Marie! Thanks for your interest. I've been trying to demonstrate from a layman's point of view that much of young earth "science" is actually destroying the faith of bright, curious minds who are extremely disappointed with YEC tactics and explanations. I've been trying to do this not by attacking John and his positions personally, though I know he is a YEC, but by using Helder's paper "How Christians Respond to Secular Science" as an example of what is not helpful.
Two days ago, after I invited a bright young man to read this discussion, he emailed me: "I read as much as I could before losing interest. How can he throw so much science out the window? .... I've lost the passion for debate on this subject. I feel at ease with my paradigm. I feel it makes sense. I can't say that I felt that way with a Christian paradigm...Science could allow for a god, but Christianity doesn't allow for science. End of story in my opinion."
This is what I am afraid of.
I would also point to the experiences of brilliant, science-minded Christians like Todd Wood and Glen Morton who get repeatedly slammed for being, well, good scientists. (i.e. http://www.icr.org/article/3132/ ). John began this thread by saying that it's Dawkins and evolution who are destroying faith. I disagree. Christians have had to deal with Bible-defying scientific claims and eloquent atheism for a many centuries. It's American fundamentalism, with its false scientific shibboleths, that is driving many people away from the camp of faith in Christ.
I have two installments left in my critique of Helder's paper. The last will include some "so what" conclusions.
I'm surprised that you didn't really deal with any of these vaguenesses . It would have been so easy for you. Now you want to get to the real tough stuff. I feel flattered. BTW I encourage you to rethink your definition of ad hominem. You are making it seem that it's unethical to call someone on deliberate misrepresentations of subjects we are presently discussing. If you want some examples of real ad hominem attacks, I know exactly where I can find them.
"...he was refering to the Genesis event, right? In the beginning. Yes, the entire week of creation was part of that beginning, the beginning of how the earth operates and is maintained."
No. Jesus wasn't referring to an event. They were not discussing events. Jesus was referring to the Torah, specifically the Book of Beginnings and the Book of Deuteronomy. Jesus was referring to Moses, as mentioned in the context, as opposed to various Jewish schools of thought about divorce. By referring to "the beginning of creation" Jesus is lifting the question of divorce to matters of Torah and the beginnings of marriage. Torah trumps Mishna.
"You could argue that the beginning was before the week of creation, but then you are misappropriating the meaning of the word in order to argue with Jesus, right?"
No. I am not trying to misappropriate the word nor am I trying to argue with Jesus. I'm arguing with YEC's use of Jesus. When you make a saying of Jesus a matter of science and the age of the earth (as if these are the point of what he is saying), it's youself and YEC who misappropriate his words. I pushed the science/literalism angle to absurdity to make this point. If Jesus is literally talking about the scientific timing of male and female creation, then the logical conclusion is that male and female were created at the "beginning of creation". Again, if the literal sense of the creation story is the real issue, then the story itself has a literal sequence -- beginning with the first day and ending on the sixth. I don't mind Jesus correcting the order a little. What's a few days? Jesus is the living Torah, afterall, and the living Torah trumps Moses. But do remember this is a reductio ad absurdum designed to keep you honest about Jesus and his supposed literalism.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Then we get a description of how that happened. We get the beginning of everything, of separation of earth and water, of light, of stars, plants, animals, fish, and humans. All of that week was a beginning, according to scripture."
None of this is what the rabbis were discussing. In fact you have hijacked their discussion. Perhaps you wish Jesus would have expounded a little more on the days of creation in the gospels but he didn't. Doesn't this give you any pause?
"You say that Jesus knowledge was limited, including about the process of creation. But this contradicts what John 1 says about Jesus being there in the beginning, with God. That Jesus himself was the Word by which the creation happened. Now yes, Jesus did indicate sometimes that somethings related to judgement and his own return were known to the Father only. But this doesn't mean that therefore He had to forget what He was involved in before."
Actually I set that idea aside for the moment. Instead I encourage you to learn the meaning of kenosis, the well-attested notion in Scripture that the Son of God voluntarily stripped himself of his omniscience and omnipotence in order to become the suffering servant of redemption. It might open up a whole new world of understanding about his incarnation for you. To sully this with our present debate would be a shame.
I really don't want to argue every text raised in this discussion, though it is tempting. I'm just concerned that our Lord is made out to be the posterboy for today's Young Earth Creationism. I also don't object to Juby's right to disagree. I object to his hermeneutics as well as his "science".
