If Ken Ham, or one of his “agents” were to start debating on these boards, I would debate them… but only to this degree:
They would have to agree that Evolutionary science is a real science.
They would have to agree that Speciation is a logical development of mutation, and population dynamics, if there is enough time for these natural processes to occur.
They would have to agree that if speciation is a normal process, then common descent is normal as well.
Whenever we let YEC’s debate on these boards who reject 1, 2 or all 3 of these basic premises, I believe we do ourselves a big dis-service…
Friday night I had a couple, good friends of mine, over for dinner. The discussion came around to BioLogos, which I mentioned in passing as one of the new websites I had rejoined. This opened the gates. They are dear Christians. The wife is a dear soul, and raised and taught her children to believe in YEC. She is involved in home-schooling (though did not teach her kids).
I was very careful to NOT cast aspersions onto her believes. I kept saying over and over, “some people believe”, and tried to emphasize how what we believe depends upon the people who are writing the materials we read.
The point is, that they both are so indoctrinated that science is so corrupted, that there is no good thing to come out of it. It really surprised them that I was adamant that the scientists in evolution are divided between a number of philosophical camps, of which Neo-Atheists are the most vocal. Likewise I explained that YEC is the most vocal and productive in anti-science material. It cause some frowns hen I said that.
The husband gave me a challenge: Find seven good solid reasons evolution works. I likewise gave him a couple of summaries of the Creation other than material creation story, and asked him to think and pray over it.
At the end, we left the table feeling good about our discussion, and hugged each other as they left.
It was not easy, and I feel very uncomfortable because I don not want to be responsible for injuring a person’s honestly held faith, even if it is faulty in my view.
I will be posting the challenge in a new topic when I’ve got a grasp on how to state it properly.
Sounds like a good evening. We really do not break bread with one another as much as we should.
Not sure what it means for evolution “to work.” I guess he means evidence that supports evolution, though not sure. I follow another forum where a YEC listed 5 reasons the earth is young, all of which were the tired things always listed, which have been thoroughly debunked many times over, but still get trotted out. It is hard to explain that the difference is not one of perspective but that of the quality and quantity of the evidence supporting the argument.
Basically, the “evidence” brought up as supporting a young earth has been addressed in places like talkorigins.org. The issues with bent rocks and geology is well addressed in the beautiful book Grand Canyon: Monument to an Ancient Earth.
It seems that the arguments to those rebuttals are never really addressed by the young earth crowd, they just keep saying the same things.
When I’m discussing the subject with YECs, quality is just about the only thing I focus on.
I tell them that it doesn’t matter how old they think the earth is, or who or what they think did or didn’t evolve from what. All that I care about is that they make sure they know what they’re talking about, and that their facts are straight — and that they make sure they’re approaching the subject honestly themselves before they start accusing “evolutionists” of dishonesty. After all, evolutionist dishonesty doesn’t reflect badly on us as Christians, but creationist dishonesty does.
Here’s one other piece of advice: suggest that they check out Reasons to Believe. I know that a lot of people round here will disagree with RTB’s stance on evolution, but I personally believe that RTB has a very valuable role to play in the debate. The fact is that evolution is much harder to understand than the age of the earth, and it takes considerable spiritual maturity and scientific expertise to understand what to make of it from a Christian point of view. Its status as a kind of political football in the culture wars is also pretty off putting too for many Christians. However, the falsehoods of young-earth are much more blatant and in-your-face, the age of the earth doesn’t have quite the same connotations in many people’s minds, and consequently there are a lot of YECs out there who are uncomfortable with evolution but who are quite receptive to the possibility of an ancient earth. This means that for an organisation such as RTB to be taking an old-earth stance without expecting them to accept evolution means that they’re not expecting them to run before they can walk.
Honestly I gave up debating YECs about anything related to science. I’m am a disadvantage, I suppose, I’ve never been a YEC. I was a professional scientist and an atheist long before I became a Christian. At first I tried to debate YECs but almost always I would run into some variation of the Gish Gallop.
My approach to YECs is now a rather simple algorithm. I view YECism as a 2x2 matrix. One one axis YECs either claim a YEC view is cardinal or that it isn’t. And on the other axis they either don’t care about the science, or, al a AIG, argue that science properly done supports a young cosmos.
I find that I can’t deal at all with YECs who drink the AIG Kool-Aid. I no longer even try. They will give you, as mentioned, the Gish Gallup or, even more frustrating, (and I’ve already seen some of that my short time here) they will ask questions with with the most sincere and humble voices–seeking, they say, “only to learn”, but the result will always be the same: “no, no, you still haven’t answered my question.” It’s maddening.
