Creationism with a human face?

Lee Strobel is a former crime reporter and atheist who later converted to evangelical Christianity and became a pastor. His main claim to fame is the blockbuster "The Case for Christ".

"The Case for a Creator" is a kind of sequel to the book on Christ. Strobel seems to be an "old earth" creationist and supporter of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. Old earth creationists (OECs for short) accept that the Earth and the universe are very old, and even use the Big Bang as evidence for a creator-god. However, they don't accept evolution. Instead, OECs believe that God created the living organisms by miraculous means, but for some reason choose to create over a span of billions of years. In this way, OECs can accept the old age of our planet and even the fossil series, while still claiming that the various organisms reflected in it are separate creations. To Darwinists, this sounds simply silly, but something close to old earth creationism was the standard position even of scientists before Darwin proposed natural selection as a purely materialist mechanism for how one organism can evolve into another.

The ID movement is dominated by old earth creationists, although it also regroups "hard" theistic evolutionists, young earth creationists and even agnostics. In many ways, "The Case for a Creator" could be seen as an introduction to the ideas of the ID movement, and several of the people interviewed by Strobel work for the conservative think tank Discovery Institute, whose Center for Science and Culture is the chief promoter of ID in the United States.

Strobel's arguments are too many to summarize in a short review, but many of them would be familiar to avid readers of this kind of literature: the Cambrian explosion and the lack of transitional fossils disprove Darwinism, the Big Bang and the kalam cosmological argument prove that the universe had a beginning and therefore must have a First Cause, irreducible complexity and information in living organisms point to design, consciousness cannot be reduced to brain states and hence some form of dualism must be correct, etc.

A more original argument comes from "The Privileged Planet", a book by Guillermo Gonzalez and J.W. Richards. The authors of this book (who are interviewed by Strobel) believe that Earth is uniquely fine tuned for life in general and intelligent life in particular. Indeed, the Earth is designed for discovery and science. This is a kind of anthropic principle (as used by theologians) applied specifically to our planet, rather than to the universe at large. It's also strikingly similar to "Rare Earth", a secular book by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee!

I admit that "The Case for a Creator" was more to my liking than "The Case for Christ". This is hardly surprising. I don't consider myself religious, but I veer strongly towards some kind of deism or panentheism. Evangelical Christianity is something else again, and I believe Strobel have major problems squaring the ID scenario in general (which is compatible with any form of deism or theism) with his particular brand of Christian faith. At one point, he tells a story about two converts to Christianity who couldn't find a single scientific error in the Bible. Well, how did they define "scientific"? Perhaps demons do possess Gadarene swine, but is that a "scientific" proposition? What about the Deluge? Even creationists appeal to supernatural intervention to explain that one! Since the rest of the book sounds so sober (yes, really), this last chapter almost made me chuckle. Lee, come on.

On a more sober note, my main problem with Strobel's scenario comes early on in the book. The author admits that the Big Bang itself is compatible with both deism and theism, but argues in favour of the latter on the basis of *later* miraculous interventions - in this context, presumably the Cambrian explosion and other acts of separate creation. However, living organisms don't just look "designed". They also look "natural". They fit in perfectly with the rest of the material universe. In a certain sense, even intelligence and consciousness fits the material world. This is compatible with deism: a deist god creates both matter and spirit, and then "rigs" them to interact in such a manner that living organisms eventually appear. From a theological perspective, it could even be argued that the theist creator of Strobel's book is sillier than the deist god, since the former have to tinker with his creation as he goes along, while the latter sets up a material-spiritual process from the start that eventually gives rise to trilobites, ammonites or men.

As for the historical evidences for the Christ of faith, I have problematized some of them in my reviews of "The Case for Christ" and "The Case for the Real Jesus". To mention just one, Strobel obviously doesn't believe modern legends concocted by still living cult leaders or their cynical disciples (and he's quite right in rejecting them) but please note that the "manuscript distance" in this case is zero. Sai Baba claimed to have been born of a virgin, and even posed with his mother for photographs! Of course, Lee would never fall for that one. Yet, the author believes that Jesus was born of a virgin, a fact only mentioned in two of the Gospels in stories which contradict each other, and are difficult to square with other statements in the Gospels themselves. Why didn't Mary and Joseph believe in Jesus being the Son of God? Strobel is clearly setting up a double standard when defending his particular version of Christianity.

That being said, I nevertheless recommend "The Case for a Creator" to those who want a good summary and introduction to the arguments put forward by the Intelligent Design movement, with special emphasis on old earth creationism. I therefore give the book...surprise...four stars.

;-)