Patrick's Objections

I’m pretty sure that @patrick is not going to be motivated by that. Let’s give him some space.

That is great common ground. I’ll take it. If you can focus on that, you can do some real good here. I appreciate your help engaging @scd, for example. I just do not have the time to manage questions from him. If you can keep your objections to religion separate from the science, you could make some real headway with him.

What are your thoughts on Martin Luther King Jr? He writes:

But America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress. It seems to me that your moral progress lags behind your scientific progress.
Essay: "Grieve the Segregation of Science" by S. Joshua Swamidass

I do not know how scientific progress helps us deal with the injustice of our world. Science can neither see nor end injustice. It cannot even tell us that the segregation of St Louis, where I live is wrong. I am in a totally secular environment, governed by science, but scientists here are looking for things outside science to deal with injustice.

It seems that MLK was on to something. A scientifically advanced society is not necessarily a just society. In our case, scientific advances have not made us more just.


It seems that you have had very negative experiences with religion. I have had similar negative experiences. @Patrick, I’m sorry for that, even though I had no personal role in what you did. I hope you are able to find healing.

We need productive and positive voices that can speak with greater authority than science to deal with some of the most pressing challenges we face in our fractured society. We need people who can speak with the same authority as MLK, and that authority does not come from science.

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I’m glad we are on the same page now. Remember back when you wrote this?

We do care a great deal about having the science right here. We are going to use different language sometimes, which can be confusing. Nonetheless, I’d really appreciate your help keeping us up today and clear. Thanks.

No, the Evangelicals will unseat themselves. What we are seeing in this country today is Christianity’s last gasp.
Demographics and the rise of the “nones” to the majority will remake the US to be more like secular Western Europe. In a most perverse way, Trump and Fox News has hasten the process which has been going on in the background for decades.

Our country was never a Christian country. Christians, also, are loosing political power. That is probably for the best. Our faith, however, does best when it does not have political power, so I am not afraid.

Well, thanks for granting that we are “educated and intelligent” :smile:.


http://news.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-humans-new-low.aspx

I do appreciate that the country is becoming more secular (note the doubling of the godless-evolution view). However, at the same time, society is becoming more fractured and isolated in echo chambers. From personal points of view, it is not possible to have a good sense of how big someone else’s echo chamber is. Right now, you are in the secular echo chamber. But there is also, for example, an anti-evolution echo chamber. That echo chamber is quite large, about twice a large as the secular view.

Take a look at this:


Creationism poll: How many Americans believe the Bible is literal, inerrant, or symbolic.

44% of US in 2014 holds that Adam and Eve were real people. That is a lot of people. Perhaps they do not run your circles, but we still share a country together. For that reason, it is certainly worth engaging these beliefs.

You are right as the first amendment guarantees that our government is secular and cannot favor one religion over another nor favor any religion over non-religion.

Look deeper at the numbers especially with respect to age. Millennials (those under 35) are already over half “nones”. The baby boomers (those over 60) are still over 70% Christian/Catholic. They (predominately white males) are the FOX news demographics. They are aging fast and will be overtaken in power by the Millennials within a few years. Within a few years the survey about will look more like Europe and Austrialia does today. It is not going to matter who Adam was or whether he existed at all.

This is very much contrary to genome science. A single person, male or female, living any time before 6 kya has zero impact on anybody’s genome today. Genghis Khan may be in my genealogy but he has had no impact on my genome.

@Patrick

Perhaps you arrived here with more or less zero awareness of the the mathematical trials on genealogy… as opposed to genetics. The difference is important. Using exponential expansion, Charlemagne could have 20,000,000 potential descendants (genealogically speaking, even though only a small portion would have any trace of his genetics). But at no point in Earth’s history would there be 20,000,000 people.

The difference between theoretical and actual is due to Pedigree Extinction… which happens when latter generations, not even aware that they are 4th, 5th or 6th cousins, marry. [[ By the way, almost half of America’s states have laws that allow 1st Cousins to marry. ]]

Each time a cousin marries a cousin, a whole slice of one’s potential ancestors collapses onto the other.

If you were God and wanted the whole world to be descended from Charlemagne, you would influence events so that one or two adults went to every occupied region on Earth, and successfully mated with at least one person. Multi-iteration computer runs show that, even with extremely conservative migration assumptions, the whole planet could be descended from the key man (in this case, Charlemagne… or Adam), within 2000 years.
The one catch is that there will be several other (presumably irrelevant or uninteresting) Universal Ancestral Pairs. In other words, Charlemagne/Wife, plus 12 other couples alive at the time of Charlemagne, will all be “equally universal”.

