This, I think, suggests that “pigeonholing” doesn’t necessarily = agreement. I.e. people might have understanding (even correct understanding) for things they disagree with. But they are familiar enough with the content of the disagreement (often because they themselves may have once resided there) that they still have those mental slots available to understand how others are thinking. They just have that slot labeled as “incorrect”. To “think another persons thoughts after them” is a necessary exercise toward understanding, but not necessarily always leading to agreement. Some of our best authors (Aquinas from antiquity, people like C.S. Lewis in more modern times) excel at this.
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And yet the arguments we repeatedly hear from them display fundamental confusions. Are you implying that they really do understand evolution and are simply lying with distortions of the theory in order to make straw man arguments against it?
Here are some of the typical ones…
- They say evolution claims people are descended from apes, when it actually says that our biological species and the apes have a common ancestor.
- They talk about life coming from a slime, when this isn’t the theory of evolution at all, but abiogenesis that life came from a chemical soup in the primordial earth.
- They say evolution is only a theory confusing the words “hypothesis” and “theory.”
- They say evolution claims living things are a result of chance alone. This is of course incorrect. All events in the world come about by a combination of intention, natural law, and chance and the events of evolution are no different. And if you want to say there is no chance in our lives but that all these things are the work of God then there is no reason why that would not work equally well with evolution.
- They say evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics that order always decreases. This is incorrect. The second law of thermodynamics isn’t really about order but probability and the number of possible states and it is only the total entropy which it is highly probable should increase. We routinely decrease entropy in one place at the expense of increase entropy elsewhere (like with refrigerators and air conditioners).
There are of course many more objections which are outright lies (though perhaps simply repeating what they were told) – like claiming there is no evidence of transitional states or no evidence of speciation. Frankly when it is claimed that they do not understand evolution, people are being rather kind and giving them some benefit of the doubt for having a minimum of integrity. I am convinced that they simply do not want there to be a scientific inquiry into the origin of the species because they want to dictate that divine magic is the origin, and they cannot see, hear, or understand what they close their eyes, ears, and minds to.
But of course it is wrong to say that ALL creationists do not understand evolution. Generalizations like that are invariably foolish. The diversity of human thinking and the ways in which they justify their ways of thinking are legion.
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No - I agree that nearly all the anti-evolution argumentation we hear around here does reveal some pretty fundamental misunderstandings (or complete failure to understand in the first place even.)
What I had more in mind when I said that was that many of us here who may have had a history of thinking along more fundamentalistic lines about Genesis still have those “old pigeonholes” available because we used to use them ourselves and so already understand how and why others might be treading those same paths themselves. I suppose that could go the other way too - you are right not to over generalize. I just don’t see it go that way as often.
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This is what was called a “paradigm shift”, although I haven’t heard that term used for quite a while. We ALL have a worldview which affects how we interpret and evaluate evidence. You just as much as I. The point I was trying to make is that our worldview, or pigeonholes, is not fixed, and we don’t necessarily reject data that doesn’t fit. (Although I have met people who do seem to fit a rigid pigeonhole type.)
But perhaps the idea has some merit in encouraging us to “in order to be understood, seek first to understand.” So long as we remember it is a helpful analogy that applies unequally to different people.
Noted. I should have used another way to quote that passage. I’ll try to remember that in future.
Also from the article
But there are plenty of scientists who have a wide range of mental pigeonholes, and no problem at all in understanding how intelligent people can believe in God.
I think the author could have expressed this better. It’s not just scientists. There are plenty of people, scientists and non scientists, who have a wide range of mental pigeonholes.
I think you will find that Creation Ministries avoids all five of those examples of " lying with distortions of the theory". Mind you, I find that evolutionists also often have their own “distortions” of both evolution and creation. You will find on both sides people with varying levels of understanding both of their own side and of the other’s. You need to be careful not to put all of us creationists into the same pigeonhole.
Appeals to differences in worldview and different ways of interpreting evidence can only get you so far, Chris. There are these pesky things called “mathematics” and “measurement” as well, and they place strict constraints on which interpretations are valid and which are not – constraints that are completely independent of worldview. Interpretations that do not respect those constraints are simply not honest – and are therefore certainly not Biblical (Deuteronomy 25:13-16 again).
I can understand a certain amount of critique about some aspects of the theory of evolution, provided, of course, that it respects these constraints and approaches the matter honestly. Arguments for a young earth, however, do not even come close.
I don’t think that @mitchellmckain is talking about creation.com in particular here. Rather he’s talking about the kind of people who just see links on their Facebook feeds and share them without clicking through to read them. Which, to be fair, isn’t lying – it’s just being reckless.
