So Richard Dawkins doesn’t actually do research on the origins of life. Nor is he the official spokesperson for scientists of any sort. Nor would it exactly be any evidence for God if we don’t (yet) have a scientific explanation. How do you figure this is not a god-of-the-gaps argument @SWilling?
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I think the current status of origin of life research is being oversold. Hugh Ross and Fuz Rana attended the 2017 ISSOL International conference and reported it on it in a podcast and a blog post. Fuz Rana in particular is the expert on this, so I suppose if one wants to challenge his take, I’m sure he’ll respond on the RTB site or Twitter.
Not that I’m utterly ignorant here. My MD required a year of graduate biochemistry that I took in the late 70’s. Origin of life is a biochemical question. (Though if there were a plausible explanation, Dawkins would be all over it). In the 150 years since Darwin, many generations of researchers have come and gone. According to the reporting from the 2017 ISSOL, we’re no closer to explaining life’s origin.
The “god-of-the-gaps” issue piques my curiosity. While historically, supernatural causes were hypothesized to explain phenomena, these ideas were almost never used as evidence for existence of the supernatural. The term didn’t appear until the late 1800’s, and it was coined by Christians.
The explanations we discover are more descriptions than explanations. We are better at describing gravity than explaining it. So, mass bends space? How does that work? The standard model of physics with 25 fundamental particles and 19 separate and precise mathematical constants is a great, empirically validated description, but how do we account for that? So far, no evidence for string theory. And if we could prove string theory, then what? Why is faith that science will someday (but not in my lifetime) explain something not science-of-the-gaps?
Where I hear “god-of-the-gaps” invoked most often is Paley’s argument from design. So far as I can see, the argument has only gotten stronger over the last two centuries as the amount of “design” to be explained has grown exponentially.
If someone disagrees with RTB’s reporting of the 2017 ISSOL, please provide sources (or better, take it up with them - though I’d still like to see it).
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Occam’s razor? If the universe appears to have been designed, perhaps the simplest argument is that it was.
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The idea that science will some day be able to answer all questions is not one supported by science. That would be unjustified confidence in the powers of human beings to wield science. We probably won’t know the limits of science in our lifetimes. But should we assume that every how or why question which science cannot answer implies a default answer based on God’s intention? If so, why? Perhaps this is unjustified confidence in the powers of human beings to know the mind of God. Maybe it is better simply to admit what we do not yet know?
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The most convincing arguments for YEC would be either a) a geocentric universe or b) no stars beyond 6,000 light years.
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I would mostly agree with this statement in the sense that I think one can have faith in some kind of ultimate first cause type of being or just accept the universe and the way that it works as a brute fact to be accepted. However the part that I strongly disagree with is when Christians point at something we do not yet have an explanation for and then consider that to be a positive argument for ID or Creationism of some kind.
I wrote up a few thoughts on the forums a little while back but find it absurd that RTB will claim all 'naturalistic explanations have been ruled out forever. I also think its a false dichotomy to contrast a scientific explanation (which RTB calls 'materialistic or ‘naturalistic’) with their hypothesis that God spontaneously formed the first self-replicating life. I compared their approach with one by someone who is an active research on abiogenesis and is a Christian who had written a recent article for BioLogos:
As for a specific scientific critique I think becoming familiar with the OoL literature is really important, as well as source criticism (that is comparing the claims in sources with what the RTB article says vs. other publications in the fields).
Nobody ever said that.
Really??? I thought I was the only one selling this. A lot of things have been oversold certainly. Socialism and Communism definitely. Chiropractics to be sure. Democracy probably. Christianity pretty much. All of these promised way way more than they ever delivered. By contrast science has been consistently undersold, finding out more about the universe than ever expected and improving our lives way beyond what anybody dreamed. How about research on the origin of life? Never heard any promises that this was going to be solved. I have always heard that this was one of the unsolved mysteries that we may never figure out. It is simply my own assessment that significant developments and paradigm shifts have been coming recently that suggest to me that a working theory of abiogenesis is not too far in the future.
