No, that’s not the question. I would suggest reading at the links before ranting further.
Of course I was speaking of fundamentalists. My point is that you seem unaware of the fact that there are fundamentalists in those churches I listed, or the fact that several of those groups are defined as fundamentalist by North American standards. It’s incredible that virtually every time you try and speak authoritatively on a subject, you demonstrate your ignorance of it.
- In North America, evangelicals are typically regarded as fundamentalists.
“In his 1980 book Fundamentalism and American Culture, Marsden wrote, “Fundamentalists were evangelical Christians… who in the twentieth century militantly opposed both modernism in theology and the cultural changes that modernism endorsed.” This is still the standard scholarly definition of fundamentalism.” [1]
You are actually included in Marsden’s view that “a militant opposition to mondernism, both theologically and culturally, is what distinguishes Protestant fundamentalism from its conservative Protestant cousins”. [2]
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Likewise, “it is common in North America to equate Pentecostals and charismatics with fundamentalists”, [3] and “many people would say that Pentecostals and charismatics are fundamentalist”. [4] So much for you claiming they aren’t fundamentalists. Clearly you are unaware of North American usage.
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Again, “North America, of course, has its Lutheran fundamentalists”. [5]
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There are also “many Reformed fundamentalists”. [6]
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The Southern Baptists were dominated by the Great Fundamentalist Takeover of the 1970s. [7] Of course you didn’t know this.
Er, you have it the wrong way around. You mean “pre-modern” does not equal “fundamentalist”. Just because someone holds a pre-modern theology does not mean they are necessarily a fundamentalist. But fundamentalists do hold a pre-modern theology, and they not only hold a pre-modern theology but oppose modern theology. They typically also oppose modern hermeneutics, and modern science, including rejecting evolution and anthropogenic climate change. That’s you, ticking all the boxes. You’re a fundamentalist.
This is what you call “the best imaginable theological company”! People who didn’t know a quarter of what we now know about the Bible, and who had toxic theologies which spawned centuries long atrocities. The “best imaginable theological company”! What a fundy you are.
As usual, you change the subject. I make the point that you defend cdesignpropentism as opposed to evolution, and you are an outspoken cdesignproponentist. You then say “I have not made specific ID arguments here”. That’s irrelevant, because it does not contradict anything I said. My statements stand,.
That is laughable, because you haven’t simply done that, you’ve promoted cdesignproponentism over evolution (which you refuse to accept).
No, it’s true. As I said, you repeatedly use weasel words to try and make it sound like you don’t reject evolution, when all your actions show otherwise. Hiding behind a minimalist definition of “descent with modification” highlights this distinctly.
This is a pathetic slur. I haven’t proved incapable of any such thing, I simply refused to accept your attempt at a change of subject. You could prove me wrong any time by saying you accept the modern evolutionary synthesis, but we both know you won’t, because you don’t.
And it’s totally laughable that you think I need to justify the definite article in the expression, given that the term “the modern evolutionary synthesis” actually appears in the literature (a fact of which you’re clearly ignorant).
This is equally laughable. Apart from the fact that I’ve read Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, Gould, Chambers, and others, there is no need to read any of the people in your list in order to understand the modern evolutionary synthesis. Again I note that in the extremely rare cases when you ever cite any scholarly literature at all, the literature you cite is typically nearly sixty years old. You’re woefully out of date on virtually every subject on which you try to speak.
So what? I wasn’t arguing for “unlimited independence of thought and expression”. That’s the qualification which you came up with after I had already proved you wrong; you abandoned your original statement, made up a new one, and said “Ha, prove this!”, when it wasn’t my original argument at all.
Yes, I chose them deliberately, making the point that even the Adventists grant their archaeologists the kind of freedom that you denied people are granted.
This is hilarious. Every time you make a bombastic statement and someone proves you wrong, you backtrack on it, replace it with a different statement, and then say “This is what I actually meant originally”. What a joke.
I never claimed to be open to every conclusion someone might derive from the Bible. Another attempt by you to change the subject.
