@Tim was, I think, contrasting the claim that “the great majority of English-speaking Christians” accept earth’s age and evolution with preceding dire warnings about the numbers who don’t. Maybe George meant “globally” for that claim, and maybe the global numbers are different from the depressing numbers in the evangelicalism-infested US. Or maybe George thinks that the approx 60% of US Christians who do accept science are a “great majority.” That seems to be a reasonable judgement, at least to me, but I wouldn’t say “George is right.”
EDIT: sorry for even posting this, I’m sure that George meant to contrast US with global “English-speaking Christians” and to claim that a great majority of the latter accept earth’s age and evolution. Others may take up the epic struggle over the meaning of “great majority” but I’m with George too.
The UK is well known for low “Young Earth” adherence, say around 15% - - but I do not yet have the statistics for Canada, Australia, New Zealand or even South Africa.
Considering how big (in absolute numbers) the American popuation is, I will likely have to accept the revision of the phrase “the great majority” of Americans to something less grand or sweeping.
Is he? He was talking explicitly about “English-speaking Christians”. AFAIK, the largest English-speaking Christian population is in the US (more obviously so, if we mean ‘speaks English as their first language’).
He had just quoted statistics showing that 37-42% of Americans are YEC, and thus reject an Old Earth. That means that only a bare majority of Americans accept an Old Earth.
I’m therefore not seeing an enormous “difference” between acceptance of evolution and an Old Earth (and thus mainstream geology) among English-Speaking Christians.
(Parenthetically, I would also point out that it has not been demonstrated that a difference in level of acceptance should necessitate a difference in how scientific fields are treated within science.)
A fairly large number of Christians demonstrate a divergence of views from the official views of their denomination (e.g. Catholics on Divorce), so I don’t think this is determinatve. (Also, were these “Wiki denomination totals” of English-speaking Christians?)
Wow, in 4 years I had completely forgotten about this thread. I suppose i must concur with you that forgetting this thread IS laughable.
However, in 4 years, I have seen the shrillness of the atheist rhetoric unleashed on this site. It continues to distress me as it seems quite counter-productive to the long term goals of most Evolutionists (I will be describing those goals too!).
In a renewal of examining the “Peacefulness” of this site, I think i gave up too quickly back in 2020. I will have a re-statement - - or revision - - of my concerns coming shortly.
I’m not sure by what standard you are measuring “shrillness”, but I assure you this crowd is tame compared to the anarchist and rabid anti-theist atheists that @ceciliafxx and I encounted as moderators on Google Plus. The way things work on the Internet you are likely to conflict with people in the extremes than with the far more common moderates. Please consider this in your future descriptions.
I find your fixation on interpreting my motivations in ways i have already wholeheartedly denied to be, well, exhausting.
Let me say that I am unabashedly protective of Evolutionists who also believe Jesus is uniquely part of God’s plan for humanity. And that I.D. proponents ruin their scientific credibility not by being Christians, but by rejecting the sciences of geology, physics, evolution … but then calling on the realm of science as somehow providing evidence for God’s existence.
This admission just leaves my original question unanswered:
Given that Climate Change, like (Old Earth) geology, also evokes considerable resistance from conservative Christians, I would also ask:
Why is the view that “evolution is sufficient WITHOUT any divine involvement” any more “atheist”/“antitheist” than the view that “Climate Change is sufficient WITHOUT any divine involvement”?
I will admit that, as I value clarity, incoherence tends to make me “grouchy”.
Repetitive incoherence, on the other hands, eventually makes me downright incandescent.
Excellent re-statement of the GAE. But I call into question the validity of that last sentence. I don’t think the GAE is understood well enough here for participants to complain.
So maybe I need to test my premise.
The GAE concludes that if God existed and He WERE to create Adam & Eve “de novo”, separate from a large pre-Adam human population created by means of evolution - - there is no way science could distinguish the footprint of Adam/Eve.
Similarly, we cannot rely on science to deny the virgin birth … for there is no way to distinguish one miraculous birth out of thousands - if not millions - of conventional births.
How many atheist evolutionists can agree with and endorse these 2 positions despite their preference for atheism? How about you @Tim ?
Firstly, w.r.t. GAE, I have already made my position clear:
I do not consider a genealogical Adam and Eve to be contradicted by science, as far as I can ascertain.
(Parenthetically, I would, and have in the past, placed GAE in the same category as Russell’s Teapot.)
Secondly, I don’t have the first fracking cluewhat “the virgin birth” has to do with any of this. It is a complete non sequitor as far as I’m concerned.
Thirdly, as I have had enough of @gbrooks9’s repetitive, incoherent, scientific-method-denying, atheist-bashing[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] nonsense …
… I think that it is best that I simply
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
and walk away from this, before I have a lapse in judgement and tell him how I really feel about this stupidity he has been peddling.
Not sure if I would call myself an “atheist evolutionist”, but since you are asking for input, I’ll say I cannot endorse these two positions, irrespective of my atheism. The positions are concerning if and how much science has to say on the subjects, assuming that it has no means to decide on the facts. This is a question about one’s opinion/philosophy of science, not matters of religion.
