As opposed to “Gish Gish Gish”? 
Hi kabbes
I think the example of your grandfather is a good one and, like you, I can understand Ben’s frustration to some degree. I think that I eluded to it and acknowledged it earlier in this thread.
I may well acept that he knows a lot about the ‘current knowledge’ of the evolution process. More than I, from a micro-biological point of view. I would argue though, that it is still possible to challenge Ben, or anyone else, without necessarily claimimg that what he knows is ‘bunk’.
Consider this. In a spirit of debate I may propose the following:
Science is about the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of God’s creation (from a theist’s perspective).
Religious faith is about the ‘what for’ and ‘how come’.
This proposition can be accepted or rejected. Assume that it is accepted.(Humour me)
In that situation, all of science’s progress and contribution helps a theist (or anyone for that matter) to understand the mechanics and effects of God’s work. It is a valuable and worthy exploit. It is to be commended.
History tells us though, that it may well change, be modified, be adjusted as scientific research makes further progress. It is about our ‘current’ understanding and so retains an element of ‘uncertainity’.
While science can give us answers through observation, it cannot give us answers to things that cannot be observed… such as why the world happened in the first place. It is not competent to do this.(Awaits correction… )
So my challenge as a theist would not be along the lines that your science is ‘wrong’ (not a good word’), but that it doesn’t necessarily disprove God. Also, I don’t have to understand ‘evolution science’ fully to challenge any assertion that God doesn’t exist.(Unless you have access to scientific evidence that God doesn’t exist).
God and science don’t have to be antagonistic. I could argue that they are complementary and explain things in different ways.
I did suggest earlier that there is perhaps more common ground than this debate would suggest. Sometimes, if we start to focus on that common ground, we make more progress than holding onto strong positions and declarations of certainty where there is clearly the potential for uncertainty.
If there is only certainty, there is no scope for debate!
pax
Hang on there walor.
As I’m pretty sure you already degree, evolution/creationism is not theism/atheism. They are totally different.
So I’m not in any way saying that Ben’s knowledge disproves the existence of God.
I am saying, however, that it disproves creationism. In the same way that evidence for gravity disproves the theory that we don’t float because God’s heavenly thumb holds on Earth.
I’m using the word “prove” very carefully here. To the extent that humans can ever use this word, the evidence does prove that creationism is wrong. OK - if I postulate the existence of God, then he can indeed do anything and that includes fabricating millions of pieces of evidence that all say that creationism is wrong. But then, god can do anything, including make me believe that I am typing this now.
Basically, what I’m saying is that to accept creationism in the face Ben’s expertise is to be solipstic - to reject primae facie evidence because it is possible that the evidence is, essentially, a figment of the imagination. Of course it isn’t possible to disprove solipsism - but it is possible to reject it as a useful view of the universe.
Creationism in the face of evidence is solipsism. Creationism is not a useful view of the universe.
pan
is there any evidence supporting the “six days as six epochs” creation story (i.e., does it hold a tad more water)? doubtful, but just curious.
Yes, it somewhat saddens me that there must be this religion versus science battle. If all could agree that religion deals with the question “Why” and science deals with the question “How” I don’t think this debate would be going on.
But look at the attitudes of the different sides. Kabbes, I don’t disagree with your point. One side is based on faith (which I define as belief without proof) The key to the difference, IMO, is that some religions or denominations of some religions insist that their holy text be interpreted literally and is the TRUTH, no if, ands, or buts. And to question any part or approved interpretation is to question the whole text and religion itself. The other side is based on skepticism (hypothesize, test, observe results, come to conclusion, refine hypothesis, repeat as needed). This isn’t an apples and oranges difference, it’s night and day.
And the emperor never likes to be told he is wearing no clothes. You’ve got to expect him to get defensive after you reveal his nudity and then you continue and tell him he has a tiny penis too. But if you insist on shoving charts, graphs, and statistics in his face to prove to him to the nearest nanometer precisely how tiny his schmeckele is, well, you’re asking for trouble.
I didn’t think you were… common ground?
You can say this with all certainty? Science has really done that?
Never been called a solipsist before… first time for everything (I’ve been called worse though 
) I thought that solipsism meant that the only possible knowledge is that of oneself. I’m not sure that that’s what you were suggesting.