In other words, that’s your position.
Yeah you do. You’ve bemoaned the status quo many times, decrying the entire Protestant Reformation and lamenting the fact that people started thinking for themselves.
Thank you for proving my point; your theology is completely medieval. You’re a fundamentalist.
[1] Barry Hankins, Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism: A Documentary Reader (NYU Press, 2008), 5-6.
[2] “According to Marsden, a militant opposition to mondernism, both theologically and culturally, is what distinguishes Protestant fundamentalistm from its conservative Protestant cousins.”, Peter C. Hill and William Paul Williamson, The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism (Guilford Press, 2005), 1.
[3] Russell P. Spittler, “Are Pentecostals and Charismatics Fundamentalists? A Review of American Uses of These Categories,” in Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture , ed. Karla O. Poewe (Univ of South Carolina Press, 1994), 73.
[4] Russell P. Spittler, “Are Pentecostals and Charismatics Fundamentalists? A Review of American Uses of These Categories,” in Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture , ed. Karla O. Poewe (Univ of South Carolina Press, 1994), 73.
[5] James M. Stayer, Martin Luther, German Saviour: German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917-1933 (McGill-Queen’s Press - MQUP, 2000), 80.
[6]. Lee Irons, “The Reformed Theocrats: A Biblical Theological Response,” in Christian Body Politic: 21st Century Reformed Christian Perspectives on Church and State , ed. Stephen Joel Garver and Lee Irons (The Hermit Kingdom Press, 2004), 73.
[7] Robison B. James, Gary H. Leazer, and James Shoopman, The Fundamentalist Takeover in the Southern Baptist Convention: A Brief History (Impact Media, 1999).
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I’m pretty sure that they don’t say that.
They usually distinguish between “the theory of evolution” and “the fact of evolution”.
My personal preference (as a non-biologist) would be to avoid saying “evolution is fact.”
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Well that doesn’t happen… .
And people do say,it’s a fact as sure as gravity.
As to the “theory of evolution”; isn’t it more.like theories of evolution?
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Creationists may say “evolution is only a theory!”
Evolutionists may say " evolution is a fact!"
I think both are used for rhetorical emphasis. Both are misleading and I think best avoided.
Evolution, as far as I can tell, is an explanatory framework, larger in scope than a theory and also more flexible, but also with many lines of experimental verification that lends a lot of confidence in its veracity.
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It’s really simple. Evolution is a fact and a theory.
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It’s common for people to confuse “imply” and “infer”, too, but that doesn’t make their usage correct. Anyone who equates Pentecostals with fundamentalists, or evangelicals with fundamentalists, or the Reformed confessions with fundamentalism, is being sloppy and confusing in usage. There can of course be overlap between fundamentalism and any of those things, but they aren’t the same, and anyone who makes out that they are the same is guilty of muddying the waters and blocking clear communication.
Another bad confusion of terms. The movement from “medieval” to “fundamentalist” is grossly misinformed.
I won’t bother replying to the rest of your diatribe. It’s just a repetition of the same old accusations. Jon Garvey will certainly attest to the fact that I’m not a fundamentalist, and I believe that Joshua would, too. Also, given the number of “Likes” he puts on my posts on religious and theological matters, I would imagine that Allen Witmer MIller, no fundamentalist, realizes that I am not a fundamentalist. And of course I have recently chided Greg, a fundamentalist, for his narrow approach to Biblical interpretation. But you can believe what you like. I’m unconcerned with your opinion of me. You aren’t a person of any significance in theology/science discussion worldwide. If your name was William Lane Craig or Alvin Plantinga or Edward Feser, I might be more concerned about how you regard me, but that is counterfactual.
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No, evolution is a phenomenon and an observable fact.
The theory of evolution addresses the mechanisms underlying the phenomenon.
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Thanks, @Chris_Falter, for inviting my opinion. I am reasonably certain I am the least qualified person you listed, and I definitely do not meet @Eddie’s criteria for an evolutionary theorist. So let me start by seeing if I understand the question by rephrasing it.
