Multiple Adams and Eves?

[I've posted below the response I gave to an email question about the claim--made by theistic evolutionists at the BioLogos site--that the human species did not begin as a single pair but as a population.]

Dear R______:

Your question was whether science had proved as impossible the claim--made by Christians, Jews, and Muslims--that mankind descended from two original humans, Adam and Eve. In particular, you implied that three methods of assessing genetic diversity (as related in a BioLogos post) prove that humans alive today exhibit too much genetic diversity to trace to a single couple.

First of all, let me point out that there is no question of 'proof' here, in either direction. Science doesn't work that way, though the BioLogos folks may not understand such issues. (I, too, am a biologist, and never during my scientific training did I receive any instruction in the philosophy of science, even a basic understanding of what science is, what it can and cannot do. I believe that my experience is the norm today, and so Venema and Falk can be excused for a naive understanding on this issue.)

On large issues in the historical sciences (such as this one), there will generally be a wealth of evidence available and a variety of methods for assessing this evidence. In addition, there will be a wealth of relevant evidence as yet undiscovered. On such questions, science uses abductive reasoning, arguing to the best explanation of all the relevant available evidence. Where that task is difficult--often because the available evidence leads to contradictory conclusions--the good scientist seeks more, better, and clearer evidence and/or methods. And in such cases (even more than usual), the good scientist remains humble, seeking truth rather than trying to prove a theory he holds a priori. When a scientist takes a strong position despite such contradictory evidence, that dogmatism is usually an indication that he lacks the objectivity that accompanies scientific discovery. This sort of dogmatism is apparent in Venema and Falk's article.

At present, there are two lines of evidence that rather clearly point to this... that all humans alive today can be traced to a single female ancestor (through their mitochondrial DNA) and that all males alive today can be traced to a single male ancestor (through the DNA in their y-chromosomes).

Venema and Falk highlight three methods (of analyzing the genetic diversity of living humans) that temper the conclusion of the two studies above.

What are we to make of this? Each of these sets of evidence and the methods used involve assumptions. And each of these assumptions is itself open to scrutiny, testable (to some degree), and (unfortunately) often held with a degree of unexamined faith by its proponents.

I could stop there, leaving it as an entirely open question as to whether the Bible is believable or reliable on this issue. But more needs to be argued on the side of an historical Adam and Eve.*

For one thing, it seems pretty clear that the assumptions associated with the BioLogos claims are less certain and less well-supported than those associated with the y-chromosome and mDNA evidence. As just one example, a study of the genetics of a population of mouflon sheep refutes some of the assumptions of Venema and Falk's methods (method 1 in particular, but all three generally). In this study, a single pair of sheep was introduced to Haute Island (in 1957), and the descendent population grew to 700 and has subsequently fluctuated between 250 and 700. Mathematical models use to predict the present population's heterozygosity (based on the known heterozygosity of the original pair) underestimated it by a factor of four. Had the models been used as in Venema and Falk's argument--to estimate the number of founding individuals by measuring the diversity of the present population--they would have grossly overestimated. That is, this test case shows that genetic diversity increases (at least in sheep, and over a mere 50 years) in ways currently not understood by the relevant experts. Venema and Falk may simply be unaware of such problems with the methods they espouse; nonetheless, their dogmatism is unwarranted.

Secondly, given the vehemence and certainty with which evolutionists claim the truth of their macro-theory, it is rather odd that when such tests finally became available, the evidence led to a conclusion so similar to the Bible's proclamation. Although theists might argue about the details (one pair or a few thousand), there is no one left still arguing for the competing view of human origins, the multi-regional hypothesis (which claimed that Asian, Caucasian, and African peoples descended from different hominid species in different parts of the world). What is agreed upon by nearly all today is that the genetic evidence shows that all humans alive today are descended from a very small population (which may have even been a single pair) living in or near eastern Africa some 40-60,000 years ago. The scientific evidence leaves Genesis 1 and 2 as viable portrayals of the true situation. And where apparently contradictory evidence exists, the assumptions associated with it turn out to be problematic.

There is no scientific evidence that can prove the Bible to be true and reliable about the descendence of humanity from a single pair. Nor is there any scientific evidence that disproves it. As a scientist, though, I have found overwhelming evidence for the truth and reliability of the Bible with many of its other claims, and that evidence has come both from science and history. More importantly, however, I know from personal experience the truth of its central claim, that the holy Creator of the universe so loved His creatures that He sent His eternal Son to make a way for me, a far-from-holy creature, to have a relationship wit Him. In your continued search for truth, I hope you will seek and find this most important truth.




* The humans to which the y-chromosome and mDNA evidence points would not be Adam and Eve but (more likely) Noah and Eve. Biblically, the bottleneck for males was more recent, since all the males on the ark were related to Noah, whereas the four females on the ark were from different families. Interestingly, this aligns with the genetic data as well. The date for mDNA 'Eve' is earlier than the date for y-chromosome 'Adam' (Noah).

Dinosaurs and the Age of the Earth

Here's another Vimeo from the Redux service at which I officiated a couple of weeks ago. The question was about what the Bible has to say about dinosaurs and the age of the Earth.

Dinosaurs and the Age of the Earth from :redux on Vimeo.

God of the Gaps

[Besides entering my busiest time of year work-wise, I'm teaching one class at the Kilns and another two classes on the internet. What suffers is my time to write new blog posts. So the following is taken from a discussion thread in my internet class, in which I clarify what I take to be the issue with the God-of-the-gaps charge.]

I guess I have a slightly different take on the God-of-the-gaps issue. As I see it, this is not so much something of which Christians generally (and much less practicing scientists who are Christians) are really guilty. Rather, it is an illegitimate charge made against Christians by naturalists. And when naturalists raise this charge, they are generally guilty of several logical fallacies...

1) They are guilty of creating a straw man. While there may be some who easily claim "because God did it" too early in the search for explanations, this is an extreme position and not the one taken by the vast majority of Christians engaged in scientific discussion. When one addresses only the absurd, extreme articulations of his opponents (setting up a straw man that is easily knocked down) instead of addressing the thoughtful, difficult objections made by more moderate opponents, one is being academically disingenuous and logically fallacious.

2) They are guilty of the ad futurum fallacy. (I actually wanted to make up my own name for a fallacy, the "log-in-your-own-eye fallacy," but will stick with a well-recognized name.) But what I mean is that the naturalist is equally guilty (moreso, actually) of engaging in naturalism-of-the-gaps. The claim is that while we don't currently know the natural explanation, give us 75 years and we will. This is a faulty appeal to the future. In good reasoning, one is expected to find the best explanation for all the currently available evidence, rather than appeal to hypothetical future evidence.

3) More fundamentally, the naturalist is guilty of equivocation, wrongly using two significantly different definitions of the 'gaps' being addressed.

The naturalist likes to identify epistemological gaps (gaps of knowledge), and show that historically such gaps have closed. But the more interesting gaps--and those raised by the old-Earth creationist and the proponent of Intelligent Design--are ontological gaps (gaps of existence or being). The naturalist serves his own cause by conflating these two definitions or by ignoring this crucial distinction.

