I’m not a YEC, but it’s obvious to me that Darwinism is not a produce of science, but of atheism. Why else would such a poor “theory” be so widely accepted? Well, that’s easy to explain - it "must have happened" coz there ain’t no God.
It used to be obvious to me, too.
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Then what happened? You realized that you have to join the Darwin Club in order to be accepted as a respectable member of the scientific community?
It’s obvious to me that evolution is a product of science, not of atheism, since there are many intelligent believers who accept evolution and even study it scientifically.
Because it’s not a poor theory, but one of the must successful in the history of science.
No, we believe it happened because that’s what the evidence shows. That’s why the theory was proposed in the first place, it best explains the data we have.
Meanwhile, you haven’t answered @AllenWitmerMiller’s request for evidence that shows life’s origin to be impossible. Could you cite just one reference that details even one chemical or physical fact that entails the impossibility of life’s origin? If you respond to this request with anything other than a direct answer I must conclude you know of no such fact because I’m pretty sure you would just love to rub my nose in it if you did, instead of having to beat around the bush with vague handwaves towards the complexity of extant life.
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That’s not a scientific hypothesis.
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The theory is widely accepted because it explains a wide array of observations in biology, such as these:
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No, I’m not a scientist at all, just a layman with a few science courses under my belt. I think I just began to gain both a better perspective of my own lack of knowledge and a better understanding and respect for science and the scientific community, and through that, I began realizing that the things I believed weren’t really creating a best-fit line through the data points. The biggest thing, though—I was no longer getting social reinforcement for my YEC theological commitments. Once that happened, I started questioning why I believed what I believed, and began to decouple my hope, meaning, and purpose from those particular beliefs.
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Yes.
That’s not a hypothesis.
That seems unlikely, given your conflation of a hypothesis with a definition.
Evidence, particularly the evidence predicted by the theory.
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Based on your experience, what is the best way to induce such questioning in others?
I’ve given this a lot of thought. Everyone’s different, but I suspect my own experience can be extrapolated to a lot of people. I think the biggest thing is transplanting someone to a different community, or expanding their community to include a variety of belief systems. In either case, it’s important to have respectful relationships there, because it’s so easy to close off one’s mind to people they don’t respect. Perhaps the idea behind all this is to try and create an environment in which it’s safe and/or comfortable for someone to question or to change.
Is that enough? I don’t know. Maybe for some, but not for others.
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Thanks for your reply, Matt.
Would you say that anyone in the community triggered the change in particular, or was it the general environment that allowed your change to come from within?
Congratulations, sir. It isn’t easy for a lot of people to make these journeys and it speaks well for you that you were able to do it.
Speaking from a never-was-a-believer-or-creationist point of view, by the way, I have often found it odd how much people find “hope, meaning and purpose” to be coupled with those beliefs. I have some difficulty understanding how the existence of a god has anything to do with hope, meaning or purpose, but while I can sort of roughly guess at that, the idea that evolutionary biology is destructive of hope, meaning or purpose baffles me completely.
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It was both. My wife left Christianity about 3 years before I did, and that in turn exposed me to a more diverse set of views. It also gave me some firsthand experience that atheists were not dishonest—and they could be far more moral than I (what a shocker that was!). That process got me pretty familiar with having incorrect preconceptions.
Then we pulled up stakes and moved to Seattle so she could pursue a degree at UW. That removed me from some of that conforming YEC pressure that I had in my hometown community. At that point I was far more open to re-examining my beliefs.
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Seattle! That’s where I am. Perhaps we should have a beer together once it is possible for people to leave their damned homes again. When I was a kid here, I learned that we were one of the “least-churched” cities in America. I hope your wife likes UW. I went there as an undergrad – marvelous institution and a nice campus.
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Thanks, Puck. Sometimes it feels a little luck-of-the-draw, almost like I had no control over it. I think back to events in the past that, should they have happened just a hair differently, would have seen me remain in my YEC community in Spokane today. It’s a bit surreal.
Oh really? How did you get involved, then? I’ve got to know.
