The scientific myth of creationism

[Buho]

Thesis (from #55): For any communication, a fully "face value" interpretation is only possible if there is only one plausible framework within which it can be read.

Immediately, this is flawed. Disproof by analogy: The "easy road" interpretation of which road to take to get over the mountain is only possible if there is only one plausible road to take. Obviously, if there is more than one road, then it is "impossible" to discern which road is "easiest!" That's the straw man you set up.

Obviously there are multiple possible interpretations of Genesis 1, otherwise TEs wouldn't have a hope to stand on. Just as there are multiple roads over the mountain. Some roads take the "north face", some are easier by taking switchbacks, one might tunnel straight through. Of the three, the tunnel is obviously the "easiest" road.

Suppose there's a toll booth on the other side that charges $100. Now the picture changed. How does one define "easiest?" Easiest physically, easiest on the pocketbook, or an ecconomic analysis of the dot product of both? This tack can get complicated fast! TEs claim the tunnel has a toll at the end, namely a mismatch with known science. YECs claim that toll at the end does not exist and that phantom toll (and complications in the comparison) are unfounded. TEs, despite YECs claims, decide upon a more difficult road. Does the road get to the other side or does it take you somewhere you don't want to go? See my reductio ad absurdium above.

Now, I agree that to a certain extent this may be true of part of the Bible. I think it is certainly true of God's core revelation - the Crucifixion and Resurrection within the larger context of Jesus' life, ascension, and promise of return (though I believe that the Gospel is reflected back at us within the overtly Christian matrix of Western culture, so that in encountering the Gospel we are really encountering something very, very familiar).

This is a double-standard. If you want an example of how, talk to some atheists who used to claim the label "Christian." They apply an alternative interpretive framework for the ressurection. For further example, talk to a Jew on the subject of Isaiah 53. Christians claim a single valid interpretation. Jews claim a single valid interpretation (one that's different from the Christian).

...flat-earth...

This is a poor analogy to universal common ancestry and a Creationist PRATT. The spherocity of the Earth can be empirically determined. It is fact. It is evidence. Universal common ancestry, to which TEs believe, cannot be empirically determined. It is theory. It is an interpretation of evidence.

When heliocentrism became intellectually popular, the Bible's unequivocal support for geocentrism strangely dissipated.

Universal common ancestry has become intellectually popular. Why hasn't creationism dissipated? For two reasons: (1) universal common ancestry comprimises a dozen core doctrines of Christianity (and Judaism), and (2) universal common ancestry, unlike geocentricism, is not emprical fact but a theoretical interpretation of evidence.

Fixity of species was formerly a Christian concept; but few YECs would admit believing in it today.

200 years ago, yes, I'd agree that YECs believed in a fixity of species, mainly because of lack of evidence and the Bible makes no mention of natural selection, adaption, or speciation. However, YECs believe in speciation now because (1) it is empirical fact and (2) it does not contradict the Bible. Do you see the difference?

How, then, can it be argued that there is only one possible interpretation of Genesis?

That's a straw man. There are multiple interpretations. One is clearly "easiest," though. See above.

I believe that the TE interpretation is one such interpretation. The fact that this interpretation exists, therefore, disproves the claim that Scripture can be read "at face value": there are multiple possible self-consistent frameworks within which one can read the Bible, and therefore one must choose one of those frameworks before reading the Bible, thus necessitating that much interpretation prior to the text.

Aah, here you affirm that, aside from the tunnel (YECs claim this is their interpretation, which you concede through inadmission is theologically sound), there is at least one more road over the mountain that arrives at the same destination and does not end up elsewhere (you claim this interpretation is theologically sound as well). What's more, the TE road may also be a tunnel, perhaps even shorter than the YEC tunnel. In fact, since there are two roads, we cannot quickly discern the "obvious" easy road, which supports your thesis and destroys the YEC claim that the "natural" reading of Genesis is the best interpretation.

Two things: (1) Your claim that the TE road goes to the same destination as the YEC road remains to be proven. It is one thing to say that the TE interpretation of Genesis is 100% theologically sound. It is quite another to work out the implications of the interpretation, inspect every joist, test every girder, watch for "cheater jumps" in logic along the way, survey the net soundness of the Bible afterwards, and compare that with the YEC interpretation (which I assume you agree is already 100% theologically sound).

(2) You must show that the TE road is better than the YEC road. I didn't say "easier" because that's what YECs claim about their interpretation, not TEs. But how can one decide which road to take if both are 100% sound? YECs claim science agrees with their road and some parts of science makes the TE road difficult (if not impossible). TEs claim science agrees with their road and some parts (or bigotedly all science) makes the YEC road difficult. Since YECs claim the "easier" interpretation in scripture, they already have an advantage.

Both (1) and (2) must be shown, and (2) is dependent upon (1) because it's pointless to travel the "better" TE road if it doesn't reach the correct destination.

+ + + + +

[In #56] We establish that the importance of historicity is secondary to the importance of meaning. Why is it, then, that many creationists raise hue and cry about historicity?

Very preceptive. I'll add to this: Creationists "raise hue and cry" about historicity because they view the importance of history is equal to the importance of meaning. You highlighted a distinction between TEs and YECs that I had not noticed before.

Here is Christianity with 0% history (my speculation): The Bible drops out of the sky fully-written by the finger of God. (For extra "glitter" the material upon which the Bible is written is a material composed of a previously undiscovered element and the composition is light-years beyond our ability -- if not impossible -- to synthesize.) The Bible contains "stories" about our past, "stories" about a savior of the human race, and "stories" about our future. Heck, let's adjust the contents of the Bible and say the stories are about some other people, not us, but like us. What we now have is a book of morals upon which we can shape and guide our lives. This does not negate the facts of God's existence, Jesus's existence, their righteousness, and our sin.

However, it does effect Jesus's substitutionary work of atonement. Why? Because Christ took upon him real sin, suffered real wrath, died a real death, and was really resurrected. Read the horrible implications of belief in a non-real resurrection in 1 Cor 15. That is scripture! Paul was addressing an early form of Gnosticism which, a few centuries later, was decreed heresy!

My point: History is essential to our salvation. YECs have the right of it when they object to Christians who lessen the importantce of history -- they attack the very core and foundational doctrines of Christianity!

I've talked about the creationist worldview, which emphasises objectivity, historicity as truth, and naturalism as an affront to God's work (which seem to contradict each other).

I, as a YEC, have been accused of being subscribing to naturalism before. You lost me here. On one end, Creation Science is being criticised because it is so easy to expose the theological foundation (Genesis, 6 days) which secular science abhores a priori. At the other end, creationists are being criticised by TEs for their naturalistic worldview (i.e., nature is all there is and nothing more)? Maybe I misread you here.

Shern: "The basic form of the mapping is that historicity maps to truth, and fiction maps to falsehood." I've said this before. I'm learning (slowly) the error of this. Parables, case in point.