If you have been following along, I've been critiquing Dr. Margaret Helder’s “How Christians Respond to Secular Science” (March, 2012). Last time, I pointed out how young earth creationists often misunderstand what scientific theories are. Neither UFO experts, Reiki practitioners, quantum incarnationists, white supremacists, nor present day geocentrists, for instance, have genuine scientific theories to support their claims. They do have their own models. Some of them are quite detailed and self-confessedly “scientific”.
I pointed out that Helder, with the support of Dr. Kurt Wise, doesn’t seem to understand what makes a theory (or model) persuasive in its ability to explain reality. As it stands, Helder believes the “strength” of the young earth model is how its main idea remains intact, perhaps even stronger, despite various weak or discredited arguments based on various kinds of evidence. Yet by standards of science and logic, this is precisely what makes such a model more impotent and less persuasive.
The bulk of Helder’s paper is taken up with controversies concerning the Cambrian Explosion. It is very telling that despite urging creationists to concentrate on building a positive case with the data, she devotes no less than 6 pages of her paper to arguments between non-YEC scientists who are delving into Cambrian mysteries. None of them, from J. William Schopf (http://www.research.ucla.edu/chal/99/highlights/article05.htm) to S. Conway Morris (http://www.pnas.org/content/97/9/4426.full.pdf) would ever posit a world-wide flood occurring 6,000 years ago as a helpful, plausible scientific explanation for the Cambrian data.
In other words, Helder uses disagreements between scientists who totally disagree with YEC as proof that YEC must be correct. This is called parasitic science. It is not science at all. Mysteries and disagreements are what advance a scientific understanding of the world. It’s frightening to think that if YEC controlled the scientific establishment, this drive to explain the great mysteries of nature would shrink to nothing but endeavours such as naming new forms of fungi.
“And so concerning the sudden appearance of animals in Cambrian rock, we see that the expectations of the creation model are met. We also see that secular scientists have not been able to find an explanation which can accommodate these data into their evolution model. The latter model does not predict abrupt appearance. They need some kind of phenomenon to initiate such an event…. The implications of the Cambrian explosion are obvious to Christians. The sudden appearance was the result of supernatural intervention…a universal flood burying large and diverse animal communities along with human populations (emphasis mine).” P. 10
This kind of YEC dismissal of all other scientific work is what drives folks bonkers. Helder tells us YEC scientific expectations have been met: God did it. Therefore all the field work, all the expense, all thinking and debating, all the gathering of evidence and sheer intellectual energy expended in trying to understand the Cambrian Explosion turns out to be “a sheer waste of time” (p. 6 par. 3) as Helder would put it. It’s a fundamentalist’s form of Occam’s Razor that says, “It’s in the Bible, dumbo”. Perhaps this explains why she hasn’t bothered updating Cambrian studies beyond her 1995 citations. So much good scientific work has gone on since that time, despite YEC’s smugness.
But even a scientifically untrained Christian can ask questions. If the Flood did it, why aren’t people, land animals, trees, boney fishes -- in fact, almost all forms of animal life as see today – missing from the entire Cambrian layer? Another way of putting it is this: Why, without sounding more convoluted than any secular scientist, would God send a flood that buries animals successively more and more unlike present animals in sucessively deeper and deeper layers of sentiment? Why is the fossil evidence of life before the Flood so simple and “squishy”? Why is the dating of rocks containing the first Cambrian fossils close to 600,000,000 years old? Why do you believe 50,000,000 years of Cambrian Explosion can be described as “sudden” and “rapid”, when your geological explanation of life spans 6,000-10,000 years? How do young creationists explain other “explosions” of life in the fossil record – like mammals and flower plants?. Why isn’t an old earth creation science a much better explanation of the fossil record?
I once believed that the meatiest part of Helder’s paper would be the hardest and lengthiest part to criticise. In fact, it was easy because the people who agree with me did all the hard work.
NEXT: Conclusion: Why YEC is both bad for science and bad for faith.
Perhaps mincing a few percentage points doesn't add anything to the debate about the DNA in chimps and humans. It detracts us from the awesome fact that we are so closely related secular scientists have to rely on "junk DNA" to explain why we are different.
Did Genesisweek take into account that humans have less chromosomes (23 rather than 24) than chimps? This alone might help with the math.
And you think Humphreys, the man who came up with the idea that earth is 6,000 years old while most of the universe is 15 billions years old, is someone who can be trusted with the facts? Whatever, John. It will all help make my conclusion more obvious.
