Good and bad conclusions from theory of evolution

Faith & Science Conversation
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It is unfortunate that discussions may at times become heated disagreements, although I have come to a better understanding (I hope) of why this occurs - my take is more with dealing in terms such as theistic evolution or “evolution is how God did this and that…” are the basic causes for disagreements we witness in this thread. Such a move to some of us is too far, as this sounds more like theology (more like ideology) and not science. I have used the somewhat humorous analogy, that of theistic chemistry or theistic physics as a counter. I am sure that if anyone decides to proclaim that chemistry shows God’s activities, he would be laughed out of the laboratory.

The central theme to me is that we understand God through revelation, with the ultimate one being Christ. Theories of the physical sciences are human constructs and are the business of the respective scientists. I can understand to some extent how a non-Christian may or may not appreciate the distinction, but to some of us, the distinction is important, whatever the topic (EC,TE, YEC, etc.,)

Those who are for or against the theory accepted by most biologists are to me at least, making irrelevant arguments.

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So the opening question is invalid? From the premiss of evolution are there true and false conclusions? Period. That question cannot be asked here? By Christians? Why? Because God? The concept of understanding of God through revelation cannot be looked at from an evolutionary perspective? By Christians? Admittedly the worst, falsest conclusion from evolution here is that since the emergence of behavioural modernity, psychologists, social scientists, sociologists, anthropologists have been seeing continuing organic evolution affect their subjects. I’m not aware of any significant mutations that could explain what is easily explained by history. Lactose intolerance isn’t significant to the capabilities of the human mind. Now alcohol dehydrogenase!

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Overall, the thread has focused on the misapplication of evolution to social, philosophical, and theological issues. Such misapplication is quite common and popular, but basically boils down to “evolution supports my personal agenda”.

Scientifically, there have been a variety of improvements and corrections to ideas about evolution over time. Lamarckian evolution, and to a lesser extent, Darwin’s version, tended excessively towards an overly gradualistic, constant rate, reflecting the popular “Enlightenment” approach of imposing a simple formula on something despite other evidence. Ideas about what is more primitive (in the sense of matching ancestral forms) versus advanced can be incorrect. The only instance I know of that fits the popular young-earth caricature of layers being assigned an order based on the perceived evolutionary sequence of the fossils was wrong - in the late 1800’s Otto Meyer decided that the fossils pointed to the Vicksburgian being older than the Jacksonian, and Claibornian youngest, but I don’t know if anyone else believed that at the time, and certainly no one who checked the actual arrangement of the layers believed that.

Ideas that evolution is some sort of “progress” in the sense of getting better in a value sense (as opposed to merely better at achieving a particular biological goal) is a major part of most non-biological misuse of evolution, but it does show up in some biological errors. For example, the idea popular in the first half of the 1900’s of racial senescence, in which particular lineages of organisms were seen as running out of steam and going into dysfunctional mutation on their way out.

For the past 50 years, there has been quite a lot of arguing about the best ways to analyze evolutionary data, often characterized more by “my way is the only way” than by “here are strengths and weaknesses of different approaches”. A similar balance is needed between several other areas, where different factors can have a bigger or smaller effect on any given example.

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Not interested in passing your test or providing you with amusement. I’m only interested in conversation with peers while you seem to prefer talking down to people. With luck you’ll get some insight into what motivates this behavior. I’m out.

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Who’s us? Don’t include me in your baseless presumption.

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One mo’ tarm.

I’m no outsider.

The lack of reference to culture in my extraction of terms from your comment is because you didn’t mention it.

What interests theologians is literature about God propositions. McLuhan’s a good Roman. I wouldn’t touch Craig with a bargepole, he’s not in the same league as Kierkegaard (whom I mustn’t mention) and Barth, both of whom address the heart of the head, just like the Desert Fathers, there are leagues between he and they. He’s not even fit to unloose Platinga’s who isn’t fit to unloose theirs.

Hearts and minds is a literary and analytical perichoresis in which evolution in all its meanings is essential to theology. And you will not to see that.

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“Not interested in passing your test or providing you with amusement. I’m only interested in conversation with peers while you seem to prefer talking down to people. With luck you’ll get some insight into what motivates this behavior. I’m out.”

Well, to me it looks like you’re “out” because you can’t stand the heat from a new POV, which is what you’re getting from me, who is unique in this conversation, and asking difficult questions of you that you seem to wish to avoid.

“Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about.” – Marshall McLuhan

Thank God for such fools towards saving time! Then let me be at BioLogos a pro-evolution, anti-evolutionistic “fool”! :hugs:

Using the analogy of theology as a mountain, it seems fit to speak of (at least) “two types of people” as mountain-climbers or non-mountain-climbers. One type of person has begun climbing the mountain. They have laced up their boots, their have the right equipment and supplies. They prepared themselves accordingly according to the teachings of experienced climbers. [They are not “evolving” onto the mountain randomly or blindly.] They are ready to intentionally (try to) ascend the mountain, with whatever ability and gifts they were given in life, step-by-step, following their “spiritual calling” or “vocation”. They keep going and don’t turn back their entire lives!

