Those who are professionals in the sciences can answer that more thoroughly than I, but you are massively mistaken with respect to COVID, the genetics of it, the evolution of it, the molecular biology and the understanding of subcellular structures and operations and the development of mRNA vaccines and other therapies that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and probably millions. Who are the antivaxxers and COVID denying conspiracists? That bad numbers of them are YECs is probably demonstrable.
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Huh. The favor you have done is against yourself. The preferred term around here is EC, and you either don’t know that or have forgotten, and/or don’t know what it stands for: Evolutionary Creation, -ist and/or -ism, as in evolutionary creationism.
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You brought up covid. The emerging consensus is that it came from the Wuhan Lab–intelligently designed. So score one for the “conspiracy theorists.” But that does not affect your argument either way.
First, my understanding of genetics and yours is irrelevant. Neither you or I are doing the work you describe.
Next, you emphasize evolution when talking about genetics, imbedding in your argument your conclusion that evolution contributed to the advances of genetic understanding. You are assuming your conclusion in your argument.
The question I asked remains unanswered. In this specific discussion, how has neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory advanced the science of genetics? Sure, since most geneticists are evolutionists, much of the advancement of genetic science has been done by evolutionists. But how does neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory add to or inform their understanding of molecular biology, subcellular structures or the development of mRNA vaccines and other therapies? My question still remains.
In fact, evolutionary theory does not have a good track record with genetics. Remember “junk DNA,” the argument from ignorance (we don’t know what it does, so it must be left over detritus from evolution–and proof of evolution)? This false assumption got in the way of advancing the understanding of the function of rest of the non protein coding DNA. Score one for the creationists who predicted that since DNA was designed, we would eventually find the purpose for most or all of it.
The big bang model also has a light-travel–time (horizon) problem. And the red shift is quantized. That is not what cosmic evolutionists would expect. What are the implications of that?
Russell Humphreys accurately predicted the magnetic fields of our solar system’s planets based on the assumption of a 6000 year old cosmos. When measured, he was correct. Evolutionary cosmologists were massively wrong. Why is that?
Of course, I can’t answer all the questions you ask. I don’t have the expertise nor the time to research them. But creationist cosmologists have answered many of them, including CBR, which also presents problems for cosmic evolutionists.
Just saying–both deep time and young cosmos creationists still have questions to be explored on both sides of this issue.
And I don’t see responses to my first three statements, one of which addresses the important question of the nature of science, a question Ken Ham also addresses. As I expected, you have mostly responded to my fourth statement, a question about how evolutionary theory informs science as you think it is easy pickings and harder to answer.
False. That is a YEC deflection, and demonstrates the willingness of YEC organizations such as AiG the misrepresent what actual scientists say. Light travel time only rules out radiation as the means of smoothing thermal equilibrium, thus another process was responsible. Generally, cosmologists are not suggesting the speed of light or other constants varied.
If you did, you would know that Humphreys was a crackpot. The magnetic fields of solar system bodies, which measurements are still being refined, is comfortably in line with the state of their interiors by standard theory. Rapid reversals for the creation week and flood are nuts, BTW.
The state of affairs for creationist response to the Standard Model of Cosmology [SMC] is frankly discussed in this article in AiG’s Answers Research Journal Beyond Distant Starlight:. Please do read the original to verify the following excerpt fairly represents the conclusions
The possibility that the universe might be genuinely old is not one that has received much consideration from within the creationist community.
…
What is the current state of creationist cosmology? The brief survey in this paper would suggest that much work still needs to be done. Indeed, beyond the distant starlight issue, very little has been done to explain the many patterns and trends that have been identified through observations of the universe beyond our solar system. In contrast, while it does not supply an ultimate explanation, the SMC does apparently provide plausible proximate explanations for all of the phenomena discussed above.The implications of this need careful consideration. It should be noted that a model’s ability to explain the observations can be misleading; for example, a model for the non-miraculous origin of the wine at Cana might be better than the true, supernatural, model at explaining the details of the chemical composition of the wine served at the wedding feast. But explanatory power is generally a good indicator that a model contains elements of the truth. The explanatory power of the SMC is itself something that beckons an explanation.
I would argue the the full picture is an even more devastating indictment of YEC views of time and space.
