Evolution Weekend
February 10th, 2008 | Published in Evolution, Science, Religion | 11 Comments
Today is evolution weekend, when Christian churches are encouraged to create an “opportunity for serious discussion and reflection on the relationship between religion and science.” Sounds like a good idea to me, since from my own experience many Christians are ignorant of the basic premises and evidences of evolution. I know I was for a long time, since I only read creationist literature. Polls also attest to this.
Here is an excerpt from the clergy letter:
We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.
(via Mere Comments)
February 10th, 2008 at 11:43 am (#)
That is a cool premise for a weekend. Being a college minister and trying to reach a very liberal, post-modern campus, it would be great to know how to engage these conversations, instead of just throwing my bible at them and saying “because the Bible…”, plus people do not like Bibles thrown at them, go figure.
Do you have any good books on this subject that are worth reading??? Especially on the topic of evolution??
Los
February 10th, 2008 at 12:52 pm (#)
And some of us aren’t ignorant, but we still don’t buy it.
February 10th, 2008 at 7:07 pm (#)
Los,
Here are the books I recommend on evolution:
* Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution by Kenneth R. Miller
* The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006) by Francis Collins
* A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson – Covers an immense amount of material in an entertaining and interesting way, while at the same time being concise. Highly recommended.
* Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer – Helped me understand evolution from an evolutionist, instead of from creationist straw men.
Josh
February 10th, 2008 at 9:48 pm (#)
I don’t buy it either. There are too many holes, gaps, problems, inconsistencies, and fraudulant claims with evolution. The theory just does not add up. It does not work.
February 11th, 2008 at 8:29 am (#)
To put the above statement into perspective I think it would help to understand that we live in a post-manufacturing consumer society. Manual labor is lowly and incapable of rewarding dignity to the worker. So what is a dignified, elite liberal arts graduate to do (of which there are millions upon millions)? Especially if Ms. Graduate is too soft for the cut-throat workaholic world of business? She’d like to make $50,000/year starting out (call it $20,000/year plus a housing allowance plus health insurance plus a book allowance plus a cell phone plus a travel allowance) and she doesn’t want to be forced to work a whole lot. She doesn’t like critical accountability either. She’d like to remain completely aloft in the dignified world of ideas. Why not fool herself along with an equally self-deceptive congregation of well-to-do Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, etc. into thinking that she’s actually a Christian? They’re not going to care if her fundamental beliefs are fundamentally at odds with the Bible. So are theirs. They want someone to tickle their ears, not to rock the foundations of what they believe. And thus proceeds the above weekenend statement.
February 11th, 2008 at 8:49 am (#)
Carlos,
Instead of distorting the gospel into something appealing to a liberal, post-modern campus, why not preach it like it is? I’m not saying a sledgehammer is the only means of delivering the gospel, but how are you going to communicate the real gospel while hiding the biblical fact that unbelievers are corrupt to the core and justly headed for eternal damnation? Should we be careful to deliver the gospel in such a way that the world loves us? People don’t like being told they’re evil — go figure! If you’re able to convert students without dealing with the ugly subject of sin, to what have you converted them? Should we as Christians be trying to engage in liberal, post-modern conversations, or should we be salt and light to a fallen world? Should the gospel come to unbelievers on their terms, building on their fundamental beliefs, or should sinners come to God on His terms and learn to build on his foundation?
February 11th, 2008 at 1:41 pm (#)
Should the gospel come to unbelievers on their terms, building on their fundamental beliefs, or should sinners come to God on His terms and learn to build on his foundation?
Isn’t that precisely what Paul did in Athens (among other places)? I’m no fan of the guy, but using their own concepts against them was a brilliant tactical move.
February 11th, 2008 at 2:09 pm (#)
There are too many holes, gaps, problems, inconsistencies, and fraudulant claims with evolution.