Suppose we think of various scientific models and scientific explanations as different compression schemes. What is being compressed? Data about the physical world. In the case of evolutionary biology, that would include genome sequences, allele frequencies, species censuses over time and space, measurable characters of fossils, etc. For our purposes here, we will assume there is agreement about the data itself.
From this perspective, every theory, every textbook, every pop sci book, every summary statement about evolution is a different compression scheme for some subset of that data. Some of these schemes might be quite lossy; “survival of the fittest” is certainly a popular summary slogan for evolution and is certainly compact, but it does not faithfully reproduce all the nuance in the data. And many of these schemes may not be rigorous or algorithmic; it is not at all obvious how to reverse the process and get any data back out. So the metaphor is not perfect. Still, summaries and theories and such do have a function comparable to compression.
Now, let’s think about compression in another context for a second. A song can be compressed via the MP3 algorithm or the AAC algorithm. If you were to compare the bits of the compressed files, they would be markedly different. You might not be able to tell they are different representations of the same song. Yet if we reverse the compression to get back the original data (or as close as we can get in the case of lossy compression) and play back the songx, even a very sensitive audiophile would recognize that both files were the same song even if they could hear the distinct artifacts of the different compression schemes.
In these terms, I think what @Eddie is saying is that most lay people only ever encounter the compressed form of the data, the various summaries of and books about evolution. And when one compares those compressed forms, there are notable differences. It is not at all obvious that they represent or compress or generate the same data. So how can a lay person be expected to agree with evolution when they don’t know what they are agreeing to?
And I think what @Chris_Falter and others mean when they say there is actually a lot of overlap or a lot of commonality is that they can see how the various compression schemes do actually represent or generate much of the same data.
Does any of that sound right to anyone?
If it is unclear, let me go one step further and try a specific example. @swamidass has regularly made the point that Darwinism is an outdated model that was (first) falsified by the work on neutral mutations by Kimura et al. But in What Evolution Is, Ernst Mayr explicitly rejects the idea that Darwinism is falsified or challenged by neutral mutations; for him, organisms and phenotypes are more critical than genotypes, and phenotype changes are less frequently neutral. These two summaries of evolution are contradictory on their face. So to a lay person they appear to be a significant point of disagreement, perhaps to the extent that @swamidass and Mayr have two distinct theories of evolution. Whereas I am reasonably certain that @swamidass and Mayr would actually agree that their summaries/models are functionally equivalent as they allow for identical or nearly identical predictions about genotypes, phenotypes, and organisms.
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Solid post @AndyWalsh. It also shows the connection between “compression” and “knowledge.”
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Hi, Andy. Your post is well-written, and in a nice tone, and contains some interesting ideas, not all of which I completely understand, as information theory isn’t my field. I’m glad you are trying to put together the best of my ideas with the best of Chris’s ideas; that’s an activity suitable to “peaceful science.”
I will respond for now only to the part that directly concerns me. About my position you write:
Your final question is definitely in tune with my concerns, but regarding the rest of your paragraph, my view is closer to the opposite of what you have stated. The various journalistic summaries and popular books (e.g., Ken MIller’s books) and blog comments about evolution often tend to gloss over differences between evolutionary theorists, to present a sort of “diplomatic” or “compromise” or “average” view of evolutionary theory, and to give the impression that debate is only over small refinements or over new finds, e.g., some new hominid fossil that has yet to be analyzed. Most of the people on this site write about “evolutionary science” or “the modern synthetic theory” as if it is a seamless whole that all specialists in evolution subscribe to unreservedly. I think the actual reality, when you read the non-popular books written by the full-time professional evolutionary theorists themselves, is quite different, much less tidy and more ragged-edged.