Having said that, however, CMI do have plenty bad arguments of their own – and since they are PhD scientists, they should know better. For starters, they claim that radiometric dating makes assumptions that it does not, or that the assumptions that it does make are not testable when in reality they are. And don’t get me started on accelerated nuclear decay…
That may be so, but the extent of “evolutionist” distortions falls far, far short of justifying any suggestion that the scientific consensus on the age of the earth could be wrong.
Chris, from this discussion and other similar ones, it seems that arguing science is a dead end. What areas of discussion do you feel would be productive in building fellowship and understanding? What do you think about discussions of differences of interpretation?
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The idea about the pigeonholes is an interesting one, but I’m not the blog author got it quite right with the “positive pigeonholes” of the optimist and the “negative pigeonholes” of the pessimist. I do believe the brain has pigeonholes, but I suspect the origin of them lies in the Dual Process Theory @Mervin_Bitikofer mentions above:
We all have belief systems that help us filter and triage the information that comes into our brains. We couldn’t function if we didn’t triage the data we come across every day. But System 1 uses different filters than System 2, so what happens in a brain where “heart and mind” are balanced is that the brain kind of has to leave some “empty space” in the sorting drawers so the differing needs of heart and mind can (hopefully) be reconciled.
Many scientists and theologians use both sets of filters in their work, so they arrive at conclusions that look different than those derived purely by System 2 filters. As Einstein pointed out, it’s the theory that decides what we can observe, and this applies in both science and theology.
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Perhaps the biggest problem with the pigeonhole theory is that it allows us to dismiss someone who disagrees with us as not having the right pigeonholes to properly understand.
(While assuming of course that we do.)
Does it ever occur to aaanyooone that God is not at variance with Nature? Look at the argument God makes for Himself and Nature - “Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no Gods.”(Gal 4:8)
If God is not “God By Nature” what then is his argument with those others who are not Gods by Nature? In other words, this verse alone serves to demonstrate the fact GOD is BY NATURE, GOD! ANYTHING natural, or considered to be a product of Nature, is placed there by God as a “natural” consequence of His Industry, whether Creation or Evolution.
Wasn’t the tower of babel a very evident act of created Evolution? Every race of MAN different from every other race of Man, with nothing said as to how much time was involved; only that it happened.
Doesn’t Evolution show up in almost every known fact of Creation? Dinosaurs devolving to birds and reptiles?
And all this talk on boards about %-ages of DNA serving to prove relationship by descent? The third day of Creation, the Earth was separated from the waters; doesn’t that show that the waters (seas, oceans) and the dry land had the same shared DNA pool? What would then be the common source for ALL creatures’ DNA? Wouldn’t they all appear to share common Creator?
The reason so many otherwise educated people can’t come to an understanding as to the the common bonds between Creation and Evolution, is the simple fact that they are so much each a part of the other.
Nature uses Evolution to form and modulate Creation, using it’s most powerful tool in its arsenal; GOD!
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Interesting definitions here. I also read some of the article, cited by you elsewhere, regarding postmodernism and how it might have had some influence on YEC thinking…
All good…The article on postmodernism was quite unwieldy, like some child deciding to build an odd structure with blocks (is it Leggos these days??) and the whole thing must balance on the single block on the bottom plus the odd misplaced blocks halfway up the artifice…
In short, I did better looking up a definition of “postmodernism” elsewhere, one which somewhere along the way made mention of the Enlightenment, Michael Foucault, and more…
Creationists (the YEC kind) begin with the belief that the Bible is the source for things. We had this discussion last night on a different aspect of the Bible…which ran through the “Satan loves to cast doubt on the Bible” line of thinking. This is not post modern since it does have a commitment to some objective truth (OT), rather than saying that objective truth is influenced by the government or the ruling class (as other writers would claim).
As for the use of pigeonholes — keeping in mind the above OT – that the Bible is the ultimate source – pigeonholes might only develop if someone, while still accepting that the Bible is from God, can accept the small detail that those genealogies in Genesis might not have included literally every successive generation, arguments based on the cultural worldview presented in some biblical passages (for example. Walton’s cosmic temple in Genesis 1) --all of which allow room for an older universe -but - still - created -and -ordered-by- God … plus some “backing down” by more secularistic or even atheistic types who take a hard position in the other direction and say evolution removes the need for God. This other group also has its own OT — but we can argue on how “O” the O really is, I suppose.
I suppose you can argue that one or the other group – is less postmodern in its thinking , than that it has a commitment to something that even “modernism” (when it was modern) overlooked. At least, that is my take on it all.
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This “lurker” would like to say that there isn’t a wasted word on this forum. Even if the conversations seem to be redundant or not productive. My understanding of the Bible has been changed pretty radically since my first visit.
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