Comments on First Round of Retractions

To be simultaneously both cynical and positive (however you choose to take it), BioLogos’s modifications on the more contentious issues have happened at around the same pace as the mainstream scientific literature seems to act - it seems to take around 2 to 10 years for erroneous papers to get retracted in mainstream journals

And BioLogos, unlike some fields one could name, has admitted genuine error, rather than organising an internal inquiry or two that showed nothing was done wrong, nobody is to blame, and that the minor errors don’t alter the validity of the work, even though it’s been taken down.

My own dog in the fight is that I fought some of these things, especially GAE, in comments at BioLogos itself for many years, and seldom even got an official reply, let alone a response.

Stepping back from specifics, I suggest the “meta-problem” behind all this is the attempt by BioLogos to use science as an infallible authority on which to judge the theological questions that are the distinctive of a group like that. It was “settled science” that showed an historical Adam and Eve to be an impossibility, and that therefore demanded the re-formulation of core Christian doctrines.

If instead they had viewed science, as at its best science does itself, as a current provisional view of how things work in the material world, their overall attitude would have been more one of, “Of course, this apparent problem for traditional teaching may well be solved by further research or a different approach.”

Such an approach makes it harder to hit Creationists or IDists over the head with the final authority of Science™, and engages more in a conversartion between sources of knowledge given equal weight - and for BioLogos that means both science and Scripture, but also philosophy, history and some of the other less consulted fields.

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Well they did do that too…

This is not accurate. They did not handle this according to the standards of mainstream science.

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…thus securing their place within mainstream scientific practice, then! :grinning: