In a podcast:
102. Reconciling Evolution | Part One
January 20, 2022
Though the theory of evolution has revolutionized the biological sciences, bringing the theory into the classroom still causes some fear and trembling—from teachers, students, parents. Last fall we spent some time with a group of people who have been researching how to teach evolution better, in a way that acknowledges the emotional and religious tensions that comes into the classroom and attempts to help students understand the science of evolution while retaining—even bolstering—their faith. In this episode we talk about the history of teaching evolution and introduce some of the research from the team.
A friend thinks that the whole Biologos approach is past its sellby date, writing to say,
This is the most tedious thing I’ve ever heard. Would probably be better informed listening to Jerry Coyne or PZ Myers. 100% of it was “waaahhhh – poor indoctrinated church people can’t really understand science until they get past their prejudices”. Then there’s the “every time you have an antibiotic there’s evolution at work!” Oh, and then there is the golden “questioning any part of science is the same as questioning science as a whole!” And then they end with, “we know that if you come to understand evolution, you will also eventually come to accept it.” This sort of stuff is insufferable. How do they still have podcast listeners?
What some of us find curious is that Christian evolutionists so seldom want to grasp the fact that the problem for most Christians is Darwinism, which is an explicitly materialist and naturalist theory of everything. The problem is not “evolution” as in antibiotics.
You may also wish to read: Michael Ruse lecture makes interesting admission re Darwinism and atheists, agnostics. Darwin’s theory, Ruse writes meant that ” the way was opened for sound non-belief, although almost always non-believers – agnostics and atheists – take their stance less on science and more on grounds of theology and philosophy.”
What happens when you use an antibiotic is just the bacteria’s immune system learning about the new threat and adapting. Now that the entire concept of immunity is officially CRIMETHINK, I guess we might as well call it evolution.
It is fascinating just how many people believe in something where there is no evidence to support it, like evolution. Speciation has never been witnessed by anyone, but completely ignored that is has never been seen.
The solution: rewrite the first paragraph as
Until ID gets rid of the DNA model in its thinking and acknowledges the fantastic achievement of Darwin for the science of genetics, it will continue to loose the fight in the Evolution debate and for good science.
Darwinism is great but limited should be the mantra!!!
Darwinian processes are self refuting in the Evolution debate but tremendous science in the field of genetics.
Until then, ID will be seen as the theological and philosophical interpretation as opposed to the reality that it is the anti ID people who actually hold these attitudes as Ruse admits.
Biologos is ignorant about evolution. There isn’t any scientific theory of evolution.
As to the Biologos claim of, “the theory of evolution has revolutionized the biological sciences,”
No, that is a patently false claim. The theory of evolution most certainly has not ‘revolutionized the biological sciences’,, Far from it.
The biological sciences, far from being ‘revolutionized’ by Darwinian evolution, simply do not even need the presuppositions of Darwinian evolution. As the late Philip Skell noted, “I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.”
To realize just how bad this is for the claim that Darwinian evolution is a science, (much less how bad it is for the claim that the “theory of evolution has revolutionized the biological sciences”), imagine 70 eminent physicists saying that they had no need of the theory of quantum mechanics, or of special relativity, or of general relativity, in order to do their research. You simply can’t do research into physics without reference to those theories. Yet Darwinian evolution is found to be a superfluous “narrative gloss” that provides ‘no discernible guidance’.
That ‘superfluousness” of Darwin’s theory is certainly a damning indictment against the claim that Darwin’s theory is essential to biological science if there ever was one.
Darwinian evolution simply does not even qualify as a science, much less has it “revolutionized the biological sciences”.
And the main thing that prevents Darwin’s theory from ever being a real science, (instead of a being the superfluous ‘narrative gloss’ that it actually is), is the core randomness, (i.e. chance), postulate that lies at the teleological denying, (i.e. design denying), center of Darwin’s theory.
Yet, as Murray Eden of MIT noted in a paper entitled, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory”, “the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.”
And indeed ‘the randomness postulate’, especially how Darwinists use the term ‘random chance,’ is ‘highly implausible’, ‘very irrational’ and therefore very unscientific.
As Wolfgang (not even wrong), Pauli himself pointed out, “Treating the empirical time scale of the evolution theoretically as infinity they have then an easy game, apparently to avoid the concept of purposesiveness. While they pretend to stay in this way completely ‘scientific’ and ‘rational,’ they become actually very irrational, particularly because they (Darwinists) use the word ‘chance’, not any longer combined with estimations of a mathematically defined probability, in its application to very rare single events more or less synonymous with the old word ‘miracle.’”
To draw out just how ‘unscientific’ the randomness postulate actually is for Darwinists, claiming that something happened completely randomly, without any reference to a rigidly defined mathematical probability, (as Darwinists do), is, in effect, to claim that that ‘random event’ happened for no rhyme or reason whatsoever.
In other words, there is no rational ‘scientific’ reason to ever be found for why the, supposedly, completely ‘random’ event happened.
Yet, as Paul Davies pointed out, “the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.”
In short, the randomness postulate of Darwinists ‘makes a mockery of science’ precisely because it claims that there is no rational reason to ever be found for why the, supposedly, completely ‘random’ event actually occurred.
Moreover, besides undermining the rationality of science, the core ‘randomness postulate’ of Darwinists also undermines the rationality of our own minds as well, since the core randomness postulate of Darwinists also holds, (besides all of life being the result of, basically, completely random events), that all of our thoughts are also the result of “unforeseen and unintended’ random events.