Shern: "Historically, of course, there is absolutely no conflict whatsoever between the bare fact of evolution and the bare fact of the Resurrection." When you say "evolution" do you mean variation, natural selection, and speciation or do you mean the greater sense of the word: universal common ancestry? The former is "bare fact." The latter is hypothesis at best. Can we prove or disprove the Holocaust happened? Neither are possible. The best we can do is amass evidence. The evidence (millions of eyewitnesses, archeological, etc.) give us a very high degree of confidence that we then take a leap of faith in saying the Holocaust actually happened in fact. (The same goes with Jesus's life.) The evidence amassed for universal common ancestry gives us contradictary answers: some evidence (interpreted) shouts it, other evidence (interpreted) says it couldn't have happened, sometimes the same evidence (interpreted by two camps) says it did happen and couldn't happen simultaneously! The verdict thus far is a confidence nowhere near to 100% as proponents of evolution would have you believe. Please elaborate on what you mean by "evolution" in the future -- it's too nebulous a word.

Shern: "If man had indeed evolved from monkeys it would in no way disprove that a certain carpenter was not actually crucified circa 30 AD and was resurrected." I agree. Same with the others you cite. However, theological problems are introduced when you introduce death and suffering before Adam, in a creation God deemed "good," in a creation that God will wipe out and create anew, but without death and suffering, the creation the world was supposed to be. I have yet to hear a TE response to these objections.

Now, had Genesis said creation was "almost good" or "created flawed", or that sin was created originally in the first humans, then I don't think anybody would have any problems with universal common ancestry -- nay, the world secular science sees in history confirms this re-written Genesis account! The problem is that TE interpretation fails on both accounts: historically and morally. TEs seek to turn Genesis into a moral account because it clashes with their worldview on the historical front, but it doesn't even work on a moral front because God specifically said creation was "very good" and without sin!

Shern: "...[Creationists] are either completely unaware of their worldview preferences, or stubbornly stuck in them." In my experience, informed Creationists are the only ones (excepting you, I'm happy to say) who are aware of how everybody has a worldview and how worldviews effect how people view and interpret things.

Evolution is not the story of nature without God, but nature which God has given the freedom to become organized all on its own. Man's evolving from australopithecus is not a story of how man remains animal behind the technological and cultural trappings, but a story of how God reached down and elevated mere dust into God-knowing creatures made to love Him. By constructing a different worldview, where evolution no longer maps to anti-Christian concepts but instead to universal truths beloved to Christianity, the origins debate can be instantly vaporized and we can, to use the words of Kenneth Miller, "find Darwin's God."

This is insightful for creationists, and provokes further thought. Thanks for sharing.

See my response to Christianity without history.

See my response on how TE interpretation doesn't even work morally. These "universal truths" (the mantra of the Unitarian) you proclaim are not found in the TE interpretation of Genesis 1. God's word refuses to budge.

If this is your thesis to show how the "TE road" (mentioned above) is coherent and arrives at the correct destination, you haven't shown it yet. I encourage you to try harder, because I really would like to hear the best of what theistic evolutionists have to offer, so that I can better understand things. I would really like to see how one can separate universal common ancestry from atheism and still weave it into God's Word.

"Darwin's God" was one or more of the following: himself, humanity, homo sapien, life, nature, Science, or atheistic "none." You can decide for yourself which one fits best by reading his more philosophical writings. I'll give you a caution, though: each of those in the Bible are condemned as objects of worship.

+ + + + +

As I've praised you before, I am very impressed with your cool of both sides, Shernren. You are very articulate, and posess great clarity of thought and logic. As before, it's a treat to discuss these things with you! I only hope that I have been shown to be equally courtious to you in the heat of the discussion as you have been with me.

Grace and peace to you, brother in Christ.

 

[shernren]

(1) universal common ancestry comprimises a dozen core doctrines of Christianity (and Judaism)

Can I expect those dozen to be listed here when I get back here after a good night's sleep?

Or at least one.

Good night.

 

[gluadys]

"Surely God won't Judge mankind in the future! He's a God of love! Just as in history, God loved His creation too much to destroy it!" Where has my logic lapsed? (I'm reminded of Paul's use of ad hominem logic in 1 Cor 15:12-34.)

Your logic has lapsed in thinking Christian TEs buy into the naïve notion that a God who is love will abstain from the judgment of wickedness. It is love that requires judgment. It is love that requires justice as well as mercy.

Do the pretty pictures tell you that the bottom layer the tree is in and the top layer the tree is in are dated "thousands" of years apart? Shouldn't the tree have rotted away after just a few, before it had time to get burried?

Yes, if you read the key to the strata. And of course the data does. No, the tree will not necessarily rot away before burial. Such fossils are found in areas where a forest has been flooded by rising sea levels or in marshy land. Especially in marshes, the water is often depleted of oxygen, and therefore not inhabited by the organisms essential to decay. Tree trunks can last for a very long time even when decay organisms are present. They can easily last much, much longer in anaerobic conditions.

Trees above others imply uprooted trees that sank rootball-first, rapid sedimentation, followed by more trees sinking and being covered as well.

Not when the roots are found to be intact, as is the case with many polystrate forests. Also, uprooted trees are not usually found standing in place. These forest usually are. The article on Joggins only mentions two forests, one on top of another. But in some places there are ten or more such forests one above another as the area passed from terrestrial to marine and back again.

There is no way this can happen in a one-year flood.

Sure, but keep that in mind that you concede catastrophe on a local scale which does not rule out catastrophe on a global scale.

It does make catastrophe on a global scale unnecessary to account for the evidence. Furthermore, there is much evidence which does rule out a global flood. (Not global catastrophe in general, since some catastrophes of the past have been global.)

What I see is global evidence for a global flood. Maybe not with this evidence, but with others.

That is because you accept as evidence anything which might possibly have happened because of a flood. Science has stricter standards.
1. Observations only count as evidence of a global flood if the only possible explanation is a global flood. (IOW, the evidence must be predicted by a global flood and only by a global flood.) That means items like the fish skeleton, which could just as easily be accounted for by a local catastrophe, cannot be evidence of a global flood.
2. No matter how much evidence one may find in favour of a global flood, there must be no evidence which contradicts/falsifies a global flood. Scientific theories are rejected primarily because they are falsified. And there are many, many examples of observations that cannot exist if a global flood had occurred.

Gluadys, the precipitation out of water has been accounted for by ICR. These are the outputs they've identified, plus about a dozen others. They also identified most of the inputs. Salt does not combine with many things. The things salt does combine with have been (over)estimated and added to the outputs. Based on their calculations, which withstand peer review, the outputs are about 25% of the inputs. What this means is more salt is going into the ocean than salt is leaving the ocean -- by a HUGE margin! Using uniformitarian assumptions and minimum inputs and maximum outputs, and assuming the original ocean had zero salt, the maximum age of the ocean is 60 million years. (Reference, scroll to bottom for graph, scroll up for details.)