Hugh Ross and Fuz Rana are creationists, though of the old earth variety.
It flows rather naturally from those translations of 1 Cor 15:44-50 which use the word “natural” rather than “physical” in contrast to “spiritual” for describing the resurrected body. The point is that “physical” obviously has more than one meaning, not just “bodily” which Paul asserts applies to the resurrection even though He tells us that it is a “spiritual body” and not a “physical body.” The problem seems to be that too many people equate “spiritual” with abstract and intangible, despite the fact that God is spirit who is the most real of anything. This is probably due to a pagan Neo-Platonic equivalence of spirit with things of the mind. So in line with the translation of the word in 1 Cor 15:44-50 as “natural” using the word “supernatural” in place of “spiritual” seems to counteract some of the problems with the word “spiritual.”
The “god of the gaps” type argument is VERY well defined. This is an argument that counts on things which science hasn’t discovered yet but which is exactly the sort of thing science excels at explaining. This is a very foolish loosing battle as science relentlessly closes such gaps and explains these things and far more than we even expected. But what in the world can a “science of the gaps” mean except as an empty swing back by those who put their “God” of human rhetoric in opposition to science. What “gap” pray tell has been closing on the front of religious discovery? LOL It is hard to even say that without laughing, since religion is manifestly far more about dogmatically clinging to old beliefs rather than discovering anything. And I can speak pejoratively about religion as a Christian since, frankly, Jesus and the Bible do the same.
As for RTB, links are not working. But perhaps the problem with RTB is that their reasons to believe are not my reasons to believe and why should they be?
Not entirely. In fact, probably not even mostly. Say rather that they (Jesus, and the many other voices heard) often speak of various proponents of certain religions pejoratively (Scribes and Pharisees as the short-fallen representatives of Judaism, and young Christians as the often wayward representatives of the fledgling Christian faith). To be sure, Paul really lays into would-be “Judaizers” at various points, but (apart from denigrating it as rubble compared to knowing Christ) we don’t know that he outright denounced it, and he still saw essential value in the law as long as law didn’t try to assert itself over the new work of the Spirit. James feeds us a couple criteria for measuring the benefit of religions, but doesn’t denounce them all en masse.
But the people claiming to follow religions? … yes, it does seem that most everywhere in the Bible it was open-season on them! It would seem you (we) are in good company there (as critics anyway). The critic’s fun may cool somewhat though when their own eyes are “treated” to a mirror.
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That’s kind of the implications of:
What does an “at least mildly oxidizing” atmosphere imply about the origin of life on Earth? It rules out all naturalistic or materialistic origin-of-life models. It establishes that the origin of life on Earth must have been achieved by a super-intelligent, supernatural Being.
Maybe the conclusion really is more mild than it sounds and if pressed, perhaps might make a more mild statement.
Agreed… It is not the dominant message of Jesus and the Bible, and I certainly don’t mean to say that religion is universally condemned. But religion is spoken of pejoratively in Christianity as well as by Jesus and the Bible because there does seem to be a tendency for it to go wrong or at least to sour somewhat. Jesus and Paul can indeed be said to be focused on particular people, though in Jesus’ case these people were certainly the leaders of religion in Israel.
It is interesting to do a search on the word “religion” in the Bible. And nearly half are rather critical. 2 Tim 3:5 speaks of those who “hold the form of religion but deny the power of it.” James 1 says, " If any one thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this man’s religion is vain. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world." And then there is Isaiha chapter one, which is quite a divine rant against the forms of religion, showing His decided preference for people simply to do good rather than evil.
But I certainly do not equate “religion” with sin as Shawn has done or in anyway deny that I am very much a part of this whole phenomenon of religion. But I do like to point out that one of the most important tasks of established religion is to guard against bad religion.