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Well of course any scientific or philosophical position can be misused and abused, but that has no bearing on whether or not they are true. You wouldn’t argue against gravity just because people fall off ladders and end up in wheelchairs, nor would you argue against atomic theory just because Kim Jong-Un is using it to try and develop nuclear weapons. In the same way, trying to falsify the theory of evolution by fabricating a link between it and racism or eugenics is nothing more nor less than noise.
In any case, when the theory of evolution, like gravity or atomic theory, has adverse consequences, that’s just a result of people either abusing or being careless with facts and objective reality. On the other hand, when scientific falsehood, misinformation and conspiratorial thinking has adverse outcomes, those adverse consequences are a direct and inevitable result of people being taught falsehood, misinformation and conspiratorial thinking.
I’m sorry Craig, but Ken Ham does vilify science. When somebody divides science in two, invents a separate category called “evolutionism” or “historical science” or “secular science” for any and every scientific theory that they don’t like, and puts well-established scientific theories into that category despite the fact that they have been established by exactly the same rules and methodologies as every other area of science, that is vilifying science.
If you don’t want to be accused of vilifying science, then don’t vilify science.
I make no such assumption, and I’m pretty sure that most other people on this forum do not make any such assumption either. If YECs are reaching out to the homeless and these people are coming to Christ as a result, then that is something to be thankful for. But it doesn’t make them right about either the age of the earth or who did or did not evolve from what.
Having said that, young earthism does divert valuable resources in the Church away from more important ministries such as outreach to the homeless. The Ark Encounter cost $100 million to build. Just think how many homeless people could have been provided with housing and shelter with that amount of money.
Science is an umbrella term for a set of subjects that draw conclusions about nature on the basis of physical evidence. It does so under the constraint of rules—rules that have proven themselves to be successful and fit for purpose in multiple different contexts. Rules which, in some contexts, if you were to break them, you would kill people.
If you think that “naturalism” should not be one of those rules, I have some sympathy to that. If you think that design and intelligence should be considered a possibility, I have sympathy for that too. But it is not “naturalism” that brings a young earth or independent human ancestry down. It is the other rules and principles—rules that apply regardless of whether miracles happen or not—that these things conflict with. Rules such as mathematics, measurement, logical consistency, making sure your facts are straight, and not making things up out of whole cloth. Rules which, in any other context, if you were to break them, you would kill people.
You would have to strip out the rules and principles that lead to those conclusions as well. Rules and principles such as mathematics, measurement, logical consistency, making sure your facts are straight, and not making things up out of whole cloth. Rules and principles that also form the basis for numerous other scientific disciplines, some of them safety-critical. And then you would have to find something else to replace them with. Something that actually worked—in every context, without killing people. Good luck with that.
And I submit that you are not getting your facts straight here.
Billions of years play a crucial role in finding oil. And evolutionary science plays a crucial role in machine learning, artificial intelligence, cancer research, immunology, virology, conservation and all sorts of things like that.
But EC folks do recognise that. Nobody is claiming that the theory of evolution or deep geological time or the cosmology of the early universe are completely solved problems. But the problems with conventional science only concern the fine details and have no bearing whatsoever on well established facts such as the age of the earth or common ancestry of all life on Earth. None of them are questions that we should expect to be answered by now if the earth really is 4.5 billion years old.
Unanswered questions for a young earth, on the other hand, are deal breakers. They are questions that leave a young earth dead in the water. They are questions on which not a shred of progress has been made in the past twenty years. They are questions that still leave young earthists inventing absurd new physical phenomena out of whole cloth—phenomena for which not only is there not a shred of evidence whatsoever, but which would have vaporised the Earth if they had any basis in reality.That’s what we’ve been discussing on the other thread that talks about the heat problem.
For the record, I don’t refer to young earthism as “creationism.” I refer to it as young earthism. Because it is perfectly possible to acknowledge the existence of God as Creator while at the same time recognising the hard indisputable evidence-based fact that He created everything far, far longer ago than six thousand years.
And there is a reason why we don’t like terms such as “evolutionist” or “evolutionism.” It is because terms such as these portray hard indisputable evidence-based facts as if they were merely disputable philosophical positions. They aren’t. They are hard indisputable evidence-based facts.
The horizon problem is not even remotely comparable to the distant starlight problem. The horizon problem concerns only phenomena that took place in the very early universe, right at the limit of what we are able to reason about theoretically and study practically. The distant starlight problem, on the other hand, concerns everything outside of a fraction of the size of the Milky Way, and physical phenomena that are well within our capability of studying. Heck, we can even measure the distance to stars further away than 6,000 light years using parallax now. Basic trigonometry.