Personally speaking, I think it's presumptuous and perhaps even blasphemous to think we can know exactly how God does things, as was pointed out to Job in Job 38:4. I believe even in the next life we will not "know" exactly how God does things because it presumes we will have God-like minds. The Scriptures weren't inspired to answer every "how" question. They were written to give humanity reliable answers to the most important who, why, and how questions that roost our hearts.
I belong to a theological tradition that says only by the inner operation of the Holy Spirit that we can truly know God and trust him and his promises in Christ. Using the Bible as a "modern" science text book or as a technology manual or as a fine arts catalogue simply abuses God's purposes for his written Word. It makes us arrogant and it gets us into trouble when we have borne false witness to God -- which has happened far too often in history.
Perhaps this gets to the point of the debate here. Creation science, especially YEC science, seems to boast that it knows exactly how God created the earth. Most important, it runs roughshod over the monumental intellectual and cultural challenges that the Spirit of God surmounted to communicate his saving truths to ancient peoples barely out of the stone age. And God is still "lisping" to us and stooping to make himself known to us, as Calvin said.
That's why I kind of like the idea of a truly "secular" science. Good science, no matter what faith conviction, must follow where the evidence leads when it comes to understanding the universe we inhabit. We need to be humble about our limited capacities and about how our faith commitments will influence our quest to understand. Yet we must follow the evidence and keep testing to see if our conclusions are sturdy and repeatable and open to peer review, even if at first it doesn't seem to fit with what we used to think about nature.
As a Christian, I know I can do this fearessly. My Father may be inscrutible in somethings, but He's no trickster.
Thanks, Allen. However, it's not just Google and the internet that can hamper deep (critical) thinking. It's also polarized thinking, hedonized thinking, reactionary thinking, politicized thinking, pragmatic thinking, secularized thinking, and slothful thinking. These may or may not be aided by the internet.
On the other hand, some of my deepest moments of insight were midwived by resources that only the internet could synergize.
Posted in: Creation vs Evolution: Impact on Witness and Faith
Marie! Thanks for your interest. I've been trying to demonstrate from a layman's point of view that much of young earth "science" is actually destroying the faith of bright, curious minds who are extremely disappointed with YEC tactics and explanations. I've been trying to do this not by attacking John and his positions personally, though I know he is a YEC, but by using Helder's paper "How Christians Respond to Secular Science" as an example of what is not helpful.
Two days ago, after I invited a bright young man to read this discussion, he emailed me: "I read as much as I could before losing interest. How can he throw so much science out the window? .... I've lost the passion for debate on this subject. I feel at ease with my paradigm. I feel it makes sense. I can't say that I felt that way with a Christian paradigm...Science could allow for a god, but Christianity doesn't allow for science. End of story in my opinion."
This is what I am afraid of.
I would also point to the experiences of brilliant, science-minded Christians like Todd Wood and Glen Morton who get repeatedly slammed for being, well, good scientists. (i.e. http://www.icr.org/article/3132/ ). John began this thread by saying that it's Dawkins and evolution who are destroying faith. I disagree. Christians have had to deal with Bible-defying scientific claims and eloquent atheism for a many centuries. It's American fundamentalism, with its false scientific shibboleths, that is driving many people away from the camp of faith in Christ.
I have two installments left in my critique of Helder's paper. The last will include some "so what" conclusions.
"
Posted in: Creation vs Evolution: Impact on Witness and Faith
I'm surprised that you didn't really deal with any of these vaguenesses . It would have been so easy for you. Now you want to get to the real tough stuff. I feel flattered. BTW I encourage you to rethink your definition of ad hominem. You are making it seem that it's unethical to call someone on deliberate misrepresentations of subjects we are presently discussing. If you want some examples of real ad hominem attacks, I know exactly where I can find them.
"...he was refering to the Genesis event, right? In the beginning. Yes, the entire week of creation was part of that beginning, the beginning of how the earth operates and is maintained."
No. Jesus wasn't referring to an event. They were not discussing events. Jesus was referring to the Torah, specifically the Book of Beginnings and the Book of Deuteronomy. Jesus was referring to Moses, as mentioned in the context, as opposed to various Jewish schools of thought about divorce. By referring to "the beginning of creation" Jesus is lifting the question of divorce to matters of Torah and the beginnings of marriage. Torah trumps Mishna.
"You could argue that the beginning was before the week of creation, but then you are misappropriating the meaning of the word in order to argue with Jesus, right?"