So when someone comes along and says, “You ought to accept modern evolutionary theory!” my answer is: Whose evolutionary theory? Lynch’s? Gunter Wagner’s? Andreas Wagner’s? Coyne’s? Shapiro’s? They are not all the same. There is some overlap, but they are not all the same. Chris prefers to discuss only the overlap; I am trying to remind him (and others) that there is a significant amount of untidy non-overlap. I don’t believe it should be labeled as “outlier” and ignored. But of course, that is exactly the strategy of Ken Miller, Eugenie Scott, BioLogos, and others, to aggressively market the overlap areas, and ignore (if not deny the existence of) the rest.
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I’m with @Chris_Falter on this. I don’t see that much disagreement.
It seems to me that there are two things here:
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How does everything work;
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What’s the best way to describe.
And it seems to me that there is pretty good agreement on how things actually work, but a lot of disagreement on how best to describe it.
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I would be willing to assert that some parts of the Theory of Evolution are as certain as Gravity.
In fact, I think I crafted such a sentence just within the last few days! But rather than chase it down (I’ve already spent 5 minutes looking for it), I’ll just re-state:
"The longer two populations (hereinafter referred to as 2 sub-groups) of the same species do not exchange genetic information, the increased likelihood that the average individual of both sub-groups will be unable to mate and produce fertile offspring.
I consider this a fact as certain as there is gravity … just more cumbersome to test.
Here a few evolution facts that apply:
- Are humans alive today are cousins.
- Chimps and human are decedent from a common chimp-human ancestor.
Thanks for engaging and clarifying, @Eddie. So, I think what you are describing can still be discussed in terms of compression, but since you didn’t find that language helpful let’s switch tacks a bit.
I’m not a wine drinker. Every now and then someone will take it upon themselves to convert me, convinced that it’s just a matter of finding one I’ll like. And so out of politeness I will occasionally try a glass. And every time, it tastes the same to me: alcohol plus something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike grape juice. Wine enthusiasts, however, can speak at length about various notes and finishes and such. They don’t talk to each other about the flavor of ethanol, not because they don’t notice it or because it isn’t part of the taste of wine, but precisely because it is always there and thus boring and unnecessary to mention.
Is it possible that the books by “full-time professional evolutionary theorists” are the equivalent of wine connoisseurs talking amongst themselves? They aren’t talking about where they agree with other evolutionary scientists because they don’t need to. What’s interesting for them is zooming in on the subtle notes that separate their ideas from those of others.
Meanwhile, the unified theory crowd are mainly trying to explain to a dry audience what wine in general tastes like. And so naturally they focus on the dominant components that are necessary for a complete accounting.
I do think it is fair to say that the various authors and books you mention give very different impressions about evolutionary biology and in some cases may even make mutually exclusive assertions. But when I read those books and/or papers with similar language, that’s how I take it - connoisseurs skipping over the basic & obvious and zeroing in on the subtle points they have trained to notice & find more interesting to talk about.
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Thanks, Andy.
The wine analogy is more helpful to me. So I’ll build my response on that.
I’m not a big wine drinker myself, but I have enough familiarity with wines that I can talk a bit about the differences between wines. There are red wines and white wines, made from quite different grapes and with flavors reflecting that. There are also very sweet wines, such as Jewish sacramental wines (e.g., Mogen David), and there are very dry wines. if you try to introduce wine to some little kid who likes grape juice, you are best to start with a sweet one – it takes time for someone with a sweet tooth to learn to like drier wines. The difference between a Mogen David and a very dry red wine is so great a difference in degree (of sweetness) that it’s in effect a difference of kind, and people who enjoy drinking very sweet wines generally don’t like very dry ones, and vice versa. If you serve a very sweet wine for dinner to someone who doesn’t like very sweet wines, you will spoil the enjoyment of dinner for that person, and likewise for dry wines.
In short, the differences between the wines are not trivial differences. To someone who doesn’t like any wine, the differences will be unimportant, but to someone who does like some wines but not others, the differences will be very important.