We could discuss (for example) the gap between the existence of a universe and the non-existence of a universe, or the gap between the Edicarean life forms and those of the Cambrian. These are fundamentally gaps of being, not merely gaps in our knowledge. And while the actual gaps involved are unchanging, the epistemological gaps (as we better understand the breadth and suddenness of the Cambrian explosion) are getting larger, not smaller. Perhaps the best example is that of the origin of life. The gap between non-living chemistry and the simplest life is now understood to be much larger than any evolutionary naturalist ever conceived.

So, it is rather uninteresting to note that we ought not be guilty of appealing to the supernatural prematurely, when there is still every indication that a natural (process) explanation will be found (for whatever phenomenon is being studied). But when we are studying origins* questions (rather than process questions), there is every reason to use abductive reasoning, and explanations that involve a supernatural being can reasonably be offered in such cases. This is especially true since only a theistic worldview logically grounds the assumptions that make science worthwhile (as discussed in another thread).



* Failure to differentiate between empirical (process) research and historical (origins) research also serves the scientific naturalist's cause. Whether this represents mere imprecision/naivete or disingenuity on their part I'm never quite sure.

The Peppered Moth Evidence

From the archives again, the post with which I followed up "Green Toothpicks" about 4 years ago...

[In the last post], I shared about an artificial (and rather poor) illustration of natural selection in action ("Green Toothpicks"). The most famous (and much-cited) example of natural selection in the wild is the changes in coloration of the Peppered Moth, changes that occurred as a result of industrialization in Great Britain. These changes were noticed throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, as Peppered Moth populations went from being mostly white (with a few melanistic individuals) to mostly dark (with a few light individuals). In the 1950's, Bernard Kettlewell, a British biologist and physician, began a series of experiments that led him to believe that this change could be explained as a result of natural selection. He concluded that the moths were eaten by birds (visually-oriented predators) as they rested on tree trunks during the day. Kettlewell reasoned that before industrialization, light-colored moths were more prevalent because they were better camouflaged on the light-colored (and lichen-covered) tree trunks. But with increasing pollution, tree trunks became darker (and lichens died), light-colored moths were less camouflaged than darker ones, and the phenotype of the population became predominantly that of the dark individuals. This elegant example from the wild remains to this day the classic textbook example of natural selection at work.

Subsequent research has cast a great deal of doubt on this entire scenario. It turns out that Peppered Moths don't normally rest on tree trunks but in the crown of the trees, that researchers (including Kettlewell) released moths by day (even though they are a nocturnal species), that many (not including Kettlewell) in fact pinned dead moths to trunks rather than use live ones in their capture-recapture experiments. In addition, neither the distribution of the various color morphs nor that of the lichens fit the patterns predicted by pollution rates, either during the industrialization or following emission controls (when white moths made a comeback in some regions). The problems unearthed have been so serious that what had been called "Darwin's missing evidence" has been deemed invalid even by evolutionary scientists. (For a summary of these problems, the reader is referred to chapter 7 of Jonathan Wells' Icons of Evolution.) Nonetheless, since evidence for the evolutionary paradigm is so scant, this invalidated tale is still a prominent feature in most modern textbooks (with no mention of its problems).

But again, suppose we ignore (for the sake of argument) the fact that subsequent research has shown that the Kettlewell scenario does not provide the evidence for which Darwinists hope. Let us be generous and grant that perhaps further research will discover a mechanism (consistent with natural selection) that explains the change in Peppered Moths. Then, as evidence for macroevolution, we have the same problem here as we had with the green toothpicks. We have--at the end of the experiment--merely a different frequency of the same phenotypes already present at the beginning. Phillip Johnson has stated the problem well (in Darwin on Trial)...

Why do other people, including experts whose intelligence and intellectual integrity I respect, think that evidence of local population fluctuations confirms the hypothesis that natural selection has the capacity to work engineering marvels, to construct wonders like the eye and the wing? Everyone who studies evolution knows that Kettlewell’s peppered moth experiment is the classic demonstration of the power of natural selection, and that Darwinists had to wait almost a century to see even this modest confirmation of their central doctrine. Everyone who studies the experiment knows that it has nothing to do with the origin of any species, or even any variety, because dark and white moths were present throughout the experiment. Only the ratios of one variety to the other changed. How could intelligent people have been so gullible as to imagine that the Kettlewell experiment in any way supported the ambitious claims of Darwinism?

At least two pitfalls (obstacles to objective truth) can be seen in the Peppered Moth story. First, moth researchers used invalid methods and jumped to wrong conclusions primarily because of an inordinant desire to provide evidence for a popular--but evidentially-impoverished--theory. Second, had their conclusions not been spurious, these same researchers (and their popularizers, including textbook editors still today) have been guilty of failing to see the scalar limitations of their results. Evidence of natural selection working at the level of a species quite simply is irrelevant as evidence for macroevolution.

As a scientist, I only hope that the Peppered Moth may serve as a reminder to avoid these pitfalls long after it has been finally discarded as a significant piece of evidence for Darwinian evolution.

Green Toothpicks

I'm pretty busy these days, catching eagles, writing reports, and doing quite a bit of teaching. So, with little time to blog, I've reached back into the archives for the following, originally posted 4 years ago today. It's called "Green Toothpicks."

I took an undergraduate biology class from Dr. "Mad Dog" Johnson, in which he tried to demonstrate natural selection in action. We went outside to a lush, uncut, well-fertilized portion of the campus lawn, where we strew a known number of toothpicks of different colors--red, yellow, blue, and green. We, the students, then acted as predators--the agents of natural selection--foraging through that patch of lawn, capturing as many toothpicks as we could find. As I recall, we found all of the yellow and red toothpicks, most of the blue ones, and almost none of the green, so well-camouflaged were they among the long blades of springtime grass. The lesson was that natural selection works just so on populations of living things.

There are at least a couple of serious problems with this experiment as an illustration of natural selection at work. If--as is claimed--natural selection acting on genetic variation is the mechanism by which evolutionary advance is made, what we demonstrated would seem to be just the opposite. Our toothpick population began with a much higher genetic diversity than it ended with. The population, which now consists almost entirely of green toothpicks, would seem to be much less able to adapt to a changing environment than when it contained the greater diversity of phenotypes. It has ever since seemed to me that we demonstrated that natural selection has a far greater capacity to tend toward extinction than to adaptation and advance.

Another problem with this illustration is just as important. Let us be unreasonably generous and grant that the resulting population of toothpicks is somehow better prepared to adapt to some future environmental change. That is, let us say--for the sake of argument--that what we witnessed was an instance of microevolution. Microevolution refers to the idea that species (and populations and such) are not static, but change over time in both their phenotype and genotype (their morphology and the genetic basis for their morphology, respectively). That microevolution occurs is a well-accepted, non-controversial idea. Let us say that the population of green toothpicks is a good example of something having undergone microevolution. The claim of neo-Darwinism is that it is this same mechanism--natural selection acting upon genetic variation (mutation)--that accounts for macroevolution. In other words, the diversity of all life is explainable by this sort of natural selection acting over vast time scales.