So, if we hypothesize a “special creation” of a holy human pair, in the middle of 10,000 evolved humans (created by evolution instead of special creation), 6000 years ago - - by 4000 years ago (or 2000 BCE) - - all humanity could be descended from the holy human pair, and a couple of dozen other couples that came out of the 10,000.

In short, for those Christians who are fixated on Original Sin, and being descended from Adam, the math shows that genealogy (which is more political or definitional, than genetic) is much more influential than 46 unique chromosomes could ever be. Genetic influence gets halved with each generation… while genealogical influence is expanded by an exponent of 2 each generation.

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Genealogy shows the genomic signature of inequality. A relative small number of powerful males living during the Mongol period succeeded in having an outsize impact on billions of people living in East Eurasia today. One single male who lived around the time of the Mongols left many millions of direct male-line descendants across the territory that the Mongols occupied.

@Patrick

Indeed.

And that is the position @swamidass’ scenario will take with the de novo Adam/Eve pairing (plus some others).

Whether a Christian includes a global flood or not, by the time of the birth of Jesus, everyone can either be descended from Adam via Noah… or descended from Adam regardless of Noah.

All the humans that never made contact with Adam’s lineage will be gone by the time of Jesus, and thus are irrelevant to the theological implications of the arrival of Jesus.

I beg to differ, as the new science of the Human Past using ancient DNA has no interest in how the Adam of the Genesis story fits into the science of who we are and how we got here.

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@Patrick,

This scenario, part evolution/part special creation, is being crafted to appeal to Christians who expect a real Adam/Eve pairing - - and yet also find evolutionary evidence compelling. It is designed to be natural and theological in scope.

Naturally, those who are uninterested in theology will not find it compelling. Nor need they find it so. Some Christians, who are already at peace with a non-real Adam/Eve pairing, could still offer this to Creationist family or friends as a way of showing them that both could be true.

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This scenario of part evolution/ part special creation is pure fiction made up to appease today’s Christians who can’t seem to deal with the fact that the Adam and Eve story was written thousands of years ago by an ancient middle eastern culture who knew nothing about human history. They were writing it to appease their need to explain who they were and how they got there. What your doing today is no different that what the writers of Genesis did thousands of years ago - making stuff up to appease your adherents.

@Patrick

It would seem that based on the intensity of your rejection of the idea, you really have no plans to stick around. You cannot play the sidelines, shouting “B.S.” every ten minutes.

I will be encouraging @swamidass to invite you towards the door just about every day I see something like this being posted.

There is no way to prove that a human couple can’t be created by God.
But there is plenty of evidence for Evolution. So, if Creationists have some special machinery in their head that won’t let them abandon a de novo couple, then we show them that such a couple can exist as part of the evolutionary tree… rather than instead of it.

The Creationists are the ones providing the “certainty”. We are the ones providing the reality. And in the process, if successful, we will be able to slowly but surely release the Science-Denying Creationist grip around America’s neck.

This is an educational process about how to combine a specific kind of spirituality with the evidences of Evolution. There really isn’t anything here to hold your interest … because there’s nothing in the program for an Atheist to have a platform on disproving God.

But we do have some nice prizes in the back… please take one and go.

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@Patrick, if you are not interested in finding common ground with people of religious faith, this may not be the right forum for you. You are welcome to give this a shot, but if you do not attempt to build bridges while you are here, it will not make sense to keep you here.

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And that position is Pure fiction. You do realize that Tens of thousands of whole genomes have been sequenced across every part of the globe. In addition four thousand ancient genomes have sequenced from 2000 years ago to 440,000 years ago from around the globe. Tens of Neanderthals whole genome sequenced. Denosivians genome sequenced. Migrations and admixtures of ancient populations across the globe determined. Statistical algorithms looking at billions of bases of DNA running millions of scenarios. All this in the last five years! And now Dr. Swanidass and friends are going to insert the Genesis character Adam into solid human history provided by the science of ancient DNA in order to appease Christians who really need an real Adam to make their faith work for them. Wow what hubris.

@Patrick

You describe the scenario as if it is a science project. It is not. It is a religious project with defined scientific underpinnings.

There is no need to get nasty about it. We have both counseled you that “religious projects” are not a good fit for you - - because you deny religion. We can’t expect someone who hates meat to be a good judge of a BBQ contest.

Accept it and stop acting like a crazy man.

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You are too kind as usual. He rails against that which he does not at all understand, and has no desire to understand. He cannot enter into our company in this state.

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@Patrick is temporarily suspended. I believe in second chances. On Monday, when his suspension lifts, let’s hope we can find a better way of engaging.

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If one has the patience to sort through the vitriol and get to the gist of the few actual points he is making, there are some thoughtful rebuttals available. But I certainly feel no need to bother when he is in this state. We all have much better things to do.

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