poor dog in outrage, or to see the doll’s destruction as the severing of a thread linking us to Izzie’s infancy. We might have looked at this little girl who was growing up so fast, who was no longer even a toddler anymore. We might have noted how quickly it was all going by, vanishing into a past that could never be reclaimed. And we might have attached all those feelings to this object of sentimental memory, now wet with dog slobber.

And I suppose, for a little while, we did all of those things. But then my wife picked up the phone, and she called her friend Leslie, Baby's creator.

Leslie promptly offered to try to stitch up the puncture wounds and make Baby a new head of hair. But the offer wasn’t really about restoring what was lost. It was about embarking on a new journey. And a journey is precisely what it became—a journey in which all of us participated, if only vicariously.

It began with a trip to the post office. Ty took Izzie with her, and together they sent Baby off to “the doll hospital.” And by a coincidence of timing, Baby arrived at Leslie’s just as she and her family were about to leave town for spring break. And so Baby went along.

And that’s when the photos started to arrive. At first it was a bald-headed Baby, unrepaired and ready for a trip to New Orleans. Then it was Baby in front Graceland. At some point Baby got a new head of hair, longer than it had been before. And so, by the time we received the pictures of Baby in Mississippi and Louisiana, she was a new doll. In some of the pictures she began sporting new outfits that Leslie had made for her.

There were pictures of Baby posing with Leslie or her daughter--or, in one case, with another doll.

And then at last we got the message that Baby was on her way home. On the day that she arrived, Izzie squealed with delight. We opened the box and took out a baby doll who was now sporting pig tails (her old hair had been short) and a new pair of flannel jammies. Izzie joyously swept the doll into her embrace while Ty read the “discharge papers,” which instructed us on follow-up care to ensure a full recovery (the most significant instruction being to keep Baby away from the dog).

In many ways, Baby’s journey isn’t very important, especially in a world where there are children who go to bed without food. But it is a story which carries with it some lessons that are less than trivial. One of those lessons is this: Had Max not chewed off Baby’s hair, Baby would never have been shipped off to Leslie. The gestures of friendship that followed wouldn’t have happened. And Baby’s wonderful journey, photographed for our delight, wouldn’t now be a part of our lives.

This is not to say that the destruction of a sentimental toy isn’t bad. What it means is that through creativity and humor and love, people were able to make this bad thing into part of a bigger story. Baby’s unfortunate encounter with Max became an integral part of something good, something that gave meaning to what might in a different context have been nothing but an unfortunate loss.

It matters what we do with the events that occur to us. The stories we jointly weave around those events can turn a minor tragedy into one episode in a lovely tale of friendship. But the stories we weave can also turn a minor tragedy into the start of something far worse, a deeper tragedy defined by hostility and regret. The latter is more likely when we cling to the past and won’t move on, when we won’t accept the finitude of things and refuse to journey into the unknown future.

Change is inevitable. Loss is inevitable. We cannot freeze things in place. Dolls will be destroyed. Relationships will end. Friends and loved ones will die. These realities are among the pieces from which we build a life. And the choices we make about what kind of life we’ll build do not just affect our own story. We also impact other lives and life stories, just as they do our own.

We don’t tell the story all by ourselves. We can’t control its course. We can only make choices about what we’ll do with the pieces that fall before us, and then wait to see what falls before us next. The challenge is to focus on building the best life we can out of the pieces that tumble into our path, and to help others do the same.

As soon as we say, “I need to acquire these pieces or the story is ruined,” we’re in trouble. That’s when we resent the pieces that tumble in our path rather than doing the best that we can with them. As soon as we say, “All these pieces need to stay in place or the story’s ruined,” we’re in trouble. Some losses are horrible, and it may well be that part of building a good life is treasuring those pieces that are most precious and preserving them from loss as best we can. But we can’t control the story. Loss is inevitable. And when loss happens, even bitter loss, we have to decide what to do, what story to build around that loss…and then strive to build the best story we can.

It’s easier to do that, and do it well, when the loss is relatively minor, when it’s a doll that’s been chomped on by a dog. But it’s by doing it well in such cases, when the loss is small, that we develop the habits of character that will carry us through the more brutal losses, the times when we confront in all its dark terror the finitude of this life.

All of this can be said without any reference to God or the transcendent. I suspect that secular humanists and die-hard naturalists will agree with the wisdom of striving in this life to make the best of what comes without trying to control what comes, to achieve that balance between accountability for ourselves and acceptance of what is beyond our control—in short, the wisdom embodied in Reinhold Niebuhr’s extraordinary Serenity Prayer, which has been embraced by twelve step programs around the world.