According to Glenn Morton, several significant outputs were not included in the ICR calculations.

http://www.asa3.org/archive/evolution/199606/0051.html

I won’t discuss this further as I think neither of us has sufficient grounding to evaluate whose data is correct, and all we can do is debate remotely via links.

Aluminum's inputs apparently equal its outputs, thus rendering the dating of the ocean using aluminum useless, since aluminum levels are in stasis, this method can account for an infinite age. This is not a fair comparison with salt.

Sure it is. Whether the salt is aluminum, sodium, potassium, magnesium or some other dissolved mineral, the process is basically the same. Here is a text which deals with each individually:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dalrymple/creationist_age_earth.html

The weakening of the magnetic poles is unrelated to the reversals in the past.

Maybe. But it doesn’t change the fact that the strength of the magnetic field fluctuates. Currently it is weakening, but it has both weakened and strengthened in the past.

 

[shernren]

First off, I correct myself: 1 Cor 15:12-34 isn't an ad hominem argument. It's a reductio ad absurdum argument. An argument like this assumes a claim for the sake of argument, works that out to its logical conclusion, arrives at an absurd conclusion, and then declares the original assumption incorrect.

In the Bible are two written accounts of two instances of God's global wrath on mankind. One appears to be placed in the past and does not appear to be prophetic. One most definately appears to be prophetic and appears to coincide with things that have not yet happened, thus it is in the future. If one discounts the historical one as never happened in a specific point in our past, why should one then treat the future one as assured future prophecy of something that will most definately happen in the future? This is inconsistent logic! One is better to discount both or none! If one discounts both, then that means our souls were never in danger of being Judged. If we will never be Judged, then we have no need for a Propitiator. If we have no need for a Propitiator, what did Christ do on the cross? If Christ did nothing on the cross, "our faith is futile" (1 Cor 15:17) and God is an injust God.

(emphasis in underline added; emphases in bold in original)

A reductio ad absurdum argument is only valid if the logical outworking is completely solid and sound. And if you can find people who believe the presumed, but do not believe the conclusion, then there is good reason to call into doubt your logical workings. And it is your obligation to check your logical workings for errors, not foist it on us and patronize us by assuming that this is some deep truth about which we have been deceived and which instantly nullifies all our beliefs and renders us non-Christian. (For what else is someone who doesn't believe in Jesus?)

What is happening here is that you are taking our assessment of the historicity of the Bible as an assessment of its reliability, as a projection of your attitudes onto us. If you were forced to believe that Noah's Flood never happened, then you would feel that the Bible is less reliable in that area, and therefore to claim that the Bible is less reliable in that area is logically inconsistent with a claim that the Bible is reliable in another, closely related area.

But why is the historicity of the Bible being taken as a criterion of reliability? Has any of us said that the Bible is false or unreliable? If we have not, then there is no reason for us to consider the promises of future judgment unreliable.

Obviously there are multiple possible interpretations of Genesis 1, otherwise TEs wouldn't have a hope to stand on. Just as there are multiple roads over the mountain.

My wording was indecisive, but I said:

For any communication, a fully "face value" interpretation is only possible if there is only one plausible framework within which it can be read.

(emphasis added)

You say that there are multiple valid interpretations of Genesis and that YECism only involves choosing the best one. And yet throughout your posts here you have consistently maintained that TEism is an invalid interpretation of Genesis. Clearly you believe in YECism because it is to you the only valid interpretation of Genesis. Arguments speak louder than claims of belief.

For if you really considered TEism to be a plausible interpretation of Genesis, why would you be so concerned that we believe it?

This is a poor analogy to universal common ancestry and a Creationist PRATT. The spherocity of the Earth can be empirically determined. It is fact. It is evidence. Universal common ancestry, to which TEs believe, cannot be empirically determined. It is theory. It is an interpretation of evidence.

Actually, no: http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1902&highlight=interpretation

Flat-earthers would say that round-earth theory is simply an alternative interpretation of the evidence, to which they have their own interpretation. Ring any bells?

200 years ago, yes, I'd agree that YECs believed in a fixity of species, mainly because of lack of evidence and the Bible makes no mention of natural selection, adaption, or speciation. However, YECs believe in speciation now because (1) it is empirical fact and (2) it does not contradict the Bible. Do you see the difference?

In other words, empirical fact has a very important place to play in the interpretation of the Bible. This will be important later.

That's a straw man. There are multiple interpretations. One is clearly "easiest," though. See above.

Do you really believe that there are multiple correct interpretations? Or that there are multiple incorrect interpretations and merely one correct one? And if you do, how do you determine which is incorrect?

Aah, here you affirm that, aside from the tunnel (YECs claim this is their interpretation, which you concede through inadmission is theologically sound)

But I was only concerned with the face-value claim of YECism. I have maintained elsewhere that YECism is not as sound as TEism. For example, most proponents of YECism subscribe to a God-of-the-gaps interpretation and are woefully unaware of the spiritual implications of Genesis 1 (that God is creator and not created, etc.). I have said elsewhere in this thread that I see YECism as an individualistic and consumeristic reading of Scripture in which the reader supersedes the writer in determining what is actually meant. All these are theological criticisms.

However, it does effect Jesus's substitutionary work of atonement. Why? Because Christ took upon him real sin, suffered real wrath, died a real death, and was really resurrected. Read the horrible implications of belief in a non-real resurrection in 1 Cor 15. That is scripture! Paul was addressing an early form of Gnosticism which, a few centuries later, was decreed heresy!

My point: History is essential to our salvation. YECs have the right of it when they object to Christians who lessen the importantce of history -- they attack the very core and foundational doctrines of Christianity!

Did I ever say that Jesus was not a historical figure? Here is what I mean by saying that historicity is secondary: http://www.christianforums.com/t2974198-fight-for-the-faith.html&page=7

Shern: "Historically, of course, there is absolutely no conflict whatsoever between the bare fact of evolution and the bare fact of the Resurrection." When you say "evolution" do you mean variation, natural selection, and speciation or do you mean the greater sense of the word: universal common ancestry? The former is "bare fact." The latter is hypothesis at best. Can we prove or disprove the Holocaust happened? Neither are possible. The best we can do is amass evidence. The evidence (millions of eyewitnesses, archeological, etc.) give us a very high degree of confidence that we then take a leap of faith in saying the Holocaust actually happened in fact. (The same goes with Jesus's life.) The evidence amassed for universal common ancestry gives us contradictary answers: some evidence (interpreted) shouts it, other evidence (interpreted) says it couldn't have happened, sometimes the same evidence (interpreted by two camps) says it did happen and couldn't happen simultaneously! The verdict thus far is a confidence nowhere near to 100% as proponents of evolution would have you believe. Please elaborate on what you mean by "evolution" in the future -- it's too nebulous a word.

Do present your contradictory evidence for common ancestry. It's important, as I will address later. And by "evolution" in this statement I mean the entire work - both theory and history as prescribed by biological evolution.