YECs who say they don’t care about the science but they believe the bible teaches a young earth–those I respect for their views and their honesty. If they also believe that it is a line in the sand issue–all I ever try to do is point out the many church fathers and theologians and creeds and councils that didn’t consider it a make or break issue–there I’ve sometimes seen some shift their position. (Especially if they didn’t realize that some of their icons, like Scofield and Spurgeon, just to name a couple, were not YECs.)
@heddle thanks for that. You have stated what I have been working toward. My friends are sincere and know next to nothing of science except for what they’ve been fed by the YEC. They were truely astonished when I said “The Evolution Camp has many streams from Atheist to Christian” That was an entirely new thought for them
It gives me a direction to go with them.
BTW: [quote=“heddle, post:22, topic:35229”]
…some variation of the Gish Gallop.
[/quote]
?? Define Gish Gallop?
Found it: [quote="] Gish Gallop - RationalWiki The Gish Gallop (also known as proof by verbosity[1]) is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort. The Gish Gallop is a belt-fed version of the on the spot fallacy, as it’s unreasonable for anyone to have a well-composed answer immediately available to every argument present in the Gallop. The Gish Gallop is named after creationist Duane Gish, who often abused it.
[/quote]
But basically it is the tactic wherein a YEC asks a question like “Well, what about ocean sediments?” and before you can fully answer (but when he senses you do know the answer) he moves on to “well what about right handed amino acids?” etc. Eventually they will hit upon a question that causes the real scientist to pause–because nobody is prepared to fire off an instantaneous answer to all questions (many of which were, at one time, legitimate questions) across multiple disciplines. The goal is to give an impression of a “gotcha” moment.
One thought I had when asked some of these questions, and specifically the big one of “Why do you believe in evolution?” is to ask questions back that allows them to reflect on what they believe regarding science, such as “Why do you believe the earth orbits the sun and rotates once a day?” It can lead to a discussion of observational differences, trust of authoritative sources, the fact that superficial observations are not always correct, but require more study, and that our interpretation of scripture is molded by our knowledge of creation. If you can accept that you indeed are whirling around in space at 900 miles per hour while orbiting the sun at upteen thousand miles per hour, and still believe the Bible, then the same principles can be applied to geology and biology.
“I’m not here for a technical debate. That is a waste of time, and it would be boring to do it with any sort of rigor. Besides, even if you convinced me and everyone in this room it would have zero impact on the scientific conclusions. Scientific controversies are not litigated in public debates, and the attempt is anti-scientific. As you know, that is not how science proceeds. Instead, if you want, I’m happy to explain to you why most scientists are so convinced by the evidence to disagree with you. You do not yourself have to agree, but there is value in understanding what you reject. It turns out that even if it is false, there is an immense amount of evidence for evolution.”
Reactions to this approach are interesting. But it certainly ends the gallop, identifying to everyone as an obviously anti-scientific ploy.
I’ll also say,
“I do not believe in evolution. Rather, I truthfully affirm that the evidence in science looks like we share common ancestors with all life. To say otherwise is to be dishonest. This is about truthfulness, not belief. I believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and put my trust there, not in evolution.”
Indeed, I was sort of ignoring the issue of the semantics of the word “believe” but that is very important as we talk of such things, and just as when talking to non-Christians about the gospel, we have to be careful to not use “church words” which have either little meaning or a different meaning to them. Thanks for pointing that out
I should also add that I say a few things that almost always provokes a question. For example,
“Scientifically, what convinced me was the mathematical theory and how it so precisely explains the genetic evidence.”
“I agree with the final conclusions of those who think God designed us, but I found obvious mathematical errors in their poof. I agree God created us, but why would you expect me to agree that 1+1=3?”
To which people will often be perplexed, with some variant of, “there is no mathematical theory of evolution.”
And I would say, “that is what I thought too, until I learned about it. I turns out that I was not getting an honest view of it as a student in the church. Maybe all of it is wrong, but we do not serve our children by misrepresenting the strength of the theory. That set me up to lose my faith. If not for God raising Jesus from the dead, I probably would have lost it.”
Most people who do not make a living from anti-evolutionism are entirely on board at this point, even if they are YECs. Those that do make a living from anti-evolutionism are not happy.
“believe” is a complex word in science.
Some people think that “I don’t believe in science. We do not believe facts, facts just are.”. This is meant to denigrate anything that is the “mere” beliefs of a group, suggesting that evidence takes away the need for belief.
But this just illogical silliness. There is objective reality that exists independent of our understanding or affirmation (“facts” in this sentence). However, belief (in the language of our faith) is a statement about what personally trust . Even outside our faith, one can choose to disbelief (or refuse to believe) a real fact that is in fact true.