Yes, that definitely resonates with me, especially now. I’d never heard of WLC until after I left YEC, but the way he characterizes the idea of a finite life (or consciousness or whatever) as being ultimately meaningless/hopeless/purposeless has never struck me as being particularly compelling.
I seem to recall Ken Ham saying something like (paraphrased), “if you want to believe what’s in the back of the Book, you have to believe what’s in the front.”
That sounds like a fine idea! Furthermore, I think this makes four members in the general area! We should open up the Seattle branch of PS, perhaps—now, hear me out—just down the road from the DI?
Oh boy. It is a really beautiful campus, so don’t even get me started on how bitter she is about classes being online.
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Somewhere in the archives is a thread titled something like “Introducing Puck the Amazon Reviewer” and so if you want to hear me natter on about it for far too long, you may want a look there. Here, I will give you the short version.
From childhood I was fascinated with religion and with evolution. I recall learning about the Scopes trial and I thought how awful it was that there had once been people so ignorant as to make such a mess of things. I loved Inherit The Wind (which, yes, is not an accurate retelling of the Scopes trial, as creationists insist on pointing out). Learning that these modern primitives still walked among us was unsettling.
At high school I was suddenly exposed to the fervor of hormones-meet-pastors Christianity, where kids were obsessed with their youth groups, and where predatory churches in the neighborhood were selling their goods to people too young and inexperienced to understand what was going on. I was horrified. And for the first time I started to have classmates who actually were reading creationist books.
But my fascination with these things died down somewhat, until years later, when, on a Seattle Mariners discussion board, I made the acquaintance of a pastor-in-training of one of the rip-roaring denominations. I said something about the vacuousness of creationists, and he responded that while this was true for many of them, the new breed of creationists, of whom he named Michael Behe as an example, were much better and had some really good ideas. I read Darwin’s Black Box. It’d been decades since I’d taken a biology class, but the book was so screamingly full of nonsense that I was surprised anyone had been taken in. I wrote to my pastor-in-training friend at length, explaining much of what was wrong with it (but, as I later learned to my dismay, MISSING much of what was wrong with it due to my lack of education on the topic), and he never wrote back again. But it drew me in to this weird world, and I began reviewing books over at Amazon, to the point that after the DI lost the ability to get actual scientists like @swamidass to review its books, it started posting absurd retorts to MY reviews. And when some of that material from my reviews came up here, I popped up here, too.
I’ve had the good fortune, through such things as the now-destroyed Amazon review threads and this site, to meet various scientists – particularly in biology and geology – who have been extremely generous in helping me with my questions about these topics, both as they relate to creationism and otherwise. Their forthrightness and helpfulness have been abundant and have done much to remedy my deficient education in biology.
I spent nineteen years in the practice of civil rights litigation, and so bring a lawyer’s perspective to the legal aspects of this thing and, I hope, a perspective on the scientific aspects which is directed less by the law and more by the things I have been able to learn about biology in the years since re-engaging with this. But on those legal aspects: as a person not participating in the beliefs of the faithful, I feel very deeply the cultural and intellectual harm that these people will do, and mean to do, if they ever get the chance, and so it seems to me that every aspect of their attack on our values, from their wretched and vile theology to their willful lies about science, needs to be scrutinized carefully and needs to be met with a response that is both honest and forceful.
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I know @AllenWitmerMiller had already replied with his take. I was thinking about that verse as well, and even Christians should say it’s true of themselves. Jeremiah 17:9 came to mind. “The heart is deceitful above all things,desperately wicked; Who can know it?” I believe sin is really just denial of God; doesn’t matter whether you have faith or not. We are all fools at times.
I’m curious if family and friends have actually said or implied that you are deceitful, or that you’re concerned about it? I’d hope it’s not the former, that would be very sad. I’d imagine it’s be difficult to keep relationships the same if you don’t have religious beliefs in common. I think it’s actually easier for people of different beliefs to become friends on other common ground, then for relationships where faith was the common ground to stay together after that changes. But their faith should be motivating them to love and pray for you anyway. Wish you the best in navigating it.