There is a second category of people who, usually self-admittedly, have not begun climbing the mountain yet, and often reject or simply refuse to accept that they personally have a “spiritual calling” or “vocation” in their life to climb the mountain. Or, they may be planning to climb the mountain one day and now actually be planning for that. They may have started preparing to climb the mountain, and just not have yet begun. They could have prepared and even gone directly to the mountain, in readying to climb the mountain some day eventually. None of this means they’re yet “on” the mountain, though, or actually doing any mountain climbing. Here is where they may talk of others climbing or who climbed the mountain, but they simply won’t tell you what it’s like to climb the mountain personally, because they haven’t tried, or tried a few hundred meters, and came back down to “think” it over again. It is they themselves who will tell you this if they are openly engaging.

“I doubt if I’m the only one here who thinks ‘mind’, ‘self’ and morality fits within an entirely natural world.”

This is something you shouldn’t so easily doubt. I’d say there are no Abrahamic monotheists here who believe that, since your implication appears to be that “natural world” = “non-theistic world”, and none of us believe that. Did you read the Scripture passages cited above? If so, what did you find there?

I asked: “Do you believe “belief in God evolved naturally without Divine Creation” , or that “without Divine Revelation, people wouldn’t believe in God, regardless of the process of ‘change-over-time’ in human history since Creation”?”

This is one of the questions you have refused to answer to me. Yet, you would answer others in a way that already answers my question, so I believe this does suffice to show which of the two “positions” you hold, even if you wouldn’t directly answer here in this thread.

Your answer in Antoine’s thread indicates that you believe “belief in God evolved naturally without Divine Creation”. This is indeed the default ideologically naturalistic position of the field of “evolutionary religious studies”, which posits that “religion arose naturally”, including belief in God, without God actually existing. According to them, people just made God up, rather than being made (for relationship) by God! In short, it fundamentally embraces the “delusion” accusation against religion and God by people like Richard Dawkins, which admittedly isn’t something I’m good at humouring and cuddling up to.

It’s not like you haven’t done this before when you come up against views that don’t match with yours here, Mark.

“FWIW, I have no intention to engage you @Dale on any of your posts in this thread. It isn’t anything you have written many times before.” – Mark (recent days at BioLogos)

FWIW, that’s certainly NOT the case with me. There are vast realms to explore than haven’t been explored at BioLogos yet, and topics that I haven’t written about here before. I keep introducing new things here for people to try on a regular basis, and they rarely follow the trails, so I drop off posting again (or get put on pause for saying in genuine astonishment, “how haven’t you seen that trail yet?!”).

Boring to me, is when someone keeps doing the same things and expects a different result. Boring is confident individualistic agnosticism that thinks others care ever so hyper-deeply about their OWN “creative personal worldview”, which meanwhile steadfastly refuses to explore the “Someone”, not just the “something” out there. Of course there’s “something” out there, Mark! The key question is and always has been: is there Someone who loves you also?

With “agnostics” who show only “token” interest in any personal action or striving to learn and grow “spiritually”, my patience soon runs out. So, it seems wanting to say “I’m out” is nearly mutual with you, Mark. Yet meanwhile I would never give up hope in you. :pray: Please don’t forget that.

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Yeah, the fallacy of an Appeal to Consequences. The consequences of a theory,happy or otherwise, have no bearing on its truthfulness.

The OP doesn’t actually go there but it’s an appropriate remark, IMO.

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Overall, the thread has focused on the misapplication of evolution to social, philosophical, and theological issues. Such misapplication is quite common and popular, but basically boils down to “evolution supports my personal agenda”.

Agreed.

One of the agendas that such misapplication of evolution includes, I believe is called “theistic evolutionism” or “evolutionary creationism”. Without acknowledging that theology can also embrace ideology, too much one-sidedness occurs in this “conversation”.

Ideas about what is more primitive (in the sense of matching ancestral forms) versus advanced can be incorrect.

Yes, agreed. They’re making up a “big Gods” narrative to suit their anthropological retelling of theology, not altogether different from August Comte’s “religion of humanity”.

Ideas that evolution is some sort of “progress” in the sense of getting better in a value sense (as opposed to merely better at achieving a particular biological goal) is a major part of most non-biological misuse of evolution, but it does show up in some biological errors.

Yes, this non-biological misuse of evolution draws on biology with faulty metaphors and a narrative that is so outlandish it surprises that some actually believe it. It astonishes me that as an over-reaction to rejecting YECism, the opposite extreme is too often embraced by “liberal evangelicals”, who load up their “theology” with “evolutionary thinking”, leading them into ideological evolutionism, which I take to be a “bad conclusion to [the] theory of evolution” being misused outside of natural-physical sciences.

