Last week I sang the undersung praises of negative role models. Our paths through life are constructed from a combination of dos and don’ts, which are made most vivid to our imitative minds when we find human exemplars of them. Some of my most effective teachers are dipshits who make me shudder with clarity about what I do not want to become. This week, as promised, I’ll focus on the perils implicit in using these most helpful negative role models.

I study and teach intellectual history, where you see this pattern often: A thinker rejects some established doctrine and makes a negative role model out of a representative of that doctrine. That rejection grows so vehement that it forces the thinker into the opposite position. I call it “barking yourself into a corner,” in effect barking like a junkyard dog to ward off some negative role model and in the process unwittingly cornering yourself in a position that doesn’t make sense.

The Protestant reformer Martin Luther is a great example. He condemned the Catholic church’s excesses so vehemently that he cornered himself—and those who followed him—with the opposite extreme.

The Catholic Church believed in “works righteousness,” the idea that have to make an effort if you want to be saved by God. In his youth, Luther had been tormented by doubt about whether he had made enough effort. His liberating revelation was that God grants grace independently of our deeds. His negative role model became the Pope, whom he deemed the anti-Christ.

Within one generation, Luther’s Protestantism swept through Europe in the form of Calvinism, which rejects works righteousness so vehemently that it ends up embracing an equally tormenting doctrine, summed up in Calvinism’s five points, with the acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity: Humans are completely sinful.
Unconditional Election: God gives grace selectively with complete disregard to the quality of the individual.
Limited Atonement: Jesus died only for those of us for whom God gives grace.
Irresistible Grace: When God gives grace, you can’t help but be good; when he doesn’t, you can’t help but be bad.
Perseverance of the Saints: Grace is eternal, as is its opposite. If you aren’t among the arbitrarily chosen, you’ll burn in hell eternally and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The doctrine is nothing if not humble—humble to the point of radical passivity. Why God would create humanity in order to play out this particular game is a mystery. Though Calvinists might speculate as to why, the question is probably one that the rest of us would do better getting over than answering. It’s a question that comes not from following a reasoned argument for something but from following one against something. Rejecting Catholicism’s extremes proved no guarantee against falling into other extremes.

Now, my sect has a similar problem to Luther’s. We evolutionists find Intelligent Design advocates to be reprehensibly sloppy thinkers. We hold their juvenile wishful thinking as a negative role model, a prime example of what not to do. We think it’s time to face the fact that we’ve got no great mommy or daddy in the sky.

Having the ID community to pick on has, I think, distracted us from the weakness in some of our own arguments. In particular, many of us will argue that because evolution explains the origins of life so much better than the Bible does, it must be right. But evolution doesn’t explain the origins at all. It only explains the progression of life once evolution gets started. On this, the ID community is correct. The burden of proof is on science to show how life starts. I think we can do it, but I think we haven’t concentrated as hard as we might on that question because we’ve been lulled into confidence by our low regard for the opposing arguments.

We evolutionists aren’t dumb, and neither are the Calvinists. We’ve just become unduly distracted by the things we’re against. We’ve barked ourselves into our respective corners. We’ve used the power of negative role models too cavalierly for our own good.