In the specific case of the toothpick illustration, we are to believe that if we waited long enough (as the toothpicks bred generation after generation) and continued preying on those toothpicks most easily spotted, eventually those toothpicks would give rise to species of dental floss, of toothbrushes, and even, eventually, of electric toothbrushes, all without the input of any sort of intelligence or designer.

That there have existed--over the course of Earth's history--different life forms is readily acknowledged. Macroevolutionary theory, as an explanation for how that record came to be, has yet to be substantiated by any evidence. Rare cases of microevolution have been documented, and then we are asked to make the unreasonable and unsupported extrapolation that such minor changes can be invoked to explain all of the advancing complexity witnessed in the fossil record. For me, Professor Johnson's toothpick demonstration has always served as a reminder of the absurdity of the grander claims of evolutionists.

Hawking's Self-Refutation

Regular readers will know by now that one of my favorite things is identifying when someone goes on record making a claim that is self-referentially absurd, or self-refuting. We have seen that scientism suffers from this fatal fallacy, we have had fun discussing the self-refuting claims of postmodernism, and we have dismissed the biblicism of young-earth creationism on the same grounds.

And now we find arguably the most brilliant mind of our lifetimes wallowing in self-refuting claims, and thereby making what may be his final book a testimony to the absurdity that results when one sets out to deny God.

I'm referring, of course, to Stephen Hawking, the iconic mathematician whose Brief History of Time was the best-selling science book of its era. His latest, coauthored by physicist Leonard Mlodinow, is titled The Grand Design, and was released in September. Its central claim--that the universe and its laws can be explained without reference to God--is indeed sweeping and grand, but the foundation required to buttress that claim is riddled with self-refuting arguments. Let's look at a couple of them.

Philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

I'm sure that some of you see the problem here (even though Hawking, his coauthor, and his editors must have missed it): these and all related claims are not scientific claims but philosophical ones. And I'm not cherry-picking an isolated logical mistake here; fully a third of the book (and arguably a whole lot more) is a rambling, philosophical discourse, one that will cause any good philosopher to wince, laugh, or cry, depending upon his mood while reading. We scientists are notoriously poor philosophers, and if it does nothing else, Hawking's book serves as a stark reminder of this fact.

But scientific naturalists have even more reason for dismay. For many who would deny God's existence, Hawking offered the best hope, as he years ago devoted his brilliant mind to discovering a 'theory of everything.' This book would seem to be the culmination of that search, and yet it winds up dissolving into postmodern nonsense.

Hawking and Mlodinow devote a chapter to the question "What Is Reality?" And the conclusion to which they arrive is that

there is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality... our perception is not direct, but rather shaped by a kind of lens, the interpretive structure of our human brains. [Therefore, no model of reality] can be said to be more real than any other.

What are we to do with such? If no view of reality can be said to be real, why bother interacting with Hawking's view of reality? If there is no theory-independent concept of reality, then this concept isn't. Like all self-refuting claims, these epistemological ones are necessarily false.

So where we expect to find piercing scientific argumentation, we are treated instead to sloppy, self-refuting philosophy (after first being told that philosophy is dead).

Others of the main claims of Hawking's new book likewise disqualify themselves, but perhaps I'll save those for another time. The bottom line is this... the Christian need not fear the fallacious arguments either of the scientific naturalist or the postmodernist (or, as in this case, someone who mixes both in bizarre ways). Even the most brilliant mind will end up stunningly in error, if he begins his search for truth with a denial of the Author of all truth.

Evolutionism vs Creationism

Here's another vimeo of the Redux session I sat in on a few weeks back. I received a number of good questions that day, including

How would you respond to the debate between evolutionism and creationism?

The Debate Between Creationism and Evolution from :redux on Vimeo.

AIG Addendum

As a follow-up to the last post, it needs to be said (since the situations are so parallel), that...

When Galileo used scientific evidence to correct the Roman Catholic church leadership's faulty interpretation of Scripture about the solar system, he wasn't attacking either the Word of God or the Son of God. We all recognize Galileo's interpretation to have been correct and the interpretation of the church (which, incidentally, was shared by both Luther and Calvin) to have been wrong.

In the same way, when William Lane Craig (or any of a host of other committed followers of Christ) uses the evidence from the creation to critique the hopelessly outdated Lightfoot/Ussher interpretation to which Ken Ham has anchored his ministry, he is not attacking the Word of God or the Son of God either.

I spend a good deal of my time discussing history and philosophy of science issues, showing how modern science uniquely arose from within the Christian worldview, and how science depends upon theistic assumptions for its logical grounding. Though it has been popular in the last 100 years to claim that Christianity and science have been opposed to one another, this claim could hardly be more false. In the history of the interaction between Christianity and modern science there has really only been that one case--the Galileo incident--in which church leadership seriously erred in their interpretation despite contrary scientific evidence. Unfortunately, the success of so-called Creation "Science" organizations in our day (like Answers in Genesis) has lent a great deal of credibility to those who would claim that Christianity opposes science. I can't wait for the day when we can look back on young-earth creationism as an amusing, aberrant, anti-intellectual interlude in recent church history.

Science and Theology Redux

I've decided to give you a break from reading my thoughts about how we know things are true, how we decide about things like the age of the creation. Instead, I'll let you listen to (and watch) me answer a couple of related questions. The forum is last Sunday's Redux (Q&A) service at my home church, Antioch. (I believe you can link to other Vimeo answers at the bottom.)

The Relationship of Science and Christianity from :redux on Vimeo.

The Argument from Similarity

I frequently get asked about the argument for evolution from the similarities observed in the genetic makeup of living things. Recently, the specific question was what to make of Richard Dawkins' claim that the heirarchies of similarities in the genetic record of living things provide 'undeniable proof of evolution.' Below, in part, is my answer.

The heirarchy of similarity among living things is a neutral fact and not in any way supportive of evolution or common ancestry. The understanding that Darwin sought to replace was a view known as typology. Typology said that the heirarchies of similarities we see among living things (extant and extinct) are grounded in necessity. Bats and rodents (on one level) share a suite of (mammalian) characteristics that sets them apart from all birds. On another level, bats share a smaller suite of characteristics that sets them apart from rodents. And these distinctions are adaptive and holistic. What we expect to see when we look at each part of a bat (and not just anatomically but also physiologically, behaviorally, and such) is that each contributes to bat-hood, that the membranous wings, the echolocation ability, the reproductive strategy, and such are all part and parcel of what it means to be a bat. The creature is well-designed for its role and niche. Moreover (on this view--which still remains the most reasonable view), the reason we don't see creatures that are half bat and half rodent (Darwin's predicted but yet undiscovered transitional forms) is because such a creature is non-functional and nonsensical.

This typological (and design-oriented) view did (and does) a very good job of accounting for the various levels (heirarchies) of similarity among living things. Before Darwin, biologists recognized that all living things were made of the same elements. In fact, Scripture clealy claims this, indicating that humans (in Gen. 2:7) and other animals (in Gen. 2:19) are alike made of "the dust of the Earth." This would simply be the best way of conveying to the ancient Hebrew mind that the physical components (the elements) of which all living things are made are the same elements as are found in the abiotic portions of the Earth. So the discovery (since Darwin's time) of the further similarities among living things at the level of proteins and (more basically) DNA does not in any way distinguish between the competing alternatives of theistic design (typology) and naturalistic evolution. In this regard, it is (at best) disingenuous of modern evolutionists to appeal to similarities among living things as evidence for their view. And this is especially true since what evolution was meant to explain--but has singularly failed to explain--was not the similarities but the differences.

