Steve Barr and I used to be friends. I’m not sure he would consider me one any longer. According to his latest posting at First Things (go here), “Religion has a significant number of friends (and potential friends) in the scientific world. The ID movement is not creating new ones.” And since creating new friends for religion among his scientific colleagues seems to have become Barr’s overriding concern, that presumably makes me and the ID movement the enemy.
I first learned of Barr back in 1992 through a friend of mine from the University of Chicago doing a postdoc at Caltech. Knowing my interest in the science-religion discussion, he told me about a talk he had heard at Caltech from a U. of Del. physicist named Stephen Barr. My friend sent me a typescript of the talk and I was intrigued. Barr quoted the Church Father Minucius Felix: “If upon entering some home you saw that everything there was well-tended, neat and decorative, you would believe that some master was in charge of it, and that he was himself much superior to those good things. So too in the home of this world, when you see providence, order and law in the heavens and on earth, believe that there is a Lord and Author of the universe, more beatiful than the stars and the various parts of the whole world.”
I called Barr and we had a nice chat. He indicated an openness to design in biology but felt that the better design arguments were to be made at the level physical law (God having designed the laws of the universe). Fair enough. In that first conversation back in 1992, I urged Barr to write a book on his law-based approach to design and thoughts about science and religion — he seemed to have an enthusiasm for the subject and the smarts to pull it off. As a research scientist, he stressed how busy he was and at the time dismissed my proposal out of hand. In following years Barr and I kept in touch. I had him invited to the MERE CREATION conference held at Biola in 1996, which he attended and at which he was a valuable participant.
Then, in 2003, ten years after our first conversation, he published a fine book titled Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (I like to think, and believe evidence supports it, that I was part of the causal chain in its production). In an email with subject header “Can you help me out,” he asked me to help promote the book, asked me to write a blurb for it, and even asked me to direct him to others who might write blurbs for it (the blurb on the back cover by Peter van Inwagen was probably at my instance). In any case, I was happy to give him the following blurb: “Stephen Barr has an exceptionally clear style and a gift for illustrating complex ideas and making them understandable. More significantly, here is a free mind joyfully relating the physics he loves to the faith that sustains him, unconcerned about the reaction of the ‘professionals’.” I meant the blurb at the time and still think it’s a fine book (indeed, I’ve used it in some of my seminary classes).
But I’m not sure I can honestly say that Barr is unconcerned about the reaction of his colleagues any longer. Indeed, given his First Things piece, he seems overly concerned to distance himself from his past ID connections and to score points with a more socially acceptable community of scholars. He protests too much. A colleague of mine, reading his First Things post, reacted this way: Read More ›