Is it dangerous to teach evolutionary theory to children?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Evolution does not predict - in any way - that chimpanzees are ancestral to us (!). We share a common ancestral population in the past. That’s like saying that modern Italian came from modern Spanish. Nope - modern languages share ancestral populations of speakers in the past.

FWIW, the folks that dispute the evidence for common ancestry do it for religious reasons, not for scientific ones - there really is no other way to put it.

Greg, if you’d like, I’d be happy to send you a copy of my recent book, free of charge. It lays out the genetic evidence for common ancestry. If you are willing to read it, I will send you one. :slight_smile:

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Read that again. I don’t throw AIG under the bus. From what I have gathered, Ken Hamm is not a lover of money. He makes a good salary but less than usual for running this size organization. (170k I think and this is public info) The ARK project on the back of donors who wanted it and was otherwise a financial risky move by AIG. I know several guys on staff with AIG and they are really great guys who all live modest lives and some who have to rely on hunting deer to feed their families! I kid you not. They pursue holiness before their God and have formed a backbone of the leadership in our church which has never been a thrust- young -earth- creationism- down your -throat type of thing but a reverence to God and the Bible focus.

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@grog

Again, you don’t seem capable of understanding the purpose of BioLogos. People like me support BioLogos because it can show Christians unhappy with the anti-science attitudes of their churches that there is a way to accept the findings of Science and to be a devoted Christian.

Old Earth Creationism can be helpful at times (for example, why don’t you accept the arguments of the Old Earth Creationists, @grog?) - - but they reject an awful lot of Evolutionary science. And this is part of the pattern.

I.D. supporters, one would think, would be in the very same wagon with the BioLogos folks. It seems the reason they are not is that precious few of them believe in Speciation by means of God’s use of Evolution. There are some notable exceptions, but for some reason, few people follow their example. And so we mostly encounter I.D. supporters who oppose Speciation by Evolution - - whether God is doing or not. It’s most puzzling.

I believe you are one of those, yes?

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Thanks for the offer Dennis. I see your bio- I traveled through British Columbia on the way to work at a Bible camp in Alaska after graduating from college years ago. Beautiful there! Stunning. We clocked a cow moose running next to our car…It was running-if my memory serves me correctly-over 35 mph.

If your book is anything like this article:
http://biologos.org/blogs/dennis-venema-letters-to-the-duchess/biological-information-and-intelligent-design-meyer-yarus-and-the-direct-templating-hypothesis

then it would be a waste of you time sending it to me because I would not understand it. I have never been impressed with high tech language books or articles on anything related to understanding how we got here. It is not because I am dumb. It is because in the almost 50 years of my life, the folks who become so focused on small details in almost anything in life and who want to spew out language that suggest that they know better than others on a topic because they are so keen on such and such details are usually the ones who appear to me to be missing the forest for the trees in that area. I have never met you to discern this, but would be interested to hear(if possible) in plain language genetic evidence for common decent. I would want to hear in plain language how this evidence provides definitive scientific proof that ALL OF LIFE came from a common decent and how this evidence does not fit into a model of already created kinds created by God with the ability to adapt. Do you have a resource that can do this? Can you give a resource recommendation that would help? Can you help me to understand if you have approached the topic of our arrival on this planet in a holistic way, borrowing from areas like statistics, logic, philosophy and most importantly, the Bible.

And by the way, what is wrong with rejecting common ancestry for religious reasons? I assume that you are a Christian?? The faith in God that I follow is one of belief in a God of miracles that can trumps the natural at any point. This theme runs through the entire Bible. Gideon with too many men to defeat the midianites. Poor orator Moses with baggage assigned to be the leader of the Israelites out from slavery. A gospel that confounds every bit of our pride and human tendency to swaggering and sniveling. A God of wisdom who confounds the wise man in his own eyes. And this leads us to a Creator who is a jealous God who won’t share grounds with the naturalistic religion’s aliens and astroids planting seeds for life. When it comes to determining how life got here, to take a single minded scientific approach is potentially the wrong approach because you have to assume (which is necessarily establishing a system of belief) that science is even capable of making such determinations. Right? If God interacts within the natural at any point, science becomes obsolete. Science that is in the present is fickle (and recently confirmed to me by a med residency student recently who had to stitch up my hand) let alone defining the past is an example of a single tree aspect of determination which may lead to missing the forest of TRUTH that God has established.