Seriously, this one is like comparing Mount Everest to a teaspoonful of sand. If you must make tu quoque arguments, at least make ones that actually compare apples with apples.
I’ve seen Russell Humphreys’ prediction and I’m sorry but it’s a joke. All he predicted was an upper limit to the magnetic fields, and he said this:
And regardless of assumptions about planetary interiors, if the present field of either planet had exceeded the maximum (the line in Figure 1), my theory would have been falsified. There is no definite minimum, but values several orders of magnitude lower than the prediction would cast serious doubt on my theory. Thus I proposed that the Voyager II measurements would be a good test of my hypothesis.
He also includes a graph. The graph is fairly small and low resolution but it looks like this:
Note that the left hand side is a logarithmic scale. The dots representing some of the planets fall far below his maximum line—Mercury is about three and a half orders of magnitude too low, Mars and Venus about five orders of magnitude, Earth, Uranus and Saturn more than one order of magnitude each. Basically, the values that he already had were already casting serious doubt on his prediction by his own criteria, and in any case since all he was predicting was an upper limit, this was the kind of prediction where he had about as much of a chance of getting it right as of getting it wrong.
Sadly this is typical of what I’ve come to expect of young earth claims. Tiny samples with huge error bars, predictions so broad that it’s hard for them to fail … I’m sorry but that is simply not how science works. Especially not when the theory you’re trying to refute is backed up by hundreds of thousands of tightly constrained results with tiny error bars and predictions that are easy to get wrong and difficult to get right.
As for your claim that “evolutionary cosmologists” failed to get their predictions right, that one doesn’t stack up either. His statement, “In contrast, many evolutionists had predicted that Uranus would have a much smaller field, or none at all” is factually untrue: there were several models knocking around at the time and some of them made much more specific and accurate predictions than Humphreys’ almost-anything-goes one.
This was covered in some detail by @pevaquark here:
And these principles aren’t exactly difficult and don’t exactly require much in the way of expertise. It’s nothing more than basic measurement and mathematics that you learn at school.
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Personally, I don’t think it will be worth your time to reach out to Ham. If you’ve heard him once, you’ve heard the shtick.
I met him at our creation day at college, and I asked him afterward about how to relate to atheists or to those who believe in evolution, and he just repeated one of the phrases he usually repeats. He probably told me to ask them, “We’re you there?” I brushed it off because I wanted to agree and the presentation tickled my ears, but I was disappointed because I truly wanted to reach out to people.
Storytelling is a powerful tool, it’s something that evolved with our language capacities for a variety of purposes. Our expectations when we hear stories are particular to our culture, however. Nowadays, we distinctly label things as “fiction” or “non-fiction”, when ancient paradigms and their oral histories were not categorized as such. We find it offensive to think that Genesis could be both, but that’s an imposition from the last few hundred years.
The ideas that I think are worth engaging with when it comes to discussions or debates, are how people are treated. If the apologetic depends on instruction, by either word or example, to mock or think of people disrespectfully, then it’s worth chiming in that this is not how we should be talking about people we don’t know. After all, if we think “evil” people are those who talk about us this way, then we can also call into question our standards for mutual discussion. When it comes to character, Christians should be behaving graciously. Not just saying so, but doing so with our words and attitudes.
Character is also another standard by which ideas can be considered. I’m mainly thinking about the “evolving from apes” idea. That is also another idea some find offensive, but why? If that’s how the evidence suggests we came about, wouldn’t that be a creative act of God? Doing science is an invitation to humility, and plenty of scientists demonstrate that when there is a new discovery. Trusting in the Holy Spirit to change us is also an act of constantly learning and not having all the answers. Science and faith can complement each other in that both involve awe, curiosity, and humility. And those things can lead to joy.
You can easily find counter examples in the new atheists, but there are plenty of others found in personal blogs, scientific research, and YouTube essays of scientists describing their areas of research.