As Nancy Pearcey succinctly explained, “Of course, the atheist pursuing his research has no choice but to rely on rationality, just as everyone else does. The point is that he has no philosophical basis for doing so. Only those who affirm a rational Creator have a basis for trusting human rationality.”
Thus in conclusion, far from Darwin’s theory “revolutionizing the biological sciences” the fact of the matter is that Darwin’s theory, via its core ‘randomness postulate’, (in so far as that “implausible” postulate is taken seriously), undermines, not only biological science, but all of science altogether, as well as also undermining the rationality of our very own thoughts.
In short, Darwin’s theory, via its core randomness postulate, is, pretty much, a direct attack on the core Judeo-Christian presuppositions that were, and still are, necessary and essential for us to even practice science in a rationally coherent manner in the first place.
Stephen Meyer, (who has a PhD in the philosophy of science from Cambridge, Isaac Newton’s alma mater), in his recent book, “Return of the God hypothesis”, lists the three necessary Judeo-Christian presuppositions that lay at the founding of modern science in Medieval Christian Europe as such.
And again, to repeat C.S. Lewis, “unless Reason is absolute—all is in ruins.”
Quote and Verse:
BA77, have you seen this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhEPAXXwcX0
i am not surprised that laymen like Seversky & Co. buy this … What is more disturbing / shocking, that so many well educated smart people support this very absurd theory …. this theory might have been convincing in 19th century, but today? It is crazy absurd …
@Gerry. @3,
Your re-write is hopelessly misinformed. Darwin knew from nothing about genetics.
In fact, genetics basically tells us what mankind already knew – tall parents have tall sons and daughters, good milk producers are selected for herd improvement, etc. Genetics, the science, knows nothing of Darwinism and is of immense worth. Genetics paved the path to Crispr, Darwinism is a stab in the dark that goes nowhere.
To claim that religiously minded tremble at the mention of genetics is a bizarre dream.
Shouting ‘Evolution’ when antibiotic resistance is mentioned is a dumb as shouting, ‘SHAZAM !’
No. It’s right on.
Nobody would use the rewrite where I just changed the word evolution for genetics. It was made to make a point by being absurd.
Darwin discovered the mechanism for genetics. He knew nothing about genes. In fact Mendel’s paper was in his possession but unread. Darwin knew about breeding which is why he emphasized it. He knew there was some mechanism that caused changes. And he hit the jackpot with natural selection.
You miss the whole point of the post. The ID movement is wasting its time discussing Darwin or atheism. Give him his due. Claim he is the father of genetics. I am well aware of the history. That will help to get rid of his discovery as useful for Evolution.
ID needs to change the discussion away from DNA. One way to do. this is to emphasize that Darwin found something very useful about DNA. Every time an article/OP gets published assuming DNA is central to the discussion, it clouds the issue and implies the deep time mechanism might actually work.
But DNA has nothing to do with Evolution.
Aside: Dembski once had me banned from this site because I criticized his discussion at a university. He tried to get into the weeds of evolution by dismissing Darwin as irrelevant.
The problem is that everyone on the planet knows about natural selection and know it works. So trying to dismiss Darwin is trying to dismiss the obvious. It is a waste of time. Instead give him credit for his discovery and then turn the discussion on his supporters to show why it is relevant.
Zweston at 6 thanks for the link. Robert Carter, and especially John Sanford, are both wrecking balls when it comes to dismantling the ‘just-so’ stories of evolution.
Darwin and genetics are as mismatched as a billiard ball and a fountain pen; not even the fervid Darwinist Wikipedia includes your imagined contribution of Darwin to genetics in its article on genetics. He gets no mention.
Genetics fits a definition of science because it contains a quality of predictability. Natural selection, whatever that means today, begins with a supposed random unpredictable mutation.
The only thing predictable about Darwinism is that whenever some advance in science is made, Darwinistas chant that’s exactly what evolution predicts.
Darwin “the father of genetics” ??? Not even the Marx brothers could come up with a joke like that.
Except that it is essentially true.
Genetics and micro evolution are essentially the same thing. (Small changes in the genome over time) What Darwin discusses in his book are things like pigeon breeding which is genetics/micro evolution. Or changes in the DNA/genes over generations.
What Darwin got wrong is that micro evolution turns into macro evolution over time. It is wrong for at least two reasons.
First, it is based on DNA and Evolution is not due to changes in DNA.
Second, all the micro evolution changes in the world will not produce new proteins.
Mendell is the father of genetics. The modern synthesis took Darwin’s ideas and blended them with Mendell’s genetics.
It is not surprising that smart people can be gullible Darwin. All it takes is to convince them something is too difficult for them to really understand and give an appearance of certainty. If smart people are convinced they cannot understand something, they simply accept others are even less prepared to understand. A lot of answers from criticism comes down to people just not understanding evolution. It is those who swear by Darwin that have no idea what it is.
Eugenics had a lot of smart people supporting the idea throughout much of the world. Eugenics was a terrible farce on science that did nothing to advance anything other than strengthen their own superiority based on nothing other than race.
Jerry, it is Mendel who founded modern genetics, especially through his studies of the garden pea. However, his work was largely overlooked at the time. KF
Do you believe I am not aware of Mendel and what he did?
I mentioned him above.
Darwinian evolution is micro evolution or modern genetics. Give him credit. It does not mean that others didn’t help.
You fail to understand what I am trying to say.