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Hi Greg -

That article is one of my more technical ones. Maybe start here, and let me know how it goes. If you find that series useful, then let me know if you’d like the book.

Perhaps one point I’ll say in reply - it is ok that some folks within the body of believers know more about certain things, if they have studied them and have become experts in a certain area. When I need my house wiring done, I call a certified electrician. When I need work done on my teeth, I go to a dentist. So yes, folks like myself, and @glipsnort, and @Swamidass, and others, do know more about the science behind these topics, because we have invested the time to learn about them. We can serve the body of Christ with our skills and knowledge, just like an electrician, a plumber, a dentist, a doctor, and so on.

One of the first things that you’ll see in that series I linked above is that science does not offer proof of anything - it offers converging lines of evidence. Proof is for alcohol and mathematics. :slight_smile:

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These two quotes…

juxtaposed with this quote…

…are quite remarkable.

Greg, you openly stated that you don’t understand the details of much of the scientific research. Yet you also feel supremely qualified to serve as judge of how to interpret that very same evidence…the evidence you just told us you don’t understand.

Do you understand how you’re coming across to your audience, Greg?

If a trial judge announced to the plaintiffs and defendants that he really didn’t understand a whole lot of the evidence, but he was going to make a definitive ruling anyway, how would the parties at law feel?

If a builder said he didn’t really understand the architect’s plans, and he didn’t understand much about the materials he was going to use, and he didn’t know the subs very well…but he said he was going to put together a fine house anyway…would you trust him?

I remind you of what you wrote three months ago:

What I said then is equally true now:

Now you just slandered my kids and their friends, Greg. Before you go any farther down this path, please consider:

  1. All four of my kids worked very hard on their college educations. One pursued a masters degree in music, and is now a soldier-musician in the U.S. Army (101st Airborne). Another got an English degree from Vanderbilt and is working in publishing. Another got a degree from Princeton and is working as an intern with a campus ministry. The baby of the family is right now working on his thesis, a statistical investigation of the Fragile Families data set.

  2. There have been plenty of U.S. students over the past 300 years who have been dissolute and unindustrious. Today’s students have nothing on the eating club habitues described by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  3. How about the college students in your church? Are they into parties and handouts?

Sigh…

I laud these fine brothers in Christ.

If God interacts within medicine at any point, medicine becomes obsolete. But I’ll bet you still go to doctors, even though you’ve experienced miracles.

Why not treat scientists the same way that you treat medical professionals?

You do know, Greg, that there are 2 kinds of naturalism:

  • Methodological naturalism, and
  • Philosophical naturalism

Help me understand what you are saying, then, Greg: Do you think that Christians should push against both types of naturalism, or just one of them? If just one, which one should Christians oppose and which one should Christians accept?

Thanks,

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Wow, is this really Dennis Venema speaking? Could it be that @Relates somehow logged onto Dennis’ account to say this? :wink:

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I was thinking the same thing! :grinning:

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Same experience in med school. It made undergraduate comparative anatomy a little difficult, as I was on the fence about evolution at the time, and evolution is really the basis of comparative anatomy, but no one anywhere ever asked or cared if I accepted evolution throughout school at a state university.

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Greg. I really believe that if more people were willing to take the position that ok, God created kinds, but He did it in a ‘tree of life’ pattern that looks a heck of a lot like common descent, a lot of biology teachers would stop going half so nuts over creationism.

Naturalism is not the point. The point is that the pattern of relationships among all living things has been studied exhaustively, confirmed and reconfirmed and comprehensively established again and again and again for the past hundred and fifty years. It’s not bias, it’s not made up, and everyone who bothers to actually look at living things with an open mind and an eye to detail can confirm it for themselves.

This link is one I highly recommend you read. It gives a very good example of something which holds true across the entire animal kingdom, plus plants and every other living thing we study.

