It is not necessary to reject a Creator in order to accept evolution

Great Debates
81

Your assumption that my debates were about Darwin is totally unfounded. The people I engaged with were selected not for their opposition to evolution, but for the fact that, unlike most Christians, they actually read the Bible. I didn’t waste my time on those who clearly hadn’t.

We can swap anecdotes about my clumsy debate efforts or your intellectually superior friends all day, but here is a scientific survey that does refute you. To avoid land-line bias, about a third of the participants were cell phone users, and they were even compensated for their air time.

It supports my assertion that the average Christian knows little about the Bible, or even the practices of his own denomination. You blithely state that most Christians had studied Genesis closely enough to detect the contradictions in it, while the survey shows that only 42% of Catholics can even name Genesis as the first book of the Bible. And since you seem to think American Christians have less knowledge than those of other countries, it’s interesting that Hispanic Catholics, who are presumably closer in knowledge to the Christians of Central and South America than the typical American Christian, show even less knowledge of the Bible, with only 29% able to name Genesis, and only 15% able to name the four Gospels. And even I was shocked that only 43% of mainline white Protestants could name the Gospels, which I would expect any eight-year old to know. Equally dismal results were obtained when Protestants and Catholics were asked about central tenets of their faiths, or the role of major Biblical figures like Moses, Abraham, and Job.

In the questions about the latter, they didn’t have to come up with, say, the name of the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt, they just had to pick it out of a list of four names. Thanks, no doubt, to Hollywood and the barrage of religious movies on TV for the Christmas and Easter season, a whopping 71% of Christians had heard of Moses, but only 41% had heard of the suffering of Job, even though it’s become a secular proverb.

The subgroup that had the best Bible knowledge was white Evangelicals, i.e. the group that is most likely to be firmly opposed to Darwin.

And since people who were aware that they knew nothing about the Bible were free to decline participation, you have to wonder how how much worse the results would be if participation had been mandatory.

And there was nothing in Einstein’s papers on relativity that explicitly addressed the contradictions in Genesis, so I guess he wanted his readers to consider gravity to be a metaphor for God’s love. Sheesh.

Since modern science was still over a thousand years in the future, just what kind of biological analysis would you expect from Augustine?

He is saying not to go nuts and extrapolate Biblical teachings into areas that they don’t really address. He is in NO WAY saying that secular teaching trumps the Bible on subjects that it does address.

I don’t need him to be anything; you’re the one who keeps bringing him up, because YOU need him to be somewhere to the left of Al Sharpton to bolster your conceit that Christians are tolerant liberals who just smile at the stupid atheists.

But, in the event, he IS a literalist, by any sane understanding of the term. In my last post, in my quote from “The City of God,” there is an ellipsis where I cut out some lines I considered irrelevant, to try to control the length of the post. But as they are relevant to his literalism, I’ll quote them here, with enough context to make them sensible:

Yet, though the fact that the angels are the work of God is not omitted here, it is indeed not explicitly mentioned; but elsewhere Holy Scripture asserts it in the clearest manner. For in the Hymn of the Three Children in the Furnace it was said, O all you works of the Lord bless the Lord; and among these works mentioned afterwards in detail, the angels are named. And in the psalm it is said, Praise the Lord from the heavens, praise Him in the heights. Praise Him, all His angels; praise Him, all His hosts. Praise Him, sun and moon; praise him, all you stars of light. Praise Him, you heaven of heavens; and you waters that be above the heavens. Let them praise the name of the Lord; for He commanded, and they were created. Here the angels are most expressly and by divine authority said to have been made by God, for of them among the other heavenly things it is said, He commanded, and they were created. Who, then, will be bold enough to suggest that the angels were made after the six days’ creation? If any one is so foolish, his folly is disposed of by a scripture of like authority, where God says, When the stars were made, the angels praised me with a loud voice. Job 38:7 The angels therefore existed before the stars; and the stars were made the fourth day.

You are trying to tell us that Augustine didn’t want to take the very straightforward prose of Genesis 1 literally, and yet here he is taking stuff that even I would say was obviously metaphorical, from hymns and psalms, stuff about the sun and moon singing praises to God, and not only taking it literally, but using it as the cornerstone of his proof that angels were created during the first day.

You’re just flat wrong.

82

So, now you want to move the goalposts from people who take their faith seriously to random people selected from a nominally Christian country with no evidence regarding their religious education.
You are not proving what you claim to prove.

I might actually agree with this point, but that was not what you said.

Irony works better when it has some actual basis in fact. Augustine was writing on a religious theme in a milieu in which such themes were understood as such and before the rise of science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Trying to frame Einstein’s discourses on science in the same context simply releals that you are unaware of the (or deliberately ignoring) changes that have arisen in the way people approach knowledge, applying anachronistic arguments from one period to statements made in a different period.