It just doesn’t make any sense … to join the ranks of Michael Dowd & Connie Barlow remaking (Thank) God (for evolution!) to fit their own private image of ideological evolutionism! Why have evangelicals (sociological category) seemingly lost almost all sense of proportion about this and not done more to warn against it, David? On this topic, I much appreciate your words.

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Yes, it’s a good comment, Adam.

At the same time, I wonder if you also accept that there are multiple “theories of evolution”, not just a single monolithic “THE” theory of evolution. Would you agree?

In that case, one can properly and faithfully challenge and critique the faultiness of, e.g., “evolutionary psychology”, i.e. cultural &/or personal history, while at the same time accepting the “evolution happens” of biology, i.e. natural history. Does that seem appropriate to note also?

Iow, one doesn’t have to be anti-evolution in natural sciences to be ideologically anti-evolutionistic in line with good theological teachings.

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“Those who are for or against the theory accepted by most biologists are to me at least, making irrelevant arguments.”

Couldn’t agree more. Wish this “reverse perspective” were better and more widely known and practised. Thankful you can “see” (experience) it too. :pray:

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That second definition has some potential.

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So psyches didn’t evolve? But evolution is a fact?

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Reverse of what perspective?

The only bad conclusions from evolution are non-scientific, irrational ones starting from either accepting it or denying it. The far right were early adopters, typical of those perverting science through their distorted vision.

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Are you suggesting that the theory(s) of biological evolution provides a meaning essential to our understanding of the Trinity?

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Guys, you will be here a long, long time. Make sure you turn your car engine over occasionally so the battery doesn’t die.

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What theories? Phyletic gradualism without punctuated equilibria or group selection is the theory. Theory as in gravitation, germ, electromagnetic. And yes, of course, the essential, ontological, immanent Trinity uses human socio-biological terms which cannot be universal, unless every intentional life form of the infinite from eternity has fathers and sons which are physically dominant.

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As a non believer, I do find this difficult. Scientific theories about the natural world are indeed just human constructs. Nature knows nothing about our theories nor does she ever show the answer book. We are guessing, as best we can, about what’s going on.

But it seems to me that Divine Revelation also fails to rise above this. I would argue that God is a human construct, along with the idea that he reveals himself in certain ways. If I accept the existence of God, I have no more than a human understanding of what that means. And doesn’t the interpretation of these revelations involve further human constructs? It is up to mankind to figure out what they mean and there is considerable disagreement. In fact most believers do not read their texts in the original language, rather they follow someone’s interpretation as a translation. And finally, isn’t the natural world itself a revelation of its creator? I don’t see how it’s possible to really escape the fallible limits of human knowledge

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Taking these from the end first…

It isn’t.

Amen to that!

Why or how should any human be expected to have anything more than a “human understanding” of anything? Isn’t that, by definition, impossible - divine revelation or not? It seems a bit of a canard against believers to think that, given a divine revelation, they will suddenly have comprehensions that their brains aren’t even designed to hold.

Theistic believers must part ways on that of course, if you insist that God is or can be nothing more than a human construct. But there is considerably more truth in your assertion than most believers are comfortably letting on … that indeed our images of God - even those images mediated by the Bible - will remain human constructs for us as much as they were for them - for better or worse. We can’t seem to get on much without something like a mental image to work with. The trick for us is to somehow avoid letting our mental images pass over into idolatry.

[think of our “God constructs” as being like what models are for scientists. It’s been said that all models are wrong, but some are useful. Just because I have an undoubtedly mostly false image in my head of what an atom is like; it doesn’t therefore follow that atoms are merely my own mental creations and nothing more. Or even that my wrong model was necessarily a bad one as regards helping me toward more accurate understandings.]

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To insist such would be to make a case for atheism which I am not attempting here.

What a thing actually is and what we can know about it are different things. The physical world is not a human construct but the Law of Gravity is. Like any and all human understanding we might have that wrong, at least in part. We can continue to refine and correct our understanding but we never escape the limitations of human knowledge and Nature does not publish the answer key.

Suppose I accept the existence of God, can I hope to do any better epistemologically? I am limited to a fallible human understanding of the matter and you don’t have have to look far to find profound disagreements among believers. An answer key would have helped here too :).

The TOE arose from a careful, intelligent examination of the natural world, which to a believer is an assessment of the handiwork of a creator. Although Darwin had serious doubts on the existence of God, such a theory could just as well have been formed in the mind of a believer.

I ask then, how does this differ from the understanding that a believer attains after thoughtful examination of scriptures and other matters. Even if I conceded that there are real revelations from a real God, your understanding of them is limited in the same way.

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