Shern: "If man had indeed evolved from monkeys it would in no way disprove that a certain carpenter was not actually crucified circa 30 AD and was resurrected." I agree. Same with the others you cite. However, theological problems are introduced when you introduce death and suffering before Adam, in a creation God deemed "good," in a creation that God will wipe out and create anew, but without death and suffering, the creation the world was supposed to be. I have yet to hear a TE response to these objections.

Maybe you haven't been listening?

http://www.christianforums.com/search.php?searchid=1620367

This is a mess to search through, you could start here:

http://www.christianforums.com/showpost.php?p=8209655&postcount=8

Shern: "...[Creationists] are either completely unaware of their worldview preferences, or stubbornly stuck in them." In my experience, informed Creationists are the only ones (excepting you, I'm happy to say) who are aware of how everybody has a worldview and how worldviews effect how people view and interpret things.

Aware of the existence of worldviews, yes. But aware of what their worldviews actually are? Aware that the common-sense hermeneutic is a modern invention, that what they think is the only valid interpretation is rooted completely in post-Enlightenment rationalism, about history as fact and myth as falsehood? How many of them know that they draw a false line down science and then declare that some can be used to interpret scripture while others can't, as I elaborated?

And I eagerly await your response to this:

(1) universal common ancestry comprimises a dozen core doctrines of Christianity (and Judaism)

because it is vital to help me address this:

See my response on how TE interpretation doesn't even work morally. These "universal truths" (the mantra of the Unitarian) you proclaim are not found in the TE interpretation of Genesis 1. God's word refuses to budge.

If this is your thesis to show how the "TE road" (mentioned above) is coherent and arrives at the correct destination, you haven't shown it yet. I encourage you to try harder, because I really would like to hear the best of what theistic evolutionists have to offer, so that I can better understand things. I would really like to see how one can separate universal common ancestry from atheism and still weave it into God's Word.

"Darwin's God" was one or more of the following: himself, humanity, homo sapien, life, nature, Science, or atheistic "none." You can decide for yourself which one fits best by reading his more philosophical writings. I'll give you a caution, though: each of those in the Bible are condemned as objects of worship.

 

[shernren]

Here is an application of the past few posts to a discussion of AiG's famous "invalidity clause":

No apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.

from AiG's Statement of Faith

Now, what does the phrase "Scriptural record" in the statement mean? Clearly it doesn't refer exclusively to the words of the Bible alone. For then it would have to take into account statements like Martin Luther's: "Joshua says that the sun stopped, not the earth!" Clearly (and AiG would not disagree) AiG means not only the Scriptural record but AiG's interpretation of the Scriptural record in addition to it. In other words, No apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record and our interpretation of it.

What could possibly justify AiG's substituting "the Scriptural record" for "the Scriptural record and our interpretation of it"? The only way to justify it is if the Scriptural record is logically equivalent to AiG's interpretation of it. In other words, repeating my thesis (with clarification) : For any communication, a fully "face value" interpretation is only possible if there is only one plausible framework within which it can be read and all other frameworks are either internally or externally inconsistent. From this, AiG clearly believes that its framework is the framework which is both internally consistent with the words of the Bible and externally consistent with the real world. All other frameworks, according to AiG, must therefore be either internally inconsistent or externally inconsistent. As such AiG has chosen its own framework on three possible reasons (or a mixture of those) : internal consistency, external consistency, or arbitrary choice.

However, as I have noted in assessing the face-value interpretation, there are multiple interpretations of the Bible which have complete internal consistency, among which many are clearly anti-Christian. For example, the atheist interpretation is that the Bible is a complete lie through and through. Mind you, it has complete internal consistency: if any one part of the Bible is a lie, it will not prove that any other part of the Bible is true. The Muslim interpretation is that the Bible is a corrupted and only temporary revelation of God's truth which was fully revealed in the Koran: again, this interpretation is completely consistent internally. Therefore, AiG cannot be choosing on the grounds of internal consistency, since there are many alternative interpretations with equal internal consistency.

Could AiG have chosen its interpretation on the basis of external consistency? Not either, for an interpretation chosen on the basis of external consistency must by definition be consistent with any relevant external evidence. In fact, if an interpretation was completely externally consistent, then there would be no "apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology" which could contradict the interpretation, since the exact method of choosing the interpretation is to select the one which does not contradict the evidence. Therefore, if AiG has to make a disclaimer that there might be apparent, perceived or claimed evidence that might contradict their interpretation, they are making it quite clear that they have not chosen their interpretation on the basis of external consistency. What, then? Are AiG willing to admit that their choice and evaluation of their own interpretation as valid and every other interpretation as invalid is really completely arbitrary?

It could be claimed that AiG's interpretation is closest to the inspired teachings of Christianity. It could be claimed that other interpretations, while maintaining stronger internal and external consistency, are farther from the inspired teachings of Christianity. However, the first problem with this is that it relegates the teachings of Christianity to the level of personal, subjective belief. If the closest interpretation to inspired teachings is less internally and externally consistent than other interpretations which are far from the inspired teachings, then clearly this represents a jeopardy for Christianity, and for AiG to admit that they chose as such is an admission of defeat. On the other hand, what are the the inspired teachings of Christianity, if not a sub-interpretation of the core of the Scriptures? Namely, it is an interpretation of the statements of the Bible relative to the highest standards of internal and external consistency in relation to the historical fact of Christ's historical mission and works. In fact, the commitment to external consistency - to historicity - is one of the cornerstones of the Christian gospel. So it can be argued that the non-Christian interpretations of the Bible are not externally consistent with the tremendous life-changing power of the gospel, which is its ultimate witness. As such, not only is external consistency important in choosing an interpretation, it is one of the primary factors involved in arriving at the inspired teaching of Scripture, and as such it is a break from the Christian tradition for AiG to abandon external consistency.

The real problem is that AiG finds itself in a chicken-and-egg situation with regards to its teachings on evolution. According to AiG, evolution is philosophically incompatible with the Bible. However, this reduces to the statement that evolution is philosophically incompatible with AiG's interpretation of the Bible. In that case, on what grounds were AiG's interpretation of the Bible chosen? Evolution is contrary to AiG's interpretation so it has to be rejected a priori; but AiG's interpretation was chosen without any reasonable criteria to recommend its choice, whether internal or external consistency. In conclusion, the invalidity clause reduces to:

No apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts whatever we say.

 

[shernren]

We've all gotten used to AiG's infamous invalidity clause:

‘By definition, no apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.’

from http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/feedback/negative_25March2002.asp
(emphasis added)

The obvious implication of the emphasized part is that it may be possible for multiple interpretations of a single event to be equally valid pending further evidence, related to the "underdetermination of scientific theories". This leaves open the possibility that an evolutionist interpretation and a creationist interpretation of the evidence may be equally valid on existing evidence.

