Thats a helpful summary for me of the Modern Synthesis, as I’m picking it up mostly as I go. A recent discussion about a possible correlation between the Avalon explosion and a near total loss of the magnetosphere opened up for me a new fascination with biochemistry. This audiobook is a great intro if anyone is intetested
Yes indeed. Coming at it from a philosophical perspective, I like to point out that we are contingent in being (human consciousness is an emergent phenomenon) and necessary with respect to our action. When Chat GPT first came out, I got an interesting response when I asked it, “Would determinism be false if a single person is able to cause a single action?”
Hi David. Thanks. I don’t have time to watch the entire video. Can you indicate a time stamp, or say what “the point” that Dawkins was silent on was? If “the point” is a philosophical interpretive one, i.e. not testable by methodological naturalism, then it could be appropriate that Dawkins was silent. In other words, the scientific method is not intended to provide all answers in life, or answer questions of metaphysical control (or not) of material processes.
I will just address one of these references you cite as it is a really obvious mistake that so many TEist make…
Psalm 104 is a poem…is obviously a poem. If you have even a miniscule of literary knowledge, you will clearly recognise why quoting a poem in support of literal reading of that same verses words is wrong!
It’s debatable whether Dawkins was stumped (@46:13) but Noble made a strong point. You would do well listening to Noble for yourself as he is not making ID arguments, but saying to the apparent consternation of evolutionary biologists, “Lamarck is back.”
Proverbs 8 isn’t a poem, Job 38 may be a poem but it’s God speaking, and the same is true of other passages. Since Psalm 104 isn’t saying anything different than what other passages say, dismissing it as being a poem is a fail.
You are ignoring the dilemma,
You cant quote poetry statements such as God set the earth upon immovable foundations to mean the earth is fixed and the sun orbits around it. To be honest…this is a flawed literary line of reasoning, we have poets all over the world who use these techniques, its pointless to continue to use this aegument to support the claim on cannot read Genesis literally. Genesis creation and flood accounts are clearly NOT poetry.
The actual point – since there are other passages which are not poetry which affirm the same thing the Psalm does – isn’t that one can’t read Genesis literally, it’s that YECists only read it literally when it’s convenient. That the word ‘raqiyah’ means a solid dome is ignored along with the Earth being a circle, not a sphere; and that the two Creation stories do not fit together if read literally is also ignored.
So? They’re also clearly not history, besides which scholars cite the first Creation story as a prime example of poetic prose – and if you chart the Flood story, it’s the same thing.
However the point is that every argument that a flat earth is not biblical applies equally to a young earth. If you are insisting that the Bible demands a young earth while at the same time denying that it also demands a flat earth, then you are applying different standards of Biblical interpretation to discussions about the age of the earth and discussions about the shape of the earth.
A little dishonesty at the start: that flat earth view with the sun and moon close in has absolutely nothing to do with the ancient near eastern view.
Nice excursus about eretz!
OMG they use Isaiah 66:1?!?! That tramples on the context; it’s a worship/temple context, so the footstool is an indication of the deity is resting in the temple.
“Pillars” in 1 Sam. 2:8 – that’s a creative interpretation. As for the “pillars of heaven”, yes, that means the mountains that they thought the solid sky-dome rested on (note to modern flat-earthers: the Bible’s flat Earth doesn’t have ice all around, it has mountains! Job 9:6 talks about the Earth shaking; the pillars here can’t be dismissed as metaphor, it’s a part of the ancient cosmology the chapter is referencing – and he skips that. He also has to really ignore the context to make Job 38 not be talking about actual pillars since the whole context is ancient cosmology!
He’s totally off base with Proverbs 8, which is referencing Genesis all the way starting a v. 22. “Drew a circle on the face of the deep” is a reference to the division of the waters into above and below the solid sky-dome – that dome made a circle where it pushed aside the waters, which is obvious because the next like mentions the solid sky!
He gets dishonest again when talking about the four corners of the Earth – the image he shows has absolutely nothing to do with the ancient near eastern cosmology! It’s interesting that he mentions that the “corners of the Earth” may well actually indicate “quadrants of the Earth”; that’s one I bumped into in grad school. I don’t know it it’s made it into any of the newer lexicon editions or newer lexicons, but it fits with the passages I’m aware of without looking as well as in ANE thought.
He’s apparently ignorant of anything about the ancient near eastern culture that Israel was immersed in; halfway through he is still using the modern flat earth image instead of the one that lies behind Genesis.
Psalm 136 is another passage that is referring back to Genesis; he has to really stretch to ignore that according to Genesis 1 there are waters above the Earth and below it both.
Exodus 20:4 – he’s right that it means the oceans, though he doesn’t get the reason correct: תַּחַת can indicate location or place and in fact be translated as “place”; so a better translation is “the water from its place by the Earth”.
In the end, though, he says the same thing that I do: that the Bible uses the ancient near eastern flat Earth-disk under a solid sky-dome does not mean that it teaches a flat Earth, it only means that the Old Testament writings used the worldview the people back then were familiar with, including that mytho-cosmology. The cosmology is not part of what the scripture teaches, it is just background so the people knew what the writer was talking about.
Most definitely. I think that’s strengthened by the fact that the video Adam linked to does not agree with literalism in the least – he’s using something that actually undermines young-Earth thinking.
Hi @klw. I suppose see heymike3s response. I would reiterate that Noble is not attacking evolution, or even evolution as a natural process. He is saying that Lamarckian ideas seem to have much more validity than the Modern Synthesis has proposed. For instance, he says that Darwin himself was interested in the function of “gemmules” that could be passed from parent to offspring and influence the next generation. For Dawkins, this is “6th edition” Darwin, not the “pure” Darwin of the original Origin of Species. Noble says the research shows unequivocally that Darwin, if not precisely right in his hypothesis of how inheritance worked, was onto something that we can now demonstrate.
My move away from young earth creationism began when I went to space camp as a Junior High student and encountered fellow space nerds in the wild for the first time. At the time, I was so sheltered within the bubble of my church community that I assumed that most real scientists rejected evolution as unscientific and that the scientific community was on the verge of embracing YEC once some materialist ideologues in the scientific community finally died. I was quite surprised when the other science-minded kids on my team strongly disagreed with my young earth creationist views. This inspired me to investigate criticisms of young earth creationism. Surprisingly it wasn’t a very emotional experience Once I was convinced of the evidence, I was able to easily shift to the view that the Big Bang, solar-nebular hypothesis, evolution, etc., were just the way that God created the universe. In my investigation, I realized that scientists actually had very reasonable answers to YEC objections to evolution and deep time and that scientists were not saying, for the most part, that you need to reject your faith to accept the science of evolution. I also found myself increasingly fascinated by the history of the universe and the history of life on earth and the possibility that it could be true seemed more exciting than frightening to me. Over the course of the next year, young earth creationism just seemed less and less likely to be true. This led me to look into old creationism and theistic evolution. My church and family reacted more strongly than I had expected. I had an apologetics club with other youth in the church at the time that ended up getting shut down by our youth pastor because I was teaching “confusing ideas” about creation. I did not lose my faith because of abandoning YEC, but it did take a while to recover the seamless intertwining of science and the Bible which I had seen in the world as a young earth creationist. As far as I was concerned, science and faith were reconciled. Now that I could not say that the Grand Canyon was the result of Noah’s flood for example, I had to find new ways to connect the Biblical narrative and what I saw in the universe. I would say overall, however, my faith and theology has only been enriched by embracing what modern science has to tell us about God’s creation.