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I don’t think the statement that “science relentlessly closes the gaps” is actually accurate. The problem is that as science closes gaps and explains things, new gaps come into view – and again, far more than we even expected. In fact, as I said, there are also mathematical theorems such as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem which tell us that there will always be gaps.
Unfortunately every time I try to make this point, people misunderstand me and think that I’m saying “gaps in our scientific knowledge are evidence for God.” I’m not saying that at all. What I’m saying is that gaps in our scientific knowledge aren’t going away any time soon, if ever.
Another question: where does the boundary between something being a God-of-the-gaps argument and it not being a God-of-the-gaps argument lie? To give a rather contrived example, imagine if the Curiosity rover discovered two stone tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them on Mars. Would that count as evidence for God, or would that just be a God-of-the-gaps argument as well? You could try arguing for grey aliens or a wormhole or something as an alternative to God, but at that point, crying “God-of-the-gaps” would be stretching it at best. Now the whole scenario may sound a bit far-fetched and contrived, but the point is that we can come up with a whole continuum of possible different scenarios demanding explanation, and we have to draw the boundary between “God of the gaps” and “not-God-of-the-gaps” somewhere. With something such as cosmic fine tuning, for example, the question is simply, on what side of the boundary does it lie? If we can’t come up with some kind of boundary line or clear demarcation here, then crying “God of the gaps” simply becomes a magic shibboleth akin to the YEC argument of “it’s just an assumption” or “it’s just an interpretation.”
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Hi J.E.S. You have a great question and lots of interesting answers here…
The nature of what is a “good” or “plausible” argument surely depends on the person receiving it. I was raised atheist but also raised to love the outdoors. My “personal” experience of the outdoors — in particular one night staring at the stars from my sleeping bag — eventually led me to believe in a Creator. That, of course, is “one person’s experence” and does not fill the definition of “plausible” unless you are using it with someone who also has had some personal “ah ha” moment. I do think the brief age of the universe and the unlikeliness of all this complexity coming together so well in 13.8 brief billion years is “something” and certainly is a challenge to those who think that way. So the complexity of it all and the way things all fit together and work together and affect one another (what would we do without some of the nerves in our bodies being where they are and doing precisely what they do???) ----the whys and hows of all that take “a lot of faith” on the part of people who want to deny some personal Intelligence outside of ourselves. This, I suspect, is the rationale behind the nontheistic theory that we were “seeded” by intelligent beings from some dying universe (I hear that often and yes, the people who hold to this always presume these beings from a universe we know nothing about — were intelligent.
Beyond all that, I do know that “the heavens declare the glory of God…” Been there, seen that!!
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Your misunderstanding of what I said is not an inaccuracy. Science does close the gaps in which a gaps type argument seek to stuff what they argue for, the fact that new gaps appear doesn’t change this in the slightest. I never said or implied that science relentlessly zeroes in on a complete picture of reality. The very fact that science reveals an increasingly greater horizon with new question to explore doesn’t support religion but just the opposite, showing us constantly that reality is much much bigger than the picture painted in antiquated documents.
I have explained elsewhere that there is a big difference between the gaps in knowledge which science simply hasn’t discovered yet and two other types of gaps of a very different nature: those which science itself discover and those which are inherent in the scientific process itself. “God of the gaps” does not apply to these other types.
It is only a God-of-the-gaps argument if it relies solely on the fact that science doesn’t have an answer yet to a particular inquiry, but since it is a legitimate line of scientific inquiry there is no reason to expect that an answer will not be found.
Neither. It would be cause for asking the question of why such tablets are on Mars and jumping to answers which happen to be convenient for particular ideologues, as they so often do, isn’t helpful at all. But then I will always be inclined to reject a claim for “evidence for God” - not for the God I believe in. I see more evidence that a belief in God is not universally beneficial and don’t believe God would provide something that is only likely to do more harm than good.