However, a recent* check shows that AiG's statement of faith has cut off the bottom half of the clause:

No apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/about/faith.asp

I think this is a small positive step to take. Why? Because where evidence invites multiple historically conflicting explanations, only one explanation can be valid. To claim anything else is a relativist solipsism, and perhaps AiG has realized this implication and is backing down. But I would, if I may read something into this, see this as an important admission that:

There is evidence for which the only valid scientific interpretation is an evolutionary interpretation, and no equally valid scientific creationist interpretation exists.

*I saw the new statement today; I can't find any record of when the change was made. But the Internet Archive records that the old statement was present on the site as late as March '05: http://web.archive.org/web/20050331024051/http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/about/faith.asp

 

[rmwilliamsll]

This thread has been quoted several times in the last few days.

It really is one of the best and most informative threads we've had the good pleasure of seeing develop here. New lurkers and others who may have missed it, would do well to start at the beginning and read this thread.

 

[shernren]

It's been quoted many times by *me*. Self-praise is no praise ... XD

 

[shernren]

Is this origins debate really no big deal? I generally am pretty tolerant of the various theological views. I find myself respecting premillennialists, preterists, amillenialists, open theists, molinists (well, because I am one), calvinists, arminians, infralapsarians, supralapsarians, presuppositionalists, evidentualists, pre post & mid tribulationists, determinists, compatibilists, multi-determinists, etc., etc.. I love to debate these issues, but in the end I can go to Romans 14 and disagree agreeably. In fact I’m quite fond of many that hold differing views.

But there’s something different about this debate. The above are all disagreements over exegesis. This is an issue of exegesis versus eisegesis. It seems to be a debate over the very authority of the Word of God and the ability of its authors to convey their message without the help of outside knowledge. Instead of scripture being sufficient in its historical and literary context, we need the outside input of science to reach the correct interpretation. Before we can believe a particular text we need to test it by the 67th book—science.

Seems to me that makes this debate very different. I think the term “compromise” is appropriate. This whole idea that it’s just a fun subject, but no big deal seems terribly naive.

Agree? Disagree? What say you?

Of course, if you were an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, you would be wondering how valid it is to call science the 82nd book of the canon. But that's a micro-quibble.

I have touched on many problems with the creationist critique of theistic-evolutionary thinking as being "science read into Scripture". Let's see how these errors work out in practice.

The first one shows itself here:

It seems to be a debate over the very authority of the Word of God and the ability of its authors to convey their message without the help of outside knowledge. Instead of scripture being sufficient in its historical and literary context, we need the outside input of science to reach the correct interpretation.

This shows a basic misunderstanding of what a message really is. But let us first see some examples of how "the outside input of science to reach the correct interpretation" is completely necessary to read the Bible.

Firstly, look at how the Bible describes miracles. A passage might go like this:

Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but the boat was already a considerable distance from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it. During the fourth watch of the night Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. "It's a ghost," they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: "Take courage! It is I. Don't be afraid." "Lord, if it's you," Peter replied, "tell me to come to you on the water." "Come," he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, "Lord, save me!" Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. "You of little faith," he said, "why did you doubt?" And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down.
(Matthew 14:22-32 NIV)

Now ask yourself: How do you know that this is a miracle? "Why, people can't walk on water! It was an act of God!" But how do you know that people can't walk on water? The Bible never tells you so. Show me a verse that explicitly says "People sink in water." Nope. Every verse that talks about drowning and floating assumes that you already know what water is, and that people drown in water and other objects can float in it.

Secondly, look at how the Bible describes, well, everything else.

When the LORD brings you into the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Hivites and Jebusites--the land he swore to your forefathers to give you, a land flowing with milk and honey--you are to observe this ceremony in this month:
(Exodus 13:5 NIV)

Does the Bible tell us what milk is? Does the Bible tell us what honey is? Do we find any verses telling us that "Milk comes from cows" or "Honey comes from bees"? Nopes. Again, the Bible assumes that we know what honey is and what milk is.

Now, isn't this peculiar? Right from the start the Bible needs outside knowledge to convey its message.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
(Genesis 1:1 NIV)

If I did not use outside knowledge, I would have to ask: "What are 'heavens'? And what is 'earth'?" The Bible never plainly spells out that the heavens are made of hard vacuum and that the earth is round and goes around the sun, which is the cause of all that geocentrism nonsense. The very first verse of the Bible needs outside knowledge to convey its message! What sort of "authority" is that to "uphold"?

What creationists consistently ignore when they make such claims is that any message requires either common experience or common vocabulary. This is simple enough. Imagine this Peter-and-Jane conversation:

Peter, catch the ball!
What ball?
That ball!

Before Peter perceives the ball as a part of his experience, the communication "Peter, catch the ball!" has no meaning to him. After he learns what "that ball" is, then he can catch it (or not), but more importantly the message now has meaning. On the other hand, when a speaker tells me that "premarital sex is wrong and demeaning", I may not have common experience to assess his message (thank God!) but I and him have a predefined common vocabulary in which the word "premarital" has a certain meaning and the word "sex" has a certain meaning and I can string it together based on other conversations I have had, which leads to me knowing what premarital sex is without ever having experienced it.

The Bible clearly assumes common experience and common vocabulary. It does not spell out what burning coals on one's head feel like when it tells you to return good for evil (hence leading to some ambiguity as to whether this is a positive or negative connotation), and it does not tell you that storms normally don't stop when people ask them to when it tells you that Jesus calmed the storm. The Bible never imposes experience on us anywhere else, it assumes that we will garner enough knowledge about reality to be able to interpret it appropriately. My question to creationists is, why assume that Genesis 1-11 is any different?

The second one, which I have never really touched on, is here:

But there’s something different about this debate. The above are all disagreements over exegesis. This is an issue of exegesis versus eisegesis. ... Instead of scripture being sufficient in its historical and literary context, we need the outside input of science to reach the correct interpretation. Before we can believe a particular text we need to test it by the 67th book—science.

Look closely at the strong leap:

we need the outside input of science to reach the correct interpretation -> Before we can believe a particular text we need to test it by the 67th book—science

whoa! How did we jump from "reaching the correct interpretation of the text" to "believing a particular text"? Let me fill in the blanks.

TEs say that we need the outside input of science to reach the correct interpretation of a text.
For TEs, this input means that the correct interpretation of the text is a mythical/literary interpretation.
Anyone who holds to a mythical/literary interpretation of the text does not believe in the text.
Therefore, TEs have chosen not to believe the particular texts by testing it by the 67th book - science.

Step 3 is where the chain breaks. Must a belief that the text is true, necessitate a belief that the text is literal/historical? Judge for yourselves.

