Musings on the "average American"

Conversation
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Ah, sorry about that. I think this is a really interesting topic that might merit a thread of its own. Journeys like that one (Creationism → Theistic Evolution) are bigger than just “learning” or “changing one’s mind” and are obviously similar to seismic changes like deconversion.

There are many public personal stories of escape from creationism with faith intact. I think there are several at the BioLogos site, and while I’ve never read Lamoureux I think his story is like that. I haven’t read Dennis Venema’s book but I think his journey started with creationism (I know he was an ID enthusiast until he read Behe’s Edge of Evolution, which no geneticist could ever take seriously). Previous generations have escape stories that should also be studied and remembered: Davis Young was a hero of mine many years ago and is an example of escape from creationism (YEC) with faith intact. Ron Numbers’ escape led to agnosticism (as he described decades ago in The Creationists).

I am more personally acquainted with people who I knew who told me their stories. One nearly-universal common thread was an encounter with scientific explanations (and data) that they had never heard or seen before. This encounter was often a college class (weeks or months long) but sometimes just a lecture or article. In every case, the exposure to previously unknown/unexamined science happened in what I’ll call a friendly environment (with one or many other believers) and came from a friendly source (a fellow believer with scientific and religious credibility). There is probably a LOT to unpack regarding that last part — for some of these people, the mere existence of a serious believer who understood evolution was a shocking discovery.

I am emphasizing stories that have a seismic change at the center, because those are the stories I have heard. There are surely stories of the more “small cracks in their worldview” nature. I suspect that even those stories involve a punctuated time of change that gets the person out of the echo chamber for good. But that, like everything else I’ve written here, is based on my experiences in a particular kind of faith community at a particular time in history. As far as I know, there has been no systematic study of these kinds of changes. Such a study would be VERY interesting and may very well turn up influences or vulnerabilities that we don’t think enough about. Or not.

I should add that about half of the stories that people told me (and occasionally still tell me) did not end with faith intact. Those stories are more consistent in their structure and all end with the person realizing they’d been lied to, for decades. They then asked the next important, indeed obvious question: “What else did they lie to me about?” An evangelical who asks that question is in for a rough ride, and no atheist (shrill or otherwise) needs to be around to help.

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FWIW, I’ll chip in some elements from my own “escape from creationism with faith intact” that differ a bit from @sfmatheson’s summary–not to contradict him, but just for some additional color. And because there’s been a fair amount of chat lately about Christians who accept the science of evolution, so I thought folks might be interested to hear more from some of us.

For reference, I grew up attending evangelical churches where YEC was treated as the only viable Christian option. I also attended Christian schools where YEC was explicitly taught as part of the science curriculum. (My high school science texts were published by Bob Jones University.) I was aware in a general sense this was counter to “secular” science, but mostly because I was told so rather than having much awareness of the alternatives. I was content with this and prepared to go off to college and have to choose between giving the “true” answers on exams and the answers that would get me good grades.

However, despite being a biology major as an undergrad and doing a PhD in molecular microbiology, that scenario never arose. Natural history and common descent didn’t come up in any of my classes; to the extent that evolution came up at all, it was in relation to issues like antimicrobial resistance that could easily be compartmentalized as unobjectionable microevolution.

So my “escape from creationism” didn’t start with

Instead, I had an encounter with theology I had never heard or seen before, which involved basically the same “shocking discovery” of the mere existence of serious believers who had no qualms with an old earth and common descent. None of these folks tried to persuade me about the science–I’m guessing they didn’t realize just how different my education had been in that regard and also they weren’t biologists–but they did address the various theological objections and issues I had grown up with. So in that regard the “friendly environment” was still a central and likely critical component, but what I learned in that context differed.

As a result, the first waypoint on my escape route was agnosticism about the details of most origins questions while retaining a belief that God was ultimately involved whatever the particulars. I was still fairly uninformed on the science, and so I didn’t have a feeling of having been lied to so much as figuring folks in my denomination were understandably underinformed about what was going on in the other denominations.

However, now that I’ve dug more into the science, I continue to struggle with my own version of:

I’m willing to grant that most/all of the folks in my particular circle are not lying in the sense of knowingly bearing false witness. Nevertheless, they are demonstrably wrong about various matters of biology, and also fairly impervious to correction. So what else are they wrong about? The answer could be ‘nothing’ of course, but it is difficult to maintain the level of trust required to believe that, especially when there is so clearly no reciprocal trust in me.

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@Roy

When you say THIS atheist… do you mean you?

Other Atheists may differ. Why would you be attracted to the GAE theme of @swamidass 's group more than the theme of “allegory” (i.e., non-hustorical events)?

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I have to say that’s an appalling statement in itself. How long ago was this? And if you don’t mind my asking, what universities? No freshman bio course should be able to avoid treating evolution, both as a topic of importance on its own and as a contributor to several other topics. And nobody should be able to get an undergrad degree in biology without at least one course on evolution. Nor should anyone be able to get a graduate degree in molecular microbiology without getting into molecular evolution in a serious way and getting at least a survey of microbial systematics and evolution. Of course there was a period when many universities didn’t realize that, unfortunately.

But I digress from your main point.

