The Perils and Promise of Preaching the God of Two Books | The BioLogos Forum

Faith & Science Conversation
25

@Patrick

Thank you for your comment.

It reminds me of Dennett’s (if I recall correctly) two models of change: The Sky Hook or Crane.

The Sky Hook is God guiding evolution from above while the Crane is a materialist view which guides from below.

Now the theist sees evolutionary change as designed and guided by God or top down in this scheme. The Darwinist sees it bottom up. They do have two differing points of view and if those were the only two choices, I would agree with you, but they are not.

Theologically I cannot limit God to only one way of doing things. The Triune understanding if God does not lock God into one mode of operation. On the other hand materialistic monism locks nature into one simple mode which is a serious weakness of that point of view. Also dualism encourages this either/or kind of thinking which limits the theistic thinking.

That is why I prefer ecological evolutionary change, because it is holistic. It is not simply bottom up or top down but it works both bottom up and top down, and horizontally as well.

Ecological evolution is led upwards by adaption to climate and geographic change. It is pushed from below by mutations and other kinds of variations. It is directed horizontally by adaption to other living creatures. Ecology gives evolution the complexity, diversity, and direction that simple genetic change does not.

While Dennett’s model of a Crane does give those opposed to a theological point of view a place to hang their hats, it does have serious problems.

  1. It (like Selection) is taken out of a human context. We are not talking about a natural crane (that is the bird), we are talking about a machine made by and used by humans for building, This crane does not occur spontaneously in nature, but is a product of rationality and design. How can we say that evolution is not a product of rationality and design if our model of it is itself the product of rationality and design.

  2. The purpose of the Crane is to demonstrate that a top to bottom movement is not needed, but the purpose of a crane is to lift something up off of the ground. It is like saying that we can lift ourselves up by our own boot straps and then using a crane to actually do the lifting.

  3. A crane is a piece of machinery that requires persons to actually make it work. People do not use cranes to make evolution work. God can use cranes, that is mechanisms, to make evolution work, like genetic change, climate change, geological change, but no one else can to my knowledge.

By the way this is why we need as broader definition of nature than is commonly used. We already have it in that since evolution is a part of nature and humans are a product of evolution by the thinking of most people.

26

You may be correct that it might be possible to harmonize science with faith but to what end? Science moves rapidly in all directions. Just to keep up in one field is a difficult task even for one in that field. Science keeps branching and branching, new discoveries every day from all over the world. So it becomes more and more difficult to keep the harmonization going, as it would always be just one tiny discovery away for disharmony again. What I am saying is that if science and faith be harmonized at a particular time, it would be unstable as a new discovery immediately disturbs the harmory.

You mention evolution with the notion of creation. A new result tomorrow would break today’s harmony. Efforts to harmonize would be temporary at best. New results in physics, chemistry, biology, genetics, geology, space science and even psychology can change the harmonization process just like Galileo, Darwin, Einstein and anyone doing scientific research can.

So why is it relevant to pursue?

27

@Patrick

There are a number of reasons why to harmonize science and faith.

I think that the primary one is to make life rational. What the New Atheism is doing is saying that life and reality are irrational, which is untrue. When we separate body, mind, and spirit, we destroy the meaning and rationality of life. If you think life has no meaning, maybe that is okay, but when we destroy life, then we have a problem.

The way I see it, by attacking the rationality of life and faith, people, who say they believe in science, are pushing those, who want to honor science, but cannot accept that life is without purpose and reason, into the arms those of fanatics who oppose science for their own reasons.

In politics and much of life is politics only a fanatic or ideologue attacks potential friends and allies. Science needs all the friends and allies it can find including rational people of faith.

29

Biologos strength is its ability to explain recent scientific results mainly in the field of genetics. They do a great job of this. But outside of genetics, they are rather weak. So I don’t think that they can claim to be harmonizing faith with all of science. To be fair, no organization can harmonize all of science with faith, as science is way too broad and advancing in all directions all the time. The main problem with harmonizing science with faith is that science is very broad and advancing rapidly.
How to do harmonize the discoveries of diversity of bird genomes AND the precision of Cosmic Background Radiation measurements AND geology and palenotology and chemistry and …with
Faith? It is too big to harmonize. If Biologos do harmonize it in one subject area like genetics, another subject area will quickly disrupt the harmonization again.

We live in 2015 with science advancing all around us. How a person makes sense of the world around them has to be done with today’s knowledge looking towards the future.

30

Can’t a person have a life full of purpose and meaning without faith of any kind?

