OK I realise this topic is a bit of a dead horse… but I’d like to try to understand where the creationists are coming from.
Whenever this comes up a creationist will post lengthy,well thought out gibberish exclaiming why evolition is nonsense, that it is a ‘religion’, that it is full of ‘holes’ etc.
What is the beef with this branch of science exactly? The Theory of Gravity does not get so much discussion, Noone questions the Theory of relativity or says that Atomic theory is bunk because ‘we can’t see atoms’.
So why evolution? I understand that some people *(read fundies) * feel that the implications of evolution goes against their religious beliefs. Fair enough.
I could argue that Atomic theory or all sorts of other scientific theories do to…
But no. its evolution that gets all the attention. For example:
It has ‘holes’ you could drive a truck through
Such as? Are the holes in evolutionary theory or just in the creationists understanding of it?
Evolution is a religion
Define this classification exactly? Is this something a-la Kent Hovind where Evolution was started by the ‘devil’ in Greece? With the Devil planting fossils and such to confuse us poor mortals?
-So what if people take their understanding of evolution on faith (ie we are not all scientists who have studied this)
-Evolution doesn’t have all the answers.
-Answers to what exactly? Who cares? Neither does the theory of Relativity. Who says it has to?
And the list goes on.
All sorts of effort has been put into the attempt to justify Creation scientifically, from the flood to the age of the earth to astronomy and so on.
Why? Is the creationists faith in their holy book so weak that they feel the need to defend and justify it? Is there some other possibility I’m missing?
There are many religious people (Christian and others) who accept evolution for what it is. The best explanation for all the physical evidence sourrounding us on this planet. Some post to this very board. So if these people can accept scientific findings without challenging them and still maintain their faith, whats the deal with creationists?
I believe that the problem is to do with the nature of humans. They cannot believe that we are just apes who got a bit cleverer than our cousins the chimps and the gorillas, and so were able to do a few things that the other apes can’t do.
For some of them, I think it’s because they interpret the bible literally and believe the earth is only 6000-10000 years old or so. If you believe that as a matter of faith, then evolution just can’t be true, since it talks in terms of millions of years instead of just a few thousand. People who don’t take the Genesis story as literally (a “day” could mean a billion years, or whatever) don’t have this problem.
For many, I think it’s anti-intellectualism-- a hostility toward the sciences as a whole, and mistrust of higher education.
I attended a fundamentalist Christian school for seven years. What I saw there was an undercurrent of mistrust and outright hostility toward “book learning” which they consider to be wholly anti-faith. There were long lectures about scientists who were “smart and educated” but had no “wisdom.” They added that college, a hotbed of anti-Christian thought, was primarily staffed by athiest liberals who were single-mindedly dedicated to stripping students of their religious faith. (I sincerely think most of them believed that Chick tracts are an accurate depiction of college classes.)
Now, this was just one school, but I think there’s a touch of this sort of position in many Creationists-- that the purpose of Evolutionary theory is not to expand scientific knowledge and understanding of our planet, but is a direct attack on God, an elaborate attempt to decieve man into believing that God does not exist.
One has to do with adaptation (adjusting to meet surrounding needs) , the other has to do with divergence. (One species evolves so much that another species is formed)
Creation of a life form is not evolution and therein lies the rub. From what I read anyways.
Me personally, I believe in both. I believe we can evolve through adaptation. I do not think I evolved from a monkey. (Although I enjoy picking bugs from counterparts hair)
Stepen Jay Gould covered some of this in his essay on William Jennings Bryan. (It’s in one of his collections, but I can’t recall exactly which one. BVully for Brontosaurus?) Bryan, oddly enough, was seen as a social [i\progressive*, not a conservative. IIRC, Science was the enemy because it devalued people and debased his position in the Universe, and it was especially galling at a time when The Common Man was being reduced to a cipher in the books of Big Business.
The stand against evolution got taken because it seemed to so directly oppose the Biblical account of God’s creation of the world from nothing, and of Man from the Dust of the Earth. Other items that one might object to – the world being round, whether bees actually build hives in lion’s carcasses, the sun standing still – would not, I suspect, have found many defenders. But creation and evolution were outside anyone’s experience, and struck at Man’s innate worth.
The back cover of the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer, by the way, has a hilarious annotated Periodic Table, with notes as if Critics of Evolution were to turn their guns on Chemistry and Physics the same way they attack Evolution. Ain’t gonna happen, though.
You remember incorrectly (or, at least, you have been misinformed). Adaptation and speciation are simply two evolutionary processes. Adaptation is a product of natural selection acting on a population, while speciation is typically the result of interrupted gene flow between two populations which were once a single population. Both processes involve what is often considered to be the crux of evolution: changing allele frequencies through time within populations.
Few people outside of creationists and those misinformed about phylogeny & taxonomy believe humans descended from monkeys. We are apes (and damn, dirty ones, at that). Apes and monkeys are both primate lineages which diverged from one another well before we arrived on the scene. Apes are our grandparents. Monkeys are our cousins.
A nitpick, to be sure, since you undoubtedly do not believe we came from apes, either. Nevertheless, the creationist would be hard-pressed to understand the similarities between ourselves and chimps or gorillas, while also understanding the similarities and differences between ourselves and monkeys. Or bats. Or rabbits. Or lizards. Or fish. “God did it” is not terribly intellectually satisfying as a proximate cause for Why Things Are the Way They Are. “Descent with modification”, on the other hand, is as elegant – and simple – an explanation as one could hope for.
A nitpick (whatan appropriate metaphor!) of my own. You are so careful with words that I wonder whether the fact that you refer to 'similarities and differences between ourselves and monkeys’ but only to 'similarities between ourselves and chimps or gorillas is purposeful or not.