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I am sure that is correct, and feel he and those who work with him are sincere Christians. However, it is always dangerous when his, his sons, his son in law and who knows what other family members are financially dependent on one ministry. I have the same feeling about all the other ministries out there that are family businesses, and there are many, unfortunately. It creates an unhealthy atmosphere.
Also, a lot of times, the real money is in book sales, and speaking engagements. I do not know how AIG handles that, which would be interesting.

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I am so interested in this topic right now! It is so fascinating. This is more than just a scientific discussion. This is a hugely implicating worldview discussion that I believe can become a cause for human kind down the road to evolve into such humanistic mindsets that the very idea of God may will become treachery against intelligence. That is where the world is heading according the prophecy don’t you know.
I read a bunch of stuff on genetics last night and my thinking on these subjects is evolving more towards creationism and less toward materialistic evolution. Dr. Venema’s testimony and belief system is helping me to grips…Everything from his professor at British Columbia extending “grace” to him and his obscure unintelligent creationist views to him deciding that the materialistic pathway for understanding life is more rational in his mind than God’s miraculous interventions. Here is what Dr. Venema says: “As an aside, as a Christian biologist I would be perfectly fine with the answer being either “natural” or “supernatural”. Both natural and supernatural means are part of the providence of God, and the distinction is not a biblical one in any case. Perhaps God set up the cosmos in a way to allow for abiogenesis to take place. Perhaps he created the first life directly—though, as we will see, there are lines of evidence that I think are suggestive of the former rather than the latter.”

I just totally disagree with ever single bone in my body and no amount of fancy scientific sounding language that appears so smart and astute and impressive will convince me otherwise. What Dr. Venema is suggesting is that amoral powers of energy, time, chance and mutation (that God casually put into place) can intelligently create things like interaction between sexual genders for procreation, eyeballs, and brains that can send a signal to the thigh muscle to relax when the ankle starts to bend sideways (I have done this a few times). He believes that God just placed some bacterium of some sort of perfect environment suitable enough for these to grow all the majesty of complexity by chance, time, energy, mutation. This is unbelievably intellectual suicide not to mention that it goes against the grain of the Bible.

He has so focused himself on the trees of scientific detail that he misses the big picture impossibility that such an occurrence could happen! 20 blocks falling by gravity into a fashion of a square block structure of precise dimensions cannot even be assigned a probability even in a trillion years let alone what he is suggesting!

And his worldview will feed his science.

Dr. Venema is telling us Christians in such a marvelously convincing way that, gosh, he is willing to accept God as the creator and miracle worker in the formulation of all complexity but chooses to side with science that suggests that this is more than likely that God’s miraculous interventions are not true and that He just got the magic ball of naturalism started. That is bold. Only God for sure knows hearts, but this appears to be an issue of the clash between the idol of human intelligence and ability of figuring life out which necessitates naturalism and the Christian God who transcends understanding.

I understand the differences between the naturalism types here Chris. The writing on the wall in these discussions to me suggest that the little bit of theology lipstick on an extreme version of methodological naturalistic evolutionary worldview that can fit many different godless ideas on how we got here is as if a back door into evolving human thinking towards full fledged humanism and philosophical naturalism and not towards God creator. This pushes full force against the precept found in Romans 1:20 where God suggests that his creation reveals his eternal power and divine nature, yet Dr. Venema is offering baby steps towards excusing God away from the scene as He finds aliens and asteroids as His competitors as life seed depositors on this earth.

I find it completely insulting to human intelligence that amoral forces of energy, time, chance mutation can create kinds and create animals with differing genders. It is so mind blowingly obviously silly in every fabric of my being that no amount of fancy sounding jargon about genetics and others can convince me. I am reading and re reading the scientific data and in every line I read, I hear godly reason screaming at the top of its lungs that the science is bolstered by the worldview and not the other way around.

I don’t question theisitic evolutionists hearts as true converts and intentions to reach the world for Christ. I do question if you have considered the potential for the dangerous road that many may take from your beliefs. For me personally, if I were to be willing to subscribe to your views, I would quickly succomb to disinterest in worshipping a God of transcendence and may even gradually find nominalism in my faith and disinterest in the Bible. Science books would become my new Bible. And by God’s grace we hope that it is not true that we become surprised one day how many folks who acted really Christian won’t be found in heaven.