We now know, for example, that there is more similarity in the DNA of humans and chimps than even evolutionists expected. What does this tell us? It tells us that relatively minor differences in DNA do not explain why chimpanzees are (like every other species of life on Earth) naked animals surviving from day to day in loose extended family groups while humans are civilized, uber-intelligent animals able to exploit every aspect of the Earth and to explore even the distant reaches of the universe. In fact, these deep DNA similarities should lead us to recognize that no strictly materialist explanation will ever satisfactorally account for the vast differences between chimps and humans, that there is something non-material going on here, and that scientific naturalism is false.

But perhaps I should be more to the point. Richard Dawkins finds in the DNA heirarchies common ancestry and evolution. But he finds these things not in the fact of the heirarchies but in the interpretive assumptions that he brings to them. In this way, his argument is (as all arguments from similarity are) circular. He begins by (wrongly) assuming that any similarities can be construed as evidence for common ancestry, and then when he perceives similarities, he's proved his assumptions. This, as any logician could tell you, is a fallacious way of reasoning. Simply put, taken at face value (that is, without beginning with biased assumptions), the discovery that living things exhibit a heirarchy of DNA similarities is just as (or more) amenable to a common-design inference as to a common-ancestry conclusion.

This was (inadvertently) illustrated many years ago by evolutionist Tim Berry. Frustrated by creationists' inability to understand evolution's dogma of "descent with modification," he asked his readers to picture a series of Corvettes. We see that the '56 Corvette is slightly different than the '55, and that the '57 is slightly modified from the '56, and so on. Unfortunately (for him and other evolutionists) the illustration shows just the opposite of what he wanted it to show, because we all know that each of those Corvettes was separately designed and manufactured, that the differences between them did not arise through their passing on, one to the other, slight variations.

All arguments from similarity are fallacious because they involve arguing in a vicious circle. And yet, this is really all that can be offered as support for evolution, whether of the atheistic form of Richard Dawkins or the theistic version of Francis Collins and others,

Church Fathers and Age of Creation

I received a question this week about whether any of the church fathers held that the Earth and universe were very old.

In some cases, where particular passages or topics of Scripture are interpreted in different ways, there may be value in assessing how other believers throughout church history dealt with that passage or topic. Often of special interest is how the early church fathers understood things (in part because these men were largely free from the religious traditions that arose within the next generations).

And so, it is not unnatural that the question would arise regarding the beliefs of the church fathers on a controversial issue in some Christian quarters today... Is the creation young (on the order of 6 to 10 thousand years) or old (13.7 billion years)?

Let me first give three reasons why what the church fathers thought on this issue is irrelevant to the issue of how old creation is. Then, let me give their answer to a more interesting and relevant question.

First, though some of the church fathers did speculate or even hold certain beliefs about how old the creation was, they did not appeal to Scripture as teaching clearly about this. (The first Christians to claim that Scripture does teach about the age of creation were James Ussher and John Lightfoot, and this was not until the 17th century. The impetus for this unprecedented claim was the translation of the Bible into the King James English. These two men made a number of assumptions and interpretive decisions, each of which is at best dubious and at worst demonstrably false, to arrive at a date for creation of 4004 BC.)

Second, the evidence for a very ancient Earth and universe--or more precisely the ability to measure the relevant evidence--did not become available until the 19th and 20th centuries.

These two facts are why a particular view on the age of creation is not a part of historic Christianity and cannot be found in any of the church's creeds.

Third, the church fathers were (along with virtually all of their contemporaries, Christian or otherwise) wrong about a number of scientific things. Some of them believed that the Earth was flat, and most or all of them believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. (Unlike the age issue, in both of these other cases Christians appealed to evidence from both the world around them and the Scriptures to maintain these wrong views.) Today, we recognize that the Earth is more or less spherical and that it is not the center of our solar system, let alone of the entire universe. And it was science that changed our understanding and science that caused us to revise our interpretation of Scripture on these issues.

For all these reasons, what the church fathers believed about the age of the creation is both uninteresting and irrelevant. What is interesting and relevant, however, is what they believed about the reliability of God's revelations to us.

You see, for most scientists today--Christian or otherwise--it would be easier to believe in a flat Earth than one that is only thousands of years old, so varied and powerful is the evidence. And so those Christians who still follow Lightfoot and Ussher's interpretation of Scripture invariably appeal to one (or more) of three unbiblical (and unhistorical) doctrines: 1) appearance of age (that God created everything with a false appearance of age), 2) fideism (that Christian faith is a blind leap, and somehow divorced from reason and evidence), and 3) biblicism (that the Bible is the only reliable source of knowledge).

In future posts, I may examine each of these wrong views in more depth. For now, however, let me close this post (by coming full circle) with a quote from arguably the most important church father, Augustine, in which he affirms the value of science in a way that directly attacks (albeit anticipating it by 16 centuries) the biblicism and fideism (as well as the dogmatism) of modern young-earth creationists...

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world... and his knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? (from The Literal Meaning of Genesis)

The Conservative Nature of Natural Selection

In the class on the History and Philosophy of Atheism I'm taking this semester at Kilns College, I had the opportunity last night to guest-lecture on naturalism and evolution. I mentioned that we now know--150 years after Darwin--that the mechanism of natural selection that he endowed with incredible creative potential instead acts only in conservative and degenerative ways. Time, however, prevented me from sharing one of my favorite illustrations of this, the "green toothpick" illustration. So I'll share it here.

I took an undergraduate biology class from Dr. M.D. "Mad Dog" Johnson, in which he tried to demonstrate natural selection in action. We went outside to a lush, uncut, well-fertilized portion of the campus lawn, where we scattered a known number of toothpicks of different colors--red, yellow, blue, and green. We, the students, then acted as predators--the agents of natural selection--foraging through that patch of lawn capturing as many toothpicks as we could find. As I recall, we found all of the yellow and red toothpicks, most of the blue ones, and almost none of the green, so well-camouflaged were they among the long blades of grass. The lesson was that natural selection works just so on populations of living things.

There are at least a couple of serious problems with this experiment as an illustration of natural selection at work. If--as is claimed--natural selection acting on genetic variation is the mechanism by which evolutionary advance is made, what we demonstrated would seem to be just the opposite. Our toothpick population began with a much higher genetic diversity than it had by the end. The population, which now consists almost entirely of green toothpicks, would seem to be much less able to adapt to a changing environment than when it contained the greater diversity of phenotypes. It has ever since seemed to me that we demonstrated that natural selection has a far greater capacity to tend toward extinction than to adaptation and advance.

Another problem with this illustration is just as important. Let us be unreasonably generous and grant that the resulting population of toothpicks is somehow better prepared to adapt to some future environmental change. That is, let us say--for the sake of argument--that what we witnessed was an instance of microevolution. Microevolution refers to the idea that species (and populations and such) are not static, but change over time in both their phenotype and genotype (their form and the genetic basis for that form, respectively).

