Awhile back, I commented on something Andrew Sullivan had said on fundamentalism vs. his religion. I noticed an odd chain of anti-fundamentalist reasoning which I suggested might be an example of begging the question, but wasn’t sure. Then, I read Ken Miller’s answer to a Templeton Foundation survey of what people thought of science vs. religion, and things sort of clicked:

To be threatened by science, God would have to be nothing more than a placeholder for human ignorance. This is the God of the creationists, of the “intelligent design” movement, of those who seek their God in darkness. What we have not found and do not yet understand becomes their best—indeed their only—evidence for faith. As a Christian, I find the flow of this logic particularly depressing. Not only does it teach us to fear the acquisition of knowledge (which might at any time disprove belief), but it also suggests that God dwells only in the shadows of our understanding. I suggest that if God is real, we should be able to find him somewhere else—in the bright light of human knowledge, spiritual and scientific…

There is great naiveté in the assumption that our presence in the universe is self-explanatory, and does not require an answer. Many who reject God imply that reasons for the existence of an orderly natural world are not to be sought. The laws of nature exist simply because they are, or because we find ourselves in one of countless “multiverses” in which ours happens to be hospitable to life. No need to ask why this should be so, or inquire as to the mechanism that generates so many worlds. The curiosity of the theist who embraces science is greater, not less, because he seeks an explanation that is deeper than science can provide, an explanation that includes science, but then seeks the ultimate reason why the logic of science should work so well. The hypothesis of God comes not from a rejection of science, but from a penetrating curiosity that asks why science is even possible, and why the laws of nature exist for us to discover…

Albert Einstein once wrote that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” Today, even as science moves ahead, that mystery remains…

It is really extraordinary what Miller does in these paragraphs. First, he condemns the cdesign proponentsists for basing their God on “ignorance,” but little by little, Miller gets around to declaring his God is to be found in “mystery.” He even endorses one of their beloved arguments, the argument from fine tuning. Yikes.

There’s a common thread that runs through both Sullivan’s and Miller’s attempts to distinguish themselves from fundamentalists: what’s good for them is bad for their opponents, though they try to call it under a different name. By way of slightly modifying an existing term, I propose calling this tendency “blackwhite”:

…this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.

-George Orwell, /1984/

This quote nicely captures two things about the Sullivan-Miller approach to fundamentalists: the willingness to call things what they aren’t and the double standard for themselves and their opponents. It also happens to fit Miller’s arbitrary declaration that his opponents find their God in “darkness” while he finds his God in “light.” So I think from now on, I’ll be referring to all such rhetoric simply as “blackwhite.”