But more fundamentally may I ask just what have TEs eisegeted into the text? What have we TEs said that Genesis and the rest of the Bible teaches? If you look here and elsewhere on the board, you will see that our theology is hardly affected by our being TEs alone. Genesis 1 still tells us that God created the world and that He alone is to be worshiped as Creator, Genesis 2 still tells us that it is not good for man to be alone and that from the beginning man was meant to be male and female, Genesis 3 still tells us that man is fallen, etc. How is this different from any of the express theology of the church? (Any reasonably orthodox church.) If you were accusing atheistic evolutionists of eisegeting into the Bible, you might have a claim there. (In fact, some atheistic evolutionists eisegete the idea that the Bible is false into the Bible precisely by using a literal/historical interpretation - see here: http://www.christianforums.com/t3338186-and-now-its-really-happening.html ) But you are talking to people here who fully adhere to the Nicene Creed, and even one who has agreed to the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy.

I'll close by citing an example of "a differing view" you seem to be fond of, but which seems as much a compromise as any:

And, please note, that in all of their writings, these never did spiritualize the 1,000 years into 2,000 years as done by amillennialist today. They quite expected the earth to last only that 1,000 years and come to an explosive end. But when it did not end in 1000AD, the whole doctrine needed revision. Then it was necessary to invent and correct Clement, Origen, and Augustine, about the millennial being spiritualized to cover the whole Church age.

http://jesus-messiah.com/prophecy/millennial.html

In other words, amillenialism reinterpreted the Scriptures as figurative after external evidence found them wanting on certain counts. Shouldn't this make this debate very different? Isn't the term “compromise” appropriate? Isn't this whole idea that it’s just a fun subject, but no big deal terribly naive?

External evidence is very important. Science is no 67th book, but without science no book would be worth reading at all.

 

[chaoschristian]

bumping for reference

 

[shernren]

(About time I re-started writing articles instead of simply being reactionary.)


A few hours ago I had the immense privilege of being able to hear about "The Universe: From Beginning to End" from none other than Prof. Brian Schmidt, a member of the team who documented the accelerating expansion of the universe. It would be like getting private piano coaching from Chopin or Liszt; in fact, I bet I wasn't the only person in the audience who felt like his talent was utterly wasted on astrophysical newbies like us. (I was both humbled and gratified when, talking with him afterwards, he revealed that he was only expecting a third of the audience he'd actually gotten.)

A sublime moment in his lecture was near the beginning, where (as any astrophysicist lecturing to us common folk must do) he laid out the distance scale astrophysicists use. The Sun is five light-minutes across, and Alpha Centauri is similar in size, and the distance between them is 4.3 light years. "And remember, this is about as dense as you get matter of any form in space," he said. "From one galaxy to another are even wider vistas of space, and so within a galaxy is about as dense as matter ever gets in the universe. But how sparse is it? If you think of the Sun as a pea right here in this lecture theater in Canberra, and Alpha Centauri as another pea, then this other pea is in - " the nearest town to Canberra, a name nobody (including I!) would recognize. "And that's the densest matter gets."

It was a mindblowing moment. Is that how vast the universe is? When Eliphaz says

"Is not God in the heights of heaven?
And see how lofty are the highest stars!"
(Job 22:12 NIV)

it's overkill - even the lowliest stars, the ones closest to us, are already too lofty to grasp. And as Prof. Schmidt went on to describe all the information we've gathered about the universe, how we've learned things, the mechanisms we've uncovered and the ideas that have been formed around the evidence, the wonder was indescribable. All the Israelites had to go by was merely

He also made the stars.
(Genesis 1:16 NIV)

- and if just those six words were enough to make David say

He determines the number of the stars
and calls them each by name.
Great is our Lord and mighty in power;
His understanding has no limit.
(Psalms 147:4-5 NIV)

how much more should we be called to worship!

And yet, I know at least one Christian who wouldn't have been happy at all to be in that lecture hall and hear that lecture. What would William Dembski, ID proponent extraordinaire, consider of Schmidt's grand theories of universe formation?

"I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed. [...] And so there is a cultural war here. Ultimately I want to see God get the credit for what he’s done — and he's not getting it."
("The design revolution?" TalkReason.org 2004)

Is it any wonder that many people who (think they) know their science shun men like this and those who follow them? Can Dembski be right when he says that our attempts to explore and frame creation are attempts to dethrone God? No, for the following reasons:

1. God created creation. Fullstop! But creationists consider the sentence incomplete. They think that you must tack on severe qualifiers before you can accept the statement as a true, Christian statement. Dembski, for example, would insist that "God created creation through means inaccessible to godless materialistic science." YECs would insist that "God created creation in such a way that Genesis 1-11 is a literal history of its creation"; they would also argue that "God created creation so that physical death would be inexistent without sin". Others, less stringent, still insist that "God created creation exactly in the order mentioned in Genesis 1".

Now, if these statements were scientifically shown to be true, then so be it! I'd gladly accept them if you had the evidence for them. But (not that there is any evidence supporting any of them) evidence aside, the creationists' error is to equate the add-on with the main sentence. They have drawn a box around the way God must create, to the extent that if God didn't create the universe using one of the little tools they've chosen for Him and placed in their little box then they cannot believe that He was the Creator after all. They've married their qualifiers to the statement "God created creation" so tightly that they'd rather jettison the statement than let their ideas go.

And when has God Himself ever sanctioned that? He created. Can you second-guess how He did it?

2. God created creation accessible. God, being God, could certainly have created a physically inconsistent universe, a world in which no physical theory can make head or tail of what's going on. (In fact some, notably Kenneth Miller, have argued that God has done precisely that at the quantum level where there is true randomness. Given the rest of my argument, I don't agree with his conclusions even though I agree with the science he cites.) God could have made a world in which there are chimeric animals with swapped parts that evolution could never accommodate; He could had made rocks randomly move, acceleration not equal to force over mass, and rain little black KJVs from heaven once in a while just to break the routine. In short, science was never necessary.

God could also have as easily created a babycot universe, padded and protected, in which we don't have much to learn or figure out - we could have been kept like babies in a world that doesn't require our brains (or, in the previous paragraph, in a world where our brains would be useless beyond ensuring survival). He could have made world which runs on Aristotelian philosophy, or Newtonian principles; He could have made species static and Lamarckianism all you need to know and organisms that use twenty metabolic pathways instead of a few thousand, and He could have made them all by fiat at that so that there would be nothing further to investigate about the relationships between them. (Most creationists believe pretty much that. I think they need to credit God with more imagination!) In short, He could have made the whole show so obvious that once you figured out how to do any science at all, you'd have the whole universe figured out in ten years of deep thought and a couple of simple experiments.

As it is, God's created a universe that's complex, but accessible - and gave us the intellectual tools to access it! In creation He's treated us to a puzzle that we can solve, but only with much thought and the very best of our effort. As it is, we've been hammering away at the world with science for four centuries now, and every time we think we have it figured out, something just pops up which opens up entire new worlds of investigation. Schmidt showed us a graph with his results, most of which were in the regime showing that the universe's expansion was accelerating, and said "When we first graphed this, that region [in which expansion was accelerating] didn't even exist - and so half our points were off the plot!"