That microevolution occurs is a well-accepted, non-controversial idea. But granting that the population of green toothpicks is a good example of something having undergone microevolution provides no support for the claim of neo-Darwinism, which is that this same mechanism--natural selection acting upon genetic variation (mutation)--can account for macroevolution. In other words, the diversity of all life is explainable by this sort of natural selection acting over vast time scales. In the specific case of the toothpick illustration, we are to believe that if we waited long enough (as the toothpicks bred generation after generation), continued natural selection (predation on those toothpicks most easily spotted) would eventually cause those toothpicks to give rise to species of dental floss, of toothbrushes, and even, eventually, of electric toothbrushes, all without the input of any sort of intelligence or designer.

The fossil record shows that there have existed--over the course of Earth's history--different life forms. But macroevolutionary theory, as an explanation for how that record came to be, has yet to be substantiated by any evidence. Rare cases of microevolution have been documented, and then we are asked to make the unreasonable and unsupported extrapolation that such minor changes can be invoked to explain all of the advancing complexity witnessed in the fossil record. For me, Professor Johnson's toothpick demonstration has always served as a reminder of the absurdity of the grander claims of evolutionists.



(A version of this post originally appeared on 26 Feb 2007.)

Lucretius and Naturalism

Did I mention that I'm in a class on the History and Philosophy of Atheism (at Kilns College)? Well, I am, and today I want to post about the first reading. Our text for the course is The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. These essential readings are selected and introduced by New Atheist Christopher Hitchens, and promise to provide good fodder for any Christian apologist-blogger. In today's post, I'll identify two sets of problems, one in the reading (by Lucretius) and one in Hitchens' introduction to it.

Lucretius was an ancient Greek naturalist; he lived in the early 1st century BC and (following Leucippus) promoted atomism, the view that in our day would be called naturalism. He rejected the pantheism of the Greek and Roman worlds of his day, pointing out that what those pagans credited to the acts of the gods could be better explained as the result of natural laws.

I find Hitchens' inclusion of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura intriguing for at least three reasons.

First, the entire project of the ancient atomists depended upon our universe being infinite as regards both space and time, a claim that Lucretius is at pains to make (though not to support). This idea was likewise foundational to Darwin's 19th-century theory and remains (logically) foundational to modern atheism. Unfortunately--for Hitchens and his ilk (Richard Dawkins admits that his opponents have accused him of being stuck in 19th-century science and further admits that he doesn't know what they're talking about)--20th century science has convincingly refuted this foundational assumption. For most scientists, philosophers of science, and historians of science, the greatest discovery of the last 100 years was the recognition that all of the matter, energy, space, and time of the universe had a beginning a finite time ago. The universe began--it is finite with regard to both space and time. Lucretius and Epicurus were wrong on this basic score, as were Kant and Darwin. I am left wondering whether Hitchens and Dawkins fail to realize the implications (for metaphysical naturalism) or are simply in denial of the evidence.

Second, Lucretius also makes clear that living things reproduce after their kind, that there is a continuity of reproduction. This idea--known to the ancient Greeks--passed out of knowledge in the Western world, and throughout the Middle Ages, educated people believed (what Homer, writing in the 8th century BC, knew to be false) that life was spontaneously generated (as maggots from rotten meat). Some would argue that modern biology began when Francesco Redi disproved spontaneous generation (at least with regard to worms in meat). Geneticist Giuseppi Sermonti, discussing the later refutation of spontaneous generation by Pasteur (with regard to bacteria), writes

Biology has advanced in status with every new refutation of the spontaneous generation thesis.

And yet, modern disciples of Darwin (like Hitchens and Dawkins) continue--contrary to all the evidence and reason--to steadfastly maintain the spontaneous generation of life from non-life.

The third problem has to do with the history of science, and seems to betray a further weakness in Hitchens' understanding. I take it that Hitchens approves of Lucretius' essay as an ancient articulation of the superiority of a reasoned appeal to natural law over a superstitious appeal to acts of the gods. But while Lucretius was right in this particular, this stands as an argument against polytheism and pantheism, but not against Christian monotheism. That is, if Hitchens' book is meant to be an argument for atheism as over against Christianity, then De Rerum Natura misses the point. More importantly, however, it was Christians--not atheists--who agreed with Lucretius, saw the world as following natural laws, and thus established (in the 16th and 17th centuries) modern science.

As glaring as are these problems in De Rerum Natura itself, there's an arguably bigger problem with Hitchens' introduction to it. Having established that Lucretius' atomism was a superior, more reasoned understanding of the world (than the religious superstitions of that day), he writes,

Atomism was viciously persecuted as heresy throughout the early Christian era, and only one printed manuscript of De Rerum Naturum survived the flames.

What is one to make of such a statement? Is it revisionist history foisted on us by someone for whom the ends (turning readers into unbelievers) justifies the means (making up history)? To be sure, atomism didn't carry the day, and the Greeks and Romans continued to worship their pantheons of gods. But there was no persecution of the ancient Greek naturalists. (Lucretius may have committed suicide, but if so it appears to be a direct consequence of his disbelief in an afterlife, and not because of any contemporary reaction against his views.) There is no evidence that atomist books were burned; the reason such books did not survive is because they were written on papyrus or animal skins, and the same fate faced every ancient writing regardless of its metaphysical claims.

But more importantly, why does Hitchens refer to the 'early Christian era' if not to wrongfully impugn Christians? Throughout the early Christian era, Christians were too busy being persecuted themselves to persecute others. They were themselves being burned at the stake and not burning obscure books about natural philosophy. Even when--much later in church history--Christians did turn their attention to the subjects of orthodoxy and heresy, the issues that captured their attention for several centuries had to do with the nature of the trinity and the deity/humanity of Christ, not what a minor sector of dead Greek poets had written.

Coming as it does in the introduction to the very first selection in his book, this statement by Hitchens raises a bright red flag. At best, it highlights either gross ignorance about or willing gullibility regarding the issues about which he writes. At worst, it stamps him at the outset as disingenuous or downright deceiving and his book as a skewed polemic rather than an honest search for truth.

The Creation Museum

I'm frequently asked--both by believers and unbelievers--about the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum that opened in May of 2007 across the river from where I grew up in Cincinnati. So I thought I'd share a post that I wrote back nearer that time. It included three apt quotes. The first, from an essay by Michael Patrick Leahy titled The Trouble with Fred and Wilma, specifically addresses the museum.

The trouble with the $27 million Creation Museum, which replaces the scientific method with word for word Christian Biblical literalist theology, is that it makes all Christians who don’t accept evolution look stupid. In doing so in such a publicly visible way it undermines the credibility of all Christians, especially those who are researching alternatives to Darwinian evolution using the tools of the scientific method. It also gives the growing movement of militant atheism, as exemplified by the works of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, an easy opportunity to misrepresent all Christians as “irrational”. The mainstream media, including the Los Angeles Times itself, are only too happy to lend assistance to this misrepresentation.

Owned by the “Young Earth Creationist” organization Answers in Genesis, the Creation Museum claims that the universe, earth, and man are only 6,000 years old, and that dinosaurs co-existed with man. The premise worked well for the Flintstones cartoon show, but has zero credibility within the scientific community in general and the Christian scientific community in particular.