It was, indeed, purposeful. The point being that we have much more in common with the other apes (here, of course, I am including us; thus “other”) than we do with monkeys. That we should have so much in common with one group of primates, but not as much in common with another group of primates, is something that warrants explainin’.
In other words, there are good reasons why we classify ourselves as apes rather than monkeys, and why we are all considered primates.
That statement is part of the problem. Many folks, myself included (and I’m a Big-E Evolutionist), start nodding off the moment allele frequencies get mentioned. It’s hard to understand what you slept through (don’t ask me to discern between Mixtec and Zapotec pottery, for instance) and some people lack the force of will (or is it desire? same difference, I suppose) to stay awake during those discussions.
But, because I have the paperwork proving I understand the difference, I feel free to call apes monkeys when I feel like it, which is usually when I see a baby gorilla on TV and, well, you know how braindead some of us breeders can be when faced with a cute infant. “I wanna baby monkey!” is about the deepest my thinking can go at those times.
Yes, that’s the one. Gould was quite sympathetic, IIRC.
Actually, there are several issues that Biblical Creationists can have with the Theory of Natural Selection. (It should be noted that not all such persons will share the complete list.)
First is the statement of Genesis 1:27 "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. "
The idea that humanity is created in the image of God seems to be contradicted by the notion that humanity descended by accident from a “lower” species.
Second is the entire notion of “materialistic” explanations. All of Darwin’s work (and that of his successors) is a-theistic, seeking only to understand the functional processes that drove events. In the eyes of many people, such a study is inherently inimical to the Word of God. Law Professor Philip Johnson is a vocal proponent of this objection.
(Such people are also liable to oppose cosmology and similar scientific disciplines as well as evolution that avoid the “first cause” issue that prompts Creationists to confuse evolution with abiogenesis or to attack the Big Bang in a debate on evolution. I do not know that Prof. Johnson is among this group.)
Third is the problem that many people are threatened by the notion that the bible may not be literally true. This is not so often driven by some quaint fear that “their book” may have a problem, as it is sometimes caricatured, but by the very real problem that if one can declare some parts of the book to be inaccurate, what is the standard by which one determines which verses are true and which verses are not?
Fourth is an issue that is often missed by those outside the Fundamentalist community: the contradiction between the narrative of Genesis vs the narrative of the Theory of Natural Selection is perceived as an attack on the moral message of Genesis. In Genesis, all the world is in harmony at the Creation. There is no mention of pain. All animals are presumed (in later commentaries, not explicitly stated in Genesis) to be vegetarians. Death, pain, and suffering enter the world through the sin of Adam and Eve. If there was a long period of evolution prior to the first humans, in which animals, “red in tooth and claw,” killed each other for food, inflicting pain and death or if ancient fossils are found with bones showing signs of arthritis, it does not simply mean that the narrative is technically inaccuarate, but the the moral message of the story is diametrically wrong.
No, but they do seem to have a beef with the Big Bang.
170 years ago many religious leaders were convinced that the newly popular science would confirm the Bible. When it didn’t, and especially when Darwin demonstrated that man did not have to be specially created, it knocked the underpinnings from this whole movement. Then religion split into the science is right and supports a properly interpreted Bible branch and the science is wrong branch. This branch has waxed and waned over the years.
I think a lot of it (see the “I’m not descended from a monkey” comment) is a reaction to our not being special, and created in God’s image.
Isn’t it the position of many, perhaps all, Christians that man is responsible for original sin through Adam and Eve’s disobedience? If there were no Adam, Eve, serpent or garden, then if man is inherently sinful it could only because God made us that way. The lack of sin, or God’s responsibility for it, eliminates the need for a savior.
Original sin is definitely a Christian concept. What I learned in Hebrew School is that the actions of Adam and Eve were responsible for the effects defined in the Bible - the need to work, the pain of childbirth, the fear of snakes - and nothing else. So the story not being true does not attack the very roots of Jewish faith as it does for Christian faith.
I know the Catholic response to this, but it has never been very convincing to me.
Coupled with this is the frequent belief that not only is the morality of Genesis done away with, it is actively replaced (or sought to be replaced) by Spencer’s “Social Darwinism”. And given the poor track record attempted implementations of social programs based on such a philosphy have had, it is little wonder that many folks of a religious bent are concerned!
What they often fail to realize, however, is that most scientists are similarly concerned with attempts at reading any sort of moral message into the process of natural selection. Just as Genesis ought not be treated as a lesson in science, natural selection ought not be treated as a philosophy of ethics, or as a guide for society.
Also, it is not easy for anyone who has been trained all their life (my mom, Catholic) with one set of views to easily accept a different set of views, especially if there appears to be problems with new views (due to not understanding).
When we first discussed the topic when I was in college, she had the standard:
But why are there still apes? and
But I can’t just decide to walk upright, or grow a longer arm!
For some, the answer to these questions clicks and it makes sense, for my mom, there was clear resistance to even explore the details of how this could all work, I think partially because that would mean her education and world view for her entire life needed some serious re-work.
Does that mean the huge percentage of Christians who accept evolution (world-wide) have weak faith?
I don’t know. This in itself is an interesting debate I think.
Maybe weak was the wrong term (although it caught your attention :p). Depends how you look at it I guess. What I meant is that many (dare I say most?) Christians (or other religions) accept evolution because they read their Holy Book to be a book of moral lessons and attitudes that hold true despite the primitive mindset the text as written in / for.
On the other hand, the creationist fundies insist that every wiord of text (where convenient) must be true (unless its obviously wrong and therefore metaphor of course.)
Why must it be literal? Do they think that if it is proved to be non literal (ie untrue) that their faith will fall apart? This is what I meant by weak.
