I am sorry for junking up the thread with multiple posts, but I somehow missed this part of your reply. But the good news is, God was in control of that, too! haha
I was just discussing this with my wife. Methodological Naturalism is the way that we operate every day. I see no reason to make an exception for scientists.
It is only in exceptional cases that we resort to spiritual causes. For example, suppose that I hear a sound at the door. I open the door and look around, but see no observable cause. Do I walk away saying, God knocked on the door? No. I say, I don’t know what caused that sound. That’s how I usually answer when there is no sufficient cause.
On the other hand, if I open the door and see that my screen door is unlatched and the wind is blowing, I assign a physical cause without giving the Lord a second thought. (The Lord forgives me every second of every day, for the most part.) That is how science operates. I do the same.
But let’s take the opposite case. I hear a sound and see no physical cause, but while I’m puzzling it out, I spy a toddler in the road. Since I’m a Christian, I see God’s hand in this. A materialist still might call it coincidence, and I couldn’t reason him/her out of that belief. But almost all human beings, universally, would see a spiritual cause in the incident. Reason plays no part in it. We are wired a certain way, but denied certain evidence. (Cue Pascal quote …)
Secondly, I wanted to echo and complement what others are saying here… There really is a world of difference between methodological naturalism and metaphysical or ontological naturalism. I’m not sure anyone who believes in metaphysical or ontological naturalism can truly be a Christian. But Christians can be methodological naturalists — this just means that for purposes of scientific inquiry, as a methodology for a specific purpose in a specific context, we bracket off the supernatural causes and say, let’s see how we can explain this from a naturalistic perspective. As Jay emphasized, this does not mean that we believe supernatural causes for these same don’t exist (that would be metaphysical or ontological). It merely means that we don’t think positing them is properly part of the method that we’re using (hence methodological).
Thanks AMW. I do understand the difference between the two terms, but thank you for clarifying for me again. Purely and simply, I made a mistake, probably because I was posting in the car, while waiting for my honorary granddaughter to be picked up from daycare, and because I was more than a little irritated by the post in question. I will probably never make this mistake again (though there is no guarantee at my age).
You must be joking. Are you the only one who’s never heard of it? If you seriously want a reply, I can give one ad nauseum, but I don’t really think that is necessary. The Culture War has entered the vernacular. Everyone knows what I’m talking about.
A few things:
So you know, I have already ordered the book you discussed from (about?) the Barna Group. I do want to understand.
I am a 64 year old with a 21 year old daughter. I have to ask her to interpret for me some times.
3.From the “other” side of the culture war, we have a different explanation for why kids leave the faith. Bear in mind, I am not evangelical, so I don’t come from the same cultural background. However, I started out my Christian life as an evangelical–I just didn’t grow up in it. So I can envision how kids might react. And we have data to back our reasons up too.
When you say stop fighting the Culture Wars, how does that work? Some of the things on Daniel’s list will not be accepted on my side. Sad but true.
I got into this because I wanted to show young people the glory of Creation, and how it pointed toward God, not away. It sounds like that may be part of your motivation too.
I’d like to offer another perspective–perhaps a way to bring together rather than separate. This is what I thought of when I thought about culture wars.
There once was an old woman. She loved the Lord and tried to do what he wanted. Most would have counted her as a conservative; she was pro-life and voted Republican because of it. She attended Church every week. She wasn’t special.
She and her husband had a house with a big room downstairs. They decided to build a guest bedroom. But when it was finished, one day she looked at that room and said, “I wonder who it’s for?” She asked the deacon at church if there was anyone who needed a place to stay. He said not to worry, someone would come.
Within a week or so, she heard from a friend that there was a homeless woman about to give birth who need a place to stay. She and her husband went to meet her. She was a black African immigrant, with no family, who had been working in adult home care. When she got pregnant she could no longer do the work.
It was agreed that she should move in. She came cautiously. No one in her community could believe that anything like this could happen. But move in she did. There was soon a parade of African visitors. They would stare as they walked by and say only God can do this. And so it was.
The old woman learned about all the ways of government subsidy–food stamps, WIC, subsidized housing, DSHS, medicaid. She was both impressed and horrified by what she saw.
Over time, the old woman and the young one became like mother and daughter. The little baby became her granddaughter. They shared faith together, and learned from one another, but mostly the old from the new: what it was to grow up poor in Africa.
The young woman moved into a section 8 apartment with her daughter.