That would not be a correct application of the label “God-of-the-gaps.” No more than the discovery contrary to the expectation of scientists that the universe had a beginning. Discoveries which happen to agree with the expectations of theists are hardly a God-of-the-gaps type argument. But can we really say that stone tablets on Mars is an expectation of theists? No. Jumping on that as proof of God’s existence is just opportunistic rhetoric.
Sure… and I think a very narrow and precise brush for this is appropriate. It is basically an appeal to temporary ignorance.
No, this is not a God-of-the-gaps type argument. Not unless it goes something like this… science cannot explain why the universe is so finely attuned to favor life, therefore it must be God. But if one grants that science may in fact come up with an explanation for why the universe is so finely tuned to some degree, then one can still argue that it still points to a designer who employed such a cause because life was a desired objective.
Thanks for your response, @mitchellmckain. Apologies if I misunderstood you.
Incidentally, I came across this slide deck by Aron Wall this evening giving some specific details on fine tuning. He discusses the question of what gaps new scientific discoveries could theoretically fill in. I’ll probably have to read it a bit more carefully, but at first glance it appears to me from what he’s saying that fine tuning is more than just a “God of the gaps” argument:
@pevaquark - I’d be interested to know your thoughts here too.
Very well done. I believe God created the universe for the specific purpose of providing an environment in which life can develop. So, of course, I expect the kind of things this paper shows.
But this doesn’t mean that I think this argument proves the existence of God. I don’t. I think it is entirely subjective just like my own reason for believing because quantum physics looks to me like a back door through which the creator can interact with the universe. I have little doubt that physics will come up with some reasons why things happened as they did. But it doesn’t therefore follow that it must necessarily have happened in this way. In fact we know that spontaneous symmetry breaking has played a key role in the development of the universe and these parameters, so some of this is entirely random. Not only is it impossible to calculate probabilities of a multiverse but it is also impossible to calculate probabilities of these parameters being as they are. We just don’t have a context to make sense of such probabilities.
But then I am predisposed to reject such proofs and I can well understand that others might find this one convincing. Oh… and as I said before… this is not an example of a god of the gaps type argument. To say that science may come up with other explanations does not mean that the argument relies on the fact that no such explanation is currently available. I don’t think it does. Furthermore with random factors playing a role, then like most of the miracles that religion makes much of, they can always be dismissed as coincidental by the skeptic.
Young Earth Creationists are fond of presuppositional apologetics, so presuppose this: Given their interpretation that the earth is only about six thousand years old and a global flood occurred forty five hundred years ago, what would we expect to find? Then if you find it, you have your evidence. So what would the earth and sky look like were it indeed six thousand year old?
Well, we would expect to see nothing further in space than light could travel over that time, so nothing beyond the crab nebula, and certainly no other galaxies, would be visible. No organic artifact would ever be carbon dated past six thousand years. Other dating methods targeted to longer spans would scarcely show any age at all. Apart from a possible few extinctions, we would expect to find only fossils and remains of plant and animal life familiar from Bible times to today. Any depositions from annual cycles such as tree ring chronologies, ice cap cores, ocean bed sediments, and coral reefs would not extend before the flood or creation. Impact creators would be limited. Sedimentary formations would be shallow. There would be no fossil fuels or thick limestone deposits.
Obviously, YEC presuppositional apologetics here fails massively in terms of predictive validation. Yet YEC organizations continue to use it to predicate most of their arguments with “we know this cannot be older than six thousand years…” and faithfully conclude that “the evidence actually supports a young earth”. Given the overwhelming burden of evidence interlocking all disciplines of science in favor of an old earth, a counter-argument can only be built with extraordinary misrepresentations and selective omissions of information.
You might be better off engaging YEC through the Bible, because anyone can come up with a ‘just so’ story to counter scientific evidence they don’t agree with.
Was Adam the first human?