31

I appreciate Mr. Hunters candor and willingness to stretch his congregation. Sadly, I do not see in my area too many preachers who are willing to deal with a christian perspective on evolutionary creationism. The Scriptures do teach of a historic Adam and Eve and Paul emphasizes “in Adam” we all sinned and “in Christ” we become new creatures. The new Adam is far superior to the old Adam. This is an integral part of Paul’s theology so whatever our findings on human genetics we can still hold to a historic couple although there may bit a more nuanced perspective that we may have to take into consideration. As far as I am aware the Scriptures do not preclude other ‘humans’ who may have been out and about (who were the others that Cain was afraid of?) Some biblical scholars have offered some reasonable theories of what this may look like but we as Christians may have to deal with some ambiguity and mystery. I am speaking here as an amateur in both theology and science but hopefully a somewhat informed layperson.

32

@Patrick

Not too long ago according to the coverage in the Boston Globe, a graduate student at Harvard wrote a long paper on Nietzsche and then shot himself in the head on the Widener Library steps on Yom Kippur. He was ethnically Jewish. He left a note calling this event an “experiment in nihilism.”

It would seem that his answer to your question is No, to which I would agree. Everyone needs faith that cannot be proven in something, ourselves, our family, science, humanity, money, God, philosophy, something which gives meaning and purpose to his or her life.

33

Sad story about an apparently very troubled man. I totally disagree that everyone needs faith in order to live a purposeful and meaningful life.

34

@Patrick

Why are you judging him by calling his death a “sad story” and him “apparently troubled?”

There was no evidence that he was troubled, just evidence that he found out that life has no purpose or meaning?

It is not rational to live a life that has no rational purpose or meaning, so the rational thing is to end it, correct? You and I might disagree, but how does that make his a sad story?

35

It is a sad story because here was a life that could have had purpose and meaning. If he could have defined a purpose for his life he could have done some good for someone and himself.

36

@Patrick

I think I have found something very interesting about this discussion. Your side, at least Jerry Coyne, seems to object to faith because it inserts the “subjective,” into Reality. You on the other hand seem to day that human Reality is purely subjective. Thus you maintain the dualist Western point of view by dividing it into objective science and subjective purpose of life.

Christians generally make a division also but in a different manner. Science is primarily objective and secondarily based on faith and logic, while Theology is primarily based on faith and logic and secondarily on objective experience.

There are real conflicts here. You reject the idea that life has objective meaning and yet you believe implicitly that it does. On the other hand you reject that Faith has an objective aspect which is exactly what Christians say it does.

You reject faith impinging into objective science, and we reject your view of science telling theology what is true and false about life which is not the purview of science as you define it.

You say that the suicide of the Harvard grad student was a sad story because his life could have has purpose and meaning. You say that he did not define a purpose for his life, however he did.

As I said he wrote a long dissertation length paper in what he sought to define the rational purpose for his life. The indication of his actions was that life has no rational purpose as you have said, so he chose the rational alternative which was to commit suicide.

His definition of the purpose for his life and doing good was to speak the truth about life by writing a paper and committing suicide. If life does have real objective meaning, he was wrong and his life is tragic example of the power of false ideas and dualism between faith and reality.

Now you say that if he had lived he could have done some good for himself and others. How do you define “good,” and from whence does this come from? The notions of good in our culture come from the Western Judeo Christian tradition. If you lived in a Hindu or Confucian or Islam culture you would have a different understanding of what is good. How we define good is based on our faith tradition, so faith and morality are inextricably connected.

You seem to think that life itself is good, so suicide is not good. Our grad student based on nihilism that you say you agree with in some sense came to a different conclusion. Thus he thought that what he was doing was good and right. On what basis do you say he was wrong?

In some sense it seems that you accept the Sartre existentialist point of view. I would be closer to the Tillich’s existentialism. I question if you would accept this analysis, but if you did if might open some possibilities for dialog.

37

No, I said it was a sad story because that is how it made me feel when I read it. It made me sad because I have two sons who are in there mid-twenties and are looking to their life’s meaning and purpose. I inferred that the man in the story was of the same age. So it made me sad and instinctive protective of my sons. It was purely evolved human emotion on my part along with my own morals and cultural norms thrown in.

38

Hi Patrick
From your responses, I gather that you picture science as moving rapidly in all directions in the pursuit of knowledge and Truth, while faith tries to follow along behind, re-interpreting fixed dogma to make it more compatible and harmonious. To some extent, I agree. But there are some very important exceptions; for example, the appearance of the first true humans.