No. I am not trying to misappropriate the word nor am I trying to argue with Jesus. I'm arguing with YEC's use of Jesus. When you make a saying of Jesus a matter of science and the age of the earth (as if these are the point of what he is saying), it's youself and YEC who misappropriate his words. I pushed the science/literalism angle to absurdity to make this point. If Jesus is literally talking about the scientific timing of male and female creation, then the logical conclusion is that male and female were created at the "beginning of creation". Again, if the literal sense of the creation story is the real issue, then the story itself has a literal sequence -- beginning with the first day and ending on the sixth. I don't mind Jesus correcting the order a little. What's a few days? Jesus is the living Torah, afterall, and the living Torah trumps Moses. But do remember this is a reductio ad absurdum designed to keep you honest about Jesus and his supposed literalism.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Then we get a description of how that happened. We get the beginning of everything, of separation of earth and water, of light, of stars, plants, animals, fish, and humans. All of that week was a beginning, according to scripture."
None of this is what the rabbis were discussing. In fact you have hijacked their discussion. Perhaps you wish Jesus would have expounded a little more on the days of creation in the gospels but he didn't. Doesn't this give you any pause?
"You say that Jesus knowledge was limited, including about the process of creation. But this contradicts what John 1 says about Jesus being there in the beginning, with God. That Jesus himself was the Word by which the creation happened. Now yes, Jesus did indicate sometimes that somethings related to judgement and his own return were known to the Father only. But this doesn't mean that therefore He had to forget what He was involved in before."
Actually I set that idea aside for the moment. Instead I encourage you to learn the meaning of kenosis, the well-attested notion in Scripture that the Son of God voluntarily stripped himself of his omniscience and omnipotence in order to become the suffering servant of redemption. It might open up a whole new world of understanding about his incarnation for you. To sully this with our present debate would be a shame.
I really don't want to argue every text raised in this discussion, though it is tempting. I'm just concerned that our Lord is made out to be the posterboy for today's Young Earth Creationism. I also don't object to Juby's right to disagree. I object to his hermeneutics as well as his "science".
Posted in: Creation vs Evolution: Impact on Witness and Faith
If you have been following along, I've been critiquing Dr. Margaret Helder’s “How Christians Respond to Secular Science” (March, 2012). Last time, I pointed out how young earth creationists often misunderstand what scientific theories are. Neither UFO experts, Reiki practitioners, quantum incarnationists, white supremacists, nor present day geocentrists, for instance, have genuine scientific theories to support their claims. They do have their own models. Some of them are quite detailed and self-confessedly “scientific”.
I pointed out that Helder, with the support of Dr. Kurt Wise, doesn’t seem to understand what makes a theory (or model) persuasive in its ability to explain reality. As it stands, Helder believes the “strength” of the young earth model is how its main idea remains intact, perhaps even stronger, despite various weak or discredited arguments based on various kinds of evidence. Yet by standards of science and logic, this is precisely what makes such a model more impotent and less persuasive.
The bulk of Helder’s paper is taken up with controversies concerning the Cambrian Explosion. It is very telling that despite urging creationists to concentrate on building a positive case with the data, she devotes no less than 6 pages of her paper to arguments between non-YEC scientists who are delving into Cambrian mysteries. None of them, from J. William Schopf (http://www.research.ucla.edu/chal/99/highlights/article05.htm) to S. Conway Morris (http://www.pnas.org/content/97/9/4426.full.pdf) would ever posit a world-wide flood occurring 6,000 years ago as a helpful, plausible scientific explanation for the Cambrian data.
In other words, Helder uses disagreements between scientists who totally disagree with YEC as proof that YEC must be correct. This is called parasitic science. It is not science at all. Mysteries and disagreements are what advance a scientific understanding of the world. It’s frightening to think that if YEC controlled the scientific establishment, this drive to explain the great mysteries of nature would shrink to nothing but endeavours such as naming new forms of fungi.
“And so concerning the sudden appearance of animals in Cambrian rock, we see that the expectations of the creation model are met. We also see that secular scientists have not been able to find an explanation which can accommodate these data into their evolution model. The latter model does not predict abrupt appearance. They need some kind of phenomenon to initiate such an event…. The implications of the Cambrian explosion are obvious to Christians. The sudden appearance was the result of supernatural intervention…a universal flood burying large and diverse animal communities along with human populations (emphasis mine).” P. 10
This kind of YEC dismissal of all other scientific work is what drives folks bonkers. Helder tells us YEC scientific expectations have been met: God did it. Therefore all the field work, all the expense, all thinking and debating, all the gathering of evidence and sheer intellectual energy expended in trying to understand the Cambrian Explosion turns out to be “a sheer waste of time” (p. 6 par. 3) as Helder would put it. It’s a fundamentalist’s form of Occam’s Razor that says, “It’s in the Bible, dumbo”. Perhaps this explains why she hasn’t bothered updating Cambrian studies beyond her 1995 citations. So much good scientific work has gone on since that time, despite YEC’s smugness.
