You are doing much better without Biologos. Move on. You are doing good work here and at work. PS is a much better place to discuss science and theology that Biologos every was and could ever be. You won.
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4 posts were split to a new topic: Patrick to Prove to Runyon That God Exists
The most important win is to win people over. I have not yet won in this most important of ways.
I have no desire for unnecessary enemies. I hope that we reconcile someday soon. It may not happen, but it is my honest and genuine desire. Hopefully they will have a change of heart. At this point, it is out of my hands. I’m focusing on other things.
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No, the most important thing is you won yourself back. You were very critical on yourself. You thought you lost something important to you. Be now after the years, you must realize that you gained (won) much more than your perceived to have lost. You are way better all around by the experience. That what I meant when I said you won.
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Now this is very true.
Thank you for reminding me of this. It was a very hard couple years because of this. You are right though. I did find my voice through it. I did win myself back.
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You are missing something very fundamental here. Biologos doesn’t do science. According to them there is no conflict between science and Christian faith. So when Christian men of science were debating science on their forum, they wanted no part of it. Biologos was like the catholic Church, cover up and get rid of any hint of scandal, disagreement, of the fundamental mission - no incompatibility between science and faith for Chrisitans.
I think this is a very important point and distinction. One one hand, I totally get it. Collins, Falk, Giberson, Lamoureux, et. al have spent considerable effort, and with much risk, getting the Christian community to accept the results of evolutionary science and especially hacking away at the pervasive “conflict” model of interaction between science and the Christian faith. Developing new science just isn’t their purpose. I don’t think it’s because they want to ignore science, it’s because there was (and is) so much work to do within the church to allow people freedom to explore options regarding origins without it being a “salvation issue”.
On the other hand, their success has been by promoting a, perhaps too simplistic, view that because there can be no conflict between science and faith (and presumably science works out in the secular arena) that the real work is to figure out how theology should respond to the results of science.
What Peaceful Science is showing, I think, is that it’s not nearly that clean cut. That science and theology can engage and push each other, interweaving a pretty complex view of reality. Genealogical Adam has elements of methodologically naturalistic science mixed with theological exploration and traditional/creedal sensitivities. That’s quite messy and hard to do.
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@patrick raised this point before, and I think he was right: Discomfort With Messiness of Science at BioLogos.
Isn’t this merely the difference between parallel monologues and true dialogue?
Perhaps it is difficult. Dialogue seems to require real interdisciplinary exchanges, and real mastery of the underlying science, not just recitals of the settled findings and narrative. We have to take questions seriously, instead of appealing to authority.
As for me, I have not aimed to convince anyone of anything. For me, honesty about the evidence trumps everything. There is no theological agenda that should prevent us from answering real questions with honesty. Of course, this will change peoples minds. For me, however, honesty is an end itself in this domain.
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This seems to match how Dennis Venema, Jim Stump, and others (e.g. @pevaquark) talk about it. Yes, it is simplistic. However, it might also be creating immense amounts of unnecessary conflict too.
Besides, isn’t real dialogue more fun any ways? I’d loose interest pretty quickly if I actually knew all the answers from the get go. This, it seems, would be very strong evidence we were neither engaging with science, nor theology, nor the grand questions themselves.
Give us a few decades, and we will have increased our knowledge. I predict we will have more questions too.
Yes, I think it’s easy to say “science and Christian faith in dialogue” but it’s very hard to do in practice.
This is definitely admirable. I do think we have to be careful though when we are talking about other people’s motivations, etc. My experience is that most people can only do so much.
I know some retired science faculty that spent most of their career just simply working with people on the idea that one can believe the Universe is billions of years old and be a legitimate Christian.
Many people who are active in the area of science and faith have also “sacrificed” time doing science to help others understand science and how it impacts faith. They have stepped away from active research to help the church understand how science works and to help break down some of the barriers that have been put up between scientists and people of faith. Yes, sometimes that will mean they will sound like “recitals of the settled findings and narrative” but I think it is good to be charitable regarding their reasons. It may not be about pushing an agenda so much as just trying to keep up with everything going on. They may feel like they need to fully understand what’s going on, and the ramifications, before abandoning one view for another.
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Yes, but you have nothing to fear. And you don’t have funders to worry about. You are free, independent and know your science really really well. And you are not afraid to dialogue with anyone and on any subject even the very controversial ones. You feel as comfortable discussing science and theology with a YEC to an atheist, from a high schooler to a retired Baptist Minister. Catholic PHD physics to agnostic evolutionary sciencetist to biblical antropolgis. It is all here at PS. Never saw that at Biologos.
Yes, this is the danger.
No, but when you’re trying to explain things to people in the pew, or write a coherent, easy to read book, it’s not much help to just “dialogue”. We can keep dialoguing but at some point we should make progress towards better understanding, and somebody needs to translate that in a way that people can understand and absorb.