The rest of the essay is well worth reading. Leahy is a theistic evolutionist, and I hope my regular readers will by now recognize that I find extremely little evidential support for that position. Nonetheless, I agree with most of what Leahy writes in this article.

The second and third quotes, by Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine, respectively, were not written specifically about the Creation Museum (obviously), but I take Ham's ministry in general and the museum in particular to be perfect examples of what these church fathers had in mind. First, Aquinas...

The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Christian, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.

Now Augustine, from The Literal Meaning of Genesis...

Usually, even a new Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world...and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. [Be prepared for a good deal of this in the months to come with regard to the Museum.] The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Making Sense of the World

In my last series of posts (on the faulty analogy central to the arguments of New Atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens), I mentioned in passing that atheism (in the form of scientific naturalism) does not provide a logical justification for doing science, whereas Christian theism does. I want in this post to flesh that out just a bit.

The fact of the matter is that modern science arose and flourished within a Christian understanding of the world. And this was not mere historical coincidence but precisely because Judeo-Christianity uniquely provides the set of assumptions that make science a worthwhile endeavor.

A short list of such assumptions includes... the existence of the universe, the order in the universe, the fact that the laws of mathematics apply to the universe, the fact that the laws of logic apply to the universe, the reliability of our senses in discovering the order in the universe, the reliability of human reasoning in drawing accurate conclusions about the universe, the necessity of honesty and integrity in conducting and reporting research...

Science depends upon these assumptions, and Christianity has a reasonable explanation for each and every one. Naturalism, not so much. In the case of most of these assumptions, scientific naturalism does not deny them, but accepts them as unexplained, unexplainable, brute (and fortuitous) facts. For others, naturalism would seem to fare even more poorly. As just one example, if naturalistic evolution is true, and human consciousness and reason are merely the purposeless results of undirected interactions of biochemicals, there seems no reason to accept that human reasoning should lead to meaningful and accurate conclusions about the world.

This problem has been recognized in recent years by a variety of thinkers from across the theological spectrum. Agnostic physicist Paul Davies, for example, wrote

People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature—the laws of physics—are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where they came from; at least not in polite company. However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.

Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga puts it this way:

Modern science was conceived, and born, and flourished in the matrix of Christian theism. Only liberal doses of self-deception and double-think, I believe, will permit it to flourish in the context of Darwinian naturalism.

Some of my readers will be familiar with a famous sentence of C.S. Lewis':

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

What some may not realize, however, is the context of this quote. It is the final statement of a paper titled "Is theology poetry?" (which can be found in the compilation of essays The Weight of Glory). And what Lewis is dealing with is exactly what I've been writing about, how scientific naturalism (what Lewis calls the "mythical cosmology derived from science") cannot explain things nearly so well as Christian theism can. So, although it's lengthy, here's the final paragraph of Lewis' argument:

I was taught at school, when I had done a sum, to "prove my answer." The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of that primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams; I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner; I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific points of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

God and the Tooth Fairy, Pt. 3

We've been examining the claim, central to Richard Dawkins' and Christopher Hitchens' attack against Christianity, that belief in God is like belief in the Tooth Fairy. We have seen that any supposed similarity between the two is extremely superficial.

Though we have not discussed whole sets of evidence (historical, existential, philosophical, and others), we have seen that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the existence of the personal, self-existent God described in the Bible. The most obvious such evidence comes from the disciplines of astronomy and physics, but it is nonetheless hard to believe that Dawkins is unaware of those greatest discoveries of the last century. It seems inexcusable, though, that he is unaware of some other evidences--which come from his own discipline of biology--such as the recognition that all living things share the same information code in their DNA and that that code is (and has been since the first life appeared) extremely well designed.

But the point of this post is to leave behind the alleged superficial similarities between belief in God and belief in the Tooth Fairy, and to look instead at the significant differences between the two. As we do, we will see not only that Dawkins and Hitchens are guilty of a faulty analogy but that, in fact, it is belief in no God--atheism--that has significant similarities to belief in the Tooth Fairy.

Belief in the Tooth Fairy--like belief in atheism--has not led to the establishment of a single hospital or orphanage. Belief in God has led to the founding of hospitals and orphanages on every continent.

Belief in the Tooth Fairy--like belief in atheism--has not resulted in the establishment of any universities. Belief in a transcendent God was behind the founding of all the institutions of higher learning, at least until the late 19th century, when the first secular (theology-neutral) school was founded.

It was belief in the God described in the Old and New Testaments that led to the founding of modern science, not belief in the Tooth Fairy or belief in naturalism.

Belief in God--unlike belief in atheism or the Tooth Fairy--provides the logical justification that makes science a worthwhile endeavor. Theism justifies (among other things) the expectation of finding order in the universe and the expectation that our senses and reasoning should be relaible in discovering that order.

Neither belief in the Tooth Fairy or belief in atheism provide an explanation for the existence/origin of the universe--monotheism does.

Theism offers a satisfactory explanation for the fact that mathematics and logic apply to this universe; naturalism and ToothFairyanism cannot.

Theism explains the existence of morality, of the universal sense of oughtness, and of the human experience of guilt. Atheism does not.

Indeed, all of the big questions that science addresses are satisfactorily explained by Christian theism and not by atheism or belief in the Tooth Fairy. These include (not only the existence of and the order in the universe already mentioned, but) the anthropic principle (the recognition that the universe, galaxy, and solar system are extremely, exquisitely designed for intelligent life on Earth), the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, and the origin of human consciousness.

Dawkins' and Hitchens' claim seems really silly when you get past the sound bite and spend a little time considering it. In truth, it takes a whole lot of blind faith to believe in no God, whereas all of the evidence and reason lead to the conclusion that God exists.

But other differences abound. No one has seen their life transformed by coming to believe in the Tooth Fairy or in atheism. But thousands, even millions of people credit their coming to believe in God for saving their marriage, turning them from alcohol, or drugs, or a life of crime, for transforming their children and families. Whole tribes, villages, regions, and even nations trace life-altering positive change to the power of the living God at work in their midst. No one so credits the Tooth Fairy, evolution, or no God with improving or transforming their lives.

This has been just a short list, and I've missed many of the ways in which belief in God is different from belief in the Tooth Fairy. But it should be obvious that in all these important ways and more, it is belief in no God that has a great deal in common with belief in the Tooth Fairy. So the next time you read or hear this vacuous faulty analogy, I hope you'll be prepared to refute it with the truth about the world in which we live.

Happy Thanksgiving!

God and the Tooth Fairy, Pt. 2

So, we're discussing the argument made by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens that belief in God is like belief in the Tooth Fairy. I have made the claim that it is fallacious, that despite its centrality to what Hitchens and Dawkins are trying to do, it commits the informal logical fallacy called the faulty analogy.

We have dismissed several of the possible similarities between belief in God and belief in the Tooth Fairy--the shared word 'belief,' that fact that both are invisible, the fact that both are immaterial. But before I discuss (in the next post) the significant and central differences between the two, I need to deal with one other alleged similarity--the epistemological one.