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I do not disagree, but my recall of two semesters of freshman biology aligned with Andy’s experience. The textbook preface offered that evolution was foundational to all of biology, and then there was only glancing mention for the rest of the course. Taxonomy, plant and animal physiology, and biochemical cycles, took up the bulk of time; I think to some extent because those topics lend readily to exams which can curve the class. Evolution clicked for me not from lecture, but from the hands on lab dissection of a rat.

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I have to admit that I don’t remember freshman biology well enough to specify. But I also recall a freshman course in which we visited various professors and learned about their research, and there was lots of evolution in that. And as an undergrad bio major I took courses in, as well as a dedicated evolution course, comparative vertebrate anatomy, comparative vertebrate physiology, plant ecology, ornithology, mammalogy, cell biology, genetics, and entomology, every one permeated with evolution. And I swear that some of those were explicitly required for the degree.

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I love your story and I know it’s at least as common as the “encountering the science for the first time” scenario. I wonder how many stories of escape can be traced to simple a friendly environment (fellow believers) that blunted or eliminated the sense that one must choose evolution or faith.

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1996-2000 I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon. 2000-2005 I was a PhD student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

It’s possible that the topic was not entirely absent. But if it had been covered in any depth, I’d likely remember having some kind of quandary about how to deal with homework and tests.

Carnegie Mellon had none of these classes. They focus of the department was almost exclusively on biochemistry, cell biology, molecular biology and genetics. If it hadn’t been for the developmental biology electives I took, I’m not sure the concept of “animal” would have factored into my biology degree.

For what it’s worth, they’ve expanded somewhat since, adding actual evolution courses, although the likes of mammalogy and comparative anatomy are still nowhere to be seen.

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Good question, and I imagine we have similar expectations that such a context is, if not strictly necessary, then at least a frequent contributor. My own belief that providing a friendly environment would be helpful is pretty much how I wound up tumbling down the rabbit hole of contemporary evolution skepticism (the stuff I got in K-12 was pretty much straight out of Henry Morris and contemporaries). My inclination was to try to help make such environments more common, and the way to go about that seemed to be to engage with communities that were not so friendly. But so far I personally haven’t gotten much traction with variations on “if you don’t make folks feel like they have to choose, they are less likely to choose the option you don’t want them to pick.”

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I’d be surprised if you could provide any alternative meaning.

AFAIK, Joshua isn’t an “expert on historical linguistics”, so I wouldn’t be at his booth either.

Why didn’t you quote the rest of my post? Then it would have been obvious that your question was loaded with blanks, you wouldn’t have given a false impression to anyone reading the thread, and I wouldn’t now be dismissing you as yet another quote-miner.

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@Roy

What false impression do you think i gave my audience. I really dont know specifically what you mean.

P.S. Sometimes my critics are intentionally evasive… but it is usually difficult to know who is being evasive and who is simply being unintentionally vague.

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Once again, if you’d quoted the whole of my post instead of extracting half a sentence and then replying as if the rest had never been written, the answer to your question would have been obvious.

For the benefit of you and anyone else who may be unaware of your mendacity, here are your posts with the contexts restored and emphasised:

There is nothing at all in my post to say I would be more attracted to the GAE theme than to “allegory”. By quoting my comment that I wouldn’t be part of the Biologos audience but omitting the follow-up that I’d be somewhere else that is neither Biologos nor GAE, and by asking why I would be “attracted to the GAE theme”, you have given the impression that I expressed a preference for GAE, when I did not.

Your misrepresentation would have been obvious if you had included the whole of my comment. That is quote-mining.

I explicitly told you what the false impression was - that I would not be attracted to Joshua’s GAE group. You omitted to quote that part of my post in your reply.

I also said that your question was loaded, a further indication of the false impression you were giving, but you omitted that too.

Not quoting the part of a post that answers the question you then ask might be accidental if done once, but when done twice in succession, when accompanied by other omissions that assist the concealment, and when achieved by quoting only fragments of sentences, it starts to look deliberate.

That is why I am now dismissing you as yet another quote-miner.

If you can satisfactorily explain why you omitted those (half-)sentences from your replies, I will reverse that decision. But I doubt you will even try.

You’re the one being evasive, and intentionally vague. Nor is it just on this occasion; there are many, many others.

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FYI

If “we had a gathering, a convention, of all the groups that are interested in interpreting the first chapters of Genesis. Let’s also assume that each group had a booth or table”, we would not have only two booths. We would have at least four:

  1. The YEC, e.g. Answers in Genesis, view.

  2. The GAE.

  3. The Biologos “Genesis being mostly a combination of myth, legend, allegory and symbolism” view. Incidentally, it is not “obvious” that “Atheists would be part of” this audience. In fact two atheists on this thread have explicitly stated that they consider it obvious that they would not.

  4. The secular, ‘just another creation myth’, view that would see Genesis interpreted by “experts in historical linguistics and culture” in the same manner as any other of these myths.

(Parenthetically, I would note that there may well be other interpretations.)

Therefore, it is a False Dichotomy to take somebody stating that they “most certainly would not be part of the Biologos audience” as expressing that they would “be attracted to the GAE”.

This in turn returns us to something I stated in my OP, that I think some on this thread have failed to take on board:

It would seem “obvious” that many atheists would not ascribe any allegoric or symbolic meaning to Genesis, and that lumping them in with Biologos is not “keep[ing] in mind what each group believes”.

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