But it’s hard, this task of taking responsibility for how we engage with the world while letting go of the outcome. Nobody does it perfectly, especially in the hard times, no matter how much we practice when the stakes are less high. When the finitude of this life slaps us in the face, and we confront in an unfettered way own limits and the limits of everyone and everything we hold dear, it is easy for some of us to allow a pretense of indifference to replace acceptance, and for recklessness to replace responsibility. For others, it is easy for angry defiance to reign, inspiring a futile effort to take control of the world, to defeat the inescapable boundaries of our existence.

And so, it may be that what we most need to practice when the stakes are less high, what we most need to learn from hapless dogs and shredded toys, is how not to be afraid of finitude. And one antidote to this fear, perhaps the only true antidote, is what Friedrich Schleiermacher called “the intuition of the Infinite in the finite”—that is, the sense that beyond our limits, instead of finding Barth’s dark and terrible “Das Nichtige,” the Nothingness, we will find instead a boundless Yes.

To trust this sense, despite the impossibility of proving that it is veridical, is the essence of religious faith as I understand it. It is to decide to live in the hope that this boundless Yes we sense in fleeting whispers is not an illusion, not a mere projection of our desires.

Sometimes our capacity for such faith is strengthened by the smaller but important yeses that come from our friends, perhaps in a series of photographs. Or in an affable dog who, despite a penchant for chewing up toys, can lift you out of yourself with the weight of his head on your lap. Or in a doll that is suddenly sporting a new pair of pig tails.

The Misguided Desire to Stifle Dawkins

This past Friday, Richard Dawkins came to Oklahoma and gave a talk at OU. I didn’t make it down. When I first heard of his impending visit I toyed with going, but then decided against driving the hour-and-a-half, fighting the crowds, and missing my children’s bedtime and one of the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica.

But events that unfolded in Oklahoma on the day of his talk led me to feel some regret at this decision. I’m speaking about the resolutions filed in the Oklahoma House of Representatives in advance of Dawkins’ arrival. The first, HR 1014, is a directive targeting OU and its Zoology Department for “indoctrinating students in the theory of evolution” and for inviting Dawkins to speak on campus. The second, HR 1015, is a spin on the first, with the focus being on chastising OU for inviting Dawkins and then urging OU to engage in an “open, dignified, and fair discussion of the Darwinian theory of evolution and all other scientific theories.”

Let me reflect on these resolutions with a couple of points in mind. The first is this: neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is not just some speculative account of the development of life on earth. It is an explanatory model for the development of life on earth that beautifully synthesizes the best research in a diverse array of disciplines ranging from genetics and microbiology to paleontology and ecology and geology. It is, as one friend recently put it, “massively explanatory.” It fits so many diverse empirical observations together, creates such a cohesive account of the development of life, has such enormous predictive power in terms of what we should observe within nature, that it would be something of a miracle were the theory not substantially correct.

In short, this is not a controversial scientific theory. To pretend otherwise in the course of teaching relevant science to college students would be to seriously mislead those students. Since no reputable university should be in the business of seriously misleading students, no reputable university should present a theory as controversial when it is not.

None of this means there are no puzzles or problems to be wrestled with, or that these puzzles and problems should be obscured in the course of teaching evolutionary theory (they're not). But given the enormous explanatory power of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, the most reasonable thing to expect is that further research into these puzzles and problems will result at most in revisions and refinements, not in the abandonment of the theory. So, it would be a mistake to present these puzzles and problems as if they were more threatening to the overall plausibility of evolutionary theory than they are.

When I say all of this, it is not as an expert in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. Rather, it is as a reasonably educated lay-person who knows what the overwhelming majority of experts have concluded based on sustained, evidence-based research over many decades. A critic recently accused me of professing to be unqualified to assess the criticisms of evolution coming from the Intelligent Design community, and yet at the same time being perfectly willing to side with the evolutionary theorists whose ideas I profess to being unqualified to assess. In other words, he was accusing me of applying a double standard.

But here’s the thing. If you’re not an expert in a field, it seems that the most reasonable course is to defer to those who are. If there is an overwhelming consensus among those experts, and if the field is one in which reason and evidence govern research, in which new research is rigorously reviewed according to adherence to an objective methodology rather than conformity to established dogma—if all of this is the case, then the reasonable course for a non-expert is to defer to the consensus of the experts unless and until that consensus changes.

It isn’t to side with a challenger whose views are widely denounced as pseudoscientific by the consensus of experts. It isn’t to decide that until one has been able to assess the merits of the challenge for oneself, one should remain neutral in the debate. It isn’t to conclude that there’s a vast conspiracy going on in which the supposed experts are all in cahoots to silence the few brave voices who dare to challenge their dogma. The consensus of the experts may be wrong—but you’d darned well better have real expertise yourself if you’re going to try to make that case.

And so, as an educated lay reader when it comes to biology (I was a biology major for two years before switching to philosophy), I accept the consensus of experts when they explain in lay terms why evolutionary theory is massively explanatory, and why the most significant puzzles and challenges currently faced by biologists do not give us reason to think that there is anything substantially or fundamentally wrong with the theory.