Now, to a young-earth creationist, the differing versions of evolution will all look much the same, because they all deny a literal six-day direct creation, and the differences in mechanism proposed by various schools of evolutionary thought will be of no importance. From the YEC point of view, all of the versions of evolution are equally false, so talking about differences between them would be a waste of time. But if one accepts descent with modification, the differences then become important. A roomful of evolutionary biologists does not have to contend with creationists, and so the things they all have in common against creationism fade out of sight, and the things on which they differ loom much larger.
So if one evolutionary theorist believes that 50% or more of mutation is under selection whereas another evolutionary theorist thinks that only 10% of mutation is under selection, that is a non-trivial difference within evolutionary theory. Or if one evolutionary theorist thinks that “hopeful monsters” have played a significant role in the development of life, whereas most theorists are gradualists who think they have played no role, that is another non-trivial difference. Or if one evolutionary theorist thinks that organisms have the ability to re-engineer their own genomes, with quasi-Lamarckian results, and most theorists deny this, or think that it happens only with extreme infrequency, that is again a non-trivial difference.
If one reads the first few hundred pages of Gould’s Structure of Evolutionary Theory, one gets a sense of the wide diversity of views that have been held, from the time prior to Darwin up to the present (well, up to the time Gould died, anyway), regarding evolutionary mechanism. I don’t think that anyone who has read much of Gould’s book would conclude that Gould thought the differences between accounts of mechanism were trivial, or that he thought all those evolutionary theorists were saying essentially the same thing, except for minor differences of emphasis.
Let’s take the example of how much of mutation is under natural selection. If the minimum and maximum estimates, across all evolutionary theorists, were very close together, e.g., if the lowest estimate was 17% and the highest 19%, then that would support Chris’s contention that the differences among evolutionary theorists were relatively trivial. But suppose the lowest estimate is 10% and the highest estimate is 70%, and defenders of virtually every number in between can be found? This would indicate that a major causal factor for evolution (selection) is weighted very differently within the field. Someone who thinks the number is 70% is going to push natural selection very hard as perhaps the greatest explanatory factor in evolution, whereas someone who thinks the number is only 10% will be inclined to say that natural selection, while of some importance, was vastly overrated by Darwin and classical neo-Darwinism. Those in the latter group will have to employ other purported mechanisms to fill in the void left in the areas where natural selection does not operate. Their picture of how evolution produces its results will be significantly different from the picture of the old, hard-line selectionists.
I think that part of the difference between Chris and myself is that for him, the polemical situation between evolution and creationism looms much larger than it does for me. Chris has said that he was raised as a creationist and for many years held to it firmly, and has indicated that he took a long road from creationism through ID to a non-ID evolutionist position. My situation is quite different. I was raised Christian but not creationist, I never read Genesis literally, and I devoured popular science books promoting evolution from the time before I started kindergarten. I went to university on a science scholarship and when contemplated what my major area of study might be, one of my main possibilities was evolutionary theory. Creationism wasn’t even on my radar screen. So when I think about evolutionary theory, I’m interested in the differences among the evolutionary theorists more than what they hold in common against creationism.
I take the same attitude toward cosmological theory. I devoured popular science stuff on the Big Bang and so on as a young boy and later, and took it for granted that the general picture of the world sketched by cosmology reflected the real history of the universe, and that the Biblical story of the origin of the universe was “poetic” or something like that, not meant to give an accurate chronological and causal account of the sequence of events. So when I today read news stories about debates in cosmology, I’m not thinking about how the various positions are all very similar in comparison with Ken Ham’s position; I’m thinking about how different they are. I see many cosmologists accepting “dark matter”, but some of them disagreeing on what % of the universe is made of dark matter; I see some cosmologists skeptical about “dark energy”; I see some who champion inflationary theory and others who reject it; I see frequent news items indicating that some recent measurement of something or other has surprised workers in the field because it seems to contradict theoretical predictions and so on. I’m no physicist or cosmologist, but I have enough general science to understand that the field of cosmology is very much a work in progress, and that its practitioners have serious disagreements over non-trivial points. But when I say something like that, it seems that someone like Chris or Jordan (or, with less politeness, someone like Jonathan Burke) will conclude that I am casting doubt on the whole project of cosmology, and may be implying that we should abandon cosmology and go back to a literal six-day creationism. Yet nothing could be further from my intent. I’m merely pointing out that serious differences exist among the experts, and so generalizations like “modern cosmology says…” need to be made cautiously. While there is a core of propositions that all cosmologists agree on, there seem to be several major bones of contention as well.