Well, you inadvertantly got this one right. On the other hand, he does not say that the Bible (or Genesis) addresses the material world. His entire discourse, (both in City of God and in On Genesis), addresses the spiritual realm as he understood it, not the material world.

Any reading of my posts, here, will demonstrate that I have never made any of the silly claims in your straw man.

Gee. Augustine refers to Daniel to continue discussing angels. (I would not doubt that he considered the story from Daniel to be a literal event, but that is not the same as his approach to Genesis.)

The fact that you consider Genesis 1 to be “straightforward prose” indicates how far off from reality is your understanding. Genesis 1 is a poem that very clearly uses a number of literary devices to make a point that God created order in the world. If you confuse that point, following any number of people who are Biblical literalists, then you get everytthing that follows arong, as well.

While possible, that certainly cannot be established from any of your assertions, based as they are on misinterpretations and anachronistic evaluations of the things you have quoted.

83
  1. I didn’t say the survey proved anything; I said it supported my assertion.
  2. You are quite evidently deliberately distorting the facts. Although the survey included people of various faiths, I ignored the non-Christians. The stats I quoted were not from “random people selected from a nominally Christian country,” they were from Christians, from a country so steeped in Christian culture that major presidential candidates tout the strength of their Christian faith as their strongest qualification for the job, and nominally secular movie channels and radio stations run nothing but Christmas programming for the entire month of December.
  3. You are the one who is desperately moving the goalposts regarding “evidence of religious education.” Your original claim was, “Since most Christians up until John Darby–and the majority since John Darby who live outside the U.S.–could recognize that the two separate Creation stories contradicted each other and represented a moral or spiritual belief, not a physical one, they never really had a problem with Darwin’s theory.”

I don’t see anything in that claim requiring four years at a Jesuit college. In fact, it seems to refer to randomly selected Christians, just as my stats did.

If there was ever a time when most Christians didn’t have a problem with Darwin’s theory, it was not due to their intellectual sophistication, but to their ignorance of what Darwin said, what the Bible says, or (most likely) both.

In fact, my original claim was much weaker. You claimed that most Christians read Genesis carefully enough to be aware of internal contradictions. My claim was that most Christians were not aware of the contradictions in Genesis and the Gospels. And the survey showed that, if the white Evangelicals who would never concede that the Bible contradicts itself are separated out, then most Christians can’t even name Genesis and the Gospels.

I’m glad you have realized that, in the brief time since you demanded to know why Augustine didn’t write a treatise on physics or biology, and even attempted to use his failure to do so to support your position. Frankly, it smacked of desperation.

Good Heavens. I quoted a passage where he explicitly affirms the sequence in which the material world was created, including the Biblical “fact” that trees and grass were growing before the sun was created. You are just sticking your fingers in your ears now.

Whoosh. You said that you needed Augustine to be a screaming liberal in precisely the same sense that I said I needed him to be a 19th-century literalist.

You’re just flailing. If you concede that he considers hymns and psalms and passages where the sun and moon sing praises to God as literal events, then you have no ground left to stand on.

Either that, or I read the Bible in translation, as did Augustine. I trust that I am well aware that oral traditions employ literary and mnemonic devices, but as far as the message is concerned, the wine-dark sea is just as wet as plain old water.

Your smokescreens cannot conceal the fact that Genesis 1 is a straightforward sequence of events regarding the physical world, and that Augustine took that sequence literally. He would never, never have abandoned Genesis, or called it allegorical or metaphorical, to comply with Darwin.

Are you going to be intellectually honest and concede that, or are you going to persist in these desperate grasps at straws?

84

And specifically from the country that I have noted has the worst record for not having its views twisted by literalism. You are still changing the goalposts.
Note the highlighted portion of my assertion when you quoted me:

= = =

Totally inaccurate.
Christians were divided on the accuracy of Darwin’s Theory–but so were scientists–and Christians were as much on the side of Darwin as opposed to him. The Reviews and Essays published about the same time by seven Anglicans was firmly on the Darwinian side of the fence. John Henry Newman, (an Anglican priest who became Catholic), supported Darwin’s Theory.
(Huxley’s famous exchange with Wilberforce was mostly a matter of personal antipathy that was exaggerated during the eulogies for Huxley after his death. Besides which, Wilberforce was only one of many Anglican clergy in attendance at that 1860 discussion and represented the specific conservative wing that was opposed by many of his fellows.)
Similarly, in Catholic circles there were many opponents of Darwin, but also many proponents of his theory. Politically, the anti-Darwinists appeared to win up until the early twentieth century, but the 1998 opening of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith revealed that within the church, there had been much more support for Darwin, mostly by the better informed theologians, than had been recognized previously. By 1910, or so, evolution was sufficiently accepted as science that the Catholic Encyclopedia recognized that it was not in conflict with the church.

