Austin Fischer: Innocence, Christian Faith and Evolutionary Biology

You affirm the historicity of the Resurrection as an event in space and time. You are not a philosophical naturalist by anyone’s definition.

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Sure I think that at any scientific/technical conference in the US, the people attending would be 70% Christian and 30% non-Christian. If it is predominately a younger crowd the split would be 50/50. That is the reality of the 2019 secular scientific world we live in.

That’s a discussion for a different day. :wink:

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When did that happen? Any more details?

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Who I really like. But he also said some silly things.

He left, it seems, in December. It seems that BioLogos is going through some funding problems, but I can’t be sure. They stopped releasing annual reports (are they allowed to do this?). If this development changes @Patrick’s view of them, to be more friendly, that would be a good thing.

Hopefully, also, Peaceful Science will be a rising voice in the coming year too.

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@swamidass faith makes him what he is: an excellent researcher, MD, father, husband, and an outstanding secular humanist!

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Biologos conference looks good this year though. Touching on ET life, bioethics, creation care. Something new and different

Biologos must submit their 990’s. Annual reports to shareholders/member is not a requirement but financials are.

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This is what I was taught about evolution as a child. Literally. I remember an older (much older) version of this cartoon being shown on an overhead projector during Sunday School. It wasn’t until I went to an evangelical liberal arts school that I was told that evolution and christian faith were not in conflict. I became an evolutionist long before I became an atheist, and becoming the former had nothing to do with becoming the latter.

For my part, I would be happy if people of all religious backgrounds came to see evolution as perfectly compatible with their faith.

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This is a bad move for them, in my opinion. “Bundling” is a real barrier to understanding in polarized contexts, and by bundling several issues together (taking the “wrong” side on them in the minds of others), they are going to be less and less acceptable to their target audience.

This reminds me. I’ve been meaning to start a thread on how essential creation ex nihilo is to Christianity

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I think that they can easily make evolutionary science compatible with their faith. What I think that what they will find HARD to do is to be tolerant of other’s people’s morality. Social issues such as abortion, SSM, gender should not be adjudicated by Religions but by people under the rule of law.

Cartoons such as the one you were taught are visual falsehoods. Humans were making a mess of things long before Charles Darwin ever breathed, or evolution as a scientific theory existed.

What is incompatible with Christianity is not the scientific theory of evolution. The conflict occurs at a much deeper level, namely, with the naturalism or materialism presupposed by most theories of evolution. Darwin’s revulsion at Alfred Russel Wallace’s change of heart about the origin of humans, for instance, did not stem from the science, but rather from Wallace’s break with Darwin’s naturalistic metaphysics.

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It is not at all clear to me that “most” theories of evolution presuppose naturalism or materialism to a greater extent than any other scientific theory.

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Christian scientists assume there is a natural process involved in the subjects they are researching, and this isn’t limited to evolution. What you are describing is more of an incompatibility with Christianity and science in general.

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Exactly. It’s Christian (and theist in general) epistemology that’s the most serious incompatibility, once you get rid of all the easily dismissed claims of fact, like flat, universe-central, young earth, global flood, etc. It’s the complete lack of evidence for the existence of gods, particularly in those cases where evidence would be expected, that makes me an atheist. But theism of some sorts are as compatible with science as Russell’s teapot is.

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To abuse the analogy a bit further, a teapot orbiting the Sun in the path of Mars is compatible with General Relativity, but I still don’t believe the teapot exists.

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James Dana was professor of geology at Yale in the mid-to-late 19th c., and author of the widely-used geology & paleontology textbook Manual of Geology. In that textbook, he writes

“Geology appears to bring us directly before the Creator…it leads to no other solution of the great problem of creation, whether of kinds of matter or of species of life, than this: DEUS FECIT.” [Latin: God creates.]

No chance any academic publisher would bring out a geology / paleontology textbook today making a similar claim.

Why was Lyell, one of Darwin’s closest friends and colleagues, so hesitant to endorse descent with modification by natural selection? Hint: it was the naturalism of the theory.

Any biologist who tried to teach theistic evolution (where the theism had some genuine explanatory content) in the regular biology curriculum at a state university would be in serious trouble.

All of those sound like non sequiturs to me. Please explain how the theory and practice of evolutionary biology rely on naturalism in a way that is fundamentally different from other fields of scientific research.

Edit: I got hit by the reply bug. This comment was in response to Paul’s comment above.

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