Then one day the young woman became sick. It got worse and worse. The young woman was afraid. She had no one to take care of her, she thought. But the old woman said, “We will take care of you no matter what.
The old woman stayed by her side in the hospital. The staff, mostly African themselves, would say, “Why is she doing this?” The nurses and doctors would ask, “How are you related?” And the old woman would say, “What, don’t we look alike?”
Finally the doctors determined that the young woman had cancer. The old woman said she should move in with them again. She couldn’t do otherwise, she couldn’t let her go through this alone.
This time it was different. They really were family. They would talk and talk and talk, they would pray and read the Bible and sing. And the old woman would sit and talk to the African visitors too, and pray with them, because they were now her friends too.
The pastor said to her one day, “Do you realize what you have done? You have broken racial barriers, social barriers, economic barriers, all barriers.” And the old woman was embarrassed. She said, “I have done nothing special. Anyone can do this." And so it is.
The story has not ended yet. But it has gone far enough to make my point. When Christian values are fully lived there will be no culture war.
What a beautiful story about the “old woman”! I strongly suspect that it’s, as they say in Hollywood, based on a true story. Best thing I’ve read, outside my lovely wife’s poetry, in weeks!
It’s interesting to me that you equate objections from scientists with persecution. I’m kind of old school in my use of persecution terminology. Perpetua and Felicity were persecuted. Ignatius of Antioch was persecuted. Muslims who are jailed for becoming followers of Christ are persecuted. (I’ve known a couple of them personally.) Occasionally being called names on the internet? That’s just the price of living in modern society, pretty much. I’ve been called names plenty of times. It’s unpleasant, but I would rather reserve the word “persecution” for much stiffer stuff.
Ann, just bringing this comment back to the fore - and please read this in a gracious tone. I’ll add my thanks to the chorus - you’ve set an excellent example for us all for gracious dialogue. I’m not perfect on that front either, to be sure.
(As an aside, I’m of the opinion that peer review can - and often should - be blunt and not be couched in soft language. That doesn’t mean that the reviewer is being mean. It means that science is a meritocracy, and that scientists are trained to be highly critical. This is a feature, not a bug. Scientists would greatly prefer that their ideas are being contested - even hotly contested - rather than ignored. But I digress - and this aside is not really for Ann but for the other ID commenter on this thread who was upset by some of the strong statements I have made about ID folks. ID researchers are swinging for the fences, claiming that their ideas should re-write nearly the entirety of modern biology. So, it’s not surprising that such claims are going to be subject to the fiery furnace of peer review.)
Back to my reply to Ann - I am working on a reply that will go into the details, but your quote above is not correct. The mark a severe bottleneck would leave on a genome would primarily be seen as locking the remaining alleles into specific linkage patterns (linkage disequilibrium, LD). (There would also be a severe loss of alleles, since 2 people can at most have four alleles of any given locus, even if there was not a severe loss of heterozygosity). We can see LD patterns in the present that map back to 200,000 years ago, at the advent of our species in the fossil record. If there had been a severe bottleneck during that time - and a bottleneck of two is very severe - then we would expect to see it in LD patterns. We see LD patterns consistent with an effective population size of 10,000 over that time span. More anon.
Hi Dennis, you and Dr. Gauger may not be so far apart on the science. She has, after all, stated that the hypothesized 2 individuals would have lived several hundred thousand years ago–in the H Erectus time frame.
That said, I fail to see how the hypothesis would provide even faint support for the theological assertion that all of humanity is descended from the Biblical Adam and Eve. The reason is that Genesis portrays Adam and Eve as agriculturalists. And the practice of agriculture goes back no more than 10,000 years.
Buggs didn’t state a timeframe in his critique. I’m working with humans. Homo erectus is not human. If Ann is open to Adam and Eve being another species (or chronospecies leading to humans) then I suppose it becomes increasingly possible to shoehorn a pair in there somewhere. I think it runs afoul of ILS patterns with other primates though (chimp, gorilla, orangutans).
Discovery Institute “attempts to push intelligent design into schools.”
I then wrote “You are aware that Discovery Institute opposes teaching ID in public schools?” and quoted their policy statement explaining this.
You then wrote:
Oh, yes, I’m well aware of it.
So if you are “well aware” that Discovery Institute opposes teaching intelligent design in public schools, then why did you write claim that Discovery Institute “attempts to push intelligent design into schools”?