Compared to… what? What other viewpoint explains the data better? What other theory is causing people to gain new insights and find new discoveries? What continues to make sense in light of new data? Certainly not young-earth creationism or intelligent design. They are built on an interpretation of Genesis, not science. And they don’t even try to explain any of the problems — anything they don’t understand, they just say “and a miracle occurred here!”
February 11th, 2008 at 5:48 pm (#)
“Compared to… what? What other viewpoint explains the data better?…”
Uhm… WHAT data?
The problem with evolution is specifically the data: there isn’t any.
You could probably load up in one large U-Haul all the “evidence” we have for evolution.
A scrap of bone the size of a postage stamp is turned into a complete humanoid-shaped being, complete with hair and facial expressions. Most “dino fossils” seen in museums have prolly only a small fraction of all those bones being actually real - the rest are plaster and laquer.
In other words, we “make stuff up” - gladly and willing fabricating a history that we THINK might have been there or that we WISH had been there because it takes away the sting of the truth a little bit and shields our conscience from the glaring eyes of God. We don’t scientifically investigate… we distract and console ourselves with wildly exaggerated stories.
Now, if you ask “what explains the fabrication better?” I’d quite happily answer “Total Depravity.” Men lie and cheat earnestly by nature if they are not constrained by the spirit of God. No suprise there.
Take for instance this story last week about some new discovery about “neanderthals” in (currently) France. Tooth enamel examination reveals that they travelled away from their place of birth - something previously not expected. How do they “know?” Because strontium levels in the tooth enamel vary from place to place, and it showed up in differerent layers of enamel.
How far is this distance supposedly travelled? Just 12 miles. Now, how many problems can you think of with this scenario? How suprised should anyone be that an upright, bipedal humanoid with the supposed early vestiges of human intelligence travelled 12 miles in it’s entire lifetime? I’d be suprised if it DIDN’T travel farther than 12 miles in it’s entire lifetime!!
To believe this story, you have to believe that in however many tens of thousands of years, there have been no major temperature changes, no major geophysical events, no floods, no earthquakes, no volcanoes, that all riviers have followed their present course unaltered for millenia, and nothing else in the environment that would change strontium levels in the slightest. Tens upon tens of thousands of years of absolutely constant environmental factors; factors that we now know don’t remain constant for even 50 or 100 years at a time.
Also, what they found was not a “neanderthal tooth actually IN an actual neanderthal…”. They found this tooth on a BEACH. By itself. It had been in the ocean! God only knows for how long, or even WHAT exactly it belongs to. For all we know, this is a tooth from a Titanic victim, or perhaps an ape or some other perfectly modern animal. I suppose it would be relatively simple to rule out human, but not so simple to rule out “other primate, possibly of recent demise.”
Evolution is built upon principles that we can demonstrate are not valid. Radioisotope decay rates, like strontium levels, require millions upon millions of years of unchanging environmental conditions in order to make radio-carbon dating anything even approaching realistic.
The “science” behind a lot of “evolution studies” is shoddy at best and outright fraudulent and worst. It requies a far greater leap of faith to believe some of this stuff than it takes to just believe that God created just the way that he said that he did.
Furthermmore, I have to question the bias of any group claiming to come from completely different, sometimes hostilely different religious backgrounds who have come to some sort of “unity” against the plain word of God that they supposedly believe, and who seem hell-bent on forming some sort of allegiance or unity with evil, worldly, ungodly men.
’nuff said.
February 11th, 2008 at 11:50 pm (#)
Hi Josh,
The massive problem with evolution is in the details. Consider the world’s largest mammal, the blue whale (there are thousands of these types of illustrations). There are no transitional fossils for its ability to breath through a hole in it’s head, nor an anus more to the front than to the back. Transitional fossils are the weakest link in evolution. Each species found in the fossil record are fully maturated and never change for the duration of the fossil record.