Darwin meticulously gathered evidence indicating that very small changes in genetic endowment, mostly random and acted on by natural selection, produced the marvelous variation seen in the biosphere. He published this in “Origin of Species” and generously acknowledged that Alfred Russell Wallace should share equally as co-discoverer. He delayed some dozen years before publishing “Descent of Man”, which maintained that the unique capabilities of humans were also acquired in this gradual, mostly contingent fashion. Of course Darwin knew that this position greatly disturbed the faith of his wife, Emma, but he probably was more reluctant knowing that Wallace was decidedly unconvinced that humans, who he believed were made in God’s image, could have appeared on the scene gradually.

Recent anthropological evidence, as interpreted by Diamond, Tattersall, Morris and Dawkins, seems to support Wallace over Darwin; i.e. that it was some epigenetic change that suddenly produced modern humans from a population of Homo sapiens who lacked the advanced culture evidenced by the Cro-Magnon people.

Science proceeds by the careful analysis of evidence accumulated following some initial lead. Sometimes it is a ‘gut feeling’ (or faith) that motivates a scientist to pursue a lead that at first looks unpromising. Some important discoveries come at the cost of ‘swimming against the current’.
Al Leo

39

Al,
I too am very interested in what makes us human. This is a 100% scientific pursuit. Yes, faith can tag along behind and agree or disagree along the way, but science will continue to extract knowledge and truth. I enjoy reading about your ideas. They are very scientific as they try to fit with the most recent results of geology, genetic, and archaeology. I commend you on doing “good” science as you look at the data before you formulate an opinion. And, most importantly, you are willing to say “I don’t know” That gives you purpose to keep looking, to keep exploring.

I have a question for you. Given that my genome and your genome both contain both Neanderthal and Denovisan sequences, when you say what makes us human, are you referring to the eight or so members of the human genus Homo or are you referring to the only living species of this genus - homo sapians?

40

Hi Patrick

When I am viewing with 'biological ‘spectacles’, I define ‘human’ as a primate possessing Homo sapiens genes, even if a few DNA sequences of the Neanderthal and Denisovian are also present. When I switch to ‘religion spectacles’, I add the epigenetic requirement of symbolic comprehension, including ability to communicate abstract ideas through language (or at least the potential to do so.) I am aware that this gives me more ‘wriggle room’ than a scientific definition should have, but it implies that historically humanity began with the Cro Magnon culture. It also implies that each child entering this world is of immense value for its potential to become fully human, but it must be taught by members of society to achieve that condition. This hypothesis was investigated in the past by attempts to raise orphaned children without human contact–attempts that always failed; or by the tales of children raised by wolves. In a way the Catholic church recognizes that ‘full humanity’ is reached at the ‘age of reason’ when one becomes morally responsible for personal sins and needs to confess them. The story of Helen Keller is instructive in this regard. At the age of 19 months an illness deprived her of hearing and sight. She had already acquired the barest of what human culture had to offer, but was left in a sort of limbo. It was only when Anne Sullivan broke through and taught her through touch to visualize the world of symbols was she able lead a fully human life.
Al Leo

41

Your definition of humanness is more cultural, psychological, and neurological than biological or genetic. So when we talk of differences with regard to genes and genomes, these are all just different primates. So the eleven species of Australopithus and the eight species of homo were different from you and I not so much from a biological/genetic sense but from a cultural, psychological, neurological sense? Ok I can accept this definition, as clearly I can survive in my 2015 urban environment much better than an Australopithecus, a Neanderthal, or my great grandfather. But with this definition, when did I become human? Did I become human at First Holy Communion when I doubted the reality of Transubstantiation? (I was only seven, but something in my brain said, “no, that can’t be true”)
I think you are trying to harmonize specifics of your faith into modern science of the evolution of the mind. Dawkins talks about memes, is this where you are going? The mind of a 19 years old in 2015 urban United States is genetically and biologically the same as a 19 year old Cro Magnon of France 40,000 years ago but they would have vastly different views as to what is moral or “sinful”. Well maybe not. :slight_smile:

42

Just throwing this out …
People have faith in science in that we believe science will show us how things work out logically, and have sensible explanations we only need to discover, once probed long enough.
This “faith” being discussed here, I think is a faith in a reason for science. ( Christians choose their creator God the Father, as the reason )
Faith verses science? Not sure about pitting the two against one another.

43

Marlene,
I won’t use the words “faith in science”. Faith is pretending to yourself and others that you know something that you really don’t know. Science on the other hand starts by admitting you don’t know something and you want to find out what is really true. Faith starts with pretending you really know something is true when you also know that there is no evidence of its truth or existence. This usually comes through childhood indoctrination. Science is based on evidence, testability, and falsification. Faith and science are opposites. Science go after the unknown, faith accepts the unknown or unknowable as real and true without any evidence.