But even a scientifically untrained Christian can ask questions. If the Flood did it, why aren’t people, land animals, trees, boney fishes -- in fact, almost all forms of animal life as see today – missing from the entire Cambrian layer? Another way of putting it is this: Why, without sounding more convoluted than any secular scientist, would God send a flood that buries animals successively more and more unlike present animals in sucessively deeper and deeper layers of sentiment? Why is the fossil evidence of life before the Flood so simple and “squishy”? Why is the dating of rocks containing the first Cambrian fossils close to 600,000,000 years old? Why do you believe 50,000,000 years of Cambrian Explosion can be described as “sudden” and “rapid”, when your geological explanation of life spans 6,000-10,000 years? How do young creationists explain other “explosions” of life in the fossil record – like mammals and flower plants?. Why isn’t an old earth creation science a much better explanation of the fossil record?
I once believed that the meatiest part of Helder’s paper would be the hardest and lengthiest part to criticise. In fact, it was easy because the people who agree with me did all the hard work.
NEXT: Conclusion: Why YEC is both bad for science and bad for faith.
Posted in: Creation vs Evolution: Impact on Witness and Faith
In keeping with the thought of His incarnation:
a joyful, safe, worshipful Christmas to you.
my deepest condolences to Americans presently grieving the tragedy at Sandy Hook.
Posted in: Creation vs Evolution: Impact on Witness and Faith
Perhaps mincing a few percentage points doesn't add anything to the debate about the DNA in chimps and humans. It detracts us from the awesome fact that we are so closely related secular scientists have to rely on "junk DNA" to explain why we are different.
See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111025122615.htm
Did Genesisweek take into account that humans have less chromosomes (23 rather than 24) than chimps? This alone might help with the math.
And you think Humphreys, the man who came up with the idea that earth is 6,000 years old while most of the universe is 15 billions years old, is someone who can be trusted with the facts? Whatever, John. It will all help make my conclusion more obvious.
Posted in: Creation vs Evolution: Impact on Witness and Faith
Personally speaking, I think it's presumptuous and perhaps even blasphemous to think we can know exactly how God does things, as was pointed out to Job in Job 38:4. I believe even in the next life we will not "know" exactly how God does things because it presumes we will have God-like minds. The Scriptures weren't inspired to answer every "how" question. They were written to give humanity reliable answers to the most important who, why, and how questions that roost our hearts.
I belong to a theological tradition that says only by the inner operation of the Holy Spirit that we can truly know God and trust him and his promises in Christ. Using the Bible as a "modern" science text book or as a technology manual or as a fine arts catalogue simply abuses God's purposes for his written Word. It makes us arrogant and it gets us into trouble when we have borne false witness to God -- which has happened far too often in history.
Perhaps this gets to the point of the debate here. Creation science, especially YEC science, seems to boast that it knows exactly how God created the earth. Most important, it runs roughshod over the monumental intellectual and cultural challenges that the Spirit of God surmounted to communicate his saving truths to ancient peoples barely out of the stone age. And God is still "lisping" to us and stooping to make himself known to us, as Calvin said.
That's why I kind of like the idea of a truly "secular" science. Good science, no matter what faith conviction, must follow where the evidence leads when it comes to understanding the universe we inhabit. We need to be humble about our limited capacities and about how our faith commitments will influence our quest to understand. Yet we must follow the evidence and keep testing to see if our conclusions are sturdy and repeatable and open to peer review, even if at first it doesn't seem to fit with what we used to think about nature.
As a Christian, I know I can do this fearessly. My Father may be inscrutible in somethings, but He's no trickster.
Posted in: R.I.P. Deep Thinking
Thanks, Allen. However, it's not just Google and the internet that can hamper deep (critical) thinking. It's also polarized thinking, hedonized thinking, reactionary thinking, politicized thinking, pragmatic thinking, secularized thinking, and slothful thinking. These may or may not be aided by the internet.
On the other hand, some of my deepest moments of insight were midwived by resources that only the internet could synergize.