Yet whenever I point out any bone of contention, whether in cosmology or evolutionary theory or climatology, that is take as implying some agenda to deny the value of the whole field. I can’t say “There is a range of views among climatologists regarding the exact percentage of the warming that is caused by CO2, as opposed to by other greenhouse gases or by other causes,” without being accused of denying global warming entirely. I can’t say, “There is a range of views among evolutionary biologists regarding which factors are important and how they are to be weighted,” without being accused of being a “creationist.”
What I’d like to hear from Chris is: “Yes, there are disagreements among evolutionary theorists regarding mechanisms, and they aren’t all trivial or minor or peripheral, and they do imply different accounts of how and why evolution happens, and the different accounts aren’t all mutually compatible, and such differences among scientists are part of the very lifeblood of any science, and we mustn’t minimize those differences merely because we are worried the creationists will misuse them to undermine evolutionary theory altogether.” If Chris would say that, our disagreement would vanish entirely.
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Why would @Chris_Falter “admit” something that isn’t true?
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But it is true. The differences among evolutionary theorists are significant.
I think it’s presumptuous to say to highly trained scientists who regard themselves as in conscious disagreement with their colleagues, “You guys are really all saying the same thing.”
Would you walk into a cosmology conference and say to the people who can’t agree on how much “dark matter” there is in the universe, that they were all really saying the same thing?
Would you walk into a conference of economists, where Galbraithians were debating with Friedmanites, and say, “You guys are really all saying the same thing?”
So why do you do this regarding evolutionary theorists? If they explicitly state areas of serious disagreement with one another, why would you presume to tell them that they aren’t actually in disagreement?
In fact, if there weren’t such a thing as “creationism,” you wouldn’t have any need to feign the existence of monolithic agreement among evolutionary theorists. Over in Europe, where creationism is almost non-existent, evolutionary theorists can frankly disagree with each other about evolutionary mechanisms, and no one says, “You are all really saying the same thing.” But in the USA, because of the existence of a large creationist population, it is feared that any perceived difference among evolutionary theorists could be used as a wedge to weaken belief in evolution overall, so apologists for evolution have employed the strategy of pretending that evolutionary theory is a seamless unity, and that any differences among evolutionary theorists are about peripheral or relatively unimportant matters. But this is a “noble lie” (in this case, an ignoble lie) generated by purely political and social concerns.
In fact there is a very large difference between a group of biologists who say that evolutionary theory is seriously defective because it lacks a coherent theory of the origin of new biological form, and other biologists who say that evolutionary theory doesn’t need any such addition. Anyone who pretends that these two groups are “saying almost the same thing” is guilty of misleading the public about the state of evolutionary theory today.
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All you are doing is following the usual cdesignproponentist “Teach the Controversy” script. You do the same with Anthropogenic Global Warming.
When presented with the overwhelming consensus of experts on these topics, you say that the consensus is irrelevant. You then appeal to fringe views, or a tiny handful of academics who disagree with the consensus for whatever reason, point to their degrees and other qualifications, and claim that their views give solid grounds on which to doubt and contest the validity of the consensus. You also refuse to acknowledge that ID (cdesignproponentism), is pseudoscience, and you repeatedly attempt to defend it from those who point out that it’s simply a theologically motivated attempt to rebrand one form of creationism.
This is not how to do proper research, or how to do science. This is literally a religious apologetic methodology which was coined by the Discovery Institute.
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Fair enough.
It must be that @Eddie understands evolutionary biology far better than mere evolutionary biologists 
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