ENV: BioLogos and the Search for Truth

Referencing this article: Haarsma Makes First Round of Corrections at BioLogos

And this deleted article: Deleted: Does Genetics Point to a Single Primal Couple?

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I really hope you aren’t the friend who gave them the tip

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The ENV article’s main point is absolutely right (and I wasn’t the tipster, either!). I was taught in maths to “show my working,” and unless one wants to be accused of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth approach to history, simply deleting errors that have generated debate is not good.

Quite apart from anything else, it maintains the myth that Truth emerges from Ignorance whole and complete, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Truth - and especially scientific truth - is messier than that, which it’s good to know because it keeps one questioning current knowledge.

A small example of my own: as Joshua was working on GAE, he asked me to bring together some of what I had written about it since 2010. The first was a working paper called “Adam and MRCA Studies,” and Josh suggested that the use of “MRCA” (most recent common ancestor) was scientifically inaccurate and even misleading with respect to Adam. And so it is, but that’s what I wrote in 2010, and anyone wanting to trace how the idea evolved is not going to be helped by a subtly corrected version of history.

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More evidence that ID is in fact motivated by religion. Why is a science organization writing about a religious organization?

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Help me understand your logic there. Say that a a religious organization makes wild religious claim, for example, about a global flood and the age of the earth. Are you saying scientific organizations should not point out the scientific issues with those claims?

Of course, it should we well known I am no ID advocate. I am just asking the nature of your logic here.

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For serious errors like these, it’s hard to see the record as truly fixed until things that were claimed that were untrue are openly acknowledged as wrong.

And, with that, not a single irony meter on the face of the planet was left intact.

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Is it clear that these articles were deleted recently? I only ask because they had a big refresh of their website going on close to a year ago now, and a lot of material did not make the cut to the new site at that time for whatever reason.

I appreciate the desire for transparency and think it is reasonable to ask questions and to encourage the preservation of significant articles. I’m just wondering if there might be other explanations for the missing posts before making inferences about intentions.

Or maybe it is also the case that they had a change of heart about my views on midichlorians and decided they were too controversial to be associated with.

https://biologos.org/blogs/jim-stump-faith-and-science-seeking-understanding/star-wars-evolution-and-the-squishiness-of-biology

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Yes
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A post was merged into an existing topic: The Discovery Institute gives advice to BioLogos on scientific integrity

I do agree we should avoid inferring intentions and motivations.

What we do know is that this is a large departure on several levels from both the standards of science and also the standards that BioLogos just laid out for themselves. Why they would do this is hard to know.

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