I largely see that as BioLogos’ purpose. They never claimed to be working on new science. They wanted to help the church understand what science has to say about the big questions and to help the church to integrated that knowledge. It’s still a human endeavor, and has it’s failings and limitations. But I think it’s uncharitable to blame BioLogos for not doing cutting edge science or being more responsive to new research, when that was never their mission as far as I can tell.
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@Jordan How is any of this going to stop the massive shift away from organized religion? It is getting to the point where 50% of millennial are Nones. Science/faith dialogue might help but it also may accelerate the massive cultural shift going on.
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I think most people at BioLogos have for years been doing the best they know how. They genuinely thought all the important scientific questions regarding Adam and Eve were settled. So there was no reason to entertain questions. This is what most people thought, and no one should falt them for this.
I’m still surprised that I was at the center of reworking several things on evolution and Adam. People have been in the debate for decades. I had thought that all the important things had been worked out already. I was wrong, it seems, but it still raises the question. Why weren’t these issues handled better ten years ago? Or twenty years ago? There were indicators in the right direction too (@jongarvey, Kemp, Opderbeck, and Davidson). Why were they all largely ignored?
I agree. I had not problem with them on this.
The issues arose when they dug in their feet about correcting mistakes they made because it undermined the theological agenda. There is nothing I see that justifies this stubbornness. It is one thing to miss an important finding. It is entirely different thing to suppress a new finding because it is against your theological goals. I do not think there is any good excuse for this second sort of mistake.
Liberal churches are shrinking, conservative ones are growing. We will see what happens in the long run.
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I teach science majors at a Christian university. Many come to the school thinking they have to choose between science and faith. Many are really struggling with their faith because of it. I appreciate that BioLogos is at least is helping by encouraging people that there can be a lot of harmony between orthodox Christian faith and mainstream science. It’s not always pretty, and GA is an example I think, but overall I still think they are a tremendous benefit to these students.
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But isn’t this a problem with the way they have been taught about their faith. The science that you are teaching shouldn’t be surprising to them as they should have been introduced to Biology, Chemistry and Physics since elementary school. (I have seen 5th grade science books that are pretty impressive)
If science is taught as neutral with regard to God, like Math is taught, it shouldn’t be a problem. I am amazed that we have two Harvard PhD physicists would can talk without a crsisis of faith about big bang cosmoslogy and then give a reasonably good argument for transubstantiation. That is impressive to me.
I don’t know anybody at BioLogos personally and haven’t engaged with it for years, but I do know that it can be very difficult to keep a theological coalition together when public statements have been made, etc. Maybe (likely) a few key players don’t see the possibility of a de novo Adam as a reason to change positions. They may see it as a minor detail that threatens to distract from a larger position. They may not see it as suppression as much as insignificant to their goals, and so not worth the distraction.
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The way it has been explained to me is that they are invested in a narrative that insists there is no scientific content in Genesis, so it is therefore not in conflict with science. I don’t necessarily agree with this, if it were correctly applied. However, they took the Genealogical Adam to be concordist eisegesis (how?), and did not want to give it the light of day for this reason. Of course, it is not eisegesis, but they did not take the time to figure that out.
They are also invested in a narrative that teaches that traditional theology needs to get with the program and change. Evolution is just a wedge by which to force this change. This narrative is something I can’t go a long with. I dissent from it.
So, in their view, the GA was unhelpful because it gave the “false” hope that traditional theology did not have to change. Their ultimate goal was to cause a change in theology, forcing it through with evolutionary science. The GA spoiled their plans. Honestly, some of them were pretty angry with me back in mid 2017. With Adam and the Genome, they had everyone’s attention, and some people were even considering making a big theological jump their direction, because it seemed to be what science required. Then I came in as spoiler and ruined their plans. They were not happy. Some were even angry (and we’ve seen it sometimes on these forum).
From my point of view, none of this is reason to withhold information from Tim Keller. They, however, argued it was and is reason to withhold information. It did not serve their goals. That is why I say honesty is an end itself. I do not agree withholding accurate science for the purpose of any theological agenda. BioLogos, at the moment, is figuring out where they stand on this. I hope they made some good decisions, but this is far from certain at the moment.
They have a confident faith, unthreatened by science, and perhaps even strengthened by science. @dga471 and @PdotdQ are among the best of what is coming in the new generation. There may be an effortless consilience that arises among them and their peers. That is what I am hoping for.
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Well, it’s more complicated than that. Scientific literacy in the US is not great in general, and we a fair amount of students who’ve been homeschooled or private Christian schools so it’s hard to tell what their science background is like. Additionally, many are more-or-less told to ignore anything related to evolution in their science courses. Quite a few are surprised when they realize that the science we teach is no different than the science at any public university.
Bottom line, yeah, the problem isn’t so much science. That is why, in my opinion, BioLogos is still a very useful resource. It’s not trying to do different science, it’s trying to give Christians another option. Many students truly come to the university believing the only options are YEC and atheism/mainstream science.
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I agree. I just hope they can turn the corner and repair their reputation. This is not at all what I intended or expected. I hope they can recover soon and quickly.