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I don’t need to be an expert in molecular biology to know that abiogenesis couldn’t have happened naturally … anymore than I need to be a computer engineer to know that computers don’t build themselves … anymore than I need to be a geologist to know that the faces on Mt. Rushmore are not the result of erosion.
“In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’”
I’m not talking about evolution, but abiogenesis.
Haven’t I already addressed that question? As a molecular biologist, you are already familiar with the function complexity evident in even the simplest cell. That is the evidence that says abiogenesis is a scientific impossibility.
Right, so if an archeologist digs up a statue, and concludes that is not the result of natural forces, but the result of intelligent design, that is not science?
If you came across your name and address spelled out on a beach with sea-shells, and concluded that that was not the result of natural forces but of intelligent design, would that be “story telling”?
So if you were a policeman and came across a murder scene in which someone’s name was written in blood on a wall, it would be “story telling” to conclude that it was written by a human and was not the result of natural forces?
Please read my relies to Mercer above.
The “who, when, where, how” are irrelevant to my point, which is that archeologists consider the recognition of intelligent design to be essential to their science. Furthermore, the “who, when, where, how” of abiogenesis are also irrelevant. I don’t claim to know those things; I am simply arguing that abiogenesis represents a scientific impossibility and that concluding that only an intelligent Creator could be responsible for it is a scientific conclusion.
I completely understand how a rational scientific conclusion could be dismissed as “vacuous” to someone who harbours a deep-seated psychological fear of said conclusion.
It’s not an “unsubstantiated assertion”. It’s a fact that science will never even come close to understanding how abiogenesis occurred.
“In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’”
Understanding that is as scientifically impossible as abiogenesis itself. All science will ever be able to is come up with junk “theories” based on delusion, superstition and magic. Get used to it.
Thanks, but repeating your simplistic little fairy tale doesn’t make it any more rational or scientific. It ignores the scientifically impossibility of the first viable organism forming naturally.
According to you, the first reproducing organism must have been no more functionally-complex than say, a fruit cake – despite all the evidence to the contrary and the fact that there is not the slightest bit of empirical evidence that a reproducing organism could be functionally “simple”. Neither do you have the slightest bit of empirical evidence that molecules can evolve into a living organism.
What is your excuse for such a childish and superstitious point of view?
Not to someone who chooses unscientific fantasy over scientific reality.
Yes, sorry – I forgot about those laws of chemistry that say mindless molecules can naturally form complex living machines that reproduce themselves. Silly me.
Space cadets doing futile research are still space cadets.
Christian space cadets are still space cadets.
I disagree with many a YEC point of view, but that is one they got DEAD RIGHT . Little wonder William Provine used to say, “Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented.” (What a fine choice of word – “invented”!)
Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true.
Really? I didn’t know that.
Atheists deny certain aspects of reality, such as miracles and visions – are you sure there’s nothing wrong with that?
According to atheism, humans have no more objective worth and a flea or a virus – which goes a long to explaining why atheistic regimes in the twentieth century killed more than 100 million people, who were evidently seen as worthless pests that could be exterminated. Nothing wrong with that?
Meanwhile, down at Atheist Central, when methodological naturalism bumps into an immovable object – such as the scientific impossibility of abiogenesis - they believe in the fatuous magical myth that it happened naturally.
Hang on, let me get this straight … you’re saying that when Psalm 14:1 refers to someone who has “said in his heart, ‘There is no God’”, it isn’t referring to someone who believes there is no God – ie, an atheist – but is in fact referring to someone who does believe in God?
If so … Congratulations! When it comes to absurd biblical interpretations, this one takes the cake!
Nabal means “fool” in Hebrew. (Hebrew: נָבָל Nāḇāl , “fool”[1])
The part of Psalms 14:1 that says “their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good” doesn’t mean every deed of an atheist is evil and that atheists are not capable of doing good deeds – it means good works done without faith don’t please God.
You need to compare it Isaiah 64:6, which says good deeds are worthless to God without faith: “But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like [b]filthy rags”.
Likewise, Hebrews 11:6 says, “ without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.”
Please don’t do it again. It’s downright embarrassing.