Probably what Dawkins and Hitchens are really claiming here is that the similarity between belief in God and belief in the Tooth Fairy is that there is no evidence for either one.

Now, it should be obvious, right out of the gate, that there's a huge difference on this score. And that is that while no one over the age of 6 has ever seriously argued that there is evidence for the Tooth Fairy, millions of people have argued and continue to argue that there is overwhelming evidence for God. Indeed, universities and nations have been founded based on belief that there is sufficient evidence for the existence of God to make following Him one's life work.

So making the grand claim that there is no evidence for God is to deny virtually all of human history, much of the philosophy of Western thought, and some of the most important scientific discoveries of the last few decades. Dawkins does mention some of these evidences, but his dismissal of them invariably depends upon other fallacies, mischaracterization, deliberate dishonesty, or just plain ignorance. While I could camp on all sorts of different types of evidence--historical, experiential, and others, I'll just briefly mention two sets of scientific evidence.

The first powerful set of evidence for the existence of a transcendent Creator-God is the universe itself. Philosophers recognize only four options for explaining the universe. The first, that the universe is entirely illusory, is not held by many in Western culture, and Dawkins would also reject it. The second is that the universe created itself, and this is easily seen to be illogical. That leaves two options, both involving something existing eternally.

The view that was most popular (at least among non-religious people) in Darwin's day was that the universe itself was eternal and static. (This view flowed out of Newtonian physics and Kantian philosophy.) It gave to Darwin's theory a nearly infinite amount of time in order to work the wonders of diversity exhibited by extinct and extant life. Monotheists--and many philosophers--nonetheless maintained that this was unlikely. They argued for the 4th option, that there exists an uncreated, eternal Being (what we call God) who created the universe.

The philosophical debate has long since been answered by science. Einstein's general relativity has replaced Newtonian physics, and we now know that the universe is not eternal, that its personal Cause exists outside the matter, energy, space, and time of the universe. This conclusion (known as the space-time theorem of relativity) follows necessarily if only two things are true: 1) the universe contains mass and 2) general relativity accurately describes the universe.

Because of the obvious theological implications of the expansion of the universe (and big bang cosmology and the space-time theorem), the history of astrophysics in the 20th century is a long litany of attempts to disprove these ideas. The result is that general relativity--and the consequent finitude of the entire universe--are the most rigorously tested and proven law of physics.

But a further set of startling scientific evidence for God's existence has accumulated within the last three decades. It is the recognition that the laws of nature (of physics and chemistry) are extremely fine-tuned to make life possible in even one location in the universe. Further, we now know that the characteristics of the Milky Way Galaxy, of our solar system, and of the Earth-moon system likewise fall within an extremely narrow range of possible values that makes life on Earth possible. Known as the 'anthropic principle,' this evidence of design is recognized as powerful scientific support for the philosophical postion known as the teleological (design) argument.

Together, these two recent scientific discoveries provide strong, quantitative evidential support for the existence of God previously unavailable, support sufficient (in the eyes of reasonable people) to refute the atheism that became popular in the late 19th century. Here's what a few modern physicists and astronomers familiar with the evidence have to say...

Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say "supernatural") plan. (Arno Penzias, Nobel Prize-winning physicist)

The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine. (Vera Kistiakowsky, MIT physicist)

As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency--or, rather, Agency--must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit? (George Greenstein, astronomer)

It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us. (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time)

Dawkins admits (in The God Delusion) that he has been accused of having a 19th-century worldview, and his subsequent discussion makes it clear that he doesn't understand what such critics are alluding to. Well, it's just this... that in his very small world of philosophically naive, like-minded atheist scientists, he seems blissfully unaware of the most important scientific discoveries of the century that followed his adored Darwin, evidence that has largely refuted the assumptions of the evolutionary theory to which he (Dawkins) gives God-like creative powers.*



* The modern intelligent design movement began in 1966 at a conference at Wistar, convened by mathematicians and probability theorists who tried to apprise Darwinists that the finitude of the universe (and the now-recognized complexity of even the simplest living cell) provided serious problems to evolutionary theory. More than 40 years later, Darwinists (like Dawkins) have yet to respond to the evidences that modern science has brought to bear against their favorite theory.

More about Slippery Slopes

A reader commented on my last post, in which I asserted that those--like John MacArthur--who claim that belief in an old Earth and universe leads invariably to loss of faith are guilty of committing a fallacy, the slippery slope fallacy. This reader suggested (if I understood him aright) that such a slippery slope does, in fact, exist, not as a logical necessity but as a pattern of occurrence:

In reality for most young people who take science courses, the slippery slope of Bible interpretation about creation slides from doubt about a 6,000-year-old earth, to doubt about Josiah's long day, to doubt about Jesus walking on water, to doubt His miraculously feeding the 5,000 and the 4,000 to doubting Jesus' bodily resurrection.

Perhaps such a path of doubt does occur. But if so, it has almost nothing to do with any logical link between an old Earth and denial of Resurrection. Rather, it has everything to do with poor hermeneutics, poor Bible teaching, and poor training in critical thinking.

Creation, walking on water, feeding 5,000, and rising from the dead are all miracles. The possibility or probability of miracles (and more particularly of the miracles recorded in Scripture) depends entirely upon whether we live in a world accurately described by Christian theism or one more accurately described by scientific naturalism ('the universe is the whole show; no god exists'). For the purposes of this argument, I'm talking about and to only those people who acknowledge God and the accuracy of the Bible's accounts of miracles.

Now, one possible problem--for those many young people taking science courses--is that they have never been taught to recognize worldview differences. That is, they go into science class expecting their professor to teach them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth without any worldview bias when, in fact, that professor begins by adopting a naturalistic worldview and discounting the possibility of a Creator. Worse, if the Christian young person has wrongly been taught that the Bible somewhere claims that the universe is only 6,000 years old, then the naive young person's doom is sealed because the professor has overwhelming evidence from virtually every scientific discipline to demonstrate the absurdity of that view.

Let me spell it out as simply as possible...

Scripture claims that Jesus walked on water.

Scripture claims that Jesus fed 5,000 people by multiplying a small number of loaves and fishes.

Scripture claims that Jesus rose bodily from the dead.

Scripture claims that God (through Jesus) created the entire universe and everything in it.

Scripture nowhere claims that the Earth and universe were created only thousands of years ago. This is merely one interpretation of how to understand Genesis 1 and the other relevant passages. By my count, there are at least 13 different interpretations of Genesis 1 that are held or that have been held by Christians committed to the inerrancy and reliability of the Bible. Only two of these 13 interpretations lead to the view that the Earth is only thousands of years old. To put it the other way around, the vast majority of the interpretive positions about Genesis 1 held by committed Christians now and throughout church history either allow for or demand the vast age of the universe and Earth that the creation itself indicates.

The young-earth interpretation does not--as its very vocal modern proponents claim--involve a straightforward reading of the text. It involves at least 5 assumptions, each of which is either quite controversial among Hebrew linguists and Bible scholars or even demonstrably false.

What's more, while Christians throughout the ages have wrestled with the proper understanding of the creation accounts, belief in a young Earth and universe simply has never been a part of historical Christian belief. It is not found in any creeds, and has never (except by those in the last 60 years who have spent their careers promoting this young-earth interpretation) been seen as necessary to salvation or to the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.