Take the recent findings about homo naledi for example. Right now, the work that Lee Bergher, the principle paleoanthropologist that has been working in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, is in the peer-review process. His team discovered what appears to be a burial with grave goods and art, a burial for a species with a mosaic of features. These features include wrists that are capable of creating tools and using them in what could possibly be art, and a burial process we currently ascribe to a large brain, but their brains were just 1/3 the size of ours! This changes what we know about human evolution, scientists are not in agreement, but the discussion surround homo naledi is a suspension of belief for what we don’t know, a willingness to change according to the evidence, and respectful disagreement.
If you’re interested, this is a helpful article:
https://www.science.org/content/article/was-small-brained-human-relative-world-s-first-gravedigger-and-artist
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There are three kinds of lies:
Lies, damned lies and statistics. Mathematics is not the be all and end all. It has major flaws if misused.
Part of the problem is the use or misuse of data. People have a habit of fitting data to fit their theory and, if it can, they do not attempt to view it any other way. Raw data has no alegience.
Patterns can be construed or be illusional. Building blocks can be universal without any sort of family connections. The same data would be seen if the conclusion was that similarity is due to function.
We do little service to God by belittling His participation, just as Creationists do no service by ignoring Science. If God is involved you can be certain it is neither random nor haphazard. 2% can be enormous if the starting figure is in the millions.
Richard
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Yes I’m aware of that. I’m fully aware that people can and do try to use and manipulate mathematics and statistics to make the raw data appear to support whatever position they are promoting. I’m fully aware that things such as p-value hacking are a thing. But there are limits to which you can press such a point. What I’m talking about here is a complete failure of the elementary basics. I’m talking about people who are trying to convince us that millions of different methods taken by hundreds of different methods and rigorously cross-checked against each other must all be consistently out by up to a factor of a million on the basis of error bars of just a few percent.
In any case, p-value hacking and twisting and manipulating mathematics in the ways that you suggest are not sticking to the rules; they are subverting if not outright breaking the rules.
I am doing no such thing. Recognising that God created the heavens and the earth far more than six thousand years ago, and that He took His time over it like a master craftsman is not belittling His participation.
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There is no place for God in the Current Evolutionary model other than perhaps that He “lit the blue touch paper and retired immediately.” Humanity is just a fluke of deviation, nothing more and nothing less. Intelligence? Cognisance? Hey, it may as well come from a tree!
There is no reason within Evolutionary theory for any creature not to attain full cognisance or to usurp humanity.
Richard
Richard, if you want to establish that evolution is not a fact, you must do so by providing physical evidence that falsifies it. If you are able to do so, then please post the details. If you are not able to do so, then coming out with tirades that “There is no place for God in the Current Evolutionary model other than perhaps that He ‘lit the blue touch paper and retired immediately’” is not an argument against evolution; it is an argument against God.
It is also an argument that I disagree with entirely, because I acknowledge God as the Creator of the universe regardless of how long ago He created it, how long ago He took over it, or who or what He caused or did not cause to evolve from what in the process. My faith is in Christ, not in non-evolution.
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FCA! How many more times! I do not dispute the existence of Evolution! Just the current scientific view of it.
If you honestly think that science gives two hoots about God then you are delusional.
Is not enough. It is a platitude.
Every so-called Christian Scientist (not the religion) I have come across manages to delineate between the two. They profess faith and then ignore it when talking science.
All I am saying is that God is not a part of the way Evolution is taught or understood. Even here (Biologos) the inclusion of God is peripheral at best.
If you are going to claim theistic creation, then God has to be centre stage. That does not mean Genesis. it means God-centric Evolution, and not what is currently taught or believed.
Richard
Few “evolutionists” actually used AND abused eugenics for these ends. Phrenology was an initial part of eugenics, and some anthropologists came to the conclusion that our bodies do not support the idea that some groups of humans were less human. This began modern anthropology, and it’s based on the notion that all humans are, first of all, equally human, but also in no way, including in language, culture, or biologically, more or less barbaric.
A few people ran with the idea that cultures evolved in a linear fashion, assigning value to where people were on the spectrum. Most anthropologists ever since have been fighting the deployment of racial discrimination and persecution and their effects. Sure, some Christians got on board with this idea, which we hear about quite often already with this topic. However, to create a narrative where people with a variety of spiritual beliefs, or lack thereof, haven’t made up a large part of abolitionist efforts is inaccurate.
Eugenics made its entrance into a society with a sociocultural history of rigid hierarchy, largely due to the proliferation of Christianity. Historically, the correlation is less “an appeal to evolutionism,” and much closer to white people maintaining power and privilege in the aftermath of the civil war.