But we need to be careful to distinguish between what the scientific theory of evolution actually holds and implies, and what amounts to controversial philosophical speculation in the light of the theory. And this is the second preliminary point I want to make.

Science studies the empirical world of matter and energy with an eye towards discovering the patterns or “natural laws” by which that world operates. But some of the things that happen in that world are not required to occur by some fixed natural law. When this is the case, scientists are inclined to say that these events happen “by chance,” although they might note that natural laws determine a framework of possible things that might happen, and affix probabilities to these various possibilities.

Genetic mutation is one of those areas in which specific occurrences aren’t determined by natural laws. And genetic mutation is a crucial element of evolutionary theory. From the standpoint of science, an event that occurs which is undetermined by natural laws will look the same whether it happens by chance or by the influence of some agency that lies outside the empirical world studied by science. In either case, no regular pattern observable in the empirical world determines what precisely occurred.

This means that a purely scientific examination of the world can never rule out the thesis that some intelligent agency is at work in the “chance gaps” left by natural laws. But such an examination can’t establish this thesis either. In brief, to infer intelligent agency at work in the “chance gaps,” we’d first need to know how such an intelligent agent would influence the course of events were there such an intelligent agent, and then we’d need to see whether events follow that course. In other words, we’d first need to have some serious insight into the MIND OF GOD. But science studies the empirical world, not the mind of God. So arguing for God’s existence in this way just isn’t science. “Intelligent Design Theory” therefore isn’t science, whatever other merits it might have as scientifically informed theology.

What all this means is that from a purely scientific standpoint, we need to be essentially agnostic with respect to the thesis that God is working in and through the processes of evolution. Science as such neither affirms nor denies this thesis. As such, it is a mistake to treat science in general or evolutionary theory in particular as the enemy of religion. And it is just as big a mistake to treat “Intelligent Design” theory as if it were science. I happen to embrace the theory that nature looks the way that it does because an intelligent agency lies behind it. But this is not a scientific theory.

There is, in short, a crucial difference between the scientific theory of evolution and the philosophical worldview--what we might call reductionistic metaphysical naturalism--which has so often been wedded to that theory. By “reductionistic metaphysical naturalism,” I mean a worldview according to which the empirical universe of matter and energy studied by science exhausts what is real, such that scientific explanation offers the ultimate explanation of every element of human experience--including morality, religious experience, aesthetics, consciousness, and the experience of being an agent who acts for reasons. All of these experiences, according to this philosophy, are ultimately caused by nothing but physical processes in our brains. They are mere by-products of events taking place in brain systems that have gradually evolved through natural selection because they advanced reproductive fitness.

To accept the scientific theory of evolution does not require one to accept reductionistic metaphysical naturalism (and by implication atheism). The conclusions of science may have bearing on the essentially philosophical arguments that address which fundamental worldviews fit best with the totality of human experience. But when scientists defend worldviews that limit reality to the scope of what science studies, they are doing philosophy, not science. And their arguments therefore need to be assessed in philosophical terms--something which I feel eminently qualified to do.

And so when Dawkins wades into philosophical waters, as he does in The God Delusion, I am more than ready to assess the quality of his efforts. I think they fall short…really far short. Put bluntly, whatever his merits as a scientist, he’s not a very good philosopher of religion.

But I would be the last person to want to silence him, even when he wanders into unfamiliar territory and wants to argue philosophy of religion. After all, as a friend of mine once said to me, even a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut. And Dawkins is a very bright man. Even when he wanders outside his area of expertise, some of his thinking may be worth engaging with.

More significantly, Dawkins has done all of us in the philosophy of religion an enormous favor. For as long as I’ve been in the discipline, we philosophers have been debating such questions as the conditions under which it is legitimate to have beliefs that go beyond the evidence. And for as long as I’ve been in the discipline, the general public has been happily ignoring our conversations and debates.

That changed with the publication of The God Delusion and the other “new atheist” bestsellers. Suddenly, a wide swath of the general public became interested in the kinds of philosophical questions that people in my discipline have been wrestling with. Suddenly, I found myself with the opportunity to write a serious introduction to the philosophy of religion that had a good chance of being read by a wide readership. Our insular academic debate was suddenly taken up by a much broader audience than ever before. In this respect, Dawkins used his platform as a recognized public intellectual in the best possible way: to engage the general public in intellectual conversations which they had largely been ignoring.

I disagree with Richard Dawkins. I think he’s just wrong to think that evolutionary theory gives us compelling reasons to question religion. More broadly, I oppose his sweeping condemnation of religion, his insistence that beliefs about the transcendent are “pernicious delusions” and that “faith is an evil.” I think he is guilty here of making hasty generalizations on the basis of the worst that religion has to offer. And I find many of his arguments not only bad, but offensive in the sense that they amount to making fun of what he clearly doesn’t understand.