Are you saying that Ben’s evidence is overwhelming and it shouldn’t or can’t be challenged? It is a fact. It is a truth. There is no debate. If so, I don’t remember catching this on nationwide TV or in the media. Surely it would warrant some coverage in the popular press as well as the scientific journals… ‘Categoric evidence that creationism is wrong… read all about it’.
Sorry, I don’t mean to lower the tone of the debate but it’s getting towards the end on the working day.
One last thought as I depart… how does this fit in the scheme of things:
Creation happens (atheistically or theistically)… then evolution happens.
Science then studies evolution (I’d argue, the only thing it can ‘study’). The information appears to be compelling and rigorous. A strong case to explain evolution is generated. It finds information that doesn’t fit with some people’s thinking on creation. Information that challenges some creationist beliefs and or personal faiths.
However, surely it cannot prove or disprove creation. Nor does it represent an ‘un-useful’ view of the universe IMHO.
walor: I think that we’re not on the same wavelength here. There are two claims that have been disproven. The first claim is that the earth is 6000 years old (or 10000 years, or whatever young-earth creationists claim). The second is that humans were specially created by divine intervention (as opposed to natural processes). There is a third claim, that life was originally created by divine intervention, which has not been so soundly disproven yet, although I believe (based on what I’ve read and half-remember) that it’s on its way out.
That’s what this debate is about. People still say that those two claims are true, and Ben is challenging them to make the second one scientific. Anything beyond that is pretty much interpretation.
It’s not up to scientists studying evolution to disprove the creation theory, it’s up to creationists to prove it (if they want it to be accepted as ‘science’, that is).
Gee…
Many-years-inactive Catholic here… but will try to recall how it went.
First of all, may I point out that Hawking’s quote from the Pope further up in the thread (about not looking into the Big Bang) was apparently in the context of an exchange of ideas and may reflect the opinion of the Pope and/or his advisor on the matter, but is not an actual doctrinal declaration or teaching. There are procedures and forms for those.
The official position of the RCC has for a long time been that we should fully study the universe: “the Heavens themselves proclaim His glory…” and all that. But they did tend historically to be cautious about how
to then spread the knowledge to the commoners, preferring that it be filtered and interpreted first (which in part was what got Galileo into trouble).
Insofar as Evolution, the RCC for decades had the position that it was OK as AN explanation of the process of creation in the face of the evidence. (BTW an important player in human paleontology in the 1st. half of the 20th century was a priest, P. Teilhard de Chardin) In the 90s JP-II in official correspondence stated that evolution IS THE best-fit explanation of current state of the physical universe including the human organism, given the current state of knowledge.
However the doctrine of Original Sin stands, it has never been dropped from the teachings of the Church.
The way I learned it, it does require that the faithful believe that at one point, Man did not know sin, was in a state of harmony with God and his environment, and knew the rules than maintained that order; that this did not last long before actual common ancestors of modern humanity succumbed to temptation and violated the natural-divine order, reaching for “the fruit of knowledge of good and evil” (assuming the role of judging what was good or bad to fit their own convenience and pleasure, without regard for the natural-divine order); that through this real act of transgression Man’s nature became corrupted (the Fall), and as a result evil and suffering and a hard life became his lot on Earth; and that this Fallen Nature is the heritage of all the descendant’s souls.
Within that, you are free to believe that where it says God made man “from the Earth” it means He grabbed one particularly promising pair of hominids from among those already around, and “breathed” a Morally Responsible Soul into them. Maybe He plunked down a Black Monolith and cranked up the Strauss. Up to you.
Unless you’re defing creationism as simply “God can do anything, including create evidence of evolution”, then the answer is yes.
Why would you expect that to get reported in the way you suggest? That would be like vast media coverage of “Another apple falls from a tree - theory of gravity proven!” No, the facts Ben presented aren’t incapable of being challenged or debated, but there has been no challenge or debate offered, has there? Only complaints about the fairness of asking “hard” questions that any undergraduate biology major would understand, as Ben pointed out. Hey, it’s trying to answer the “hard” questions that provides all advances in knowledge, right?
One is free to think (or not) that evolution is part of God’s plan, and that the people who wrote those books thousands of years ago just didn’t have the knowledge to explain it better, and that studying how evolution works is exploring the glory of His creation. There’s no conflict, since there’s no intersection of conceptual frameworks, outside of a particular segment of Protestant Christianity. But there’s no need to invoke theology there- the process is capable of being understood without it.
