“Be-de, be-de, be-de, that’s all folk science!”

Over 20 years ago, my dad gave me Science Held Hostage: What’s Wrong with Creation Science and Evolutionism, written by Howard J. Van Till, Davis A. Young, and Clarence Menninga. (In retrospect, I’m pretty sure my dad wouldn’t have agreed with the authors; I think he just wanted to give me a book that fit my interests.) Sadly, I didn’t crack it open for two decades. But after having adopted Walton’s ANE perspective, something urged me to unpack that box, dig out the book, and “pick up and read.” Within a few short chapters, I was convinced of the book’s core message: both creationists (of the young- and old-earth sort) and evolutionists (of the rabid atheistic sort—hence, the “-ism” in evolutionism) had presented us with a false dichotomy. As such, both atheistic evolutionism and special creationism victimized the public by demanding we choose one of two options: either (1) science can settle infallibly (or legitimately discard) questions of a philosophico-religious nature, or (2) religion can infallibly answer questions of a scientific nature.

Because both groups colluded (albeit unintentionally) to form this false dichotomy, Van Till, et al, considered both groups to be “folk science.” In “FROM CALVINISM TO FREETHOUGHT: The Road Less Traveled”, Van Till writes:

Now I was getting somewhere! Nevertheless, I wasn’t yet convinced that naturalistic evolution was the answer. So, for an extremely short season, I clung to the idea that science could prove the existence of an Intelligent Designer, whose nature is unarguably, well, “super,” for lack of a better descriptor. Jumping on the Intelligent Design (ID) bandwagon would allow me to accept common descent to some degree while refusing to admit evolution to be the sole mechanism by which God created, especially when it came to the creation of the human race and the infusion of the soul. There was a part of me, like Dr. John Walton, that wanted to retain one or more historical anchors in the Genesis 2-3 narrative.

But Van Till continued to haunt me. Although Science Held Hostage was written well before the advent of the ID movement, I soon came to the conclusion that ID was committing the same “sins” as the YEC movement and that ID methodology didn’t serve the advancement of scientific knowledge. In fact, ID’s presuppositions appeared to serve the advancement of scientific agnosticism in principle, if not in practice. It appeared that the ID movement was willing to throw its hands up, lock the laboratory doors, and no longer explore possibilities or test theories beyond what they declared to be “irreducibly complex.” Heck, if past generations had settled for that kind of answer, we’d still be a geocentric society with a fear of traveling beyond the sight of land.

The illusion of “irreducible complexity” isn’t as unassailable as ID proponents would want the public to believe. As much as I sympathized with the ID movement in its quest to prove the existence of an Intelligent Designer via the scientific method, thus explaining “knowledge gaps” as evidence of divine creative activity and supernatural tampering, the core of my being didn’t want any part of that. Did I really want to be caught holding the ID bag when scientists declared that something previously thought “irreducibly complex” by ID proponents was, in fact, “reducibly complex”? Of course not.

Van Till’s aforementioned essay “FROM CALVINISM TO FREETHOUGHT” essentially updates the core of Science Held Hostage‘s message to take ID into account:

But, how then, could I continue to be a theist? If the scientific method was inadequate for proving that God created the universe, what leg did I have to stand on? Enter an unlikely bedfellow: Stephen Jay Gould.