The creationists would have us believe, however, that this accessibility is an illusion. There is no mechanism, law, or overarching testable explanation for how animals and plants and all life are related; God made different kinds, and that's that. The fact that evolution can construct relationships and family trees and look for quirky little artifacts of our history in our genes - oh, that's all fakery perpetrated, consciously or not, by professors who like their university positions and their preconceived mindsets. Nature's accessibility, they say, is a lie created by those who would have ulterior motives in telling us that it is accessible. ... come on! If there was no evidence for evolution this might be acceptable, but now that there is - can our opened door into creation's mysteries be so wrong to step through, especially since God Himself made it? And that brings me to my third point.

3. God created us able to access creation's mechanisms. Tonight's talk brought to me echoes of Job:

"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone-
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?
(Job 38:4-7 NIV)

The conventional way to read this passage and the rest that follows is that God is chastising Job for speaking without knowledge (38:2) and for challenging God when he himself is so small; that reading certainly has much truth. However, as a (future, God willing) scientist, I think there might just be a better way to read it.

For in the science of the Big Bang we've marked off the dimensions of space; in the nebular hypothesis of the Solar System we've theorized about setting the cornerstone of the Earth. Submarines have walked the recesses of the deep, and aircraft and satellites have comprehended the vast expanses of the Earth; meteorologists have cut channels for the torrents of rain to satisfy a desolate wasteland and zookeepers and ecologists (also, less fortunate savannah residents) have satisfied the hunger of lions. Need I go on? If God's point was merely that Job cannot do and does not know these things, his point is wasted on us who can and who do. Of course we have farther to go (by God's grace - woe to us if we ever get bored of the universe!), but we already have so much.

No, I think behind the chastising discipline is an invitation, almost jesting:

"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Because boy, you don't know what you missed!"

If only Job knew - if only Job could have seen! God created an entire creation; more critically, He gifted us with the mental prowess and intellectual acuity to investigate and explore, to poke around, to access creation as He meant it to be accessed, to ponder wonders like the foundation of the earth and the music of the spheres. Should such investigation be considered dangerous? Immoral? Surely it was part of what God created us to do!

The fact that God brought Job on a tour of creation, as little as Job knew about it, shows that God never considered the contemplation of creation any danger to Him. Seeing the foundations of the Earth, or the storehouses of hail, or where the mountain goat gives birth, cannot by itself endanger our faith or draw us away from God - these are just the natural exercise of our God-given intelligence.

So when Dembski says that the exercise of naturalistic science (which is really another way of saying "scientifically exploring God's creation) robs God of His glory, I can only conclude that Dembski has never really done science as a Christian, or at least thought about it as a Christian. Material mechanisms are anything but mindless, unless you are content with living in either a senseless or a foolproof universe and derive comfort from seeing the shadow of God in whatever you can't (bring yourself to) explain in nature. The fact that God even bothered with mechanisms which we can investigate and verify or falsify shows how much He cared, and shows how much we have to gain from studying these mechanisms.

No, my physical investigations can never rob God of His glory - they reveal it.

 

[gluadys]

No, my physical investigations can never rob God of His glory - they reveal it.

There is a little-known English poet of the 19th century who wrote one of my favorite sonnets. His name is Joseph Blanco White and the sonnet is called To Night.

Mysterious Night! When our first parents knew
Thee from report divine and heard thy name,
Did they not tremble for this lovely frame—
This glorious canopy of light and blue?

Yet ‘neath a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came
And lo! creation widened in man’s view.

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun? or who could find
While flower and leaf and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou madst us blind?

Why do we then shun death with anxious strife?
If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?
​

I have always loved especially the middle line "And lo! creation widened in man's view."

That, to me, is the function of science. It widens our view of creation and reveals the glory of God, its Creator.

 

[Willtor]

Well said as always, Shernren.

Along those lines I think that the cosmological passages were never intended to be limiting. The passages in question talk about things the authors could see but didn't understand but the authors were no less inspired by them. The mechanisms are evidence of the direction of their inspiration: fear of God. The mechanisms made (and still make) spiritual sense of what they observed but they were never intended to stifle exploration. I find it doubtful that the authors ever really considered systematic exploration. But if there are people whose inspiration leads them to exploration this isn't an illegitimate response.

If the universe is larger/older/more complex than the Biblical authors imagined this is should not be made to work against them. On the contrary, they wrote with as many superlatives as they could muster. And if their superlatives weren't enough to capture the reality then a spiritual response is not to fight the reality on the basis of their language and modes of thought but to be present to the sense of awe to which they were present and hopefully to recognize their rightness. The inspiration was not that the world was such-and-such an age or such-and-such a shape but these things came as a natural response to the inspiration. Isn't it strange then, that the teachings of the Scriptures should show us something about how God intends for us to live our lives and not rote facts?

Carl Sagan: 'In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."' (courtesy Wikiquote)

There are some things on which I think Carl Sagan was profoundly mistaken but I think he was not so far off with this. (Though I do think he was describing mostly a 20th century attitude)

 

[Assyrian]

Awesome shernren. Keep up the good work.

 

[theIdi0t]

.

 

[theIdi0t]

A Biblical expression or its immediate context will enable anyone with common sense to recognize when a passage must be interpreted figuratively.

"Common sense" what a strange term to use, for such a complicated, and diverse text as scripture. What you're really saying is that we should take our 20th century sensibilities, and apply them to the Bible, and disregard the sensibilities of those in the time of writing.

Never mind that literalism, and his kin are products of the modern age, and not the pre-modern age, and never mind that we in the modern age have such a low esteem for myth, when in the past myths conveyed the most important of all truths.

The creationist can read Genesis and try and teach me a how, and I look at him blankly, and I tell him I do not know what to do with it, because when I read scripture I see "why"; why we are here, not how we got here. And more importantly who is he that I behold.

To say that our lives are affected because a literal adam and eve ate a fruit from a tree, to me is a great crime. Our lives are affected because we eat such fruit everyday of our lives. I'm not imperfect because Adam was imperfect, I'm a imperfect because I know I would have done the same thing.

Scripture interpreted in ways outside of our experience with God, are interpretations we can cast into the fire for their uselessness, because they're void in bringing us closer to the Divine we stand far from.

 

[Ave Maria]

You are right that creationism is a myth. However, there is nothing scientific about creationism.

 

[shernren]

You are right that creationism is a myth. However, there is nothing scientific about creationism.

I would not say that unqualified. In fact, I think the worst thing about creationism is precisely that it acts very scientific, and that creationists think because of that that they are very scientific. And the reasons for this are very interesting - it was precisely to study this internal opinion that I started this thread. I think that creationism is a very interesting sociological study of what people associate with science and scientists.

The typical creationist "scientific" article goes like this: [optional bits in braces]

• [We have alraedy shown how X is false.]
• Evolutionists once thought that X was true.
• Recent research shows that, in fact, reality is more like Y.
• Creationism predicted Y all along!
• Meanwhile, those stuck in the mainstream are confused:
• "We didn't expect Y," says scientist.
• [Furthermore, there is dissension in the mainstream: "Of course we expected Y," says other scientist, not realizing that this is precisely what creationism predicts!]
• Bible verse about how great God is / how stupid sinful humans are / the truth of the Bible / Jesus.