This is a huge topic, but evolution is a poor scapegoat for it.
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This is a fallacy for a simple reason: it ignores the fact that the scriptures are ancient literature by requiring them to speak in terms of modern science.
In this they are confused because science is nothing more nor less than studying what God has done.
You keep using that claim but you also keep ignoring the fact that the scriptures are ancient literature! In both of the literary types of the first Genesis Creation story the days are literary days, not literal days.
That’s idolatry – we don’t worship days.
Well, Ham is an uneducated self-appointed ‘teacher’ who comes close to being a false prophet; he understands neither the scriptures nor science and thus misleads many. He is also legitimately called a fool because he condemns people who have studied the scriptures more deeply than he is even capable of for having a better understanding than he does.
This statement shows the same sort of ignorance that Ham displays: the number of scientists who “search only for scientific evidence that is contrary to Genesis 1” can probably be listed on a single page formatted like an old-school telephone book. The fact is that most scientists aren’t interested in Genesis 1 because it has nothing to tell science and science isn’t capable of commenting on it.
This, to the contrary, is clear and accurate:
But people who prefer to be told what to believe will never get that.
Imagine my agony when I hike one of the side canyons with a bunch of Christians who turned out to be primarily YECists. I had never before encountered such rabid blindness or refusal to actually consider the implications of the Creation accounts having been written as ancient literature that was never intended to be read as though it was actually written in English like someone’s great-grandfather’s diary of events he witnessed.
I hadn’t encountered that oath to be dishonest when I was on that hike, which was a good thing as I was reeling enough by the deliberate blindness the YECists were demonstrating.
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Well said! That puts it more clearly than I’ve ever managed to do.
They can’t answer it – to even think about it would violate their oath to be dishonest.
And right there is the biggest reason that YECism should be denounced from every pulpit in the world: it requires people to be dishonest! It has no respect for the scriptures, only for its idol of demanding that God in ages past must conform to their views now. As this puts it:
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I decided to weigh in on the geology issue after all . . . .
I’ll be blunt: either the geological record that shows the ages of the youngest mountain ranges being at the very least many hundreds of thousands and probably millions of years old actually tells us that the earth is at least that old (since it can’t be younger than any of its parts), or God is a liar.
YECism denies the plain evidence about those mountain ranges. They are thus teaching the second option.
The only explanation for the fact that the youngest mountain ranges are many hundreds of thousands of years old that includes a young earth is that God is deliberately deceitful.
And while I’m at it…
We seem to have arrived on the scene at a very special time in cosmic history: late enough to be able to observe the cosmos and gain understanding, early enough that we can still see back to the beginning. Neil DeGrasse Tyson once noted this, but he failed to reach what to me is an obvious point: is this just coincidence?
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This would be an abuse of the pupit. It is not our job t dictate or to insist on a point of view. The job of the preacher is to lay out the evidence, the possible viewpoints, and let the listener make an informed choice. If you try and destroy a YEC viewpoint you will more than likely destroy the faith that it underpins.
Richard
YECism is destructive of faith as it is – that’s why so many, many kids brought up that way abandon Christianity when they get to college.
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There is nothing wrong with YEC as long as it is self-contained. The problem comes when it confronts or is confronted by science. The age of the cosmos has no bearing on sin and salvation or practical Christianity. But, if you make it important, say as a litmus to the accuracy of the Bible, it becomes critical.
The problem is not with the specific view but how it impinges on everything else. And, if you are going to attack that view you have to be able to replace the parts it underpins or the whole faith collapses like a deck of cards. IOW the reason so many young YECs lose faith is because they lose faith in the Bible. They have been shown that it does not say what they thought in terms of creation so they no longer believe any of it. All or nothing!
Before you can teach against YEC you must first establish that the Bible is not an authority on science. And that is easier said than done.
As a preacher I must allow for people to still believe in both a seven-day creation and an historic Garden of Eden with all the apparent incongruities with science or reality still intact.
Otherwise I am destroying not building faith. I can offer the alternative viewpoint, but must emphasise that it is not essential for faith in God or salvation.
Richard
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No – you have to move faith away from the book and to the Incarnate Eternal Word, His death and His Resurrection.
With university students introducing them to the critical apparatus in my Novum Testamentum Graece was a good first step because why would God allow all those variant readings unless it was to tell us to not trust a book but a Person?
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