The purported 7,000-year age of the Earth was arrived at by adding up the genealogies in the Bible from Adam to Jesus. This presumes that the Adam of Genesis 2 was the first man. As one scholar put it:
“In order to use Biblical genealogies as a calendar, one must make the fundamental assumption that Adam and Eve were the first humans. Obviously, if this is not the case, then the Bible’s genealogical record is incomplete, and thus any calculation made using its genealogies would be erroneous.” Mike Janssen, Creationism and Biblical Geneologies.
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However, there are two creation accounts in Genesis. The first account, Genesis 1:1-2:4, doesn’t mention Adam and Eve by name. It simply says that, “God created man [‘adam’ in Hebrew, or ‘mankind’] in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27).
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At first glance, the second account (Genesis 2:5-25) seems to be a re-retelling of the first. This is partly because most translations place Genesis 2:4 under a header that says something like “The Creation of Man” or “Adam and Eve”, thereby making 2:4 the opening verse of the second account. E.g. here’s the NIV version:
Gen 2:3 Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
Adam and Eve
Gen 2:4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.
- This is unfortunate, because there were no headers, paragraphs, chapter/verse numbers or even punctuation in the earliest available manuscripts. So 2:4 could actually be the closing verse of the first account, which is where the New Living Translation (among others) places it, though it makes the mistake of splitting verse 4, placing the second half below the header and merging it with verse 5 (remember, they’re guessing, because there was no punctuation in the earliest available manuscripts):
Gen 2:3 And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation. 4 This is the account of the creation of the heavens and the earth.
The Man and Woman in Eden
When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5 neither wild plants nor grains were growing on the earth.
- A more reasonable translation would be as follows:
Gen 2:3 And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation. 4 This is the account of the creation of the heavens and the earth, when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.
The Man and Woman in Eden
5 Neither wild plants nor grains were growing on the land [Eden, not the whole Earth]. For the LORD God had not yet sent rain to water the land, and there were no people to cultivate the soil. 6 Instead, springs came up from the ground and watered all the land. 7 Then the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person. 8 Then the LORD God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he placed the man he had made.
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On this reading, the creation of the heavens and the earth, along with humans, happened before the creation of Adam (‘ha’adam’ or ‘the man’, as distinct from the generic ‘adam’ or ‘mankind’ of Genesis 1).
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Another cause for confusion is that the Hebrew word translated ‘earth’ actually means ‘land’, the boundaries of which are determined by context (the NIV footnote concurs, “Genesis 2:5 Or land; also in verse 6”). So when Genesis 2:5 says “Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground,” it doesn’t necessarily refer to the whole planet Earth.
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Instead, the second account appears to be of a local event, because 2:8 says “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed [a specific man, Adam, formed in 2:7, not generic ‘mankind’ created in 1:27].” So plants may have existed elsewhere on Earth (from the Genesis 1 creation), just not in Eden, until God planted the garden there. 2:10-14 names some rivers and places near Eden, including the rivers Tigris and Euphrates which are in present-day Iraq (although Adam’s descendants possibly named the Iraqi rivers after the original ones located elsewhere), thereby showing that this is a local event, not a cosmic one.
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Note that God ‘planted’ the garden in 2:8, He didn’t create new plants there. As for “formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air” in 2:19, the verb translated ‘formed’ or ‘made’ is in the pluperfect tense, so it can be construed as ‘had made’, referring back to the creation in Genesis 1, not to a new local creation. God brought the animal species created in Genesis 1 to Adam to name in Genesis 2. Point 10 below discusses why God created Adam and Eve instead of populating Eden with the humans of Genesis 1.
9. So it is possible that mankind was created long before Adam and Eve came on the scene, and this throws the genealogical dating method off-kilter, because that method starts the clock with Adam.