Consider also the human ankle. It’s function alone is a impressive feat of engineering, but the deeper problems are the muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, and nerves that make it work. Each of those are products of blind evolution. Such critical and necessary positive random mutations forming together and working together are mathematically impossible. The nerves alone that run from the ankle to the brain and back again that tell the ankle to move in any given direction is an utterly improbable random mutation (the nerves had to mutate into existence, and those mutations had to mutate and connect to the brain and to the ankle!). The theory of evolution says it happened over millions of years. The plausibility of this is impossibly low.
Mutation rates in malaria cells are equivalent to that of the needed mutation rates for new body structures. In multiple studies of malaria, the random mutations rarely work together, and they never create anything beneficial. Rather the mutations are most always harmful.
Evolutionist connect lines of horses or bears or apes in textbook illustrations stating that these evolutionary lines show how evolution works. These illustrations are a leap of logic because biological relationships do not necessarily equal biological evolution, especially with the massive amount of missing transitional fossils. To make the two equal would require the scientific method to be followed, which of course it cannot be since all we have is fossils.
Evolution science struggles to resolve it own problems. In light of the missing links and the unexplainable Cambrian Explosion, the theory Punctuated Equilibrium was proposed, which state that a species can appear on the scene and disappear from the scene with little change. The theory is controversial (because it is considered the Darwinist “miracle” solution), but it gained a lot of supporters because evolutionary scientist cannot get past these and other problems. There are three main groups of evolutionary science; classic Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism, and Punctuated Equilibrium, and their battles have been dubbed the Darwin Wars.
You wrote, “They [ID and YEC) are built on an interpretation of Genesis, not science. And they don’t even try to explain any of the problems — anything they don’t understand, they just say “and a miracle occurred here!”
I am surprised by that statement. Have you read Johnson, or Behe, or Dembski regarding ID? Johnson is a former Supreme Court clerk for justice Earl Warren and a retired Berkeley law professor, Behe is a biochemist, and Dembski is a philosopher and mathematician. All three avoid the book of Genesis and stick their respective fields. They go to great lengths to explain the problems. But yes, they do say miracles occurred, because they believe God had his hand in the design of the world and everything in it.
Lastly, consider any bird. Feather are an amazing random mutations. For a bird to fly it requires hundreds of different sized feathers. Every bird has these differing sized feathers exactly where they need them. And again, the only way for this exact placement is by random mutation. In addition every bird has air filled bones and eyes that are unique (more and more random mutations!). In order for birds to have survived past the first sets of very small random mutations all of these mutations had to be working together from the very beginning, in addition the bird had to somehow learn to lift off, fly, turn, and land safely. And on top of all this, there are no evolutionary ancestors for a birds tail, and appendage that is actually multiple appendages. Birds alone mathematically refute evolution.
-Steve
(P.S. Other than this disagreement, your blog is one of my favorites. Your quotes are a daily stop for me. Thanks!)
February 17th, 2008 at 1:57 pm (#)
>>Should the gospel come to unbelievers on their terms,
>>building on their fundamental beliefs, or should sinners
>>come to God on His terms and learn to build on his
>>foundation?
>Isn’t that precisely what Paul did in Athens (among other
>places)? I’m no fan of the guy, but using their own
>concepts against them was a brilliant tactical move.
I don’t think so. The Athenians were a strange lot that “spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.” (Acts 17:21) I don’t think their example should be considered broadly normative, but even in Athens Paul didn’t build on their fundamental beliefs. Could it be he was just poking fun at their ignorance? I’d say the premise of Paul’s argument lies moreso in his saying, “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth…” (Acts 17:24) That’s the kind of foundation that can lead sinners to real understanding. It might also be worth noting that Paul’s apologetic in Athens was also not especially fruitful. In any case, his argument hinged not on human reasoning but on Jesus’ resurrection, and it was precisely that foolishness (”foolishness to the Greeks” (1Cor 1), which is to say foolishness on their terms, building on their fundamental beliefs) that led the “few men” to believe.