I understand. Ken Ham sees the same trend and reads the same book you just bought and comes to this conclusion in his AiG blog:
Our research from my co-authored book, Already Gone, showed that one of the reasons that young people are leaving the church is precisely because they aren’t being given answers to their questions! They have questions about science and the Bible but, instead of getting solid, Bible-affirming answers, they are getting no answers or the message that you can believe in millions of years, evolution, and the Bible at the same time. The issue of millions of years was a primary issue we uncovered behind why so many young people are leaving the church. We need to reach these young people with solid, biblically based answers!
So, you tell me. Can a person believe in millions of years, evolution, and the Bible at the same time? That is the actual dichotomy that young people who grow up in such churches face.
Since you are not an evangelical, you should know that about 57% of evangelical Christians don’t accept evolution. In many evangelical churches, this is exactly the sort of teaching that kids receive. Others want to make belief in the de novo, special creation of Adam an “essential” that we must believe about creation. Kids are being unnecessarily forced into a corner, as @DanielK noted in closing, and many of them are drifting away from the church because of it. One of the problems for ID is that its arguments about science and the scientific method have been co-opted and turned into this (from the same blog post):
So, of course young people are going to see a contradiction between much of the modern “science” (really historical science interpreted through the lens of naturalism and atheism) they’ve been taught and the teachings of the Bible! But sadly very few youth leaders, pastors, and parents are dealing with this indoctrination.
So, the answer is to double down. More of the same. Here is where that is getting us:
Notice that from 2006-2016, a mere 10 years, the number of religiously unaffiliated among 18-29 year olds has risen from 23% to 39%. I find that alarming. Simply doing more of what we’ve been doing obviously isn’t working.
On an organizational level, it means to stop pursuing cultural change by political means. Seek to win the battle of ideas, not the battle of the ballot box. On a personal level, it means what you showed it means. It means learning to empathize with the “other,” and caring for the least among us.
Pope Francis perhaps has a lesson to teach evangelicals here. The Catholic church has not changed its dogma, but the pope nevertheless experiences soaring popularity. Why? In my judgment, it’s because he is preaching the gospel to the poor. There is a lesson here …
I showed up here a little over a year ago because I was researching the trend of young people leaving the church. Since controversy over evolution was one of the reasons that I discovered, I came here to learn what I could. I honestly could care less about the historical disagreements between the various groups and positions. I’m more concerned with the effect that they have on our youth.
Official policy and actual results sometimes vary. And then there is the law of unintended consequences. Once the self-serving politicians in the legislature and the State Board of Education got “on board” with Discovery’s push to change the science curricula, they went hog wild. They changed social studies standards to highlight the fact that America was founded as a Christian nation, and mandated history books to detail the accomplishments of Ronald Reagan. The resulting textbook was mocked nationwide for, among other things, implying that slaves “immigrated” to the United States.
You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. The moral of the story is: don’t get in bed with politicians. Discovery opened this can of worms long ago. Will they, like Ken Ham, simply double down for more of the same? Obviously, I can’t answer that question. I can only ask it and hope the organization rethinks its political entanglements.
The argument against Edge of Evolution has a lot more to do with the science than the philosophical or theological outlook that Behe may have. Further study of the very system he outlined in his book, quinone resistance in Falciparum, turned out to be quite different than what he described in his book. On top of that, his basic idea seems to fall into the trap of the Sharpshooter fallacy.
Buggs did quote this section from what I am assuming is your book:
"If a species were formed through such an event [by a single ancestral breeding pair] or if a species were reduced in numbers to a single breeding pair at some point in its history, it would leave a telltale mark on its genome that would persist for hundreds of thousands of years— a severe reduction in genetic variability for the species as a whole”
Therefore, he has accepted the time frame of a few hundreds thousand years, which I am presuming would refer to about 200,000 years which is the current estimate for the start of H. sapiens. If Ann Gauger thinks that the evidence allows for a bottleneck further back in H. erectus (i.e. millions of years) then that would seem to be a tacit admission that there isn’t evidence for a more recent bottleneck, although I certainly don’t want to put words in Dr. Gauger’s mouth.
For that reason, I think the LD evidence would certainly counter what Buggs’ criticisms.
According to what I’ve seen, there is evidence of two bottlenecks in H. sapiens: the “out of Africa” event, and the crossing of the Bering Strait. If someone has seen something more recent that contradicts this research, I would be interested to hear about it.
Best thing I’ve read, outside my lovely wife’s poetry, in weeks!