Ask our old friend Occam then. There’s no need, outside of the solipsistic self’s own desire, to invoke The Hand of God to explain facts when there is a simpler, broader, more predictive, mundane conceptual framework available that fits the facts even better (or perfectly, in the case of evolution).
Is creationism “useful” for anything beyond making its adherents feel better?
Check out Genesis and the Big Bang by Dr. Gerald Schroeder. He is currently an instructor at Aish HaTorah, a Jewish Institution in the Old City of Jerusalem, and a discussion of his work begins here.
Okay, something we need to really nail down here–it is certainly possible to come up with a definition of the word “creationism” which amounts to “the idea or belief that the Universe has a Creator”. But that isn’t what we’re talking about here. “Creationism”, in this context, means “the belief or claim that individual species or kinds of life, including humans, were separately created by God”. It is this latter definition that the word “creationism” usually refers to in modern American life. The first is clearly a philosophical question. It is possible to make the second claim in a way that it can’t be scientifically disproven: “God created all kinds of living things separately, including humans, but he made all of them, including humans, in such a way that they appear to have evolved and they appear to be related to each other by common lines of descent, and God furthermore made a lot of supporting evidence like fossils which he planted in the ground.” This is a philosophical question, in the same way that the assertion “I am the only reality, and everything I see, including other ‘people’, are illusions and figments of my imagination” is a philosophical, not a scientifically falsifiable, assertion. Most creationists–that is, people who reject that fact that biological evolution has taken place–also assert that in fact the evidence favors their account, and disproves the account of evolutionary biologists, geologists, astrophysicists, and so on. They do make testable claims–that there was a world-wide flood, and that there is evidence for this flood; that the Universe and Earth are six to ten thousand years old, and that there is evidence for this age being the true one; and so forth. (Note: Not all creationists–in the anti-biological-evolution sense–are Young Earth Creationists, but they’re the most virulent.) Wherever the Young Earth Creationists make testable claims which are at odds with the findings of modern science, those claims have been tested, and found to be false. This includes the central claim, that the evidence favors separate creation of living species over evolution. The evidence favors evolution so overwhelmingly that we may speak of it as a fact, in the same way we speak of the fact that matter is made up of atoms.
Well, if Genesis is taken very metaphorically, to mean “God created everything, but he took a long time to do it [‘one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’], and it was a ‘progressive’ thing, not happening all at once, but in stages”, then such a theological view won’t necessarily conflict with the findings of science. There are forms of creationism (def. 2–“rejecting biological evolution”) which assert that the Genesis “days” are long epochs, but which otherwise claim that Genesis is a straightforward historical account of things. There are still problems with this. “The Earth” is not the same age as all of “the Heavens”–the Universe is billions of years older than the Solar System. Plant life did not exist on the land before the formation of the Sun. Birds did not come into existence before land life–birds evolved from land-dwelling creatures.
Though your statement has merit, the two fields overlap.
Fundies and various (though not all) creationists regularly overstep the boundaries of “why” in their attempts to assert the Genesis account as history rather than poetry or interpretation.
Science-minded folk, I imagine, might be prone to drawing some “meaning” (i.e., some philisophical worldview) from their observations of the surrounding environment.
Neither is “wrong” (in terms of one’s right to do such things). Just showing that there is indeed an overlap and thus a potential for friction.
The Bible contradicts itself on where animals come from. Genesis 1:20 says they came from water:
But Genesis 2:19 says they came from the land:
I’d like to see zev steinhardt or cmkeller explain THAT one!
sdimbert:
I have read Rabbi Nathan Aviezer’s stuff trying to reconcile the Jewish view of Genesis with science. I have read (and responded to) many of the articles on the anthropic principle and evolution on aish.com. Aviezer denies evolution. aish.com has articles strongly poking at evolution. Schroeder seems receptive to evolution and the 15 billion year age of the universe, and arrives there through selective reading of the Gemarah. He jumps through some logical loopholes which are quite extraordinary, but not unexpected after seeing similar Talmudic reasoning.