It is just not the case that science is silent on things it cannot make definitive statements on. If that were so, there would be almost nothing at all science could say anything about, because precious few if any questions have absolutely definitive answers in science - that’s just not what it is about. It does inform us, though. There is a difference between scientifically viable/respectable positions, and ones that are not that. Positing something that is not indicated by any available evidence or even in conflict with previously well-established theories is not equivalent to positing something that is completely compatible with previously well-established theories, let alone indicated weakly or strongly by any available evidence.
If GAE was claiming that all currently living humans were the descendants of a single couple, science could safely comment that there is for the time being no warrant for this conjecture. Even if true, it is indistinguishable from its own falsehood because it is an assumption that yields no predictions we have had a chance to test yet. This may not be an outright denial of the claim, but it is something other than no comment at all.
If GAE was claiming that God breathed the breath of life into mud golems to create that couple of common human ancestors, that would be proposing a new, unknown mechanism that should be experimentally verifiable, but somehow eluded all of the thorough testing that left us with currently known theories about how humans and other animals come into being. It is thereby in open conflict with the state of our knowledge on the subject. One could come up with excuses for why we have no more instances of it, but the fact that we don’t is already not a neutral statement.
Human reproduction, likewise, is understood too well, and observed too much for virgin births to have escaped our notice. They conflict with what we know about reproduction. That is not saying virgin births could not or did not happen. But it is also not a neutral position on the matter.
I’m saying science is not silent on everything it has no definitive answers for. Not all ideas that are not ruled out are equally scientifically plausible. Some ideas are less believable than others. The idea that all humans trace back to one specific and contemporaneous male and female ancestor couple is not among the most believable ones, if scientific thinking is what guides our judgement of its believability. Neither is the idea that ways of starting pregnancies without sexual acts could plausibly have been known or implemented some two millennia ago.
If that was intended to characterize GAE, it’s seriously misstated. GAE is not a scientific hypothesis, and I don’t think anyone has claimed that it is. It’s a religious hypothesis with a scientific component: given reasonable population parameters, is it likely that a couple living 6000 years ago could be ancestral to everyone living 2000 years ago? That scientific part is not particularly controversial. The idea of separate creation of Adam and Eve isn’t a scientific hypothesis and never was claimed to be.
And that’s a serious misstatement of the virgin birth idea. It’s supposed to be a miracle, a one-off. All we can say is that if it happened we would have no evidence of it.
I hope you know that isn’t even close to what GAE is about, but I see a bigger problem here, one that seems to be revealed again in this more recent comment of yours:
I think you are mistaken to mix miraculous claims (breath into mud golems, nonphysical zygote formation) in with non-miraculous ones. For one thing, it causes you to write inaccurately about what people believe, and that’s a really bad look. (I was a Christian for half my life and never once heard a believer claim that the virgin birth was anything other than a miracle.) Worse though, in the context of this conversation, it leads you to make claims that seem just flat ridiculous to me. You seem to actually believe that the “breath of life” from a deity into a mud golem is a “mechanism” that “should be experimentally verifiable.”
If you actually believe that, then you’re either crazy or — much more likely — you are carelessly projecting your idiosyncratic and narrow beliefs about gods, miracles, and “mechanisms” onto others. I doubt you will find a more obstinate materialist than me; perhaps like you, I simply don’t believe in fairies or miracles and don’t take any of those claims seriously. But I take the (small amount of) time it takes to understand what the claims actually are. I suggest you try that, too.
In my opinion, the reliability of science is meaningful. Something being reliable means that it is something we may rely on. When science says (for the sake of argument) that virgin births don’t happen, then one of three things must be the case:
Virgin births do, in fact, not happen. Then tales of them are not literal and/or accurate historical accounts. Investigating such tales will never amount to an investigation of the alleged events themselves, and will therefore not provide for a better understanding of nature than what we would have independent thereof.
Virgin births do, in fact, happen naturally. Then our theory is inaccurate, presumably because we have not had the chance to record and study enough of them to understand how and when virgin births happen within a better theory. Insofar as it may improve our understanding of nature, taking reports of virgin births seriously and investigating them scientifically may be a worthwhile endeavour.
Virgin births happen, but only as miraculous suspensions of otherwise acting natural law. Then we should be careful to not rely on the discoveries of science to inform us about what may or may not occur in nature. Because there is ultimately no controlling for divine whimsy, and virgin births are a result of such, any attempt to investigate them scientifically is futile.
We don’t know which of these is the case, but one of these interpretations, I’d say, comes with a unique (for worse, I’d say, not for better) attitude towards science in general.
To get back to gbrooks9’s original prompt, my point is this: If science is unable to distinguish between several alternative explanations of an event or state of affairs, that is not nothing. One is in that case justified, scientifically, in saying that there is no scientific warrant to accept any one of them over the rest. In my opinion, that is a statement about them.