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Brotjer Greg,

You have just espoused a very, very serious heresy.

You have advocated that forces at work in our universe are not under God’s providential control:

Consequently, you feel that any scientific theory that describes natural processes in terms of those forces is bound to lead the faithful astray into philosophical naturalism.

Since you feel so strongly about this subject, you had better warn your church to stop listening to those godless, amoral scientists who show up on TV every morning. They are so bold as to describe the rain and the wind entirely as the result of amoral energy, time, and randomness. Don’t wait! Make a Facebook post right now to denounce those heathen weather forecasters. They lead the faithful down the path to philosophical naturalism every morning!

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That is not at all what I suggest. Not even close. It is as simple as this: God as He Creates of kinds of species set into a natural environment to function as they will according to how they were designed makes incredible sense. And God is sovereignly in control of this and He is also attributed as CREATOR. This jives with how people, those designed after His own image work where we design, create, build, construct, fabricate things to work in an environment for which they are needed or wanted.

The idea that a seed placed into amoral space, time and energy to develop into complexity without any help from intelligence is counter intuitive not to mention unbiblical in the highest degree. It would be the equivalent of my placing 400 2x4’s on a construction site and expecting a house in a year…or in a million years. Anyway, this also hints of little need for a Creator for those philosophical naturalists have called the seed planter an asteroid or alien pushing the idea of God so far down the road that He becomes invisible. And I believe that apostacy is more dangerous than downright heresy because apostacy gives the appearance that everything is good when it is very much not, where downright heresy in a day in age of information transmission gets displaced more quickly. Satan comes in the form of an angel of light. That is why I believe the seeker church movement is so dangerous.

All that this resembles is an attempt to fit the mainstream mold developed on the back of philosophical naturalism as you call it and I would dare say not always for god honoring reasons but for worldly and selfish ones.

I sense that you are such a strong believer in Christ that you want to honor Him in seeking truth. This is a complex issue of a clash of worldviews Chris that must be very carefully analyzed because I believe that satan is poking his head into the argument for the purposes of deceiving the elect (as if this were possible Paul would say)

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Ken and his family are paid about $500,000 per year in salary (public info). And this is for a ministry that is currently losing money. Addi in merchandise sales and who knows how high the actual figure would be.

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Can you forward your source? I literally read that he was getting a $170k salary recently. This is a very important area of concern. And I don’t know about AIG’s financial problems. I just talked to a friend on staff with AIG who wants to build a house in KY capable for housing his family and his in-laws. They don’t seem concerned about moving on anytime soon apparently.

But there is a movement right now that is confronting pastors and teachers from profiteering on the back of God’s truth. Even some of my favorite Bible teachers were tending to accept huge book proceeds in the millions while the layperson, if they are implementing true Biblical principle from those books may suffer financial loss in a world hostile to Christ. This disconnect between shepherd and sheep is spoken against strongly by our Savior and is just yet another form of apostacy that has hurt the church significantly. Leaders will be judged more strictly because reason has it, where the leader wants to go so will the sheep.

If I am going to take what appears to be historical narrative in the Bible lightly and as if poetry however, then why would any of us be concerned about the exacting precepts that suggest the importance of Christian leaders towards servant minded financial integrity as they lead the fold? Just sayin’

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That link about “kinds” is one of my favorites! Glad you found it! :slight_smile:

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I would just like to take a moment and state that I greatly appreciate the step toward peaceful dialogue that these sentences represent. “Only God for sure knows hearts,” Greg admits, and he goes on to say, “but this appears to be X.” Later, “For me personally, if I were to subscribe to your views…” This shows a recognition of the subjective nature of his statements, and a willingness to understand that the rationale that he imagines drives others may be just that, and may not be the actual rationale that drives them. I dunno… for me, that’s a pretty big step in a positive direction.

In all sincerity,
AMW

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I couldn’t make it through the first 30 min. of that movie. Does that call my salvation into doubt? haha

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Google “is ken ham rich” His total compensation package is reaching nearly $200,000.