If you think about it, that's actually not too different from how a typical popular science magazine or website would cover it:

• Evolutionists once thought that X is true.
• Recent research shows that, in fact, reality is more like Y.
• [Nobody predicted Y! -or-
• This vindicates some people: "Of course we expected Y," says other scientist.]
• Some in the mainstream are confused:
• "We didn't expect Y," says scientist.
• Others suggest caution: "This is really interesting / fascinating / surprising / cute / [synonym], but more tests are needed," says scientist.
• Closing quote from researcher about world peace / curing cancer / halting global warming / other practical application of research.

I don't think the similarities are accidental. I think they come from a subgroup of a generation that has grown up with the wrong idea of science. It's a generation which has lived through the science wars and seen Kuhn's ideas of scientific revolutions and has come to the idea that science is either plain right or plain wrong. Note the similarity of the two article formats above: it sounds almost like a report from the battlefront of World War Science. "There Old Science goes and loses another battle again", both creationists and popular science mags opine.

It's a culture used to either deifying right science or lambasting wrong science. Just witness what we compare creationists to: flat-earth geocentrists, looking to teach creationism in schools along with aether and phlogiston and astrology. Gee, that's an incredible rogues' gallery of old scientific ideas to compare them to, don't you think? Why doesn't anybody ever say that creationism is as obsolete as, say, Newtonian mechanics? The principle of conservation of energy? (Invalidated, of course, by Einstein's E=mc^2.) The Second Law of Thermodynamics? (Inapplicable naively on nanoscopic scales; one of the researchers involved in this is at ANU.) Or hey, the theory that the universe's expansion is slowing down? (An accelerating expansion fits recent data much better; again, ANU researchers did important work here.) See the pattern? Yeah, ANU kicks butt majorly in the sciences - uh, wrong one.

Science, in our heads, automatically falls into two categories: "Discovered by modern ingenuity fighting hard against old prejudices" and "Blockheads believed this last century". It's always geocentrism or Galileo; ether or Einstein. These were real struggles, certainly, but every once in a while we should remember that every physics student in the world for the past two centuries has learned two years, if not more, of Newtonian mechanics - despite it being practically completely wrong over both very large scales and very small, and for completely different but equally devastating reasons in both cases at that. If you think about it, almost everything in the universe is either relativistic (galaxies to stars) or quantum (molecules to quarks). And if you think about it, that means that 90% of students (those who don't go on to some sort of undergraduate physics degree) have, as their best understanding of physics, a theory that doesn't work with 90% of the universe (surely an underestimation). Pareto, turned on his head!

But of course nobody thinks of Newtonian mechanics as being wrong. That's a surprising bit of cognitive dissonance. It happens only because Newtonian mechanics works in most of our everyday lives - and when you think about it, most of the physical universe really doesn't give a whit about our everyday lives. (Ok, ok, enough rant already.) The point is that our black-and-white, stupid-or-science mentality doesn't really accommodate a lot of science. More of that later, while I make a stunning proposal:

Creationism and scientism manifest because of an abnormally strong psychological linkage between this flawed image of science as being black-and-white, and the ethical absolutism of morality also being black-and-white.

Think about it. I believe that the reason that creationist articles resonate so powerfully with us is because, at their heart, they're formatted biblically. (This is in no way an endorsement.) They set themselves up as cautionary tales against following evil. In Proverbs, the simple man wanders into the house of the prostitute and ends up ensnared by her sexual wiles, his very life in her hands. In creationist propaganda, the ignorant Christian wanders into university (or into public schools) and ends up ensnared by atheistic philosophy, his mind unthinkingly brainwashed into believing that there is no God. While the simple man didn't know his morals, the ignorant Christian didn't know his science: had he understood that facts X, Y, and Z (not to mention Bible passages A and B) contradict evolution, he would never have gotten into this whole mess.

Note the transference: the simple man was not aware of the hollowness of his principles, while the ignorant Christian is essentially unaware of the hollowness of a scientific theory. I don't think it's a coincidence that evolution is explicitly compared to geocentrism in some AiG articles. It's playing the same game as when evolutionists compare creationism itself to geocentrism: this science is "black", and that other science is "white"; this science is "wrong", and that other science is "right". And what's scientifically "right" is also ethically and philosophically "right".

But of course science really isn't black and white. In our ideological fervor to dethrone creationism we often forget that, to a first approximation and on the surface, quite a few things do look pretty darn "intelligently designed". It's important to realize that "right" and "wrong", in science, are really just keywords for "accurately integrates a lot of data" and "accurately integrates very little data, if any at all" respectively. And there are plenty of theories in between. The difficulty is that instead of finding science this way - theories, justified by data before all else - children are presented science in their first two or three years of contact with it as some kind of arbitrary abstraction of the universe made valid only by the say-so of the Great High Teacher and Textbook: Everything is made out of atoms. We said so. Write it on your exam; it's the right answer, and anything else is wrong.

Real science doesn't sit for exams: real theories live or die by how much data they can explain. Creationists try to smear evolution by showing that it got a whole lot of answers wrong when it took the BIOL1001 final exam, forgetting to factor in everything that evolution does explain before complaining about everything that it, in its current form, doesn't explain. I could make a big fuss about Newtonian mechanics by complaining, as I did above, that it doesn't explain a whole host of stuff; I'd be forgetting that it does explain a lot. Indeed, people only believed that the Earth is flat because, if you subtract all the mountains and valleys, what's left does look pretty flat if you're only looking at a small piece of land. (After all, real estate agents neglect the curvature of the Earth when considering the area of a plot.) Science isn't done by fiat; it's done in a real world.

The point? We need far better approaches to teaching science. If creationism comes across as "scientific", that's really half the fault of us scientists for helping people understand what science really is in the first place.

 

[Schroeder]

well after a few years of trying to debate these ideas i have found it is not that important. We live through Christ and the SPirit. and when we die i am sure we will get the REAL truth. which i am sure we all have some of the truth in what we believe. To think we know the whole truth is funny. to many seem to think they do. Personly i believe in creationism, not that it has any real affect on how i live at all.

 

[Schroeder]

The point? We need far better approaches to teaching science. If creationism comes across as "scientific", that's really half the fault of us scientists for helping people understand what science really is in the first place.

but science is not about what is right or wrong or ab out being fact or not. science is about finding or looking for EVERY possible idea of how why what when ect of what is being studied. SO creationism can be scientific without it being correct. it just may be a scientific look at something in which it shows how it DOESNT work or happen or whatever. Or it could be how it does work or happen ect. Science is nice and important but NOT that important. We survived thousands of years without it did we not. not much of science has made us live better maybe longer but not better. depending on your view of things. Or maybe i should say happier or more content ect.