I think a better terms to use, with different shades of meaning, are…
Affirm (to agree with, perhaps within a bracketed context or contingent on some details)
Confess (to publicly state an affirmation)
Trust (to relationally reorient one’s life around in a potentially costly way)
Warranted (to have good reason, perhaps but not exclusively from evidence)
Evidence (artifacts that might make trust, affirmation, or confession warranted)
The terms “faith” and “belief” have come to mean “evidence-free beliefs”, and therefore “unwarranted”. For these reasons I do not recommend using those words in any contexts (including the Church) without defining them first. The scientism of culture has so thoroughly pervaded culture that even some sermons I’ve heard seem to encourage unwarranted belief as somehow better than warranted belief.
Finally, at the core of our “faith” is “trust” in Jesus. That faith is not judged by the quality of our arguments or evidence. It is rather either vindicated or impoverished entirely by the trustworthiness of One in whom we trust. Whether we are YECs, TE, OEC, atheists, scientists or artists, children or adults, dark or light, eastern or western, Jesus is worthy of our trust.
“Thanks so much for your willingness to learn on this. This takes a lot of time to understand. No quick verbal answer substitutes for reading the scientific studies and understanding them for yourself. Part of the reason you aren’t satisfied with my answer is that I can only give you now the briefest of summaries. However, I can assure that I have read the studies, and the concerns you have been answered thoroughly. Maybe someday you will get a chance to read it yourself.”
Sometimes, when I am less kind and they are more pushy,
“Ignorance is not an argument, especially if it is willful. Just because you do not know or understand the answer, does not mean it doesn’t exist. There is quite a lot in science that is very difficult to understand, but that doesn’t mean a problem is not solved. It just means that complete understanding of the solution might be beyond an untrained eye.”
The good thing about this is that it is all true, and it is understandable by large groups of people.
I think we actually need to pay more attention to what happens when unfortunately uninformed Christians are enabled (by us), to bring Christ and the gospel into disrepute, or are inadequately opposed. Christianity is littered with the fallout of Christians damaging the name of Christ because other Christians permitted them to do so.
This is a problem I was attempting to address in one of my first Topics. The language of “belief” (as discussed below) is allowed to become far too imprecise in usage. For example, my personal bugaboo about “receiving Eternal Life”. Only God is Eternal. We hare given “Everlasting Life” with a beginning and no end. It makes a huge difference in discussing the Creation Origins issues.
It is even worse when arguing Science which terms are often “hard” definitions. That is part of the problem in this whole YEC vs EC issue.
@Swamidass
Thank you for that observation. I attempted to point out to my friends that Ken Hamm and others in the YEC camp have a vested interest in maintaining a faulty (or failed) interpretation. It is extremely hard to back down from a position that contradicts the inertia one has built in a Ministry such as AIG.
I follow the Ministry of Marvin Rosenthal, who has developed a different view of the Rapture than is normally espoused by Evangelicals (the Pre-Wrath Rapture of the Church). He ended up leaving the multi-million dollar ministry he had built up because of that change in doctrine. Anybody who is willing to sacrifice for their interpretation of Scripture is to be noted for their stand. Over the years he has established a new ministry (Zion’s Fire).
That is why I have tremendous respect for Scientist Christians who make the stand in the face of their upbringing and church affiliation.
Also why I salute all those BIoLogos lurkers who are here under an assumed Name! Blessing to you!
Thanks for that. This is a good listing of alternate words I will keep in my arsenal.
Another point I tried to make (with little impact at this time). I think my conversation with this couple will be more like water dripping on a stone than any big immediate change of heart. I ask if they can prove what evidence in their faith they have, and they say “The Bible” (rather than Jesus). That thinking runs toward science too (in their minds).
I agree with the sentiment. However, I feel this is not a one-size fits all effort. What may work in “Opposing” someone who uses the Gish Gallop intentionally requires a one approach (see @Swamidass above) . Where someone who is just repeating it from rote, or is not as educated, but defending their misbelief, requires a longer approach. “Teachable Moments” is always a good tactic to use. This requires time and an extended winsome (to quote Dr Swindoll) attitude. Loving one into the position of change.
Even if those who post and debate on the forums aren’t interested in changing their minds, it is a service to those of us who are more open and come and read the forums later. I’ve gotten a lot out of reading forum discussions here and on other sites. As someone who “converted” from YEC to EC, the public service done by those who sit here and debate all day is appreciated. If you can’t stand going back and forth on forums like that, then either don’t open the thread or only open it with the intent to read and not comment.
I can echo this too. It does make a difference. I’d read and been involved in many debates (not here specifically) that never changed my mind as a YECer (maybe because I was in it to “win”). But when the time came for me to be honest with myself and begin to ask questions and be willing to hear the answers, some of those experiences came back to mind. The calm, respectful discussions I’d witnessed helped me feel much more okay with asking questions in the first place.