But none of this changes the fact that he is probably the best known living defender of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, that he is an expert in this theory, and that he ranks among the most renowned public intellectuals alive today--one who has used his notoriety to stimulate a broad public conversation. Scholars like this are precisely the kinds of people that we want college students to hear, even when they stray outside their areas of expertise, even when they’re wrong. We don’t, of course, want our students to listen without their critical faculties. But we want our students to hear them.

HR 1015, which of the two resolutions targets Dawkins most directly, chastises a major university for inviting a prominent public intellectual to speak on campus as part of a series on Darwin (a topic which no one would deny is an area in which Dawkins is expert). And why does this bill chastise OU for extending this invitation? Because Dawkins’ views are “contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma” and because Dawkins demonstrates “an intolerance for cultural diversity and diversity of thinking.”

We may wonder about the absurdity of accusing Dawkins of not tolerating diversity in a document that effectively seeks to silence a minority viewpoint on the ground that it offends the majority. Where, exactly, is the tolerance of diversity when one thinks majority opinion ought to dictate whose views should be given a platform?

But let me focus a bit more deeply on this charge of intolerance. When you call a belief system “evil” and “dangerous” and “pernicious,” there is a sense in which this expresses intolerance. And there is no question that Dawkins is on the record calling religion all of these things. But I’m pretty sure that I am on the record calling Nazism evil and dangerous, and nobody has accused me of doing anything objectionable.

Why not? Because Nazism is evil and dangerous. Now I don’t think all religion is evil, and so I think Dawkins’ judgment here is way off base. But the point is this: the species of intolerance which Dawkins is guilty of here isn’t the sort that we condemn just because it’s intolerant. This kind of intolerance--this willingness to stand up and denounce something as dangerous and wrong--is a virtue when its target really is dangerous and wrong.

So the question is which belief systems are dangerous and wrong. How do you decide? You decide by having spirited debates on the matter. You decide by hearing the arguments for various viewpoints and critically assessing those arguments. This can’t happen if those who believe that some belief systems are dangerous aren’t free to make their case. It can’t happen because they are shunned or excluded on the grounds that their viewpoint is “intolerant.”

When we speak about “intolerance,” we need to distinguish between two very different things. On the one hand, there’s the use of coercive power, usually by someone in a position of authority, to censor certain beliefs or persecute those who adhere to certain beliefs. On the other hand, there is the act of passing a negative judgment on some belief--either the judgment that the belief is mistaken, or that it’s dangerous--on the basis of reasons that are publicly shared and can therefore be subjected to critical assessment.

It is the former kind of intolerance that we need to avoid. That kind of intolerance amounts to political oppression. And if we want to avoid the former kind of intolerance, we need to allow the latter kind. Doing the latter is essential not only to academic discourse but to participatory democracy. It is by permitting the free and open discussion of ideas--including the critical evaluation of those ideas in what may be starkly negative ways--that we are most likely to discern which belief systems are good ones and which are bad.

And history teaches, I think, that if there are ideas and belief systems which really are dangerous, it is not a good idea to deal with them by legislating their censorship or suppression. Instead, it is far better to foster a climate in which the harmfulness and irrationality of those ideas can be brought to light through reasoned argument. Let the social discourse expose harmful ideas for what they are, and allegiance to those ideas will begin to wane. In the meantime, what we should legislate against are the overtly harmful behaviors that dangerously irrational ideas might be prone to inspire.

And so when Dawkins argues that religious ideas are dangerously irrational, we should listen to what he says without seeking to suppress it, and critically assess the merits of what he says. And when someone argues that Dawkins’ ideas are dangerously irrational, we should do the same. What we should not do, in either case, is attempt to stifle the open and critical discourse upon which both academic progress and deliberative democracy depend.

Despite what the House Resolutions claim, the science departments at OU are not stifling open and critical discourse when they design their teaching around the judgment that evolutionary theory offers the best scientific account of the phenomena it’s intended to explain. Rather, they are designing their teaching around the consensus that has emerged as the current outcome of ongoing open and critical discourse. At the same time, they are teaching students why evolutionary theory has emerged as the dominant theory, and they are teaching students how to participate in open and critical scientific discourse. If, in the end, it should prove that evolutionary theory is seriously defective, this will be demonstrated by students who understand why scientists have for so long found the theory convincing and who are well-trained in the methods of critical scientific inquiry. It won't be demonstrated because ideologues have succeeded in bullying their way into science programs with theories that aren’t science.

In these recent events surrounding Dawkins' visit to OU, there is an instance of someone with an intolerant desire to stifle open and critical discourse. In filing HR’s 1014 and 1015, Representative Thomsen is expressing that desire. The good news is that even if these resolutions pass, they lack the power to make Thomsen’s intolerant wishes a reality.