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One potential objection to the view that Adam was not the first human is that Genesis 3:20 says Eve “would become the mother of all the living.” If there were females before Eve, wouldn’t some humans alive today be descended from them and not from Eve? Not necessarily. It is possible that God created Adam and Eve because the earlier humans had died out, including all their descendants. So Eve would “become the mother of all the living.” Not all who ever lived, but all who lived after her.
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This approach addresses another potential objection. If there was life before Adam, then part of the fossil record predates him. The entire fossil record shows death and suffering, so since all death and suffering is the result of sin, there must have been sin before Adam. Then why does 1 Corinthians 15:22 say “… in Adam all die …”? Just as Eve was the mother of all who lived after her (not of all who ever lived), so in Adam all who lived after him (not all who ever lived) die. The “all” in that verse is referring to Paul’s readers, as in “all of you …”
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Some may object, “Why would God allow possibly millions of years of death and suffering?” Well, why would He allow thousands of years of death and suffering? Either way, every living thing experiences no more than a lifetime of suffering in this life.
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From a scientific perspective, some may object that if mankind was created about the same time as the earliest animals, then we should find evidence of humans living more than 7,000 years ago. Well, bearing in mind that fossilization is a rare event and there may not have been many humans that far back, it seems we do (e.g. Michael Cremo’s book, Forbidden Archaeology. Note: Cremo is not a Christian and his scientific claims should be considered separately from his religious explanation for those claims).
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Another potential objection. 1 Corinthians 15:45 says “So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam [Christ], a life-giving spirit.” If the first man was Adam, how could there have been men before Adam? Paul was addressing Adam’s descendants, and their sins which they inherited from Adam. So for the purposes of 1 Corinthians, Adam was ‘the first man’. If someone says, “As the first man climbed the wall, you too will climb it,” we don’t immediately assume he’s referring to the first man that ever climbed the wall. Instead, we look to the context to indicate which first man the speaker is referring to (perhaps the first man that the audience saw climb the wall).
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The same construal would suit Romans 5:14, “Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses …” Again, Paul is emphasizing the original sin that Adam passed on to his descendants. This is not to suggest that Jesus’s atonement does not cover the sins of those before Adam, all the way back to the first human of Genesis 1. However, those sins are irrelevant to Paul’s audience, so as far as they (and those after them) were concerned, he’s referring to the Adam of Genesis 2.
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Having said that, it is possible that ‘Adam’ has a double meaning in the above New Testament verses, as referring both to the first human (‘adam’) of Genesis 1 and Adam of Genesis 2. Paul’s mother tongue was Hebrew, and he would have known that ‘adam’ is both the generic word for the first humans in Genesis 1 and the proper name ‘Adam’ in Genesis 2 onwards. As the NIV footnote to Genesis 2:7 states, “The Hebrew for man (adam) … is also the name Adam (see verse 20).” Paul’s Greek-speaking audience would have been unaware of the Hebrew double-meaning, but God wrote the scriptures for a wider readership.
Conclusion
Creationism seems to be in tension with much of the scientific data on the age of the Earth and the universe. Even if some of those findings are inaccurate, 7-10,000 years is too short a time to account for much of the evidence. The problem is, the genealogical dating method rests on the assumption that the Earth and Adam were created at about the same time, but the Bible doesn’t say that. So Young Earth Creationism is possibly mistaken, and it’s a shame to reject scientific findings just because of an error in biblical exegesis.
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Absolutely. I see far too many attempts – even by Christians – to refute YEC that criticise them for making the Bible their starting point and trying to make science conform to the Bible. It’s something that we need to be very careful to avoid because as soon as you give even a hint of questioning the authority of Scripture, the shutters go up.
That’s why I always start by acknowledging the authority of the Bible and then outlining what the Bible demands in how we approach scientific findings – in particular, by hammering home the need for honest and accurate weights and measures.
I like your overview of the creation accounts in Genesis. It really brings home the point that Genesis 1-11 leaves a lot of things wide open to interpretation and that some things simply aren’t as clear cut as a naive reading of the King James Version would have us believe.
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