It is like what was said above. When you try to get the first 2 chapters of Genesis to agree with the modern science, you have to actually ignore the words of the story (and most of the commentaries.) You lose the meaning of the Creation story – it is not 6 days, plants didn’t come before the sun, the sun and the moon were not created on the same day, humans weren’t the most recent creatures to arrive on the planet. Even more so, it is totally unnecessary given the science – it is extraneous and can be chopped by Occam’s Razor. What you end up is the worst of two worlds, with unconvincing Biblical interpretation and unconvincing “science.”
In fact, the “how” can explain the “why” - that there is no “why”, there is no planning or Grand Design comprehensible, and the fact that it can’t be comprehended doesn’t mean that there is a Grand Designer. It all leads into the existential argument.
Of course.
Indeed so. But the next paragraph was meant to tie into the this one, so let us continue.
**Wrong. That’s exactly what I am suggesting.
Look, the way science works is to postulate a hypothesis and then test it. Rigorously. If anything comes along that interferes with the hypothesis then you have to adjust your hypothesis.
The theory of evolution has been around a loooong time. Furthermore, we’ve gotten very clever indeed in the last decade or so in terms of genetics. It’s this research that has really nailed the lid on the coffin of creationism, because genetic research agrees totally with the idea of evolution. That, incidentally, is why you do have to understand Ben’s questions if you seriously want to try to deny evolution.
But back to solipsism. Evidence is overwhelming that creationism is wrong. To accept creationism is to deny all empirical evidence. This is solipsism - the only thing you are accepting as true is yourself.
This is why I used the word “proof” carefully. Get Spiritus in here and he’ll get all epistimological on my ass and point out that nothing can ever be proved. But to the extent that we as humans can prove something, we have proved that evolution, as a concept, is true. Only by postulating that everything we experience is a lie can we reject it.
Well certainly it’s been taught as fact in schools for as long as I’ve been alive. I’m sure when evidence became overwhelming 50 years ago there was some mention of it.
I am indeed saying that it is a truth and that the only people even attempting to debate it are those who simply don’t understand it. “Look at me! I don’t know what I’m talking about but I’m going to declare you wrong anyway!” That kind of thing.
Well we’re talking about evolution as development of life after life has established a foothold. I’m not saying that it is certain that god didn’t place that first virus (or whatever) on the Earth. Personally I think that the idea of god is bunkum, so I’m happy to accept that the first proto-life did occur by chance, but I don’t expect you to necessarily buy that, since we don’t have the evidence for it. Similarly I see nothing wrong with the idea that god was the prodder of evolution - if god exists I personally see him as a cosmic manipulator of chance - the one who decides whether the die rolls a six or a one. Directing evolution would fit nicely in with that.
So no, it doesn’t disprove “creation” as the placing of the first proto-virus on the Earth. But it does disprove creation as an alternative to evolution.
In summary, what I mean by saing that creationism is an unuseful viewpoint is that creation as an alternative to evolution (saying nothing about where the first life came from) denies all evidence so is solipstic. This makes it unuseful since if we want to be solipstic we will achieve nothing - I may even deny you.
pan
BTW, I think the word or concept I’ve been groping around for is pseudoscience. Creationism isn’t just philosophy or theology. Once upon a time, creationist ideas may have been legitimate science, the best science of the day–wrong, of course, but so were the geocentric model of the Solar System or the phlogiston theory of combustion. But creationism–and its related ideas, like a young Earth and Universe, or a worldwide Deluge–aren’t science any more; they’re just claptrap.
Wildest Bill, do you still maintain that evolutionists merely assert, without presenting evidence, that evolution is true?
Also, let me ask a question which I already asked you in another thread: what books have you read on evolution?
-Ben
Since we’re past 150 posts and still no creationist has even attempted to provide a detailed answer to even one of the 11 questions, I’ve decided to ask Helen Fryman (aka “Tuppence”) to have a crack at them. For those who don’t know, she’s the C/E expert at http://www.carm.org.
Incidentally, I should add a further “abject failure” condition: quotefests will be considered to be an admission of abject defeat. Let’s face it: for every quote creationists can present in which some scientist says (or seems to say) “evolution is bunk” or “homology is bunk,” evolutionists can present not one, not ten, not a hundred, but a thousand scientists who think that creationism is an utter crock. Besides, merely quoting a scientist as saying “evolution is bunk” wouldn’t be explaining the evidence from a creationist framework, now, would it?
-Ben