There is a very clear logical link between belief in the miracle of Resurrection and belief in the miracle of creation. And belief in the latter is more reasonable today than it ever has been,* as the latest evidence from nearly every scientific discipline overwhelmingly supports the Biblical understanding of the universe in which we live. Unfortunately (for some), none of that evidence supports the view made popular only last century, that the Earth and universe are only thousands of years old.

If our young people begin to doubt the truth of historic Christianity when faced with evidence from science, then the main problem is that they have not been taught to think well, not been taught to interpret Scripture well, or--worst of all--been taught a modern mischaracterization of historical Christianity and what the Bible teaches (and doesn't teach) about creation.

By the way, it was Joshua--not Josiah--for whom "the sun stood still."


*That is, for the person who hasn't already had a personal, life-transforming encounter with the living, risen Lord and Creator.

Harris On Beetles

In the last post, I quoted Sam Harris (in Letter to a Christian Nation) as follows...

Over 99 percent of the species that ever walked, flew, or slithered upon this earth are now extinct. This fact alone appears to rule out intelligent design.

I tried to help him out, tried to turn this into an argument, by supplying the missing premise. That missing premise, however, turned out to be pretty silly when articulated... "Persistence is the test of whether or not something is designed." One can think of any number of things that were clearly designed but which are no longer used or in existence.

But perhaps this is not what Harris was driving at. The alternatives (as we saw) are no better, however. He may have been making a very subjective and straw-man argument... "If I were God, I'd have created once and once only, and had every species last forever." This, too, is hard to take seriously. The Judeo-Christian God is more creative than that, and reserves the right to create and destroy life as He wills. Moreover, the 99% of living things that have died and gone extinct have served innumerable purposes, including becoming the fossil fuels upon which modern technology depends. More importantly, much of previous life played critical roles in preparing the Earth for later life. But taking into account such things as evidence (especially when it goes against his view) seems beyond Harris.

The remaining alternative is that Harris simply wasn't making an argument at all, but merely stating his own opinion. In this case, one wonders why anyone would really consider it. Another example of Harris' 'reasoning,' and in this instance I have to assume it's mere opinion (because I cannot begin to fill in the missing but necessary premises), is the following...

The biologist J.B.S. Haldane is reported to have said that, if there is a God, He has "an inordinate fondness for beetles." One would have hoped that an observation this devastating would have closed the book on creationism for all time.

Let me first point out that, while arguments can be devastating, mere observations cannot. But Harris' choice of the word 'observation' tells me that (at least subconsciously) he recognizes that Haldane's remark does not constitute an argument or even the conclusion of an argument.

I cannot imagine how the existence of 350,000 species of beetles counts as evidence against God having created living things. Recounting all the ways in which coleopterans are useful and important to their various ecosystems is a task of which no one (but the Creator Himself) is capable. Beetles are found in virtually every ecosystem where any living things are found. They are prey, predator, parasite, symbiont, decomposer, scavenger, garbageman. Open up a rotting log, a decomposing carcass, or a week-old cowpie and you'll find beetles busy at work, in greater numbers and variety than flies or any other creature. Forests, deserts, ponds, tidal flats, arctic tundra, mountain streams, and every other life zone on Earth (with the exception of deep oceans) are home to beetles, every species of which is perfectly adapted for its time and place and role.

Maybe Haldane and Harris don't like beetles. They certainly don't speak as experts who understand (or have given even a moment's thought to) them or their place in the amazing pageant of life that makes Earth such a fascinating--indeed, unique--place. As with the rest of Letter, Harris' rhetoric here turns out to be nothing but empty, ignorant opinion, completely irrelevant to the thesis he is supposed to be supporting.

While we're on the subject, I was thrilled yesterday to discover a species of beetle I had never seen before. It was a largish scarabid beetle, and one would have been tempted to call it a "June Beetle" but for the fact that adults appear to take wing with the first snows of October.

More on Scientism

I received a couple of questions regarding my last post on scientism. The first was what my definition of science is. The second was what my particular complaint about Chris Mooney's article is, whether I see him as claiming that science is the only source of knowledge, or whether I perceive him as arriving at a wrong conclusion in the particular case of the autism-vaccination link.

The answer to the second question is 'both.' My primary problem with Mooney is that he seems to believe (indeed, the whole context of the article is) that science is the only source of knowledge. This is scientism; indeed, this is what's known as 'strong' scientism, as opposed to a weaker, slightly more reasonable (but still flawed) epistemology. And in the particular case of whether vaccination can trigger autism, this demonstrably illogical view leads him to an unfounded (and wrong) conclusion. In both his epistemology--scientism--and the wrong conclusions to which it leads, Mooney's basic problem is a lack of understanding of science itself.

Now, to be sure, if the question were, 'what percentage of autism diagnoses appear to be associated with (triggered by) vaccination?', that would require some sort of 'scientific' testing, whether that were a questionnaire or actually some sort of experimentation. But Mooney's claim is that since 'science' stepped in and hasn't discovered a link, we can dismiss as goofy the claims of those parents who believe (on the basis of mere eyewitness evidence) that vaccination triggered autism in their child.

All of this underscores a basic problem with the degree of authority with which we invest scientists. (And this gets back to the first question, 'what is the definition of science?') It turns out that scientists like Mooney are not the experts on what constitutes science, and he betrays his naivete by talking as though scientism is true. Further, the mistake he makes with regard to the specific case of vaccination-induced autism is rather a freshman error. That is, he seems unaware of a basic understanding in the philosophy of science. Let me explain. Jordan wrote,

In the case of the Autism-Vaccine link, do you think science can say conclusively one way or the other? I would think that given the right experiment(s) science should be able to detect a correlation if it exists.

The correct answer, according to philosophers of science (and scientists with some basic understanding of same) is that science should be able to say conclusively one way, but not the other. In other words, if there is a link, science might (or perhaps should) be able to discover it. But if science fails to discover such a link, it is illegitimate to claim (as Mooney does) that no such link exists.

Put simply, it's impossible to prove a universal negative. To prove the claim that there is no extraterrestrial life anywhere in the universe would require searching every inch of it. Likewise, science can prove a link between vaccination and autism but cannot prove that no such link exists. And what we have here is a scientist (Mooney) who lacks philosophical understanding basic to his science claiming that science has proved a universal negative. What's worse, he makes this absurd claim in spite of a good deal of counterevidence, evidence he dismisses because of his mistaken belief in scientism.

So what is science? Well, that's a profound question that really requires years of study (in philosophy and history, not in any science discipline per se). Let me just say this for now... While we often know science when we see it, there is no line of demarcation--no set of necessary and sufficient criteria--that separates science from non-science. And whereas it has thus far proved impossible to adequately define science, it is quite simple to demonstrate that the view known as scientism--the idea that so-called science is the only true source of knowledge--is logically absurd.

(A common mistake is to equate any knowledge gained through our senses with scientific knowledge. Such a definition of science is recognized as much too broad to have any value. People have always used, and continue to use, their senses at every moment of their lives, yet we do not think of ourselves as continually engaged in science.)