My claim was that Christians outside the influence of Darby (and Scoffield and Moody and so forth) tended to be aware of the issues. A poll of U.S. beliefs simply does not support your claim against mine.

Now, you are just being silly, as well as twisting my words. My position has not changed, although your “Einstein” example remains both anachronistic and silly.

No. I am aware that his references to a poetic passage was being used for a purpose different than you wish to imagine it. My ears are clear, but your knowledge of ancient writings is muddy.

You went much farther than claiming I needed Augustine to be liberal; you made really stupid claims about how I view atheists, Christians, and the whole issue.

If you are unaware of the tradition in which he wrote and insist on viewing his statements from the perspective of Scoffield or Darby, you demonstrate a serious lack of understanding of the literature and the times. I do not insist that he claims such praise from inanimate objects was literal. In fact, I would note that such claims are a sure indication that he was operating in the realm of spirituality and not literal physicality.

And yet, you insist that that passage was a literal record of fact, when it clearly was not. You really have no idea what you are talking about.
Genesis 1 is a counter to various non-Hebrew myths prevalent at the time of its writing that portray a world created as a by-product of conflicts between competing gods or as the malign output of mischievous or spiteful deities.
In response, Genesis 1 describes the world as being the creation of a benevolent God who creates light, the heavens and waters, then the Earth on days 1 through 3, then creates objects to provide illumination, creatures to populate the heavens and waters, and then creatures to populate the Earth on days 4 through 6. And on each day, at the close, He blesses his creation. The point is that His effort was orderly, good, and blessed, not that he did any specific act on a specific day. (Augustine, in fact, argued in On Genesis , against a six day creation, insisting that it all happened at a single moment. That hardly supports your claim that he believed that Genesis 1 was a literal presentation of events.)

I am being intellectually honest while you persist in pretending that the only reading of Augustine’s works must conform to a late 19th/early 20th century misreading of both Augustine and Genesis.
I will concede when you demonstrate that I am in error. (That will not happen while you demonstrate your ignorance of the topic.)

85

Um, I did note it, and addressed it. Note the highlighted portion of my response:

Holy crap. First you accuse me of moving the goalposts for having the temerity to cite a Bible knowledge poll of American Christians, rather than the super-sophisticated Mexican Christians, and then you send the goalposts to the next galaxy by citing the attitudes of “better informed theologians,” or encyclopedia authors, as your typical Christians. Too funny.

Jeez, have you retained anything you’ve read in my responses? Several posts ago, I quoted him (which BTW is generally considered better form than paraphrasing him with loaded words like “insisting,” with no cite) saying that the seven days of Creation were aspects of a single day, and acknowledged that he interpreted “day” in a non-standard way. That is not the same as taking the entire chapter as an allegory.

And I hope that even you can admit that creation of everything in a single moment does not help the assertion that he is compatible with Darwin.

If this is the best you can do, I have to get ready for work. The lack of input from anybody else indicates that I am writing only for you, and you have made it clear that you will never admit you are wrong, but instead have regressed into your usual tactic of calling me ignorant and uninformed on the issues, and therefore the evidence I have presented doesn’t matter. I have nothing to add to my case, and obviously, neither do you, so I will take your response to my question about your intellectual integrity as a “no,” and thank you for the debate.

86

I realize that you think you have made some wonderful points, but you have not. Hispanic Catholics in the U.S. tend to have come from the poorest, and often illiterate, segments of their native countries, so they make their own exceptions. As to the “better informed theologians,” that was in reference to a separate error of yours that falsely claimed that Christians had always been in conflict with Darwin and that any who did not were uninformed of either Darwin or the Bible. You were wrong, again, and are now trying to mix and match separate claims to hide your error.

Sorry. I do not accept your misinterpretations as legitimate points. On the one hand, you have to have him hold to a literal reading of the text, then you turn right around when his words contradict that thought and claim that his reading is simply “non-standard.” Get back to me when you are consistent in your approach.

More straw man claims? I have made no claims that he is “compatible” with Darwin in regards to evolution. I have only noted that an insistence that he and all the Christians before the nineteenth century believed only in a literal reading of Genesis is wrong.

You need to read this paragraph back to yourself, recognizing yourself as the object of your scorn. (You might also wish to do a bit of reading regarding the ways in which pre-scientific people dealt with myth and how Augustine, in particular, addressed it.)